Loafing along Death Valley trails : $b a personal narrative of people and placesCaruthers, William
History
Loafing along Death Valley trails : $b a personal narrative of people and places
Caruthers, William
Death Valley (Calif. and Nev.)
As he raised his gun for the kill, the panther sprang and the battle was
on. They fought all over the barroom—standing up; lying down; rolling
over—first one then the other on top. Tables toppled, chairs crashed.
For half an hour they battled savagely, finally rolling against the
bar—both mauled and bloody. There with his strong vice-like legs wrapped
around Slim’s and an arm of steel gripping neck and shoulder, Brown
slipped irons over the bad man’s wrists. “Get up,” Brown ordered as he
stood aside, breathing hard.
Slim rose, leaned against the bar. There was fight in him still and
seeing a bottle in front of him, he seized it with manacled hands,
started to lift it.
“Slim,” Brown said calmly, “if you lift that bottle you’ll never lift
another.”
The bad boy instinctively knew the look that pages death and Slim’s
fingers fell from the bottle.
Greenwater had no jail and Brown took him to his own cabin. Leaving the
manacles on the prisoner he took his shoes, locked them in a closet. No
man drunk or sober he reflected, would tackle barefoot the gravelled
street littered with thousands of broken liquor bottles. Then he went to
bed.
Waking later, he discovered that Slim had vanished and with him, Brown’s
number 12 shoes. He tried Slim’s shoe but couldn’t get his foot into it.
There was nothing to do but follow barefoot. He left a blood-stained
trail, but at 2 a.m. he found Slim in a blacksmith shop having the
handcuffs removed. Brown retrieved his shoes and on the return trip Slim
went barefoot. After hog-tying his prisoner Brown chained him to the bed
and went to sleep.
Thereafter, the bad boys scratched Greenwater off their calling list.
Slim afterwards attained fame with Villa in Mexico, became a good
citizen and later went East, established a sanatorium catering to the
wealthy and acquired a fortune.
Among the first arrivals in Greenwater was a lanky adventurer known to
the Indians as Long Man and to whites for his ability to make money in
any venture and an even more marvelous inability to keep it. He was
Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks. Broke at the time, he was seeking the quickest
way to a “comeback.”
Foreseeing that the biggest names in copper meant a rush, he had taken a
look at the little stagnant spring with a green scum that was to give
the town its name.
“Not enough water in it to do the family washing,” he decided and with
uncanny talent for seeing opportunity where others would starve to
death, he was soon peddling water at a dollar a bucket. He had hauled it
40 miles uphill from Furnace Creek wash.
A hopeful, but late arrival who expected to find the town crowded with
killers was an undertaker who came with a huge stock of coffins. The
prospect of a quick turnover seemed to guarantee success, but in two
years Greenwater had exactly one funeral and he sold but one coffin.
Disgusted he stacked the caskets in the center of his shop; left and was
never again heard of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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