VII
Milk River and I were sitting in my room in the Canyon House an hour later, talking. I had sent word to the county seat that the coroner had a job down here, and had found a place to stow Vogel’s body until he came.
“Can you tell me who spread the grand news that I was a deputy sheriff?” I asked Milk River, who was making a cigarette while I lit one of the Fatimas he had refused. “It was supposed to be a secret.”
“Was it? Nobody would of thought it. Our Mr. Turney didn’t do nothing else for two days but run around telling folks what was going to happen when the new deputy come. He sure laid out a reputation for you! According to his way of telling it, you was the toughest, hardest, strongest, fastest, sharpest, biggest, wisest and meanest man west of the Mississippi River.”
“Who is this Turney?”
“You mean you don’t know him? From the way he talked, I took it you and him ate off the same plate.”
“Never even heard any rumors about him. Who is he?”
“He’s the gent that bosses the Orilla County Company outfit up the way.”
So my client’s local manager was the boy who had tipped my mitt!
“Got anything special to do the next few days?” I asked.
“Nothing downright special.”
“I’ve got a place on the payroll for a man who knows this country and can chaperon me around it.”
He poured a mouthful of grey smoke at the ceiling.
“I’d have to know what the play was before I’d set in,” he said slowly. “You ain’t a regular deputy, and you don’t belong in this country. It ain’t none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to tie in with a blind game.”
That was sensible enough.
“I’ll spread it out for you,” I offered. “I’m a private detective—the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. The stockholders of the Orilla Colony Company sent me down here. They’ve spent a lot of money irrigating and developing their land, and now they’re about ready to start selling it.
“According to them, the combination of heat and water makes it ideal farm land—as good as the Imperial Valley. Nevertheless, there doesn’t seem to be any great rush of customers. What’s the matter, so the stockholders figure, is that you original inhabitants of this end of the state are such a hard lot that peaceful farmers don’t want to come among you.
“It’s no secret from anybody that both borders of this United States are sprinkled with sections that are as lawless now as they ever were in the old days. There’s too much money in running immigrants over the line, and it’s too easy, not to have attracted a lot of gentlemen who don’t care how they get their money. With only 450 immigration inspectors divided between the two borders, the government hasn’t been able to do much. The official guess is that some 135,000 foreigners were run into the country last year through back and side doors. Compared to this graft, rum-running—even dope-running—is kid stuff!
“Because this end of Orilla County isn’t railroaded or telephoned up, it has got to be one of the chief smuggling sections, and therefore, according to these men who hired me, full of assorted thugs. On another job a couple of months ago, I happened to run into a smuggling game, and knocked it over. The Orilla Colony people thought I could do the same thing for them down here. So hither I come to make this part of Arizona nice and ladylike.
“I stopped over at the county seat and got myself sworn in as deputy sheriff, in case the official standing came in handy. The sheriff said he didn’t have a deputy down here and hadn’t the money to hire one, so he was glad to sign me on. But we thought it was a secret—until I got here.”
“I think you’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River grinned at me, “so I reckon I’ll take that job you was offering. But I ain’t going to be no deputy myself. I’ll play around with you, but I don’t want to tie myself up, so I’ll have to enforce no laws I don’t like. If you want to have me hanging around you sort of loose and individual-like, I’m with you.”
“It’s a bargain. Now what can you tell me that I ought to know?”
He blew more smoke at the ceiling.
“Well, you needn’t bother none about the Circle H.A.R. They’re plenty tough, but they ain’t running nothing over the line.”
“That’s all right as far as it goes,” I agreed, “but my job is to clean out troublemakers, and from what I’ve seen of them they come under that heading.”
“You’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River repeated. “Of course they’re troublesome! But how could Peery raise cows down here if he didn’t get hisself a crew that’s a match for the gunmen your Orilla Colony people don’t like? And you know how cowhands are. Set ’em down in a hard neighborhood and they’re hell-bent on proving to everybody that they’re just as tough as the next one—and tougher.”
“I’ve nothing against them—if they behave. Now about these border-running folks?”
“I reckon Bardell’s your big meat. Whether you’ll ever get anything on him is another thing—something for you to work up a lather over. Next to him—Big ’Nacio. You ain’t seen him yet? A big, black-whiskered Mex that’s got a rancho down the canyon—four-five mile this side of the line. Anything that comes over the line comes through that rancho. But proving that’s another item for you to beat your head about.”
“He and Bardell work together?”
“Uh-huh—I reckon he works for Bardell. Another thing you got to include in your tally is that these foreign gents who buy their way across the line don’t always—nor even mostly—wind up where they want to. It ain’t nothing unusual these days to find some bones out in the desert beside what was a grave until the coyotes opened it. And the buzzards are getting fat! If the immigrant’s got anything worth taking on him, or if a couple of government men happen to be nosing around, or if anything happens to make the smuggling gents nervous, they usually drop their customer and dig him in where he falls.”
The racket of the dinner-bell downstairs cut off our conference at this point.