Chapter 3

The area of southern California Patrick Burgstone called home lay thirty rough and desolate miles back into the high desert canyon country, halfway between Tehachapi and Mojave, about one hundred and fifty miles from Los Angeles. The desert was a harsh place to live. Patrick didn't know any different though. His pa and he had traipsed across the Mojave desert all his life. By caring for a small herd of goats, they managed a living, of sorts, but the water and forage the goats needed kept them moving.

Two summers back his old man got a mesquite thorn stuck in his right arm. He should have known better, but the damn idiot didn't bother with taking it out. The wound festered up good and the next thing Patrick knew his pa was ailing something fierce. Course, by that time, there wasn't anything could be done for him. And it took the tough old coot three days to die. After hours moaning and carrying on, he'd sleep some, then set to moaning all over again. He got so fevered he didn't even recognize his own son. Scared Patrick plenty too. All he could think of, sitting there on a rock not five feet off, watching his pa slowly slip away, was how stupid it was for an old timer like his pa to fall to the likes of a mesquite thorn.

The man lay on a piece of beat up old canvas spread under an overhang in the side of a wash. He craved water, kept asking and asking. Problem was the boy didn't know when he was going to find any to replace what little they carried on Jenny. The old mule could only handle one barrel. Towards the last Patrick had stopped giving his pa any water at all, not a sip, no matter how hard he begged. After all, a person had to take care of himself. Shoot, the old man knew as well as anybody, water was just about the most valuable possession a person could have out on the desert. Without it, you up and died. Pa was going to die anyway, so it made no sense to waste what little water he had.

When the old man finally cashed in, Patrick dug a shallow grave and covered him up. He was on his own now.

He wandered across the desert for one whole turn of seasons, staying close to one tank until the animals either drank it dry or soiled it so bad he couldn't drink it himself. Then it was off across the waste until one of the goats smelled water and led him to another supply. That was how he'd found the spring that came up through the rocks behind his shack. He was checking out a side arm of a canyon and next thing the goats were clambering up the side towards a big old ledge. Be damned if there wasn't a spring pooling up, right in the middle of summer. Fresh water, year round. There wasn't any reason to go further.

It took him almost a month of scouring the dry hills and canyons to find an old abandoned silver mine and the small shack someone built just below her. With the help of old Jenny he hauled that shack, board by board, back to his ledge in the canyon. Making an Indian travois, the mule could drag more than she could carry. Patrick felt right proud about thinking up that one. Still, it took almost two weeks to cart the lumber over a little at a time. The mule couldn't climb the steep trail weaving back and forth across the cliff face and up to the spring, so he carried those boards up two and three at a time, all by himself.

All the same, he built a right nice place. After a couple of extra trips into Tehachapi to trade milk for a keg of nails, a hammer and saw, and a fifth of whiskey, he had everything he needed. By using the cliff where the spring bubbled up as one wall, he'd fashioned the other three walls of wood. Although the chimney leaned a mite to the left, all the rock sloughed off the canyon wall and onto the ledge gave Patrick plenty to build a respectable fireplace. And he figured out some special touchs too. He added a plank shelf on one wall where a person could set a bowl, or can of coffee, or just about anything. A peg by the door held his winter coat. He'd forgotten to buy hinges in town, but after pounding off some of the rust and straightening them some, the old hinges worked well enough. The table and chair took a bit of extra trouble to get up the canyon wall to his new place. From all the cussing he did as he packed the awkward furnishings up the trail, a person might have thought he was trying to lift them on nothing but the blue streak.

Far as Patrick was concerned, the crowning point of the whole shebang had been the bed. He took rope and laced it back and forth across the frame and covered the whole affair with two blankets. It didn't even take him a month of laying there all by himself to figure he needed a woman to really make the place. His goat milk was bought up as quickly as he could haul it to Tehachapi. He put together a harness for Jenny to hold a five gallon tin on each side of her. Keeping the tins right in the spring until he had them full, the milk stayed fresh. Money piled up a hell of a lot faster than he could spend on beans and coffee alone. There wasn't any doubt he could afford to feed a woman. All he needed was to figure out how to get one up here.

After a week's worth of the problem of female companionship eating at him, Patrick headed to town one morning before the shadow off the far wall of the canyon cleared his ledge. There wasn't anyone to talk to, living up there on the side of the canyon all by himself. Pa didn't take to a lot of words, but at least before he died there was someone to holler at him to shut up when he got to complaining. Jenny's having an agreeable nature still didn't provide more than a one sided conversation. Besides, talking to the mule reminded him too much of the prospectors Pa and he ran into every so often. Those greasy, saggy skinned oldtimers got so starved for companionship they acted right peculiar, like maybe they did more than just talk to their mules. Patrick gave Jenny's lead a rough jerk. Made his skin itch to think on it.

There were ways to get a willing woman. Pa talked about whorehouses with fancy smelling ladies running around in their under things. Maybe somebody finally put up a bawdyhouse in Tehachapi this past winter, he mused. But that wasn't what he wanted either. According to Pa, the girls working those places thought their holes were gold mines. At two dollars a poke his money wouldn't last long. No, what he wanted was a woman of his own, one he didn't have to go all the way to town to see, one he didn't have to pay. By the time he had Tehachapi in sight, Patrick had his mind made up. There had to be a woman willing to give her services in exchange for eats and a bed.

After tying Jenny up out front, Patrick sidled up to the bar at Whitehorse's. Of the dozen or so customers, Patrick was undoubtedly the rangiest. He wore a dirt packed fleece lined coat his pa traded off a prospector so long ago Patrick couldn't remember his pa without it. With a full head of matted, dark brown hair hanging to his shoulders, denim overalls and sturdy leather boots, he stood taller than most anyone else in the place. The only bath he ever saw was when he got caught out in a storm. He wasn't out to impress anyone with fancy ways. He'd only drunk two beers before the duded up drummer beside him opened a conversation. "Tight fisted bunch, here abouts. Haven't made a sale since I left Baker's Field."

"That a fact?" Patrick set his glass mug on the bar and eyed the young drummer's store bought suit and black bowler. "What ya sellin'?"

"Like I said, not much of anything, lately. Maybe the folks up in Owen's Valley will be interested in my hardware." The man pulled his coat collar closed. "Don't know why I bothered coming this way. This is a dang cold place, this plateau. The valley's already warming up for an early summer."

"Don't never complain 'bout the weather, boy. Like as not that'll bring a blizzard. February ain't none too late fer one either, and that's a fact." Patrick drained his mug and pounded the bar for another. "I'd be a mite better could I find me a nice soft woman to warm me up, though."

"A dame, you say. I heard tell there's a soiled dove doing business in the bar over by the post office. Heard she's right pretty, too."

"Naw, I don't mean that kind a' woman. I ain't aimin' to toss my money in a empty hole. What I'm looking fer is a woman to live with me. Take care of the cookin' and cleanin', what'll lay down and spread her thighs when I feel like it."

"In that case you might want to give a look at this." The drummer reached under his jacket and into his back pocket, unfolding the Tehachapi Trumpet as he pulled it out. "There's a new section in this paper. Quite a sale's idea, I'll give it that. It's called a "Personal Advertisement". You put in your ad for just about anything. Why not a 'mail order bride'? Look here." The drummer spread the newspaper out right on top of the bar and planted a manicured finger tip at the top of a column of print on the second page.

WANTED
Team of mules for farm work.
Top dollar paid for right team.

Patrick bought the young man a drink, seeing as he was being so helpful explaining how it worked. He couldn't read a lick, but he didn't figure the drummer for putting him on. The general notion was easy enough to understand. "Well I'll be damned. Thanks, mister. That sounds to be worth the tryin'."

"Glad to be of help," the man smiled, showing nice white teeth. He slapped some silver on the bar and grabbed up an awkward looking big black leather case by its handle. "Good luck, then," he smiled again. "I think I heard the stage coming in, and no offense intended, but I'm ready to leave this parsimonious town."

Patrick finished his beer and took to the street himself not two minutes after the drummer. The barkeep gave him directions. He found the newspaper office in a narrow little building just down the street. A picture of a trumpet next to some fancy lettering painted on a window almost as wide as the structure made the office easy to find, even if he couldn't read the lettering itself.

A tiny bell over the door sent a tinging sound through the office, bringing a short little man scurrying from somewhere back behind a set of swinging doors. He was wiping black sticky looking stuff off his hands with a rag that appeared to have been used too many times for the same purpose. The small pair of Ben Franklin spectacles the man wore kept falling down his nose. With one grubby knuckle, fingers curled back out of the way, he pressed the glasses back into place.

"May I help you?"

"May be. You do personal ad-ver-tise-ments?" Patrick asked.

"We sure do. Anything up to twenty words the cost is only two bits. What is it you wish to advertise for?"

Patrick ignored the man's whiney, pinched nose voice as best he could. He hadn't counted on having to spend money just for placing his advertisement. He scratched the back of his neck with a ragged finger nail while he thought that one out. Two bits wouldn't put a big hole in his savings, after all. "I'm lookin' fer a woman. One ta marry."

The newspaperman pushed his glasses back into place again. "That a fact?" he asked, as if commiserating with the stubble faced, dust covered man standing in front of him across the counter. "Well sir, we just happen to be joining in on a special syndication. Seems Tehachapi isn't the only place women are scarce. 'Advertising For a Bride' its called. For an extra nickel we run your ad in five major cities. As well as the local paper, you understand."

"How much'll that cost me?" Patrick had to look away from the man. His thick lensed glasses made his eyes pop out from his face, enlarging the lashes on his lower eye lid so much that Patrick could see them individually. The sight somehow made Patrick nervous.

"Two bits for the ad and another nickel for the five cities." The man repeated.

"All together, damn it," Patrick snapped. The confounded clerk was getting him testy. It wasn't as if he did this sort of thing every day.

"Well, yes. Um, let me see here. That would come to thirty cents. All together."

"I ain't much with words. You help with that?"

"Certainly, certainly. No problem at all." The little man set his rag down and rummaged under the counter a moment. Bringing up a sheet of blank paper, he pulled a pencil from behind his ear, licked the point and asked, "Now then, what do you do for a living?"

"Herd goats."

"Yes, I see. Um, maybe farmer would be a good way to say it? Do you have your own ranch?"

"I got me a place a fair piece out in the canyons. That's what got me ta wanting my own woman. Right nice place too."

The newspaper man looked up from the sheet of paper he was busy writing on. After a moment's once-over, he returned to his composition. "I'm sure it is. That's good. Let's see here. Ah-h, how's this sound?" The little man scribbled something on the pad with his stub of a pencil and turned the page for Patrick's appraisal.

Patrick looked at the little man behind the counter for a second, then, pretending to read the words put on the pad, scanned the squiggles there. "That'll do 'er. How much ya say again?"

"Thirty cents," came the quick reply.

Removing his change purse, Patrick carefully counted out six coins and laid them on the counter. "Six nickels. That's thirty cents." His tone challenged the newspaper man to declare differently. He could count, by damn.

"The ladies that answer your ad will send them here. You just check in here once in a while. I'll hold any responses you receive to your advertisement and give them to you then, '' the clerk told him, placing his pencil back behind his ear and picking the change up off the counter.