The Red Book Magazine/Volume 8/Number 2/The Recoverer of Springs

by Roy Norton

 

The Recoverer of Springs

BY ROY NORTON
Author of “Whistling Sandy,” etc.

Whiskers, a whirlwind of whiskers. That's what the professor looked like when he arrived.

Most of the trains had forgotten to stop at Arcadia Springs, Arizona, since the springs which made the town “went dry,” so there was wild excitement over the event. The whistle gave a jocund yelp, the brakes stretched out big flat hands and caught hold, everything came to a halt, and one vestibule door opened.

From it, the unfeeling train-men projected, comet-wise, Prof. Elisha Smith, his prodigious facial covering blowing awry and his long tailed coat fluttering. Profanity on the part of the train crew, a carpet bag of ancient Roman style, and a battered silk-hat of the Paleozoic age, followed him.

The vestibule door slammed shut, the train crawled off into the east, and Prof. Elisha Smith gathered himself and his belongings together

“Well,” he remarked cheerfully, “I got this far anyhow.”

“That's the first time the train has stopped in six months and all for this,” drawled a dolefully monotonous voice behind him. Then addressing the Professor, as if he were a freak from an archeological institute the speaker, continued, “And they stopped the train merely to put this batch of shags off.”

One of Prof. Smith's eyes gazed steadily into space, while the other, after many vague whirlings, aimed itself at a melancholy man seated on a long, unused baggage truck. The seated one looked as if he might be an undertaker who occasionally dealt faro.

“Well, my friend,” said the Professor, as he deftly straightened out a bend in his celluloid collar, “you aint the only one in the mourner's trust. This town don't look none too good to me. What's the matter of it?”

The occupant of the truck studied a crack with great earnestness for some time before replying. That he was not merely sleeping beneath his dingy sombrero was shown by the steadiness with which he chewed tobacco in a rubbery way, elongation alternating with rotundity as his jaws opened and shut.

“Stranger,” he said, “you are now at the once famous Arcadia Springs. From the uttermost confines of the globe pilgrims poured into this sacred shrine until it became the Mecca of the suffering. Beautiful croquet grounds afforded exercise and recreation for those whose systems need the invigoration of the health giving sun, and our magnificent ping-pong table was the envy of all other so-called resorts in Arizona.”

As he continued, his voice took on the tone of a spieler at a sideshow and his mind reverted to past literature written by a perigrinating newspaper reporter for a week's board.

“The waters of this wonderous libation sent from Heaven, bring balm to the weary worldlings, give health to the hopeless, and restore years to the youthless. The dread fiend Rheumatism is routed and the vermiform appendix resumes innocuous desuetude after a few baths. Corns and bunions fall off and the tobacco habit is cured. The great white plague sees its finish and the halt and blind quit halting and blinding in these waters, for two dollars American, or three dollars Mex. per day.” The voice gave place to a sigh that seemed to indicate the soles of the speaker's boots had been ripped off with it.

“There is a time, stranger, when money gathers to me like it does to an oil magnate. I absorb so much of it that I leak it. Then comes an earthquake—Bing! I own a hotel and a spring-resort without a spring. The railway agent packed his turkey to another station last week and took everything except the telegraph wires. The bank dealer hiked with his roll and lay-out two months ago, and the proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra World's Emporium twiddled his fingers at me as he rode away on top of his stock, bound for Phoenix. There you have it.”

“My brother, I sympathize with you,” said the Professor, tears flowing unrestrainedly down his bearded cheeks. “Ah, it must indeed have been Providence that sent me to your aid. Providence, sir, that makes men get there at the right time, even if they do get there seemingly late.”

He put one largely veined hand to his mouth, pressed his nose close to the other's ear, and with an air of great secrecy said, “S-s-s-t! Come with me where we can talk alone.”

The proprietor of the waterless springs looked at a Mexican who was sleeping the calm, deep slumber of his class on the idle scales, and then at the empty buildings of the street leading away from the station.

“Stranger,” he murmured, “if I could subdivide Arcadia and sell it to insurance men and politicians in the east who want places to be alone in, I'd have Mr. Cræsus beat a Salt Lake block and John D. runnin' up an alley. There sleeps the entire floating population.”

The Professor fixed the baleful glare of one eye on his new acquaintance, seized his hand with a firm grasp, and fairly dragged him twice around the station and into a deserted coal-shed. He tiptoed to an opening in the rear while Arcadia's representative gazed at him in solemn wonder.

In highly melodramatic tones, pitched low to suit the occasion, the Professor said, “Here is my secret. You see before you the world renowned Professor Doctor Elisha Smith, V.S., A.Z.Z., the great Recoverer of Springs. It is a profession with me. Her late Majesty, Queen Victoria, wanted me, yea begged me on her bended knees, to go to—” The hotel man seemed on the point of interpolating a destination, but evidently thinking better of it merely cleared his throat.

“Yea, begged me,” continued the Professor not heeding the break, “to go to the Sahara desert and recover springs which—um—m—well, were lost there thousands of years ago. I came west for my health, and now find before me the opportunity of benefiting my fellow man with my immense knowledge. Are you on?”

“But did you ever really recover a spring?” queried the forlorn one, exhibiting thereby both hope and skepticism.

“Ever recover one? Me, Professor Elisha Smith ever recover a spring? Millions of 'em sir; millions of 'em.” He spat violently on the ground as a new idea portrayed itself on the hairless portion of his face

“The terrific concentration of my mind, sir, compels me to seek something to drink. I am athirst. Er—has the saloon man left, too?”

“No, he's the only business man that's till here. He sticks on account of Mirandy, my daughter.”

The Professor thrust his arm through that of the landlord and together they repaired to the idle “Home of the Thirsty,” where the proprietor, a wooden legged man, was playing “The Maiden's Prayer” on a harmonica.

When the new-comer wiped his mustaches with a sigh of satisfaction, he waved his hand in a carelessly munificent way, saying that as soon as he could get a check cashed he would pay. The dispenser, from force of old habit, toyed with a bung starter, and then gazed disheartenedly across the sand levels of the desert, a disappointed man.

“Let us go where we can be alone,” said the Recoverer of Springs in a low whisper to his companion.

“Oh don't mind him,” came the answer. “He's in on the play.”

Perhaps they were visions of more drinks that lent the sudden glow of warmth to the Professor's face.

“It takes time to think out your problem, my friend,” he began. “It may take a week or so. In the meantime, if you will proffer me the hospertality of your hoard and bedding, I will cogitate. That is the word, sir, cogitate. Springs is caused in the first place by atmospheric pressure on the earth's top. Space is nothin' but air. There is so many other earths in it, that the air gets squeezed, as it were. Hence, atmospheric pressure. The earth is like a syringe. This here atmospheric pressure is the hand that squashes the bulb. Springs are little holes in the great syringe.

“These holes runs all the time unless they get plugged up. That's it, sir. Arcadia's hole got plugged!”

He stretched his arms out to loosen the sleeves of his tightly-fitting coat and secure a firmer grasp of his subject before getting well under way. The saloon-keeper put one hand behind his ear for a better hearing and the interested landlord paused with an air of great expectancy.

“You see, the metrophoneous phlogomy of geology teaches us that this earth is like a layer cake when the layers is some jumbled. Here is one layer at a slant of 26 degrees Farnheit and here's another at 45 degrees anthracite as it were. Along comes this here earthquake, and gets busy. It tips over some of the layers, putties up the holes in your spring, and it takes Professor Doctor Elisha Smith, V.S., A.Z.Z., commonly known as Professor Elisha Smith, the world renowned Recoverer of Springs, to get her going again. It will cost you a thousand dollars.”

Longer arguments followed and the saloon-keeper and the proprietor of Arcadia became enthused. They decided to try to raise the money. In the meantime, the Recoverer of Springs was to cogitate.

And his cogitations were assisted by Mirandy.

Mirandy was a tall girl with the easy grace of the desert about her. Thirty-eight Arizona summers had lent a tinge of sorrel to her face. Her hands were forceful and she giggled. Her feet gave her an aspect of great solidity; but she was an admirer of the Professor's whiskers and hat, and the race for her affections waxed swift.

In this rivalry the saloon-keeper was handicapped, from the fact that he had neither whiskers nor hat and ambled humpingly in a sidewise gait because of the impediment in his legs.

 

For many days the Recoverer of Springs cogitated—cogitated as to the easiest and most diplomatic method of prying loose the thousand. At first there seemed to be nothing but easy money. Now, alas! he was in love—wildly, foolishly in love. Moonlight nights found him gazing with tender eyes across the cactus and thinking of Mirandy. His heart leaped when she giggled at him, and he lost no opportunity of being with her. To him she seemed some beauteous angel, as she sat in the backyard picking the feathers from spring chickens for their frugal repast, or currying a horse for her father to ride to the Bar-G ranch. Much time he devoted to the exact parting of his hair at the back of his head and the fondling of his beard, and always he preserved an air of great profundity.

The saloon-keeper, distanced in the round-up of Mirandy's affections, grew pensive and surly. He whittled so much in odd times at his wooden leg that it grew thin and attenuated. The harmonica lay long untouched, although Mirandy had so often said that he “played jest swell.” When the occasional cowboy appeared, he no longer presented the professional glad face. He drank his own beverages, showing thereby true desperation.

 

One day a perspiring deputy sheriff cantered into the town and added an ornament to the saloon wall in the shape of a reward notice for the apprehension of a certain “One-Eyed Dick Mulligan.”

The placard laid much stress on the fact that Mr. Mulligan was badly wanted for horse stealing, and mentioned as a mere incident that he had, at various times in his careless career, killed nine men.

Temptation allured the saloon man as do brass suspender buttons a Piute brave. If he could have the Recoverer of Springs thrown into durance, he might win Mirandy's favor in the attendant confusion. He reasoned thusly: “If I git that old mattrass pinched and he gits tied up in corral for three month a-gittin' himself identyfied, I win the gal. But I aint got no business without a spring and I do reckon he can sure git it runnin'. Springs—plenty dinero. No springs—I go bust. No Smith—no springs.”

After many days, cupidity won over Cupid. One day, as the Recoverer dozed placidly on the porch in front of the saloon, his hat laid to one side and a large bandanna handkerchief protecting his calm peaceful face from the light, there came to the “Home of the Thirsty” a band of cowboys.

“Get on to the bearded lady,” said one,

“Lady nothin'!” said another. “It's hair mattress bein' aired.”

Glad expectations oozed from the cowboys as it does from small boys waiting for a circus to open. The silk hat and whiskers promised much. gratifying entertainment. Real tenderfeet were scarce. the last one of this particular kind had been compelled to walk on all fours up ind down the porch, shaking his whiskers frantically and bleating like a goat, while his audience drank and discussed his gaits.

“Sh-h-h!” came a warning hiss from the doorway, and the saloon-keeper appeared with finger on lips and a look of terror in his face. In response to his beckoning the cavalcade filed softly inside.

“Boys,” he said in a solicitous whisper, “I've been waitin' for help. That old geezer out there is One-Eyed Dick Mulligan and he's let his windbreaks grow.”

With intense interest and painful silence, the cowmen read the reward notice on the wall. They gazed at the occupant of the tilted chair and listened at the sonorous snores that alternated with short gasps like the putterings of a gasoline engine. They decided, accustomed as they were to this form of sleeping sound, that if One-Eyed Dick's prowess in the gun line were equal to his snoring strength he must indeed been a terror. Direct assault on such a demon was out of the question, as it might come to a case of killing and the reward said plainly, “Alive.”

All sorts of suggestions as to the best method were. made, from merely roping him to chloroforming him. They finessed. Gunny sacks were gathered from the saloon-keeper's bunk, stitched together until they formed an immense bag, and the trap was ready. Nervous hands held it widely open as they crept cautiously out upon their prey. They threw it over and fell upon the serenely sleeping Recoverer. A football “down” would have looked like a church “'sociable” game in comparison with what followed. An ancient gladiator, enmeshed in a net, would have felt outdone by the Professor—outhowled, outsworn, and finally out-pleaded. Violent expostulations were followed by gurglings, gruntings, and growlings and more bad language. Nothing saved the burning of the sacks except the fact that they were impregnated with asbestos. The cowboys were given valuable additions to their vocabularies.

Mirandy and her father appeared, but their wonderment and indignation subsided when the saloon-keeper explained that he had “Recognized the creature in the bag as Mulligan the minute he set eyes on him, but didn't calkylate to raise no ruction.” Lord Nelson and he were in the same class, proving that wooden legs are no bar to heroism.

In but a brief time a buckboard, with the enmeshed Professor carelessly lashed upon it, bucked its way over the sands toward Tucson, while the cowboy escort gleefully planned a bizarre expenditure of the thousand dollars reward.

The Recoverer of Springs, stiff and sore, perspiring and profane, was haled into court, where none could say whether he was or was not one Mulligan, due to be hanged for horse stealing but forgiven for various sanguinary acts. The justice of the peace disliked the responsibility of passing the death sentence without identification, although most of the spectators were as willing as Barkus.

After rapping strenuously for silence, the justice ordered that the “prisoner's face be exposed.” Blank looks passed between the sheriff and his deputies.

“The court orders that his whiskers be removed,” came the thundering explanation from the justice.

Some of the more lawless citizens volunteered to pull them off, but withdrew under the fiery gaze of the Professor's one good eye.

The prisoner was not without resource. He arose and faced the court. One hand clung lovingly to the patriarchal beard, which like a door mat, covered his middle front, the other was energetically waved aloft.

“Not on yer tin type, judge,” he said. “I demand counsel and stand on my rights as a American citizen. There aint no law allowing you to separate me from my hair till I'm proved guilty. Whiskers is a sacred thing, because they are private property, and the Declaration of Independence and Patrick Henry mention 'The sacred rights of property,' or somethin' like that. It's unconstitutional, irrelevant, and uncompatible. I'm Mulligan with whiskers or I aint Mulligan. E pluribus unum says the law in Latin which same means united we are and divided be damned. The bet goes as it lays.”

The burst of forensic eloquence and the one-eyed magnetism of the orator, swept all before it. The court was in a quandary and demanded time to look up Blackstone on Beards. The Professor was detained in jail. The officers took him to the calaboose, part of him dejected and the rest triumphant, ind the breezes, as he went, blew joyously through his facial fringe.

 

“I suppose you can lead in a little hymn, can't ye?” a voice greeted him from the semi-darkness as he was thrust within the cell.

The Professor responded with many and strange oaths.

“Excuse me,” came the voice when there was a break for a breathing space in the new prisoner's monologue. “I thought maybe you was a Missionanary. The last one with lilocks like your'n was.”

As his eves became accustomed to the gloom, the Recoverer of Springs discovered that his sole companion was a gnarled man who, seated on a nail key beneath a grating and clad in decided negligee, was industriously patching the seat of a pair of trousers with a sail needle and some striped bed ticking.

“Who are you, if you aint a missionary?” continued the man.

“Professor Elisha Smith, Recoverer of Springs.”

“What's the difference between a recoverer of springs and a common, onnery well-borer?”

The Professor maintained silence.

“I was a well-borer myself, before I got six months for stealing a pipe-organ,” the voice continued.

The acquaintanceship thus opened under such confining circumstances, ripened into friendship. It developed a hankering for the well business in the Professor. It became a certainty in his mind, as he pondered over it, that if he could but regain liberty, induce the well-borer to move his plant to Arcadia and commence operations, he could yet get the thousand dollars and perhaps—here he sighed—Mirandy. When he chose he combined the seductiveness of a siren with the persistency of a porous plaster. The well-borer was about as resisting as an oyster. He yielded to blandishment and “came over.”

One morning the horse, for whose pilfering Mulligan was mostly wanted, wandered back to its corral, some the worse for wear but by his mere presence disposing of the charge of theft.

There was no alternative but to release the star prisoner. The sheriff took it on himself to remit three months of the time against the well-borer, giving as his reason for so doing “good behavior.” In reality, however, it was because county warrants were behind, the borer a prodigious eater, the officer's credit poor, and in addition, to let him go “saved a heap of trouble.” So together the prisoners were liberated.

 

Thus it came about that on a certain day there rumbled across the sands and into Arcadia a freighter's wagon, bringing a drilling outfit, on the top of which were seated in state, the well-borer and the Recoverer of Springs. Professor Doctor Elisha Smith, V.S., A.Z.Z., had returned to his own again.

Uncorking his eloquence he sprayed it over Mirandy and her father. They hearkened to his scornful denials of ever having “lifted” a horse, saw in him a martyr to a justice that was well known to work with bandaged eyes, and took him back to their hearts. The saloon-keeper bit his nails, and if he had ever heard the word would probably have hissed, “Foiled!” Lacking this erudition he retired to his back room where he jumped up and down in such a transport of rage that his bewhittled leg broke off and he was crippled until he could fashion another.

Securing a bit of sage brush in lieu of a willow wand, the Professor traversed the hill side on the days of his return, and when he saw himself observed would mutter strange incantations like “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,” and similar weird sayings indulged in by all true wizards.

The well-borer found the bar-room a haven of rest, and, having some small but real money, was made not unwelcome. It grieved him sore when he was compelled, by the vicissitudes of business, to set up his plant in a place selected by the Recoverer of Springs and begin that most disgusting of all human actions—work. He thought longingly many times of his little home in the Tucson jail, but “got busy.”

And while the well-borer sought the heart of the earth, the Recoverer of Springs sought the heart of Mirandy. They passed long moon-lighted evenings on a hammock constructed from two hair riatas crossed by barrel staves, her head gently pressed against his whiskers, while from across the waste there was wafted to them the solemn strains of “A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother,” feelingly rendered on the saloon-keeper's harmonica. Mirandy's coy ear would wink forward as she listened to her hero's tales of dungeons deep and clanking chains. As a martyr, the Professor, to hear him tell it, had Martin Luther backed off the boards. So eloquent was the tale of his sufferings that Mirandy often wept. Those were the halcyon days indeed.

But even they came to cloudy weather The well-borer's supply of money, credit, and material all came to an end together. And to add to his unrest the visible supply of stimulant was not exhausted hut merely withheld. It was unbecoming, he maintained, that a man whose business consisted in the finding of water, should be cut off from drink. He struck. As he was the whole force, the tie-up was complete and no pickets were necessary.

The Recoverer of Springs was grieved hut stirred to activity. He secured a sufficient advance from the landlord to appease the well-borer and sent him to Tucson for more pipe, assuring him as he went that matters would all be straightened out ere his return.

The world-renowned Elisha was mightily perplexed. He wandered dejectedly around the great barn-like hotel and the wind flapped tunes from the tails of his coat. He soliloquized:

“There aint no water in that hole. I can't get the thousand without it and I can't get the gal. I can't run away with her, because it takes money to run even a foot race. Moses himself would have a hard job beatin' moisture outen these rocks. There aint nothin' will save me except to have some accident that 'll delay the game.”

 

The thought of an accident gave a new trend to his plans. And the word dinned itself under his hat as the day wore on. As if in sympathy with him, nature herself assisted in his enterprise. Sultry clouds aligned themselves across the skies and the night came darkly down. Moonlight would have been a calamity.

As the night wore on the Professor tiptoed his way out of the hotel and to the well derrick. He had thoughtfully provided himself with a stick of giant powder that would certainly provide accident in plenty. It would any way necessitate the drilling of another hole. He capped his stick and dropped it.

A terrific peal of thunder drowned the noise of the explosion. The ground trembled. And to the astonishment as well as fright of the Professor, it trembled not only once, and twice, but thrice.

“The devil's shore broke loose,” he ejaculated, and the hair on his head forgot its parting. An earthquake had jarred the landscape and rocked the inn on its foundations.

From an upper window the disturbed and awakened proprietor beheld in the lightning's glare a strange sight. It was the Recoverer of Springs. There he stood, clad in his underwear, his whiskers and hair blowing, while apparently dancing up and down on nothing. In reality, the Professor was merely in full retreat for the seclusion of his room.

“Great gosh all fish hooks!” murmured the landlord, as he shivered with superstitious dread and cowered beneath his sheets. “That old cuss has certainly got a strong pull somewhere, but I reckon it's in a place where water's at a premium. He's simply got sore at somethin' and is a shakin' the heart out o' things 'round here.”

As the night wore on and the storm continued there was no sleep to be had in Arcadia.

The wearied landlord was called to his senses on the following morning by the ecstatic voice of Mirandy, shrieking: “Paw! Oh Paw! The spring's done started again and is runnin' stronger 'n ever.”

He sprang from the bed and his bare feet slapped the crying stairs as he galloped downward in mad and unceremonious haste. It was true. Either the “accident,” or the earthquake had “unplugged her.” The spring bubbled and gushed as of old.

When the Recoverer sauntered carelessly into the breakfast room a few minutes later, being a healthy man and fond of eating when opportunity offered, he was seized by the erstwhile dignified landlord and given a bear hug of thankfulness. He wondered inwardly what had happened and, when explanations came, blandly waved his hand, threw out his chest and said “Dead easy! Nothin' at all for me to do. If you'd only told me in time I could a made 'em hot or cold, sulpurious or magnesiumurius, just as you wished. Sorry I didn't think to ask you.”

 

Before the well-borer's return he had received Mirandy's hand, the paternal blessing, and a thousand dollars. He was given due honor as the savior of Arcadia and installed in fat luxury as the manager of the hotel. He was taken into the family secrets and even learned the cause of his arrest.

And thereupon the Professor was galvanized. He walked rapidly across the mesa grinding his teeth as he strode. He rushed furiously up to the bar of the “Home of the Thirsty” and his smouldering wrath reached high-water mark?

With a simple gesture, made easy by long experience in past brawls, he extracted his glass eye and laid it on the bar where it glared unfeelingly at his former rival, the saloon-keeper.

“Pal, I'm next,” he said. “You're goin' to be a bird and fly unless I change my mind and load you up with so much hot lead you can't lug it. The truth is I am One-Eyed Mulligan with his whiskers growed; the man that thing called for!”

He strode to the reward notice which had caused him so much trouble, and ripped it from the wall. As he again faced the startled dispenser he whipped a huge gun, with marvelous dexterity, from the seclusion of his coat tails and its solemn and unwinking eye glared at the man behind the bar with as great steadiness as did the eye of glass, and with a deadly menace.

The barkeeper capitulated with many pleadings, packed his harmonica, drank the last of his stock, locked the door, and departed, never more to grace Arcadia with his music or his presence. And as he went the Recoverer of Springs muttered: “It's him to hustle and me to the green old age, and thus does virtue pay its own bets.”