HE celebrated speech of Hamlet to Horatio, beginning "There are more things in heaven and earth," came into the mind of Bill Davies, of Ridge, Montana, when he got to the end of the sequence of events that circled round the Queer Place, on the road to Spring Lake.
From Ridge to Midway is easy going, as a rule, and at Midway the freighters camp. There are not always freighters there, of course; but since the Spring Lake mines opened up, to work steadily day and night, the chances are in favor of seeing, dotting the little pocket valley at Midway, the twinkling camp fires of the freighters outspanned for the night there. Sometimes the only light in the valley is the dropped yellow star of Buck Flannigan's "hotel"—the only one between Ridge and Spring Lake.
Buck built it when the placer miners were tearing out the gravel at Midway, thirty years ago. He stayed on after the creek bed had been torn out, the pocket desecrated, and the banks on either hand were left looking as if a mad giant with a rake had been at work there. Unshaven and bleary, he pottered about his paintless hotel, while year by year nature tried to cover over the signs of havoc, and the shacks of what was once Midway fell log by log. You could never say he had a jag on. He was just soaked, yet always coherent.
Flannigan's was thirty miles from Ridge, and two and thirty from Spring Lake, and it looked very lonely, and Flannigan was the split double of a dime-novel cover of Bad Man Plummer—and there, mark you, were the holes in the floor that told of dancing tenderfeet, and there was Flannigan, smiling, as the chink put down your plate of steak and onions, and Flannigan's voice huskily inquired: "What do you drink with it?"
Most of the freighters did not go near Flannigan's after they hauled into the meadow; just got the horses out, the nose bags on, the frying pan on the fire, the blankets spread. They might, in the morning, "have one" at Flannigan's, but that was about the extent of their visits; for Flannigan's depressed everybody. It wasn't a hotel; it was a relict. That checkerboard on the table in the corner of the barroom was the most tragic of checkerboards. The most stolid of men would turn, with a shudder, from the checkerboard. And yet it was the only amusement in sixty- two miles.
It used to haunt and fascinate Bill Davies on the infrequent occasions that loneliness, or drizzle, prompted him to go over to Flannigan's after having made camp. Perched on the high seat of his wagon, waggling through the mountains, the impression of the lone barroom with the lone checkerboard on the corner table used to stay with him even more poignantly than the impression of Flannigan. When Flannigan was talking to him—when Flannigan's bulging, washed-out eyes made him look away, as one looks away from a cuttlefish—Bill used to look at that checkerboard; then back to Flannigan he would turn, to find Flannigan's eyes queerer still.
Something queer about that checkerboard. They didn't play checkers in the old days, when Flannigan's was open day and night. The cards slipped on the table then, the balls ran on the little horses, the dice rattled. In those days, if you wanted to shake for a drink with a friend at Flannigan's you could, by waggling your hand in air for a sign as you advanced to the bar, have the dicebox clapped down there for you. It used to stand on a shelf behind the bar, a dicebox big as a large pepper pot, with dice half an inch square. But it was hidden away when the gold seekers departed, and nature encroached again on Midway—and there was only the checkerboard.
"Queer!"
So thought Davies, haunted by the checkerboard as he waggled through the soundless, red-black woods on his high wagon perch. It was morning, dewy and fragrant in the mountains. Behind him, and below, lay the meadow—Midway Meadow—with its black marks of old fires, its torn river bed, its moldering shacks, and Flannigan's. The horses' hoofs fell muffled, the wheels rolled silently in the foot of dust that was the road. The only noise of his progress was the squeak of cargo rubbing, box against box, and an occasional clink of chains when the whiffle swung.
"Queer about that checkerboard!"
It suddenly struck him that there was, perhaps, a game a man could play by himself on a checkerboard.
"Oh, maybe Flannigan plays with the chink!" he considered, and smiled to himself.