The Second Johnston McCulley Mystery by Johnston McCulley

Author:Johnston McCulley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: megapack, anthology, collection
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

FORBEARANCE

Originally published in All Around Magazine, January 1917.

CHAPTER I

DAD MEEK ARRIVES

There was nothing impressive in the appearance of the light motor-truck’s body, but the chassis was of foreign make; and the man who bent over the wheel, chuckling as he drove, wore a Stetson that was the most expensive procurable, and soft, laced boots that had been made to order. His name was Lates, and he was a raisin king—a man who held that wise economy meant buying the best of everything and keeping modern in every particular.

Lates had made half a million by forcing raisin grapes to grow where scarcely anything had grown before, and by controlling the crops of his neighbors. He was a driver of men, himself included, yet he loved nothing better than a little joke. Hence, as the truck sped over the oiled California highway, Lates took his eyes from the road long enough to glance back behind the seat. His chuckle changed to a soft laugh as he faced ahead again and took a sharp curve in the road on the high.

Here the thoroughfare was lined on the one side by giant eucalyptus trees, behind which were Lates’s raisin fields, and on the other by a high, metal fence, beyond which were countless rows of little houses fronted by pens in which countless thousands of chickens cackled and sang their lives away.

“Right here’s where I put one over on Bill Roach,” quoth Lates, and, without slackening speed, he swung from the highway and through a wide iron gate that had been left open, and the truck charged up the private drive that led to the Roach mansion and the neat concrete office building of the National Poultry Farm.

The driveway was lined with palms, with here and there a magnolia, and it curved gracefully for more than three hundred yards from the gate to Roach’s front door. An approaching vehicle could not be seen until it was within fifty yards of the house; hence, Lates decided, his should be heard. He manipulated levers and buttons to make noise and smoke.

Therefore Roach, sitting before his desk in the office building, discerned the roaring of a motor and had his ears tortured by the continual honk of an auto horn. With a roar of rage he got up, clamped his teeth down upon his lifeless cigar, put his hat on the back of his head, and strode wrathfully across the room to the door.

To Roach, the presence of a motor car on his private driveway was second only to the unpardonable insult. Roach’s chickens and eggs went to market behind the finest teams in California; and when he rode or drove abroad, either on business or with his daughter Betty, he used horseflesh that would have delighted the critical judges of a fashionable stock show.

His love of horses, remaining from the old Texas days when he had dealt in cattle instead of fowls, was in an inverse ratio to his hatred of all sorts of automobiles. And

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