HEART OF THE WEST

by O. Henry


CONTENTS

 I. Hearts and Crosses
 II. The Ransom of Mack
 III. Telemachus, Friend
 IV. The Handbook of Hymen
 V. The Pimienta Pancakes
 VI. Seats of the Haughty
 VII. Hygeia at the Solito
 VIII. An Afternoon Miracle
 IX. The Higher Abdication
 X. Cupid à la Carte
 XI. The Caballero’s Way
 XII. The Sphinx Apple
 XIII. The Missing Chord
 XIV. A Call Loan
 XV. The Princess and the Puma
 XVI. The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson
 XVII. Christmas by Injunction
 XVIII. A Chaparral Prince
 XIX. The Reformation of Calliope




HEART OF THE WEST




I
HEARTS AND CROSSES


Baldy Woods reached for the bottle, and got it. Whenever Baldy went for
anything he usually—but this is not Baldy’s story. He poured out a
third drink that was larger by a finger than the first and second.
Baldy was in consultation; and the consultee is worthy of his hire.

“I’d be king if I was you,” said Baldy, so positively that his holster
creaked and his spurs rattled.

Webb Yeager pushed back his flat-brimmed Stetson, and made further
disorder in his straw-coloured hair. The tonsorial recourse being
without avail, he followed the liquid example of the more resourceful
Baldy.

“If a man marries a queen, it oughtn’t to make him a two-spot,”
declared Webb, epitomising his grievances.

“Sure not,” said Baldy, sympathetic, still thirsty, and genuinely
solicitous concerning the relative value of the cards. “By rights
you’re a king. If I was you, I’d call for a new deal. The cards have
been stacked on you—I’ll tell you what you are, Webb Yeager.”

“What?” asked Webb, with a hopeful look in his pale-blue eyes.

“You’re a prince-consort.”

“Go easy,” said Webb. “I never blackguarded you none.”

“It’s a title,” explained Baldy, “up among the picture-cards; but it
don’t take no tricks. I’ll tell you, Webb. It’s a brand they’re got for
certain animals in Europe. Say that you or me or one of them Dutch
dukes marries in a royal family. Well, by and by our wife gets to be
queen. Are we king? Not in a million years. At the coronation
ceremonies we march between little casino and the Ninth Grand Custodian
of the Royal Hall Bedchamber. The only use we are is to appear in
photographs, and accept the responsibility for the heir-apparent. That
ain’t any square deal. Yes, sir, Webb, you’re a prince-consort; and if
I was you, I’d start a interregnum or a habeus corpus or somethin’; and
I’d be king if I had to turn from the bottom of the deck.”

Baldy emptied his glass to the ratification of his Warwick pose.

“Baldy,” said Webb, solemnly, “me and you punched cows in the same
outfit for years. We been runnin’ on the same range, and ridin’ the
same trails since we was boys. I wouldn’t talk about my family affairs
to nobody but you. You was line-rider on the Nopalito Ranch when I
married Santa McAllister. I was foreman then; but what am I now? I
don’t amount to a knot in a stake rope.”

“When old McAllister was the cattle king of West Texas,” continued
Baldy with Satanic sweetness, “you was some tallow. You had as much to
say on the ranch as he did.”

“I did,” admitted Webb, “up to the time he found out I was tryin’ to
get my rope over Santa’s head. Then he kept me out on the range as far
from the ranch-house as he could. When the old man died they commenced
to call Santa the ‘cattle queen.’ I’m boss of the cattle—that’s all.
She ’tends to all the business; she handles all the money; I can’t sell
even a beef-steer to a party of campers, myself. Santa’s the ‘queen’;
and I’m Mr. Nobody.”

“I’d be king if I was you,” repeated Baldy Woods, the royalist. “When a
man marries a queen he ought to grade up with her—on the hoof—
dressed—dried—corned—any old way from the chaparral to the
packing-house. Lots of folks thinks it’s funny, Webb, that you don’t
have the say-so on the Nopalito. I ain’t reflectin’ none on Miz
Yeager—she’s the finest little lady between the Rio Grande and next
Christmas—but a man ought to be boss of his own camp.”

The smooth, brown face of Yeager lengthened to a mask of wounded
melancholy. With that expression, and his rumpled yellow hair and
guileless blue eyes, he might have been likened to a schoolboy whose
leadership had been usurped by a youngster of superior strength. But
his active and sinewy seventy-two inches, and his girded revolvers
forbade the comparison.

“What was that you called me, Baldy?” he asked. “What kind of a concert
was it?”

“A ‘consort,’” corrected Baldy—“a ‘prince-consort.’ It’s a kind of
short-card pseudonym. You come in sort of between Jack-high and a
four-card flush.”

Webb Yeager sighed, and gathered the strap of his Winchester scabbard
from the floor.

“I’m ridin’ back to the ranch to-day,” he said half-heartedly. “I’ve
got to start a bunch of beeves for San Antone in the morning.”

“I’m your company as far as Dry Lake,” announced Baldy. “I’ve got a
round-up camp on the San Marcos cuttin’ out two-year-olds.”

The two _compañeros_ mounted their ponies and trotted away from the
little railroad settlement, where they had foregathered in the thirsty
morning.

At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting
cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum
of the ponies’ hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of
the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse is
seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between
your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So, without apology,
Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles
away.

“You remember, yourself, Baldy, that there was a time when Santa wasn’t
quite so independent. You remember the days when old McAllister was
keepin’ us apart, and how she used to send me the sign that she wanted
to see me? Old man Mac promised to make me look like a colander if I
ever come in gun-shot of the ranch. You remember the sign she used to
send, Baldy—the heart with a cross inside of it?”

“Me?” cried Baldy, with intoxicated archness. “You old sugar-stealing
coyote! Don’t I remember! Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned
turtle-dove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them
hiroglyphs. The ‘gizzard-and-crossbones’ we used to call it. We used to
see ’em on truck that was sent out from the ranch. They was marked in
charcoal on the sacks of flour and in lead-pencil on the newspapers. I
see one of ’em once chalked on the back of a new cook that old man
McAllister sent out from the ranch—danged if I didn’t.”

“Santa’s father,” explained Webb gently, “got her to promise that she
wouldn’t write to me or send me any word. That heart-and-cross sign was
her scheme. Whenever she wanted to see me in particular she managed to
put that mark on somethin’ at the ranch that she knew I’d see. And I
never laid eyes on it but what I burnt the wind for the ranch the same
night. I used to see her in that coma mott back of the little
horse-corral.”

“We knowed it,” chanted Baldy; “but we never let on. We was all for
you. We knowed why you always kept that fast paint in camp. And when we
see that gizzard-and-crossbones figured out on the truck from the ranch
we knowed old Pinto was goin’ to eat up miles that night instead of
grass. You remember Scurry—that educated horse-wrangler we had— the
college fellow that tangle-foot drove to the range? Whenever Scurry saw
that come-meet-your-honey brand on anything from the ranch, he’d wave
his hand like that, and say, ‘Our friend Lee Andrews will again swim
the Hell’s point to-night.’”

“The last time Santa sent me the sign,” said Webb, “was once when she
was sick. I noticed it as soon as I hit camp, and I galloped Pinto
forty mile that night. She wasn’t at the coma mott. I went to the
house; and old McAllister met me at the door. ‘Did you come here to get
killed?’ says he; ‘I’ll disoblige you for once. I just started a
Mexican to bring you. Santa wants you. Go in that room and see her. And
then come out here and see me.’

“Santa was lyin’ in bed pretty sick. But she gives out a kind of a
smile, and her hand and mine lock horns, and I sets down by the bed—
mud and spurs and chaps and all. ‘I’ve heard you ridin’ across the
grass for hours, Webb,’ she says. ‘I was sure you’d come. You saw the
sign?’ she whispers. ‘The minute I hit camp,’ says I. ‘’Twas marked on
the bag of potatoes and onions.’ ‘They’re always together,’ says she,
soft like—‘always together in life.’ ‘They go well together,’ I says,
‘in a stew.’ ‘I mean hearts and crosses,’ says Santa. ‘Our sign—to love
and to suffer—that’s what they mean.’

“And there was old Doc Musgrove amusin’ himself with whisky and a
palm-leaf fan. And by and by Santa goes to sleep; and Doc feels her
forehead; and he says to me: ‘You’re not such a bad febrifuge. But
you’d better slide out now; for the diagnosis don’t call for you in
regular doses. The little lady’ll be all right when she wakes up.’

“I seen old McAllister outside. ‘She’s asleep,’ says I. ‘And now you
can start in with your colander-work. Take your time; for I left my gun
on my saddle-horn.’

“Old Mac laughs, and he says to me: ‘Pumpin’ lead into the best
ranch-boss in West Texas don’t seem to me good business policy. I don’t
know where I could get as good a one. It’s the son-in-law idea, Webb,
that makes me admire for to use you as a target. You ain’t my idea for
a member of the family. But I can use you on the Nopalito if you’ll
keep outside of a radius with the ranch-house in the middle of it. You
go upstairs and lay down on a cot, and when you get some sleep we’ll
talk it over.’”

Baldy Woods pulled down his hat, and uncurled his leg from his
saddle-horn. Webb shortened his rein, and his pony danced, anxious to
be off. The two men shook hands with Western ceremony.

“_Adios_, Baldy,” said Webb, “I’m glad I seen you and had this talk.”

With a pounding rush that sounded like the rise of a covey of quail,
the riders sped away toward different points of the compass. A hundred
yards on his route Baldy reined in on the top of a bare knoll, and
emitted a yell. He swayed on his horse; had he been on foot, the earth
would have risen and conquered him; but in the saddle he was a master
of equilibrium, and laughed at whisky, and despised the centre of
gravity.

Webb turned in his saddle at the signal.

“If I was you,” came Baldy’s strident and perverting tones, “I’d be
king!”

At eight o’clock on the following morning Bud Turner rolled from his
saddle in front of the Nopalito ranch-house, and stumbled with whizzing
rowels toward the gallery. Bud was in charge of the bunch of
beef-cattle that was to strike the trail that morning for San Antonio.
Mrs. Yeager was on the gallery watering a cluster of hyacinths growing
in a red earthenware jar.

“King” McAllister had bequeathed to his daughter many of his strong
characteristics—his resolution, his gay courage, his contumacious
self-reliance, his pride as a reigning monarch of hoofs and horns.
_Allegro_ and _fortissimo_ had been McAllister’s temp and tone. In
Santa they survived, transposed to the feminine key. Substantially, she
preserved the image of the mother who had been summoned to wander in
other and less finite green pastures long before the waxing herds of
kine had conferred royalty upon the house. She had her mother’s slim,
strong figure and grave, soft prettiness that relieved in her the
severity of the imperious McAllister eye and the McAllister air of
royal independence.

Webb stood on one end of the gallery giving orders to two or three
sub-bosses of various camps and outfits who had ridden in for
instructions.

“Morning,” said Bud briefly. “Where do you want them beeves to go in
town—to Barber’s, as usual?”

Now, to answer that had been the prerogative of the queen. All the
reins of business—buying, selling, and banking—had been held by her
capable fingers. The handling of cattle had been entrusted fully to her
husband. In the days of “King” McAllister, Santa had been his secretary
and helper; and she had continued her work with wisdom and profit. But
before she could reply, the prince-consort spake up with calm decision:

“You drive that bunch to Zimmerman and Nesbit’s pens. I spoke to
Zimmerman about it some time ago.”

Bud turned on his high boot-heels.

“Wait!” called Santa quickly. She looked at her husband with surprise
in her steady gray eyes.

“Why, what do you mean, Webb?” she asked, with a small wrinkle
gathering between her brows. “I never deal with Zimmerman and Nesbit.
Barber has handled every head of stock from this ranch in that market
for five years. I’m not going to take the business out of his hands.”
She faced Bud Turner. “Deliver those cattle to Barber,” she concluded
positively.

Bud gazed impartially at the water-jar hanging on the gallery, stood on
his other leg, and chewed a mesquite-leaf.

“I want this bunch of beeves to go to Zimmerman and Nesbit,” said Webb,
with a frosty light in his blue eyes.

“Nonsense,” said Santa impatiently. “You’d better start on, Bud, so as
to noon at the Little Elm water-hole. Tell Barber we’ll have another
lot of culls ready in about a month.”

Bud allowed a hesitating eye to steal upward and meet Webb’s. Webb saw
apology in his look, and fancied he saw commiseration.

“You deliver them cattle,” he said grimly, “to—”

“Barber,” finished Santa sharply. “Let that settle it. Is there
anything else you are waiting for, Bud?”

“No, m’m,” said Bud. But before going he lingered while a cow’s tail
could have switched thrice; for man is man’s ally; and even the
Philistines must have blushed when they took Samson in the way they
did.

“You hear your boss!” cried Webb sardonically. He took off his hat, and
bowed until it touched the floor before his wife.

“Webb,” said Santa rebukingly, “you’re acting mighty foolish to-day.”

“Court fool, your Majesty,” said Webb, in his slow tones, which had
changed their quality. “What else can you expect? Let me tell you. I
was a man before I married a cattle-queen. What am I now? The
laughing-stock of the camps. I’ll be a man again.”

Santa looked at him closely.

“Don’t be unreasonable, Webb,” she said calmly. “You haven’t been
slighted in any way. Do I ever interfere in your management of the
cattle? I know the business side of the ranch much better than you do.
I learned it from Dad. Be sensible.”

“Kingdoms and queendoms,” said Webb, “don’t suit me unless I am in the
pictures, too. I punch the cattle and you wear the crown. All right.
I’d rather be High Lord Chancellor of a cow-camp than the eight-spot in
a queen-high flush. It’s your ranch; and Barber gets the beeves.”

Webb’s horse was tied to the rack. He walked into the house and brought
out his roll of blankets that he never took with him except on long
rides, and his “slicker,” and his longest stake-rope of plaited
raw-hide. These he began to tie deliberately upon his saddle. Santa, a
little pale, followed him.

Webb swung up into the saddle. His serious, smooth face was without
expression except for a stubborn light that smouldered in his eyes.

“There’s a herd of cows and calves,” said he, “near the Hondo
water-hole on the Frio that ought to be moved away from timber. Lobos
have killed three of the calves. I forgot to leave orders. You’d better
tell Simms to attend to it.”

Santa laid a hand on the horse’s bridle, and looked her husband in the
eye.

“Are you going to leave me, Webb?” she asked quietly.

“I am going to be a man again,” he answered.

“I wish you success in a praiseworthy attempt,” she said, with a sudden
coldness. She turned and walked directly into the house.

Webb Yeager rode to the southeast as straight as the topography of West
Texas permitted. And when he reached the horizon he might have ridden
on into blue space as far as knowledge of him on the Nopalito went. And
the days, with Sundays at their head, formed into hebdomadal squads;
and the weeks, captained by the full moon, closed ranks into menstrual
companies crying “Tempus fugit” on their banners; and the months
marched on toward the vast camp-ground of the years; but Webb Yeager
came no more to the dominions of his queen.

One day a being named Bartholomew, a sheep-man—and therefore of little
account—from the lower Rio Grande country, rode in sight of the
Nopalito ranch-house, and felt hunger assail him. _Ex consuetudine_ he
was soon seated at the mid-day dining table of that hospitable kingdom.
Talk like water gushed from him: he might have been smitten with
Aaron’s rod—that is your gentle shepherd when an audience is vouchsafed
him whose ears are not overgrown with wool.

“Missis Yeager,” he babbled, “I see a man the other day on the Rancho
Seco down in Hidalgo County by your name—Webb Yeager was his. He’d just
been engaged as manager. He was a tall, light-haired man, not saying
much. Perhaps he was some kin of yours, do you think?”

“A husband,” said Santa cordially. “The Seco has done well. Mr. Yeager
is one of the best stockmen in the West.”

The dropping out of a prince-consort rarely disorganises a monarchy.
Queen Santa had appointed as _mayordomo_ of the ranch a trusty subject,
named Ramsay, who had been one of her father’s faithful vassals. And
there was scarcely a ripple on the Nopalito ranch save when the
gulf-breeze created undulations in the grass of its wide acres.

For several years the Nopalito had been making experiments with an
English breed of cattle that looked down with aristocratic contempt
upon the Texas long-horns. The experiments were found satisfactory; and
a pasture had been set aside for the blue-bloods. The fame of them had
gone forth into the chaparral and pear as far as men ride in saddles.
Other ranches woke up, rubbed their eyes, and looked with new
dissatisfaction upon the long-horns.

As a consequence, one day a sunburned, capable, silk-kerchiefed
nonchalant youth, garnished with revolvers, and attended by three
Mexican _vaqueros_, alighted at the Nopalito ranch and presented the
following business-like epistle to the queen thereof:

Mrs. Yeager—The Nopalito Ranch:
    Dear Madam:
    I am instructed by the owners of the Rancho Seco to purchase 100
    head of two and three-year-old cows of the Sussex breed owned by
    you. If you can fill the order please deliver the cattle to the
    bearer; and a check will be forwarded to you at once.


Respectfully,
Webster Yeager,
Manager the Rancho Seco.


Business is business, even—very scantily did it escape being written
“especially”—in a kingdom.

That night the 100 head of cattle were driven up from the pasture and
penned in a corral near the ranch-house for delivery in the morning.

When night closed down and the house was still, did Santa Yeager throw
herself down, clasping that formal note to her bosom, weeping, and
calling out a name that pride (either in one or the other) had kept
from her lips many a day? Or did she file the letter, in her business
way, retaining her royal balance and strength?

Wonder, if you will; but royalty is sacred; and there is a veil. But
this much you shall learn:

At midnight Santa slipped softly out of the ranch-house, clothed in
something dark and plain. She paused for a moment under the live-oak
trees. The prairies were somewhat dim, and the moonlight was pale
orange, diluted with particles of an impalpable, flying mist. But the
mock-bird whistled on every bough of vantage; leagues of flowers
scented the air; and a kindergarten of little shadowy rabbits leaped
and played in an open space near by. Santa turned her face to the
southeast and threw three kisses thitherward; for there was none to
see.

Then she sped silently to the blacksmith-shop, fifty yards away; and
what she did there can only be surmised. But the forge glowed red; and
there was a faint hammering such as Cupid might make when he sharpens
his arrow-points.

Later she came forth with a queer-shaped, handled thing in one hand,
and a portable furnace, such as are seen in branding-camps, in the
other. To the corral where the Sussex cattle were penned she sped with
these things swiftly in the moonlight.

She opened the gate and slipped inside the corral. The Sussex cattle
were mostly a dark red. But among this bunch was one that was milky
white—notable among the others.

And now Santa shook from her shoulder something that we had not seen
before—a rope lasso. She freed the loop of it, coiling the length in
her left hand, and plunged into the thick of the cattle.

The white cow was her object. She swung the lasso, which caught one
horn and slipped off. The next throw encircled the forefeet and the
animal fell heavily. Santa made for it like a panther; but it scrambled
up and dashed against her, knocking her over like a blade of grass.

Again she made her cast, while the aroused cattle milled around the
four sides of the corral in a plunging mass. This throw was fair; the
white cow came to earth again; and before it could rise Santa had made
the lasso fast around a post of the corral with a swift and simple
knot, and had leaped upon the cow again with the rawhide hobbles.

In one minute the feet of the animal were tied (no record-breaking
deed) and Santa leaned against the corral for the same space of time,
panting and lax.

And then she ran swiftly to her furnace at the gate and brought the
branding-iron, queerly shaped and white-hot.

The bellow of the outraged white cow, as the iron was applied, should
have stirred the slumbering auricular nerves and consciences of the
near-by subjects of the Nopalito, but it did not. And it was amid the
deepest nocturnal silence that Santa ran like a lapwing back to the
ranch-house and there fell upon a cot and sobbed—sobbed as though
queens had hearts as simple ranchmen’s wives have, and as though she
would gladly make kings of prince-consorts, should they ride back again
from over the hills and far away.

In the morning the capable, revolvered youth and his _vaqueros_ set
forth, driving the bunch of Sussex cattle across the prairies to the
Rancho Seco. Ninety miles it was; a six days’ journey, grazing and
watering the animals on the way.

The beasts arrived at Rancho Seco one evening at dusk; and were
received and counted by the foreman of the ranch.

The next morning at eight o’clock a horseman loped out of the brush to
the Nopalito ranch-house. He dismounted stiffly, and strode, with
whizzing spurs, to the house. His horse gave a great sigh and swayed
foam-streaked, with down-drooping head and closed eyes.

But waste not your pity upon Belshazzar, the flea-bitten sorrel.
To-day, in Nopalito horse-pasture he survives, pampered, beloved,
unridden, cherished record-holder of long-distance rides.

The horseman stumbled into the house. Two arms fell around his neck,
and someone cried out in the voice of woman and queen alike: “Webb— oh,
Webb!”

“I was a skunk,” said Webb Yeager.

“Hush,” said Santa, “did you see it?”

“I saw it,” said Webb.

What they meant God knows; and you shall know, if you rightly read the
primer of events.

“Be the cattle-queen,” said Webb; “and overlook it if you can. I was a
mangy, sheep-stealing coyote.”

“Hush!” said Santa again, laying her fingers upon his mouth. “There’s
no queen here. Do you know who I am? I am Santa Yeager, First Lady of
the Bedchamber. Come here.”

She dragged him from the gallery into the room to the right. There
stood a cradle with an infant in it—a red, ribald, unintelligible,
babbling, beautiful infant, sputtering at life in an unseemly manner.

“There’s no queen on this ranch,” said Santa again. “Look at the king.
He’s got your eyes, Webb. Down on your knees and look at his Highness.”

But jingling rowels sounded on the gallery, and Bud Turner stumbled
there again with the same query that he had brought, lacking a few
days, a year ago.

“‘Morning. Them beeves is just turned out on the trail. Shall I drive
’em to Barber’s, or—”

He saw Webb and stopped, open-mouthed.

“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!” shrieked the king in his cradle, beating the air
with his fists.

“You hear your boss, Bud,” said Webb Yeager, with a broad grin—just as
he had said a year ago.

And that is all, except that when old man Quinn, owner of the Rancho
Seco, went out to look over the herd of Sussex cattle that he had
bought from the Nopalito ranch, he asked his new manager:

“What’s the Nopalito ranch brand, Wilson?”

“X Bar Y,” said Wilson.

“I thought so,” said Quinn. “But look at that white heifer there; she’s
got another brand—a heart with a cross inside of it. What brand is
that?”




II
THE RANSOM OF MACK


Me and old Mack Lonsbury, we got out of that Little Hide-and-Seek gold
mine affair with about $40,000 apiece. I say “old” Mack; but he wasn’t
old. Forty-one, I should say; but he always seemed old.

“Andy,” he says to me, “I’m tired of hustling. You and me have been
working hard together for three years. Say we knock off for a while,
and spend some of this idle money we’ve coaxed our way.”

“The proposition hits me just right,” says I. “Let’s be nabobs for a
while and see how it feels. What’ll we do—take in the Niagara Falls, or
buck at faro?”

“For a good many years,” says Mack, “I’ve thought that if I ever had
extravagant money I’d rent a two-room cabin somewhere, hire a Chinaman
to cook, and sit in my stocking feet and read Buckle’s History of
Civilisation.”

“That sounds self-indulgent and gratifying without vulgar ostentation,”
says I; “and I don’t see how money could be better invested. Give me a
cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner’s Self-Instructor for the Banjo, and I’ll
join you.”

A week afterwards me and Mack hits this small town of Piña, about
thirty miles out from Denver, and finds an elegant two-room house that
just suits us. We deposited half-a-peck of money in the Piña bank and
shook hands with every one of the 340 citizens in the town. We brought
along the Chinaman and the cuckoo clock and Buckle and the Instructor
with us from Denver; and they made the cabin seem like home at once.

Never believe it when they tell you riches don’t bring happiness. If
you could have seen old Mack sitting in his rocking-chair with his
blue-yarn sock feet up in the window and absorbing in that Buckle stuff
through his specs you’d have seen a picture of content that would have
made Rockefeller jealous. And I was learning to pick out “Old Zip Coon”
on the banjo, and the cuckoo was on time with his remarks, and Ah Sing
was messing up the atmosphere with the handsomest smell of ham and eggs
that ever laid the honeysuckle in the shade. When it got too dark to
make out Buckle’s nonsense and the notes in the Instructor, me and Mack
would light our pipes and talk about science and pearl diving and
sciatica and Egypt and spelling and fish and trade-winds and leather
and gratitude and eagles, and a lot of subjects that we’d never had
time to explain our sentiments about before.

One evening Mack spoke up and asked me if I was much apprised in the
habits and policies of women folks.

“Why, yes,” says I, in a tone of voice; “I know ’em from Alfred to
Omaha. The feminine nature and similitude,” says I, “is as plain to my
sight as the Rocky Mountains is to a blue-eyed burro. I’m onto all
their little side-steps and punctual discrepancies.”

“I tell you, Andy,” says Mack, with a kind of sigh, “I never had the
least amount of intersection with their predispositions. Maybe I might
have had a proneness in respect to their vicinity, but I never took the
time. I made my own living since I was fourteen; and I never seemed to
get my ratiocinations equipped with the sentiments usually depicted
toward the sect. I sometimes wish I had,” says old Mack.

“They’re an adverse study,” says I, “and adapted to points of view.
Although they vary in rationale, I have found ’em quite often obviously
differing from each other in divergences of contrast.”

“It seems to me,” goes on Mack, “that a man had better take ’em in and
secure his inspirations of the sect when he’s young and so preordained.
I let my chance go by; and I guess I’m too old now to go hopping into
the curriculum.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I tells him. “Maybe you better credit yourself with
a barrel of money and a lot of emancipation from a quantity of
uncontent. Still, I don’t regret my knowledge of ’em,” I says. “It
takes a man who understands the symptoms and by-plays of women-folks to
take care of himself in this world.”

We stayed on in Piña because we liked the place. Some folks might enjoy
their money with noise and rapture and locomotion; but me and Mack we
had had plenty of turmoils and hotel towels. The people were friendly;
Ah Sing got the swing of the grub we liked; Mack and Buckle were as
thick as two body-snatchers, and I was hitting out a cordial
resemblance to “Buffalo Gals, Can’t You Come Out To-night,” on the
banjo.

One day I got a telegram from Speight, the man that was working on a
mine I had an interest in out in New Mexico. I had to go out there; and
I was gone two months. I was anxious to get back to Piña and enjoy life
once more.

When I struck the cabin I nearly fainted. Mack was standing in the
door; and if angels ever wept, I saw no reason why they should be
smiling then.

That man was a spectacle. Yes; he was worse; he was a spyglass; he was
the great telescope in the Lick Observatory. He had on a coat and shiny
shoes and a white vest and a high silk hat; and a geranium as big as an
order of spinach was spiked onto his front. And he was smirking and
warping his face like an infernal storekeeper or a kid with colic.

“Hello, Andy,” says Mack, out of his face. “Glad to see you back.
Things have happened since you went away.”

“I know it,” says I, “and a sacrilegious sight it is. God never made
you that way, Mack Lonsbury. Why do you scarify His works with this
presumptuous kind of ribaldry?”

“Why, Andy,” says he, “they’ve elected me justice of the peace since
you left.”

I looked at Mack close. He was restless and inspired. A justice of the
peace ought to be disconsolate and assuaged.

Just then a young woman passed on the sidewalk; and I saw Mack kind of
half snicker and blush, and then he raised up his hat and smiled and
bowed, and she smiled and bowed, and went on by.

“No hope for you,” says I, “if you’ve got the Mary-Jane infirmity at
your age. I thought it wasn’t going to take on you. And patent leather
shoes! All this in two little short months!”

“I’m going to marry the young lady who just passed to-night,” says
Mack, in a kind of flutter.

“I forgot something at the post-office,” says I, and walked away quick.

I overtook that young woman a hundred yards away. I raised my hat and
told her my name. She was about nineteen; and young for her age. She
blushed, and then looked at me cool, like I was the snow scene from the
“Two Orphans.”

“I understand you are to be married to-night,” I said.

“Correct,” says she. “You got any objections?”

“Listen, sissy,” I begins.

“My name is Miss Rebosa Redd,” says she in a pained way.

“I know it,” says I. “Now, Rebosa, I’m old enough to have owed money to
your father. And that old, specious, dressed-up, garbled, sea-sick
ptomaine prancing about avidiously like an irremediable turkey gobbler
with patent leather shoes on is my best friend. Why did you go and get
him invested in this marriage business?”

“Why, he was the only chance there was,” answers Miss Rebosa.

“Nay,” says I, giving a sickening look of admiration at her complexion
and style of features; “with your beauty you might pick any kind of a
man. Listen, Rebosa. Old Mack ain’t the man you want. He was twenty-two
when you was _née_ Reed, as the papers say. This bursting into bloom
won’t last with him. He’s all ventilated with oldness and rectitude and
decay. Old Mack’s down with a case of Indian summer. He overlooked his
bet when he was young; and now he’s suing Nature for the interest on
the promissory note he took from Cupid instead of the cash. Rebosa, are
you bent on having this marriage occur?”

“Why, sure I am,” says she, oscillating the pansies on her hat, “and so
is somebody else, I reckon.”

“What time is it to take place?” I asks.

“At six o’clock,” says she.

I made up my mind right away what to do. I’d save old Mack if I could.
To have a good, seasoned, ineligible man like that turn chicken for a
girl that hadn’t quit eating slate pencils and buttoning in the back
was more than I could look on with easiness.

“Rebosa,” says I, earnest, drawing upon my display of knowledge
concerning the feminine intuitions of reason—“ain’t there a young man
in Piña—a nice young man that you think a heap of?”

“Yep,” says Rebosa, nodding her pansies—“Sure there is! What do you
think! Gracious!”

“Does he like you?” I asks. “How does he stand in the matter?”

“Crazy,” says Rebosa. “Ma has to wet down the front steps to keep him
from sitting there all the time. But I guess that’ll be all over after
to-night,” she winds up with a sigh.

“Rebosa,” says I, “you don’t really experience any of this adoration
called love for old Mack, do you?”

“Lord! no,” says the girl, shaking her head. “I think he’s as dry as a
lava bed. The idea!”

“Who is this young man that you like, Rebosa?” I inquires.

“It’s Eddie Bayles,” says she. “He clerks in Crosby’s grocery. But he
don’t make but thirty-five a month. Ella Noakes was wild about him
once.”

“Old Mack tells me,” I says, “that he’s going to marry you at six
o’clock this evening.”

“That’s the time,” says she. “It’s to be at our house.”

“Rebosa,” says I, “listen to me. If Eddie Bayles had a thousand dollars
cash—a thousand dollars, mind you, would buy him a store of his own—if
you and Eddie had that much to excuse matrimony on, would you consent
to marry him this evening at five o’clock?”

The girl looks at me a minute; and I can see these inaudible
cogitations going on inside of her, as women will.

“A thousand dollars?” says she. “Of course I would.”

“Come on,” says I. “We’ll go and see Eddie.”

We went up to Crosby’s store and called Eddie outside. He looked to be
estimable and freckled; and he had chills and fever when I made my
proposition.

“At five o’clock?” says he, “for a thousand dollars? Please don’t wake
me up! Well, you _are_ the rich uncle retired from the spice business
in India! I’ll buy out old Crosby and run the store myself.”

We went inside and got old man Crosby apart and explained it. I wrote
my check for a thousand dollars and handed it to him. If Eddie and
Rebosa married each other at five he was to turn the money over to
them.

And then I gave ’em my blessing, and went to wander in the wildwood for
a season. I sat on a log and made cogitations on life and old age and
the zodiac and the ways of women and all the disorder that goes with a
lifetime. I passed myself congratulations that I had probably saved my
old friend Mack from his attack of Indian summer. I knew when he got
well of it and shed his infatuation and his patent leather shoes, he
would feel grateful. “To keep old Mack disinvolved,” thinks I, “from
relapses like this, is worth more than a thousand dollars.” And most of
all I was glad that I’d made a study of women, and wasn’t to be
deceived any by their means of conceit and evolution.

It must have been half-past five when I got back home. I stepped in;
and there sat old Mack on the back of his neck in his old clothes with
his blue socks on the window and the History of Civilisation propped up
on his knees.

“This don’t look like getting ready for a wedding at six,” I says, to
seem innocent.

“Oh,” says Mack, reaching for his tobacco, “that was postponed back to
five o’clock. They sent me over a note saying the hour had been
changed. It’s all over now. What made you stay away so long, Andy?”

“You heard about the wedding?” I asks.

“I operated it,” says he. “I told you I was justice of the peace. The
preacher is off East to visit his folks, and I’m the only one in town
that can perform the dispensations of marriage. I promised Eddie and
Rebosa a month ago I’d marry ’em. He’s a busy lad; and he’ll have a
grocery of his own some day.”

“He will,” says I.

“There was lots of women at the wedding,” says Mack, smoking up. “But I
didn’t seem to get any ideas from ’em. I wish I was informed in the
structure of their attainments like you said you was.”

“That was two months ago,” says I, reaching up for the banjo.




III
TELEMACHUS, FRIEND


Returning from a hunting trip, I waited at the little town of Los
Piños, in New Mexico, for the south-bound train, which was one hour
late. I sat on the porch of the Summit House and discussed the
functions of life with Telemachus Hicks, the hotel proprietor.

Perceiving that personalities were not out of order, I asked him what
species of beast had long ago twisted and mutilated his left ear. Being
a hunter, I was concerned in the evils that may befall one in the
pursuit of game.

“That ear,” says Hicks, “is the relic of true friendship.”

“An accident?” I persisted.

“No friendship is an accident,” said Telemachus; and I was silent.

“The only perfect case of true friendship I ever knew,” went on my
host, “was a cordial intent between a Connecticut man and a monkey. The
monkey climbed palms in Barranquilla and threw down cocoanuts to the
man. The man sawed them in two and made dippers, which he sold for two
_reales_ each and bought rum. The monkey drank the milk of the nuts.
Through each being satisfied with his own share of the graft, they
lived like brothers.

“But in the case of human beings, friendship is a transitory art,
subject to discontinuance without further notice.

“I had a friend once, of the entitlement of Paisley Fish, that I
imagined was sealed to me for an endless space of time. Side by side
for seven years we had mined, ranched, sold patent churns, herded
sheep, took photographs and other things, built wire fences, and picked
prunes. Thinks I, neither homocide nor flattery nor riches nor
sophistry nor drink can make trouble between me and Paisley Fish. We
was friends an amount you could hardly guess at. We was friends in
business, and we let our amicable qualities lap over and season our
hours of recreation and folly. We certainly had days of Damon and
nights of Pythias.

“One summer me and Paisley gallops down into these San Andrés mountains
for the purpose of a month’s surcease and levity, dressed in the
natural store habiliments of man. We hit this town of Los Piños, which
certainly was a roof-garden spot of the world, and flowing with
condensed milk and honey. It had a street or two, and air, and hens,
and a eating-house; and that was enough for us.

“We strikes the town after supper-time, and we concludes to sample
whatever efficacy there is in this eating-house down by the railroad
tracks. By the time we had set down and pried up our plates with a
knife from the red oil-cloth, along intrudes Widow Jessup with the hot
biscuit and the fried liver.

“Now, there was a woman that would have tempted an anchovy to forget
his vows. She was not so small as she was large; and a kind of welcome
air seemed to mitigate her vicinity. The pink of her face was the _in
hoc signo_ of a culinary temper and a warm disposition, and her smile
would have brought out the dogwood blossoms in December.

“Widow Jessup talks to us a lot of garrulousness about the climate and
history and Tennyson and prunes and the scarcity of mutton, and finally
wants to know where we came from.

“‘Spring Valley,’ says I.

“‘Big Spring Valley,’ chips in Paisley, out of a lot of potatoes and
knuckle-bone of ham in his mouth.

“That was the first sign I noticed that the old _fidus Diogenes_
business between me and Paisley Fish was ended forever. He knew how I
hated a talkative person, and yet he stampedes into the conversation
with his amendments and addendums of syntax. On the map it was Big
Spring Valley; but I had heard Paisley himself call it Spring Valley a
thousand times.

“Without saying any more, we went out after supper and set on the
railroad track. We had been pardners too long not to know what was
going on in each other’s mind.

“‘I reckon you understand,’ says Paisley, ‘that I’ve made up my mind to
accrue that widow woman as part and parcel in and to my hereditaments
forever, both domestic, sociable, legal, and otherwise, until death us
do part.’

“‘Why, yes,’ says I, ‘I read it between the lines, though you only
spoke one. And I suppose you are aware,’ says I, ‘that I have a
movement on foot that leads up to the widow’s changing her name to
Hicks, and leaves you writing to the society column to inquire whether
the best man wears a japonica or seamless socks at the wedding!’

“‘There’ll be some hiatuses in your program,’ says Paisley, chewing up
a piece of a railroad tie. ‘I’d give in to you,’ says he, ‘in ’most any
respect if it was secular affairs, but this is not so. The smiles of
woman,’ goes on Paisley, ‘is the whirlpool of Squills and Chalybeates,
into which vortex the good ship Friendship is often drawn and
dismembered. I’d assault a bear that was annoying you,’ says Paisley,
‘or I’d endorse your note, or rub the place between your
shoulder-blades with opodeldoc the same as ever; but there my sense of
etiquette ceases. In this fracas with Mrs. Jessup we play it alone.
I’ve notified you fair.’

“And then I collaborates with myself, and offers the following
resolutions and by-laws:

“‘Friendship between man and man,’ says I, ‘is an ancient historical
virtue enacted in the days when men had to protect each other against
lizards with eighty-foot tails and flying turtles. And they’ve kept up
the habit to this day, and stand by each other till the bellboy comes
up and tells them the animals are not really there. I’ve often heard,’
I says, ‘about ladies stepping in and breaking up a friendship between
men. Why should that be? I’ll tell you, Paisley, the first sight and
hot biscuit of Mrs. Jessup appears to have inserted a oscillation into
each of our bosoms. Let the best man of us have her. I’ll play you a
square game, and won’t do any underhanded work. I’ll do all of my
courting of her in your presence, so you will have an equal
opportunity. With that arrangement I don’t see why our steamboat of
friendship should fall overboard in the medicinal whirlpools you speak
of, whichever of us wins out.’

“‘Good old hoss!’ says Paisley, shaking my hand. ‘And I’ll do the
same,’ says he. ‘We’ll court the lady synonymously, and without any of
the prudery and bloodshed usual to such occasions. And we’ll be friends
still, win or lose.’

“At one side of Mrs. Jessup’s eating-house was a bench under some trees
where she used to sit in the breeze after the south-bound had been fed
and gone. And there me and Paisley used to congregate after supper and
make partial payments on our respects to the lady of our choice. And we
was so honorable and circuitous in our calls that if one of us got
there first we waited for the other before beginning any gallivantery.

“The first evening that Mrs. Jessup knew about our arrangement I got to
the bench before Paisley did. Supper was just over, and Mrs. Jessup was
out there with a fresh pink dress on, and almost cool enough to handle.

“I sat down by her and made a few specifications about the moral
surface of nature as set forth by the landscape and the contiguous
perspective. That evening was surely a case in point. The moon was
attending to business in the section of sky where it belonged, and the
trees was making shadows on the ground according to science and nature,
and there was a kind of conspicuous hullabaloo going on in the bushes
between the bullbats and the orioles and the jack-rabbits and other
feathered insects of the forest. And the wind out of the mountains was
singing like a Jew’s-harp in the pile of old tomato-cans by the
railroad track.

“I felt a kind of sensation in my left side—something like dough rising
in a crock by the fire. Mrs. Jessup had moved up closer.

“‘Oh, Mr. Hicks,’ says she, ‘when one is alone in the world, don’t they
feel it more aggravated on a beautiful night like this?’

“I rose up off the bench at once.

“‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ says I, ‘but I’ll have to wait till Paisley comes
before I can give a audible hearing to leading questions like that.’

“And then I explained to her how we was friends cinctured by years of
embarrassment and travel and complicity, and how we had agreed to take
no advantage of each other in any of the more mushy walks of life, such
as might be fomented by sentiment and proximity. Mrs. Jessup appears to
think serious about the matter for a minute, and then she breaks into a
species of laughter that makes the wildwood resound.

“In a few minutes Paisley drops around, with oil of bergamot on his
hair, and sits on the other side of Mrs. Jessup, and inaugurates a sad
tale of adventure in which him and Pieface Lumley has a skinning-match
of dead cows in ’95 for a silver-mounted saddle in the Santa Rita
valley during the nine months’ drought.

“Now, from the start of that courtship I had Paisley Fish hobbled and
tied to a post. Each one of us had a different system of reaching out
for the easy places in the female heart. Paisley’s scheme was to
petrify ’em with wonderful relations of events that he had either come
across personally or in large print. I think he must have got his idea
of subjugation from one of Shakespeare’s shows I see once called
‘Othello.’ There is a coloured man in it who acquires a duke’s daughter
by disbursing to her a mixture of the talk turned out by Rider Haggard,
Lew Dockstader, and Dr. Parkhurst. But that style of courting don’t
work well off the stage.

“Now, I give you my own recipe for inveigling a woman into that state
of affairs when she can be referred to as ‘_née_ Jones.’ Learn how to
pick up her hand and hold it, and she’s yours. It ain’t so easy. Some
men grab at it so much like they was going to set a dislocation of the
shoulder that you can smell the arnica and hear ’em tearing off
bandages. Some take it up like a hot horseshoe, and hold it off at
arm’s length like a druggist pouring tincture of asafœtida in a bottle.
And most of ’em catch hold of it and drag it right out before the
lady’s eyes like a boy finding a baseball in the grass, without giving
her a chance to forget that the hand is growing on the end of her arm.
Them ways are all wrong.

“I’ll tell you the right way. Did you ever see a man sneak out in the
back yard and pick up a rock to throw at a tomcat that was sitting on a
fence looking at him? He pretends he hasn’t got a thing in his hand,
and that the cat don’t see him, and that he don’t see the cat. That’s
the idea. Never drag her hand out where she’ll have to take notice of
it. Don’t let her know that you think she knows you have the least idea
she is aware you are holding her hand. That was my rule of tactics; and
as far as Paisley’s serenade about hostilities and misadventure went,
he might as well have been reading to her a time-table of the Sunday
trains that stop at Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

“One night when I beat Paisley to the bench by one pipeful, my
friendship gets subsidised for a minute, and I asks Mrs. Jessup if she
didn’t think a ‘H’ was easier to write than a ‘J.’ In a second her head
was mashing the oleander flower in my button-hole, and I leaned over
and—but I didn’t.

“‘If you don’t mind,’ says I, standing up, ‘we’ll wait for Paisley to
come before finishing this. I’ve never done anything dishonourable yet
to our friendship, and this won’t be quite fair.’

“‘Mr. Hicks,’ says Mrs. Jessup, looking at me peculiar in the dark, ‘if
it wasn’t for but one thing, I’d ask you to hike yourself down the
gulch and never disresume your visits to my house.’

“‘And what is that, ma’am?’ I asks.

“‘You are too good a friend not to make a good husband,’ says she.

“In five minutes Paisley was on his side of Mrs. Jessup.

“‘In Silver City, in the summer of ’98,’ he begins, ‘I see Jim
Batholomew chew off a Chinaman’s ear in the Blue Light Saloon on
account of a crossbarred muslin shirt that—what was that noise?’

“I had resumed matters again with Mrs. Jessup right where we had left
off.

“‘Mrs. Jessup,’ says I, ‘has promised to make it Hicks. And this is
another of the same sort.’

“Paisley winds his feet round a leg of the bench and kind of groans.

“‘Lem,’ says he, ‘we been friends for seven years. Would you mind not
kissing Mrs. Jessup quite so loud? I’d do the same for you.’

“‘All right,’ says I. ‘The other kind will do as well.’

“‘This Chinaman,’ goes on Paisley, ‘was the one that shot a man named
Mullins in the spring of ’97, and that was—’

“Paisley interrupted himself again.

“‘Lem,’ says he, ‘if you was a true friend you wouldn’t hug Mrs. Jessup
quite so hard. I felt the bench shake all over just then. You know you
told me you would give me an even chance as long as there was any.’

“‘Mr. Man,’ says Mrs. Jessup, turning around to Paisley, ‘if you was to
drop in to the celebration of mine and Mr. Hicks’s silver wedding,
twenty-five years from now, do you think you could get it into that
Hubbard squash you call your head that you are _nix cum rous_ in this
business? I’ve put up with you a long time because you was Mr. Hicks’s
friend; but it seems to me it’s time for you to wear the willow and
trot off down the hill.’

“‘Mrs. Jessup,’ says I, without losing my grasp on the situation as
fiancé, ‘Mr. Paisley is my friend, and I offered him a square deal and
a equal opportunity as long as there was a chance.’

“‘A chance!’ says she. ‘Well, he may think he has a chance; but I hope
he won’t think he’s got a cinch, after what he’s been next to all the
evening.’

“Well, a month afterwards me and Mrs. Jessup was married in the Los
Piños Methodist Church; and the whole town closed up to see the
performance.

“When we lined up in front and the preacher was beginning to sing out
his rituals and observances, I looks around and misses Paisley. I calls
time on the preacher. ‘Paisley ain’t here,’ says I. ‘We’ve got to wait
for Paisley. A friend once, a friend always—that’s Telemachus Hicks,’
says I. Mrs. Jessup’s eyes snapped some; but the preacher holds up the
incantations according to instructions.

“In a few minutes Paisley gallops up the aisle, putting on a cuff as he
comes. He explains that the only dry-goods store in town was closed for
the wedding, and he couldn’t get the kind of a boiled shirt that his
taste called for until he had broke open the back window of the store
and helped himself. Then he ranges up on the other side of the bride,
and the wedding goes on. I always imagined that Paisley calculated as a
last chance that the preacher might marry him to the widow by mistake.

“After the proceedings was over we had tea and jerked antelope and
canned apricots, and then the populace hiked itself away. Last of all
Paisley shook me by the hand and told me I’d acted square and on the
level with him and he was proud to call me a friend.

“The preacher had a small house on the side of the street that he’d
fixed up to rent; and he allowed me and Mrs. Hicks to occupy it till
the ten-forty train the next morning, when we was going on a bridal
tour to El Paso. His wife had decorated it all up with hollyhocks and
poison ivy, and it looked real festal and bowery.

“About ten o’clock that night I sets down in the front door and pulls
off my boots a while in the cool breeze, while Mrs. Hicks was fixing
around in the room. Right soon the light went out inside; and I sat
there a while reverberating over old times and scenes. And then I heard
Mrs. Hicks call out, ‘Ain’t you coming in soon, Lem?’

“‘Well, well!’ says I, kind of rousing up. ‘Durn me if I wasn’t waiting
for old Paisley to—’

“But when I got that far,” concluded Telemachus Hicks, “I thought
somebody had shot this left ear of mine off with a forty-five. But it
turned out to be only a lick from a broomhandle in the hands of Mrs.
Hicks.”




IV
THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN


’Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that
the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of
the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can’t
tell me why our college professors shouldn’t be transferred to the
meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they
could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the
main office what kind of weather to expect. But there’s the other side
of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished
me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.

We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line
prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a
line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in
the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army
through a peace conference.

Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and
stops to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper of
modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the weather,
and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom of the deck
was “warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes.”

That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me and
Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain,
thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot on
a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. We
got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough
for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought
proper.

If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up
in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won’t
stand it.

When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each
other’s jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and
called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a
edict to me. Says he:

“I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the
bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears
compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates
out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-masticated noises
that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady
enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.”

“Mr. Green,” says I, “you having been a friend of mine once, I have
some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for
society between you and a common yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of
the inmates of this here cabin would be wagging a tail just at
present.”

This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we quits speaking
to one another. We divides up the cooking implements, and Idaho cooks
his grub on one side of the fireplace, and me on the other. The snow is
up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day.

You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing
“if John had three apples and James five” on a slate. We never felt any
special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species
of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that we could
use in emergencies. But, snowbound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots,
we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer or Greek and
fractions and the higher branches of information, we’d have had some
resources in the line of meditation and private thought. I’ve seen them
Eastern college fellows working in camps all through the West, and I
never noticed but what education was less of a drawback to ’em than you
would think. Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew McWilliams’
saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of
these strangers that claimed to be a botanist. But that horse died.

One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little
shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I
started toward ’em, but caught Idaho’s eye. He speaks for the first
time in a week.

“Don’t burn your fingers,” says he. “In spite of the fact that you’re
only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, I’ll give you a
square deal. And that’s more than your parents did when they turned you
loose in the world with the sociability of a rattle-snake and the
bedside manner of a frozen turnip. I’ll play you a game of seven-up,
the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the
other.”

We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book; and I took mine. Then
each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.

I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book. And
Idaho took at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.

Mine was a little book about five by six inches called “Herkimer’s
Handbook of Indispensable Information.” I may be wrong, but I think
that was the greatest book that ever was written. I’ve got it to-day;
and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the
information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York _Tribune!_
Herkimer had cases on both of ’em. That man must have put in fifty
years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuff. There
was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl’s
age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest
tunnel in the world, the number of the stars, how long it takes for
chicken pox to break out, what a lady’s neck ought to measure, the veto
powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many pounds
of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average annual
temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to plant
an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number of
hairs on a blond lady’s head, how to preserve eggs, the height of all
the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles, and
how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of tacks
in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and what to
do before the doctor comes—and a hundred times as many things besides.
If there was anything Herkimer didn’t know I didn’t miss it out of the
book.

I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of education
was compressed in it. I forgot the snow, and I forgot that me and old
Idaho was on the outs. He was sitting still on a stool reading away
with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look shining through
his tan-bark whiskers.

“Idaho,” says I, “what kind of a book is yours?”

Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any
slander or malignity.

“Why,” says he, “this here seems to be a volume by Homer K. M.”

“Homer K. M. what?” I asks.

“Why, just Homer K. M.,” says he.

“You’re a liar,” says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me
up a tree. “No man is going ’round signing books with his initials. If
it’s Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K. M.
Jones, why don’t you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of
it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothes-line?”

“I put it to you straight, Sandy,” says Idaho, quiet. “It’s a poem
book,” says he, “by Homer K. M. I couldn’t get colour out of it at
first, but there’s a vein if you follow it up. I wouldn’t have missed
this book for a pair of red blankets.”

“You’re welcome to it,” says I. “What I want is a disinterested
statement of facts for the mind to work on, and that’s what I seem to
find in the book I’ve drawn.”

“What you’ve got,” says Idaho, “is statistics, the lowest grade of
information that exists. They’ll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.’s
system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular
toast is ‘nothing doing,’ and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps
it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an
invitation to split a quart. But it’s poetry,” says Idaho, “and I have
sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey sense
in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of
philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat
by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual
rainfall.”

So that’s the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the excitement
we got was studying our books. That snowstorm sure fixed us with a fine
lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted, if you had
stepped up to me suddenly and said: “Sanderson Pratt, what would it
cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by twenty-eight tin at
nine dollars and fifty cents per box?” I’d have told you as quick as
light could travel the length of a spade handle at the rate of one
hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second. How many can do it?
You wake up ’most any man you know in the middle of the night, and ask
him quick to tell you the number of bones in the human skeleton
exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the Nebraska
Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you? Try him and see.

About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn’t exactly
know. Idaho boosted the wine-agent every time he opened his mouth; but
I wasn’t so sure.

This Homer K. M., from what leaked out of his libretto through Idaho,
seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it was a tin
can tied to his tail. After running himself half to death, he sits
down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says:

“Oh, well, since we can’t shake the growler, let’s get it filled at the
corner, and all have a drink on me.”

Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia
producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and
Maltese cats.

That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore. It was a habit of ours to sell
out quick and keep moving. We unloaded our grubstaker for eight
thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little town
of Rosa, on the Salmon river, to rest up, and get some human grub, and
have our whiskers harvested.

Rosa was no mining-camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of
uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country. There
was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me
and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off at
nights at the Sunset View Hotel. Being now well read as well as
travelled, we was soon _pro re nata_ with the best society in Rosa, and
was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned entertainments.
It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in the city hall,
for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho first met Mrs.
De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society.

Mrs. Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town.
It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you could see
it as plain as egg on the chin of an O’Grady on a Friday. Twenty-two
men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to stake a claim on that
yellow house.

There was a dance after the song books and quail bones had been raked
out of the Hall. Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs.
Sampson and asked for a dance. I side-stepped the two-step, and asked
permission to escort her home. That’s where I made a hit.

On the way home says she:

“Ain’t the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr. Pratt?”

“For the chance they’ve got,” says I, “they’re humping themselves in a
mighty creditable way. That big one you see is sixty-six million miles
distant. It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us. With an
eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of ’em,
including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go out
now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years.”

“My!” says Mrs. Sampson. “I never knew that before. How warm it is! I’m
as damp as I can be from dancing so much.”

“That’s easy to account for,” says I, “when you happen to know that
you’ve got two million sweat-glands working all at once. If every one
of your perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was
placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles.”

“Lawsy!” says Mrs. Sampson. “It sounds like an irrigation ditch you was
describing, Mr. Pratt. How do you get all this knowledge of
information?”

“From observation, Mrs. Sampson,” I tells her. “I keep my eyes open
when I go about the world.”

“Mr. Pratt,” says she, “I always did admire a man of education. There
are so few scholars among the sap-headed plug-uglies of this town that
it is a real pleasure to converse with a gentleman of culture. I’d be
gratified to have you call at my house whenever you feel so inclined.”

And that was the way I got the goodwill of the lady in the yellow
house. Every Tuesday and Friday evening I used to go there and tell her
about the wonders of the universe as discovered, tabulated, and
compiled from nature by Herkimer. Idaho and the other gay Lutherans of
the town got every minute of the rest of the week that they could.

I never imagined that Idaho was trying to work on Mrs. Sampson with old
K. M.’s rules of courtship till one afternoon when I was on my way over
to take her a basket of wild hog-plums. I met the lady coming down the
lane that led to her house. Her eyes was snapping, and her hat made a
dangerous dip over one eye.

“Mr. Pratt,” she opens up, “this Mr. Green is a friend of yours, I
believe.”

“For nine years,” says I.

“Cut him out,” says she. “He’s no gentleman!”

“Why ma’am,” says I, “he’s a plain incumbent of the mountains, with
asperities and the usual failings of a spendthrift and a liar, but I
never on the most momentous occasion had the heart to deny that he was
a gentleman. It may be that in haberdashery and the sense of arrogance
and display Idaho offends the eye, but inside, ma’am, I’ve found him
impervious to the lower grades of crime and obesity. After nine years
of Idaho’s society, Mrs. Sampson,” I winds up, “I should hate to impute
him, and I should hate to see him imputed.”

“It’s right plausible of you, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson, “to take
up the curmudgeons in your friend’s behalf; but it don’t alter the fact
that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the
ignominy of any lady.”

“Why, now, now, now!” says I. “Old Idaho do that! I could believe it of
myself, sooner. I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and a
blizzard was responsible for that. Once while we was snow-bound in the
mountains he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven poetry,
which may have corrupted his demeanour.”

“It has,” says Mrs. Sampson. “Ever since I knew him he has been
reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby
Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you judge by her
poetry.”

“Then Idaho has struck a new book,” says I, “for the one he had was by
a man who writes under the _nom de plume_ of K. M.”

“He’d better have stuck to it,” says Mrs. Sampson, “whatever it was.
And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, and
on ’em is pinned a note. Now, Mr. Pratt, you know a lady when you see
her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a
moment that I’d skip out to the woods with a man along with a jug of
wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down
under the trees with him? I take a little claret with my meals, but I’m
not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising Cain
in any such style as that. And of course he’d bring his book of verses
along, too. He said so. Let him go on his scandalous picnics alone! Or
let him take his Ruby Ott with him. I reckon she wouldn’t kick unless
it was on account of there being too much bread along. And what do you
think of your gentleman friend now, Mr. Pratt?”

“Well, ’m,” says I, “it may be that Idaho’s invitation was a kind of
poetry, and meant no harm. May be it belonged to the class of rhymes
they call figurative. They offend law and order, but they get sent
through the mails on the grounds that they mean something that they
don’t say. I’d be glad on Idaho’s account if you’d overlook it,” says
I, “and let us extricate our minds from the low regions of poetry to
the higher planes of fact and fancy. On a beautiful afternoon like
this, Mrs. Sampson,” I goes on, “we should let our thoughts dwell
accordingly. Though it is warm here, we should remember that at the
equator the line of perpetual frost is at an altitude of fifteen
thousand feet. Between the latitudes of forty degrees and forty-nine
degrees it is from four thousand to nine thousand feet.”

“Oh, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson, “it’s such a comfort to hear you
say them beautiful facts after getting such a jar from that minx of a
Ruby’s poetry!”

“Let us sit on this log at the roadside,” says I, “and forget the
inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns of
ascertained facts and legalised measures that beauty is to be found. In
this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson,” says I, “is statistics more
wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the
depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand
years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near
Newcastle. A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet eight
inches deep will hold one ton of coal. If an artery is cut, compress it
above the wound. A man’s leg contains thirty bones. The Tower of London
was burned in 1841.”

“Go on, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson. “Them ideas is so original and
soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be.”

But it wasn’t till two weeks later that I got all that was coming to me
out of Herkimer.

One night I was waked up by folks hollering “Fire!” all around. I
jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene.
When I see it was Mrs. Sampson’s house, I gave forth a kind of yell,
and I was there in two minutes.

The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every
masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and
barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to
get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him
the whole place was on fire down-stairs, and no man could go in it and
come out alive.

“Where’s Mrs. Sampson?” I asks.

“She hasn’t been seen,” says one of the firemen. “She sleeps up-stairs.
We’ve tried to get in, but we can’t, and our company hasn’t got any
ladders yet.”

I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Handbook out
of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when I felt it in my hands —I
reckon I was some daffy with the sensation of excitement.

“Herky, old boy,” I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, “you ain’t
ever lied to me yet, and you ain’t ever throwed me down at a scratch
yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!” says I.

I turned to “What to do in Case of Accidents,” on page 117. I run my
finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never
overlooked anything! It said:

Suffocation from Inhaling Smoke or Gas.—There is nothing better than
flaxseed. Place a few seed in the outer corner of the eye.


I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was
running by.

“Here,” says I, giving him some money, “run to the drug store and bring
a dollar’s worth of flaxseed. Hurry, and you’ll get another one for
yourself. Now,” I sings out to the crowd, “we’ll have Mrs. Sampson!”
And I throws away my coat and hat.

Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me. It’s sure death,
they say, to go in the house, for the floors was beginning to fall
through.

“How in blazes,” I sings out, kind of laughing yet, but not feeling
like it, “do you expect me to put flaxseed in a eye without the eye?”

I jabbed each elbow in a fireman’s face, kicked the bark off of one
citizen’s shin, and tripped the other one with a side hold. And then I
busted into the house. If I die first I’ll write you a letter and tell
you if it’s any worse down there than the inside of that yellow house
was; but don’t believe it yet. I was a heap more cooked than the
hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants. The
fire and smoke had me down on the floor twice, and was about to shame
Herkimer, but the firemen helped me with their little stream of water,
and I got to Mrs. Sampson’s room. She’d lost conscientiousness from the
smoke, so I wrapped her in the bed clothes and got her on my shoulder.
Well, the floors wasn’t as bad as they said, or I never could have done
it—not by no means.

I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the grass.
Then, of course, every one of them other twenty-two plaintiff’s to the
lady’s hand crowded around with tin dippers of water ready to save her.
And up runs the boy with the flaxseed.

I unwrapped the covers from Mrs. Sampson’s head. She opened her eyes
and says:

“Is that you, Mr. Pratt?”

“S-s-sh,” says I. “Don’t talk till you’ve had the remedy.”

I runs my arm around her neck and raises her head, gentle, and breaks
the bag of flaxseed with the other hand; and as easy as I could I bends
over and slips three or four of the seeds in the outer corner of her
eye.

Up gallops the village doc by this time, and snorts around, and grabs
at Mrs. Sampson’s pulse, and wants to know what I mean by any such
sandblasted nonsense.

“Well, old Jalap and Jerusalem oakseed,” says I, “I’m no regular
practitioner, but I’ll show you my authority, anyway.”

They fetched my coat, and I gets out the Handbook.

“Look on page 117,” says I, “at the remedy for suffocation by smoke or
gas. Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says. I don’t know
whether it works as a smoke consumer or whether it hikes the compound
gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, and he was
called to the case first. If you want to make it a consultation,
there’s no objection.”

Old doc takes the book and looks at it by means of his specs and a
fireman’s lantern.

“Well, Mr. Pratt,” says he, “you evidently got on the wrong line in
reading your diagnosis. The recipe for suffocation says: ‘Get the
patient into fresh air as quickly as possible, and place in a reclining
position.’ The flaxseed remedy is for ‘Dust and Cinders in the Eye,’ on
the line above. But, after all—”

“See here,” interrupts Mrs. Sampson, “I reckon I’ve got something to
say in this consultation. That flaxseed done me more good than anything
I ever tried.” And then she raises up her head and lays it back on my
arm again, and says: “Put some in the other eye, Sandy dear.”

And so if you was to stop off at Rosa to-morrow, or any other day,
you’d see a fine new yellow house with Mrs. Pratt, that was Mrs.
Sampson, embellishing and adorning it. And if you was to step inside
you’d see on the marble-top centre table in the parlour “Herkimer’s
Handbook of Indispensable Information,” all rebound in red morocco, and
ready to be consulted on any subject pertaining to human happiness and
wisdom.




V
THE PIMIENTA PANCAKES


While we were rounding up a bunch of the Triangle-O cattle in the Frio
bottoms a projecting branch of a dead mesquite caught my wooden stirrup
and gave my ankle a wrench that laid me up in camp for a week.

On the third day of my compulsory idleness I crawled out near the grub
wagon, and reclined helpless under the conversational fire of Judson
Odom, the camp cook. Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with
customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved,
for the greater portion of his time, of an audience.

Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud’s obmutescence.

Betimes I was stirred by invalid longings for something to eat that did
not come under the caption of “grub.” I had visions of the maternal
pantry “deep as first love, and wild with all regret,” and then I
asked:

“Jud, can you make pancakes?”

Jud laid down his six-shooter, with which he was preparing to pound an
antelope steak, and stood over me in what I felt to be a menacing
attitude. He further endorsed my impression that his pose was resentful
by fixing upon me with his light blue eyes a look of cold suspicion.

“Say, you,” he said, with candid, though not excessive, choler, “did
you mean that straight, or was you trying to throw the gaff into me?
Some of the boys been telling you about me and that pancake racket?”

“No, Jud,” I said, sincerely, “I meant it. It seems to me I’d swap my
pony and saddle for a stack of buttered brown pancakes with some first
crop, open kettle, New Orleans sweetening. Was there a story about
pancakes?”

Jud was mollified at once when he saw that I had not been dealing in
allusions. He brought some mysterious bags and tin boxes from the grub
wagon and set them in the shade of the hackberry where I lay reclined.
I watched him as he began to arrange them leisurely and untie their
many strings.

“No, not a story,” said Jud, as he worked, “but just the logical
disclosures in the case of me and that pink-eyed snoozer from Mired
Mule Canada and Miss Willella Learight. I don’t mind telling you.

“I was punching then for old Bill Toomey, on the San Miguel. One day I
gets all ensnared up in aspirations for to eat some canned grub that
hasn’t ever mooed or baaed or grunted or been in peck measures. So, I
gets on my bronc and pushes the wind for Uncle Emsley Telfair’s store
at the Pimienta Crossing on the Nueces.

“About three in the afternoon I throwed my bridle rein over a mesquite
limb and walked the last twenty yards into Uncle Emsley’s store. I got
up on the counter and told Uncle Emsley that the signs pointed to the
devastation of the fruit crop of the world. In a minute I had a bag of
crackers and a long-handled spoon, with an open can each of apricots
and pineapples and cherries and greengages beside of me with Uncle
Emsley busy chopping away with the hatchet at the yellow clings. I was
feeling like Adam before the apple stampede, and was digging my spurs
into the side of the counter and working with my twenty-four-inch spoon
when I happened to look out of the window into the yard of Uncle
Emsley’s house, which was next to the store.

“There was a girl standing there—an imported girl with fixings on—
philandering with a croquet maul and amusing herself by watching my
style of encouraging the fruit canning industry.

“I slid off the counter and delivered up my shovel to Uncle Emsley.

“‘That’s my niece,’ says he; ‘Miss Willella Learight, down from
Palestine on a visit. Do you want that I should make you acquainted?’

“‘The Holy Land,’ I says to myself, my thoughts milling some as I tried
to run ’em into the corral. ‘Why not? There was sure angels in
Pales—Why, yes, Uncle Emsley,’ I says out loud, ‘I’d be awful edified
to meet Miss Learight.’

“So Uncle Emsley took me out in the yard and gave us each other’s
entitlements.

“I never was shy about women. I never could understand why some men who
can break a mustang before breakfast and shave in the dark, get all
left-handed and full of perspiration and excuses when they see a bold
of calico draped around what belongs to it. Inside of eight minutes me
and Miss Willella was aggravating the croquet balls around as amiable
as second cousins. She gave me a dig about the quantity of canned fruit
I had eaten, and I got back at her, flat-footed, about how a certain
lady named Eve started the fruit trouble in the first free-grass
pasture—‘Over in Palestine, wasn’t it?’ says I, as easy and pat as
roping a one-year-old.

“That was how I acquired cordiality for the proximities of Miss
Willella Learight; and the disposition grew larger as time passed. She
was stopping at Pimienta Crossing for her health, which was very good,
and for the climate, which was forty per cent. hotter than Palestine. I
rode over to see her once every week for a while; and then I figured it
out that if I doubled the number of trips I would see her twice as
often.

“One week I slipped in a third trip; and that’s where the pancakes and
the pink-eyed snoozer busted into the game.

“That evening, while I set on the counter with a peach and two damsons
in my mouth, I asked Uncle Emsley how Miss Willella was.

“‘Why,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘she’s gone riding with Jackson Bird, the
sheep man from over at Mired Mule Canada.’

“I swallowed the peach seed and the two damson seeds. I guess somebody
held the counter by the bridle while I got off; and then I walked out
straight ahead till I butted against the mesquite where my roan was
tied.

“‘She’s gone riding,’ I whisper in my bronc’s ear, ‘with Birdstone
Jack, the hired mule from Sheep Man’s Canada. Did you get that, old
Leather-and-Gallops?’

“That bronc of mine wept, in his way. He’d been raised a cow pony and
he didn’t care for snoozers.

“I went back and said to Uncle Emsley: ‘Did you say a sheep man?’

“‘I said a sheep man,’ says Uncle Emsley again. ‘You must have heard
tell of Jackson Bird. He’s got eight sections of grazing and four
thousand head of the finest Merinos south of the Arctic Circle.’

“I went out and sat on the ground in the shade of the store and leaned
against a prickly pear. I sifted sand into my boots with unthinking
hands while I soliloquised a quantity about this bird with the Jackson
plumage to his name.

“I never had believed in harming sheep men. I see one, one day, reading
a Latin grammar on hossback, and I never touched him! They never
irritated me like they do most cowmen. You wouldn’t go to work now, and
impair and disfigure snoozers, would you, that eat on tables and wear
little shoes and speak to you on subjects? I had always let ’em pass,
just as you would a jack-rabbit; with a polite word and a guess about
the weather, but no stopping to swap canteens. I never thought it was
worth while to be hostile with a snoozer. And because I’d been lenient,
and let ’em live, here was one going around riding with Miss Willella
Learight!

“An hour by sun they come loping back, and stopped at Uncle Emsley’s
gate. The sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each
other sentences all sprightful and sagacious for a while. And then this
feathered Jackson flies up in his saddle and raises his little stewpot
of a hat, and trots off in the direction of his mutton ranch. By this
time I had turned the sand out of my boots and unpinned myself from the
prickly pear; and by the time he gets half a mile out of Pimienta, I
singlefoots up beside him on my bronc.

“I said that snoozer was pink-eyed, but he wasn’t. His seeing
arrangement was grey enough, but his eye-lashes was pink and his hair
was sandy, and that gave you the idea. Sheep man?—he wasn’t more than a
lamb man, anyhow—a little thing with his neck involved in a yellow silk
handkerchief, and shoes tied up in bowknots.

“‘Afternoon!’ says I to him. ‘You now ride with a equestrian who is
commonly called Dead-Moral-Certainty Judson, on account of the way I
shoot. When I want a stranger to know me I always introduce myself
before the draw, for I never did like to shake hands with ghosts.’

“‘Ah,’ says he, just like that—‘Ah, I’m glad to know you, Mr. Judson.
I’m Jackson Bird, from over at Mired Mule Ranch.’

“Just then one of my eyes saw a roadrunner skipping down the hill with
a young tarantula in his bill, and the other eye noticed a rabbit-hawk
sitting on a dead limb in a water-elm. I popped over one after the
other with my forty-five, just to show him. ‘Two out of three,’ says I.
‘Birds just naturally seem to draw my fire wherever I go.’

“‘Nice shooting,’ says the sheep man, without a flutter. ‘But don’t you
sometimes ever miss the third shot? Elegant fine rain that was last
week for the young grass, Mr. Judson?’ says he.

“‘Willie,’ says I, riding over close to his palfrey, ‘your infatuated
parents may have denounced you by the name of Jackson, but you sure
moulted into a twittering Willie—let us slough off this here analysis
of rain and the elements, and get down to talk that is outside the
vocabulary of parrots. That is a bad habit you have got of riding with
young ladies over at Pimienta. I’ve known birds,’ says I, ‘to be served
on toast for less than that. Miss Willella,’ says I, ‘don’t ever want
any nest made out of sheep’s wool by a tomtit of the Jacksonian branch
of ornithology. Now, are you going to quit, or do you wish for to
gallop up against this Dead-Moral-Certainty attachment to my name,
which is good for two hyphens and at least one set of funeral
obsequies?’

“Jackson Bird flushed up some, and then he laughed.

“‘Why, Mr. Judson,’ says he, ‘you’ve got the wrong idea. I’ve called on
Miss Learight a few times; but not for the purpose you imagine. My
object is purely a gastronomical one.’

“I reached for my gun.

“‘Any coyote,’ says I, ‘that would boast of dishonourable—’

“‘Wait a minute,’ says this Bird, ‘till I explain. What would I do with
a wife? If you ever saw that ranch of mine! I do my own cooking and
mending. Eating—that’s all the pleasure I get out of sheep raising. Mr.
Judson, did you ever taste the pancakes that Miss Learight makes?’

“‘Me? No,’ I told him. ‘I never was advised that she was up to any
culinary manoeuvres.’

“‘They’re golden sunshine,’ says he, ‘honey-browned by the ambrosial
fires of Epicurus. I’d give two years of my life to get the recipe for
making them pancakes. That’s what I went to see Miss Learight for,’
says Jackson Bird, ‘but I haven’t been able to get it from her. It’s an
old recipe that’s been in the family for seventy-five years. They hand
it down from one generation to another, but they don’t give it away to
outsiders. If I could get that recipe, so I could make them pancakes
for myself on my ranch, I’d be a happy man,’ says Bird.

“‘Are you sure,’ I says to him, ‘that it ain’t the hand that mixes the
pancakes that you’re after?’

“‘Sure,’ says Jackson. ‘Miss Learight is a mighty nice girl, but I can
assure you my intentions go no further than the gastro—’ but he seen my
hand going down to my holster and he changed his similitude—‘than the
desire to procure a copy of the pancake recipe,’ he finishes.

“‘You ain’t such a bad little man,’ says I, trying to be fair. ‘I was
thinking some of making orphans of your sheep, but I’ll let you fly
away this time. But you stick to pancakes,’ says I, ‘as close as the
middle one of a stack; and don’t go and mistake sentiments for syrup,
or there’ll be singing at your ranch, and you won’t hear it.’

“‘To convince you that I am sincere,’ says the sheep man, ‘I’ll ask you
to help me. Miss Learight and you being closer friends, maybe she would
do for you what she wouldn’t for me. If you will get me a copy of that
pancake recipe, I give you my word that I’ll never call upon her
again.’

“‘That’s fair,’ I says, and I shook hands with Jackson Bird. ‘I’ll get
it for you if I can, and glad to oblige.’ And he turned off down the
big pear flat on the Piedra, in the direction of Mired Mule; and I
steered northwest for old Bill Toomey’s ranch.

“It was five days afterward when I got another chance to ride over to
Pimienta. Miss Willella and me passed a gratifying evening at Uncle
Emsley’s. She sang some, and exasperated the piano quite a lot with
quotations from the operas. I gave imitations of a rattlesnake, and
told her about Snaky McFee’s new way of skinning cows, and described
the trip I made to Saint Louis once. We was getting along in one
another’s estimations fine. Thinks I, if Jackson Bird can now be
persuaded to migrate, I win. I recollect his promise about the pancake
receipt, and I thinks I will persuade it from Miss Willella and give it
to him; and then if I catches Birdie off of Mired Mule again, I’ll make
him hop the twig.

“So, along about ten o’clock, I put on a wheedling smile and says to
Miss Willella: ‘Now, if there’s anything I do like better than the
sight of a red steer on green grass it’s the taste of a nice hot
pancake smothered in sugar-house molasses.’

“Miss Willella gives a little jump on the piano stool, and looked at me
curious.

“‘Yes,’ says she, ‘they’re real nice. What did you say was the name of
that street in Saint Louis, Mr. Odom, where you lost your hat?’

“‘Pancake Avenue,’ says I, with a wink, to show her that I was on about
the family receipt, and couldn’t be side-corralled off of the subject.
‘Come, now, Miss Willella,’ I says; ‘let’s hear how you make ’em.
Pancakes is just whirling in my head like wagon wheels. Start her off,
now—pound of flour, eight dozen eggs, and so on. How does the catalogue
of constituents run?’

“‘Excuse me for a moment, please,’ says Miss Willella, and she gives me
a quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool. She ambled out
into the other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his shirt
sleeves, with a pitcher of water. He turns around to get a glass on the
table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket. ‘Great post-holes!’
thinks I, ‘but here’s a family thinks a heap of cooking receipts,
protecting it with firearms. I’ve known outfits that wouldn’t do that
much by a family feud.’

“‘Drink this here down,’ says Uncle Emsley, handing me the glass of
water. ‘You’ve rid too far to-day, Jud, and got yourself over-excited.
Try to think about something else now.’

“‘Do you know how to make them pancakes, Uncle Emsley?’ I asked.

“‘Well, I’m not as apprised in the anatomy of them as some,’ says Uncle
Emsley, ‘but I reckon you take a sifter of plaster of Paris and a
little dough and saleratus and corn meal, and mix ’em with eggs and
buttermilk as usual. Is old Bill going to ship beeves to Kansas City
again this spring, Jud?’

“That was all the pancake specifications I could get that night. I
didn’t wonder that Jackson Bird found it uphill work. So I dropped the
subject and talked with Uncle Emsley for a while about hollow-horn and
cyclones. And then Miss Willella came and said ‘Good-night,’ and I hit
the breeze for the ranch.

“About a week afterward I met Jackson Bird riding out of Pimienta as I
rode in, and we stopped on the road for a few frivolous remarks.

“‘Got the bill of particulars for them flapjacks yet?’ I asked him.

“‘Well, no,’ says Jackson. ‘I don’t seem to have any success in getting
hold of it. Did you try?’

“‘I did,’ says I, ‘and ’twas like trying to dig a prairie dog out of
his hole with a peanut hull. That pancake receipt must be a jookalorum,
the way they hold on to it.’

“‘I’m most ready to give it up,’ says Jackson, so discouraged in his
pronunciations that I felt sorry for him; ‘but I did want to know how
to make them pancakes to eat on my lonely ranch,’ says he. ‘I lie awake
at nights thinking how good they are.’

“‘You keep on trying for it,’ I tells him, ‘and I’ll do the same. One
of us is bound to get a rope over its horns before long. Well, so-long,
Jacksy.’

“You see, by this time we were on the peacefullest of terms. When I saw
that he wasn’t after Miss Willella, I had more endurable contemplations
of that sandy-haired snoozer. In order to help out the ambitions of his
appetite I kept on trying to get that receipt from Miss Willella. But
every time I would say ‘pancakes’ she would get sort of remote and
fidgety about the eye, and try to change the subject. If I held her to
it she would slide out and round up Uncle Emsley with his pitcher of
water and hip-pocket howitzer.

“One day I galloped over to the store with a fine bunch of blue
verbenas that I cut out of a herd of wild flowers over on Poisoned Dog
Prairie. Uncle Emsley looked at ’em with one eye shut and says:

“‘Haven’t ye heard the news?’

“‘Cattle up?’ I asks.

“‘Willella and Jackson Bird was married in Palestine yesterday,’ says
he. ‘Just got a letter this morning.’

“I dropped them flowers in a cracker-barrel, and let the news trickle
in my ears and down toward my upper left-hand shirt pocket until it got
to my feet.

“‘Would you mind saying that over again once more, Uncle Emsley?’ says
I. ‘Maybe my hearing has got wrong, and you only said that prime
heifers was 4.80 on the hoof, or something like that.’

“‘Married yesterday,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘and gone to Waco and Niagara
Falls on a wedding tour. Why, didn’t you see none of the signs all
along? Jackson Bird has been courting Willella ever since that day he
took her out riding.’

“‘Then,’ says I, in a kind of yell, ‘what was all this zizzaparoola he
gives me about pancakes? Tell me _that_.’

“When I said ‘pancakes’ Uncle Emsley sort of dodged and stepped back.

“‘Somebody’s been dealing me pancakes from the bottom of the deck,’ I
says, ‘and I’ll find out. I believe you know. Talk up,’ says I, ‘or
we’ll mix a panful of batter right here.’

“I slid over the counter after Uncle Emsley. He grabbed at his gun, but
it was in a drawer, and he missed it two inches. I got him by the front
of his shirt and shoved him in a corner.

“‘Talk pancakes,’ says I, ‘or be made into one. Does Miss Willella make
’em?’

“‘She never made one in her life and I never saw one,’ says Uncle
Emsley, soothing. ‘Calm down now, Jud—calm down. You’ve got excited,
and that wound in your head is contaminating your sense of
intelligence. Try not to think about pancakes.’

“‘Uncle Emsley,’ says I, ‘I’m not wounded in the head except so far as
my natural cognitive instincts run to runts. Jackson Bird told me he
was calling on Miss Willella for the purpose of finding out her system
of producing pancakes, and he asked me to help him get the bill of
lading of the ingredients. I done so, with the results as you see. Have
I been sodded down with Johnson grass by a pink-eyed snoozer, or what?’

“‘Slack up your grip in my dress shirt,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘and I’ll
tell you. Yes, it looks like Jackson Bird has gone and humbugged you
some. The day after he went riding with Willella he came back and told
me and her to watch out for you whenever you got to talking about
pancakes. He said you was in camp once where they was cooking
flapjacks, and one of the fellows cut you over the head with a frying
pan. Jackson said that whenever you got overhot or excited that wound
hurt you and made you kind of crazy, and you went raving about
pancakes. He told us to just get you worked off of the subject and
soothed down, and you wouldn’t be dangerous. So, me and Willella done
the best by you we knew how. Well, well,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘that
Jackson Bird is sure a seldom kind of a snoozer.’”

During the progress of Jud’s story he had been slowly but deftly
combining certain portions of the contents of his sacks and cans.
Toward the close of it he set before me the finished product—a pair of
red-hot, rich-hued pancakes on a tin plate. From some secret hoarding
he also brought a lump of excellent butter and a bottle of golden
syrup.

“How long ago did these things happen?” I asked him.

“Three years,” said Jud. “They’re living on the Mired Mule Ranch now.
But I haven’t seen either of ’em since. They say Jackson Bird was
fixing his ranch up fine with rocking chairs and window curtains all
the time he was putting me up the pancake tree. Oh, I got over it after
a while. But the boys kept the racket up.”

“Did you make these cakes by the famous recipe?” I asked.

“Didn’t I tell you there wasn’t no receipt?” said Jud. “The boys
hollered pancakes till they got pancake hungry, and I cut this recipe
out of a newspaper. How does the truck taste?”

“They’re delicious,” I answered. “Why don’t you have some, too, Jud?”

I was sure I heard a sigh.

“Me?” said Jud. “I don’t ever eat ’em.”




VI
SEATS OF THE HAUGHTY


Golden by day and silver by night, a new trail now leads to us across
the Indian Ocean. Dusky kings and princes have found our Bombay of the
West; and few be their trails that do not lead down to Broadway on
their journey for to admire and for to see.

If chance should ever lead you near a hotel that transiently shelters
some one of these splendid touring grandees, I counsel you to seek
Lucullus Polk among the republican tuft-hunters that besiege its
entrances. He will be there. You will know him by his red, alert,
Wellington-nosed face, by his manner of nervous caution mingled with
determination, by his assumed promoter’s or broker’s air of busy
impatience, and by his bright-red necktie, gallantly redressing the
wrongs of his maltreated blue serge suit, like a battle standard still
waving above a lost cause. I found him profitable; and so may you. When
you do look for him, look among the light-horse troop of Bedouins that
besiege the picket-line of the travelling potentate’s guards and
secretaries—among the wild-eyed genii of Arabian Afternoons that gather
to make astounding and egregrious demands upon the prince’s coffers.

I first saw Mr. Polk coming down the steps of the hotel at which
sojourned His Highness the Gaekwar of Baroda, most enlightened of the
Mahratta princes, who, of late, ate bread and salt in our Metropolis of
the Occident.

Lucullus moved rapidly, as though propelled by some potent moral force
that imminently threatened to become physical. Behind him closely
followed the impetus—a hotel detective, if ever white Alpine hat,
hawk’s nose, implacable watch chain, and loud refinement of manner
spoke the truth. A brace of uniformed porters at his heels preserved
the smooth decorum of the hotel, repudiating by their air of
disengagement any suspicion that they formed a reserve squad of
ejectment.

Safe on the sidewalk, Lucullus Polk turned and shook a freckled fist at
the caravansary. And, to my joy, he began to breathe deep invective in
strange words:

“Rides in howdays, does he?” he cried loudly and sneeringly. “Rides on
elephants in howdahs and calls himself a prince! Kings—yah! Comes over
here and talks horse till you would think he was a president; and then
goes home and rides in a private dining-room strapped onto an elephant.
Well, well, well!”

The ejecting committee quietly retired. The scorner of princes turned
to me and snapped his fingers.

“What do you think of that?” he shouted derisively. “The Gaekwar of
Baroda rides in an elephant in a howdah! And there’s old Bikram
Shamsher Jang scorching up and down the pig-paths of Khatmandu on a
motor-cycle. Wouldn’t that maharajah you? And the Shah of Persia, that
ought to have been Muley-on-the-spot for at least three, he’s got the
palanquin habit. And that funny-hat prince from Korea—wouldn’t you
think he could afford to amble around on a milk-white palfrey once in a
dynasty or two? Nothing doing! His idea of a Balaklava charge is to
tuck his skirts under him and do his mile in six days over the
hog-wallows of Seoul in a bull-cart. That’s the kind of visiting
potentates that come to this country now. It’s a hard deal, friend.”

I murmured a few words of sympathy. But it was uncomprehending, for I
did not know his grievance against the rulers who flash, meteor-like,
now and then upon our shores.

“The last one I sold,” continued the displeased one, “was to that
three-horse-tailed Turkish pasha that came over a year ago. Five
hundred dollars he paid for it, easy. I says to his executioner or
secretary—he was a kind of a Jew or a Chinaman—‘His Turkey Gibbets is
fond of horses, then?’

“‘Him?’ says the secretary. ‘Well, no. He’s got a big, fat wife in the
harem named Bad Dora that he don’t like. I believe he intends to saddle
her up and ride her up and down the board-walk in the Bulbul Gardens a
few times every day. You haven’t got a pair of extra-long spurs you
could throw in on the deal, have you?’ Yes, sir; there’s mighty few
real rough-riders among the royal sports these days.”

As soon as Lucullus Polk got cool enough I picked him up, and with no
greater effort than you would employ in persuading a drowning man to
clutch a straw, I inveigled him into accompanying me to a cool corner
in a dim café.

And it came to pass that man-servants set before us brewage; and
Lucullus Polk spake unto me, relating the wherefores of his
beleaguering the antechambers of the princes of the earth.

“Did you ever hear of the S.A. & A.P. Railroad in Texas? Well, that
don’t stand for Samaritan Actor’s Aid Philanthropy. I was down that way
managing a summer bunch of the gum and syntax-chewers that play the
Idlewild Parks in the Western hamlets. Of course, we went to pieces
when the soubrette ran away with a prominent barber of Beeville. I
don’t know what became of the rest of the company. I believe there were
some salaries due; and the last I saw of the troupe was when I told
them that forty-three cents was all the treasury contained. I say I
never saw any of them after that; but I heard them for about twenty
minutes. I didn’t have time to look back. But after dark I came out of
the woods and struck the S.A. & A.P. agent for means of transportation.
He at once extended to me the courtesies of the entire railroad, kindly
warning me, however, not to get aboard any of the rolling stock.

“About ten the next morning I steps off the ties into a village that
calls itself Atascosa City. I bought a thirty-cent breakfast and a
ten-cent cigar, and stood on the Main Street jingling the three pennies
in my pocket—dead broke. A man in Texas with only three cents in his
pocket is no better off than a man that has no money and owes two
cents.

“One of luck’s favourite tricks is to soak a man for his last dollar so
quick that he don’t have time to look it. There I was in a swell St.
Louis tailor-made, blue-and-green plaid suit, and an eighteen-carat
sulphate-of-copper scarf-pin, with no hope in sight except the two
great Texas industries, the cotton fields and grading new railroads. I
never picked cotton, and I never cottoned to a pick, so the outlook had
ultramarine edges.

“All of a sudden, while I was standing on the edge of the wooden
sidewalk, down out of the sky falls two fine gold watches in the middle
of the street. One hits a chunk of mud and sticks. The other falls hard
and flies open, making a fine drizzle of little springs and screws and
wheels. I looks up for a balloon or an airship; but not seeing any, I
steps off the sidewalk to investigate.

“But I hear a couple of yells and see two men running up the street in
leather overalls and high-heeled boots and cartwheel hats. One man is
six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken cast
of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud. The
other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes for the
empty case, and says, ‘I win.’ Then the elevated pessimist goes down
under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty-dollar
gold pieces to his albino friend. I don’t know how much money it was;
it looked as big as an earthquake-relief fund to me.

“‘I’ll have this here case filled up with works,’ says Shorty, ‘and
throw you again for five hundred.’

“‘I’m your company,’ says the high man. ‘I’ll meet you at the Smoked
Dog Saloon an hour from now.’

“The little man hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a
jewelry store. The heartbroken person stoops over and takes a
telescopic view of my haberdashery.

“‘Them’s a mighty slick outfit of habiliments you have got on, Mr.
Man,’ says he. ‘I’ll bet a hoss you never acquired the right, title,
and interest in and to them clothes in Atascosa City.’

“‘Why, no,’ says I, being ready enough to exchange personalities with
this moneyed monument of melancholy. ‘I had this suit tailored from a
special line of coatericks, vestures, and pantings in St. Louis. Would
you mind putting me sane,’ says I, ‘on this watch-throwing contest?
I’ve been used to seeing time-pieces treated with more politeness and
esteem—except women’s watches, of course, which by nature they abuse by
cracking walnuts with ’em and having ’em taken showing in tintype
pictures.’

“‘Me and George,’ he explains, ‘are up from the ranch, having a spell
of fun. Up to last month we owned four sections of watered grazing down
on the San Miguel. But along comes one of these oil prospectors and
begins to bore. He strikes a gusher that flows out twenty thousand —or
maybe it was twenty million—barrels of oil a day. And me and George
gets one hundred and fifty thousand dollars—seventy-five thousand
dollars apiece—for the land. So now and then we saddles up and hits the
breeze for Atascosa City for a few days of excitement and damage.
Here’s a little bunch of the _dinero_ that I drawed out of the bank
this morning,’ says he, and shows a roll of twenties and fifties as big
around as a sleeping-car pillow. The yellowbacks glowed like a sunset
on the gable end of John D.’s barn. My knees got weak, and I sat down
on the edge of the board sidewalk.

“‘You must have knocked around a right smart,’ goes on this oil
Grease-us. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you have saw towns more
livelier than what Atascosa City is. Sometimes it seems to me that
there ought to be some more ways of having a good time than there is
here, ’specially when you’ve got plenty of money and don’t mind
spending it.’

“Then this Mother Cary’s chick of the desert sits down by me and we
hold a conversationfest. It seems that he was money-poor. He’d lived in
ranch camps all his life; and he confessed to me that his supreme idea
of luxury was to ride into camp, tired out from a round-up, eat a peck
of Mexican beans, hobble his brains with a pint of raw whisky, and go
to sleep with his boots for a pillow. When this barge-load of
unexpected money came to him and his pink but perky partner, George,
and they hied themselves to this clump of outhouses called Atascosa
City, you know what happened to them. They had money to buy anything
they wanted; but they didn’t know what to want. Their ideas of
spendthriftiness were limited to three—whisky, saddles, and gold
watches. If there was anything else in the world to throw away fortunes
on, they had never heard about it. So, when they wanted to have a hot
time, they’d ride into town and get a city directory and stand in front
of the principal saloon and call up the population alphabetically for
free drinks. Then they would order three or four new California saddles
from the storekeeper, and play crack-loo on the sidewalk with
twenty-dollar gold pieces. Betting who could throw his gold watch the
farthest was an inspiration of George’s; but even that was getting to
be monotonous.

“Was I on to the opportunity? Listen.

“In thirty minutes I had dashed off a word picture of metropolitan joys
that made life in Atascosa City look as dull as a trip to Coney Island
with your own wife. In ten minutes more we shook hands on an agreement
that I was to act as his guide, interpreter and friend in and to the
aforesaid wassail and amenity. And Solomon Mills, which was his name,
was to pay all expenses for a month. At the end of that time, if I had
made good as director-general of the rowdy life, he was to pay me one
thousand dollars. And then, to clinch the bargain, we called the roll
of Atascosa City and put all of its citizens except the ladies and
minors under the table, except one man named Horace Westervelt St.
Clair. Just for that we bought a couple of hatfuls of cheap silver
watches and egged him out of town with ’em. We wound up by dragging the
harness-maker out of bed and setting him to work on three new saddles;
and then we went to sleep across the railroad track at the depot, just
to annoy the S.A. & A.P. Think of having seventy-five thousand dollars
and trying to avoid the disgrace of dying rich in a town like that!

“The next day George, who was married or something, started back to the
ranch. Me and Solly, as I now called him, prepared to shake off our
moth balls and wing our way against the arc-lights of the joyous and
tuneful East.

“‘No way-stops,’ says I to Solly, ‘except long enough to get you
barbered and haberdashed. This is no Texas feet shampetter,’ says I,
‘where you eat chili-concarne-con-huevos and then holler “Whoopee!”
across the plaza. We’re now going against the real high life. We’re
going to mingle with the set that carries a Spitz, wears spats, and
hits the ground in high spots.’

“Solly puts six thousand dollars in century bills in one pocket of his
brown ducks, and bills of lading for ten thousand dollars on Eastern
banks in another. Then I resume diplomatic relations with the S.A. &
A.P., and we hike in a northwesterly direction on our circuitous route
to the spice gardens of the Yankee Orient.

“We stopped in San Antonio long enough for Solly to buy some clothes,
and eight rounds of drinks for the guests and employees of the Menger
Hotel, and order four Mexican saddles with silver trimmings and white
Angora _suaderos_ to be shipped down to the ranch. From there we made a
big jump to St. Louis. We got there in time for dinner; and I put our
thumb-prints on the register of the most expensive hotel in the city.

“‘Now,’ says I to Solly, with a wink at myself, ‘here’s the first
dinner-station we’ve struck where we can get a real good plate of
beans.’ And while he was up in his room trying to draw water out of the
gas-pipe, I got one finger in the buttonhole of the head waiter’s
Tuxedo, drew him apart, inserted a two-dollar bill, and closed him up
again.

“‘Frankoyse,’ says I, ‘I have a pal here for dinner that’s been
subsisting for years on cereals and short stogies. You see the chef and
order a dinner for us such as you serve to Dave Francis and the general
passenger agent of the Iron Mountain when they eat here. We’ve got more
than Bernhardt’s tent full of money; and we want the nose-bags crammed
with all the Chief Deveries _de cuisine_. Object is no expense. Now,
show us.’

“At six o’clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There’s
nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at
once. The chef called it _dinnay à la poker_. It’s a famous thing among
the gormands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There
was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness’s stout; roast veal, mock
turtle soup, and chicken pâté; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca;
canvas-back duck, canvas-back ham, and cotton-tail rabbit; Philadelphia
capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin—and so on, in threes. The idea was
that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away
the discard and gives you pears to fill on.


“I was sure Solly would be tickled to death with these hands, after the
bobtail flushes he’d been eating on the ranch; and I was a little
anxious that he should, for I didn’t remember his having honoured my
efforts with a smile since we left Atascosa City.

“We were in the main dining-room, and there was a fine-dressed crowd
there, all talking loud and enjoyable about the two St. Louis topics,
the water supply and the colour line. They mix the two subjects so fast
that strangers often think they are discussing water-colours; and that
has given the old town something of a rep as an art centre. And over in
the corner was a fine brass band playing; and now, thinks I, Solly will
become conscious of the spiritual oats of life nourishing and
exhilarating his system. But _nong, mong frang_.

“He gazed across the table at me. There was four square yards of it,
looking like the path of a cyclone that has wandered through a
stock-yard, a poultry-farm, a vegetable-garden, and an Irish linen
mill. Solly gets up and comes around to me.

“‘Luke,’ says he, ‘I’m pretty hungry after our ride. I thought you said
they had some beans here. I’m going out and get something I can eat.
You can stay and monkey with this artificial layout of grub if you want
to.’

“‘Wait a minute,’ says I.

“I called the waiter, and slapped ‘S. Mills’ on the back of the check
for thirteen dollars and fifty cents.

“‘What do you mean,’ says I, ‘by serving gentlemen with a lot of truck
only suitable for deck-hands on a Mississippi steamboat? We’re going
out to get something decent to eat.’

“I walked up the street with the unhappy plainsman. He saw a
saddle-shop open, and some of the sadness faded from his eyes. We went
in, and he ordered and paid for two more saddles—one with a solid
silver horn and nails and ornaments and a six-inch border of
rhinestones and imitation rubies around the flaps. The other one had to
have a gold-mounted horn, quadruple-plated stirrups, and the leather
inlaid with silver beadwork wherever it would stand it. Eleven hundred
dollars the two cost him.

“Then he goes out and heads toward the river, following his nose. In a
little side street, where there was no street and no sidewalks and no
houses, he finds what he is looking for. We go into a shanty and sit on
high stools among stevedores and boatmen, and eat beans with tin
spoons. Yes, sir, beans—beans boiled with salt pork.

“‘I kind of thought we’d strike some over this way,’ says Solly.

“‘Delightful,’ says I, ‘That stylish hotel grub may appeal to some; but
for me, give me the husky _table d’goat_.’

“When we had succumbed to the beans I leads him out of the
tarpaulin-steam under a lamp post and pulls out a daily paper with the
amusement column folded out.

“‘But now, what ho for a merry round of pleasure,’ says I. ‘Here’s one
of Hall Caine’s shows, and a stock-yard company in “Hamlet,” and
skating at the Hollowhorn Rink, and Sarah Bernhardt, and the Shapely
Syrens Burlesque Company. I should think, now, that the Shapely—’

“But what does this healthy, wealthy, and wise man do but reach his
arms up to the second-story windows and gape noisily.

“‘Reckon I’ll be going to bed,’ says he; ‘it’s about my time. St. Louis
is a kind of quiet place, ain’t it?’

“‘Oh, yes,’ says I; ‘ever since the railroads ran in here the town’s
been practically ruined. And the building-and-loan associations and the
fair have about killed it. Guess we might as well go to bed. Wait till
you see Chicago, though. Shall we get tickets for the Big Breeze
to-morrow?’

“‘Mought as well,’ says Solly. ‘I reckon all these towns are about
alike.’

“Well, maybe the wise cicerone and personal conductor didn’t fall hard
in Chicago! Loolooville-on-the-Lake is supposed to have one or two
things in it calculated to keep the rural visitor awake after the
curfew rings. But not for the grass-fed man of the pampas! I tried him
with theatres, rides in automobiles, sails on the lake, champagne
suppers, and all those little inventions that hold the simple life in
check; but in vain. Solly grew sadder day by day. And I got fearful
about my salary, and knew I must play my trump card. So I mentioned New
York to him, and informed him that these Western towns were no more
than gateways to the great walled city of the whirling dervishes.

“After I bought the tickets I missed Solly. I knew his habits by then;
so in a couple of hours I found him in a saddle-shop. They had some new
ideas there in the way of trees and girths that had strayed down from
the Canadian mounted police; and Solly was so interested that he almost
looked reconciled to live. He invested about nine hundred dollars in
there.

“At the depot I telegraphed a cigar-store man I knew in New York to
meet me at the Twenty-third Street ferry with a list of all the
saddle-stores in the city. I wanted to know where to look for Solly
when he got lost.

“Now I’ll tell you what happened in New York. I says to myself: ‘Friend
Heherezade, you want to get busy and make Bagdad look pretty to the sad
sultan of the sour countenance, or it’ll be the bowstring for yours.’
But I never had any doubt I could do it.

“I began with him like you’d feed a starving man. I showed him the
horse-cars on Broadway and the Staten Island ferry-boats. And then I
piled up the sensations on him, but always keeping a lot of warmer ones
up my sleeve.

“At the end of the third day he looked like a composite picture of five
thousand orphans too late to catch a picnic steamboat, and I was
wilting down a collar every two hours wondering how I could please him
and whether I was going to get my thou. He went to sleep looking at the
Brooklyn Bridge; he disregarded the sky-scrapers above the third story;
it took three ushers to wake him up at the liveliest vaudeville in
town.

“Once I thought I had him. I nailed a pair of cuffs on him one morning
before he was awake; and I dragged him that evening to the palm-cage of
one of the biggest hotels in the city—to see the Johnnies and the
Alice-sit-by-the-hours. They were out in numerous quantities, with the
fat of the land showing in their clothes. While we were looking them
over, Solly divested himself of a fearful, rusty kind of laugh—like
moving a folding bed with one roller broken. It was his first in two
weeks, and it gave me hope.

“‘Right you are,’ says I. ‘They’re a funny lot of post-cards, aren’t
they?’

“‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of them dudes and culls on the hoof,’ says he.
‘I was thinking of the time me and George put sheep-dip in Horsehead
Johnson’s whisky. I wish I was back in Atascosa City,’ says he.

“I felt a cold chill run down my back. ‘Me to play and mate in one
move,’ says I to myself.

“I made Solly promise to stay in the café for half an hour and I hiked
out in a cab to Lolabelle Delatour’s flat on Forty-third Street. I knew
her well. She was a chorus-girl in a Broadway musical comedy.

“‘Jane,’ says I when I found her, ‘I’ve got a friend from Texas here.
He’s all right, but—well, he carries weight. I’d like to give him a
little whirl after the show this evening—bubbles, you know, and a buzz
out to a casino for the whitebait and pickled walnuts. Is it a go?’

“‘Can he sing?’ asks Lolabelle.

“‘You know,’ says I, ‘that I wouldn’t take him away from home unless
his notes were good. He’s got pots of money—bean-pots full of it.’

“‘Bring him around after the second act,’ says Lolabelle, ‘and I’ll
examine his credentials and securities.’

“So about ten o’clock that evening I led Solly to Miss Delatour’s
dressing-room, and her maid let us in. In ten minutes in comes
Lolabelle, fresh from the stage, looking stunning in the costume she
wears when she steps from the ranks of the lady grenadiers and says to
the king, ‘Welcome to our May-day revels.’ And you can bet it wasn’t
the way she spoke the lines that got her the part.

“As soon as Solly saw her he got up and walked straight out through the
stage entrance into the street. I followed him. Lolabelle wasn’t paying
my salary. I wondered whether anybody was.

“‘Luke,’ says Solly, outside, ‘that was an awful mistake. We must have
got into the lady’s private room. I hope I’m gentleman enough to do
anything possible in the way of apologies. Do you reckon she’d ever
forgive us?’

“‘She may forget it,’ says I. ‘Of course it was a mistake. Let’s go
find some beans.’

“That’s the way it went. But pretty soon afterward Solly failed to show
up at dinner-time for several days. I cornered him. He confessed that
he had found a restaurant on Third Avenue where they cooked beans in
Texas style. I made him take me there. The minute I set foot inside the
door I threw up my hands.

“There was a young woman at the desk, and Solly introduced me to her.
And then we sat down and had beans.

“Yes, sir, sitting at the desk was the kind of a young woman that can
catch any man in the world as easy as lifting a finger. There’s a way
of doing it. She knew. I saw her working it. She was healthy-looking
and plain dressed. She had her hair drawn back from her forehead and
face—no curls or frizzes; that’s the way she looked. Now I’ll tell you
the way they work the game; it’s simple. When she wants a man, she
manages it so that every time he looks at her he finds her looking at
him. That’s all.

“The next evening Solly was to go to Coney Island with me at seven. At
eight o’clock he hadn’t showed up. I went out and found a cab. I felt
sure there was something wrong.

“‘Drive to the Back Home Restaurant on Third Avenue,’ says I. ‘And if I
don’t find what I want there, take in these saddle-shops.’ I handed him
the list.

“‘Boss,’ says the cabby, ‘I et a steak in that restaurant once. If
you’re real hungry, I advise you to try the saddle-shops first.’

“‘I’m a detective,’ says I, ‘and I don’t eat. Hurry up!’

“As soon as I got to the restaurant I felt in the lines of my palms
that I should beware of a tall, red, damfool man, and I was going to
lose a sum of money.

“Solly wasn’t there. Neither was the smooth-haired lady.

“I waited; and in an hour they came in a cab and got out, hand in hand.
I asked Solly to step around the corner for a few words. He was
grinning clear across his face; but I had not administered the grin.

“‘She’s the greatest that ever sniffed the breeze,’ says he.

“‘Congrats,’ says I. ‘I’d like to have my thousand now, if you please.’

“‘Well, Luke,’ says he, ‘I don’t know that I’ve had such a skyhoodlin’
fine time under your tutelage and dispensation. But I’ll do the best I
can for you—I’ll do the best I can,’ he repeats. ‘Me and Miss Skinner
was married an hour ago. We’re leaving for Texas in the morning.’

“‘Great!’ says I. ‘Consider yourself covered with rice and Congress
gaiters. But don’t let’s tie so many satin bows on our business
relations that we lose sight of ’em. How about my honorarium?’

“‘Missis Mills,’ says he, ‘has taken possession of my money and papers
except six bits. I told her what I’d agreed to give you; but she says
it’s an irreligious and illegal contract, and she won’t pay a cent of
it. But I ain’t going to see you treated unfair,’ says he. ‘I’ve got
eighty-seven saddles on the ranch what I’ve bought on this trip; and
when I get back I’m going to pick out the best six in the lot and send
’em to you.’”

“And did he?” I asked, when Lucullus ceased talking.

“He did. And they are fit for kings to ride on. The six he sent me must
have cost him three thousand dollars. But where is the market for ’em?
Who would buy one except one of these rajahs and princes of Asia and
Africa? I’ve got ’em all on the list. I know every tan royal dub and
smoked princerino from Mindanao to the Caspian Sea.”

“It’s a long time between customers,” I ventured.

“They’re coming faster,” said Polk. “Nowadays, when one of the
murdering mutts gets civilised enough to abolish suttee and quit using
his whiskers for a napkin, he calls himself the Roosevelt of the East,
and comes over to investigate our Chautauquas and cocktails. I’ll place
’em all yet. Now look here.”

From an inside pocket he drew a tightly folded newspaper with much-worn
edges, and indicated a paragraph.

“Read that,” said the saddler to royalty. The paragraph ran thus:

His Highness Seyyid Feysal bin Turkee, Imam of Muskat, is one of the
most progressive and enlightened rulers of the Old World. His stables
contain more than a thousand horses of the purest Persian breeds. It is
said that this powerful prince contemplates a visit to the United
States at an early date.


“There!” said Mr. Polk triumphantly. “My best saddle is as good as
sold—the one with turquoises set in the rim of the cantle. Have you
three dollars that you could loan me for a short time?”

It happened that I had; and I did.

If this should meet the eye of the Imam of Muskat, may it quicken his
whim to visit the land of the free! Otherwise I fear that I shall be
longer than a short time separated from my dollars three.




VII
HYGEIA AT THE SOLITO


If you are knowing in the chronicles of the ring you will recall to
mind an event in the early ’nineties when, for a minute and sundry odd
seconds, a champion and a “would-be” faced each other on the alien side
of an international river. So brief a conflict had rarely imposed upon
the fair promise of true sport. The reporters made what they could of
it, but, divested of padding, the action was sadly fugacious. The
champion merely smote his victim, turned his back upon him, remarking,
“I know what I done to dat stiff,” and extended an arm like a ship’s
mast for his glove to be removed.

Which accounts for a trainload of extremely disgusted gentlemen in an
uproar of fancy vests and neck-wear being spilled from their pullmans
in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also
partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which “Cricket” McGuire
found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot
platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to
San Antonian ears. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that
way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman—may his shadow
never measure under six foot two.

The cattleman, out this early to catch the south-bound for his ranch
station, stopped at the side of the distressed patron of sport, and
spoke in the kindly drawl of his ilk and region, “Got it pretty bad,
bud?”

“Cricket” McGuire, ex-feather-weight prizefighter, tout, jockey,
follower of the “ponies,” all-round sport, and manipulator of the gum
balls and walnut shells, looked up pugnaciously at the imputation cast
by “bud.”

“G’wan,” he rasped, “telegraph pole. I didn’t ring for yer.”

Another paroxysm wrung him, and he leaned limply against a convenient
baggage truck. Raidler waited patiently, glancing around at the white
hats, short overcoats, and big cigars thronging the platform. “You’re
from the No’th, ain’t you, bud?” he asked when the other was partially
recovered. “Come down to see the fight?”

“Fight!” snapped McGuire. “Puss-in-the-corner! ’Twas a hypodermic
injection. Handed him just one like a squirt of dope, and he’s asleep,
and no tanbark needed in front of his residence. Fight!” He rattled a
bit, coughed, and went on, hardly addressing the cattleman, but rather
for the relief of voicing his troubles. “No more dead sure t’ings for
me. But Rus Sage himself would have snatched at it. Five to one dat de
boy from Cork wouldn’t stay t’ree rounds is what I invested in. Put my
last cent on, and could already smell the sawdust in dat all-night
joint of Jimmy Delaney’s on T’irty-seventh Street I was goin’ to buy.
And den—say, telegraph pole, what a gazaboo a guy is to put his whole
roll on one turn of the gaboozlum!”

“You’re plenty right,” said the big cattleman; “more ’specially when
you lose. Son, you get up and light out for a hotel. You got a mighty
bad cough. Had it long?”

“Lungs,” said McGuire comprehensively. “I got it. The croaker says I’ll
come to time for six months longer—maybe a year if I hold my gait. I
wanted to settle down and take care of myself. Dat’s why I speculated
on dat five to one perhaps. I had a t’ousand iron dollars saved up. If
I winned I was goin’ to buy Delaney’s café. Who’d a t’ought dat stiff
would take a nap in de foist round—say?”

“It’s a hard deal,” commented Raidler, looking down at the diminutive
form of McGuire crumpled against the truck. “But you go to a hotel and
rest. There’s the Menger and the Maverick, and—”

“And the Fi’th Av’noo, and the Waldorf-Astoria,” mimicked McGuire.
“Told you I went broke. I’m on de bum proper. I’ve got one dime left.
Maybe a trip to Europe or a sail in me private yacht would fix me up—
pa-per!”

He flung his dime at a newsboy, got his _Express_, propped his back
against the truck, and was at once rapt in the account of his Waterloo,
as expanded by the ingenious press.

Curtis Raidler interrogated an enormous gold watch, and laid his hand
on McGuire’s shoulder.

“Come on, bud,” he said. “We got three minutes to catch the train.”

Sarcasm seemed to be McGuire’s vein.

“You ain’t seen me cash in any chips or call a turn since I told you I
was broke, a minute ago, have you? Friend, chase yourself away.”

“You’re going down to my ranch,” said the cattleman, “and stay till you
get well. Six months’ll fix you good as new.” He lifted McGuire with
one hand, and half-dragged him in the direction of the train.

“What about the money?” said McGuire, struggling weakly to escape.

“Money for what?” asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not
understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled
cog-wheels—at right angles, and moving upon different axes.

Passengers on the south-bound saw them seated together, and wondered at
the conflux of two such antipodes. McGuire was five feet one, with a
countenance belonging to either Yokohama or Dublin. Bright-beady of
eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit,
indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither
new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil. Six
feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he
represented the union of the West and South. Few accurate pictures of
his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the
mutoscope is as yet unknown in Texas. After all, the only possible
medium of portrayal of Raidler’s kind would be the fresco—something
high and simple and cool and unframed.

They were rolling southward on the International. The timber was
huddling into little, dense green motts at rare distances before the
inundation of the downright, vert prairies. This was the land of the
ranches; the domain of the kings of the kine.

McGuire sat, collapsed into his corner of the seat, receiving with acid
suspicion the conversation of the cattleman. What was the “game” of
this big “geezer” who was carrying him off? Altruism would have been
McGuire’s last guess. “He ain’t no farmer,” thought the captive, “and
he ain’t no con man, for sure. W’at’s his lay? You trail in, Cricket,
and see how many cards he draws. You’re up against it, anyhow. You got
a nickel and gallopin’ consumption, and you better lay low. Lay low and
see w’at’s his game.”

At Rincon, a hundred miles from San Antonio, they left the train for a
buckboard which was waiting there for Raidler. In this they travelled
the thirty miles between the station and their destination. If anything
could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious McGuire to a
sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvety wheels across an exhilarant
savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a nimble, tireless trot,
which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild, untrammelled gallop.
The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they absorbed it, with the
delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road perished, and the
buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the grass itself, steered by
the practised hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny distant mott of trees
was a signboard, each convolution of the low hills a voucher of course
and distance. But McGuire reclined upon his spine, seeing nothing but a
desert, and receiving the cattleman’s advances with sullen distrust.
“W’at’s he up to?” was the burden of his thoughts; “w’at kind of a gold
brick has the big guy got to sell?” McGuire was only applying the
measure of the streets he had walked to a range bounded by the horizon
and the fourth dimension.

A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick
and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had
reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped
it at the ranch for the boys to attend to. It was impossible for
McGuire to know or comprehend that, in the eyes of the cattleman, his
case and that of the calf were identical in interest and demand upon
his assistance. A creature was ill and helpless; he had the power to
render aid—these were the only postulates required for the cattleman to
act. They formed his system of logic and the most of his creed. McGuire
was the seventh invalid whom Raidler had picked up thus casually in San
Antonio, where so many thousand go for the ozone that is said to linger
about its contracted streets. Five of them had been guests of Solito
Ranch until they had been able to leave, cured or better, and
exhausting the vocabulary of tearful gratitude. One came too late, but
rested very comfortably, at last, under a ratama tree in the garden.

So, then, it was no surprise to the ranchhold when the buckboard spun
to the door, and Raidler took up his debile _protégé_ like a handful of
rags and set him down upon the gallery.

McGuire looked upon things strange to him. The ranch-house was the best
in the country. It was built of brick hauled one hundred miles by
wagon, but it was of but one story, and its four rooms were completely
encircled by a mud floor “gallery.” The miscellaneous setting of
horses, dogs, saddles, wagons, guns, and cow-punchers’ paraphernalia
oppressed the metropolitan eyes of the wrecked sportsman.

“Well, here we are at home,” said Raidler, cheeringly.

“It’s a h—l of a looking place,” said McGuire promptly, as he rolled
upon the gallery floor in a fit of coughing.

“We’ll try to make it comfortable for you, buddy,” said the cattleman
gently. “It ain’t fine inside; but it’s the outdoors, anyway, that’ll
do you the most good. This’ll be your room, in here. Anything we got,
you ask for it.”

He led McGuire into the east room. The floor was bare and clean. White
curtains waved in the gulf breeze through the open windows. A big
willow rocker, two straight chairs, a long table covered with
newspapers, pipes, tobacco, spurs, and cartridges stood in the centre.
Some well-mounted heads of deer and one of an enormous black javeli
projected from the walls. A wide, cool cot-bed stood in a corner.
Nueces County people regarded this guest chamber as fit for a prince.
McGuire showed his eyeteeth at it. He took out his nickel and spun it
up to the ceiling.

“T’ought I was lyin’ about the money, did ye? Well, you can frisk me if
you wanter. Dat’s the last simoleon in the treasury. Who’s goin’ to
pay?”

The cattleman’s clear grey eyes looked steadily from under his grizzly
brows into the huckleberry optics of his guest. After a little he said
simply, and not ungraciously, “I’ll be much obliged to you, son, if you
won’t mention money any more. Once was quite a plenty. Folks I ask to
my ranch don’t have to pay anything, and they very scarcely ever offers
it. Supper’ll be ready in half an hour. There’s water in the pitcher,
and some, cooler, to drink, in that red jar hanging on the gallery.”

“Where’s the bell?” asked McGuire, looking about.

“Bell for what?”

“Bell to ring for things. I can’t—see here,” he exploded in a sudden,
weak fury, “I never asked you to bring me here. I never held you up for
a cent. I never gave you a hard-luck story till you asked me. Here I am
fifty miles from a bellboy or a cocktail. I’m sick. I can’t hustle.
Gee! but I’m up against it!” McGuire fell upon the cot and sobbed
shiveringly.

Raidler went to the door and called. A slender, bright-complexioned
Mexican youth about twenty came quickly. Raidler spoke to him in
Spanish.

“Ylario, it is in my mind that I promised you the position of _vaquero_
on the San Carlos range at the fall _rodeo_.”

“_Si, señor_, such was your goodness.”

“Listen. This _señorito_ is my friend. He is very sick. Place yourself
at his side. Attend to his wants at all times. Have much patience and
care with him. And when he is well, or—and when he is well, instead of
_vaquero_ I will make you _mayordomo_ of the Rancho de las Piedras.
_Esta bueno?_”

“_Si, si—mil gracias, señor_.” Ylario tried to kneel upon the floor in
his gratitude, but the cattleman kicked at him benevolently, growling,
“None of your opery-house antics, now.”

Ten minutes later Ylario came from McGuire’s room and stood before
Raidler.

“The little _señor_,” he announced, “presents his compliments” (Raidler
credited Ylario with the preliminary) “and desires some pounded ice,
one hot bath, one gin feez-z, that the windows be all closed, toast,
one shave, one Newyorkheral’, cigarettes, and to send one telegram.”

Raidler took a quart bottle of whisky from his medicine cabinet. “Here,
take him this,” he said.

Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few
weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the
cow-punchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest
importation of Raidler’s. He was an absolutely new experience to them.
He explained to them all the intricate points of sparring and the
tricks of training and defence. He opened to their minds’ view all the
indecorous life of a tagger after professional sports. His jargon of
slang was a continuous joy and surprise to them. His gestures, his
strange poses, his frank ribaldry of tongue and principle fascinated
them. He was like a being from a new world.

Strange to say, this new world he had entered did not exist to him. He
was an utter egoist of bricks and mortar. He had dropped out, he felt,
into open space for a time, and all it contained was an audience for
his reminiscences. Neither the limitless freedom of the prairie days
nor the grand hush of the close-drawn, spangled nights touched him. All
the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a sporting
journal. “Get something for nothing,” was his mission in life;
“Thirty-seventh” Street was his goal.

Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt
worse. It was then that he became the ranch’s incubus, its harpy, its
Old Man of the Sea. He shut himself in his room like some venomous
kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing. The
keynote of his plaint was that he had been inveigled into a gehenna
against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts.
With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of
others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and
diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the
skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his
prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer
might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established
the fact that McGuire was breathing with only one lung, but his
appearance remained the same.

In constant attendance upon him was Ylario, whom the coming reward of
the _mayordomo_ship must have greatly stimulated, for McGuire chained
him to a bitter existence. The air—the man’s only chance for life—he
commanded to be kept out by closed windows and drawn curtains. The room
was always blue and foul with cigarette smoke; whosoever entered it
must sit, suffocating, and listen to the imp’s interminable gasconade
concerning his scandalous career.

The oddest thing of all was the relation existing between McGuire and
his benefactor. The attitude of the invalid toward the cattleman was
something like that of a peevish, perverse child toward an indulgent
parent. When Raidler would leave the ranch McGuire would fall into a
fit of malevolent, silent sullenness. When he returned, he would be met
by a string of violent and stinging reproaches. Raidler’s attitude
toward his charge was quite inexplicable in its way. The cattleman
seemed actually to assume and feel the character assigned to him by
McGuire’s intemperate accusations—the character of tyrant and guilty
oppressor. He seemed to have adopted the responsibility of the fellow’s
condition, and he always met his tirades with a pacific, patient, and
even remorseful kindness that never altered.

One day Raidler said to him, “Try more air, son. You can have the
buckboard and a driver every day if you’ll go. Try a week or two in one
of the cow camps. I’ll fix you up plumb comfortable. The ground, and
the air next to it—them’s the things to cure you. I knowed a man from
Philadelphy, sicker than you are, got lost on the Guadalupe, and slept
on the bare grass in sheep camps for two weeks. Well, sir, it started
him getting well, which he done. Close to the ground—that’s where the
medicine in the air stays. Try a little hossback riding now. There’s a
gentle pony—”

“What’ve I done to yer?” screamed McGuire. “Did I ever doublecross yer?
Did I ask you to bring me here? Drive me out to your camps if you
wanter; or stick a knife in me and save trouble. Ride! I can’t lift my
feet. I couldn’t sidestep a jab from a five-year-old kid. That’s what
your d—d ranch has done for me. There’s nothing to eat, nothing to see,
and nobody to talk to but a lot of Reubens who don’t know a punching
bag from a lobster salad.”

“It’s a lonesome place, for certain,” apologised Raidler abashedly. “We
got plenty, but it’s rough enough. Anything you think of you want, the
boys’ll ride up and fetch it down for you.”

It was Chad Murchison, a cow-puncher from the Circle Bar outfit, who
first suggested that McGuire’s illness was fraudulent. Chad had brought
a basket of grapes for him thirty miles, and four out of his way, tied
to his saddle-horn. After remaining in the smoke-tainted room for a
while, he emerged and bluntly confided his suspicions to Raidler.

“His arm,” said Chad, “is harder’n a diamond. He interduced me to what
he called a shore-perplexus punch, and ’twas like being kicked twice by
a mustang. He’s playin’ it low down on you, Curt. He ain’t no sicker’n
I am. I hate to say it, but the runt’s workin’ you for range and
shelter.”

The cattleman’s ingenuous mind refused to entertain Chad’s view of the
case, and when, later, he came to apply the test, doubt entered not
into his motives.

One day, about noon, two men drove up to the ranch, alighted, hitched,
and came in to dinner; standing and general invitations being the
custom of the country. One of them was a great San Antonio doctor,
whose costly services had been engaged by a wealthy cowman who had been
laid low by an accidental bullet. He was now being driven back to the
station to take the train back to town. After dinner Raidler took him
aside, pushed a twenty-dollar bill against his hand, and said:

“Doc, there’s a young chap in that room I guess has got a bad case of
consumption. I’d like for you to look him over and see just how bad he
is, and if we can do anything for him.”

“How much was that dinner I just ate, Mr. Raidler?” said the doctor
bluffly, looking over his spectacles. Raidler returned the money to his
pocket. The doctor immediately entered McGuire’s room, and the
cattleman seated himself upon a heap of saddles on the gallery, ready
to reproach himself in the event the verdict should be unfavourable.

In ten minutes the doctor came briskly out. “Your man,” he said
promptly, “is as sound as a new dollar. His lungs are better than mine.
Respiration, temperature, and pulse normal. Chest expansion four
inches. Not a sign of weakness anywhere. Of course I didn’t examine for
the bacillus, but it isn’t there. You can put my name to the diagnosis.
Even cigarettes and a vilely close room haven’t hurt him. Coughs, does
he? Well, you tell him it isn’t necessary. You asked if there is
anything we could do for him. Well, I advise you to set him digging
post-holes or breaking mustangs. There’s our team ready. Good-day,
sir.” And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off.

Raidler reached out and plucked a leaf from a mesquite bush by the
railing, and began chewing it thoughtfully.

The branding season was at hand, and the next morning Ross Hargis,
foreman of the outfit, was mustering his force of some twenty-five men
at the ranch, ready to start for the San Carlos range, where the work
was to begin. By six o’clock the horses were all saddled, the grub
wagon ready, and the cow-punchers were swinging themselves upon their
mounts, when Raidler bade them wait. A boy was bringing up an extra
pony, bridled and saddled, to the gate. Raidler walked to McGuire’s
room and threw open the door. McGuire was lying on his cot, not yet
dressed, smoking.

“Get up,” said the cattleman, and his voice was clear and brassy, like
a bugle.

“How’s that?” asked McGuire, a little startled.

“Get up and dress. I can stand a rattlesnake, but I hate a liar. Do I
have to tell you again?” He caught McGuire by the neck and stood him on
the floor.

“Say, friend,” cried McGuire wildly, “are you bug-house? I’m sick— see?
I’ll croak if I got to hustle. What’ve I done to yer?”—he began his
chronic whine—“I never asked yer to—”

“Put on your clothes,” called Raidler in a rising tone.

Swearing, stumbling, shivering, keeping his amazed, shining eyes upon
the now menacing form of the aroused cattleman, McGuire managed to
tumble into his clothes. Then Raidler took him by the collar and shoved
him out and across the yard to the extra pony hitched at the gate. The
cow-punchers lolled in their saddles, open-mouthed.

“Take this man,” said Raidler to Ross Hargis, “and put him to work.
Make him work hard, sleep hard, and eat hard. You boys know I done what
I could for him, and he was welcome. Yesterday the best doctor in San
Antone examined him, and says he’s got the lungs of a burro and the
constitution of a steer. You know what to do with him, Ross.”

Ross Hargis only smiled grimly.

“Aw,” said McGuire, looking intently at Raidler, with a peculiar
expression upon his face, “the croaker said I was all right, did he?
Said I was fakin’, did he? You put him onto me. You t’ought I wasn’t
sick. You said I was a liar. Say, friend, I talked rough, I know, but I
didn’t mean most of it. If you felt like I did—aw! I forgot—I ain’t
sick, the croaker says. Well, friend, now I’ll go work for yer. Here’s
where you play even.”

He sprang into the saddle easily as a bird, got the quirt from the
horn, and gave his pony a slash with it. “Cricket,” who once brought in
Good Boy by a neck at Hawthorne—and a 10 to 1 shot—had his foot in the
stirrups again.

McGuire led the cavalcade as they dashed away for San Carlos, and the
cow-punchers gave a yell of applause as they closed in behind his dust.

But in less than a mile he had lagged to the rear, and was last man
when they struck the patch of high chaparral below the horse pens.
Behind a clump of this he drew rein, and held a handkerchief to his
mouth. He took it away drenched with bright, arterial blood, and threw
it carefully into a clump of prickly pear. Then he slashed with his
quirt again, gasped “G’wan” to his astonished pony, and galloped after
the gang.

That night Raidler received a message from his old home in Alabama.
There had been a death in the family; an estate was to divide, and they
called for him to come. Daylight found him in the buckboard, skimming
the prairies for the station. It was two months before he returned.
When he arrived at the ranch house he found it well-nigh deserted save
for Ylario, who acted as a kind of steward during his absence. Little
by little the youth made him acquainted with the work done while he was
away. The branding camp, he was informed, was still doing business. On
account of many severe storms the cattle had been badly scattered, and
the branding had been accomplished but slowly. The camp was now in the
valley of the Guadalupe, twenty miles away.

“By the way,” said Raidler, suddenly remembering, “that fellow I sent
along with them—McGuire—is he working yet?”

“I do not know,” said Ylario. “Mans from the camp come verree few times
to the ranch. So plentee work with the leetle calves. They no say. Oh,
I think that fellow McGuire he dead much time ago.”

“Dead!” said Raidler. “What you talking about?”

“Verree sick fellow, McGuire,” replied Ylario, with a shrug of his
shoulder. “I theenk he no live one, two month when he go away.”

“Shucks!” said Raidler. “He humbugged you, too, did he? The doctor
examined him and said he was sound as a mesquite knot.”

“That doctor,” said Ylario, smiling, “he tell you so? That doctor no
see McGuire.”

“Talk up,” ordered Raidler. “What the devil do you mean?”

“McGuire,” continued the boy tranquilly, “he getting drink water
outside when that doctor come in room. That doctor take me and pound me
all over here with his fingers”—putting his hand to his chest—“I not
know for what. He put his ear here and here and here, and listen— I not
know for what. He put little glass stick in my mouth. He feel my arm
here. He make me count like whisper—so—twenty, _treinta_, _cuarenta_.
Who knows,” concluded Ylario, with a deprecating spread of his hands,
“for what that doctor do those verree droll and such-like things?”

“What horses are up?” asked Raidler shortly.

“Paisano is grazing out behind the little corral, _señor_.”

“Saddle him for me at once.”

Within a very few minutes the cattleman was mounted and away. Paisano,
well named after that ungainly but swift-running bird, struck into his
long lope that ate up the ground like a strip of macaroni. In two hours
and a quarter Raidler, from a gentle swell, saw the branding camp by a
water hole in the Guadalupe. Sick with expectancy of the news he
feared, he rode up, dismounted, and dropped Paisano’s reins. So gentle
was his heart that at that moment he would have pleaded guilty to the
murder of McGuire.

The only being in the camp was the cook, who was just arranging the
hunks of barbecued beef, and distributing the tin coffee cups for
supper. Raidler evaded a direct question concerning the one subject in
his mind.

“Everything all right in camp, Pete?” he managed to inquire.

“So, so,” said Pete, conservatively. “Grub give out twice. Wind
scattered the cattle, and we’ve had to rake the brush for forty mile. I
need a new coffee-pot. And the mosquitos is some more hellish than
common.”

“The boys—all well?”

Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of
cow-punchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It
was not like the boss to make them.

“What’s left of ’em don’t miss no calls to grub,” the cook conceded.

“What’s left of ’em?” repeated Raidler in a husky voice. Mechanically
he began to look around for McGuire’s grave. He had in his mind a white
slab such as he had seen in the Alabama church-yard. But immediately he
knew that was foolish.

“Sure,” said Pete; “what’s left. Cow camps change in two months. Some’s
gone.”

Raidler nerved himself.

“That—chap—I sent along—McGuire—did—he—”

“Say,” interrupted Pete, rising with a chunk of corn bread in each
hand, “that was a dirty shame, sending that poor, sick kid to a cow
camp. A doctor that couldn’t tell he was graveyard meat ought to be
skinned with a cinch buckle. Game as he was, too—it’s a scandal among
snakes—lemme tell you what he done. First night in camp the boys
started to initiate him in the leather breeches degree. Ross Hargis
busted him one swipe with his chaparreras, and what do you reckon the
poor child did? Got up, the little skeeter, and licked Ross. Licked
Ross Hargis. Licked him good. Hit him plenty and everywhere and hard.
Ross’d just get up and pick out a fresh place to lay down on agin.

“Then that McGuire goes off there and lays down with his head in the
grass and bleeds. A hem’ridge they calls it. He lays there eighteen
hours by the watch, and they can’t budge him. Then Ross Hargis, who
loves any man who can lick him, goes to work and damns the doctors from
Greenland to Poland Chiny; and him and Green Branch Johnson they gets
McGuire into a tent, and spells each other feedin’ him chopped raw meat
and whisky.

“But it looks like the kid ain’t got no appetite to git well, for they
misses him from the tent in the night and finds him rootin’ in the
grass, and likewise a drizzle fallin’. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘lemme go and
die like I wanter. He said I was a liar and a fake and I was playin’
sick. Lemme alone.’

“Two weeks,” went on the cook, “he laid around, not noticin’ nobody,
and then—”

A sudden thunder filled the air, and a score of galloping centaurs
crashed through the brush into camp.

“Illustrious rattlesnakes!” exclaimed Pete, springing all ways at once;
“here’s the boys come, and I’m an assassinated man if supper ain’t
ready in three minutes.”

But Raidler saw only one thing. A little, brown-faced, grinning chap,
springing from his saddle in the full light of the fire. McGuire was
not like that, and yet—

In another instant the cattleman was holding him by the hand and
shoulder.

“Son, son, how goes it?” was all he found to say.

“Close to the ground, says you,” shouted McGuire, crunching Raidler’s
fingers in a grip of steel; “and dat’s where I found it—healt’ and
strengt’, and tumbled to what a cheap skate I been actin’. T’anks fer
kickin’ me out, old man. And—say! de joke’s on dat croaker, ain’t it? I
looked t’rough the window and see him playin’ tag on dat Dago kid’s
solar plexus.”

“You son of a tinker,” growled the cattleman, “whyn’t you talk up and
say the doctor never examined you?”

“Ah—g’wan!” said McGuire, with a flash of his old asperity, “nobody
can’t bluff me. You never ast me. You made your spiel, and you t’rowed
me out, and I let it go at dat. And, say, friend, dis chasin’ cows is
outer sight. Dis is de whitest bunch of sports I ever travelled with.
You’ll let me stay, won’t yer, old man?”

Raidler looked wonderingly toward Ross Hargis.

“That cussed little runt,” remarked Ross tenderly, “is the
Jo-dartin’est hustler—and the hardest hitter in anybody’s cow camp.”




VIII
AN AFTERNOON MIRACLE


At the United States end of an international river bridge, four armed
rangers sweltered in a little ’dobe hut, keeping a fairly faithful
espionage upon the lagging trail of passengers from the Mexican side.

Bud Dawson, proprietor of the Top Notch Saloon, had, on the evening
previous, violently ejected from his premises one Leandro Garcia, for
alleged violation of the Top Notch code of behaviour. Garcia had
mentioned twenty-four hours as a limit, by which time he would call and
collect a painful indemnity for personal satisfaction.

This Mexican, although a tremendous braggart, was thoroughly
courageous, and each side of the river respected him for one of these
attributes. He and a following of similar bravoes were addicted to the
pastime of retrieving towns from stagnation.

The day designated by Garcia for retribution was to be further
signalised on the American side by a cattlemen’s convention, a bull
fight, and an old settlers’ barbecue and picnic. Knowing the avenger to
be a man of his word, and believing it prudent to court peace while
three such gently social relaxations were in progress, Captain McNulty,
of the ranger company stationed there, detailed his lieutenant and
three men for duty at the end of the bridge. Their instructions were to
prevent the invasion of Garcia, either alone or attended by his gang.

Travel was slight that sultry afternoon, and the rangers swore gently,
and mopped their brows in their convenient but close quarters. For an
hour no one had crossed save an old woman enveloped in a brown wrapper
and a black mantilla, driving before her a burro loaded with kindling
wood tied in small bundles for peddling. Then three shots were fired
down the street, the sound coming clear and snappy through the still
air.

The four rangers quickened from sprawling, symbolic figures of
indolence to alert life, but only one rose to his feet. Three turned
their eyes beseechingly but hopelessly upon the fourth, who had gotten
nimbly up and was buckling his cartridge-belt around him. The three
knew that Lieutenant Bob Buckley, in command, would allow no man of
them the privilege of investigating a row when he himself might go.

The agile, broad-chested lieutenant, without a change of expression in
his smooth, yellow-brown, melancholy face, shot the belt strap through
the guard of the buckle, hefted his sixes in their holsters as a belle
gives the finishing touches to her toilette, caught up his Winchester,
and dived for the door. There he paused long enough to caution his
comrades to maintain their watch upon the bridge, and then plunged into
the broiling highway.

The three relapsed into resigned inertia and plaintive comment.

“I’ve heard of fellows,” grumbled Broncho Leathers, “what was wedded to
danger, but if Bob Buckley ain’t committed bigamy with trouble, I’m a
son of a gun.”

“Peculiarness of Bob is,” inserted the Nueces Kid, “he ain’t had proper
trainin’. He never learned how to git skeered. Now, a man ought to be
skeered enough when he tackles a fuss to hanker after readin’ his name
on the list of survivors, anyway.”

“Buckley,” commented Ranger No. 3, who was a misguided Eastern man,
burdened with an education, “scraps in such a solemn manner that I have
been led to doubt its spontaneity. I’m not quite onto his system, but
he fights, like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic.”

“I never heard,” mentioned Broncho, “about any of Dibble’s ways of
mixin’ scrappin’ and cipherin’.”

“Triggernometry?” suggested the Nueces infant.

“That’s rather better than I hoped from you,” nodded the Easterner,
approvingly. “The other meaning is that Buckley never goes into a fight
without giving away weight. He seems to dread taking the slightest
advantage. That’s quite close to foolhardiness when you are dealing
with horse-thieves and fence-cutters who would ambush you any night,
and shoot you in the back if they could. Buckley’s too full of sand.
He’ll play Horatius and hold the bridge once too often some day.”

“I’m on there,” drawled the Kid; “I mind that bridge gang in the
reader. Me, I go instructed for the other chap—Spurious Somebody—the
one that fought and pulled his freight, to fight ’em on some other
day.”

“Anyway,” summed up Broncho, “Bob’s about the gamest man I ever see
along the Rio Bravo. Great Sam Houston! If she gets any hotter she’ll
sizzle!” Broncho whacked at a scorpion with his four-pound Stetson
felt, and the three watchers relapsed into comfortless silence.

How well Bob Buckley had kept his secret, since these men, for two
years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus
spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward
in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had
suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a
physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he
forced his craven body to do the bravest deeds. Scourging himself
always, as a monk whips his besetting sin, Buckley threw himself with
apparent recklessness into every danger, with the hope of some day
ridding himself of the despised affliction. But each successive test
brought no relief, and the ranger’s face, by nature adapted to
cheerfulness and good-humour, became set to the guise of gloomy
melancholy. Thus, while the frontier admired his deeds, and his prowess
was celebrated in print and by word of mouth in many camp-fires in the
valley of the Bravo, his heart was sick within him. Only himself knew
of the horrible tightening of the chest, the dry mouth, the weakening
of the spine, the agony of the strung nerves—the never-failing symptoms
of his shameful malady.

One mere boy in his company was wont to enter a fray with a leg perched
flippantly about the horn of his saddle, a cigarette hanging from his
lips, which emitted smoke and original slogans of clever invention.
Buckley would have given a year’s pay to attain that devil-may-care
method. Once the debonair youth said to him: “Buck, you go into a scrap
like it was a funeral. Not,” he added, with a complimentary wave of his
tin cup, “but what it generally is.”

Buckley’s conscience was of the New England order with Western
adjustments, and he continued to get his rebellious body into as many
difficulties as possible; wherefore, on that sultry afternoon he chose
to drive his own protesting limbs to investigation of that sudden alarm
that had startled the peace and dignity of the State.

Two squares down the street stood the Top Notch Saloon. Here Buckley
came upon signs of recent upheaval. A few curious spectators pressed
about its front entrance, grinding beneath their heels the fragments of
a plate-glass window. Inside, Buckley found Bud Dawson utterly ignoring
a bullet wound in his shoulder, while he feelingly wept at having to
explain why he failed to drop the “blamed masquerooter,” who shot him.
At the entrance of the ranger Bud turned appealingly to him for
confirmation of the devastation he might have dealt.

“You know, Buck, I’d ’a’ plum got him, first rattle, if I’d thought a
minute. Come in a-masque-rootin’, playin’ female till he got the drop,
and turned loose. I never reached for a gun, thinkin’ it was sure
Chihuahua Betty, or Mrs. Atwater, or anyhow one of the Mayfield girls
comin’ a-gunnin’, which they might, liable as not. I never thought of
that blamed Garcia until—”

“Garcia!” snapped Buckley. “How did he get over here?”

Bud’s bartender took the ranger by the arm and led him to the side
door. There stood a patient grey burro cropping the grass along the
gutter, with a load of kindling wood tied across its back. On the
ground lay a black shawl and a voluminous brown dress.

“Masquerootin’ in them things,” called Bud, still resisting attempted
ministrations to his wounds. “Thought he was a lady till he gave a yell
and winged me.”

“He went down this side street,” said the bartender. “He was alone, and
he’ll hide out till night when his gang comes over. You ought to find
him in that Mexican lay-out below the depot. He’s got a girl down
there—Pancha Sales.”

“How was he armed?” asked Buckley.

“Two pearl-handled sixes, and a knife.”

“Keep this for me, Billy,” said the ranger, handing over his
Winchester. Quixotic, perhaps, but it was Bob Buckley’s way. Another
man—and a braver one—might have raised a posse to accompany him. It was
Buckley’s rule to discard all preliminary advantage.

The Mexican had left behind him a wake of closed doors and an empty
street, but now people were beginning to emerge from their places of
refuge with assumed unconsciousness of anything having happened. Many
citizens who knew the ranger pointed out to him with alacrity the
course of Garcia’s retreat.

As Buckley swung along upon the trail he felt the beginning of the
suffocating constriction about his throat, the cold sweat under the
brim of his hat, the old, shameful, dreaded sinking of his heart as it
went down, down, down in his bosom.


The morning train of the Mexican Central had that day been three hours
late, thus failing to connect with the I. & G.N. on the other side of
the river. Passengers for _Los Estados Unidos_ grumblingly sought
entertainment in the little swaggering mongrel town of two nations,
for, until the morrow, no other train would come to rescue them.
Grumblingly, because two days later would begin the great fair and
races in San Antone. Consider that at that time San Antone was the hub
of the wheel of Fortune, and the names of its spokes were Cattle, Wool,
Faro, Running Horses, and Ozone. In those times cattlemen played at
crack-loo on the sidewalks with double-eagles, and gentlemen backed
their conception of the fortuitous card with stacks limited in height
only by the interference of gravity. Wherefore, thither journeyed the
sowers and the reapers—they who stampeded the dollars, and they who
rounded them up. Especially did the caterers to the amusement of the
people haste to San Antone. Two greatest shows on earth were already
there, and dozens of smallest ones were on the way.

On a side track near the mean little ’dobe depot stood a private car,
left there by the Mexican train that morning and doomed by an
ineffectual schedule to ignobly await, amid squalid surroundings,
connection with the next day’s regular.

The car had been once a common day-coach, but those who had sat in it
and gringed to the conductor’s hat-band slips would never have
recognised it in its transformation. Paint and gilding and certain
domestic touches had liberated it from any suspicion of public
servitude. The whitest of lace curtains judiciously screened its
windows. From its fore end drooped in the torrid air the flag of
Mexico. From its rear projected the Stars and Stripes and a busy
stovepipe, the latter reinforcing in its suggestion of culinary
comforts the general suggestion of privacy and ease. The beholder’s
eye, regarding its gorgeous sides, found interest to culminate in a
single name in gold and blue letters extending almost its entire
length—a single name, the audacious privilege of royalty and genius.
Doubly, then, was this arrogant nomenclature here justified; for the
name was that of “Alvarita, Queen of the Serpent Tribe.” This, her car,
was back from a triumphant tour of the principal Mexican cities, and
now headed for San Antonio, where, according to promissory
advertisement, she would exhibit her “Marvellous Dominion and Fearless
Control over Deadly and Venomous Serpents, Handling them with Ease as
they Coil and Hiss to the Terror of Thousands of Tongue-tied
Tremblers!”

One hundred in the shade kept the vicinity somewhat depeopled. This
quarter of the town was a ragged edge; its denizens the bubbling froth
of five nations; its architecture tent, _jacal_, and ’dobe; its
distractions the hurdy-gurdy and the informal contribution to the
sudden stranger’s store of experience. Beyond this dishonourable fringe
upon the old town’s jowl rose a dense mass of trees, surmounting and
filling a little hollow. Through this bickered a small stream that
perished down the sheer and disconcerting side of the great cañon of
the Rio Bravo del Norte.

In this sordid spot was condemned to remain for certain hours the
impotent transport of the Queen of the Serpent Tribe.

The front door of the car was open. Its forward end was curtained off
into a small reception-room. Here the admiring and propitiatory
reporters were wont to sit and transpose the music of Señorita
Alvarita’s talk into the more florid key of the press. A picture of
Abraham Lincoln hung against a wall; one of a cluster of school-girls
grouped upon stone steps was in another place; a third was Easter
lilies in a blood-red frame. A neat carpet was under foot. A pitcher,
sweating cold drops, and a glass stood on a fragile stand. In a willow
rocker, reading a newspaper, sat Alvarita.

Spanish, you would say; Andalusian, or, better still, Basque; that
compound, like the diamond, of darkness and fire. Hair, the shade of
purple grapes viewed at midnight. Eyes, long, dusky, and disquieting
with their untroubled directness of gaze. Face, haughty and bold,
touched with a pretty insolence that gave it life. To hasten conviction
of her charm, but glance at the stacks of handbills in the corner,
green, and yellow, and white. Upon them you see an incompetent
presentment of the señorita in her professional garb and pose.
Irresistible, in black lace and yellow ribbons, she faces you; a blue
racer is spiralled upon each bare arm; coiled twice about her waist and
once about her neck, his horrid head close to hers, you perceive Kuku,
the great eleven-foot Asian python.

A hand drew aside the curtain that partitioned the car, and a
middle-aged, faded woman holding a knife and a half-peeled potato
looked in and said:

“Alviry, are you right busy?”

“I’m reading the home paper, ma. What do you think! that pale,
tow-headed Matilda Price got the most votes in the _News_ for the
prettiest girl in Gallipo—_lees_.”

“Shush! She wouldn’t of done it if _you’d_ been home, Alviry. Lord
knows, I hope we’ll be there before fall’s over. I’m tired gallopin’
round the world playin’ we are dagoes, and givin’ snake shows. But that
ain’t what I wanted to say. That there biggest snake’s gone again. I’ve
looked all over the car and can’t find him. He must have been gone an
hour. I remember hearin’ somethin’ rustlin’ along the floor, but I
thought it was you.”

“Oh, blame that old rascal!” exclaimed the Queen, throwing down her
paper. “This is the third time he’s got away. George never _will_
fasten down the lid to his box properly. I do believe he’s _afraid_ of
Kuku. Now I’ve got to go hunt him.”

“Better hurry; somebody might hurt him.”

The Queen’s teeth showed in a gleaming, contemptuous smile. “No danger.
When they see Kuku outside they simply scoot away and buy bromides.
There’s a crick over between here and the river. That old scamp’d swap
his skin any time for a drink of running water. I guess I’ll find him
there, all right.”

A few minutes later Alvarita stopped upon the forward platform, ready
for her quest. Her handsome black skirt was shaped to the most recent
proclamation of fashion. Her spotless shirt-waist gladdened the eye in
that desert of sunshine, a swelling oasis, cool and fresh. A man’s
split-straw hat sat firmly on her coiled, abundant hair. Beneath her
serene, round, impudent chin a man’s four-in-hand tie was jauntily
knotted about a man’s high, stiff collar. A parasol she carried, of
white silk, and its fringe was lace, yellowly genuine.

I will grant Gallipolis as to her costume, but firmly to Seville or
Valladolid I am held by her eyes; castanets, balconies, mantillas,
serenades, ambuscades, escapades—all these their dark depths
guaranteed.

“Ain’t you afraid to go out alone, Alviry?” queried the Queen-mother
anxiously. “There’s so many rough people about. Mebbe you’d better—”

“I never saw anything I was afraid of yet, ma. ’Specially people. And
men in particular. Don’t you fret. I’ll trot along back as soon as I
find that runaway scamp.”

The dust lay thick upon the bare ground near the tracks. Alvarita’s eye
soon discovered the serrated trail of the escaped python. It led across
the depot grounds and away down a smaller street in the direction of
the little cañon, as predicted by her. A stillness and lack of
excitement in the neighbourhood encouraged the hope that, as yet, the
inhabitants were unaware that so formidable a guest traversed their
highways. The heat had driven them indoors, whence outdrifted
occasional shrill laughs, or the depressing whine of a maltreated
concertina. In the shade a few Mexican children, like vivified stolid
idols in clay, stared from their play, vision-struck and silent, as
Alvarita came and went. Here and there a woman peeped from a door and
stood dumb, reduced to silence by the aspect of the white silk parasol.

A hundred yards and the limits of the town were passed, scattered
chaparral succeeding, and then a noble grove, overflowing the bijou
cañon. Through this a small bright stream meandered. Park-like it was,
with a kind of cockney ruralness further endorsed by the waste papers
and rifled tins of picnickers. Up this stream, and down it, among its
pseudo-sylvan glades and depressions, wandered the bright and unruffled
Alvarita. Once she saw evidence of the recreant reptile’s progress in
his distinctive trail across a spread of fine sand in the arroyo. The
living water was bound to lure him; he could not be far away.

So sure was she of his immediate proximity that she perched herself to
idle for a time in the curve of a great creeper that looped down from a
giant water-elm. To reach this she climbed from the pathway a little
distance up the side of a steep and rugged incline. Around her
chaparral grew thick and high. A late-blooming ratama tree dispensed
from its yellow petals a sweet and persistent odour. Adown the ravine
rustled a seductive wind, melancholy with the taste of sodden, fallen
leaves.

Alvarita removed her hat, and undoing the oppressive convolutions of
her hair, began to slowly arrange it in two long, dusky plaits.

From the obscure depths of a thick clump of evergreen shrubs five feet
away, two small jewel-bright eyes were steadfastly regarding her.
Coiled there lay Kuku, the great python; Kuku, the magnificent, he of
the plated muzzle, the grooved lips, the eleven-foot stretch of
elegantly and brilliantly mottled skin. The great python was viewing
his mistress without a sound or motion to disclose his presence.
Perhaps the splendid truant forefelt his capture, but, screened by the
foliage, thought to prolong the delight of his escapade. What pleasure
it was, after the hot and dusty car, to lie thus, smelling the running
water, and feeling the agreeable roughness of the earth and stones
against his body! Soon, very soon the Queen would find him, and he,
powerless as a worm in her audacious hands, would be returned to the
dark chest in the narrow house that ran on wheels.

Alvarita heard a sudden crunching of the gravel below her. Turning her
head she saw a big, swarthy Mexican, with a daring and evil expression,
contemplating her with an ominous, dull eye.

“What do you want?” she asked as sharply as five hairpins between her
lips would permit, continuing to plait her hair, and looking him over
with placid contempt. The Mexican continued to gaze at her, and showed
his teeth in a white, jagged smile.

“I no hurt-y you, Señorita,” he said.

“You bet you won’t,” answered the Queen, shaking back one finished,
massive plait. “But don’t you think you’d better move on?”

“Not hurt-y you—no. But maybeso take one _beso_—one li’l kees, you call
him.”

The man smiled again, and set his foot to ascend the slope. Alvarita
leaned swiftly and picked up a stone the size of a cocoanut.

“Vamoose, quick,” she ordered peremptorily, “you _coon!_”

The red of insult burned through the Mexican’s dark skin.

“_Hidalgo, Yo!_” he shot between his fangs. “I am not neg-r-ro! _Diabla
bonita_, for that you shall pay me.”

He made two quick upward steps this time, but the stone, hurled by no
weak arm, struck him square in the chest. He staggered back to the
footway, swerved half around, and met another sight that drove all
thoughts of the girl from his head. She turned her eyes to see what had
diverted his interest. A man with red-brown, curling hair and a
melancholy, sunburned, smooth-shaven face was coming up the path,
twenty yards away. Around the Mexican’s waist was buckled a pistol belt
with two empty holsters. He had laid aside his sixes—possibly in the
_jacal_ of the fair Pancha—and had forgotten them when the passing of
the fairer Alvarita had enticed him to her trail. His hands now flew
instinctively to the holsters, but finding the weapons gone, he spread
his fingers outward with the eloquent, abjuring, deprecating Latin
gesture, and stood like a rock. Seeing his plight, the newcomer
unbuckled his own belt containing two revolvers, threw it upon the
ground, and continued to advance.

“Splendid!” murmured Alvarita, with flashing eyes.

As Bob Buckley, according to the mad code of bravery that his sensitive
conscience imposed upon his cowardly nerves, abandoned his guns and
closed in upon his enemy, the old, inevitable nausea of abject fear
wrung him. His breath whistled through his constricted air passages.
His feet seemed like lumps of lead. His mouth was dry as dust. His
heart, congested with blood, hurt his ribs as it thumped against them.
The hot June day turned to moist November. And still he advanced,
spurred by a mandatory pride that strained its uttermost against his
weakling flesh.

The distance between the two men slowly lessened. The Mexican stood,
immovable, waiting. When scarce five yards separated them a little
shower of loosened gravel rattled down from above to the ranger’s feet.
He glanced upward with instinctive caution. A pair of dark eyes,
brilliantly soft, and fierily tender, encountered and held his own. The
most fearful heart and the boldest one in all the Rio Bravo country
exchanged a silent and inscrutable communication. Alvarita, still
seated within her vine, leaned forward above the breast-high chaparral.
One hand was laid across her bosom. One great dark braid curved forward
over her shoulder. Her lips were parted; her face was lit with what
seemed but wonder—great and absolute wonder. Her eyes lingered upon
Buckley’s. Let no one ask or presume to tell through what subtle medium
the miracle was performed. As by a lightning flash two clouds will
accomplish counterpoise and compensation of electric surcharge, so on
that eyeglance the man received his complement of manhood, and the maid
conceded what enriched her womanly grace by its loss.

The Mexican, suddenly stirring, ventilated his attitude of apathetic
waiting by conjuring swiftly from his bootleg a long knife. Buckley
cast aside his hat, and laughed once aloud, like a happy school-boy at
a frolic. Then, empty-handed, he sprang nimbly, and Garcia met him
without default.

So soon was the engagement ended that disappointment imposed upon the
ranger’s warlike ecstasy. Instead of dealing the traditional downward
stroke, the Mexican lunged straight with his knife. Buckley took the
precarious chance, and caught his wrist, fair and firm. Then he
delivered the good Saxon knock-out blow—always so pathetically
disastrous to the fistless Latin races—and Garcia was down and out,
with his head under a clump of prickly pears. The ranger looked up
again to the Queen of the Serpents.

Alvarita scrambled down to the path.

“I’m mighty glad I happened along when I did,” said the ranger.

“He—he frightened me so!” cooed Alvarita.

They did not hear the long, low hiss of the python under the shrubs.
Wiliest of the beasts, no doubt he was expressing the humiliation he
felt at having so long dwelt in subjection to this trembling and
colouring mistress of his whom he had deemed so strong and potent and
fearsome.

Then came galloping to the spot the civic authorities; and to them the
ranger awarded the prostrate disturber of the peace, whom they bore
away limply across the saddle of one of their mounts. But Buckley and
Alvarita lingered.

Slowly, slowly they walked. The ranger regained his belt of weapons.
With a fine timidity she begged the indulgence of fingering the great
.45’s, with little “Ohs” and “Ahs” of new-born, delicious shyness.

The _cañoncito_ was growing dusky. Beyond its terminus in the river
bluff they could see the outer world yet suffused with the waning glory
of sunset.

A scream—a piercing scream of fright from Alvarita. Back she cowered,
and the ready, protecting arm of Buckley formed her refuge. What terror
so dire as to thus beset the close of the reign of the
never-before-daunted Queen?

Across the path there crawled a _caterpillar_—a horrid, fuzzy, two-inch
caterpillar! Truly, Kuku, thou went avenged. Thus abdicated the Queen
of the Serpent Tribe—_viva la reina!_




IX
THE HIGHER ABDICATION


Curly the tramp sidled toward the free-lunch counter. He caught a
fleeting glance from the bartender’s eye, and stood still, trying to
look like a business man who had just dined at the Menger and was
waiting for a friend who had promised to pick him up in his motor car.
Curly’s histrionic powers were equal to the impersonation; but his
make-up was wanting.

The bartender rounded the bar in a casual way, looking up at the
ceiling as though he was pondering some intricate problem of
kalsomining, and then fell upon Curly so suddenly that the roadster had
no excuses ready. Irresistibly, but so composedly that it seemed almost
absendmindedness on his part, the dispenser of drinks pushed Curly to
the swinging doors and kicked him out, with a nonchalance that almost
amounted to sadness. That was the way of the Southwest.

Curly arose from the gutter leisurely. He felt no anger or resentment
toward his ejector. Fifteen years of tramphood spent out of the
twenty-two years of his life had hardened the fibres of his spirit. The
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell blunted from the buckler
of his armoured pride. With especial resignation did he suffer
contumely and injury at the hands of bartenders. Naturally, they were
his enemies; and unnaturally, they were often his friends. He had to
take his chances with them. But he had not yet learned to estimate
these cool, languid, Southwestern knights of the bungstarter, who had
the manners of an Earl of Pawtucket, and who, when they disapproved of
your presence, moved you with the silence and despatch of a chess
automaton advancing a pawn.

Curly stood for a few moments in the narrow, mesquite-paved street. San
Antonio puzzled and disturbed him. Three days he had been a non-paying
guest of the town, having dropped off there from a box car of an I. &
G.N. freight, because Greaser Johnny had told him in Des Moines that
the Alamo City was manna fallen, gathered, cooked, and served free with
cream and sugar. Curly had found the tip partly a good one. There was
hospitality in plenty of a careless, liberal, irregular sort. But the
town itself was a weight upon his spirits after his experience with the
rushing, business-like, systematised cities of the North and East. Here
he was often flung a dollar, but too frequently a good-natured kick
would follow it. Once a band of hilarious cowboys had roped him on
Military Plaza and dragged him across the black soil until no
respectable rag-bag would have stood sponsor for his clothes. The
winding, doubling streets, leading nowhere, bewildered him. And then
there was a little river, crooked as a pot-hook, that crawled through
the middle of the town, crossed by a hundred little bridges so nearly
alike that they got on Curly’s nerves. And the last bartender wore a
number nine shoe.

The saloon stood on a corner. The hour was eight o’clock. Homefarers
and outgoers jostled Curly on the narrow stone sidewalk. Between the
buildings to his left he looked down a cleft that proclaimed itself
another thoroughfare. The alley was dark except for one patch of light.
Where there was light there were sure to be human beings. Where there
were human beings after nightfall in San Antonio there might be food,
and there was sure to be drink. So Curly headed for the light.

The illumination came from Schwegel’s Café. On the sidewalk in front of
it Curly picked up an old envelope. It might have contained a check for
a million. It was empty; but the wanderer read the address, “Mr. Otto
Schwegel,” and the name of the town and State. The postmark was
Detroit.

Curly entered the saloon. And now in the light it could be perceived
that he bore the stamp of many years of vagabondage. He had none of the
tidiness of the calculating and shrewd professional tramp. His wardrobe
represented the cast-off specimens of half a dozen fashions and eras.
Two factories had combined their efforts in providing shoes for his
feet. As you gazed at him there passed through your mind vague
impressions of mummies, wax figures, Russian exiles, and men lost on
desert islands. His face was covered almost to his eyes with a curly
brown beard that he kept trimmed short with a pocket-knife, and that
had furnished him with his _nom de route_. Light-blue eyes, full of
sullenness, fear, cunning, impudence, and fawning, witnessed the stress
that had been laid upon his soul.

The saloon was small, and in its atmosphere the odours of meat and
drink struggled for the ascendancy. The pig and the cabbage wrestled
with hydrogen and oxygen. Behind the bar Schwegel laboured with an
assistant whose epidermal pores showed no signs of being obstructed.
Hot weinerwurst and sauerkraut were being served to purchasers of beer.
Curly shuffled to the end of the bar, coughed hollowly, and told
Schwegel that he was a Detroit cabinet-maker out of a job.

It followed as the night the day that he got his schooner and lunch.

“Was you acquainted maybe with Heinrich Strauss in Detroit?” asked
Schwegel.

“Did I know Heinrich Strauss?” repeated Curly, affectionately. “Why,
say, ’Bo, I wish I had a dollar for every game of pinochle me and Heine
has played on Sunday afternoons.”

More beer and a second plate of steaming food was set before the
diplomat. And then Curly, knowing to a fluid-drachm how far a “con”
game would go, shuffled out into the unpromising street.

And now he began to perceive the inconveniences of this stony Southern
town. There was none of the outdoor gaiety and brilliancy and music
that provided distraction even to the poorest in the cities of the
North. Here, even so early, the gloomy, rock-walled houses were closed
and barred against the murky dampness of the night. The streets were
mere fissures through which flowed grey wreaths of river mist. As he
walked he heard laughter and the chink of coin and chips behind
darkened windows, and music coming from every chink of wood and stone.
But the diversions were selfish; the day of popular pastimes had not
yet come to San Antonio.

But at length Curly, as he strayed, turned the sharp angle of another
lost street and came upon a rollicking band of stockmen from the
outlying ranches celebrating in the open in front of an ancient wooden
hotel. One great roisterer from the sheep country who had just
instigated a movement toward the bar, swept Curly in like a stray goat
with the rest of his flock. The princes of kine and wool hailed him as
a new zoological discovery, and uproariously strove to preserve him in
the diluted alcohol of their compliments and regards.

An hour afterward Curly staggered from the hotel barroom dismissed by
his fickle friends, whose interest in him had subsided as quickly as it
had risen. Full—stoked with alcoholic fuel and cargoed with food, the
only question remaining to disturb him was that of shelter and bed.

A drizzling, cold Texas rain had begun to fall—an endless, lazy,
unintermittent downfall that lowered the spirits of men and raised a
reluctant steam from the warm stones of the streets and houses. Thus
comes the “norther” dousing gentle spring and amiable autumn with the
chilling salutes and adieux of coming and departing winter.

Curly followed his nose down the first tortuous street into which his
irresponsible feet conducted him. At the lower end of it, on the bank
of the serpentine stream, he perceived an open gate in a cemented rock
wall. Inside he saw camp fires and a row of low wooden sheds built
against three sides of the enclosing wall. He entered the enclosure.
Under the sheds many horses were champing at their oats and corn. Many
wagons and buckboards stood about with their teams’ harness thrown
carelessly upon the shafts and doubletrees. Curly recognised the place
as a wagon-yard, such as is provided by merchants for their out-of-town
friends and customers. No one was in sight. No doubt the drivers of
those wagons were scattered about the town “seeing the elephant and
hearing the owl.” In their haste to become patrons of the town’s
dispensaries of mirth and good cheer the last ones to depart must have
left the great wooden gate swinging open.

Curly had satisfied the hunger of an anaconda and the thirst of a
camel, so he was neither in the mood nor the condition of an explorer.
He zigzagged his way to the first wagon that his eyesight distinguished
in the semi-darkness under the shed. It was a two-horse wagon with a
top of white canvas. The wagon was half filled with loose piles of wool
sacks, two or three great bundles of grey blankets, and a number of
bales, bundles, and boxes. A reasoning eye would have estimated the
load at once as ranch supplies, bound on the morrow for some outlying
hacienda. But to the drowsy intelligence of Curly they represented only
warmth and softness and protection against the cold humidity of the
night. After several unlucky efforts, at last he conquered gravity so
far as to climb over a wheel and pitch forward upon the best and
warmest bed he had fallen upon in many a day. Then he became
instinctively a burrowing animal, and dug his way like a prairie-dog
down among the sacks and blankets, hiding himself from the cold air as
snug and safe as a bear in his den. For three nights sleep had visited
Curly only in broken and shivering doses. So now, when Morpheus
condescended to pay him a call, Curly got such a strangle hold on the
mythological old gentleman that it was a wonder that anyone else in the
whole world got a wink of sleep that night.

Six cowpunchers of the Cibolo Ranch were waiting around the door of the
ranch store. Their ponies cropped grass near by, tied in the Texas
fashion—which is not tied at all. Their bridle reins had been dropped
to the earth, which is a more effectual way of securing them (such is
the power of habit and imagination) than you could devise out of a
half-inch rope and a live-oak tree.

These guardians of the cow lounged about, each with a brown cigarette
paper in his hand, and gently but unceasingly cursed Sam Revell, the
storekeeper. Sam stood in the door, snapping the red elastic bands on
his pink madras shirtsleeves and looking down affectionately at the
only pair of tan shoes within a forty-mile radius. His offence had been
serious, and he was divided between humble apology and admiration for
the beauty of his raiment. He had allowed the ranch stock of “smoking”
to become exhausted.

“I thought sure there was another case of it under the counter, boys,”
he explained. “But it happened to be catterdges.”

“You’ve sure got a case of happenedicitis,” said Poky Rodgers, fence
rider of the Largo Verde _potrero_. “Somebody ought to happen to give
you a knock on the head with the butt end of a quirt. I’ve rode in nine
miles for some tobacco; and it don’t appear natural and seemly that you
ought to be allowed to live.”

“The boys was smokin’ cut plug and dried mesquite leaves mixed when I
left,” sighed Mustang Taylor, horse wrangler of the Three Elm camp.
“They’ll be lookin’ for me back by nine. They’ll be settin’ up, with
their papers ready to roll a whiff of the real thing before bedtime.
And I’ve got to tell ’em that this pink-eyed, sheep-headed,
sulphur-footed, shirt-waisted son of a calico broncho, Sam Revell,
hasn’t got no tobacco on hand.”

Gregorio Falcon, Mexican vaquero and best thrower of the rope on the
Cibolo, pushed his heavy, silver-embroidered straw sombrero back upon
his thicket of jet black curls, and scraped the bottoms of his pockets
for a few crumbs of the precious weed.

“Ah, Don Samuel,” he said, reproachfully, but with his touch of
Castilian manners, “escuse me. Dthey say dthe jackrabbeet and dthe
sheep have dthe most leetle _sesos_—how you call dthem—brain-es? Ah
don’t believe dthat, Don Samuel—escuse me. Ah dthink people w’at don’t
keep esmokin’ tobacco, dthey—bot you weel escuse me, Don Samuel.”

“Now, what’s the use of chewin’ the rag, boys,” said the untroubled
Sam, stooping over to rub the toes of his shoes with a red-and-yellow
handkerchief. “Ranse took the order for some more smokin’ to San Antone
with him Tuesday. Pancho rode Ranse’s hoss back yesterday; and Ranse is
goin’ to drive the wagon back himself. There wa’n’t much of a load—just
some woolsacks and blankets and nails and canned peaches and a few
things we was out of. I look for Ranse to roll in to-day sure. He’s an
early starter and a hell-to-split driver, and he ought to be here not
far from sundown.”

“What plugs is he drivin’?” asked Mustang Taylor, with a smack of hope
in his tones.

“The buckboard greys,” said Sam.

“I’ll wait a spell, then,” said the wrangler. “Them plugs eat up a
trail like a road-runner swallowin’ a whip snake. And you may bust me
open a can of greengage plums, Sam, while I’m waitin’ for somethin’
better.”

“Open me some yellow clings,” ordered Poky Rodgers. “I’ll wait, too.”

The tobaccoless punchers arranged themselves comfortably on the steps
of the store. Inside Sam chopped open with a hatchet the tops of the
cans of fruit.

The store, a big, white wooden building like a barn, stood fifty yards
from the ranch-house. Beyond it were the horse corrals; and still
farther the wool sheds and the brush-topped shearing pens—for the
Rancho Cibolo raised both cattle and sheep. Behind the store, at a
little distance, were the grass-thatched _jacals_ of the Mexicans who
bestowed their allegiance upon the Cibolo.

The ranch-house was composed of four large rooms, with plastered adobe
walls, and a two-room wooden ell. A twenty-feet-wide “gallery”
circumvented the structure. It was set in a grove of immense live-oaks
and water-elms near a lake—a long, not very wide, and tremendously deep
lake in which at nightfall, great gars leaped to the surface and
plunged with the noise of hippopotamuses frolicking at their bath. From
the trees hung garlands and massive pendants of the melancholy grey
moss of the South. Indeed, the Cibolo ranch-house seemed more of the
South than of the West. It looked as if old “Kiowa” Truesdell might
have brought it with him from the lowlands of Mississippi when he came
to Texas with his rifle in the hollow of his arm in ’55.

But, though he did not bring the family mansion, Truesdell did bring
something in the way of a family inheritance that was more lasting than
brick or stone. He brought one end of the Truesdell-Curtis family feud.
And when a Curtis bought the Rancho de los Olmos, sixteen miles from
the Cibolo, there were lively times on the pear flats and in the
chaparral thickets off the Southwest. In those days Truesdell cleaned
the brush of many a wolf and tiger cat and Mexican lion; and one or two
Curtises fell heirs to notches on his rifle stock. Also he buried a
brother with a Curtis bullet in him on the bank of the lake at Cibolo.
And then the Kiowa Indians made their last raid upon the ranches
between the Frio and the Rio Grande, and Truesdell at the head of his
rangers rid the earth of them to the last brave, earning his sobriquet.
Then came prosperity in the form of waxing herds and broadening lands.
And then old age and bitterness, when he sat, with his great mane of
hair as white as the Spanish-dagger blossoms and his fierce, pale-blue
eyes, on the shaded gallery at Cibolo, growling like the pumas that he
had slain. He snapped his fingers at old age; the bitter taste to life
did not come from that. The cup that stuck at his lips was that his
only son Ransom wanted to marry a Curtis, the last youthful survivor of
the other end of the feud.

For a while the only sounds to be heard at the store were the rattling
of the tin spoons and the gurgling intake of the juicy fruits by the
cowpunchers, the stamping of the grazing ponies, and the singing of a
doleful song by Sam as he contentedly brushed his stiff auburn hair for
the twentieth time that day before a crinkly mirror.

From the door of the store could be seen the irregular, sloping stretch
of prairie to the south, with its reaches of light-green, billowy
mesquite flats in the lower places, and its rises crowned with nearly
black masses of short chaparral. Through the mesquite flat wound the
ranch road that, five miles away, flowed into the old government trail
to San Antonio. The sun was so low that the gentlest elevation cast its
grey shadow miles into the green-gold sea of sunshine.

That evening ears were quicker than eyes.

The Mexican held up a tawny finger to still the scraping of tin against
tin.

“One waggeen,” said he, “cross dthe Arroyo Hondo. Ah hear dthe wheel.
Verree rockee place, dthe Hondo.”

“You’ve got good ears, Gregorio,” said Mustang Taylor. “I never heard
nothin’ but the song-bird in the bush and the zephyr skallyhootin’
across the peaceful dell.”

In ten minutes Taylor remarked: “I see the dust of a wagon risin’ right
above the fur end of the flat.”

“You have verree good eyes, señor,” said Gregorio, smiling.

Two miles away they saw a faint cloud dimming the green ripples of the
mesquites. In twenty minutes they heard the clatter of the horses’
hoofs: in five minutes more the grey plugs dashed out of the thicket,
whickering for oats and drawing the light wagon behind them like a toy.

From the _jacals_ came a cry of: “_El Amo! El Amo!_” Four Mexican
youths raced to unharness the greys. The cowpunchers gave a yell of
greeting and delight.

Ranse Truesdell, driving, threw the reins to the ground and laughed.

“It’s under the wagon sheet, boys,” he said. “I know what you’re
waiting for. If Sam lets it run out again we’ll use those yellow shoes
of his for a target. There’s two cases. Pull ’em out and light up. I
know you all want a smoke.”

After striking dry country Ranse had removed the wagon sheet from the
bows and thrown it over the goods in the wagon. Six pair of hasty hands
dragged it off and grabbled beneath the sacks and blankets for the
cases of tobacco.

Long Collins, tobacco messenger from the San Gabriel outfit, who rode
with the longest stirrups west of the Mississippi, delved with an arm
like the tongue of a wagon. He caught something harder than a blanket
and pulled out a fearful thing—a shapeless, muddy bunch of leather tied
together with wire and twine. From its ragged end, like the head and
claws of a disturbed turtle, protruded human toes.

“Who-ee!” yelled Long Collins. “Ranse, are you a-packin’ around of
corpuses? Here’s a—howlin’ grasshoppers!”

Up from his long slumber popped Curly, like some vile worm from its
burrow. He clawed his way out and sat blinking like a disreputable,
drunken owl. His face was as bluish-red and puffed and seamed and
cross-lined as the cheapest round steak of the butcher. His eyes were
swollen slits; his nose a pickled beet; his hair would have made the
wildest thatch of a Jack-in-the-box look like the satin poll of a Cléo
de Mérode. The rest of him was scarecrow done to the life.

Ranse jumped down from his seat and looked at his strange cargo with
wide-open eyes.

“Here, you maverick, what are you doing in my wagon? How did you get in
there?”

The punchers gathered around in delight. For the time they had
forgotten tobacco.

Curly looked around him slowly in every direction. He snarled like a
Scotch terrier through his ragged beard.

“Where is this?” he rasped through his parched throat. “It’s a damn
farm in an old field. What’d you bring me here for—say? Did I say I
wanted to come here? What are you Reubs rubberin’ at—hey? G’wan or I’ll
punch some of yer faces.”

“Drag him out, Collins,” said Ranse.

Curly took a slide and felt the ground rise up and collide with his
shoulder blades. He got up and sat on the steps of the store shivering
from outraged nerves, hugging his knees and sneering. Taylor lifted out
a case of tobacco and wrenched off its top. Six cigarettes began to
glow, bringing peace and forgiveness to Sam.

“How’d you come in my wagon?” repeated Ranse, this time in a voice that
drew a reply.

Curly recognised the tone. He had heard it used by freight brakemen and
large persons in blue carrying clubs.

“Me?” he growled. “Oh, was you talkin’ to me? Why, I was on my way to
the Menger, but my valet had forgot to pack my pyjamas. So I crawled
into that wagon in the wagon-yard—see? I never told you to bring me out
to this bloomin’ farm—see?”

“What is it, Mustang?” asked Poky Rodgers, almost forgetting to smoke
in his ecstasy. “What do it live on?”

“It’s a galliwampus, Poky,” said Mustang. “It’s the thing that hollers
‘willi-walloo’ up in ellum trees in the low grounds of nights. I don’t
know if it bites.”

“No, it ain’t, Mustang,” volunteered Long Collins. “Them galliwampuses
has fins on their backs, and eighteen toes. This here is a
hicklesnifter. It lives under the ground and eats cherries. Don’t stand
so close to it. It wipes out villages with one stroke of its prehensile
tail.”

Sam, the cosmopolite, who called bartenders in San Antone by their
first name, stood in the door. He was a better zoologist.

“Well, ain’t that a Willie for your whiskers?” he commented. “Where’d
you dig up the hobo, Ranse? Goin’ to make an auditorium for inbreviates
out of the ranch?”

“Say,” said Curly, from whose panoplied breast all shafts of wit fell
blunted. “Any of you kiddin’ guys got a drink on you? Have your fun.
Say, I’ve been hittin’ the stuff till I don’t know straight up.”

He turned to Ranse. “Say, you shanghaied me on your d—d old prairie
schooner—did I tell you to drive me to a farm? I want a drink. I’m
goin’ all to little pieces. What’s doin’?”

Ranse saw that the tramp’s nerves were racking him. He despatched one
of the Mexican boys to the ranch-house for a glass of whisky. Curly
gulped it down; and into his eyes came a brief, grateful glow—as human
as the expression in the eye of a faithful setter dog.

“Thanky, boss,” he said, quietly.

“You’re thirty miles from a railroad, and forty miles from a saloon,”
said Ranse.

Curly fell back weakly against the steps.

“Since you are here,” continued the ranchman, “come along with me. We
can’t turn you out on the prairie. A rabbit might tear you to pieces.”

He conducted Curly to a large shed where the ranch vehicles were kept.
There he spread out a canvas cot and brought blankets.

“I don’t suppose you can sleep,” said Ranse, “since you’ve been
pounding your ear for twenty-four hours. But you can camp here till
morning. I’ll have Pedro fetch you up some grub.”

“Sleep!” said Curly. “I can sleep a week. Say, sport, have you got a
coffin nail on you?”

Fifty miles had Ransom Truesdell driven that day. And yet this is what
he did.

Old “Kiowa” Truesdell sat in his great wicker chair reading by the
light of an immense oil lamp. Ranse laid a bundle of newspapers fresh
from town at his elbow.

“Back, Ranse?” said the old man, looking up.

“Son,” old “Kiowa” continued, “I’ve been thinking all day about a
certain matter that we have talked about. I want you to tell me again.
I’ve lived for you. I’ve fought wolves and Indians and worse white men
to protect you. You never had any mother that you can remember. I’ve
taught you to shoot straight, ride hard, and live clean. Later on I’ve
worked to pile up dollars that’ll be yours. You’ll be a rich man,
Ranse, when my chunk goes out. I’ve made you. I’ve licked you into
shape like a leopard cat licks its cubs. You don’t belong to yourself
—you’ve got to be a Truesdell first. Now, is there to be any more
nonsense about this Curtis girl?”

“I’ll tell you once more,” said Ranse, slowly. “As I am a Truesdell and
as you are my father, I’ll never marry a Curtis.”

“Good boy,” said old “Kiowa.” “You’d better go get some supper.”

Ranse went to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Pedro, the Mexican
cook, sprang up to bring the food he was keeping warm in the stove.

“Just a cup of coffee, Pedro,” he said, and drank it standing. And
then:

“There’s a tramp on a cot in the wagon-shed. Take him something to eat.
Better make it enough for two.”

Ranse walked out toward the _jacals_. A boy came running.

“Manuel, can you catch Vaminos, in the little pasture, for me?”

“Why not, señor? I saw him near the _puerta_ but two hours past. He
bears a drag-rope.”

“Get him and saddle him as quick as you can.”

“_Prontito, señor_.”

Soon, mounted on Vaminos, Ranse leaned in the saddle, pressed with his
knees, and galloped eastward past the store, where sat Sam trying his
guitar in the moonlight.

Vaminos shall have a word—Vaminos the good dun horse. The Mexicans, who
have a hundred names for the colours of a horse, called him _gruyo_. He
was a mouse-coloured, slate-coloured, flea-bitten roan-dun, if you can
conceive it. Down his back from his mane to his tail went a line of
black. He would live forever; and surveyors have not laid off as many
miles in the world as he could travel in a day.

Eight miles east of the Cibolo ranch-house Ranse loosened the pressure
of his knees, and Vaminos stopped under a big ratama tree. The yellow
ratama blossoms showered fragrance that would have undone the roses of
France. The moon made the earth a great concave bowl with a crystal sky
for a lid. In a glade five jack-rabbits leaped and played together like
kittens. Eight miles farther east shone a faint star that appeared to
have dropped below the horizon. Night riders, who often steered their
course by it, knew it to be the light in the Rancho de los Olmos.

In ten minutes Yenna Curtis galloped to the tree on her sorrel pony
Dancer. The two leaned and clasped hands heartily.

“I ought to have ridden nearer your home,” said Ranse. “But you never
will let me.”

Yenna laughed. And in the soft light you could see her strong white
teeth and fearless eyes. No sentimentality there, in spite of the
moonlight, the odour of the ratamas, and the admirable figure of Ranse
Truesdell, the lover. But she was there, eight miles from her home, to
meet him.

“How often have I told you, Ranse,” she said, “that I am your half-way
girl? Always half-way.”

“Well?” said Ranse, with a question in his tones.

“I did,” said Yenna, with almost a sigh. “I told him after dinner when
I thought he would be in a good humour. Did you ever wake up a lion,
Ranse, with the mistaken idea that he would be a kitten? He almost tore
the ranch to pieces. It’s all up. I love my daddy, Ranse, and I’m
afraid—I’m afraid of him too. He ordered me to promise that I’d never
marry a Truesdell. I promised. That’s all. What luck did you have?”

“The same,” said Ranse, slowly. “I promised him that his son would
never marry a Curtis. Somehow I couldn’t go against him. He’s mighty
old. I’m sorry, Yenna.”

The girl leaned in her saddle and laid one hand on Ranse’s, on the horn
of his saddle.

“I never thought I’d like you better for giving me up,” she said
ardently, “but I do. I must ride back now, Ranse. I slipped out of the
house and saddled Dancer myself. Good-night, neighbour.”

“Good-night,” said Ranse. “Ride carefully over them badger holes.”

They wheeled and rode away in opposite directions. Yenna turned in her
saddle and called clearly:

“Don’t forget I’m your half-way girl, Ranse.”

“Damn all family feuds and inherited scraps,” muttered Ranse
vindictively to the breeze as he rode back to the Cibolo.

Ranse turned his horse into the small pasture and went to his own room.
He opened the lowest drawer of an old bureau to get out the packet of
letters that Yenna had written him one summer when she had gone to
Mississippi for a visit. The drawer stuck, and he yanked at it
savagely—as a man will. It came out of the bureau, and bruised both his
shins—as a drawer will. An old, folded yellow letter without an
envelope fell from somewhere—probably from where it had lodged in one
of the upper drawers. Ranse took it to the lamp and read it curiously.

Then he took his hat and walked to one of the Mexican _jacals_.

“Tia Juana,” he said, “I would like to talk with you a while.”

An old, old Mexican woman, white-haired and wonderfully wrinkled, rose
from a stool.

“Sit down,” said Ranse, removing his hat and taking the one chair in
the _jacal_. “Who am I, Tia Juana?” he asked, speaking Spanish.

“Don Ransom, our good friend and employer. Why do you ask?” answered
the old woman wonderingly.

“Tia Juana, who am I?” he repeated, with his stern eyes looking into
hers.

A frightened look came in the old woman’s face. She fumbled with her
black shawl.

“Who am I, Tia Juana?” said Ranse once more.

“Thirty-two years I have lived on the Rancho Cibolo,” said Tia Juana.
“I thought to be buried under the coma mott beyond the garden before
these things should be known. Close the door, Don Ransom, and I will
speak. I see in your face that you know.”

An hour Ranse spent behind Tia Juana’s closed door. As he was on his
way back to the house Curly called to him from the wagon-shed.

The tramp sat on his cot, swinging his feet and smoking.

“Say, sport,” he grumbled. “This is no way to treat a man after
kidnappin’ him. I went up to the store and borrowed a razor from that
fresh guy and had a shave. But that ain’t all a man needs. Say—can’t
you loosen up for about three fingers more of that booze? I never asked
you to bring me to your d—d farm.”

“Stand up out here in the light,” said Ranse, looking at him closely.

Curly got up sullenly and took a step or two.

His face, now shaven smooth, seemed transformed. His hair had been
combed, and it fell back from the right side of his forehead with a
peculiar wave. The moonlight charitably softened the ravages of drink;
and his aquiline, well-shaped nose and small, square cleft chin almost
gave distinction to his looks.

Ranse sat on the foot of the cot and looked at him curiously.

“Where did you come from—have you got any home or folks anywhere?”

“Me? Why, I’m a dook,” said Curly. “I’m Sir Reginald—oh, cheese it. No;
I don’t know anything about my ancestors. I’ve been a tramp ever since
I can remember. Say, old pal, are you going to set ’em up again
to-night or not?”

“You answer my questions and maybe I will. How did you come to be a
tramp?”

“Me?” answered Curly. “Why, I adopted that profession when I was an
infant. Case of had to. First thing I can remember, I belonged to a
big, lazy hobo called Beefsteak Charley. He sent me around to houses to
beg. I wasn’t hardly big enough to reach the latch of a gate.”

“Did he ever tell you how he got you?” asked Ranse.

“Once when he was sober he said he bought me for an old six-shooter and
six bits from a band of drunken Mexican sheep-shearers. But what’s the
diff? That’s all I know.”

“All right,” said Ranse. “I reckon you’re a maverick for certain. I’m
going to put the Rancho Cibolo brand on you. I’ll start you to work in
one of the camps to-morrow.”

“Work!” sniffed Curly, disdainfully. “What do you take me for? Do you
think I’d chase cows, and hop-skip-and-jump around after crazy sheep
like that pink and yellow guy at the store says these Reubs do? Forget
it.”

“Oh, you’ll like it when you get used to it,” said Ranse. “Yes, I’ll
send you up one more drink by Pedro. I think you’ll make a first-class
cowpuncher before I get through with you.”

“Me?” said Curly. “I pity the cows you set me to chaperon. They can go
chase themselves. Don’t forget my nightcap, please, boss.”

Ranse paid a visit to the store before going to the house. Sam Rivell
was taking off his tan shoes regretting and preparing for bed.

“Any of the boys from the San Gabriel camp riding in early in the
morning?” asked Ranse.

“Long Collins,” said Sam briefly. “For the mail.”

“Tell him,” said Ranse, “to take that tramp out to camp with him and
keep him till I get there.”

Curly was sitting on his blankets in the San Gabriel camp cursing
talentedly when Ranse Truesdell rode up and dismounted on the next
afternoon. The cowpunchers were ignoring the stray. He was grimy with
dust and black dirt. His clothes were making their last stand in favour
of the conventions.

Ranse went up to Buck Rabb, the camp boss, and spoke briefly.

“He’s a plumb buzzard,” said Buck. “He won’t work, and he’s the
low-downest passel of inhumanity I ever see. I didn’t know what you
wanted done with him, Ranse, so I just let him set. That seems to suit
him. He’s been condemned to death by the boys a dozen times, but I told
’em maybe you was savin’ him for the torture.”

Ranse took off his coat.

“I’ve got a hard job before me, Buck, I reckon, but it has to be done.
I’ve got to make a man out of that thing. That’s what I’ve come to camp
for.”

He went up to Curly.

“Brother,” he said, “don’t you think if you had a bath it would allow
you to take a seat in the company of your fellow-man with less
injustice to the atmosphere.”

“Run away, farmer,” said Curly, sardonically. “Willie will send for
nursey when he feels like having his tub.”

The _charco_, or water hole, was twelve yards away. Ranse took one of
Curly’s ankles and dragged him like a sack of potatoes to the brink.
Then with the strength and sleight of a hammer-throw he hurled the
offending member of society far into the lake.

Curly crawled out and up the bank spluttering like a porpoise.

Ranse met him with a piece of soap and a coarse towel in his hands.

“Go to the other end of the lake and use this,” he said. “Buck will
give you some dry clothes at the wagon.”

The tramp obeyed without protest. By the time supper was ready he had
returned to camp. He was hardly to be recognised in his new shirt and
brown duck clothes. Ranse observed him out of the corner of his eye.

“Lordy, I hope he ain’t a coward,” he was saying to himself. “I hope he
won’t turn out to be a coward.”

His doubts were soon allayed. Curly walked straight to where he stood.
His light-blue eyes were blazing.

“Now I’m clean,” he said meaningly, “maybe you’ll talk to me. Think
you’ve got a picnic here, do you? You clodhoppers think you can run
over a man because you know he can’t get away. All right. Now, what do
you think of that?”

Curly planted a stinging slap against Ranse’s left cheek. The print of
his hand stood out a dull red against the tan.

Ranse smiled happily.

The cowpunchers talk to this day of the battle that followed.

Somewhere in his restless tour of the cities Curly had acquired the art
of self-defence. The ranchman was equipped only with the splendid
strength and equilibrium of perfect health and the endurance conferred
by decent living. The two attributes nearly matched. There were no
formal rounds. At last the fibre of the clean liver prevailed. The last
time Curly went down from one of the ranchman’s awkward but powerful
blows he remained on the grass, but looking up with an unquenched eye.

Ranse went to the water barrel and washed the red from a cut on his
chin in the stream from the faucet.

On his face was a grin of satisfaction.

Much benefit might accrue to educators and moralists if they could know
the details of the curriculum of reclamation through which Ranse put
his waif during the month that he spent in the San Gabriel camp. The
ranchman had no fine theories to work out—perhaps his whole stock of
pedagogy embraced only a knowledge of horse-breaking and a belief in
heredity.

The cowpunchers saw that their boss was trying to make a man out of the
strange animal that he had sent among them; and they tacitly organised
themselves into a faculty of assistants. But their system was their
own.

Curly’s first lesson stuck. He became on friendly and then on intimate
terms with soap and water. And the thing that pleased Ranse most was
that his “subject” held his ground at each successive higher step. But
the steps were sometimes far apart.

Once he got at the quart bottle of whisky kept sacredly in the grub
tent for rattlesnake bites, and spent sixteen hours on the grass,
magnificently drunk. But when he staggered to his feet his first move
was to find his soap and towel and start for the _charco_. And once,
when a treat came from the ranch in the form of a basket of fresh
tomatoes and young onions, Curly devoured the entire consignment before
the punchers reached the camp at supper time.

And then the punchers punished him in their own way. For three days
they did not speak to him, except to reply to his own questions or
remarks. And they spoke with absolute and unfailing politeness. They
played tricks on one another; they pounded one another hurtfully and
affectionately; they heaped upon one another’s heads friendly curses
and obloquy; but they were polite to Curly. He saw it, and it stung him
as much as Ranse hoped it would.

Then came a night that brought a cold, wet norther. Wilson, the
youngest of the outfit, had lain in camp two days, ill with fever. When
Joe got up at daylight to begin breakfast he found Curly sitting asleep
against a wheel of the grub wagon with only a saddle blanket around
him, while Curly’s blankets were stretched over Wilson to protect him
from the rain and wind.

Three nights after that Curly rolled himself in his blanket and went to
sleep. Then the other punchers rose up softly and began to make
preparations. Ranse saw Long Collins tie a rope to the horn of a
saddle. Others were getting out their six-shooters.

“Boys,” said Ranse, “I’m much obliged. I was hoping you would. But I
didn’t like to ask.”

Half a dozen six-shooters began to pop—awful yells rent the air—Long
Collins galloped wildly across Curly’s bed, dragging the saddle after
him. That was merely their way of gently awaking their victim. Then
they hazed him for an hour, carefully and ridiculously, after the code
of cow camps. Whenever he uttered protest they held him stretched over
a roll of blankets and thrashed him woefully with a pair of leather
leggings.

And all this meant that Curly had won his spurs, that he was receiving
the puncher’s accolade. Nevermore would they be polite to him. But he
would be their “pardner” and stirrup-brother, foot to foot.

When the fooling was ended all hands made a raid on Joe’s big
coffee-pot by the fire for a Java nightcap. Ranse watched the new
knight carefully to see if he understood and was worthy. Curly limped
with his cup of coffee to a log and sat upon it. Long Collins followed
and sat by his side. Buck Rabb went and sat at the other.
Curly—grinned.

And then Ranse furnished Curly with mounts and saddle and equipment,
and turned him over to Buck Rabb, instructing him to finish the job.

Three weeks later Ranse rode from the ranch into Rabb’s camp, which was
then in Snake Valley. The boys were saddling for the day’s ride. He
sought out Long Collins among them.

“How about that bronco?” he asked.

Long Collins grinned.

“Reach out your hand, Ranse Truesdell,” he said, “and you’ll touch him.
And you can shake his’n, too, if you like, for he’s plumb white and
there’s none better in no camp.”

Ranse looked again at the clear-faced, bronzed, smiling cowpuncher who
stood at Collins’s side. Could that be Curly? He held out his hand, and
Curly grasped it with the muscles of a bronco-buster.

“I want you at the ranch,” said Ranse.

“All right, sport,” said Curly, heartily. “But I want to come back
again. Say, pal, this is a dandy farm. And I don’t want any better fun
than hustlin’ cows with this bunch of guys. They’re all to the
merry-merry.”

At the Cibolo ranch-house they dismounted. Ranse bade Curly wait at the
door of the living room. He walked inside. Old “Kiowa” Truesdell was
reading at a table.

“Good-morning, Mr. Truesdell,” said Ranse.

The old man turned his white head quickly.

“How is this?” he began. “Why do you call me ‘Mr.—’?”

When he looked at Ranse’s face he stopped, and the hand that held his
newspaper shook slightly.

“Boy,” he said slowly, “how did you find it out?”

“It’s all right,” said Ranse, with a smile. “I made Tia Juana tell me.
It was kind of by accident, but it’s all right.”

“You’ve been like a son to me,” said old “Kiowa,” trembling.

“Tia Juana told me all about it,” said Ranse. “She told me how you
adopted me when I was knee-high to a puddle duck out of a wagon train
of prospectors that was bound West. And she told me how the kid—your
own kid, you know—got lost or was run away with. And she said it was
the same day that the sheep-shearers got on a bender and left the
ranch.”

“Our boy strayed from the house when he was two years old,” said the
old man. “And then along came those emigrant wagons with a youngster
they didn’t want; and we took you. I never intended you to know, Ranse.
We never heard of our boy again.”

“He’s right outside, unless I’m mighty mistaken,” said Ranse, opening
the door and beckoning.

Curly walked in.

No one could have doubted. The old man and the young had the same sweep
of hair, the same nose, chin, line of face, and prominent light-blue
eyes.

Old “Kiowa” rose eagerly.

Curly looked about the room curiously. A puzzled expression came over
his face. He pointed to the wall opposite.

“Where’s the tick-tock?” he asked, absent-mindedly.

“The clock,” cried old “Kiowa” loudly. “The eight-day clock used to
stand there. Why—”

He turned to Ranse, but Ranse was not there.

Already a hundred yards away, Vaminos, the good flea-bitten dun, was
bearing him eastward like a racer through dust and chaparral towards
the Rancho de los Olmos.




X
CUPID À LA CARTE


“The dispositions of woman,” said Jeff Peters, after various opinions
on the subject had been advanced, “run, regular, to diversions. What a
woman wants is what you’re out of. She wants more of a thing when it’s
scarce. She likes to have souvenirs of things that never happened. She
likes to be reminded of things she never heard of. A one-sided view of
objects is disjointing to the female composition.

“’Tis a misfortune of mine, begotten by nature and travel,” continued
Jeff, looking thoughtfully between his elevated feet at the grocery
stove, “to look deeper into some subjects than most people do. I’ve
breathed gasoline smoke talking to street crowds in nearly every town
in the United States. I’ve held ’em spellbound with music, oratory,
sleight of hand, and prevarications, while I’ve sold ’em jewelry,
medicine, soap, hair tonic, and junk of other nominations. And during
my travels, as a matter of recreation and expiation, I’ve taken
cognisance some of women. It takes a man a lifetime to find out about
one particular woman; but if he puts in, say, ten years, industrious
and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex. One
lesson I picked up was when I was working the West with a line of
Brazilian diamonds and a patent fire kindler just after my trip from
Savannah down through the cotton belt with Dalby’s Anti-explosive Lamp
Oil Powder. ’Twas when the Oklahoma country was in first bloom. Guthrie
was rising in the middle of it like a lump of self-raising dough. It
was a boom town of the regular kind—you stood in line to get a chance
to wash your face; if you ate over ten minutes you had a lodging bill
added on; if you slept on a plank at night they charged it to you as
board the next morning.

“By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering
choice places wherein to feed. So I looked around and found a
proposition that exactly cut the mustard. I found a restaurant tent
just opened up by an outfit that had drifted in on the tail of the
boom. They had knocked together a box house, where they lived and did
the cooking, and served the meals in a tent pitched against the side.
That tent was joyful with placards on it calculated to redeem the
world-worn pilgrim from the sinfulness of boarding houses and
pick-me-up hotels. ‘Try Mother’s Home-Made Biscuits,’ ‘What’s the
Matter with Our Apple Dumplings and Hard Sauce?’ ‘Hot Cakes and Maple
Syrup Like You Ate When a Boy,’ ‘Our Fried Chicken Never Was Heard to
Crow’— there was literature doomed to please the digestions of man! I
said to myself that mother’s wandering boy should munch there that
night. And so it came to pass. And there is where I contracted my case
of Mame Dugan.

“Old Man Dugan was six feet by one of Indiana loafer, and he spent his
time sitting on his shoulder blades in a rocking-chair in the shanty
memorialising the great corn-crop failure of ’96. Ma Dugan did the
cooking, and Mame waited on the table.

“As soon as I saw Mame I knew there was a mistake in the census
reports. There wasn’t but one girl in the United States. When you come
to specifications it isn’t easy. She was about the size of an angel,
and she had eyes, and ways about her. When you come to the kind of a
girl she was, you’ll find a belt of ’em reaching from the Brooklyn
Bridge west as far as the courthouse in Council Bluffs, Ia. They earn
their own living in stores, restaurants, factories, and offices.
They’re chummy and honest and free and tender and sassy, and they look
life straight in the eye. They’ve met man face to face, and discovered
that he’s a poor creature. They’ve dropped to it that the reports in
the Seaside Library about his being a fairy prince lack confirmation.

“Mame was that sort. She was full of life and fun, and breezy; she
passed the repartee with the boarders quick as a wink; you’d have
smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the
insides of a personal affection. I am glued to the theory that the
diversions and discrepancies of the indisposition known as love should
be as private a sentiment as a toothbrush. ’Tis my opinion that the
biographies of the heart should be confined with the historical
romances of the liver to the advertising pages of the magazines. So,
you’ll excuse the lack of an itemised bill of my feelings toward Mame.

“Pretty soon I got a regular habit of dropping into the tent to eat at
irregular times when there wasn’t so many around. Mame would sail in
with a smile, in a black dress and white apron, and say: ‘Hello, Jeff
—why don’t you come at mealtime? Want to see how much trouble you can
be, of course. Friedchickenbeefsteakporkchopshamandeggspotpie’—and so
on. She called me Jeff, but there was no significations attached.
Designations was all she meant. The front names of any of us she used
as they came to hand. I’d eat about two meals before I left, and string
’em out like a society spread where they changed plates and wives, and
josh one another festively between bites. Mame stood for it, pleasant,
for it wasn’t up to her to take any canvas off the tent by declining
dollars just because they were whipped in after meal times.

“It wasn’t long until there was another fellow named Ed Collier got the
between-meals affliction, and him and me put in bridges between
breakfast and dinner, and dinner and supper, that made a three-ringed
circus of that tent, and Mame’s turn as waiter a continuous
performance. That Collier man was saturated with designs and
contrivings. He was in well-boring or insurance or claim-jumping, or
something—I’ve forgotten which. He was a man well lubricated with
gentility, and his words were such as recommended you to his point of
view. So, Collier and me infested the grub tent with care and activity.
Mame was level full of impartiality. ’Twas like a casino hand the way
she dealt out her favours—one to Collier and one to me and one to the
board, and not a card up her sleeve.

“Me and Collier naturally got acquainted, and gravitated together some
on the outside. Divested of his stratagems, he seemed to be a pleasant
chap, full of an amiable sort of hostility.

“‘I notice you have an affinity for grubbing in the banquet hall after
the guests have fled,’ says I to him one day, to draw his conclusions.

“‘Well, yes,’ says Collier, reflecting; ‘the tumult of a crowded board
seems to harass my sensitive nerves.’

“‘It exasperates mine some, too,’ says I. ‘Nice little girl, don’t you
think?’

“‘I see,’ says Collier, laughing. ‘Well, now that you mention it, I
have noticed that she doesn’t seem to displease the optic nerve.’

“‘She’s a joy to mine,’ says I, ‘and I’m going after her. Notice is
hereby served.’

“‘I’ll be as candid as you,’ admits Collier, ‘and if the drug stores
don’t run out of pepsin I’ll give you a run for your money that’ll
leave you a dyspeptic at the wind-up.’

“So Collier and me begins the race; the grub department lays in new
supplies; Mame waits on us, jolly and kind and agreeable, and it looks
like an even break, with Cupid and the cook working overtime in Dugan’s
restaurant.

“’Twas one night in September when I got Mame to take a walk after
supper when the things were all cleared away. We strolled out a
distance and sat on a pile of lumber at the edge of town. Such
opportunities was seldom, so I spoke my piece, explaining how the
Brazilian diamonds and the fire kindler were laying up sufficient
treasure to guarantee the happiness of two, and that both of ’em
together couldn’t equal the light from somebody’s eyes, and that the
name of Dugan should be changed to Peters, or reasons why not would be
in order.

“Mame didn’t say anything right away. Directly she gave a kind of
shudder, and I began to learn something.

“‘Jeff,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry you spoke. I like you as well as any of
them, but there isn’t a man in the world I’d ever marry, and there
never will be. Do you know what a man is in my eye? He’s a tomb. He’s a
sarcophagus for the interment of
Beafsteakporkchopsliver’nbaconham-andeggs. He’s that and nothing more.
For two years I’ve watched men eat, eat, eat, until they represent
nothing on earth to me but ruminant bipeds. They’re absolutely nothing
but something that goes in front of a knife and fork and plate at the
table. They’re fixed that way in my mind and memory. I’ve tried to
overcome it, but I can’t. I’ve heard girls rave about their
sweethearts, but I never could understand it. A man and a sausage
grinder and a pantry awake in me exactly the same sentiments. I went to
a matinée once to see an actor the girls were crazy about. I got
interested enough to wonder whether he liked his steak rare, medium, or
well done, and his eggs over or straight up. That was all. No, Jeff;
I’ll marry no man and see him sit at the breakfast table and eat, and
come back to dinner and eat, and happen in again at supper to eat, eat,
eat.’

“‘But, Mame,’ says I, ‘it’ll wear off. You’ve had too much of it.
You’ll marry some time, of course. Men don’t eat always.’

“‘As far as my observation goes, they do. No, I’ll tell you what I’m
going to do.’ Mame turns, sudden, to animation and bright eyes.
‘There’s a girl named Susie Foster in Terre Haute, a chum of mine. She
waits in the railroad eating house there. I worked two years in a
restaurant in that town. Susie has it worse than I do, because the men
who eat at railroad stations gobble. They try to flirt and gobble at
the same time. Whew! Susie and I have it all planned out. We’re saving
our money, and when we get enough we’re going to buy a little cottage
and five acres we know of, and live together, and grow violets for the
Eastern market. A man better not bring his appetite within a mile of
that ranch.’

“‘Don’t girls ever—’ I commenced, but Mame heads me off, sharp.

“‘No, they don’t. They nibble a little bit sometimes; that’s all.’

“‘I thought the confect—’

“‘For goodness’ sake, change the subject,’ says Mame.

“As I said before, that experience puts me wise that the feminine
arrangement ever struggles after deceptions and illusions. Take
England—beef made her; wieners elevated Germany; Uncle Sam owes his
greatness to fried chicken and pie, but the young ladies of the
Shetalkyou schools, they’ll never believe it. Shakespeare, they allow,
and Rubinstein, and the Rough Riders is what did the trick.

“’Twas a situation calculated to disturb. I couldn’t bear to give up
Mame; and yet it pained me to think of abandoning the practice of
eating. I had acquired the habit too early. For twenty-seven years I
had been blindly rushing upon my fate, yielding to the insidious lures
of that deadly monster, food. It was too late. I was a ruminant biped
for keeps. It was lobster salad to a doughnut that my life was going to
be blighted by it.

“I continued to board at the Dugan tent, hoping that Mame would relent.
I had sufficient faith in true love to believe that since it has often
outlived the absence of a square meal it might, in time, overcome the
presence of one. I went on ministering to my fatal vice, although I
felt that each time I shoved a potato into my mouth in Mame’s presence
I might be burying my fondest hopes.

“I think Collier must have spoken to Mame and got the same answer, for
one day he orders a cup of coffee and a cracker, and sits nibbling the
corner of it like a girl in the parlour, that’s filled up in the
kitchen, previous, on cold roast and fried cabbage. I caught on and did
the same, and maybe we thought we’d made a hit! The next day we tried
it again, and out comes old man Dugan fetching in his hands the fairy
viands.

“‘Kinder off yer feed, ain’t ye, gents?’ he asks, fatherly and some
sardonic. ‘Thought I’d spell Mame a bit, seein’ the work was light, and
my rheumatiz can stand the strain.’

“So back me and Collier had to drop to the heavy grub again. I noticed
about that time that I was seized by a most uncommon and devastating
appetite. I ate until Mame must have hated to see me darken the door.
Afterward I found out that I had been made the victim of the first dark
and irreligious trick played on me by Ed Collier. Him and me had been
taking drinks together uptown regular, trying to drown our thirst for
food. That man had bribed about ten bartenders to always put a big slug
of Appletree’s Anaconda Appetite Bitters in every one of my drinks. But
the last trick he played me was hardest to forget.

“One day Collier failed to show up at the tent. A man told me he left
town that morning. My only rival now was the bill of fare. A few days
before he left Collier had presented me with a two-gallon jug of fine
whisky which he said a cousin had sent him from Kentucky. I now have
reason to believe that it contained Appletree’s Anaconda Appetite
Bitters almost exclusively. I continued to devour tons of provisions.
In Mame’s eyes I remained a mere biped, more ruminant than ever.

“About a week after Collier pulled his freight there came a kind of
side-show to town, and hoisted a tent near the railroad. I judged it
was a sort of fake museum and curiosity business. I called to see Mame
one night, and Ma Dugan said that she and Thomas, her younger brother,
had gone to the show. That same thing happened for three nights that
week. Saturday night I caught her on the way coming back, and got to
sit on the steps a while and talk to her. I noticed she looked
different. Her eyes were softer, and shiny like. Instead of a Mame
Dugan to fly from the voracity of man and raise violets, she seemed to
be a Mame more in line as God intended her, approachable, and suited to
bask in the light of the Brazilians and the Kindler.

“‘You seem to be right smart inveigled,’ says I, ‘with the Unparalleled
Exhibition of the World’s Living Curiosities and Wonders.’

“‘It’s a change,’ says Mame.

“‘You’ll need another,’ says I, ‘if you keep on going every night.’

“‘Don’t be cross, Jeff,’ says she; ‘it takes my mind off business.’

“‘Don’t the curiosities eat?’ I ask.

“‘Not all of them. Some of them are wax.’

“‘Look out, then, that you don’t get stuck,’ says I, kind of flip and
foolish.

“Mame blushed. I didn’t know what to think about her. My hopes raised
some that perhaps my attentions had palliated man’s awful crime of
visibly introducing nourishment into his system. She talked some about
the stars, referring to them with respect and politeness, and I
drivelled a quantity about united hearts, homes made bright by true
affection, and the Kindler. Mame listened without scorn, and I says to
myself, ‘Jeff, old man, you’re removing the hoodoo that has clung to
the consumer of victuals; you’re setting your heel upon the serpent
that lurks in the gravy bowl.’

“Monday night I drop around. Mame is at the Unparalleled Exhibition
with Thomas.

“‘Now, may the curse of the forty-one seven-sided sea cooks,’ says I,
‘and the bad luck of the nine impenitent grasshoppers rest upon this
self-same sideshow at once and forever more. Amen. I’ll go to see it
myself to-morrow night and investigate its baleful charm. Shall man
that was made to inherit the earth be bereft of his sweetheart first by
a knife and fork and then by a ten-cent circus?’

“The next night before starting out for the exhibition tent I inquire
and find out that Mame is not at home. She is not at the circus with
Thomas this time, for Thomas waylays me in the grass outside of the
grub tent with a scheme of his own before I had time to eat supper.

“‘What’ll you give me, Jeff,’ says he, ‘if I tell you something?’

“‘The value of it, son,’ I says.

“‘Sis is stuck on a freak,’ says Thomas, ‘one of the side-show freaks.
I don’t like him. She does. I overheard ’em talking. Thought maybe
you’d like to know. Say, Jeff, does it put you wise two dollars’ worth?
There’s a target rifle up town that—’

“I frisked my pockets and commenced to dribble a stream of halves and
quarters into Thomas’s hat. The information was of the pile-driver
system of news, and it telescoped my intellects for a while. While I
was leaking small change and smiling foolish on the outside, and
suffering disturbances internally, I was saying, idiotically and
pleasantly:

“‘Thank you, Thomas—thank you—er—a freak, you said, Thomas. Now, could
you make out the monstrosity’s entitlements a little clearer, if you
please, Thomas?’

“‘This is the fellow,’ says Thomas, pulling out a yellow handbill from
his pocket and shoving it under my nose. ‘He’s the Champion Faster of
the Universe. I guess that’s why Sis got soft on him. He don’t eat
nothing. He’s going to fast forty-nine days. This is the sixth. That’s
him.’

“I looked at the name Thomas pointed out—‘Professor Eduardo Collieri.’
‘Ah!’ says I, in admiration, ‘that’s not so bad, Ed Collier. I give you
credit for the trick. But I don’t give you the girl until she’s Mrs.
Freak.’

“I hit the sod in the direction of the show. I came up to the rear of
the tent, and, as I did so, a man wiggled out like a snake from under
the bottom of the canvas, scrambled to his feet, and ran into me like a
locoed bronco. I gathered him by the neck and investigated him by the
light of the stars. It is Professor Eduardo Collieri, in human
habiliments, with a desperate look in one eye and impatience in the
other.

“‘Hello, Curiosity,’ says I. ‘Get still a minute and let’s have a look
at your freakship. How do you like being the willopus-wallopus or the
bim-bam from Borneo, or whatever name you are denounced by in the
side-show business?’

“‘Jeff Peters,’ says Collier, in a weak voice. ‘Turn me loose, or I’ll
slug you one. I’m in the extremest kind of a large hurry. Hands off!’

“‘Tut, tut, Eddie,’ I answers, holding him hard; ‘let an old friend
gaze on the exhibition of your curiousness. It’s an eminent graft you
fell onto, my son. But don’t speak of assaults and battery, because
you’re not fit. The best you’ve got is a lot of nerve and a mighty
empty stomach.’ And so it was. The man was as weak as a vegetarian cat.

“‘I’d argue this case with you, Jeff,’ says he, regretful in his style,
‘for an unlimited number of rounds if I had half an hour to train in
and a slab of beefsteak two feet square to train with. Curse the man, I
say, that invented the art of going foodless. May his soul in eternity
be chained up within two feet of a bottomless pit of red-hot hash. I’m
abandoning the conflict, Jeff; I’m deserting to the enemy. You’ll find
Miss Dugan inside contemplating the only living mummy and the informed
hog. She’s a fine girl, Jeff. I’d have beat you out if I could have
kept up the grubless habit a little while longer. You’ll have to admit
that the fasting dodge was aces-up for a while. I figured it out that
way. But say, Jeff, it’s said that love makes the world go around. Let
me tell you, the announcement lacks verification. It’s the wind from
the dinner horn that does it. I love that Mame Dugan. I’ve gone six
days without food in order to coincide with her sentiments. Only one
bite did I have. That was when I knocked the tattooed man down with a
war club and got a sandwich he was gobbling. The manager fined me all
my salary; but salary wasn’t what I was after. ’Twas that girl. I’d
give my life for her, but I’d endanger my immortal soul for a beef
stew. Hunger is a horrible thing, Jeff. Love and business and family
and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words
when a man’s starving!’

“In such language Ed Collier discoursed to me, pathetic. I gathered the
diagnosis that his affections and his digestions had been implicated in
a scramble and the commissary had won out. I never disliked Ed Collier.
I searched my internal admonitions of suitable etiquette to see if I
could find a remark of a consoling nature, but there was none
convenient.

“‘I’d be glad, now,’ says Ed, ‘if you’ll let me go. I’ve been hard hit,
but I’ll hit the ration supply harder. I’m going to clean out every
restaurant in town. I’m going to wade waist deep in sirloins and swim
in ham and eggs. It’s an awful thing, Jeff Peters, for a man to come to
this pass—to give up his girl for something to eat—it’s worse than that
man Esau, that swapped his copyright for a partridge— but then,
hunger’s a fierce thing. You’ll excuse me, now, Jeff, for I smell a
pervasion of ham frying in the distance, and my legs are crying out to
stampede in that direction.’

“‘A hearty meal to you, Ed Collier,’ I says to him, ‘and no hard
feelings. For myself, I am projected to be an unseldom eater, and I
have condolence for your predicaments.’

“There was a sudden big whiff of frying ham smell on the breeze; and
the Champion Faster gives a snort and gallops off in the dark toward
fodder.

“I wish some of the cultured outfit that are always advertising the
extenuating circumstances of love and romance had been there to see.
There was Ed Collier, a fine man full of contrivances and flirtations,
abandoning the girl of his heart and ripping out into the contiguous
territory in the pursuit of sordid grub. ’Twas a rebuke to the poets
and a slap at the best-paying element of fiction. An empty stomach is a
sure antidote to an overfull heart.

“I was naturally anxious to know how far Mame was infatuated with
Collier and his stratagems. I went inside the Unparalleled Exhibition,
and there she was. She looked surprised to see me, but unguilty.

“‘It’s an elegant evening outside,’ says I. ‘The coolness is quite nice
and gratifying, and the stars are lined out, first class, up where they
belong. Wouldn’t you shake these by-products of the animal kingdom long
enough to take a walk with a common human who never was on a programme
in his life?’

“Mame gave a sort of sly glance around, and I knew what that meant.

“‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I hate to tell you; but the curiosity that lives on
wind has flew the coop. He just crawled out under the tent. By this
time he has amalgamated himself with half the delicatessen truck in
town.’

“‘You mean Ed Collier?’ says Mame.

“‘I do,’ I answers; ‘and a pity it is that he has gone back to crime
again. I met him outside the tent, and he exposed his intentions of
devastating the food crop of the world. ’Tis enormously sad when one’s
ideal descends from his pedestal to make a seventeen-year locust of
himself.’

“Mame looked me straight in the eye until she had corkscrewed my
reflections.

“‘Jeff,’ says she, ‘it isn’t quite like you to talk that way. I don’t
care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed. A man may do ridiculous things, but
they don’t look ridiculous to the girl he does ’em for. That was one
man in a hundred. He stopped eating just to please me. I’d be
hard-hearted and ungrateful if I didn’t feel kindly toward him. Could
you do what he did?’

“‘I know,’ says I, seeing the point, ‘I’m condemned. I can’t help it.
The brand of the consumer is upon my brow. Mrs. Eve settled that
business for me when she made the dicker with the snake. I fell from
the fire into the frying-pan. I guess I’m the Champion Feaster of the
Universe.’ I spoke humble, and Mame mollified herself a little.

“‘Ed Collier and I are good friends,’ she said, ‘the same as me and
you. I gave him the same answer I did you—no marrying for me. I liked
to be with Ed and talk with him. There was something mighty pleasant to
me in the thought that here was a man who never used a knife and fork,
and all for my sake.’

“‘Wasn’t you in love with him?’ I asks, all injudicious. ‘Wasn’t there
a deal on for you to become Mrs. Curiosity?’

“All of us do it sometimes. All of us get jostled out of the line of
profitable talk now and then. Mame put on that little lemon _glacé_
smile that runs between ice and sugar, and says, much too pleasant:
‘You’re short on credentials for asking that question, Mr. Peters.
Suppose you do a forty-nine day fast, just to give you ground to stand
on, and then maybe I’ll answer it.’

“So, even after Collier was kidnapped out of the way by the revolt of
his appetite, my own prospects with Mame didn’t seem to be improved.
And then business played out in Guthrie.

“I had stayed too long there. The Brazilians I had sold commenced to
show signs of wear, and the Kindler refused to light up right frequent
on wet mornings. There is always a time, in my business, when the star
of success says, ‘Move on to the next town.’ I was travelling by wagon
at that time so as not to miss any of the small towns; so I hitched up
a few days later and went down to tell Mame good-bye. I wasn’t
abandoning the game; I intended running over to Oklahoma City and work
it for a week or two. Then I was coming back to institute fresh
proceedings against Mame.

“What do I find at the Dugans’ but Mame all conspicuous in a blue
travelling dress, with her little trunk at the door. It seems that
sister Lottie Bell, who is a typewriter in Terre Haute, is going to be
married next Thursday, and Mame is off for a week’s visit to be an
accomplice at the ceremony. Mame is waiting for a freight wagon that is
going to take her to Oklahoma, but I condemns the freight wagon with
promptness and scorn, and offers to deliver the goods myself. Ma Dugan
sees no reason why not, as Mr. Freighter wants pay for the job; so,
thirty minutes later Mame and I pull out in my light spring wagon with
white canvas cover, and head due south.

“That morning was of a praiseworthy sort. The breeze was lively, and
smelled excellent of flowers and grass, and the little cottontail
rabbits entertained themselves with skylarking across the road. My two
Kentucky bays went for the horizon until it come sailing in so fast you
wanted to dodge it like a clothesline. Mame was full of talk and
rattled on like a kid about her old home and her school pranks and the
things she liked and the hateful ways of those Johnson girls just
across the street, ‘way up in Indiana. Not a word was said about Ed
Collier or victuals or such solemn subjects. About noon Mame looks and
finds that the lunch she had put up in a basket had been left behind. I
could have managed quite a collation, but Mame didn’t seem to be
grieving over nothing to eat, so I made no lamentations. It was a sore
subject with me, and I ruled provender in all its branches out of my
conversation.

“I am minded to touch light on explanations how I came to lose the way.
The road was dim and well grown with grass; and there was Mame by my
side confiscating my intellects and attention. The excuses are good or
they are not, as they may appear to you. But I lost it, and at dusk
that afternoon, when we should have been in Oklahoma City, we were
seesawing along the edge of nowhere in some undiscovered river bottom,
and the rain was falling in large, wet bunches. Down there in the
swamps we saw a little log house on a small knoll of high ground. The
bottom grass and the chaparral and the lonesome timber crowded all
around it. It seemed to be a melancholy little house, and you felt
sorry for it. ’Twas that house for the night, the way I reasoned it. I
explained to Mame, and she leaves it to me to decide. She doesn’t
become galvanic and prosecuting, as most women would, but she says it’s
all right; she knows I didn’t mean to do it.

“We found the house was deserted. It had two empty rooms. There was a
little shed in the yard where beasts had once been kept. In a loft of
it was a lot of old hay. I put my horses in there and gave them some of
it, for which they looked at me sorrowful, expecting apologies. The
rest of the hay I carried into the house by armfuls, with a view to
accommodations. I also brought in the patent kindler and the
Brazilians, neither of which are guaranteed against the action of
water.

“Mame and I sat on the wagon seats on the floor, and I lit a lot of the
kindler on the hearth, for the night was chilly. If I was any judge,
that girl enjoyed it. It was a change for her. It gave her a different
point of view. She laughed and talked, and the kindler made a dim light
compared to her eyes. I had a pocketful of cigars, and as far as I was
concerned there had never been any fall of man. We were at the same old
stand in the Garden of Eden. Out there somewhere in the rain and the
dark was the river of Zion, and the angel with the flaming sword had
not yet put up the keep-off-the-grass sign. I opened up a gross or two
of the Brazilians and made Mame put them on—rings, brooches, necklaces,
eardrops, bracelets, girdles, and lockets. She flashed and sparkled
like a million-dollar princess until she had pink spots in her cheeks
and almost cried for a looking-glass.

“When it got late I made a fine bunk on the floor for Mame with the hay
and my lap robes and blankets out of the wagon, and persuaded her to
lie down. I sat in the other room burning tobacco and listening to the
pouring rain and meditating on the many vicissitudes that came to a man
during the seventy years or so immediately preceding his funeral.

“I must have dozed a little while before morning, for my eyes were
shut, and when I opened them it was daylight, and there stood Mame with
her hair all done up neat and correct, and her eyes bright with
admiration of existence.

“‘Gee whiz, Jeff!’ she exclaims, ‘but I’m hungry. I could eat a—’

“I looked up and caught her eye. Her smile went back in and she gave me
a cold look of suspicion. Then I laughed, and laid down on the floor to
laugh easier. It seemed funny to me. By nature and geniality I am a
hearty laugher, and I went the limit. When I came to, Mame was sitting
with her back to me, all contaminated with dignity.

“‘Don’t be angry, Mame,’ I says, ‘for I couldn’t help it. It’s the
funny way you’ve done up your hair. If you could only see it!’

“‘You needn’t tell stories, sir,’ said Mame, cool and advised. ‘My hair
is all right. I know what you were laughing about. Why, Jeff, look
outside,’ she winds up, peeping through a chink between the logs. I
opened the little wooden window and looked out. The entire river bottom
was flooded, and the knob of land on which the house stood was an
island in the middle of a rushing stream of yellow water a hundred
yards wide. And it was still raining hard. All we could do was to stay
there till the doves brought in the olive branch.

“I am bound to admit that conversations and amusements languished
during that day. I was aware that Mame was getting a too prolonged
one-sided view of things again, but I had no way to change it.
Personally, I was wrapped up in the desire to eat. I had hallucinations
of hash and visions of ham, and I kept saying to myself all the time,
‘What’ll you have to eat, Jeff?—what’ll you order now, old man, when
the waiter comes?’ I picks out to myself all sorts of favourites from
the bill of fare, and imagines them coming. I guess it’s that way with
all hungry men. They can’t get their cogitations trained on anything
but something to eat. It shows that the little table with the
broken-legged caster and the imitation Worcester sauce and the napkin
covering up the coffee stains is the paramount issue, after all,
instead of the question of immortality or peace between nations.

“I sat there, musing along, arguing with myself quite heated as to how
I’d have my steak—with mushrooms, or _à la créole_. Mame was on the
other seat, pensive, her head leaning on her hand. ‘Let the potatoes
come home-fried,’ I states in my mind, ‘and brown the hash in the pan,
with nine poached eggs on the side.’ I felt, careful, in my own pockets
to see if I could find a peanut or a grain or two of popcorn.

“Night came on again with the river still rising and the rain still
falling. I looked at Mame and I noticed that desperate look on her face
that a girl always wears when she passes an ice-cream lair. I knew that
poor girl was hungry—maybe for the first time in her life. There was
that anxious look in her eye that a woman has only when she has missed
a meal or feels her skirt coming unfastened in the back.

“It was about eleven o’clock or so on the second night when we sat,
gloomy, in our shipwrecked cabin. I kept jerking my mind away from the
subject of food, but it kept flopping back again before I could fasten
it. I thought of everything good to eat I had ever heard of. I went
away back to my kidhood and remembered the hot biscuit sopped in
sorghum and bacon gravy with partiality and respect. Then I trailed
along up the years, pausing at green apples and salt, flapjacks and
maple, lye hominy, fried chicken Old Virginia style, corn on the cob,
spareribs and sweet potato pie, and wound up with Georgia Brunswick
stew, which is the top notch of good things to eat, because it
comprises ’em all.

“They say a drowning man sees a panorama of his whole life pass before
him. Well, when a man’s starving he sees the ghost of every meal he
ever ate set out before him, and he invents new dishes that would make
the fortune of a chef. If somebody would collect the last words of men
who starved to death, they’d have to sift ’em mighty fine to discover
the sentiment, but they’d compile into a cook book that would sell into
the millions.

“I guess I must have had my conscience pretty well inflicted with
culinary meditations, for, without intending to do so, I says, out
loud, to the imaginary waiter, ‘Cut it thick and have it rare, with the
French fried, and six, soft-scrambled, on toast.’

“Mame turned her head quick as a wing. Her eyes were sparkling and she
smiled sudden.

“‘Medium for me,’ she rattles out, ‘with the Juliennes, and three,
straight up. Draw one, and brown the wheats, double order to come. Oh,
Jeff, wouldn’t it be glorious! And then I’d like to have a half fry,
and a little chicken curried with rice, and a cup custard with ice
cream, and—’

“‘Go easy,’ I interrupts; ‘where’s the chicken liver pie, and the
kidney _sauté_ on toast, and the roast lamb, and—’

“‘Oh,’ cuts in Mame, all excited, ‘with mint sauce, and the turkey
salad, and stuffed olives, and raspberry tarts, and—’

“‘Keep it going,’ says I. ‘Hurry up with the fried squash, and the hot
corn pone with sweet milk, and don’t forget the apple dumpling with
hard sauce, and the cross-barred dew-berry pie—’

“Yes, for ten minutes we kept up that kind of restaurant repartee. We
ranges up and down and backward and forward over the main trunk lines
and the branches of the victual subject, and Mame leads the game, for
she is apprised in the ramifications of grub, and the dishes she
nominates aggravates my yearnings. It seems that there is a feeling
that Mame will line up friendly again with food. It seems that she
looks upon the obnoxious science of eating with less contempt than
before.

“The next morning we find that the flood has subsided. I geared up the
bays, and we splashed out through the mud, some precarious, until we
found the road again. We were only a few miles wrong, and in two hours
we were in Oklahoma City. The first thing we saw was a big restaurant
sign, and we piled into there in a hurry. Here I finds myself sitting
with Mame at table, with knives and forks and plates between us, and
she not scornful, but smiling with starvation and sweetness.

“’Twas a new restaurant and well stocked. I designated a list of
quotations from the bill of fare that made the waiter look out toward
the wagon to see how many more might be coming.

“There we were, and there was the order being served. ’Twas a banquet
for a dozen, but we felt like a dozen. I looked across the table at
Mame and smiled, for I had recollections. Mame was looking at the table
like a boy looks at his first stem-winder. Then she looked at me,
straight in the face, and two big tears came in her eyes. The waiter
was gone after more grub.

“‘Jeff,’ she says, soft like, ‘I’ve been a foolish girl. I’ve looked at
things from the wrong side. I never felt this way before. Men get
hungry every day like this, don’t they? They’re big and strong, and
they do the hard work of the world, and they don’t eat just to spite
silly waiter girls in restaurants, do they, Jeff? You said once—that
is, you asked me—you wanted me to—well, Jeff, if you still care—I’d be
glad and willing to have you always sitting across the table from me.
Now give me something to eat, quick, please.’

“So, as I’ve said, a woman needs to change her point of view now and
then. They get tired of the same old sights—the same old dinner table,
washtub, and sewing machine. Give ’em a touch of the various—a little
travel and a little rest, a little tomfoolery along with the tragedies
of keeping house, a little petting after the blowing-up, a little
upsetting and a little jostling around—and everybody in the game will
have chips added to their stack by the play.”




XI
THE CABALLERO’S WAY


The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had
murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger
number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.

The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company
would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say,
twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio
Grande. He killed for the love of it—because he was quick-tempered— to
avoid arrest—for his own amusement—any reason that came to his mind
would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot
five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the
service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every
cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to
Matamoras.

Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half
Madonna, and the rest—oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half
Madonna can always be something more—the rest, let us say, was
humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed _jacal_ near a little Mexican
settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a
father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand
years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken
dream from drinking _mescal_. Back of the _jacal_ a tremendous forest
of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its
door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that
the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once,
clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked
grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty
and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff’s posse, denying
knowledge of her man in her soft _mélange_ of Spanish and English.

One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, _ex offico_,
commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain
Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and
undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said
captain’s territory.

The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and
forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private
Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on
the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.

Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful _couleur de rose_ through his
ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket,
and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.

The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican
settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away.

Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a
machine gun, Sandridge moved among the _Jacales_, patiently seeking
news of the Cisco Kid.

Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain
vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of
the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans “to see them kick”: if he demanded
from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be
entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to
follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned
palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with “_quien sabes_” and
denials of the Kid’s acquaintance.

But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing—a man
of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.

“No use to ask them Mexicans,” he said to Sandridge. “They’re afraid to
tell. This _hombre_ they call the Kid—Goodall is his name, ain’t
it?—he’s been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run
across him at—but I guess I don’t keer to say, myself. I’m two seconds
later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth
thinking about. But this Kid’s got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing
that he comes to see. She lives in that _jacal_ a hundred yards down
the arroyo at the edge of the pear. Maybe she—no, I don’t suppose she
would, but that _jacal_ would be a good place to watch, anyway.”

Sandridge rode down to the _jacal_ of Perez. The sun was low, and the
broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the
grass-thatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush
corral near by. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral
leaves. The old Mexican lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a
stupor from his mescal, and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he
and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes—so old his
wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the
_jacal_ stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring
at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman.

The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful
assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that
at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been
looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought
of him.

Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this. He seemed to be made of
sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. He seemed to
illuminate the shadow of the pear when he smiled, as though the sun
were rising again. The men she had known had been small and dark. Even
the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than
herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled
the noonday.

As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her
make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided
in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of
the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air
spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had
inherited from the _gitanas_ of the Basque province. As for the
humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not
perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a
symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.

The newly lighted sun-god asked for a drink of water. Tonia brought it
from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter. Sandridge considered
it necessary to dismount so as to lessen the trouble of her
ministrations.

I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human
heart; but I assert, by the chronicler’s right, that before a quarter
of an hour had sped, Sandridge was teaching her how to plaint a
six-strand rawhide stake-rope, and Tonia had explained to him that were
it not for her little English book that the peripatetic _padre_ had
given her and the little crippled _chivo_, that she fed from a bottle,
she would be very, very lonely indeed.

Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid’s fences needed repairing, and
that the adjutant-general’s sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.

In his camp by the water hole Lieutenant Sandridge announced and
reiterated his intention of either causing the Cisco Kid to nibble the
black loam of the Frio country prairies or of haling him before a judge
and jury. That sounded business-like. Twice a week he rode over to the
Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia’s slim, slightly
lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing
lariata. A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.

The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept
his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the
rear of the _jacal_. Thus he might bring down the kite and the
humming-bird with one stone.

While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco
Kid was also attending to his professional duties. He moodily shot up a
saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town
marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and then
rode away, morose and unsatisfied. No true artist is uplifted by
shooting an aged man carrying an old-style .38 bulldog.

On his way the Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel
when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of delight. He yearned for the
woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He
wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty
devotion. He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under the
brush shelter, and tell him how the _chivo_ was thriving on the bottle.

The Kid turned the speckled roan’s head up the ten-mile pear flat that
stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf
Crossing of the Frio. The roan whickered; for he had a sense of
locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse;
and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the
end of a forty-foot stake-rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe’s
straw-roofed hut.

More weird and lonesome than the journey of an Amazonian explorer is
the ride of one through a Texas pear flat. With dismal monotony and
startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift
their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way. The
demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the
parched traveller with its lush grey greenness. It warps itself a
thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to
lure the rider into blind and impassable spine-defended “bottoms of the
bag,” leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass
whirling in his head.

To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the
cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends
hovering about.

But it was not so with the Kid and his mount. Winding, twisting,
circling, tracing the most fantastic and bewildering trail ever picked
out, the good roan lessened the distance to the Lone Wolf Crossing with
every coil and turn that he made.

While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he
knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was
a single-minded man of conventional ideas. He had a voice like a coyote
with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it. It
was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its
beginning as near as may be to these words:

Don’t you monkey with my Lulu girl
Or I’ll tell you what I’ll do—


and so on. The roan was inured to it, and did not mind.

But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own
consent to refrain from contributing to the world’s noises. So the Kid,
by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia’s _jacal_, had
reluctantly allowed his song to die away—not because his vocal
performance had become less charming to his own ears, but because his
laryngeal muscles were aweary.

As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced
through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain
landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then, where
the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the _jacal_
and the hackberry tree on the edge of the arroyo. A few yards farther
the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly
openings. Then he dismounted, dropped the roan’s reins, and proceeded
on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian. The roan, knowing his
part, stood still, making no sound.

The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and
reconnoitred between the leaves of a clump of cactus.

Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the _jacal_, sat his
Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape
condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in
more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be
added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of
a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her
nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate
six-strand plait.

Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a
slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A
gun-scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a
six-shooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia’s
fingers needed close attention.

And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and
in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of
the Kid.

“Remember, then,” said Tonia, “you must not come again until I send for
you. Soon he will be here. A _vaquero_ at the _tienda_ said to-day he
saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago. When he is that near he always
comes. If he comes and finds you here he will kill you. So, for my
sake, you must come no more until I send you the word.”

“All right,” said the stranger. “And then what?”

“And then,” said the girl, “you must bring your men here and kill him.
If not, he will kill you.”

“He ain’t a man to surrender, that’s sure,” said Sandridge. “It’s kill
or be killed for the officer that goes up against Mr. Cisco Kid.”

“He must die,” said the girl. “Otherwise there will not be any peace in
the world for thee and me. He has killed many. Let him so die. Bring
your men, and give him no chance to escape.”

“You used to think right much of him,” said Sandridge.

Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a
lemon-tinted arm over the ranger’s shoulder.

“But then,” she murmured in liquid Spanish, “I had not beheld thee,
thou great, red mountain of a man! And thou art kind and good, as well
as strong. Could one choose him, knowing thee? Let him die; for then I
will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me.”

“How can I know when he comes?” asked Sandridge.

“When he comes,” said Tonia, “he remains two days, sometimes three.
Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the _lavendera_, has a swift
pony. I will write a letter to thee and send it by him, saying how it
will be best to come upon him. By Gregorio will the letter come. And
bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the
rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is ‘_El Chivato_,’ as they
call him, to send a ball from his _pistola_.”

“The Kid’s handy with his gun, sure enough,” admitted Sandridge, “but
when I come for him I shall come alone. I’ll get him by myself or not
at all. The Cap wrote one or two things to me that make me want to do
the trick without any help. You let me know when Mr. Kid arrives, and
I’ll do the rest.”

“I will send you the message by the boy Gregorio,” said the girl. “I
knew you were braver than that small slayer of men who never smiles.
How could I ever have thought I cared for him?”

It was time for the ranger to ride back to his camp on the water hole.
Before he mounted his horse he raised the slight form of Tonia with one
arm high from the earth for a parting salute. The drowsy stillness of
the torpid summer air still lay thick upon the dreaming afternoon. The
smoke from the fire in the _jacal_, where the _frijoles_ blubbered in
the iron pot, rose straight as a plumb-line above the clay-daubed
chimney. No sound or movement disturbed the serenity of the dense pear
thicket ten yards away.

When the form of Sandridge had disappeared, loping his big dun down the
steep banks of the Frio crossing, the Kid crept back to his own horse,
mounted him, and rode back along the tortuous trail he had come.

But not far. He stopped and waited in the silent depths of the pear
until half an hour had passed. And then Tonia heard the high, untrue
notes of his unmusical singing coming nearer and nearer; and she ran to
the edge of the pear to meet him.

The Kid seldom smiled; but he smiled and waved his hat when he saw her.
He dismounted, and his girl sprang into his arms. The Kid looked at her
fondly. His thick, black hair clung to his head like a wrinkled mat.
The meeting brought a slight ripple of some undercurrent of feeling to
his smooth, dark face that was usually as motionless as a clay mask.

“How’s my girl?” he asked, holding her close.

“Sick of waiting so long for you, dear one,” she answered. “My eyes are
dim with always gazing into that devil’s pincushion through which you
come. And I can see into it such a little way, too. But you are here,
beloved one, and I will not scold. _Que mal muchacho!_ not to come to
see your _alma_ more often. Go in and rest, and let me water your horse
and stake him with the long rope. There is cool water in the jar for
you.”

The Kid kissed her affectionately.

“Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me,”
said he. “But if you’ll run in, _chica_, and throw a pot of coffee
together while I attend to the _caballo_, I’ll be a good deal obliged.”

Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he
admired himself greatly. He was _muy caballero_, as the Mexicans
express it, where the ladies were concerned. For them he had always
gentle words and consideration. He could not have spoken a harsh word
to a woman. He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but
he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman.
Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come
under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the
stories circulated about Mr. Kid. One shouldn’t believe everything one
heard, they said. When confronted by their indignant men folk with
proof of the _caballero’s_ deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been
driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.

Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the
pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem
that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his
hiding-place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the
actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not
think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.

At the end of the short twilight they gathered around a supper of
_frijoles_, goat steaks, canned peaches, and coffee, by the light of a
lantern in the _jacal_. Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled,
smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket. Tonia washed
the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel.
Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of
her small world since the Kid’s last visit; it was as all his other
home-comings had been.

Then outside Tonia swung in a grass hammock with her guitar and sang
sad _canciones de amor_.

“Do you love me just the same, old girl?” asked the Kid, hunting for
his cigarette papers.

“Always the same, little one,” said Tonia, her dark eyes lingering upon
him.

“I must go over to Fink’s,” said the Kid, rising, “for some tobacco. I
thought I had another sack in my coat. I’ll be back in a quarter of an
hour.”

“Hasten,” said Tonia, “and tell me—how long shall I call you my own
this time? Will you be gone again to-morrow, leaving me to grieve, or
will you be longer with your Tonia?”

“Oh, I might stay two or three days this trip,” said the Kid, yawning.
“I’ve been on the dodge for a month, and I’d like to rest up.”

He was gone half an hour for his tobacco. When he returned Tonia was
still lying in the hammock.

“It’s funny,” said the Kid, “how I feel. I feel like there was somebody
lying behind every bush and tree waiting to shoot me. I never had
mullygrubs like them before. Maybe it’s one of them presumptions. I’ve
got half a notion to light out in the morning before day. The Guadalupe
country is burning up about that old Dutchman I plugged down there.”

“You are not afraid—no one could make my brave little one fear.”

“Well, I haven’t been usually regarded as a jack-rabbit when it comes
to scrapping; but I don’t want a posse smoking me out when I’m in your
_jacal_. Somebody might get hurt that oughtn’t to.”

“Remain with your Tonia; no one will find you here.”

The Kid looked keenly into the shadows up and down the arroyo and
toward the dim lights of the Mexican village.

“I’ll see how it looks later on,” was his decision.

At midnight a horseman rode into the rangers’ camp, blazing his way by
noisy “halloes” to indicate a pacific mission. Sandridge and one or two
others turned out to investigate the row. The rider announced himself
to be Domingo Sales, from the Lone Wolf Crossing. he bore a letter for
Señor Sandridge. Old Luisa, the _lavendera_, had persuaded him to bring
it, he said, her son Gregorio being too ill of a fever to ride.

Sandridge lighted the camp lantern and read the letter. These were its
words:

_Dear One:_ He has come. Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of
the pear. When he first talked he said he would stay three days or
more. Then as it grew later he was like a wolf or a fox, and walked
about without rest, looking and listening. Soon he said he must leave
before daylight when it is dark and stillest. And then he seemed to
suspect that I be not true to him. He looked at me so strange that I am
frightened. I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia. Last of all
he said I must prove to him I am true. He thinks that even now men are
waiting to kill him as he rides from my house. To escape he says he
will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and
the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away. But before that
he says that I must put on his clothes, his _pantalones_ and _camisa_
and hat, and ride away on his horse from the _jacal_ as far as the big
road beyond the crossing and back again. This before he goes, so he can
tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him. It is a terrible
thing. An hour before daybreak this is to be. Come, my dear one, and
kill this man and take me for your Tonia. Do not try to take hold of
him alive, but kill him quickly. Knowing all, you should do that. You
must come long before the time and hide yourself in the little shed
near the _jacal_ where the wagon and saddles are kept. It is dark in
there. He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla. I
send you a hundred kisses. Come surely and shoot quickly and straight.


THINE OWN TONIA.


Sandridge quickly explained to his men the official part of the
missive. The rangers protested against his going alone.

“I’ll get him easy enough,” said the lieutenant. “The girl’s got him
trapped. And don’t even think he’ll get the drop on me.”

Sandridge saddled his horse and rode to the Lone Wolf Crossing. He tied
his big dun in a clump of brush on the arroyo, took his Winchester from
its scabbard, and carefully approached the Perez _jacal_. There was
only the half of a high moon drifted over by ragged, milk-white gulf
clouds.

The wagon-shed was an excellent place for ambush; and the ranger got
inside it safely. In the black shadow of the brush shelter in front of
the _jacal_ he could see a horse tied and hear him impatiently pawing
the hard-trodden earth.

He waited almost an hour before two figures came out of the _jacal_.
One, in man’s clothes, quickly mounted the horse and galloped past the
wagon-shed toward the crossing and village. And then the other figure,
in skirt, waist, and mantilla over its head, stepped out into the faint
moonlight, gazing after the rider. Sandridge thought he would take his
chance then before Tonia rode back. He fancied she might not care to
see it.

“Throw up your hands,” he ordered loudly, stepping out of the
wagon-shed with his Winchester at his shoulder.

There was a quick turn of the figure, but no movement to obey, so the
ranger pumped in the bullets—one—two—three—and then twice more; for you
never could be too sure of bringing down the Cisco Kid. There was no
danger of missing at ten paces, even in that half moonlight.

The old ancestor, asleep on his blanket, was awakened by the shots.
Listening further, he heard a great cry from some man in mortal
distress or anguish, and rose up grumbling at the disturbing ways of
moderns.

The tall, red ghost of a man burst into the _jacal_, reaching one hand,
shaking like a _tule_ reed, for the lantern hanging on its nail. The
other spread a letter on the table.

“Look at this letter, Perez,” cried the man. “Who wrote it?”

“_Ah, Dios!_ it is Señor Sandridge,” mumbled the old man, approaching.
“_Pues, señor_, that letter was written by ‘_El Chivato_,’ as he is
called—by the man of Tonia. They say he is a bad man; I do not know.
While Tonia slept he wrote the letter and sent it by this old hand of
mine to Domingo Sales to be brought to you. Is there anything wrong in
the letter? I am very old; and I did not know. _Valgame Dios!_ it is a
very foolish world; and there is nothing in the house to drink— nothing
to drink.”

Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and
throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his
humming-bird, of whom not a feather fluttered. He was not a _caballero_
by instinct, and he could not understand the niceties of revenge.

A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon-shed struck up a
harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began:

Don’t you monkey with my Lulu girl
Or I’ll tell you what I’ll do—




XII
THE SPHINX APPLE


Twenty miles out from Paradise, and fifteen miles short of Sunrise
City, Bildad Rose, the stage-driver, stopped his team. A furious snow
had been falling all day. Eight inches it measured now, on a level. The
remainder of the road was not without peril in daylight, creeping along
the ribs of a bijou range of ragged mountains. Now, when both snow and
night masked its dangers, further travel was not to be thought of, said
Bildad Rose. So he pulled up his four stout horses, and delivered to
his five passengers oral deductions of his wisdom.

Judge Menefee, to whom men granted leadership and the initiatory as
upon a silver salver, sprang from the coach at once. Four of his
fellow-passengers followed, inspired by his example, ready to explore,
to objurgate, to resist, to submit, to proceed, according as their
prime factor might be inclined to sway them. The fifth passenger, a
young woman, remained in the coach.

Bildad had halted upon the shoulder of the first mountain spur. Two
rail-fences, ragged-black, hemmed the road. Fifty yards above the upper
fence, showing a dark blot in the white drifts, stood a small house.
Upon this house descended—or rather ascended—Judge Menefee and his
cohorts with boyish whoops born of the snow and stress. They called;
they pounded at window and door. At the inhospitable silence they waxed
restive; they assaulted and forced the pregnable barriers, and invaded
the premises.

The watchers from the coach heard stumblings and shoutings from the
interior of the ravaged house. Before long a light within flickered,
glowed, flamed high and bright and cheerful. Then came running back
through the driving flakes the exuberant explorers. More deeply pitched
than the clarion—even orchestral in volume—the voice of Judge Menefee
proclaimed the succour that lay in apposition with their state of
travail. The one room of the house was uninhabited, he said, and bare
of furniture; but it contained a great fireplace, and they had
discovered an ample store of chopped wood in a lean-to at the rear.
Housing and warmth against the shivering night were thus assured. For
the placation of Bildad Rose there was news of a stable, not ruined
beyond service, with hay in a loft, near the house.

“Gentlemen,” cried Bildad Rose from his seat, swathed in coats and
robes, “tear me down two panels of that fence, so I can drive in. That
is old man Redruth’s shanty. I thought we must be nigh it. They took
him to the foolish house in August.”

Cheerfully the four passengers sprang at the snow-capped rails. The
exhorted team tugged the coach up the slant to the door of the edifice
from which a mid-summer madness had ravished its proprietor. The driver
and two of the passengers began to unhitch. Judge Menefee opened the
door of the coach, and removed his hat.

“I have to announce, Miss Garland,” said he, “the enforced suspension
of our journey. The driver asserts that the risk in travelling the
mountain road by night is too great even to consider. It will be
necessary to remain in the shelter of this house until morning. I beg
that you will feel that there is nothing to fear beyond a temporary
inconvenience. I have personally inspected the house, and find that
there are means to provide against the rigour of the weather, at least.
You shall be made as comfortable as possible. Permit me to assist you
to alight.”

To the Judge’s side came the passenger whose pursuit in life was the
placing of the Little Goliath windmill. His name was Dunwoody; but that
matters not much. In travelling merely from Paradise to Sunrise City
one needs little or no name. Still, one who would seek to divide
honours with Judge Madison L. Menefee deserves a cognomenal peg upon
which Fame may hang a wreath. Thus spake, loudly and buoyantly, the
aerial miller:

“Guess you’ll have to climb out of the ark, Mrs. McFarland. This wigwam
isn’t exactly the Palmer House, but it turns snow, and they won’t
search your grip for souvenir spoons when you leave. _We’ve_ got a fire
going; and _we’ll_ fix you up with dry Tilbys and keep the mice away,
anyhow, all right, all right.”

One of the two passengers who were struggling in a _melée_ of horses,
harness, snow, and the sarcastic injunctions of Bildad Rose, called
loudly from the whirl of his volunteer duties: “Say! some of you
fellows get Miss Solomon into the house, will you? Whoa, there! you
confounded brute!”

Again must it be gently urged that in travelling from Paradise to
Sunrise City an accurate name is prodigality. When Judge Menefee—
sanctioned to the act by his grey hair and widespread repute—had
introduced himself to the lady passenger, she had, herself, sweetly
breathed a name, in response, that the hearing of the male passengers
had variously interpreted. In the not unjealous spirit of rivalry that
eventuated, each clung stubbornly to his own theory. For the lady
passenger to have reasseverated or corrected would have seemed didactic
if not unduly solicitous of a specific acquaintance. Therefore the lady
passenger permitted herself to be Garlanded and McFarlanded and
Solomoned with equal and discreet complacency. It is thirty-five miles
from Paradise to Sunrise City. _Compagnon de voyage_ is name enough, by
the gripsack of the Wandering Jew! for so brief a journey.

Soon the little party of wayfarers were happily seated in a cheerful
arc before the roaring fire. The robes, cushions, and removable
portions of the coach had been brought in and put to service. The lady
passenger chose a place near the hearth at one end of the arc. There
she graced almost a throne that her subjects had prepared. She sat upon
cushions and leaned against an empty box and barrel, robe bespread,
which formed a defence from the invading draughts. She extended her
feet, delectably shod, to the cordial heat. She ungloved her hands, but
retained about her neck her long fur boa. The unstable flames half
revealed, while the warding boa half submerged, her face— a youthful
face, altogether feminine, clearly moulded and calm with beauty’s
unchallenged confidence. Chivalry and manhood were here vying to please
and comfort her. She seemed to accept their devoirs—not piquantly, as
one courted and attended; nor preeningly, as many of her sex unworthily
reap their honours; not yet stolidly, as the ox receives his hay; but
concordantly with nature’s own plan—as the lily ingests the drop of dew
foreordained to its refreshment.

Outside the wind roared mightily, the fine snow whizzed through the
cracks, the cold besieged the backs of the immolated six; but the
elements did not lack a champion that night. Judge Menefee was attorney
for the storm. The weather was his client, and he strove by special
pleading to convince his companions in that frigid jury-box that they
sojourned in a bower of roses, beset only by benignant zephyrs. He drew
upon a fund of gaiety, wit, and anecdote, sophistical, but crowned with
success. His cheerfulness communicated itself irresistibly. Each one
hastened to contribute his own quota toward the general optimism. Even
the lady passenger was moved to expression.

“I think it is quite charming,” she said, in her slow, crystal tones.

At intervals some one of the passengers would rise and humorously
explore the room. There was little evidence to be collected of its
habitation by old man Redruth.

Bildad Rose was called upon vivaciously for the ex-hermit’s history.
Now, since the stage-driver’s horses were fairly comfortable and his
passengers appeared to be so, peace and comity returned to him.

“The old didapper,” began Bildad, somewhat irreverently, “infested this
here house about twenty year. He never allowed nobody to come nigh him.
He’d duck his head inside and slam the door whenever a team drove
along. There was spinning-wheels up in his loft, all right. He used to
buy his groceries and tobacco at Sam Tilly’s store, on the Little
Muddy. Last August he went up there dressed in a red bedquilt, and told
Sam he was King Solomon, and that the Queen of Sheba was coming to
visit him. He fetched along all the money he had—a little bag full of
silver—and dropped it in Sam’s well. ‘She won’t come,’ says old man
Redruth to Sam, ‘if she knows I’ve got any money.’

“As soon as folks heard he had that sort of a theory about women and
money they knowed he was crazy; so they sent down and packed him to the
foolish asylum.”

“Was there a romance in his life that drove him to a solitary
existence?” asked one of the passengers, a young man who had an Agency.

“No,” said Bildad, “not that I ever heard spoke of. Just ordinary
trouble. They say he had had unfortunateness in the way of love
derangements with a young lady when he was young; before he contracted
red bed-quilts and had his financial conclusions disqualified. I never
heard of no romance.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Judge Menefee, impressively; “a case of unrequited
affection, no doubt.”

“No, sir,” returned Bildad, “not at all. She never married him.
Marmaduke Mulligan, down at Paradise, seen a man once that come from
old Redruth’s town. He said Redruth was a fine young man, but when you
kicked him on the pocket all you could hear jingle was a cuff-fastener
and a bunch of keys. He was engaged to this young lady—Miss Alice—
something was her name; I’ve forgot. This man said she was the kind of
girl you like to have reach across you in a car to pay the fare. Well,
there come to the town a young chap all affluent and easy, and fixed up
with buggies and mining stock and leisure time. Although she was a
staked claim, Miss Alice and the new entry seemed to strike a mutual
kind of a clip. They had calls and coincidences of going to the post
office and such things as sometimes make a girl send back the
engagement ring and other presents—‘a rift within the loot,’ the poetry
man calls it.

“One day folks seen Redruth and Miss Alice standing talking at the
gate. Then he lifts his hat and walks away, and that was the last
anybody in that town seen of him, as far as this man knew.”

“What about the young lady?” asked the young man who had an Agency.

“Never heard,” answered Bildad. “Right there is where my lode of
information turns to an old spavined crowbait, and folds its wings, for
I’ve pumped it dry.”

“A very sad—” began Judge Menefee, but his remark was curtailed by a
higher authority.

“What a charming story!” said the lady passenger, in flute-like tones.

A little silence followed, except for the wind and the crackling of the
fire.

The men were seated upon the floor, having slightly mitigated its
inhospitable surface with wraps and stray pieces of boards. The man who
was placing Little Goliath windmills arose and walked about to ease his
cramped muscles.

Suddenly a triumphant shout came from him. He hurried back from a dusky
corner of the room, bearing aloft something in his hand. It was an
apple—a large, red-mottled, firm pippin, pleasing to behold. In a paper
bag on a high shelf in that corner he had found it. It could have been
no relic of the lovewrecked Redruth, for its glorious soundness
repudiated the theory that it had lain on that musty shelf since
August. No doubt some recent bivouackers, lunching in the deserted
house, had left it there.

Dunwoody—again his exploits demand for him the honours of
nomenclature—flaunted his apple in the faces of his fellow-marooners.
“See what I found, Mrs. McFarland!” he cried, vaingloriously. He held
the apple high up in the light of the fire, where it glowed a still
richer red. The lady passenger smiled calmly—always calmly.

“What a charming apple!” she murmured, clearly.

For a brief space Judge Menefee felt crushed, humiliated, relegated.
Second place galled him. Why had this blatant, obtrusive, unpolished
man of windmills been selected by Fate instead of himself to discover
the sensational apple? He could have made of the act a scene, a
function, a setting for some impromptu, fanciful discourse or piece of
comedy—and have retained the role of cynosure. Actually, the lady
passenger was regarding this ridiculous Dunboddy or Woodbundy with an
admiring smile, as if the fellow had performed a feat! And the windmill
man swelled and gyrated like a sample of his own goods, puffed up with
the wind that ever blows from the chorus land toward the domain of the
star.

While the transported Dunwoody, with his Aladdin’s apple, was receiving
the fickle attentions of all, the resourceful jurist formed a plan to
recover his own laurels.

With his courtliest smile upon his heavy but classic features, Judge
Menefee advanced, and took the apple, as if to examine it, from the
hand of Dunwoody. In his hand it became Exhibit A.

“A fine apple,” he said, approvingly. “Really, my dear Mr. Dudwindy,
you have eclipsed all of us as a forager. But I have an idea. This
apple shall become an emblem, a token, a symbol, a prize bestowed by
the mind and heart of beauty upon the most deserving.”

The audience, except one, applauded. “Good on the stump, ain’t he?”
commented the passenger who was nobody in particular to the young man
who had an Agency.

The unresponsive one was the windmill man. He saw himself reduced to
the ranks. Never would the thought have occurred to him to declare his
apple an emblem. He had intended, after it had been divided and eaten,
to create diversion by sticking the seeds against his forehead and
naming them for young ladies of his acquaintance. One he was going to
name Mrs. McFarland. The seed that fell off first would be—but ’twas
too late now.

“The apple,” continued Judge Menefee, charging his jury, “in modern
days occupies, though undeservedly, a lowly place in our esteem.
Indeed, it is so constantly associated with the culinary and the
commercial that it is hardly to be classed among the polite fruits. But
in ancient times this was not so. Biblical, historical, and
mythological lore abounds with evidences that the apple was the
aristocrat of fruits. We still say ‘the apple of the eye’ when we wish
to describe something superlatively precious. We find in Proverbs the
comparison to ‘apples of silver.’ No other product of tree or vine has
been so utilised in figurative speech. Who has not heard of and longed
for the ‘apples of the Hesperides’? I need not call your attention to
the most tremendous and significant instance of the apple’s ancient
prestige when its consumption by our first parents occasioned the fall
of man from his state of goodness and perfection.”

“Apples like them,” said the windmill man, lingering with the objective
article, “are worth $3.50 a barrel in the Chicago market.”

“Now, what I have to propose,” said Judge Menefee, conceding an
indulgent smile to his interrupter, “is this: We must remain here,
perforce, until morning. We have wood in plenty to keep us warm. Our
next need is to entertain ourselves as best we can, in order that the
time shall not pass too slowly. I propose that we place this apple in
the hands of Miss Garland. It is no longer a fruit, but, as I said, a
prize, in award, representing a great human idea. Miss Garland,
herself, shall cease to be an individual—but only temporarily, I am
happy to add”—(a low bow, full of the old-time grace). “She shall
represent her sex; she shall be the embodiment, the epitome of
womankind—the heart and brain, I may say, of God’s masterpiece of
creation. In this guise she shall judge and decide the question which
follows:

“But a few minutes ago our friend, Mr. Rose, favoured us with an
entertaining but fragmentary sketch of the romance in the life of the
former professor of this habitation. The few facts that we have learned
seem to me to open up a fascinating field for conjecture, for the study
of human hearts, for the exercise of the imagination—in short, for
story-telling. Let us make use of the opportunity. Let each one of us
relate his own version of the story of Redruth, the hermit, and his
lady-love, beginning where Mr. Rose’s narrative ends—at the parting of
the lovers at the gate. This much should be assumed and conceded—that
the young lady was not necessarily to blame for Redruth’s becoming a
crazed and world-hating hermit. When we have done, Miss Garland shall
render the JUDGEMENT OF WOMAN. As the Spirit of her Sex she shall
decide which version of the story best and most truly depicts human and
love interest, and most faithfully estimates the character and acts of
Redruth’s betrothed according to the feminine view. The apple shall be
bestowed upon him who is awarded the decision. If you are all agreed,
we shall be pleased to hear the first story from Mr. Dinwiddie.”

The last sentence captured the windmill man. He was not one to linger
in the dumps.

“That’s a first-rate scheme, Judge,” he said, heartily. “Be a regular
short-story vaudeville, won’t it? I used to be correspondent for a
paper in Springfield, and when there wasn’t any news I faked it. Guess
I can do my turn all right.”

“I think the idea is charming,” said the lady passenger, brightly. “It
will be almost like a game.”

Judge Menefee stepped forward and placed the apple in her hand
impressively.

“In olden days,” he said, orotundly, “Paris awarded the golden apple to
the most beautiful.”

“I was at the Exposition,” remarked the windmill man, now cheerful
again, “but I never heard of it. And I was on the Midway, too, all the
time I wasn’t at the machinery exhibit.”

“But now,” continued the Judge, “the fruit shall translate to us the
mystery and wisdom of the feminine heart. Take the apple, Miss Garland.
Hear our modest tales of romance, and then award the prize as you may
deem it just.”

The lady passenger smiled sweetly. The apple lay in her lap beneath her
robes and wraps. She reclined against her protecting bulwark, brightly
and cosily at ease. But for the voices and the wind one might have
listened hopefully to hear her purr. Someone cast fresh logs upon the
fire. Judge Menefee nodded suavely. “Will you oblige us with the
initial story?” he asked.

The windmill man sat as sits a Turk, with his hat well back on his head
on account of the draughts.

“Well,” he began, without any embarrassment, “this is about the way I
size up the difficulty: Of course Redruth was jostled a good deal by
this duck who had money to play ball with who tried to cut him out of
his girl. So he goes around, naturally, and asks her if the game is
still square. Well, nobody wants a guy cutting in with buggies and gold
bonds when he’s got an option on a girl. Well, he goes around to see
her. Well, maybe he’s hot, and talks like the proprietor, and forgets
that an engagement ain’t always a lead-pipe cinch. Well, I guess that
makes Alice warm under the lacy yoke. Well, she answers back sharp.
Well, he—”

“Say!” interrupted the passenger who was nobody in particular, “if you
could put up a windmill on every one of them ‘wells’ you’re using,
you’d be able to retire from business, wouldn’t you?”

The windmill man grinned good-naturedly.

“Oh, I ain’t no _Guy de Mopassong_,” he said, cheerfully. “I’m giving
it to you in straight American. Well, she says something like this:
‘Mr. Gold Bonds is only a friend,’ says she; ‘but he takes me riding
and buys me theatre tickets, and that’s what you never do. Ain’t I to
never have any pleasure in life while I can?’ ‘Pass this
chatfield-chatfield thing along,’ says Redruth;—‘hand out the mitt to
the Willie with creases in it or you don’t put your slippers under my
wardrobe.’

“Now that kind of train orders don’t go with a girl that’s got any
spirit. I bet that girl loved her honey all the time. Maybe she only
wanted, as girls do, to work the good thing for a little fun and
caramels before she settled down to patch George’s other pair, and be a
good wife. But he is glued to the high horse, and won’t come down.
Well, she hands him back the ring, proper enough; and George goes away
and hits the booze. Yep. That’s what done it. I bet that girl fired the
cornucopia with the fancy vest two days after her steady left. George
boards a freight and checks his bag of crackers for parts unknown. He
sticks to Old Booze for a number of years; and then the aniline and
aquafortis gets the decision. ‘Me for the hermit’s hut,’ says George,
‘and the long whiskers, and the buried can of money that isn’t there.’

“But that Alice, in my mind, was on the level. She never married, but
took up typewriting as soon as the wrinkles began to show, and kept a
cat that came when you said ‘weeny—weeny—weeny!’ I got too much faith
in good women to believe they throw down the fellow they’re stuck on
every time for the dough.” The windmill man ceased.

“I think,” said the lady passenger, slightly moving upon her lowly
throne, “that that is a char—”

“Oh, Miss Garland!” interposed Judge Menefee, with uplifted hand, “I
beg of you, no comments! It would not be fair to the other contestants.
Mr.—er—will you take the next turn?” The Judge addressed the young man
who had the Agency.

“My version of the romance,” began the young man, diffidently clasping
his hands, “would be this: They did not quarrel when they parted. Mr.
Redruth bade her good-by and went out into the world to seek his
fortune. He knew his love would remain true to him. He scorned the
thought that his rival could make an impression upon a heart so fond
and faithful. I would say that Mr. Redruth went out to the Rocky
Mountains in Wyoming to seek for gold. One day a crew of pirates landed
and captured him while at work, and—”

“Hey! what’s that?” sharply called the passenger who was nobody in
particular—“a crew of pirates landed in the Rocky Mountains! Will you
tell us how they sailed—”

“Landed from a train,” said the narrator, quietly and not without some
readiness. “They kept him prisoner in a cave for months, and then they
took him hundreds of miles away to the forests of Alaska. There a
beautiful Indian girl fell in love with him, but he remained true to
Alice. After another year of wandering in the woods, he set out with
the diamonds—”

“What diamonds?” asked the unimportant passenger, almost with acerbity.

“The ones the saddlemaker showed him in the Peruvian temple,” said the
other, somewhat obscurely. “When he reached home, Alice’s mother led
him, weeping, to a green mound under a willow tree. ‘Her heart was
broken when you left,’ said her mother. ‘And what of my rival—of
Chester McIntosh?’ asked Mr. Redruth, as he knelt sadly by Alice’s
grave. ‘When he found out,’ she answered, ‘that her heart was yours, he
pined away day by day until, at length, he started a furniture store in
Grand Rapids. We heard lately that he was bitten to death by an
infuriated moose near South Bend, Ind., where he had gone to try to
forget scenes of civilisation.’ With which, Mr. Redruth forsook the
face of mankind and became a hermit, as we have seen.

“My story,” concluded the young man with an Agency, “may lack the
literary quality; but what I wanted it to show is that the young lady
remained true. She cared nothing for wealth in comparison with true
affection. I admire and believe in the fair sex too much to think
otherwise.”

The narrator ceased, with a sidelong glance at the corner where
reclined the lady passenger.

Bildad Rose was next invited by Judge Menefee to contribute his story
in the contest for the apple of judgment. The stage-driver’s essay was
brief.

“I’m not one of them lobo wolves,” he said, “who are always blaming on
women the calamities of life. My testimony in regards to the fiction
story you ask for, Judge, will be about as follows: What ailed Redruth
was pure laziness. If he had up and slugged this Percival De Lacey that
tried to give him the outside of the road, and had kept Alice in the
grape-vine swing with the blind-bridle on, all would have been well.
The woman you want is sure worth taking pains for.

“‘Send for me if you want me again,’ says Redruth, and hoists his
Stetson, and walks off. He’d have called it pride, but the
nixycomlogical name for it is laziness. No woman don’t like to run
after a man. ‘Let him come back, hisself,’ says the girl; and I’ll be
bound she tells the boy with the pay ore to trot; and then spends her
time watching out the window for the man with the empty pocket-book and
the tickly moustache.

“I reckon Redruth waits about nine year expecting her to send him a
note by a nigger asking him to forgive her. But she don’t. ‘This game
won’t work,’ says Redruth; ‘then so won’t I.’ And he goes in the hermit
business and raises whiskers. Yes; laziness and whiskers was what done
the trick. They travel together. You ever hear of a man with long
whiskers and hair striking a bonanza? No. Look at the Duke of
Marlborough and this Standard Oil snoozer. Have they got ’em?

“Now, this Alice didn’t never marry, I’ll bet a hoss. If Redruth had
married somebody else she might have done so, too. But he never turns
up. She has these here things they call fond memories, and maybe a lock
of hair and a corset steel that he broke, treasured up. Them sort of
articles is as good as a husband to some women. I’d say she played out
a lone hand. I don’t blame no woman for old man Redruth’s abandonment
of barber shops and clean shirts.”

Next in order came the passenger who was nobody in particular. Nameless
to us, he travels the road from Paradise to Sunrise City.

But him you shall see, if the firelight be not too dim, as he responds
to the Judge’s call.

A lean form, in rusty-brown clothing, sitting like a frog, his arms
wrapped about his legs, his chin resting upon his knees. Smooth,
oakum-coloured hair; long nose; mouth like a satyr’s, with upturned,
tobacco-stained corners. An eye like a fish’s; a red necktie with a
horseshoe pin. He began with a rasping chuckle that gradually formed
itself into words.

“Everybody wrong so far. What! a romance without any orange blossoms!
Ho, ho! My money on the lad with the butterfly tie and the certified
checks in his trouserings.

“Take ’em as they parted at the gate? All right. ‘You never loved me,’
says Redruth, wildly, ‘or you wouldn’t speak to a man who can buy you
the ice-cream.’ ‘I hate him,’ says she. ‘I loathe his side-bar buggy; I
despise the elegant cream bonbons he sends me in gilt boxes covered
with real lace; I feel that I could stab him to the heart when he
presents me with a solid medallion locket with turquoises and pearls
running in a vine around the border. Away with him! ’Tis only you I
love.’ ‘Back to the cosy corner!’ says Redruth. ‘Was I bound and
lettered in East Aurora? Get platonic, if you please. No jack-pots for
mine. Go and hate your friend some more. For me the Nickerson girl on
Avenue B, and gum, and a trolley ride.’

“Around that night comes John W. Croesus. ‘What! tears?’ says he,
arranging his pearl pin. ‘You have driven my lover away,’ says little
Alice, sobbing: ‘I hate the sight of you.’ ‘Marry me, then,’ says John
W., lighting a Henry Clay. ‘What!’ she cries indignantly, ‘marry you!
Never,’ she says, ‘until this blows over, and I can do some shopping,
and you see about the licence. There’s a telephone next door if you
want to call up the county clerk.’”

The narrator paused to give vent to his cynical chuckle.

“Did they marry?” he continued. “Did the duck swallow the June-bug? And
then I take up the case of Old Boy Redruth. There’s where you are all
wrong again, according to my theory. What turned him into a hermit? One
says laziness; one says remorse; one says booze. I say women did it.
How old is the old man now?” asked the speaker, turning to Bildad Rose.

“I should say about sixty-five.”

“All right. He conducted his hermit shop here for twenty years. Say he
was twenty-five when he took off his hat at the gate. That leaves
twenty years for him to account for, or else be docked. Where did he
spend that ten and two fives? I’ll give you my idea. Up for bigamy. Say
there was the fat blonde in Saint Jo, and the panatela brunette at
Skillet Ridge, and the gold tooth down in the Kaw valley. Redruth gets
his cases mixed, and they send him up the road. He gets out after they
are through with him, and says: ‘Any line for me except the crinoline.
The hermit trade is not overdone, and the stenographers never apply to
’em for work. The jolly hermit’s life for me. No more long hairs in the
comb or dill pickles lying around in the cigar tray.’ You tell me they
pinched old Redruth for the noodle villa just because he said he was
King Solomon? Figs! He _was_ Solomon. That’s all of mine. I guess it
don’t call for any apples. Enclosed find stamps. It don’t sound much
like a prize winner.”

Respecting the stricture laid by Judge Menefee against comments upon
the stories, all were silent when the passenger who was nobody in
particular had concluded. And then the ingenious originator of the
contest cleared his throat to begin the ultimate entry for the prize.
Though seated with small comfort upon the floor, you might search in
vain for any abatement of dignity in Judge Menefee. The now diminishing
firelight played softly upon his face, as clearly chiselled as a Roman
emperor’s on some old coin, and upon the thick waves of his honourable
grey hair.

“A woman’s heart!” he began, in even but thrilling tones—“who can hope
to fathom it? The ways and desires of men are various. I think that the
hearts of all women beat with the same rhythm, and to the same old tune
of love. Love, to a woman, means sacrifice. If she be worthy of the
name, no gold or rank will outweigh with her a genuine devotion.

“Gentlemen of the—er—I should say, my friends, the case of Redruth
_versus_ love and affection has been called. Yet, who is on trial? Not
Redruth, for he has been punished. Not those immortal passions that
clothe our lives with the joy of the angels. Then who? Each man of us
here to-night stands at the bar to answer if chivalry or darkness
inhabits his bosom. To judge us sits womankind in the form of one of
its fairest flowers. In her hand she holds the prize, intrinsically
insignificant, but worthy of our noblest efforts to win as a guerdon of
approval from so worthy a representative of feminine judgment and
taste.

“In taking up the imaginary history of Redruth and the fair being to
whom he gave his heart, I must, in the beginning, raise my voice
against the unworthy insinuation that the selfishness or perfidy or
love of luxury of any woman drove him to renounce the world. I have not
found woman to be so unspiritual or venal. We must seek elsewhere,
among man’s baser nature and lower motives for the cause.

“There was, in all probability, a lover’s quarrel as they stood at the
gate on that memorable day. Tormented by jealousy, young Redruth
vanished from his native haunts. But had he just cause to do so? There
is no evidence for or against. But there is something higher than
evidence; there is the grand, eternal belief in woman’s goodness, in
her steadfastness against temptation, in her loyalty even in the face
of proffered riches.

“I picture to myself the rash lover, wandering, self-tortured, about
the world. I picture his gradual descent, and, finally, his complete
despair when he realises that he has lost the most precious gift life
had to offer him. Then his withdrawal from the world of sorrow and the
subsequent derangement of his faculties becomes intelligible.

“But what do I see on the other hand? A lonely woman fading away as the
years roll by; still faithful, still waiting, still watching for a form
and listening for a step that will come no more. She is old now. Her
hair is white and smoothly banded. Each day she sits at the door and
gazes longingly down the dusty road. In spirit she is waiting there at
the gate, just as he left her—his forever, but not here below. Yes; my
belief in woman paints that picture in my mind. Parted forever on
earth, but waiting! She in anticipation of a meeting in Elysium; he in
the Slough of Despond.”

“I thought he was in the bughouse,” said the passenger who was nobody
in particular.

Judge Menefee stirred, a little impatiently. The men sat, drooping, in
grotesque attitudes. The wind had abated its violence; coming now in
fitful, virulent puffs. The fire had burned to a mass of red coals
which shed but a dim light within the room. The lady passenger in her
cosy nook looked to be but a formless dark bulk, crowned by a mass of
coiled, sleek hair and showing but a small space of snowy forehead
above her clinging boa.

Judge Menefee got stiffly to his feet.

“And now, Miss Garland,” he announced, “we have concluded. It is for
you to award the prize to the one of us whose argument—especially, I
may say, in regard to his estimate of true womanhood—approaches nearest
to your own conception.”

No answer came from the lady passenger. Judge Menefee bent over
solicitously. The passenger who was nobody in particular laughed low
and harshly. The lady was sleeping sweetly. The Judge essayed to take
her hand to awaken her. In doing so he touched a small, cold, round,
irregular something in her lap.

“She has eaten the apple,” announced Judge Menefee, in awed tones, as
he held up the core for them to see.




XIII
THE MISSING CHORD


I stopped overnight at the sheep-ranch of Rush Kinney, on the Sandy
Fork of the Nueces. Mr. Kinney and I had been strangers up to the time
when I called “Hallo!” at his hitching-rack; but from that moment until
my departure on the next morning we were, according to the Texas code,
undeniable friends.

After supper the ranchman and I lugged our chairs outside the two-room
house, to its floorless gallery roofed with chaparral and sacuista
grass. With the rear legs of our chairs sinking deep into the
hardpacked loam, each of us reposed against an elm pillar of the
structure and smoked El Toro tobacco, while we wrangled amicably
concerning the affairs of the rest of the world.

As for conveying adequate conception of the engaging charm of that
prairie evening, despair waits upon it. It is a bold chronicler who
will undertake the description of a Texas night in the early spring. An
inventory must suffice.

The ranch rested upon the summit of a lenient slope. The ambient
prairie, diversified by arroyos and murky patches of brush and pear,
lay around us like a darkened bowl at the bottom of which we reposed as
dregs. Like a turquoise cover the sky pinned us there. The miraculous
air, heady with ozone and made memorably sweet by leagues of wild
flowerets, gave tang and savour to the breath. In the sky was a great,
round, mellow searchlight which we knew to be no moon, but the dark
lantern of summer, who came to hunt northward the cowering spring. In
the nearest corral a flock of sheep lay silent until a groundless panic
would send a squad of them huddling together with a drumming rush. For
other sounds a shrill family of coyotes yapped beyond the shearing-pen,
and whippoorwills twittered in the long grass. But even these
dissonances hardly rippled the clear torrent of the mocking-birds’
notes that fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs and trees. It would
not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and essay to touch the
stars, they hung so bright and imminent.

Mr. Kinney’s wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the house.
She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of duties, in
which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and contented
pride. In one room we had supped. Presently, from the other, as Kinney
and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and brilliant music.
If I could justly estimate the art of piano-playing, the construer of
that rollicking fantasia had creditably mastered the secrets of the
keyboard. A piano, and one so well played, seemed to me to be an
unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising ranch-house. I must
have looked my surprise at Rush Kinney, for he laughed in his soft,
Southern way, and nodded at me through the moonlit haze of our
cigarettes.

“You don’t often hear as agreeable a noise as that on a sheep-ranch,”
he remarked; “but I never see any reason for not playing up to the arts
and graces just because we happen to live out in the brush. It’s a
lonesome life for a woman; and if a little music can make it any
better, why not have it? That’s the way I look at it.”

“A wise and generous theory,” I assented. “And Mrs. Kinney plays well.
I am not learned in the science of music, but I should call her an
uncommonly good performer. She has technic and more than ordinary
power.”

The moon was very bright, you will understand, and I saw upon Kinney’s
face a sort of amused and pregnant expression, as though there were
things behind it that might be expounded.

“You came up the trail from the Double-Elm Fork,” he said promisingly.
“As you crossed it you must have seen an old deserted _jacal_ to your
left under a comma mott.”

“I did,” said I. “There was a drove of _javalis_ rooting around it. I
could see by the broken corrals that no one lived there.”

“That’s where this music proposition started,” said Kinney. “I don’t
mind telling you about it while we smoke. That’s where old Cal Adams
lived. He had about eight hundred graded merinos and a daughter that
was solid silk and as handsome as a new stake-rope on a thirty-dollar
pony. And I don’t mind telling you that I was guilty in the second
degree of hanging around old Cal’s ranch all the time I could spare
away from lambing and shearing. Miss Marilla was her name; and I had
figured it out by the rule of two that she was destined to become the
chatelaine and lady superior of Rancho Lomito, belonging to R. Kinney,
Esq., where you are now a welcome and honoured guest.

“I will say that old Cal wasn’t distinguished as a sheepman. He was a
little, old stoop-shouldered _hombre_ about as big as a gun scabbard,
with scraggy white whiskers, and condemned to the continuous use of
language. Old Cal was so obscure in his chosen profession that he
wasn’t even hated by the cowmen. And when a sheepman don’t get eminent
enough to acquire the hostility of the cattlemen, he is mighty apt to
die unwept and considerably unsung.

“But that Marilla girl was a benefit to the eye. And she was the most
elegant kind of a housekeeper. I was the nearest neighbour, and I used
to ride over to the Double-Elm anywhere from nine to sixteen times a
week with fresh butter or a quarter of venison or a sample of new
sheep-dip just as a frivolous excuse to see Marilla. Marilla and me got
to be extensively inveigled with each other, and I was pretty sure I
was going to get my rope around her neck and lead her over to the
Lomito. Only she was so everlastingly permeated with filial sentiments
toward old Cal that I never could get her to talk about serious
matters.

“You never saw anybody in your life that was as full of knowledge and
had less sense than old Cal. He was advised about all the branches of
information contained in learning, and he was up to all the rudiments
of doctrines and enlightenment. You couldn’t advance him any ideas on
any of the parts of speech or lines of thought. You would have thought
he was a professor of the weather and politics and chemistry and
natural history and the origin of derivations. Any subject you brought
up old Cal could give you an abundant synopsis of it from the Greek
root up to the time it was sacked and on the market.

“One day just after the fall shearing I rides over to the Double-Elm
with a lady’s magazine about fashions for Marilla and a scientific
paper for old Cal.

“While I was tying my pony to a mesquite, out runs Marilla, ‘tickled to
death’ with some news that couldn’t wait.

“‘Oh, Rush,’ she says, all flushed up with esteem and gratification,
‘what do you think! Dad’s going to buy me a piano. Ain’t it grand? I
never dreamed I’d ever have one.”

“‘It’s sure joyful,’ says I. ‘I always admired the agreeable uproar of
a piano. It’ll be lots of company for you. That’s mighty good of Uncle
Cal to do that.’

“‘I’m all undecided,’ says Marilla, ‘between a piano and an organ. A
parlour organ is nice.’

“‘Either of ’em,’ says I, ‘is first-class for mitigating the lack of
noise around a sheep-ranch. For my part,’ I says, ‘I shouldn’t like
anything better than to ride home of an evening and listen to a few
waltzes and jigs, with somebody about your size sitting on the
piano-stool and rounding up the notes.’

“‘Oh, hush about that,’ says Marilla, ‘and go on in the house. Dad
hasn’t rode out to-day. He’s not feeling well.’

“Old Cal was inside, lying on a cot. He had a pretty bad cold and
cough. I stayed to supper.

“‘Going to get Marilla a piano, I hear,’ says I to him.

“‘Why, yes, something of the kind, Rush,’ says he. ‘She’s been
hankering for music for a long spell; and I allow to fix her up with
something in that line right away. The sheep sheared six pounds all
round this fall; and I’m going to get Marilla an instrument if it takes
the price of the whole clip to do it.’

“‘_Star wayno_,’ says I. ‘The little girl deserves it.’

“‘I’m going to San Antone on the last load of wool,’ says Uncle Cal,
‘and select an instrument for her myself.’

“‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ I suggests, ‘to take Marilla along and let
her pick out one that she likes?’

“I might have known that would set Uncle Cal going. Of course, a man
like him, that knew everything about everything, would look at that as
a reflection on his attainments.

“‘No, sir, it wouldn’t,’ says he, pulling at his white whiskers. ‘There
ain’t a better judge of musical instruments in the whole world than
what I am. I had an uncle,’ says he, ‘that was a partner in a
piano-factory, and I’ve seen thousands of ’em put together. I know all
about musical instruments from a pipe-organ to a corn-stalk fiddle.
There ain’t a man lives, sir, that can tell me any news about any
instrument that has to be pounded, blowed, scraped, grinded, picked, or
wound with a key.’

“‘You get me what you like, dad,’ says Marilla, who couldn’t keep her
feet on the floor from joy. ‘Of course you know what to select. I’d
just as lief it was a piano or a organ or what.’

“‘I see in St. Louis once what they call a orchestrion,’ says Uncle
Cal, ‘that I judged was about the finest thing in the way of music ever
invented. But there ain’t room in this house for one. Anyway, I imagine
they’d cost a thousand dollars. I reckon something in the piano line
would suit Marilla the best. She took lessons in that respect for two
years over at Birdstail. I wouldn’t trust the buying of an instrument
to anybody else but myself. I reckon if I hadn’t took up sheep-raising
I’d have been one of the finest composers or piano-and-organ
manufacturers in the world.’

“That was Uncle Cal’s style. But I never lost any patience with him, on
account of his thinking so much of Marilla. And she thought just as
much of him. He sent her to the academy over at Birdstail for two years
when it took nearly every pound of wool to pay the expenses.

“Along about Tuesday Uncle Cal put out for San Antone on the last
wagonload of wool. Marilla’s uncle Ben, who lived in Birdstail, come
over and stayed at the ranch while Uncle Cal was gone.

“It was ninety miles to San Antone, and forty to the nearest
railroad-station, so Uncle Cal was gone about four days. I was over at
the Double-Elm when he came rolling back one evening about sundown. And
up there in the wagon, sure enough, was a piano or a organ—we couldn’t
tell which—all wrapped up in woolsacks, with a wagon-sheet tied over it
in case of rain. And out skips Marilla, hollering, ‘Oh, oh!’ with her
eyes shining and her hair a-flying. ‘Dad—dad,’ she sings out, ‘have you
brought it—have you brought it?’—and it right there before her eyes, as
women will do.

“‘Finest piano in San Antone,’ says Uncle Cal, waving his hand, proud.
‘Genuine rosewood, and the finest, loudest tone you ever listened to. I
heard the storekeeper play it, and I took it on the spot and paid cash
down.’

“Me and Ben and Uncle Cal and a Mexican lifted it out of the wagon and
carried it in the house and set it in a corner. It was one of them
upright instruments, and not very heavy or very big.

“And then all of a sudden Uncle Cal flops over and says he’s mighty
sick. He’s got a high fever, and he complains of his lungs. He gets
into bed, while me and Ben goes out to unhitch and put the horses in
the pasture, and Marilla flies around to get Uncle Cal something hot to
drink. But first she puts both arms on that piano and hugs it with a
soft kind of a smile, like you see kids doing with their Christmas
toys.

“When I came in from the pasture, Marilla was in the room where the
piano was. I could see by the strings and woolsacks on the floor that
she had had it unwrapped. But now she was tying the wagon-sheet over it
again, and there was a kind of solemn, whitish look on her face.

“‘Ain’t wrapping up the music again, are you, Marilla?’ I asks. ‘What’s
the matter with just a couple of tunes for to see how she goes under
the saddle?’

“‘Not to-night, Rush,’ says she. ‘I don’t want to play any to-night.
Dad’s too sick. Just think, Rush, he paid three hundred dollars for it
—nearly a third of what the wool-clip brought!’

“‘Well, it ain’t anyways in the neighbourhood of a third of what you
are worth,’ I told her. ‘And I don’t think Uncle Cal is too sick to
hear a little agitation of the piano-keys just to christen the machine.

“‘Not to-night, Rush,’ says Marilla, in a way that she had when she
wanted to settle things.

“But it seems that Uncle Cal was plenty sick, after all. He got so bad
that Ben saddled up and rode over to Birdstail for Doc Simpson. I
stayed around to see if I’d be needed for anything.

“When Uncle Cal’s pain let up on him a little he called Marilla and
says to her: ‘Did you look at your instrument, honey? And do you like
it?’

“‘It’s lovely, dad,’ says she, leaning down by his pillow; ‘I never saw
one so pretty. How dear and good it was of you to buy it for me!’

“‘I haven’t heard you play on it any yet,’ says Uncle Cal; ‘and I’ve
been listening. My side don’t hurt quite so bad now—won’t you play a
piece, Marilla?’

“But no; she puts Uncle Cal off and soothes him down like you’ve seen
women do with a kid. It seems she’s made up her mind not to touch that
piano at present.

“When Doc Simpson comes over he tells us that Uncle Cal has pneumonia
the worst kind; and as the old man was past sixty and nearly on the
lift anyhow, the odds was against his walking on grass any more.

“On the fourth day of his sickness he calls for Marilla again and wants
to talk piano. Doc Simpson was there, and so was Ben and Mrs. Ben,
trying to do all they could.

“‘I’d have made a wonderful success in anything connected with music,’
says Uncle Cal. ‘I got the finest instrument for the money in San
Antone. Ain’t that piano all right in every respect, Marilla?’

“‘It’s just perfect, dad,’ says she. ‘It’s got the finest tone I ever
heard. But don’t you think you could sleep a little while now, dad?’

“‘No, I don’t,’ says Uncle Cal. ‘I want to hear that piano. I don’t
believe you’ve even tried it yet. I went all the way to San Antone and
picked it out for you myself. It took a third of the fall clip to buy
it; but I don’t mind that if it makes my good girl happier. Won’t you
play a little bit for dad, Marilla?’

“Doc Simpson beckoned Marilla to one side and recommended her to do
what Uncle Cal wanted, so it would get him quieted. And her uncle Ben
and his wife asked her, too.

“‘Why not hit out a tune or two with the soft pedal on?’ I asks
Marilla. ‘Uncle Cal has begged you so often. It would please him a good
deal to hear you touch up the piano he’s bought for you. Don’t you
think you might?’

“But Marilla stands there with big tears rolling down from her eyes and
says nothing. And then she runs over and slips her arm under Uncle
Cal’s neck and hugs him tight.

“‘Why, last night, dad,’ we heard her say, ‘I played it ever so much.
Honest—I have been playing it. And it’s such a splendid instrument, you
don’t know how I love it. Last night I played “Bonnie Dundee” and the
“Anvil Polka” and the “Blue Danube”—and lots of pieces. You must surely
have heard me playing a little, didn’t you, dad? I didn’t like to play
loud when you was so sick.’

“‘Well, well,’ says Uncle Cal, ‘maybe I did. Maybe I did and forgot
about it. My head is a little cranky at times. I heard the man in the
store play it fine. I’m mighty glad you like it, Marilla. Yes, I
believe I could go to sleep a while if you’ll stay right beside me till
I do.’

“There was where Marilla had me guessing. Much as she thought of that
old man, she wouldn’t strike a note on that piano that he’d bought her.
I couldn’t imagine why she told him she’d been playing it, for the
wagon-sheet hadn’t ever been off of it since she put it back on the
same day it come. I knew she could play a little anyhow, for I’d once
heard her snatch some pretty fair dance-music out of an old piano at
the Charco Largo Ranch.

“Well, in about a week the pneumonia got the best of Uncle Cal. They
had the funeral over at Birdstail, and all of us went over. I brought
Marilla back home in my buckboard. Her uncle Ben and his wife were
going to stay there a few days with her.

“That night Marilla takes me in the room where the piano was, while the
others were out on the gallery.

“‘Come here, Rush,’ says she; ‘I want you to see this now.’

“She unties the rope, and drags off the wagon-sheet.

“If you ever rode a saddle without a horse, or fired off a gun that
wasn’t loaded, or took a drink out of an empty bottle, why, then you
might have been able to scare an opera or two out of the instrument
Uncle Cal had bought.

“Instead of a piano, it was one of the machines they’ve invented to
play the piano with. By itself it was about as musical as the holes of
a flute without the flute.

“And that was the piano that Uncle Cal had selected; and standing by it
was the good, fine, all-wool girl that never let him know it.

“And what you heard playing a while ago,” concluded Mr. Kinney, “was
that same deputy-piano machine; only just at present it’s shoved up
against a six-hundred-dollar piano that I bought for Marilla as soon as
we was married.”




XIV
A CALL LOAN


In those days the cattlemen were the anointed. They were the grandees
of the grass, kings of the kine, lords of the lea, barons of beef and
bone. They might have ridden in golden chariots had their tastes so
inclined. The cattleman was caught in a stampede of dollars. It seemed
to him that he had more money than was decent. But when he had bought a
watch with precious stones set in the case so large that they hurt his
ribs, and a California saddle with silver nails and Angora skin
_suaderos_, and ordered everybody up to the bar for whisky—what else
was there for him to spend money for?

Not so circumscribed in expedient for the reduction of surplus wealth
were those lairds of the lariat who had womenfolk to their name. In the
breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may slumber
through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does it become
extinct.

So, out of the chaparral came Long Bill Longley from the Bar Circle
Branch on the Frio—a wife-driven man—to taste the urban joys of
success. Something like half a million dollars he had, with an income
steadily increasing.

Long Bill was a graduate of the camp and trail. Luck and thrift, a cool
head, and a telescopic eye for mavericks had raised him from cowboy to
be a cowman. Then came the boom in cattle, and Fortune, stepping
gingerly among the cactus thorns, came and emptied her cornucopia at
the doorstep of the ranch.

In the little frontier city of Chaparosa, Longley built a costly
residence. Here he became a captive, bound to the chariot of social
existence. He was doomed to become a leading citizen. He struggled for
a time like a mustang in his first corral, and then he hung up his
quirt and spurs. Time hung heavily on his hands. He organised the First
National Bank of Chaparosa, and was elected its president.

One day a dyspeptic man, wearing double-magnifying glasses, inserted an
official-looking card between the bars of the cashier’s window of the
First National Bank. Five minutes later the bank force was dancing at
the beck and call of a national bank examiner.

This examiner, Mr. J. Edgar Todd, proved to be a thorough one.

At the end of it all the examiner put on his hat, and called the
president, Mr. William R. Longley, into the private office.

“Well, how do you find things?” asked Longley, in his slow, deep tones.
“Any brands in the round-up you didn’t like the looks of?”

“The bank checks up all right, Mr. Longley,” said Todd; “and I find
your loans in very good shape—with one exception. You are carrying one
very bad bit of paper—one that is so bad that I have been thinking that
you surely do not realise the serious position it places you in. I
refer to a call loan of $10,000 made to Thomas Merwin. Not only is the
amount in excess of the maximum sum the bank can loan any individual
legally, but it is absolutely without endorsement or security. Thus you
have doubly violated the national banking laws, and have laid yourself
open to criminal prosecution by the Government. A report of the matter
to the Comptroller of the Currency—which I am bound to make—would, I am
sure, result in the matter being turned over to the Department of
Justice for action. You see what a serious thing it is.”

Bill Longley was leaning his lengthy, slowly moving frame back in his
swivel chair. His hands were clasped behind his head, and he turned a
little to look the examiner in the face. The examiner was surprised to
see a smile creep about the rugged mouth of the banker, and a kindly
twinkle in his light-blue eyes. If he saw the seriousness of the
affair, it did not show in his countenance.

“Of course, you don’t know Tom Merwin,” said Longley, almost genially.
“Yes, I know about that loan. It hasn’t any security except Tom
Merwin’s word. Somehow, I’ve always found that when a man’s word is
good it’s the best security there is. Oh, yes, I know the Government
doesn’t think so. I guess I’ll see Tom about that note.”

Mr. Todd’s dyspepsia seemed to grow suddenly worse. He looked at the
chaparral banker through his double-magnifying glasses in amazement.

“You see,” said Longley, easily explaining the thing away, “Tom heard
of 2000 head of two-year-olds down near Rocky Ford on the Rio Grande
that could be had for $8 a head. I reckon ’twas one of old Leandro
Garcia’s outfits that he had smuggled over, and he wanted to make a
quick turn on ’em. Those cattle are worth $15 on the hoof in Kansas
City. Tom knew it and I knew it. He had $6,000, and I let him have the
$10,000 to make the deal with. His brother Ed took ’em on to market
three weeks ago. He ought to be back ’most any day now with the money.
When he comes Tom’ll pay that note.”

The bank examiner was shocked. It was, perhaps, his duty to step out to
the telegraph office and wire the situation to the Comptroller. But he
did not. He talked pointedly and effectively to Longley for three
minutes. He succeeded in making the banker understand that he stood
upon the border of a catastrophe. And then he offered a tiny loophole
of escape.

“I am going to Hilldale’s to-night,” he told Longley, “to examine a
bank there. I will pass through Chaparosa on my way back. At twelve
o’clock to-morrow I shall call at this bank. If this loan has been
cleared out of the way by that time it will not be mentioned in my
report. If not—I will have to do my duty.”

With that the examiner bowed and departed.

The President of the First National lounged in his chair half an hour
longer, and then he lit a mild cigar, and went over to Tom Merwin’s
house. Merwin, a ranchman in brown duck, with a contemplative eye, sat
with his feet upon a table, plaiting a rawhide quirt.

“Tom,” said Longley, leaning against the table, “you heard anything
from Ed yet?”

“Not yet,” said Merwin, continuing his plaiting. “I guess Ed’ll be
along back now in a few days.”

“There was a bank examiner,” said Longley, “nosing around our place
to-day, and he bucked a sight about that note of yours. You know I know
it’s all right, but the thing _is_ against the banking laws. I was
pretty sure you’d have paid it off before the bank was examined again,
but the son-of-a-gun slipped in on us, Tom. Now, I’m short of cash
myself just now, or I’d let you have the money to take it up with. I’ve
got till twelve o’clock to-morrow, and then I’ve got to show the cash
in place of that note or—”

“Or what, Bill?” asked Merwin, as Longley hesitated.

“Well, I suppose it means be jumped on with both of Uncle Sam’s feet.”

“I’ll try to raise the money for you on time,” said Merwin, interested
in his plaiting.

“All right, Tom,” concluded Longley, as he turned toward the door; “I
knew you would if you could.”

Merwin threw down his whip and went to the only other bank in town, a
private one, run by Cooper & Craig.

“Cooper,” he said, to the partner by that name, “I’ve got to have
$10,000 to-day or to-morrow. I’ve got a house and lot there that’s
worth about $6,000 and that’s all the actual collateral. But I’ve got a
cattle deal on that’s sure to bring me in more than that much profit
within a few days.”

Cooper began to cough.

“Now, for God’s sake don’t say no,” said Merwin. “I owe that much money
on a call loan. It’s been called, and the man that called it is a man
I’ve laid on the same blanket with in cow-camps and ranger-camps for
ten years. He can call anything I’ve got. He can call the blood out of
my veins and it’ll come. He’s got to have the money. He’s in a devil of
a—Well, he needs the money, and I’ve got to get it for him. You know my
word’s good, Cooper.”

“No doubt of it,” assented Cooper, urbanely, “but I’ve a partner, you
know. I’m not free in making loans. And even if you had the best
security in your hands, Merwin, we couldn’t accommodate you in less
than a week. We’re just making a shipment of $15,000 to Myer Brothers
in Rockdell, to buy cotton with. It goes down on the narrow-gauge
to-night. That leaves our cash quite short at present. Sorry we can’t
arrange it for you.”

Merwin went back to his little bare office and plaited at his quirt
again. About four o’clock in the afternoon he went to the First
National Bank and leaned over the railing of Longley’s desk.

“I’ll try to get that money for you to-night—I mean to-morrow, Bill.”

“All right, Tom,” said Longley quietly.

At nine o’clock that night Tom Merwin stepped cautiously out of the
small frame house in which he lived. It was near the edge of the little
town, and few citizens were in the neighbourhood at that hour. Merwin
wore two six-shooters in a belt, and a slouch hat. He moved swiftly
down a lonely street, and then followed the sandy road that ran
parallel to the narrow-gauge track until he reached the water-tank, two
miles below the town. There Tom Merwin stopped, tied a black silk
handkerchief about the lower part of his face, and pulled his hat down
low.

In ten minutes the night train for Rockdell pulled up at the tank,
having come from Chaparosa.

With a gun in each hand Merwin raised himself from behind a clump of
chaparral and started for the engine. But before he had taken three
steps, two long, strong arms clasped him from behind, and he was lifted
from his feet and thrown, face downward upon the grass. There was a
heavy knee pressing against his back, and an iron hand grasping each of
his wrists. He was held thus, like a child, until the engine had taken
water, and until the train had moved, with accelerating speed, out of
sight. Then he was released, and rose to his feet to face Bill Longley.

“The case never needed to be fixed up this way, Tom,” said Longley. “I
saw Cooper this evening, and he told me what you and him talked about.
Then I went down to your house to-night and saw you come out with your
guns on, and I followed you. Let’s go back, Tom.”

They walked away together, side by side.

“’Twas the only chance I saw,” said Merwin presently. “You called your
loan, and I tried to answer you. Now, what’ll you do, Bill, if they
sock it to you?”

“What would you have done if they’d socked it to you?” was the answer
Longley made.

“I never thought I’d lay in a bush to stick up a train,” remarked
Merwin; “but a call loan’s different. A call’s a call with me. We’ve
got twelve hours yet, Bill, before this spy jumps onto you. We’ve got
to raise them spondulicks somehow. Maybe we can—Great Sam Houston! do
you hear that?”

Merwin broke into a run, and Longley kept with him, hearing only a
rather pleasing whistle somewhere in the night rendering the lugubrious
air of “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

“It’s the only tune he knows,” shouted Merwin, as he ran. “I’ll bet—”

They were at the door of Merwin’s house. He kicked it open and fell
over an old valise lying in the middle of the floor. A sunburned,
firm-jawed youth, stained by travel, lay upon the bed puffing at a
brown cigarette.

“What’s the word, Ed?” gasped Merwin.

“So, so,” drawled that capable youngster. “Just got in on the 9:30.
Sold the bunch for fifteen, straight. Now, buddy, you want to quit
kickin’ a valise around that’s got $29,000 in greenbacks in its
in’ards.”




XV
THE PRINCESS AND THE PUMA


There had to be a king and queen, of course. The king was a terrible
old man who wore six-shooters and spurs, and shouted in such a
tremendous voice that the rattlers on the prairie would run into their
holes under the prickly pear. Before there was a royal family they
called the man “Whispering Ben.” When he came to own 50,000 acres of
land and more cattle than he could count, they called him O’Donnell
“the Cattle King.”

The queen had been a Mexican girl from Laredo. She made a good, mild,
Colorado-claro wife, and even succeeded in teaching Ben to modify his
voice sufficiently while in the house to keep the dishes from being
broken. When Ben got to be king she would sit on the gallery of
Espinosa Ranch and weave rush mats. When wealth became so irresistible
and oppressive that upholstered chairs and a centre table were brought
down from San Antone in the wagons, she bowed her smooth, dark head,
and shared the fate of the Danae.

To avoid _lèse-majesté_ you have been presented first to the king and
queen. They do not enter the story, which might be called “The
Chronicle of the Princess, the Happy Thought, and the Lion that Bungled
his Job.”

Josefa O’Donnell was the surviving daughter, the princess. From her
mother she inherited warmth of nature and a dusky, semi-tropic beauty.
From Ben O’Donnell the royal she acquired a store of intrepidity,
common sense, and the faculty of ruling. The combination was one worth
going miles to see. Josefa while riding her pony at a gallop could put
five out of six bullets through a tomato-can swinging at the end of a
string. She could play for hours with a white kitten she owned,
dressing it in all manner of absurd clothes. Scorning a pencil, she
could tell you out of her head what 1545 two-year-olds would bring on
the hoof, at $8.50 per head. Roughly speaking, the Espinosa Ranch is
forty miles long and thirty broad—but mostly leased land. Josefa, on
her pony, had prospected over every mile of it. Every cow-puncher on
the range knew her by sight and was a loyal vassal. Ripley Givens,
foreman of one of the Espinosa outfits, saw her one day, and made up
his mind to form a royal matrimonial alliance. Presumptuous? No. In
those days in the Nueces country a man was a man. And, after all, the
title of cattle king does not presuppose blood royalty. Often it only
signifies that its owner wears the crown in token of his magnificent
qualities in the art of cattle stealing.

One day Ripley Givens rode over to the Double Elm Ranch to inquire
about a bunch of strayed yearlings. He was late in setting out on his
return trip, and it was sundown when he struck the White Horse Crossing
of the Nueces. From there to his own camp it was sixteen miles. To the
Espinosa ranch it was twelve. Givens was tired. He decided to pass the
night at the Crossing.

There was a fine water hole in the river-bed. The banks were thickly
covered with great trees, undergrown with brush. Back from the water
hole fifty yards was a stretch of curly mesquite grass—supper for his
horse and bed for himself. Givens staked his horse, and spread out his
saddle blankets to dry. He sat down with his back against a tree and
rolled a cigarette. From somewhere in the dense timber along the river
came a sudden, rageful, shivering wail. The pony danced at the end of
his rope and blew a whistling snort of comprehending fear. Givens
puffed at his cigarette, but he reached leisurely for his pistol-belt,
which lay on the grass, and twirled the cylinder of his weapon
tentatively. A great gar plunged with a loud splash into the water
hole. A little brown rabbit skipped around a bunch of catclaw and sat
twitching his whiskers and looking humorously at Givens. The pony went
on eating grass.

It is well to be reasonably watchful when a Mexican lion sings soprano
along the arroyos at sundown. The burden of his song may be that young
calves and fat lambs are scarce, and that he has a carnivorous desire
for your acquaintance.

In the grass lay an empty fruit can, cast there by some former
sojourner. Givens caught sight of it with a grunt of satisfaction. In
his coat pocket tied behind his saddle was a handful or two of ground
coffee. Black coffee and cigarettes! What ranchero could desire more?

In two minutes he had a little fire going clearly. He started, with his
can, for the water hole. When within fifteen yards of its edge he saw,
between the bushes, a side-saddled pony with down-dropped reins
cropping grass a little distance to his left. Just rising from her
hands and knees on the brink of the water hole was Josefa O’Donnell.
She had been drinking water, and she brushed the sand from the palms of
her hands. Ten yards away, to her right, half concealed by a clump of
sacuista, Givens saw the crouching form of the Mexican lion. His amber
eyeballs glared hungrily; six feet from them was the tip of the tail
stretched straight, like a pointer’s. His hind-quarters rocked with the
motion of the cat tribe preliminary to leaping.

Givens did what he could. His six-shooter was thirty-five yards away
lying on the grass. He gave a loud yell, and dashed between the lion
and the princess.

The “rucus,” as Givens called it afterward, was brief and somewhat
confused. When he arrived on the line of attack he saw a dim streak in
the air, and heard a couple of faint cracks. Then a hundred pounds of
Mexican lion plumped down upon his head and flattened him, with a heavy
jar, to the ground. He remembered calling out: “Let up, now—no fair
gouging!” and then he crawled from under the lion like a worm, with his
mouth full of grass and dirt, and a big lump on the back of his head
where it had struck the root of a water-elm. The lion lay motionless.
Givens, feeling aggrieved, and suspicious of fouls, shook his fist at
the lion, and shouted: “I’ll rastle you again for twenty—” and then he
got back to himself.

Josefa was standing in her tracks, quietly reloading her silver-mounted
.38. It had not been a difficult shot. The lion’s head made an easier
mark than a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string. There was a
provoking, teasing, maddening smile upon her mouth and in her dark
eyes. The would-be-rescuing knight felt the fire of his fiasco burn
down to his soul. Here had been his chance, the chance that he had
dreamed of; and Momus, and not Cupid, had presided over it. The satyrs
in the wood were, no doubt, holding their sides in hilarious, silent
laughter. There had been something like vaudeville—say Signor Givens
and his funny knockabout act with the stuffed lion.

“Is that you, Mr. Givens?” said Josefa, in her deliberate, saccharine
contralto. “You nearly spoilt my shot when you yelled. Did you hurt
your head when you fell?”

“Oh, no,” said Givens, quietly; “that didn’t hurt.” He stooped
ignominiously and dragged his best Stetson hat from under the beast. It
was crushed and wrinkled to a fine comedy effect. Then he knelt down
and softly stroked the fierce, open-jawed head of the dead lion.

“Poor old Bill!” he exclaimed mournfully.

“What’s that?” asked Josefa, sharply.

“Of course you didn’t know, Miss Josefa,” said Givens, with an air of
one allowing magnanimity to triumph over grief. “Nobody can blame you.
I tried to save him, but I couldn’t let you know in time.”

“Save who?”

“Why, Bill. I’ve been looking for him all day. You see, he’s been our
camp pet for two years. Poor old fellow, he wouldn’t have hurt a
cottontail rabbit. It’ll break the boys all up when they hear about it.
But you couldn’t tell, of course, that Bill was just trying to play
with you.”

Josefa’s black eyes burned steadily upon him. Ripley Givens met the
test successfully. He stood rumpling the yellow-brown curls on his head
pensively. In his eye was regret, not unmingled with a gentle reproach.
His smooth features were set to a pattern of indisputable sorrow.
Josefa wavered.

“What was your pet doing here?” she asked, making a last stand.
“There’s no camp near the White Horse Crossing.”

“The old rascal ran away from camp yesterday,” answered Givens readily.
“It’s a wonder the coyotes didn’t scare him to death. You see, Jim
Webster, our horse wrangler, brought a little terrier pup into camp
last week. The pup made life miserable for Bill—he used to chase him
around and chew his hind legs for hours at a time. Every night when
bedtime came Bill would sneak under one of the boy’s blankets and sleep
to keep the pup from finding him. I reckon he must have been worried
pretty desperate or he wouldn’t have run away. He was always afraid to
get out of sight of camp.”

Josefa looked at the body of the fierce animal. Givens gently patted
one of the formidable paws that could have killed a yearling calf with
one blow. Slowly a red flush widened upon the dark olive face of the
girl. Was it the signal of shame of the true sportsman who has brought
down ignoble quarry? Her eyes grew softer, and the lowered lids drove
away all their bright mockery.

“I’m very sorry,” she said humbly; “but he looked so big, and jumped so
high that—”

“Poor old Bill was hungry,” interrupted Givens, in quick defence of the
deceased. “We always made him jump for his supper in camp. He would lie
down and roll over for a piece of meat. When he saw you he thought he
was going to get something to eat from you.”

Suddenly Josefa’s eyes opened wide.

“I might have shot you!” she exclaimed. “You ran right in between. You
risked your life to save your pet! That was fine, Mr. Givens. I like a
man who is kind to animals.”

Yes; there was even admiration in her gaze now. After all, there was a
hero rising out of the ruins of the anti-climax. The look on Givens’s
face would have secured him a high position in the S.P.C.A.

“I always loved ’em,” said he; “horses, dogs, Mexican lions, cows,
alligators—”

“I hate alligators,” instantly demurred Josefa; “crawly, muddy things!”

“Did I say alligators?” said Givens. “I meant antelopes, of course.”

Josefa’s conscience drove her to make further amends. She held out her
hand penitently. There was a bright, unshed drop in each of her eyes.

“Please forgive me, Mr. Givens, won’t you? I’m only a girl, you know,
and I was frightened at first. I’m very, very sorry I shot Bill. You
don’t know how ashamed I feel. I wouldn’t have done it for anything.”

Givens took the proffered hand. He held it for a time while he allowed
the generosity of his nature to overcome his grief at the loss of Bill.
At last it was clear that he had forgiven her.

“Please don’t speak of it any more, Miss Josefa. ’Twas enough to
frighten any young lady the way Bill looked. I’ll explain it all right
to the boys.”

“Are you really sure you don’t hate me?” Josefa came closer to him
impulsively. Her eyes were sweet—oh, sweet and pleading with gracious
penitence. “I would hate anyone who would kill my kitten. And how
daring and kind of you to risk being shot when you tried to save him!
How very few men would have done that!” Victory wrested from defeat!
Vaudeville turned into drama! Bravo, Ripley Givens!

It was now twilight. Of course Miss Josefa could not be allowed to ride
on to the ranch-house alone. Givens resaddled his pony in spite of that
animal’s reproachful glances, and rode with her. Side by side they
galloped across the smooth grass, the princess and the man who was kind
to animals. The prairie odours of fruitful earth and delicate bloom
were thick and sweet around them. Coyotes yelping over there on the
hill! No fear. And yet—

Josefa rode closer. A little hand seemed to grope. Givens found it with
his own. The ponies kept an even gait. The hands lingered together, and
the owner of one explained:

“I never was frightened before, but just think! How terrible it would
be to meet a really wild lion! Poor Bill! I’m so glad you came with
me!”

O’Donnell was sitting on the ranch gallery.

“Hello, Rip!” he shouted—“that you?”

“He rode in with me,” said Josefa. “I lost my way and was late.”

“Much obliged,” called the cattle king. “Stop over, Rip, and ride to
camp in the morning.”

But Givens would not. He would push on to camp. There was a bunch of
steers to start off on the trail at daybreak. He said good-night, and
trotted away.

An hour later, when the lights were out, Josefa, in her night-robe,
came to her door and called to the king in his own room across the
brick-paved hallway:

“Say, pop, you know that old Mexican lion they call the ‘Gotch-eared
Devil’—the one that killed Gonzales, Mr. Martin’s sheep herder, and
about fifty calves on the Salado range? Well, I settled his hash this
afternoon over at the White Horse Crossing. Put two balls in his head
with my .38 while he was on the jump. I knew him by the slice gone from
his left ear that old Gonzales cut off with his machete. You couldn’t
have made a better shot yourself, daddy.”

“Bully for you!” thundered Whispering Ben from the darkness of the
royal chamber.




XVI
THE INDIAN SUMMER OF DRY VALLEY JOHNSON


Dry Valley Johnson shook the bottle. You have to shake the bottle
before using; for sulphur will not dissolve. Then Dry Valley saturated
a small sponge with the liquid and rubbed it carefully into the roots
of his hair. Besides sulphur there was sugar of lead in it and tincture
of nux vomica and bay rum. Dry Valley found the recipe in a Sunday
newspaper. You must next be told why a strong man came to fall a victim
to a Beauty Hint.

Dry Valley had been a sheepman. His real name was Hector, but he had
been rechristened after his range to distinguish him from “Elm Creek”
Johnson, who ran sheep further down the Frio.

Many years of living face to face with sheep on their own terms wearied
Dry Valley Johnson. So, he sold his ranch for eighteen thousand dollars
and moved to Santa Rosa to live a life of gentlemanly ease. Being a
silent and melancholy person of thirty-five—or perhaps thirty-eight—he
soon became that cursed and earth-cumbering thing—an elderlyish
bachelor with a hobby. Some one gave him his first strawberry to eat,
and he was done for.

Dry Valley bought a four-room cottage in the village, and a library on
strawberry culture. Behind the cottage was a garden of which he made a
strawberry patch. In his old grey woolen shirt, his brown duck
trousers, and high-heeled boots he sprawled all day on a canvas cot
under a live-oak tree at his back door studying the history of the
seductive, scarlet berry.

The school teacher, Miss De Witt, spoke of him as “a fine, presentable
man, for all his middle age.” But, the focus of Dry Valley’s eyes
embraced no women. They were merely beings who flew skirts as a signal
for him to lift awkwardly his heavy, round-crowned, broad-brimmed felt
Stetson whenever he met them, and then hurry past to get back to his
beloved berries.

And all this recitative by the chorus is only to bring us to the point
where you may be told why Dry Valley shook up the insoluble sulphur in
the bottle. So long-drawn and inconsequential a thing is history—the
anamorphous shadow of a milestone reaching down the road between us and
the setting sun.

When his strawberries were beginning to ripen Dry Valley bought the
heaviest buggy whip in the Santa Rosa store. He sat for many hours
under the live oak tree plaiting and weaving in an extension to its
lash. When it was done he could snip a leaf from a bush twenty feet
away with the cracker. For the bright, predatory eyes of Santa Rosa
youth were watching the ripening berries, and Dry Valley was arming
himself against their expected raids. No greater care had he taken of
his tender lambs during his ranching days than he did of his cherished
fruit, warding it from the hungry wolves that whistled and howled and
shot their marbles and peered through the fence that surrounded his
property.

In the house next to Dry Valley’s lived a widow with a pack of children
that gave the husbandman frequent anxious misgivings. In the woman
there was a strain of the Spanish. She had wedded one of the name of
O’Brien. Dry Valley was a connoisseur in cross strains; and he foresaw
trouble in the offspring of this union.

Between the two homesteads ran a crazy picket fence overgrown with
morning glory and wild gourd vines. Often he could see little heads
with mops of black hair and flashing dark eyes dodging in and out
between the pickets, keeping tabs on the reddening berries.

Late one afternoon Dry Valley went to the post office. When he came
back, like Mother Hubbard he found the deuce to pay. The descendants of
Iberian bandits and Hibernian cattle raiders had swooped down upon his
strawberry patch. To the outraged vision of Dry Valley there seemed to
be a sheep corral full of them; perhaps they numbered five or six.
Between the rows of green plants they were stooped, hopping about like
toads, gobbling silently and voraciously his finest fruit.

Dry Valley slipped into the house, got his whip, and charged the
marauders. The lash curled about the legs of the nearest—a greedy
ten-year-old—before they knew they were discovered. His screech gave
warning; and the flock scampered for the fence like a drove of
_javelis_ flushed in the chaparral. Dry Valley’s whip drew a toll of
two more elfin shrieks before they dived through the vine-clad fence
and disappeared.

Dry Valley, less fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking
his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood,
voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act
of breathing and preserving the perpendicular.

Behind the bush stood Panchita O’Brien, scorning to fly. She was
nineteen, the oldest of the raiders. Her night-black hair was gathered
back in a wild mass and tied with a scarlet ribbon. She stood, with
reluctant feet, yet nearer the brook than to the river; for childhood
had environed and detained her.

She looked at Dry Valley Johnson for a moment with magnificent
insolence, and before his eyes slowly crunched a luscious berry between
her white teeth. Then she turned and walked slowly to the fence with a
swaying, conscious motion, such as a duchess might make use of in
leading a promenade. There she turned again and grilled Dry Valley
Johnson once more in the dark flame of her audacious eyes, laughed a
trifle school-girlishly, and twisted herself with pantherish quickness
between the pickets to the O’Brien side of the wild gourd vine.

Dry Valley picked up his whip and went into his house. He stumbled as
he went up the two wooden steps. The old Mexican woman who cooked his
meals and swept his house called him to supper as he went through the
rooms. Dry Valley went on, stumbled down the front steps, out the gate
and down the road into a mesquite thicket at the edge of town. He sat
down in the grass and laboriously plucked the spines from a prickly
pear, one by one. This was his attitude of thought, acquired in the
days when his problems were only those of wind and wool and water.

A thing had happened to the man—a thing that, if you are eligible, you
must pray may pass you by. He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer
of the Soul.

Dry Valley had had no youth. Even his childhood had been one of dignity
and seriousness. At six he had viewed the frivolous gambols of the
lambs on his father’s ranch with silent disapproval. His life as a
young man had been wasted. The divine fires and impulses, the glorious
exaltations and despairs, the glow and enchantment of youth had passed
above his head. Never a thrill of Romeo had he known; he was but a
melancholy Jaques of the forest with a ruder philosophy, lacking the
bitter-sweet flavour of experience that tempered the veteran years of
the rugged ranger of Arden. And now in his sere and yellow leaf one
scornful look from the eyes of Panchita O’Brien had flooded the
autumnal landscape with a tardy and delusive summer heat.

But a sheepman is a hardy animal. Dry Valley Johnson had weathered too
many northers to turn his back on a late summer, spiritual or real.
Old? He would show them.

By the next mail went an order to San Antonio for an outfit of the
latest clothes, colours and styles and prices no object. The next day
went the recipe for the hair restorer clipped from a newspaper; for Dry
Valley’s sunburned auburn hair was beginning to turn silvery above his
ears.

Dry Valley kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies
after youthful strawberry snatchers. Then, a few days later, he
suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated
midsummer madness.

A jay-bird-blue tennis suit covered him outwardly, almost as far as his
wrists and ankles. His shirt was ox-blood; his collar winged and tall;
his necktie a floating oriflamme; his shoes a venomous bright tan,
pointed and shaped on penitential lasts. A little flat straw hat with a
striped band desecrated his weather-beaten head. Lemon-coloured kid
gloves protected his oak-tough hands from the benignant May sunshine.
This sad and optic-smiting creature teetered out of its den, smiling
foolishly and smoothing its gloves for men and angels to see. To such a
pass had Dry Valley Johnson been brought by Cupid, who always shoots
game that is out of season with an arrow from the quiver of Momus.
Reconstructing mythology, he had risen, a prismatic macaw, from the
ashes of the grey-brown phoenix that had folded its tired wings to
roost under the trees of Santa Rosa.

Dry Valley paused in the street to allow Santa Rosans within sight of
him to be stunned; and then deliberately and slowly, as his shoes
required, entered Mrs. O’Brien’s gate.

Not until the eleven months’ drought did Santa Rosa cease talking about
Dry Valley Johnson’s courtship of Panchita O’Brien. It was an
unclassifiable procedure; something like a combination of cake-walking,
deaf-and-dumb oratory, postage stamp flirtation and parlour charades.
It lasted two weeks and then came to a sudden end.

Of course Mrs. O’Brien favoured the match as soon as Dry Valley’s
intentions were disclosed. Being the mother of a woman child, and
therefore a charter member of the Ancient Order of the Rat-trap, she
joyfully decked out Panchita for the sacrifice. The girl was
temporarily dazzled by having her dresses lengthened and her hair piled
up on her head, and came near forgetting that she was only a slice of
cheese. It was nice, too, to have as good a match as Mr. Johnson paying
you attentions and to see the other girls fluttering the curtains at
their windows to see you go by with him.

Dry Valley bought a buggy with yellow wheels and a fine trotter in San
Antonio. Every day he drove out with Panchita. He was never seen to
speak to her when they were walking or driving. The consciousness of
his clothes kept his mind busy; the knowledge that he could say nothing
of interest kept him dumb; the feeling that Panchita was there kept him
happy.

He took her to parties and dances, and to church. He tried—oh, no man
ever tried so hard to be young as Dry Valley did. He could not dance;
but he invented a smile which he wore on these joyous occasions, a
smile that, in him, was as great a concession to mirth and gaiety as
turning hand-springs would be in another. He began to seek the company
of the young men in the town—even of the boys. They accepted him as a
decided damper, for his attempts at sportiveness were so forced that
they might as well have essayed their games in a cathedral. Neither he
nor any other could estimate what progress he had made with Panchita.

The end came suddenly in one day, as often disappears the false
afterglow before a November sky and wind.

Dry Valley was to call for the girl one afternoon at six for a walk. An
afternoon walk in Santa Rosa was a feature of social life that called
for the pink of one’s wardrobe. So Dry Valley began gorgeously to array
himself; and so early that he finished early, and went over to the
O’Brien cottage. As he neared the porch on the crooked walk from the
gate he heard sounds of revelry within. He stopped and looked through
the honeysuckle vines in the open door.

Panchita was amusing her younger brothers and sisters. She wore a man’s
clothes—no doubt those of the late Mr. O’Brien. On her head was the
smallest brother’s straw hat decorated with an ink-striped paper band.
On her hands were flapping yellow cloth gloves, roughly cut out and
sewn for the masquerade. The same material covered her shoes, giving
them the semblance of tan leather. High collar and flowing necktie were
not omitted.

Panchita was an actress. Dry Valley saw his affectedly youthful gait,
his limp where the right shoe hurt him, his forced smile, his awkward
simulation of a gallant air, all reproduced with startling fidelity.
For the first time a mirror had been held up to him. The corroboration
of one of the youngsters calling, “Mamma, come and see Pancha do like
Mr. Johnson,” was not needed.

As softly as the caricatured tans would permit, Dry Valley tiptoed back
to the gate and home again.

Twenty minutes after the time appointed for the walk Panchita tripped
demurely out of her gate in a thin, trim white lawn and sailor hat. She
strolled up the sidewalk and slowed her steps at Dry Valley’s gate, her
manner expressing wonder at his unusual delinquency.

Then out of his door and down the walk strode—not the polychromatic
victim of a lost summertime, but the sheepman, rehabilitated. He wore
his old grey woolen shirt, open at the throat, his brown duck trousers
stuffed into his run-over boots, and his white felt sombrero on the
back of his head. Twenty years or fifty he might look; Dry Valley cared
not. His light blue eyes met Panchita’s dark ones with a cold flash in
them. He came as far as the gate. He pointed with his long arm to her
house.

“Go home,” said Dry Valley. “Go home to your mother. I wonder lightnin’
don’t strike a fool like me. Go home and play in the sand. What
business have you got cavortin’ around with grown men? I reckon I was
locoed to be makin’ a he poll-parrot out of myself for a kid like you.
Go home and don’t let me see you no more. Why I done it, will somebody
tell me? Go home, and let me try and forget it.”

Panchita obeyed and walked slowly toward her home, saying nothing. For
some distance she kept her head turned and her large eyes fixed
intrepidly upon Dry Valley’s. At her gate she stood for a moment
looking back at him, then ran suddenly and swiftly into the house.

Old Antonia was building a fire in the kitchen stove. Dry Valley
stopped at the door and laughed harshly.

“I’m a pretty looking old rhinoceros to be gettin’ stuck on a kid,
ain’t I, ’Tonia?” said he.

“Not verree good thing,” agreed Antonia, sagely, “for too much old man
to likee _muchacha_.”

“You bet it ain’t,” said Dry Valley, grimly. “It’s dum foolishness;
and, besides, it hurts.”

He brought at one armful the regalia of his aberration—the blue tennis
suit, shoes, hat, gloves and all, and threw them in a pile at Antonia’s
feet.

“Give them to your old man,” said he, “to hunt antelope in.”

Just as the first star presided palely over the twilight Dry Valley got
his biggest strawberry book and sat on the back steps to catch the last
of the reading light. He thought he saw the figure of someone in his
strawberry patch. He laid aside the book, got his whip and hurried
forth to see.

It was Panchita. She had slipped through the picket fence and was
half-way across the patch. She stopped when she saw him and looked at
him without wavering.

A sudden rage—a humiliating flush of unreasoning wrath—came over Dry
Valley. For this child he had made himself a motley to the view. He had
tried to bribe Time to turn backward for himself; he had—been made a
fool of. At last he had seen his folly. There was a gulf between him
and youth over which he could not build a bridge even with yellow
gloves to protect his hands. And the sight of his torment coming to
pester him with her elfin pranks—coming to plunder his strawberry vines
like a mischievous schoolboy—roused all his anger.

“I told you to keep away from here,” said Dry Valley. “Go back to your
home.”

Panchita moved slowly toward him.

Dry Valley cracked his whip.

“Go back home,” said Dry Valley, savagely, “and play theatricals some
more. You’d make a fine man. You’ve made a fine one of me.”

She came a step nearer, silent, and with that strange, defiant, steady
shine in her eyes that had always puzzled him. Now it stirred his
wrath.

His whiplash whistled through the air. He saw a red streak suddenly
come out through her white dress above her knee where it had struck.

Without flinching and with the same unchanging dark glow in her eyes,
Panchita came steadily toward him through the strawberry vines. Dry
Valley’s trembling hand released his whip handle. When within a yard of
him Panchita stretched out her arms.

“God, kid!” stammered Dry Valley, “do you mean—?”

But the seasons are versatile; and it may have been Springtime, after
all, instead of Indian Summer, that struck Dry Valley Johnson.




XVII
CHRISTMAS BY INJUNCTION


Cherokee was the civic father of Yellowhammer. Yellowhammer was a new
mining town constructed mainly of canvas and undressed pine. Cherokee
was a prospector. One day while his burro was eating quartz and pine
burrs Cherokee turned up with his pick a nugget, weighing thirty
ounces. He staked his claim and then, being a man of breadth and
hospitality, sent out invitations to his friends in three States to
drop in and share his luck.

Not one of the invited guests sent regrets. They rolled in from the
Gila country, from Salt River, from the Pecos, from Albuquerque and
Phoenix and Santa Fe, and from the camps intervening.

When a thousand citizens had arrived and taken up claims they named the
town Yellowhammer, appointed a vigilance committee, and presented
Cherokee with a watch-chain made of nuggets.

Three hours after the presentation ceremonies Cherokee’s claim played
out. He had located a pocket instead of a vein. He abandoned it and
staked others one by one. Luck had kissed her hand to him. Never
afterward did he turn up enough dust in Yellowhammer to pay his bar
bill. But his thousand invited guests were mostly prospering, and
Cherokee smiled and congratulated them.

Yellowhammer was made up of men who took off their hats to a smiling
loser; so they invited Cherokee to say what he wanted.

“Me?” said Cherokee, “oh, grubstakes will be about the thing. I reckon
I’ll prospect along up in the Mariposas. If I strike it up there I will
most certainly let you all know about the facts. I never was any hand
to hold out cards on my friends.”

In May Cherokee packed his burro and turned its thoughtful,
mouse-coloured forehead to the north. Many citizens escorted him to the
undefined limits of Yellowhammer and bestowed upon him shouts of
commendation and farewells. Five pocket flasks without an air bubble
between contents and cork were forced upon him; and he was bidden to
consider Yellowhammer in perpetual commission for his bed, bacon and
eggs, and hot water for shaving in the event that luck did not see fit
to warm her hands by his campfire in the Mariposas.

The name of the father of Yellowhammer was given him by the gold
hunters in accordance with their popular system of nomenclature. It was
not necessary for a citizen to exhibit his baptismal certificate in
order to acquire a cognomen. A man’s name was his personal property.
For convenience in calling him up to the bar and in designating him
among other blue-shirted bipeds, a temporary appellation, title, or
epithet was conferred upon him by the public. Personal peculiarities
formed the source of the majority of such informal baptisms. Many were
easily dubbed geographically from the regions from which they confessed
to have hailed. Some announced themselves to be “Thompsons,” and
“Adamses,” and the like, with a brazenness and loudness that cast a
cloud upon their titles. A few vaingloriously and shamelessly uncovered
their proper and indisputable names. This was held to be unduly
arrogant, and did not win popularity. One man who said he was
Chesterton L. C. Belmont, and proved it by letters, was given till
sundown to leave the town. Such names as “Shorty,” “Bow-legs,” “Texas,”
“Lazy Bill,” “Thirsty Rogers,” “Limping Riley,” “The Judge,” and
“California Ed” were in favour. Cherokee derived his title from the
fact that he claimed to have lived for a time with that tribe in the
Indian Nation.

On the twentieth day of December Baldy, the mail rider, brought
Yellowhammer a piece of news.

“What do I see in Albuquerque,” said Baldy, to the patrons of the bar,
“but Cherokee all embellished and festooned up like the Czar of Turkey,
and lavishin’ money in bulk. Him and me seen the elephant and the owl,
and we had specimens of this seidlitz powder wine; and Cherokee he
audits all the bills, C.O.D. His pockets looked like a pool table’s
after a fifteen-ball run.

“Cherokee must have struck pay ore,” remarked California Ed. “Well,
he’s white. I’m much obliged to him for his success.”

“Seems like Cherokee would ramble down to Yellowhammer and see his
friends,” said another, slightly aggrieved. “But that’s the way.
Prosperity is the finest cure there is for lost forgetfulness.”

“You wait,” said Baldy; “I’m comin’ to that. Cherokee strikes a
three-foot vein up in the Mariposas that assays a trip to Europe to the
ton, and he closes it out to a syndicate outfit for a hundred thousand
hasty dollars in cash. Then he buys himself a baby sealskin overcoat
and a red sleigh, and what do you think he takes it in his head to do
next?”

“Chuck-a-luck,” said Texas, whose ideas of recreation were the
gamester’s.

“Come and Kiss Me, Ma Honey,” sang Shorty, who carried tintypes in his
pocket and wore a red necktie while working on his claim.

“Bought a saloon?” suggested Thirsty Rogers.

“Cherokee took me to a room,” continued Baldy, “and showed me. He’s got
that room full of drums and dolls and skates and bags of candy and
jumping-jacks and toy lambs and whistles and such infantile truck. And
what do you think he’s goin’ to do with them inefficacious
knick-knacks? Don’t surmise none—Cherokee told me. He’s goin’ to lead
’em up in his red sleigh and—wait a minute, don’t order no drinks yet—
he’s goin’ to drive down here to Yellowhammer and give the kids—the
kids of this here town—the biggest Christmas tree and the biggest
cryin’ doll and Little Giant Boys’ Tool Chest blowout that was ever
seen west of the Cape Hatteras.”

Two minutes of absolute silence ticked away in the wake of Baldy’s
words. It was broken by the House, who, happily conceiving the moment
to be ripe for extending hospitality, sent a dozen whisky glasses
spinning down the bar, with the slower travelling bottle bringing up
the rear.

“Didn’t you tell him?” asked the miner called Trinidad.

“Well, no,” answered Baldy, pensively; “I never exactly seen my way to.

“You see, Cherokee had this Christmas mess already bought and paid for;
and he was all flattered up with self-esteem over his idea; and we had
in a way flew the flume with that fizzy wine I speak of; so I never let
on.”

“I cannot refrain from a certain amount of surprise,” said the Judge,
as he hung his ivory-handled cane on the bar, “that our friend Cherokee
should possess such an erroneous conception of—ah—his, as it were, own
town.”

“Oh, it ain’t the eighth wonder of the terrestrial world,” said Baldy.
“Cherokee’s been gone from Yellowhammer over seven months. Lots of
things could happen in that time. How’s he to know that there ain’t a
single kid in this town, and so far as emigration is concerned, none
expected?”

“Come to think of it,” remarked California Ed, “it’s funny some ain’t
drifted in. Town ain’t settled enough yet for to bring in the
rubber-ring brigade, I reckon.”

“To top off this Christmas-tree splurge of Cherokee’s,” went on Baldy,
“he’s goin’ to give an imitation of Santa Claus. He’s got a white wig
and whiskers that disfigure him up exactly like the pictures of this
William Cullen Longfellow in the books, and a red suit of fur-trimmed
outside underwear, and eight-ounce gloves, and a stand-up, lay-down
croshayed red cap. Ain’t it a shame that a outfit like that can’t get a
chance to connect with a Annie and Willie’s prayer layout?”

“When does Cherokee allow to come over with his truck?” inquired
Trinidad.

“Mornin’ before Christmas,” said Baldy. “And he wants you folks to have
a room fixed up and a tree hauled and ready. And such ladies to assist
as can stop breathin’ long enough to let it be a surprise for the
kids.”

The unblessed condition of Yellowhammer had been truly described. The
voice of childhood had never gladdened its flimsy structures; the
patter of restless little feet had never consecrated the one rugged
highway between the two rows of tents and rough buildings. Later they
would come. But now Yellowhammer was but a mountain camp, and nowhere
in it were the roguish, expectant eyes, opening wide at dawn of the
enchanting day; the eager, small hands to reach for Santa’s bewildering
hoard; the elated, childish voicings of the season’s joy, such as the
coming good things of the warm-hearted Cherokee deserved.

Of women there were five in Yellowhammer. The assayer’s wife, the
proprietress of the Lucky Strike Hotel, and a laundress whose washtub
panned out an ounce of dust a day. These were the permanent feminines;
the remaining two were the Spangler Sisters, Misses Fanchon and Erma,
of the Transcontinental Comedy Company, then playing in repertoire at
the (improvised) Empire Theatre. But of children there were none.
Sometimes Miss Fanchon enacted with spirit and address the part of
robustious childhood; but between her delineation and the visions of
adolescence that the fancy offered as eligible recipients of Cherokee’s
holiday stores there seemed to be fixed a gulf.

Christmas would come on Thursday. On Tuesday morning Trinidad, instead
of going to work, sought the Judge at the Lucky Strike Hotel.

“It’ll be a disgrace to Yellowhammer,” said Trinidad, “if it throws
Cherokee down on his Christmas tree blowout. You might say that that
man made this town. For one, I’m goin’ to see what can be done to give
Santa Claus a square deal.”

“My co-operation,” said the Judge, “would be gladly forthcoming. I am
indebted to Cherokee for past favours. But, I do not see—I have
heretofore regarded the absence of children rather as a luxury—but in
this instance—still, I do not see—”

“Look at me,” said Trinidad, “and you’ll see old Ways and Means with
the fur on. I’m goin’ to hitch up a team and rustle a load of kids for
Cherokee’s Santa Claus act, if I have to rob an orphan asylum.”

“Eureka!” cried the Judge, enthusiastically.

“No, you didn’t,” said Trinidad, decidedly. “I found it myself. I
learned about that Latin word at school.”

“I will accompany you,” declared the Judge, waving his cane. “Perhaps
such eloquence and gift of language as I possess will be of benefit in
persuading our young friends to lend themselves to our project.”

Within an hour Yellowhammer was acquainted with the scheme of Trinidad
and the Judge, and approved it. Citizens who knew of families with
offspring within a forty-mile radius of Yellowhammer came forward and
contributed their information. Trinidad made careful notes of all such,
and then hastened to secure a vehicle and team.

The first stop scheduled was at a double log-house fifteen miles out
from Yellowhammer. A man opened the door at Trinidad’s hail, and then
came down and leaned upon the rickety gate. The doorway was filled with
a close mass of youngsters, some ragged, all full of curiosity and
health.

“It’s this way,” explained Trinidad. “We’re from Yellowhammer, and we
come kidnappin’ in a gentle kind of a way. One of our leading citizens
is stung with the Santa Claus affliction, and he’s due in town
to-morrow with half the folderols that’s painted red and made in
Germany. The youngest kid we got in Yellowhammer packs a forty-five and
a safety razor. Consequently we’re mighty shy on anybody to say ‘Oh’
and ‘Ah’ when we light the candles on the Christmas tree. Now, partner,
if you’ll loan us a few kids we guarantee to return ’em safe and sound
on Christmas Day. And they’ll come back loaded down with a good time
and Swiss Family Robinsons and cornucopias and red drums and similar
testimonials. What do you say?”

“In other words,” said the Judge, “we have discovered for the first
time in our embryonic but progressive little city the inconveniences of
the absence of adolescence. The season of the year having approximately
arrived during which it is a custom to bestow frivolous but often
appreciated gifts upon the young and tender—”

“I understand,” said the parent, packing his pipe with a forefinger. “I
guess I needn’t detain you gentlemen. Me and the old woman have got
seven kids, so to speak; and, runnin’ my mind over the bunch, I don’t
appear to hit upon none that we could spare for you to take over to
your doin’s. The old woman has got some popcorn candy and rag dolls hid
in the clothes chest, and we allow to give Christmas a little whirl of
our own in a insignificant sort of style. No, I couldn’t, with any
degree of avidity, seem to fall in with the idea of lettin’ none of ’em
go. Thank you kindly, gentlemen.”

Down the slope they drove and up another foothill to the ranch-house of
Wiley Wilson. Trinidad recited his appeal and the Judge boomed out his
ponderous antiphony. Mrs. Wiley gathered her two rosy-cheeked
youngsters close to her skirts and did not smile until she had seen
Wiley laugh and shake his head. Again a refusal.

Trinidad and the Judge vainly exhausted more than half their list
before twilight set in among the hills. They spent the night at a stage
road hostelry, and set out again early the next morning. The wagon had
not acquired a single passenger.

“It’s creepin’ upon my faculties,” remarked Trinidad, “that borrowin’
kids at Christmas is somethin’ like tryin’ to steal butter from a man
that’s got hot pancakes a-comin’.”

“It is undoubtedly an indisputable fact,” said the Judge, “that the—
ah—family ties seem to be more coherent and assertive at that period of
the year.”

On the day before Christmas they drove thirty miles, making four
fruitless halts and appeals. Everywhere they found “kids” at a premium.

The sun was low when the wife of a section boss on a lonely railroad
huddled her unavailable progeny behind her and said:

“There’s a woman that’s just took charge of the railroad eatin’ house
down at Granite Junction. I hear she’s got a little boy. Maybe she
might let him go.”

Trinidad pulled up his mules at Granite Junction at five o’clock in the
afternoon. The train had just departed with its load of fed and
appeased passengers.

On the steps of the eating house they found a thin and glowering boy of
ten smoking a cigarette. The dining-room had been left in chaos by the
peripatetic appetites. A youngish woman reclined, exhausted, in a
chair. Her face wore sharp lines of worry. She had once possessed a
certain style of beauty that would never wholly leave her and would
never wholly return. Trinidad set forth his mission.

“I’d count it a mercy if you’d take Bobby for a while,” she said,
wearily. “I’m on the go from morning till night, and I don’t have time
to ’tend to him. He’s learning bad habits from the men. It’ll be the
only chance he’ll have to get any Christmas.”

The men went outside and conferred with Bobby. Trinidad pictured the
glories of the Christmas tree and presents in lively colours.

“And, moreover, my young friend,” added the Judge, “Santa Claus himself
will personally distribute the offerings that will typify the gifts
conveyed by the shepherds of Bethlehem to—”

“Aw, come off,” said the boy, squinting his small eyes. “I ain’t no
kid. There ain’t any Santa Claus. It’s your folks that buys toys and
sneaks ’em in when you’re asleep. And they make marks in the soot in
the chimney with the tongs to look like Santa’s sleigh tracks.”

“That might be so,” argued Trinidad, “but Christmas trees ain’t no
fairy tale. This one’s goin’ to look like the ten-cent store in
Albuquerque, all strung up in a redwood. There’s tops and drums and
Noah’s arks and—”

“Oh, rats!” said Bobby, wearily. “I cut them out long ago. I’d like to
have a rifle—not a target one—a real one, to shoot wildcats with; but I
guess you won’t have any of them on your old tree.”

“Well, I can’t say for sure,” said Trinidad diplomatically; “it might
be. You go along with us and see.”

The hope thus held out, though faint, won the boy’s hesitating consent
to go. With this solitary beneficiary for Cherokee’s holiday bounty,
the canvassers spun along the homeward road.

In Yellowhammer the empty storeroom had been transformed into what
might have passed as the bower of an Arizona fairy. The ladies had done
their work well. A tall Christmas tree, covered to the topmost branch
with candles, spangles, and toys sufficient for more than a score of
children, stood in the centre of the floor. Near sunset anxious eyes
had begun to scan the street for the returning team of the
child-providers. At noon that day Cherokee had dashed into town with
his new sleigh piled high with bundles and boxes and bales of all sizes
and shapes. So intent was he upon the arrangements for his altruistic
plans that the dearth of children did not receive his notice. No one
gave away the humiliating state of Yellowhammer, for the efforts of
Trinidad and the Judge were expected to supply the deficiency.

When the sun went down Cherokee, with many wings and arch grins on his
seasoned face, went into retirement with the bundle containing the
Santa Claus raiment and a pack containing special and undisclosed
gifts.

“When the kids are rounded up,” he instructed the volunteer arrangement
committee, “light up the candles on the tree and set ’em to playin’
‘Pussy Wants a Corner’ and ‘King William.’ When they get good and at
it, why—old Santa’ll slide in the door. I reckon there’ll be plenty of
gifts to go ’round.”

The ladies were flitting about the tree, giving it final touches that
were never final. The Spangled Sisters were there in costume as Lady
Violet de Vere and Marie, the maid, in their new drama, “The Miner’s
Bride.” The theatre did not open until nine, and they were welcome
assistants of the Christmas tree committee. Every minute heads would
pop out the door to look and listen for the approach of Trinidad’s
team. And now this became an anxious function, for night had fallen and
it would soon be necessary to light the candles on the tree, and
Cherokee was apt to make an irruption at any time in his Kriss Kringle
garb.

At length the wagon of the child “rustlers” rattled down the street to
the door. The ladies, with little screams of excitement, flew to the
lighting of the candles. The men of Yellowhammer passed in and out
restlessly or stood about the room in embarrassed groups.

Trinidad and the Judge, bearing the marks of protracted travel,
entered, conducting between them a single impish boy, who stared with
sullen, pessimistic eyes at the gaudy tree.

“Where are the other children?” asked the assayer’s wife, the
acknowledged leader of all social functions.

“Ma’am,” said Trinidad with a sigh, “prospectin’ for kids at Christmas
time is like huntin’ in a limestone for silver. This parental business
is one that I haven’t no chance to comprehend. It seems that fathers
and mothers are willin’ for their offsprings to be drownded, stole, fed
on poison oak, and et by catamounts 364 days in the year; but on
Christmas Day they insists on enjoyin’ the exclusive mortification of
their company. This here young biped, ma’am, is all that washes out of
our two days’ manoeuvres.”

“Oh, the sweet little boy!” cooed Miss Erma, trailing her De Vere robes
to centre of stage.

“Aw, shut up,” said Bobby, with a scowl. “Who’s a kid? You ain’t, you
bet.”

“Fresh brat!” breathed Miss Erma, beneath her enamelled smile.

“We done the best we could,” said Trinidad. “It’s tough on Cherokee,
but it can’t be helped.”

Then the door opened and Cherokee entered in the conventional dress of
Saint Nick. A white rippling beard and flowing hair covered his face
almost to his dark and shining eyes. Over his shoulder he carried a
pack.

No one stirred as he came in. Even the Spangler Sisters ceased their
coquettish poses and stared curiously at the tall figure. Bobby stood
with his hands in his pockets gazing gloomily at the effeminate and
childish tree. Cherokee put down his pack and looked wonderingly about
the room. Perhaps he fancied that a bevy of eager children were being
herded somewhere, to be loosed upon his entrance. He went up to Bobby
and extended his red-mittened hand.

“Merry Christmas, little boy,” said Cherokee. “Anything on the tree you
want they’ll get it down for you. Won’t you shake hands with Santa
Claus?”

“There ain’t any Santa Claus,” whined the boy. “You’ve got old false
billy goat’s whiskers on your face. I ain’t no kid. What do I want with
dolls and tin horses? The driver said you’d have a rifle, and you
haven’t. I want to go home.”

Trinidad stepped into the breach. He shook Cherokee’s hand in warm
greeting.

“I’m sorry, Cherokee,” he explained. “There never was a kid in
Yellowhammer. We tried to rustle a bunch of ’em for your swaree, but
this sardine was all we could catch. He’s a atheist, and he don’t
believe in Santa Claus. It’s a shame for you to be out all this truck.
But me and the Judge was sure we could round up a wagonful of
candidates for your gimcracks.”

“That’s all right,” said Cherokee gravely. “The expense don’t amount to
nothin’ worth mentionin’. We can dump the stuff down a shaft or throw
it away. I don’t know what I was thinkin’ about; but it never occurred
to my cogitations that there wasn’t any kids in Yellowhammer.”

Meanwhile the company had relaxed into a hollow but praiseworthy
imitation of a pleasure gathering.

Bobby had retreated to a distant chair, and was coldly regarding the
scene with ennui plastered thick upon him. Cherokee, lingering with his
original idea, went over and sat beside him.

“Where do you live, little boy?” he asked respectfully.

“Granite Junction,” said Bobby without emphasis.

The room was warm. Cherokee took off his cap, and then removed his
beard and wig.

“Say!” exclaimed Bobby, with a show of interest, “I know your mug, all
right.”

“Did you ever see me before?” asked Cherokee.

“I don’t know; but I’ve seen your picture lots of times.”

“Where?”

The boy hesitated. “On the bureau at home,” he answered.

“Let’s have your name, if you please, buddy.”

“Robert Lumsden. The picture belongs to my mother. She puts it under
her pillow of nights. And once I saw her kiss it. I wouldn’t. But women
are that way.”

Cherokee rose and beckoned to Trinidad.

“Keep this boy by you till I come back,” he said. “I’m goin’ to shed
these Christmas duds, and hitch up my sleigh. I’m goin’ to take this
kid home.”

“Well, infidel,” said Trinidad, taking Cherokee’s vacant chair, “and so
you are too superannuated and effete to yearn for such mockeries as
candy and toys, it seems.”

“I don’t like you,” said Bobby, with acrimony. “You said there would be
a rifle. A fellow can’t even smoke. I wish I was at home.”

Cherokee drove his sleigh to the door, and they lifted Bobby in beside
him. The team of fine horses sprang away prancingly over the hard snow.
Cherokee had on his $500 overcoat of baby sealskin. The laprobe that he
drew about them was as warm as velvet.

Bobby slipped a cigarette from his pocket and was trying to snap a
match.

“Throw that cigarette away,” said Cherokee, in a quiet but new voice.

Bobby hesitated, and then dropped the cylinder overboard.

“Throw the box, too,” commanded the new voice.

More reluctantly the boy obeyed.

“Say,” said Bobby, presently, “I like you. I don’t know why. Nobody
never made me do anything I didn’t want to do before.”

“Tell me, kid,” said Cherokee, not using his new voice, “are you sure
your mother kissed that picture that looks like me?”

“Dead sure. I seen her do it.”

“Didn’t you remark somethin’ a while ago about wanting a rifle?”

“You bet I did. Will you get me one?”

“To-morrow—silver-mounted.”

Cherokee took out his watch.

“Half-past nine. We’ll hit the Junction plumb on time with Christmas
Day. Are you cold? Sit closer, son.”




XVIII
A CHAPARRAL PRINCE


Nine o’clock at last, and the drudging toil of the day was ended. Lena
climbed to her room in the third half-story of the Quarrymen’s Hotel.
Since daylight she had slaved, doing the work of a full-grown woman,
scrubbing the floors, washing the heavy ironstone plates and cups,
making the beds, and supplying the insatiate demands for wood and water
in that turbulent and depressing hostelry.

The din of the day’s quarrying was over—the blasting and drilling, the
creaking of the great cranes, the shouts of the foremen, the backing
and shifting of the flat-cars hauling the heavy blocks of limestone.
Down in the hotel office three or four of the labourers were growling
and swearing over a belated game of checkers. Heavy odours of stewed
meat, hot grease, and cheap coffee hung like a depressing fog about the
house.

Lena lit the stump of a candle and sat limply upon her wooden chair.
She was eleven years old, thin and ill-nourished. Her back and limbs
were sore and aching. But the ache in her heart made the biggest
trouble. The last straw had been added to the burden upon her small
shoulders. They had taken away Grimm. Always at night, however tired
she might be, she had turned to Grimm for comfort and hope. Each time
had Grimm whispered to her that the prince or the fairy would come and
deliver her out of the wicked enchantment. Every night she had taken
fresh courage and strength from Grimm.

To whatever tale she read she found an analogy in her own condition.
The woodcutter’s lost child, the unhappy goose girl, the persecuted
stepdaughter, the little maiden imprisoned in the witch’s hut—all these
were but transparent disguises for Lena, the overworked kitchenmaid in
the Quarrymen’s Hotel. And always when the extremity was direst came
the good fairy or the gallant prince to the rescue.

So, here in the ogre’s castle, enslaved by a wicked spell, Lena had
leaned upon Grimm and waited, longing for the powers of goodness to
prevail. But on the day before Mrs. Maloney had found the book in her
room and had carried it away, declaring sharply that it would not do
for servants to read at night; they lost sleep and did not work briskly
the next day. Can one only eleven years old, living away from one’s
mamma, and never having any time to play, live entirely deprived of
Grimm? Just try it once and you will see what a difficult thing it is.

Lena’s home was in Texas, away up among the little mountains on the
Pedernales River, in a little town called Fredericksburg. They are all
German people who live in Fredericksburg. Of evenings they sit at
little tables along the sidewalk and drink beer and play pinochle and
scat. They are very thrifty people.

Thriftiest among them was Peter Hildesmuller, Lena’s father. And that
is why Lena was sent to work in the hotel at the quarries, thirty miles
away. She earned three dollars every week there, and Peter added her
wages to his well-guarded store. Peter had an ambition to become as
rich as his neighbour, Hugo Heffelbauer, who smoked a meerschaum pipe
three feet long and had wiener schnitzel and hassenpfeffer for dinner
every day in the week. And now Lena was quite old enough to work and
assist in the accumulation of riches. But conjecture, if you can, what
it means to be sentenced at eleven years of age from a home in the
pleasant little Rhine village to hard labour in the ogre’s castle,
where you must fly to serve the ogres, while they devour cattle and
sheep, growling fiercely as they stamp white limestone dust from their
great shoes for you to sweep and scour with your weak, aching fingers.
And then—to have Grimm taken away from you!

Lena raised the lid of an old empty case that had once contained canned
corn and got out a sheet of paper and a piece of pencil. She was going
to write a letter to her mamma. Tommy Ryan was going to post it for her
at Ballinger’s. Tommy was seventeen, worked in the quarries, went home
to Ballinger’s every night, and was now waiting in the shadows under
Lena’s window for her to throw the letter out to him. That was the only
way she could send a letter to Fredericksburg. Mrs. Maloney did not
like for her to write letters.

The stump of the candle was burning low, so Lena hastily bit the wood
from around the lead of her pencil and began. This is the letter she
wrote:

DEAREST MAMMA:—I want so much to see you. And Gretel and Claus and
Heinrich and little Adolf. I am so tired. I want to see you. To-day I
was slapped by Mrs. Maloney and had no supper. I could not bring in
enough wood, for my hand hurt. She took my book yesterday. I mean
“Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” which Uncle Leo gave me. It did not hurt any one
for me to read the book. I try to work as well as I can, but there is
so much to do. I read only a little bit every night. Dear mamma, I
shall tell you what I am going to do. Unless you send for me to-morrow
to bring me home I shall go to a deep place I know in the river and
drown. It is wicked to drown, I suppose, but I wanted to see you, and
there is no one else. I am very tired, and Tommy is waiting for the
letter. You will excuse me, mamma, if I do it.


Your respectful and loving daughter,
LENA.


Tommy was still waiting faithfully when the letter was concluded, and
when Lena dropped it out she saw him pick it up and start up the steep
hillside. Without undressing she blew out the candle and curled herself
upon the mattress on the floor.

At 10:30 o’clock old man Ballinger came out of his house in his
stocking feet and leaned over the gate, smoking his pipe. He looked
down the big road, white in the moonshine, and rubbed one ankle with
the toe of his other foot. It was time for the Fredericksburg mail to
come pattering up the road.

Old man Ballinger had waited only a few minutes when he heard the
lively hoofbeats of Fritz’s team of little black mules, and very soon
afterward his covered spring wagon stood in front of the gate. Fritz’s
big spectacles flashed in the moonlight and his tremendous voice
shouted a greeting to the postmaster of Ballinger’s. The mail-carrier
jumped out and took the bridles from the mules, for he always fed them
oats at Ballinger’s.

While the mules were eating from their feed bags old man Ballinger
brought out the mail sack and threw it into the wagon.

Fritz Bergmann was a man of three sentiments—or to be more accurate—
four, the pair of mules deserving to be reckoned individually. Those
mules were the chief interest and joy of his existence. Next came the
Emperor of Germany and Lena Hildesmuller.

“Tell me,” said Fritz, when he was ready to start, “contains the sack a
letter to Frau Hildesmuller from the little Lena at the quarries? One
came in the last mail to say that she is a little sick, already. Her
mamma is very anxious to hear again.”

“Yes,” said old man Ballinger, “thar’s a letter for Mrs. Helterskelter,
or some sich name. Tommy Ryan brung it over when he come. Her little
gal workin’ over thar, you say?”

“In the hotel,” shouted Fritz, as he gathered up the lines; “eleven
years old and not bigger as a frankfurter. The close-fist of a Peter
Hildesmuller!—some day I shall with a big club pound that man’s
dummkopf—all in and out the town. Perhaps in this letter Lena will say
that she is yet feeling better. So, her mamma will be glad. _Auf
wiedersehen_, Herr Ballinger—your feets will take cold out in the night
air.”

“So long, Fritzy,” said old man Ballinger. “You got a nice cool night
for your drive.”

Up the road went the little black mules at their steady trot, while
Fritz thundered at them occasional words of endearment and cheer.

These fancies occupied the mind of the mail-carrier until he reached
the big post oak forest, eight miles from Ballinger’s. Here his
ruminations were scattered by the sudden flash and report of pistols
and a whooping as if from a whole tribe of Indians. A band of galloping
centaurs closed in around the mail wagon. One of them leaned over the
front wheel, covered the driver with his revolver, and ordered him to
stop. Others caught at the bridles of Donder and Blitzen.

“Donnerwetter!” shouted Fritz, with all his tremendous voice—“wass ist?
Release your hands from dose mules. Ve vas der United States mail!”

“Hurry up, Dutch!” drawled a melancholy voice. “Don’t you know when
you’re in a stick-up? Reverse your mules and climb out of the cart.”

It is due to the breadth of Hondo Bill’s demerit and the largeness of
his achievements to state that the holding up of the Fredericksburg
mail was not perpetrated by way of an exploit. As the lion while in the
pursuit of prey commensurate to his prowess might set a frivolous foot
upon a casual rabbit in his path, so Hondo Bill and his gang had
swooped sportively upon the pacific transport of Meinherr Fritz.

The real work of their sinister night ride was over. Fritz and his mail
bag and his mules came as gentle relaxation, grateful after the arduous
duties of their profession. Twenty miles to the southeast stood a train
with a killed engine, hysterical passengers and a looted express and
mail car. That represented the serious occupation of Hondo Bill and his
gang. With a fairly rich prize of currency and silver the robbers were
making a wide detour to the west through the less populous country,
intending to seek safety in Mexico by means of some fordable spot on
the Rio Grande. The booty from the train had melted the desperate
bushrangers to jovial and happy skylarkers.

Trembling with outraged dignity and no little personal apprehension,
Fritz climbed out to the road after replacing his suddenly removed
spectacles. The band had dismounted and were singing, capering, and
whooping, thus expressing their satisfied delight in the life of a
jolly outlaw. Rattlesnake Rogers, who stood at the heads of the mules,
jerked a little too vigorously at the rein of the tender-mouthed
Donder, who reared and emitted a loud, protesting snort of pain.
Instantly Fritz, with a scream of anger, flew at the bulky Rogers and
began to assiduously pummel that surprised freebooter with his fists.

“Villain!” shouted Fritz, “dog, bigstiff! Dot mule he has a soreness by
his mouth. I vill knock off your shoulders mit your head— robbermans!”

“Yi-yi!” howled Rattlesnake, roaring with laughter and ducking his
head, “somebody git this here sour-krout off’n me!”

One of the band yanked Fritz back by the coat-tail, and the woods rang
with Rattlesnake’s vociferous comments.

“The dog-goned little wienerwurst,” he yelled, amiably. “He’s not so
much of a skunk, for a Dutchman. Took up for his animile plum quick,
didn’t he? I like to see a man like his hoss, even if it is a mule. The
dad-blamed little Limburger he went for me, didn’t he! Whoa, now,
muley—I ain’t a-goin’ to hurt your mouth agin any more.”

Perhaps the mail would not have been tampered with had not Ben Moody,
the lieutenant, possessed certain wisdom that seemed to promise more
spoils.

“Say, Cap,” he said, addressing Hondo Bill, “there’s likely to be good
pickings in these mail sacks. I’ve done some hoss tradin’ with these
Dutchmen around Fredericksburg, and I know the style of the varmints.
There’s big money goes through the mails to that town. Them Dutch risk
a thousand dollars sent wrapped in a piece of paper before they’d pay
the banks to handle the money.”

Hondo Bill, six feet two, gentle of voice and impulsive in action, was
dragging the sacks from the rear of the wagon before Moody had finished
his speech. A knife shone in his hand, and they heard the ripping sound
as it bit through the tough canvas. The outlaws crowded around and
began tearing open letters and packages, enlivening their labours by
swearing affably at the writers, who seemed to have conspired to
confute the prediction of Ben Moody. Not a dollar was found in the
Fredericksburg mail.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Hondo Bill to the
mail-carrier in solemn tones, “to be packing around such a lot of old,
trashy paper as this. What d’you mean by it, anyhow? Where do you
Dutchers keep your money at?”

The Ballinger mail sack opened like a cocoon under Hondo’s knife. It
contained but a handful of mail. Fritz had been fuming with terror and
excitement until this sack was reached. He now remembered Lena’s
letter. He addressed the leader of the band, asking that that
particular missive be spared.

“Much obliged, Dutch,” he said to the disturbed carrier. “I guess
that’s the letter we want. Got spondulicks in it, ain’t it? Here she
is. Make a light, boys.”

Hondo found and tore open the letter to Mrs. Hildesmuller. The others
stood about, lighting twisted up letters one from another. Hondo gazed
with mute disapproval at the single sheet of paper covered with the
angular German script.

“Whatever is this you’ve humbugged us with, Dutchy? You call this here
a valuable letter? That’s a mighty low-down trick to play on your
friends what come along to help you distribute your mail.”

“That’s Chiny writin’,” said Sandy Grundy, peering over Hondo’s
shoulder.

“You’re off your kazip,” declared another of the gang, an effective
youth, covered with silk handkerchiefs and nickel plating. “That’s
shorthand. I see ’em do it once in court.”

“Ach, no, no, no—dot is German,” said Fritz. “It is no more as a little
girl writing a letter to her mamma. One poor little girl, sick and
vorking hard avay from home. Ach! it is a shame. Good Mr. Robberman,
you vill please let me have dot letter?”

“What the devil do you take us for, old Pretzels?” said Hondo with
sudden and surprising severity. “You ain’t presumin’ to insinuate that
we gents ain’t possessed of sufficient politeness for to take an
interest in the miss’s health, are you? Now, you go on, and you read
that scratchin’ out loud and in plain United States language to this
here company of educated society.”

Hondo twirled his six-shooter by its trigger guard and stood towering
above the little German, who at once began to read the letter,
translating the simple words into English. The gang of rovers stood in
absolute silence, listening intently.

“How old is that kid?” asked Hondo when the letter was done.

“Eleven,” said Fritz.

“And where is she at?”

“At dose rock quarries—working. Ach, mein Gott—little Lena, she speak
of drowning. I do not know if she vill do it, but if she shall I
schwear I vill dot Peter Hildesmuller shoot mit a gun.”

“You Dutchers,” said Hondo Bill, his voice swelling with fine contempt,
“make me plenty tired. Hirin’ out your kids to work when they ought to
be playin’ dolls in the sand. You’re a hell of a sect of people. I
reckon we’ll fix your clock for a while just to show what we think of
your old cheesy nation. Here, boys!”

Hondo Bill parleyed aside briefly with his band, and then they seized
Fritz and conveyed him off the road to one side. Here they bound him
fast to a tree with a couple of lariats. His team they tied to another
tree near by.

“We ain’t going to hurt you bad,” said Hondo reassuringly. “’Twon’t
hurt you to be tied up for a while. We will now pass you the time of
day, as it is up to us to depart. Ausgespielt—nixcumrous, Dutchy. Don’t
get any more impatience.”

Fritz heard a great squeaking of saddles as the men mounted their
horses. Then a loud yell and a great clatter of hoofs as they galloped
pell-mell back along the Fredericksburg road.

For more than two hours Fritz sat against his tree, tightly but not
painfully bound. Then from the reaction after his exciting adventure he
sank into slumber. How long he slept he knew not, but he was at last
awakened by a rough shake. Hands were untying his ropes. He was lifted
to his feet, dazed, confused in mind, and weary of body. Rubbing his
eyes, he looked and saw that he was again in the midst of the same band
of terrible bandits. They shoved him up to the seat of his wagon and
placed the lines in his hands.

“Hit it out for home, Dutch,” said Hondo Bill’s voice commandingly.
“You’ve given us lots of trouble and we’re pleased to see the back of
your neck. Spiel! Zwei bier! Vamoose!”

Hondo reached out and gave Blitzen a smart cut with his quirt.

The little mules sprang ahead, glad to be moving again. Fritz urged
them along, himself dizzy and muddled over his fearful adventure.

According to schedule time, he should have reached Fredericksburg at
daylight. As it was, he drove down the long street of the town at
eleven o’clock A.M. He had to pass Peter Hildesmuller’s house on his
way to the post-office. He stopped his team at the gate and called. But
Frau Hildesmuller was watching for him. Out rushed the whole family of
Hildesmullers.

Frau Hildesmuller, fat and flushed, inquired if he had a letter from
Lena, and then Fritz raised his voice and told the tale of his
adventure. He told the contents of that letter that the robber had made
him read, and then Frau Hildesmuller broke into wild weeping. Her
little Lena drown herself! Why had they sent her from home? What could
be done? Perhaps it would be too late by the time they could send for
her now. Peter Hildesmuller dropped his meerschaum on the walk and it
shivered into pieces.

“Woman!” he roared at his wife, “why did you let that child go away? It
is your fault if she comes home to us no more.”

Every one knew that it was Peter Hildesmuller’s fault, so they paid no
attention to his words.

A moment afterward a strange, faint voice was heard to call: “Mamma!”
Frau Hildesmuller at first thought it was Lena’s spirit calling, and
then she rushed to the rear of Fritz’s covered wagon, and, with a loud
shriek of joy, caught up Lena herself, covering her pale little face
with kisses and smothering her with hugs. Lena’s eyes were heavy with
the deep slumber of exhaustion, but she smiled and lay close to the one
she had longed to see. There among the mail sacks, covered in a nest of
strange blankets and comforters, she had lain asleep until wakened by
the voices around her.

Fritz stared at her with eyes that bulged behind his spectacles.

“Gott in Himmel!” he shouted. “How did you get in that wagon? Am I
going crazy as well as to be murdered and hanged by robbers this day?”

“You brought her to us, Fritz,” cried Frau Hildesmuller. “How can we
ever thank you enough?”

“Tell mamma how you came in Fritz’s wagon,” said Frau Hildesmuller.

“I don’t know,” said Lena. “But I know how I got away from the hotel.
The Prince brought me.”

“By the Emperor’s crown!” shouted Fritz, “we are all going crazy.”

“I always knew he would come,” said Lena, sitting down on her bundle of
bedclothes on the sidewalk. “Last night he came with his armed knights
and captured the ogre’s castle. They broke the dishes and kicked down
the doors. They pitched Mr. Maloney into a barrel of rain water and
threw flour all over Mrs. Maloney. The workmen in the hotel jumped out
of the windows and ran into the woods when the knights began firing
their guns. They wakened me up and I peeped down the stair. And then
the Prince came up and wrapped me in the bedclothes and carried me out.
He was so tall and strong and fine. His face was as rough as a
scrubbing brush, and he talked soft and kind and smelled of schnapps.
He took me on his horse before him and we rode away among the knights.
He held me close and I went to sleep that way, and didn’t wake up till
I got home.”

“Rubbish!” cried Fritz Bergmann. “Fairy tales! How did you come from
the quarries to my wagon?”

“The Prince brought me,” said Lena, confidently.

And to this day the good people of Fredericksburg haven’t been able to
make her give any other explanation.




XIX
THE REFORMATION OF CALLIOPE


Calliope Catesby was in his humours again. Ennui was upon him. This
goodly promontory, the earth—particularly that portion of it known as
Quicksand—was to him no more than a pestilent congregation of vapours.
Overtaken by the megrims, the philosopher may seek relief in soliloquy;
my lady find solace in tears; the flaccid Easterner scold at the
millinery bills of his women folk. Such recourse was insufficient to
the denizens of Quicksand. Calliope, especially, was wont to express
his ennui according to his lights.

Over night Calliope had hung out signals of approaching low spirits. He
had kicked his own dog on the porch of the Occidental Hotel, and
refused to apologise. He had become capricious and fault-finding in
conversation. While strolling about he reached often for twigs of
mesquite and chewed the leaves fiercely. That was always an ominous
act. Another symptom alarming to those who were familiar with the
different stages of his doldrums was his increasing politeness and a
tendency to use formal phrases. A husky softness succeeded the usual
penetrating drawl in his tones. A dangerous courtesy marked his
manners. Later, his smile became crooked, the left side of his mouth
slanting upward, and Quicksand got ready to stand from under.

At this stage Calliope generally began to drink. Finally, about
midnight, he was seen going homeward, saluting those whom he met with
exaggerated but inoffensive courtesy. Not yet was Calliope’s melancholy
at the danger point. He would seat himself at the window of the room he
occupied over Silvester’s tonsorial parlours and there chant lugubrious
and tuneless ballads until morning, accompanying the noises by
appropriate maltreatment of a jangling guitar. More magnanimous than
Nero, he would thus give musical warning of the forthcoming municipal
upheaval that Quicksand was scheduled to endure.

A quiet, amiable man was Calliope Catesby at other times—quiet to
indolence, and amiable to worthlessness. At best he was a loafer and a
nuisance; at worst he was the Terror of Quicksand. His ostensible
occupation was something subordinate in the real estate line; he drove
the beguiled Easterner in buckboards out to look over lots and ranch
property. Originally he came from one of the Gulf States, his lank six
feet, slurring rhythm of speech, and sectional idioms giving evidence
of his birthplace.

And yet, after taking on Western adjustments, this languid pine-box
whittler, cracker barrel hugger, shady corner lounger of the cotton
fields and sumac hills of the South became famed as a bad man among men
who had made a life-long study of the art of truculence.

At nine the next morning Calliope was fit. Inspired by his own
barbarous melodies and the contents of his jug, he was ready primed to
gather fresh laurels from the diffident brow of Quicksand. Encircled
and criss-crossed with cartridge belts, abundantly garnished with
revolvers, and copiously drunk, he poured forth into Quicksand’s main
street. Too chivalrous to surprise and capture a town by silent sortie,
he paused at the nearest corner and emitted his slogan—that fearful,
brassy yell, so reminiscent of the steam piano, that had gained for him
the classic appellation that had superseded his own baptismal name.
Following close upon his vociferation came three shots from his
forty-five by way of limbering up the guns and testing his aim. A
yellow dog, the personal property of Colonel Swazey, the proprietor of
the Occidental, fell feet upward in the dust with one farewell yelp. A
Mexican who was crossing the street from the Blue Front grocery
carrying in his hand a bottle of kerosene, was stimulated to a sudden
and admirable burst of speed, still grasping the neck of the shattered
bottle. The new gilt weather-cock on Judge Riley’s lemon and
ultramarine two-story residence shivered, flapped, and hung by a
splinter, the sport of the wanton breezes.

The artillery was in trim. Calliope’s hand was steady. The high, calm
ecstasy of habitual battle was upon him, though slightly embittered by
the sadness of Alexander in that his conquests were limited to the
small world of Quicksand.

Down the street went Calliope, shooting right and left. Glass fell like
hail; dogs vamosed; chickens flew, squawking; feminine voices shrieked
concernedly to youngsters at large. The din was perforated at intervals
by the _staccato_ of the Terror’s guns, and was drowned periodically by
the brazen screech that Quicksand knew so well. The occasions of
Calliope’s low spirits were legal holidays in Quicksand. All along the
main street in advance of his coming clerks were putting up shutters
and closing doors. Business would languish for a space. The right of
way was Calliope’s, and as he advanced, observing the dearth of
opposition and the few opportunities for distraction, his ennui
perceptibly increased.

But some four squares farther down lively preparations were being made
to minister to Mr. Catesby’s love for interchange of compliments and
repartee. On the previous night numerous messengers had hastened to
advise Buck Patterson, the city marshal, of Calliope’s impending
eruption. The patience of that official, often strained in extending
leniency toward the disturber’s misdeeds, had been overtaxed. In
Quicksand some indulgence was accorded the natural ebullition of human
nature. Providing that the lives of the more useful citizens were not
recklessly squandered, or too much property needlessly laid waste, the
community sentiment was against a too strict enforcement of the law.
But Calliope had raised the limit. His outbursts had been too frequent
and too violent to come within the classification of a normal and
sanitary relaxation of spirit.

Buck Patterson had been expecting and awaiting in his little
ten-by-twelve frame office that preliminary yell announcing that
Calliope was feeling blue. When the signal came the city marshal rose
to his feet and buckled on his guns. Two deputy sheriffs and three
citizens who had proven the edible qualities of fire also stood up,
ready to bandy with Calliope’s leaden jocularities.

“Gather that fellow in,” said Buck Patterson, setting forth the lines
of the campaign. “Don’t have no talk, but shoot as soon as you can get
a show. Keep behind cover and bring him down. He’s a nogood ’un. It’s
up to Calliope to turn up his toes this time, I reckon. Go to him all
spraddled out, boys. And don’t git too reckless, for what Calliope
shoots at he hits.”

Buck Patterson, tall, muscular, and solemn-faced, with his bright “City
Marshal” badge shining on the breast of his blue flannel shirt, gave
his posse directions for the onslaught upon Calliope. The plan was to
accomplish the downfall of the Quicksand Terror without loss to the
attacking party, if possible.

The splenetic Calliope, unconscious of retributive plots, was steaming
down the channel, cannonading on either side, when he suddenly became
aware of breakers ahead. The city marshal and one of the deputies rose
up behind some dry-goods boxes half a square to the front and opened
fire. At the same time the rest of the posse, divided, shelled him from
two side streets up which they were cautiously manoeuvring from a
well-executed detour.

The first volley broke the lock of one of Calliope’s guns, cut a neat
underbit in his right ear, and exploded a cartridge in his crossbelt,
scorching his ribs as it burst. Feeling braced up by this unexpected
tonic to his spiritual depression, Calliope executed a fortissimo note
from his upper register, and returned the fire like an echo. The
upholders of the law dodged at his flash, but a trifle too late to save
one of the deputies a bullet just above the elbow, and the marshal a
bleeding cheek from a splinter that a ball tore from the box he had
ducked behind.

And now Calliope met the enemy’s tactics in kind. Choosing with a rapid
eye the street from which the weakest and least accurate fire had come,
he invaded it at a double-quick, abandoning the unprotected middle of
the street. With rare cunning the opposing force in that direction—one
of the deputies and two of the valorous volunteers— waited, concealed
by beer barrels, until Calliope had passed their retreat, and then
peppered him from the rear. In another moment they were reinforced by
the marshal and his other men, and then Calliope felt that in order to
successfully prolong the delights of the controversy he must find some
means of reducing the great odds against him. His eye fell upon a
structure that seemed to hold out this promise, providing he could
reach it.

Not far away was the little railroad station, its building a strong box
house, ten by twenty feet, resting upon a platform four feet above
ground. Windows were in each of its walls. Something like a fort it
might become to a man thus sorely pressed by superior numbers.

Calliope made a bold and rapid spurt for it, the marshal’s crowd
“smoking” him as he ran. He reached the haven in safety, the station
agent leaving the building by a window, like a flying squirrel, as the
garrison entered the door.

Patterson and his supporters halted under protection of a pile of
lumber and held consultations. In the station was an unterrified
desperado who was an excellent shot and carried an abundance of
ammunition. For thirty yards on either side of the besieged was a
stretch of bare, open ground. It was a sure thing that the man who
attempted to enter that unprotected area would be stopped by one of
Calliope’s bullets.

The city marshal was resolved. He had decided that Calliope Catesby
should no more wake the echoes of Quicksand with his strident whoop. He
had so announced. Officially and personally he felt imperatively bound
to put the soft pedal on that instrument of discord. It played bad
tunes.

Standing near was a hand truck used in the manipulation of small
freight. It stood by a shed full of sacked wool, a consignment from one
of the sheep ranches. On this truck the marshal and his men piled three
heavy sacks of wool. Stooping low, Buck Patterson started for
Calliope’s fort, slowly pushing this loaded truck before him for
protection. The posse, scattering broadly, stood ready to nip the
besieged in case he should show himself in an effort to repel the
juggernaut of justice that was creeping upon him. Only once did
Calliope make demonstration. He fired from a window, and some tufts of
wool spurted from the marshal’s trustworthy bulwark. The return shots
from the posse pattered against the window frame of the fort. No loss
resulted on either side.

The marshal was too deeply engrossed in steering his protected
battleship to be aware of the approach of the morning train until he
was within a few feet of the platform. The train was coming up on the
other side of it. It stopped only one minute at Quicksand. What an
opportunity it would offer to Calliope! He had only to step out the
other door, mount the train, and away.

Abandoning his breastwork, Buck, with his gun ready, dashed up the
steps and into the room, driving upon the closed door with one heave of
his weighty shoulder. The members of the posse heard one shot fired
inside, and then there was silence.

At length the wounded man opened his eyes. After a blank space he again
could see and hear and feel and think. Turning his eyes about, he found
himself lying on a wooden bench. A tall man with a perplexed
countenance, wearing a big badge with “City Marshal” engraved upon it,
stood over him. A little old woman in black, with a wrinkled face and
sparkling black eyes, was holding a wet handkerchief against one of his
temples. He was trying to get these facts fixed in his mind and
connected with past events, when the old woman began to talk.

“There now, great, big, strong man! That bullet never tetched ye! Jest
skeeted along the side of your head and sort of paralysed ye for a
spell. I’ve heerd of sech things afore; cun-cussion is what they names
it. Abel Wadkins used to kill squirrels that way—barkin’ ’em, Abe
called it. You jest been barked, sir, and you’ll be all right in a
little bit. Feel lots better already, don’t ye! You just lay still a
while longer and let me bathe your head. You don’t know me, I reckon,
and ’tain’t surprisin’ that you shouldn’t. I come in on that train from
Alabama to see my son. Big son, ain’t he? Lands! you wouldn’t hardly
think he’d ever been a baby, would ye? This is my son, sir.”

Half turning, the old woman looked up at the standing man, her worn
face lighting with a proud and wonderful smile. She reached out one
veined and calloused hand and took one of her son’s. Then smiling
cheerily down at the prostrate man, she continued to dip the
handkerchief, in the waiting-room tin washbasin and gently apply it to
his temple. She had the benevolent garrulity of old age.

“I ain’t seen my son before,” she continued, “in eight years. One of my
nephews, Elkanah Price, he’s a conductor on one of them railroads and
he got me a pass to come out here. I can stay a whole week on it, and
then it’ll take me back again. Jest think, now, that little boy of mine
has got to be a officer—a city marshal of a whole town! That’s
somethin’ like a constable, ain’t it? I never knowed he was a officer;
he didn’t say nothin’ about it in his letters. I reckon he thought his
old mother’d be skeered about the danger he was in. But, laws! I never
was much of a hand to git skeered. ’Tain’t no use. I heard them guns
a-shootin’ while I was gettin’ off them cars, and I see smoke a-comin’
out of the depot, but I jest walked right along. Then I see son’s face
lookin’ out through the window. I knowed him at oncet. He met me at the
door, and squeezes me ’most to death. And there you was, sir, a-lyin’
there jest like you was dead, and I ’lowed we’d see what might be done
to help sot you up.”

“I think I’ll sit up now,” said the concussion patient. “I’m feeling
pretty fair by this time.”

He sat, somewhat weakly yet, leaning against the wall. He was a rugged
man, big-boned and straight. His eyes, steady and keen, seemed to
linger upon the face of the man standing so still above him. His look
wandered often from the face he studied to the marshal’s badge upon the
other’s breast.

“Yes, yes, you’ll be all right,” said the old woman, patting his arm,
“if you don’t get to cuttin’ up agin, and havin’ folks shooting at you.
Son told me about you, sir, while you was layin’ senseless on the
floor. Don’t you take it as meddlesome fer an old woman with a son as
big as you to talk about it. And you mustn’t hold no grudge ag’in’ my
son for havin’ to shoot at ye. A officer has got to take up for the
law—it’s his duty—and them that acts bad and lives wrong has to suffer.
Don’t blame my son any, sir—’tain’t his fault. He’s always been a good
boy—good when he was growin’ up, and kind and ’bedient and
well-behaved. Won’t you let me advise you, sir, not to do so no more?
Be a good man, and leave liquor alone and live peaceably and goodly.
Keep away from bad company and work honest and sleep sweet.”

The black-mitted hand of the old pleader gently touched the breast of
the man she addressed. Very earnest and candid her old, worn face
looked. In her rusty black dress and antique bonnet she sat, near the
close of a long life, and epitomised the experience of the world. Still
the man to whom she spoke gazed above her head, contemplating the
silent son of the old mother.

“What does the marshal say?” he asked. “Does he believe the advice is
good? Suppose the marshal speaks up and says if the talk’s all right?”

The tall man moved uneasily. He fingered the badge on his breast for a
moment, and then he put an arm around the old woman and drew her close
to him. She smiled the unchanging mother smile of three-score years,
and patted his big brown hand with her crooked, mittened fingers while
her son spake.

“I says this,” he said, looking squarely into the eyes of the other
man, “that if I was in your place I’d follow it. If I was a drunken,
desp’rate character, without shame or hope, I’d follow it. If I was in
your place and you was in mine I’d say: ‘Marshal, I’m willin’ to swear
if you’ll give me the chance I’ll quit the racket. I’ll drop the
tanglefoot and the gun play, and won’t play hoss no more. I’ll be a
good citizen and go to work and quit my foolishness. So help me God!’
That’s what I’d say to you if you was marshal and I was in your place.”

“Hear my son talkin’,” said the old woman softly. “Hear him, sir. You
promise to be good and he won’t do you no harm. Forty-one year ago his
heart first beat ag’in’ mine, and it’s beat true ever since.”

The other man rose to his feet, trying his limbs and stretching his
muscles.

“Then,” said he, “if you was in my place and said that, and I was
marshal, I’d say: ‘Go free, and do your best to keep your promise.’”

“Lawsy!” exclaimed the old woman, in a sudden flutter, “ef I didn’t
clear forget that trunk of mine! I see a man settin’ it on the platform
jest as I seen son’s face in the window, and it went plum out of my
head. There’s eight jars of home-made quince jam in that trunk that I
made myself. I wouldn’t have nothin’ happen to them jars for a red
apple.”

Away to the door she trotted, spry and anxious, and then Calliope
Catesby spoke out to Buck Patterson:

“I just couldn’t help it, Buck. I seen her through the window a-comin’
in. She never had heard a word ’bout my tough ways. I didn’t have the
nerve to let her know I was a worthless cuss bein’ hunted down by the
community. There you was lyin’ where my shot laid you, like you was
dead. The idea struck me sudden, and I just took your badge off and
fastened it onto myself, and I fastened my reputation onto you. I told
her I was the marshal and you was a holy terror. You can take your
badge back now, Buck.”

With shaking fingers Calliope began to unfasten the disc of metal from
his shirt.

“Easy there!” said Buck Patterson. “You keep that badge right where it
is, Calliope Catesby. Don’t you dare to take it off till the day your
mother leaves this town. You’ll be city marshal of Quicksand as long as
she’s here to know it. After I stir around town a bit and put ’em on
I’ll guarantee that nobody won’t give the thing away to her. And say,
you leather-headed, rip-roarin’, low-down son of a locoed cyclone, you
follow that advice she give me! I’m goin’ to take some of it myself,
too.”

“Buck,” said Calliope feelingly, “ef I don’t I hope I may—”

“Shut up,” said Buck. “She’s a-comin’ back.”