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The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories

by Owen Wister · English · Gutenberg #1390 · 385,778 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories

Author: Owen Wister


        
Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1390]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1390

Credits: Produced by Bill Brewer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JIMMYJOHN BOSS, AND OTHER STORIES ***

THE JIMMYJOHN BOSS AND OTHER STORIES

By Owen Wister




To Messrs. Harper & Bothers and Henry Mills Alden whose friendliness and
fair dealing I am glad of this chance to record

Owen Wister




Preface

     It's very plain that if a thing's the fashion--
       Too much the fashion--if the people leap
     To do it, or to be it, in a passion
       Of haste and crowding, like a herd of sheep,

     Why then that thing becomes through imitation
       Vulgar, excessive, obvious, and cheap.

     No gentleman desires to be pursuing

     What every Tom and Dick and Harry's doing.

     Stranger, do you write books? I ask the question,
       Because I'm told that everybody writes
     That what with scribbling, eating, and digestion,
       And proper slumber, all our days and nights

     Are wholly filled. It seems an odd suggestion--
       But if you do write, stop it, leave the masses,
       Read me, and join the small selected classes.




The Jimmyjohn Boss


I

One day at Nampa, which is in Idaho, a ruddy old massive jovial man
stood by the Silver City stage, patting his beard with his left hand,
and with his right the shoulder of a boy who stood beside him. He had
come with the boy on the branch train from Boise, because he was a
careful German and liked to say everything twice--twice at least when it
was a matter of business. This was a matter of very particular business,
and the German had repeated himself for nineteen miles. Presently the
east-bound on the main line would arrive from Portland; then the Silver
City stage would take the boy south on his new mission, and the man
would journey by the branch train back to Boise. From Boise no one could
say where he might not go, west or east. He was a great and pervasive
cattle man in Oregon, California, and other places. Vogel and Lex--even
to-day you may hear the two ranch partners spoken of. So the veteran
Vogel was now once more going over his notions and commands to his
youthful deputy during the last precious minutes until the east-bound
should arrive.

“Und if only you haf someding like dis,” said the old man, as he tapped
his beard and patted the boy, “it would be five hoondert more dollars
salary in your liddle pants.”

The boy winked up at his employer. He had a gray, humorous eye; he was
slim and alert, like a sparrow-hawk--the sort of boy his father openly
rejoices in and his mother is secretly in prayer over. Only, this boy
had neither father nor mother. Since the age of twelve he had looked out
for himself, never quite without bread, sometimes attaining champagne,
getting along in his American way variously, on horse or afoot, across
regions of wide plains and mountains, through towns where not a soul
knew his name. He closed one of his gray eyes at his employer, and
beyond this made no remark.

“Vat you mean by dat vink, anyhow?” demanded the elder.

“Say,” said the boy, confidentially--“honest now. How about you and me?
Five hundred dollars if I had your beard. You've got a record and I've
got a future. And my bloom's on me rich, without a scratch. How many
dollars you gif me for dat bloom?” The sparrow-hawk sailed into a
freakish imitation of his master.

“You are a liddle rascal!” cried the master, shaking with entertainment.
“Und if der peoples vas to hear you sass old Max Vogel in dis style they
would say, 'Poor old Max, he lose his gr-rip.' But I don't lose it.” His
great hand closed suddenly on the boy's shoulder, his voice cut clean
and heavy as an axe, and then no more joking about him. “Haf you
understand that?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Nineteen, sir.”

“Oh my, that is offle young for the job I gif you. Some of dose man you
go to boss might be your father. Und how much do you weigh?”

“About a hundred and thirty.”

“Too light, too light. Und I haf keep my eye on you in Boise. You are
not so goot a boy as you might be.”

“Well, sir, I guess not.”

“But you was not so bad a boy as you might be, neider. You don't lie
about it. Now it must be farewell to all that foolishness. Haf you
understand? You go to set an example where one is needed very bad. If
those men see you drink a liddle, they drink a big lot. You forbid them,
they laugh at you. You must not allow one drop of whiskey at the whole
place. Haf you well understand?”

“Yes, sir. Me and whiskey are not necessary to each other's happiness.”

“It is not you, it is them. How are you mit your gun?”

Vogel took the boy's pistol from its holster and aimed at an empty
bottle which was sticking in the thin Deceiver snow. “Can you do this?”
 he said, carelessly, and fired. The snow struck the bottle, but the
unharming bullet was buried half an inch to the left.

The boy took his pistol with solemnity. “No,” he said. “Guess I can't do
that.” He fired, and the glass splintered into shapelessness. “Told you
I couldn't miss as close as you did,” said he.

“You are a darling,” said Mr. Vogel. “Gif me dat lofely weapon.”

A fortunate store of bottles lay, leaned, or stood about in the white
snow of Nampa, and Mr. Vogel began at them.

“May I ask if anything is the matter?” inquired a mild voice from the
stage.

“Stick that lily head in-doors,” shouted Vogel; and the face and
eye-glasses withdrew again into the stage. “The school-teacher he will
be beautifool virtuous company for you at Malheur Agency,” continued
Vogel, shooting again; and presently the large old German destroyed a
bottle with a crashing smack. “Ah!” said he, in unison with the smack.
“Ah-ha! No von shall say der old Max lose his gr-rip. I shoot it efry
time now, but the train she whistle. I hear her.”

The boy affected to listen earnestly.

“Bah! I tell you I hear de whistle coming.”

“Did you say there was a whistle?” ventured the occupant of the stage.
The snow shone white on his glasses as he peered out.

“Nobody whistle for you,” returned the robust Vogel. “You listen to me,”
 he continued to the boy. “You are offle yoong. But I watch you plenty
this long time. I see you work mit my stock on the Owyhee and the
Malheur; I see you mit my oder men. My men they say always more and
more, 'Yoong Drake he is a goot one,' und I think you are a goot one
mine own self. I am the biggest cattle man on the Pacific slope, und I
am also an old devil. I have think a lot, und I like you.”

“I'm obliged to you, sir.”

“Shut oop. I like you, und therefore I make you my new sooperintendent
at my Malheur Agency r-ranch, mit a bigger salary as you don't get
before. If you are a sookcess, I r-raise you some more.”

“I am satisfied now, sir.”

“Bah! Never do you tell any goot business man you are satisfied mit vat
he gif you, for eider he don't believe you or else he think you are a
fool. Und eider ways you go down in his estimation. You make those men
at Malheur Agency behave themselves und I r-raise you. Only I do vish, I
do certainly vish you had some beard on that yoong chin.”

The boy glanced at his pistol.

“No, no, no, my son,” said the sharp old German. “I don't want gunpowder
in dis affair. You must act kviet und decisif und keep your liddle shirt
on. What you accomplish shootin'? You kill somebody, und then, pop!
somebody kills you. What goot is all that nonsense to me?”

“It would annoy me some, too,” retorted the boy, eyeing the capitalist.
“Don't leave me out of the proposition.”

“Broposition! Broposition! Now you get hot mit old Max for nothing.”

“If you didn't contemplate trouble,” pursued the boy, “what was your
point just now in sampling my marksmanship?” He kicked some snow in the
direction of the shattered bottle. “It's understood no whiskey comes on
that ranch. But if no gunpowder goes along with me, either, let's call
the deal off. Buy some other fool.”

“You haf not understand, my boy. Und you get very hot because I happen
to make that liddle joke about somebody killing you. Was you thinking
maybe old Max not care what happen to you?”

A moment of silence passed before the answer came: “Suppose we talk
business?”

“Very well, very well. Only notice this thing. When oder peoples talk
oop to me like you haf done many times, it is not they who does the
getting hot. It is me--old Max. Und when old Max gets hot he slings them
out of his road anywheres. Some haf been very sorry they get so slung.
You invite me to buy some oder fool? Oh, my boy, I will buy no oder fool
except you, for that was just like me when I was yoong Max!” Again the
ruddy and grizzled magnate put his hand on the shoulder of the boy, who
stood looking away at the bottles, at the railroad track, at anything
save his employer.

The employer proceeded: “I was afraid of nobody und noding in those
days. You are afraid of nobody and noding. But those days was different.
No Pullman sleepers, no railroad at all. We come oop the Columbia in
the steamboat, we travel hoonderts of miles by team, we sleep, we eat
nowheres in particular mit many unexpected interooptions. There was
Indians, there was offle bad white men, und if you was not offle
yourself you vanished quickly. Therefore in those days was Max Vogel
hell und repeat.”

The magnate smiled a broad fond smile over the past which he had kicked,
driven, shot, bled, and battled through to present power; and the boy
winked up at him again now.

“I don't propose to vanish, myself,” said he.

“Ah-ha! you was no longer mad mit der old Max! Of coorse I care what
happens to you. I was alone in the world myself in those lofely wicked
days.”

Reserve again made flinty the boy's face.

“Neider did I talk about my feelings,” continued Max Vogel, “but I nefer
show them too quick. If I was injured I wait, and I strike to kill. We
all paddles our own dugout, eh? We ask no favors from nobody; we must
win our spurs! Not so? Now I talk business with you where you interroopt
me. If cow-boys was not so offle scarce in the country, I would long ago
haf bounce the lot of those drunken fellows. But they cannot be spared;
we must get along so. I cannot send Brock, he is needed at Harper's. The
dumb fellow at Alvord Lake is too dumb; he is not quickly courageous.
They would play high jinks mit him. Therefore I send you. Brock he say
to me you haf joodgement. I watch, and I say to myself also, this boy
haf goot joodgement. And when you look at your pistol so quick, I tell
you quick I don't send you to kill men when they are so scarce already!
My boy, it is ever the moral, the say-noding strength what gets
there--mit always the liddle pistol behind, in case--joost in case. Haf
you understand? I ask you to shoot. I see you know how, as Brock told
me. I recommend you to let them see that aggomplishment in a friendly
way. Maybe a shooting-match mit prizes--I pay for them--pretty soon
after you come. Und joodgement--und joodgement. Here comes that train.
Haf you well understand?”

Upon this the two shook hands, looking square friendship in each other's
eyes. The east-bound, long quiet and dark beneath its flowing clots of
smoke, slowed to a halt. A few valises and legs descended, ascended,
herding and hurrying; a few trunks were thrown resoundingly in and out
of the train; a woolly, crooked old man came with a box and a bandanna
bundle from the second-class car; the travellers of a thousand miles
looked torpidly at him through the dim, dusty windows of their Pullman,
and settled again for a thousand miles more. Then the east-bound,
shooting heavier clots of smoke laboriously into the air, drew its slow
length out of Nampa, and away.

“Where's that stage?” shrilled the woolly old man. “That's what I'm
after.”

“Why, hello!” shouted Vogel. “Hello, Uncle Pasco! I heard you was dead.”

Uncle Pasco blinked his small eyes to see who hailed him. “Oh!” said he,
in his light, crusty voice. “Dutchy Vogel. No, I ain't dead. You guessed
wrong. Not dead. Help me up, Dutchy.”

A tolerant smile broadened Vogel's face. “It was ten years since I see
you,” said he, carrying the old man's box.

“Shouldn't wonder. Maybe it'll be another ten till you see me next.” He
stopped by the stage step, and wheeling nimbly, surveyed his old-time
acquaintance, noting the good hat, the prosperous watch-chain, the big,
well-blacked boots. “Not seen me for ten years. Hee-hee! No. Usen't to
have a cent more than me. Twins in poverty. That's how Dutchy and me
started. If we was buried to-morrow they'd mark him 'Pecunious' and me
'Impecunious.' That's what. Twins in poverty.”

“I stick to von business at a time, Uncle,” said good-natured,
successful Max.

A flicker of aberration lighted in the old man's eye. “H'm, yes,” said
he, pondering. “Stuck to one business. So you did. H'm.” Then, suddenly
sly, he chirped: “But I've struck it rich now.” He tapped his box.
“Jewelry,” he half-whispered. “Miners and cow-boys.”

“Yes,” said Vogel. “Those poor, deluded fellows, they buy such stuff.”
 And he laughed at the seedy visionary who had begun frontier life
with him on the bottom rung and would end it there. “Do you play that
concertina yet, Uncle?” he inquired.

“Yes, yes. I always play. It's in here with my tooth-brush and socks.”
 Uncle Pasco held up the bandanna. “Well, he's getting ready to start. I
guess I'll be climbing inside. Holy Gertrude!”

This shrill comment was at sight of the school-master, patient within
the stage. “What business are you in?” demanded Uncle Pasco.

“I am in the spelling business,” replied the teacher, and smiled,
faintly.

“Hell!” piped Uncle Pasco. “Take this.”

He handed in his bandanna to the traveller, who received it politely.
Max Vogel lifted the box of cheap jewelry; and both he and the boy came
behind to boost the old man up on the stage step. But with a nettled
look he leaped up to evade them, tottered half-way, and then, light as a
husk of grain, got himself to his seat and scowled at the schoolmaster.

After a brief inspection of that pale, spectacled face, “Dutchy,” he
called out of the door, “this country is not what it was.”

But old Max Vogel was inattentive. He was speaking to the boy, Dean
Drake, and held a flask in his hand. He reached the flask to his new
superintendent. “Drink hearty,” said he. “There, son! Don't be shy. Haf
you forgot it is forbidden fruit after now?”

“Kid sworn off?” inquired Uncle Pasco of the school-master.

“I understand,” replied this person, “that Mr. Vogel will not allow
his cow-boys at the Malheur Agency to have any whiskey brought there.
Personally, I feel gratified.” And Mr. Bolles, the new school-master,
gave his faint smile.

“Oh,” muttered Uncle Pasco. “Forbidden to bring whiskey on the ranch?
H'm.” His eyes wandered to the jewelry-box. “H'm,” said he again; and
becoming thoughtful, he laid back his moth-eaten sly head, and spoke no
further with Mr. Bolles.

Dean Drake climbed into the stage and the vehicle started.

“Goot luck, goot luck, my son!” shouted the hearty Max, and opened and
waved both his big arms at the departing boy: He stood looking after the
stage. “I hope he come back,” said he. “I think he come back. If he come
I r-raise him fifty dollars without any beard.”


II

The stage had not trundled so far on its Silver City road but that a
whistle from Nampa station reached its three occupants. This was the
branch train starting back to Boise with Max Vogel aboard; and the boy
looked out at the locomotive with a sigh.

“Only five days of town,” he murmured. “Six months more wilderness now.”

“My life has been too much town,” said the new school-master. “I am
looking forward to a little wilderness for a change.”

Old Uncle Pasco, leaning back, said nothing; he kept his eyes shut and
his ears open.

“Change is what I don't get,” sighed Dean Drake. In a few miles,
however, before they had come to the ferry over Snake River, the recent
leave-taking and his employer's kind but dominating repression lifted
from the boy's spirit. His gray eye wakened keen again, and he began
to whistle light opera tunes, looking about him alertly, like the
sparrow-hawk that he was. “Ever see Jeannie Winston in 'Fatinitza'?” he
inquired of Mr. Bolles.

The school-master, with a startled, thankful countenance, stated that he
had never.

“Ought to,” said Drake.

    “You a man? that can't be true!
     Men have never eyes like you.”

“That's what the girls in the harem sing in the second act. Golly whiz!”
 The boy gleamed over the memory of that evening.

“You have a hard job before you,” said the school-master, changing the
subject.

“Yep. Hard.” The wary Drake shook his head warningly at Mr. Bolles to
keep off that subject, and he glanced in the direction of slumbering
Uncle Pasco. Uncle Pasco was quite aware of all this. “I wouldn't take
another lonesome job so soon,” pursued Drake, “but I want the money.
I've been working eleven months along the Owyhee as a sort of junior
boss, and I'd earned my vacation. Just got it started hot in Portland,
when biff! old Vogel telegraphs me. Well, I'll be saving instead of
squandering. But it feels so good to squander!”

“I have never had anything to squander,” said Bolles, rather sadly.

“You don't say! Well, old man, I hope you will. It gives a man a lot
he'll never get out of spelling-books. Are you cold? Here.” And despite
the school-master's protest, Dean Drake tucked his buffalo coat round
and over him. “Some day, when I'm old,” he went on, “I mean to live
respectable under my own cabin and vine. Wife and everything. But not,
anyway, till I'm thirty-five.”

He dropped into his opera tunes for a while; but evidently it was
not “Fatinitza” and his vanished holiday over which he was chiefly
meditating, for presently he exclaimed: “I'll give them a shooting-match
in the morning. You shoot?”

Bolles hoped he was going to learn in this country, and exhibited a
Smith & Wesson revolver.

Drake grieved over it. “Wrap it up warm,” said he. “I'll lend you a
real one when we get to the Malheur Agency. But you can eat, anyhow.
Christmas being next week, you see, my programme is, shoot all A.M. and
eat all P.M. I wish you could light on a notion what prizes to give my
buccaroos.”

“Buccaroos?” said Bolles.

“Yep. Cow-punchers. Vaqueros. Buccaroos in Oregon. Bastard Spanish word,
you see, drifted up from Mexico. Vogel would not care to have me give
'em money as prizes.”

At this Uncle Pasco opened an eye.

“How many buccaroos will there be?” Bolles inquired.

“At the Malheur Agency? It's the headquarters of five of our ranches.
There ought to be quite a crowd. A dozen, probably, at this time of
year.”

Uncle Pasco opened his other eye. “Here, you!” he said, dragging at his
box under the seat. “Pull it, can't you? There. Just what you're after.
There's your prizes.” Querulous and watchful, like some aged, rickety
ape, the old man drew out his trinkets in shallow shelves.

“Sooner give 'em nothing,” said Dean Drake.

“What's that? What's the matter with them?”

“Guess the boys have had all the brass rings and glass diamonds they
want.”

“That's all you know, then. I sold that box clean empty through the
Palouse country last week, 'cept the bottom drawer, and an outfit on
Meacham's hill took that. Shows all you know. I'm going clean through
your country after I've quit Silver City. I'll start in by Baker City
again, and I'll strike Harney, and maybe I'll go to Linkville. I know
what buccaroos want. I'll go to Fort Rinehart, and I'll go to the Island
Ranch, and first thing you'll be seeing your boys wearing my stuff all
over their fingers and Sunday shirts, and giving their girls my stuff
right in Harney City. That's what.”

“All right, Uncle. It's a free country.”

“Shaw! Guess it is. I was in it before you was, too. You were wet behind
the ears when I was jammin' all around here. How many are they up at
your place, did you say?”

“I said about twelve. If you're coming our way, stop and eat with us.”

“Maybe I will and maybe I won't.” Uncle Pasco crossly shoved his box
back.

“All right, Uncle. It's a free country,” repeated Drake.

Not much was said after this. Uncle Pasco unwrapped his concertina from
the red handkerchief and played nimbly for his own benefit. At Silver
City he disappeared, and, finding he had stolen nothing from them, they
did not regret him. Dean Drake had some affairs to see to here before
starting for Harper's ranch, and it was pleasant to Bolles to find how
Drake was esteemed through this country. The school-master was to board
at the Malheur Agency, and had come this way round because the new
superintendent must so travel. They were scarcely birds of a feather,
Drake and Bolles, yet since one remote roof was to cover them, the
in-door man was glad this boy-host had won so much good-will from
high and low. That the shrewd old Vogel should trust so much in a
nineteen-year-old was proof enough at least of his character; but when
Brock, the foreman from Harper's, came for them at Silver City, Bolles
witnessed the affection that the rougher man held for Drake. Brock shook
the boy's hand with that serious quietness and absence of words which
shows the Western heart is speaking. After a look at Bolles and a silent
bestowing of the baggage aboard the team, he cracked his long whip and
the three rattled happily away through the dips of an open country where
clear streams ran blue beneath the winter air. They followed the Jordan
(that Idaho Jordan) west towards Oregon and the Owyhee, Brock often
turning in his driver's seat so as to speak with Drake. He had a long,
gradual chapter of confidences and events; through miles he unburdened
these to his favorite:

The California mare was coring well in harness. The eagle over at
Whitehorse ranch had fought the cat most terrible. Gilbert had got a
mule-kick in the stomach, but was eating his three meals. They had a new
boy who played the guitar. He used maple-syrup an his meat, and claimed
he was from Alabama. Brock guessed things were about as usual in most
ways. The new well had caved in again. Then, in the midst of his gossip,
the thing he had wanted to say all along came out: “We're pleased about
your promotion,” said he; and, blushing, shook Drake's hand again.

Warmth kindled the boy's face, and next, with a sudden severity, he
said: “You're keeping back something.”

The honest Brock looked blank, then labored in his memory.

“Has the sorrel girl in Harney married you yet?” said Drake. Brock
slapped his leg, and the horses jumped at his mirth. He was mostly
grave-mannered, but when his boy superintendent joked, he rejoiced with
the same pride that he took in all of Drake's excellences.

“The boys in this country will back you up,” said he, next day; and
Drake inquired: “What news from the Malheur Agency?”

“Since the new Chinaman has been cooking for them,” said Brock, “they
have been peaceful as a man could wish.”

“They'll approve of me, then,” Drake answered. “I'm feeding 'em hyas
Christmas muck-a-muck.”

“And what may that be?” asked the schoolmaster.

“You no kumtux Chinook?” inquired Drake. “Travel with me and you'll
learn all sorts of languages. It means just a big feed. All whiskey is
barred,” he added to Brock.

“It's the only way,” said the foreman. “They've got those Pennsylvania
men up there.”

Drake had not encountered these.

“The three brothers Drinker,” said Brock. “Full, Half-past Full, and
Drunk are what they call them. Them's the names; they've brought them
from Klamath and Rogue River.”

“I should not think a Chinaman would enjoy such comrades,” ventured Mr.
Bolles.

“Chinamen don't have comrades in this country,” said Brock, briefly.
“They like his cooking. It's a lonesome section up there, and a Chinaman
could hardly quit it, not if he was expected to stay. Suppose they kick
about the whiskey rule?” he suggested to Drake.

“Can't help what they do. Oh, I'll give each boy his turn in Harney City
when he gets anxious. It's the whole united lot I don't propose to have
cut up on me.”

A look of concern for the boy came over the face of foreman Brock.
Several times again before their parting did he thus look at his
favorite. They paused at Harper's for a day to attend to some matters,
and when Drake was leaving this place one of the men said to him: “We'll
stand by you.” But from his blithe appearance and talk as the slim boy
journeyed to the Malheur River and Headquarter ranch, nothing seemed
to be on his mind. Oregon twinkled with sun and fine white snow. They
crossed through a world of pines and creviced streams and exhilarating
silence. The little waters fell tinkling through icicles in the
loneliness of the woods, and snowshoe rabbits dived into the brush. East
Oregon, the Owyhee and the Malheur country, the old trails of General
Crook, the willows by the streams, the open swales, the high woods
where once Buffalo Horn and Chief E-egante and O-its the medicine-man
prospered, through this domain of war and memories went Bolles the
school-master with Dean Drake and Brock. The third noon from Harper's
they came leisurely down to the old Malheur Agency, where once the
hostile Indians had drawn pictures on the door, and where Castle Rock
frowned down unchanged.

“I wish I was going to stay here with you,” said Brock to Drake. “By
Indian Creek you can send word to me quicker than we've come.”

“Why, you're an old bat!” said the boy to his foreman, and clapped him
farewell on the shoulder.

Brock drove away, thoughtful. He was not a large man. His face was
clean-cut, almost delicate. He had a well-trimmed, yellow mustache, and
it was chiefly in his blue eye and lean cheek-bone that the frontiersman
showed. He loved Dean Drake more than he would ever tell, even to
himself.

The young superintendent set at work to ranch-work this afternoon of
Brock's leaving, and the buccaroos made his acquaintance one by one and
stared at him. Villany did not sit outwardly upon their faces; they were
not villains; but they stared at the boy sent to control them, and they
spoke together, laughing. Drake took the head of the table at supper,
with Bolles on his right. Down the table some silence, some staring,
much laughing went on--the rich brute laugh of the belly untroubled by
the brain. Sam, the Chinaman, rapid and noiseless, served the dishes.

“What is it?” said a buccaroo.

“Can it bite?” said another.

“If you guess what it is, you can have it,” said a third.

“It's meat,” remarked Drake, incisively, helping himself; “and tougher
than it looks.”

The brute laugh rose from the crowd and fell into surprised silence; but
no rejoinder came, and they ate their supper somewhat thoughtfully. The
Chinaman's quick, soft eye had glanced at Dean Drake when they laughed.
He served his dinner solicitously. In his kitchen that evening he and
Bolles unpacked the good things--the olives, the dried fruits, the
cigars--brought by the new superintendent for Christmas; and finding
Bolles harmless, like his gentle Asiatic self, Sam looked cautiously
about and spoke:

“You not know why they laugh,” said he. “They not talk about my meat
then. They mean new boss, Misser Dlake. He velly young boss.”

“I think,” said Bolles, “Mr. Drake understood their meaning, Sam. I have
noticed that at times he expresses himself peculiarly. I also think they
understood his meaning.”

The Oriental pondered. “Me like Misser Dlake,” said he. And drawing
quite close, he observed, “They not nice man velly much.”

Next day and every day “Misser Dlake” went gayly about his business, at
his desk or on his horse, vigilant, near and far, with no sign save a
steadier keenness in his eye. For the Christmas dinner he provided
still further sending to the Grande Ronde country for turkeys and other
things. He won the heart of Bolles by lending him a good horse; but the
buccaroos, though they were boisterous over the coming Christmas joy,
did not seem especially grateful. Drake, however, kept his worries to
himself.

“This thing happens anywhere,” he said one night in the office to
Bolles, puffing a cigar. “I've seen a troop of cavalry demoralize itself
by a sort of contagion from two or three men.”

“I think it was wicked to send you here by yourself,” blurted Bolles.

“Poppycock! It's the chance of my life, and I'll jam her through or
bust.”

“I think they have decided you are getting turkeys because you are
afraid of them,” said Bolles.

“Why, of course! But d' you figure I'm the man to abandon my Christmas
turkey because my motives for eating it are misconstrued?”

Dean Drake smoked for a while; then a knock came at the door. Five
buccaroos entered and stood close, as is the way with the guilty who
feel uncertain.

“We were thinking as maybe you'd let us go over to town,” said Half-past
Full, the spokesman.

“When?”

“Oh, any day along this week.”

“Can't spare you till after Christmas.”

“Maybe you'll not object to one of us goin'?”

“You'll each have your turn after this week.”

A slight pause followed. Then Half-past Full said: “What would you do if
I went, anyway?”

“Can't imagine,” Drake answered, easily. “Go, and I'll be in a position
to inform you.”

The buccaroo dropped his stolid bull eyes, but raised them again and
grinned. “Well, I'm not particular about goin' this week, boss.”

“That's not my name,” said Drake, “but it's what I am.”

They stood a moment. Then they shuffled out. It was an orderly
retreat--almost.

Drake winked over to Bolles. “That was a graze,” said he, and smoked for
a while. “They'll not go this time. Question is, will they go next?”


III

Drake took a fresh cigar, and threw his legs over the chair arm.

“I think you smoke too much,” said Bolles, whom three days had made
familiar and friendly.

“Yep. Have to just now. That's what! as Uncle Pasco would say. They are
a half-breed lot, though,” the boy continued, returning to the buccaroos
and their recent visit. “Weaken in the face of a straight bluff, you
see, unless they get whiskey-courageous. And I've called 'em down on
that.”

“Oh!” said Bolles, comprehending.

“Didn't you see that was their game? But he will not go after it.”

“The flesh is all they seem to understand,” murmured Bolles.

Half-past Full did not go to Harney City for the tabooed whiskey, nor
did any one. Drake read his buccaroos like the children that they were.
After the late encounter of grit, the atmosphere was relieved of storm.
The children, the primitive, pagan, dangerous children, forgot all about
whiskey, and lusted joyously for Christmas. Christmas was coming! No
work! A shooting-match! A big feed! Cheerfulness bubbled at the Malheur
Agency. The weather itself was in tune. Castle Rock seemed no longer
to frown, but rose into the shining air, a mass of friendly strength.
Except when a rare sledge or horseman passed, Mr. Bolles's journeys to
the school were all to show it was not some pioneer colony in a new,
white, silent world that heard only the playful shouts and songs of the
buccaroos. The sun overhead and the hard-crushing snow underfoot filled
every one with a crisp, tingling hilarity.

Before the sun first touched Castle Rock on the morning of the feast
they were up and in high feather over at the bunk-house. They raced
across to see what Sam was cooking; they begged and joyfully swallowed
lumps of his raw plum-pudding. “Merry Christmas!” they wished him, and
“Melly Clismas!” said he to them. They played leap-frog over by the
stable, they put snow down each other's backs. Their shouts rang round
corners; it was like boys let out of school. When Drake gathered them
for the shooting-match, they cheered him; when he told them there were
no prizes, what did they care for prizes? When he beat them all the
first round, they cheered him again. Pity he hadn't offered prizes! He
wasn't a good business man, after all!

The rounds at the target proceeded through the forenoon, Drake the
acclaimed leader; and the Christmas sun drew to mid-sky. But as its
splendor in the heavens increased, the happy shoutings on earth began
to wane. The body was all that the buccaroos knew; well, the flesh comes
pretty natural to all of us--and who had ever taught these men about
the spirit? The further they were from breakfast the nearer they were
to dinner; yet the happy shootings waned! The spirit is a strange thing.
Often it dwells dumb in human clay, then unexpectedly speaks out of the
clay's darkness.

It was no longer a crowd Drake had at the target. He became aware that
quietness had been gradually coming over the buccaroos. He looked, and
saw a man wandering by himself in the lane. Another leaned by the stable
corner, with a vacant face. Through the windows of the bunk-house
he could see two or three on their beds. The children were tired of
shouting. Drake went in-doors and threw a great log on the fire. It
blazed up high with sparks, and he watched it, although the sun shown
bright on the window-sill. Presently he noticed that a man had come in
and taken a chair. It was Half-past Full, and with his boots stretched
to the warmth, he sat gazing into the fire. The door opened and another
buckaroo entered and sat off in a corner. He had a bundle of old
letters, smeared sheets tied trite a twisted old ribbon. While his
large, top-toughened fingers softly loosened the ribbon, he sat with his
back to the room and presently began to read the letters over, one
by one. Most of the men came in before long, and silently joined the
watchers round the treat fireplace. Drake threw another log on, and in
a short time this, too, broke into ample flame. The silence was long;
a slice of shadow had fallen across the window-sill, when a young man
spoke, addressing the logs:

“I skinned a coon in San Saba, Texas, this day a year.”

At the sound of a voice, some of their eyes turned on the speaker, but
turned back to the fire again. The spirit had spoken from the clay,
aloud; and the clay was uncomfortable at hearing it.

After some more minutes a neighbor whispered to a neighbor, “Play you a
game of crib.”

The man nodded, stole over to where the board was, and brought it across
the floor on creaking tip-toe. They set it between them, and now and
then the cards made a light sound in the room.

“I treed that coon on Honey,” said the young man, after a while--“Honey
Creek, San Saba. Kind o' dry creek. Used to flow into Big Brady when it
rained.”

The flames crackled on, the neighbors still played their cribbage. Still
was the day bright, but the shrinking wedge of sun had gone entirely
from the window-sill. Half-past Full had drawn from his pocket a
mouthorgan, breathing half-tunes upon it; in the middle of “Suwanee
River” the man who sat in the corner laid the letter he was beginning
upon the heap on his knees and read no more. The great genial logs lay
glowing, burning; from the fresher one the flames flowed and forked;
along the embered surface of the others ran red and blue shivers of
iridescence. With legs and arms crooked and sprawled, the buccaroos
brooded, staring into the glow with seldom-winking eyes, while deep
inside the clay the spirit spoke quietly. Christmas Day was passing,
but the sun shone still two good hours high. Outside, over the snow
and pines, it was only in the deeper folds of the hills that the blue
shadows had come; the rest of the world was gold and silver; and from
far across that silence into this silence by the fire came a tinkling
stir of sound. Sleighbells it was, steadily coming, too early for Bolles
to be back from his school festival.

The toy-thrill of the jingling grew clear and sweet, a spirit of
enchantment that did not wake the stillness, but cast it into a deeper
dream. The bells came near the door and stopped, and then Drake opened
it.

“Hello, Uncle Pasco!” said he. “Thought you were Santa Claus.”

“Santa Claus! H'm. Yes. That's what. Told you maybe I'd come.”

“So you did. Turkey is due in--let's see--ninety minutes. Here, boys!
some of you take Uncle Pasco's horse.”

“No, no, I won't. You leave me alone. I ain't stoppin' here. I ain't
hungry. I just grubbed at the school. Sleepin' at Missouri Pete's
to-night. Got to make the railroad tomorrow.” The old man stopped his
precipitate statements. He sat in his sledge deeply muffled, blinking
at Drake and the buccaroos, who had strolled out to look at him, “Done a
big business this trip,” said he. “Told you I would. Now if you was only
givin' your children a Christmas-tree like that I seen that feller yer
schoolmarm doin' just now--hee-hee!” From his blankets he revealed the
well-known case. “Them things would shine on a tree,” concluded Uncle
Pasco.

“Hang 'em in the woods, then,” said Drake.

“Jewelry, is it?” inquired the young Texas man.

Uncle Pasco whipped open his case. “There you are,” said he. “All what's
left. That ring'll cost you a dollar.”

“I've a dollar somewheres,” said the young man, fumbling.

Half-past Full, on the other side of the sleigh, stood visibly
fascinated by the wares he was given a skilful glimpse of down among the
blankets. He peered and he pondered while Uncle Pasco glibly spoke to
him.

“Scatter your truck out plain!” the buccaroo exclaimed, suddenly. “I'm
not buying in the dark. Come over to the bunk-house and scatter.”

“Brass will look just the same anywhere,” said Drake.

“Brass!” screamed Uncle. “Brass your eye!”

But the buccaroos, plainly glad for distraction, took the woolly old
scolding man with them. Drake shouted that if getting cheated cheered
them, by all means to invest heavily, and he returned alone to his fire,
where Bolles soon joined him. They waited, accordingly, and by-and-by
the sleigh-bells jingled again. As they had come out of the silence,
so did they go into it, their little silvery tinkle dancing away in the
distance, faint and fainter, then, like a breath, gone.

Uncle Pasco's trinkets had audibly raised the men's spirits. They
remained in the bunkhouse, their laughter reaching Drake and Bolles more
and more. Sometimes they would scuffle and laugh loudly.

“Do you imagine it's more leap-frog?” inquired the school-master.

“Gambling,” said Drake. “They'll keep at it now till one of them wins
everything the rest have bought.”

“Have they been lively ever since morning?”

“Had a reaction about noon,” said Drake. “Regular home-sick spell. I
felt sorry for 'em.”

“They seem full of reaction,” said Bolles. “Listen to that!”

It was now near four o'clock, and Sam came in, announcing dinner.

“All ready,” said the smiling Chinaman.

“Pass the good word to the bunk-house,” said Drake, “if they can hear
you.”

Sam went across, and the shouting stopped. Then arose a thick volley of
screams and cheers.

“That don't sound right,” said Drake, leaping to his feet. In the next
instant the Chinaman, terrified, returned through the open door. Behind
him lurched Half-past Full, and stumbled into the room. His boot caught,
and he pitched, but saved himself and stood swaying, heavily looking at
Drake. The hair curled dense over his bull head, his mustache was spread
with his grin, the light of cloddish humor and destruction burned in his
big eye. The clay had buried the spirit like a caving pit.

“Twas false jewelry all right!” he roared, at the top of his voice. “A
good old jimmyjohn full, boss. Say, boss, goin' to run our jimmyjohn off
the ranch? Try it on, kid. Come over and try it on!” The bull beat on
the table.

Dean Drake had sat quickly down in his chair, his gray eye upon the
hulking buccaroo. Small and dauntless he sat, a sparrow-hawk caught in a
trap, and game to the end--whatever end.

“It's a trifle tardy to outline any policy about your demijohn,” said
he, seriously. “You folks had better come in and eat before you're
beyond appreciating.”

“Ho, we'll eat your grub, boss. Sam's cooking goes.” The buccaroo
lurched out and away to the bunk-house, where new bellowing was set up.

“I've got to carve this turkey, friend,” said the boy to Bolles.

“I'll do my best to help eat it,” returned the school-master, smiling.

“Misser Dlake,” said poor Sam, “I solly you. I velly solly you.”


IV

“Reserve your sorrow, Sam,” said Dean Drake. “Give us your soup for a
starter. Come,” he said to Bolles. “Quick.”

He went into the dining-room, prompt in his seat at the head of the
table, with the school-master next to him.

“Nice man, Uncle Pasco,” he continued. “But his time is not now. We have
nothing to do for the present but sit like every day and act perfectly
natural.”

“I have known simpler tasks,” said Mr. Bolles, “but I'll begin by
spreading this excellently clean napkin.”

“You're no schoolmarm!” exclaimed Drake; “you please me.”

“The worst of a bad thing,” said the mild Bolles, “is having time to
think about it, and we have been spared that.”

“Here they come,” said Drake.

They did come. But Drake's alert strategy served the end he had tried
for. The drunken buccaroos swarmed disorderly to the door and halted.
Once more the new superintendent's ways took them aback. Here was the
decent table with lights serenely burning, with unwonted good things
arranged upon it--the olives, the oranges, the preserves. Neat as parade
drill were the men's places, all the cups and forks symmetrical along
the white cloth. There, waiting his guests at the far end, sat the slim
young boss talking with his boarder, Mr. Bolles, the parts in their
smooth hair going with all the rest of this propriety. Even the daily
tin dishes were banished in favor of crockery.

“Bashful of Sam's napkins, boys?” said the boss. “Or is it the
bald-headed china?”

At this bidding they came in uncertainly. Their whiskey was ashamed
inside. They took their seats, glancing across at each other in a
transient silence, drawing their chairs gingerly beneath them. Thus
ceremony fell unexpected upon the gathering, and for a while they
swallowed in awkwardness what the swift, noiseless Sam brought them.
He in a long white apron passed and re-passed with his things from his
kitchen, doubly efficient and civil under stress of anxiety for
his young master. In the pauses of his serving he watched from the
background, with a face that presently caught the notice of one of them.

“Smile, you almond-eyed highbinder,” said the buccaroo. And the Chinaman
smiled his best.

“I've forgot something,” said Half-past Full, rising. “Don't let 'em
skip a course on me.” Half-past left the room.

“That's what I have been hoping for,” said Drake to Bolles.

Half-past returned presently and caught Drake's look of expectancy. “Oh
no, boss,” said the buccaroo, instantly, from the door. “You're on to
me, but I'm on to you.” He slammed the door with ostentation and dropped
with a loud laugh into his seat.

“First smart thing I've known him do,” said Drake to Bolles. “I am
disappointed.”

Two buccaroos next left the room together.

“They may get lost in the snow,” said the humorous Half-past. “I'll just
show 'em the trail.” Once more he rose from the dinner and went out.

“Yes, he knew too much to bring it in here,” said Drake to Bolles. “He
knew none but two or three would dare drink, with me looking on.”

“Don't you think he is afraid to bring it in the same room with you at
all?” Bolles suggested.

“And me temperance this season? Now, Bolles, that's unkind.”

“Oh, dear, that is not at all what--”

“I know what you meant, Bolles. I was only just making a little merry
over this casualty. No, he don't mind me to that extent, except when
he's sober. Look at him!”

Half-past was returning with his friends. Quite evidently they had all
found the trail.

“Uncle Pasco is a nice old man!” pursued Drake. “I haven't got my gun
on. Have you?”

“Yes,” said Bolles, but with a sheepish swerve of the eye.

Drake guessed at once. “Not Baby Bunting? Oh, Lord! and I promised
to give you an adult weapon!--the kind they're wearing now by way of
full-dress.”

“Talkin' secrets, boss?” said Half-past Full.

The well-meaning Sam filled his cup, and this proceeding shifted the
buccaroo's truculent attention.

“What's that mud?” he demanded.

“Coffee,” said Sam, politely.

The buccaroo swept his cup to the ground, and the next man howled
dismay.

“Burn your poor legs?” said Half-past. He poured his glass over the
victim. They wrestled, the company pounded the table, betting hoarsely,
until Half-past went to the floor, and his plate with him.

“Go easy,” said Drake. “You're smashing the company's property.”

“Bald-headed china for sure, boss!” said a second of the brothers
Drinker, and dropped a dish.

“I'll merely tell you,” said Drake, “that the company don't pay for this
china twice.”

“Not twice?” said Half-past Full, smashing some more. “How about
thrice?”

“Want your money now?” another inquired.

A riot of banter seized upon all of them, and they began to laugh and
destroy.

“How much did this cost?” said one, prying askew his three-tined fork.

“How much did you cost yourself?” said another to Drake.

“What, our kid boss? Two bits, I guess.”

“Hyas markook. Too dear!”

They bawled at their own jokes, loud and ominous; threat sounded beneath
their lightest word, the new crashes of china that they threw on the
floor struck sharply through the foreboding din of their mirth. The
spirit that Drake since his arrival had kept under in them day by day,
but not quelled, rose visibly each few succeeding minutes, swelling
upward as the tide does. Buoyed up on the whiskey, it glittered in their
eyes and yelled mutinously in their voices.

“I'm waiting all orders,” said Bolles to Drake.

“I haven't any,” said Drake. “New ones, that is. We've sat down to see
this meal out. Got to keep sitting.”

He leaned back, eating deliberately, saying no more to the buccaroos;
thus they saw he would never leave the room till they did. As he had
taken his chair the first, so was the boy bound to quit it the last. The
game of prying fork-tines staled on them one by one, and they took to
songs, mostly of love and parting. With the red whiskey in their eyes
they shouted plaintively of sweethearts, and vows, and lips, and meeting
in the wild wood. From these they went to ballads of the cattle-trail
and the Yuba River, and so inevitably worked to the old coast song, made
of three languages, with its verses rhymed on each year since the first
beginning. Tradition laid it heavy upon each singer in his turn to keep
the pot a-boiling by memory or by new invention, and the chant went
forward with hypnotic cadence to a tune of larkish, ripping gayety. He
who had read over his old stained letters in the homesick afternoon had
waked from such dreaming and now sang:

     “Once jes' onced in the year o' 49,
     I met a fancy thing by the name o' Keroline;
     I never could persuade her for to leave me be;
     She went and she took and she married me.”

His neighbor was ready with an original contribution:

     “Once, once again in the year o' '64,
     By the city of Whatcom down along the shore--
     I never could persuade them for to leave me be--
     A Siwash squaw went and took and married me.”

“What was you doin' between all them years?” called Half-past Full.

“Shut yer mouth,” said the next singer:

     “Once, once again in the year o' 71
     ['Twas the suddenest deed that I ever done)--
     I never could persuade them for to leave me be--
     A rich banker's daughter she took and married me.”

“This is looking better,” said Bolles to Drake.

“Don't you believe it,” said the boy.

Ten or a dozen years were thus sung.

“I never could persuade them for to leave me be” tempestuously brought
down the chorus and the fists, until the drunkards could sit no more,
but stood up to sing, tramping the tune heavily together. Then, just as
the turn came round to Drake himself, they dashed their chairs down and
herded out of the room behind Half-past Full, slamming the door.

Drake sat a moment at the head of his Christmas dinner, the fallen
chairs, the lumpy wreck. Blood charged his face from his hair to his
collar. “Let's smoke,” said he. They went from the dinner through the
room of the great fireplace to his office beyond.

“Have a mild one?” he said to the schoolmaster.

“No, a strong one to-night, if you please.” And Bolles gave his mild
smile.

“You do me good now and then,” said Drake.

“Dear me,” said the teacher, “I have found it the other way.”

All the rooms fronted on the road with doors--the old-time agency doors,
where the hostiles had drawn their pictures in the days before peace had
come to reign over this country. Drake looked out, because the singing
had stopped and they were very quiet in the bunk-house. He saw the
Chinaman steal from his kitchen.

“Sam is tired of us,” he said to Bolles.

“Tired?”

“Running away, I guess. I'd prefer a new situation myself. That's where
you're deficient, Bolles. Only got sense enough to stay where you happen
to be. Hello. What is he up to?”

Sam had gone beside a window of the bunkhouse and was listening there,
flat like a shadow. Suddenly he crouched, and was gone among the sheds.
Out of the bunk-house immediately came a procession, the buccaroos still
quiet, a careful, gradual body.

Drake closed his door and sat in the chair again. “They're escorting
that jug over here,” said he. “A new move, and a big one.”

He and Bolles heard them enter the next room, always without much noise
or talk--the loudest sound was the jug when they set it on the floor.
Then they seemed to sit, talking little.

“Bolles,” said Drake, “the sun has set. If you want to take after Sam--”

But the door of the sitting-room opened and the Chinaman himself came
in. He left the door a-swing and spoke clearly. “Misser Dlake,” said he,
“slove bloke” (stove broke).

The superintendent came out of his office, following Sam to the kitchen.
He gave no look or word to the buccaroos with their demijohn; he merely
held his cigar sidewise in his teeth and walked with no hurry through
the sitting-room. Sam took him through to the kitchen and round to a
hind corner of the stove, pointing.

“Misser Dlake,” said he, “slove no bloke. I hear them inside. They going
kill you.”

“That's about the way I was figuring it,” mused Dean Drake.

“Misser Dlake,” said the Chinaman, with appealing eyes, “I velly solly
you. They no hurtee me. Me cook.”

“Sam, there is much meat in your words. Condensed beef don't class with
you. But reserve your sorrows yet a while. Now what's my policy?” he
debated, tapping the stove here and there for appearances; somebody
might look in. “Shall I go back to my office and get my guns?”

“You not goin' run now?” said the Chinaman, anxiously.

“Oh yes, Sam. But I like my gun travelling. Keeps me kind of warm. Now
if they should get a sight of me arming--no, she's got to stay here till
I come back for her. So long, Sam! See you later. And I'll have time to
thank you then.”

Drake went to the corral in a strolling manner. There he roped the
strongest of the horses, and also the school-master's. In the midst of
his saddling, Bolles came down.

“Can I help you in any way?” said Bolles.

“You've done it. Saved me a bothering touch-and-go play to get you out
here and seem innocent. I'm going to drift.”

“Drift?”

“There are times to stay and times to leave, Bolles; and this is a case
of the latter. Have you a real gun on now?”

Poor Bolles brought out guiltily his.22 Smith & Wesson. “I don't seem to
think of things,” said he.

“Cheer up,” said Drake. “How could you thought-read me? Hide Baby
Bunting, though. Now we're off. Quietly, at the start. As if we were
merely jogging to pasture.”

Sam stood at his kitchen door, mutely wishing them well. The horses were
walking without noise, but Half-past Full looked out of the window.

“We're by, anyhow,” said Drake. “Quick now. Burn the earth.” The
horse sprang at his spurs. “Dust, you son of a gun! Rattle your hocks!
Brindle! Vamoose!” Each shouted word was a lash with his quirt. “Duck!”
 he called to Bolles.

Bolles ducked, and bullets grooved the spraying snow. They rounded a
corner and saw the crowd jumping into the corral, and Sam's door empty
of that prudent Celestial.

“He's a very wise Chinaman!” shouted Drake, as they rushed.

“What?” screamed Bolles.

“Very wise Chinaman. He'll break that stove now to prove his innocence.”

“Who did you say was innocent?” screamed Bolles.

“Oh, I said you were,” yelled Drake, disgusted; and he gave over this
effort at conversation as their horses rushed along.


V

It was a dim, wide stretch of winter into which Drake and Bolles
galloped from the howling pursuit. Twilight already veiled the base of
Castle Rock, and as they forged heavily up a ridge through the caking
snow, and the yells came after them, Bolles looked seriously at Dean
Drake; but that youth wore an expression of rising merriment. Bolles
looked back at the dusk from which the yells were sounding, then forward
to the spreading skein of night where the trail was taking him and the
boy, and in neither direction could he discern cause for gayety.

“May I ask where we are going?” said he.

“Away,” Drake answered. “Just away, Bolles. It's a healthy resort.”

Ten miles were travelled before either spoke again. The drunken
buccaroos yelled hot on their heels at first, holding more obstinately
to this chase than sober ruffians would have attempted. Ten cold, dark
miles across the hills it took to cure them; but when their shootings,
that had followed over heights where the pines grew and down through
the open swales between, dropped off, and died finally away among the
willows along the south fork of the Malheur, Drake reined in his horse
with a jerk.

“Now isn't that too bad!” he exclaimed.

“It is all very bad,” said Bolles, sorry to hear the boy's tone of
disappointment.

“I didn't think they'd fool me again,” continued Drake, jumping down.

“Again?” inquired the interested Bolles.

“Why, they've gone home!” said the boy, in disgust.

“I was hoping so,” said the school-master.

“Hoping? Why, it's sad, Bolles. Four miles farther and I'd have had them
lost.”

“Oh!” said Bolles.

“I wanted them to keep after us,” complained Drake. “Soon as we had a
good lead I coaxed them. Coaxed them along on purpose by a trail they
knew, and four miles from here I'd have swung south into the mountains
they don't know. There they'd have been good and far from home in the
snow without supper, like you and me, Bolles. But after all my trouble
they've gone back snug to that fireside. Well, let us be as cosey as we
can.”

He built a bright fire, and he whistled as he kicked the snow from his
boots, busying over the horses and the blankets. “Take a rest,” he said
to Bolles. “One man's enough to do the work. Be with you soon to share
our little cottage.” Presently Bolles heard him reciting confidentially
to his horse, “Twas the night after Christmas, and all in the
house--only we are not all in the house!” He slapped the belly of his
horse Tyee, who gambolled away to the limit of his picket-rope.

“Appreciating the moon, Bolles?” said he, returning at length to the
fire. “What are you so gazeful about, father?”

“This is all my own doing,” lamented the school-master.

“What, the moon is?”

“It has just come over me,” Bolles continued. “It was before you got in
the stage at Nampa. I was talking. I told Uncle Pasco that I was glad no
whiskey was to be allowed on the ranch. It all comes from my folly!”

“Why, you hungry old New England conscience!” cried the boy, clapping
him on the shoulder. “How in the world could you foresee the crookedness
of that hoary Beelzebub?”

“That's all very well,” said Bolles, miserably. “You would never have
mentioned it yourself to him.”

“You and I, Bolles, are different. I was raised on miscellaneous
wickedness. A look at my insides would be liable to make you say your
prayers.”

The school-master smiled. “If I said any prayers,” he replied, “you
would be in them.”

Drake looked moodily at the fire. “The Lord helps those who help
themselves,” said he. “I've prospered. For a nineteen-year-old I've
hooked my claw fairly deep here and there. As for to-day--why, that's
in the game too. It was their deal. Could they have won it on their own
play? A joker dropped into their hand. It's my deal now, and I have some
jokers myself. Go to sleep, Bolles. We've a ride ahead of us.”

The boy rolled himself in his blanket skillfully. Bolles heard him say
once or twice in a sort of judicial conversation with the blanket--“and
all in the house--but we were not all in the house. Not all. Not a full
house--” His tones drowsed comfortably into murmur, and then to quiet
breathing. Bolles fed the fire, thatched the unneeded wind-break (for
the calm, dry night was breathless), and for a long while watched the
moon and a tuft of the sleeping boy's hair.

“If he is blamed,” said the school-master, “I'll never forgive myself.
I'll never forgive myself anyhow.”

A paternal, or rather maternal, expression came over Bolles's face, and
he removed his large, serious glasses. He did not sleep very well.

The boy did. “I'm feeling like a bird,” said he, as they crossed through
the mountains next morning on a short cut to the Owybee. “Breakfast will
brace you up, Bolles. There'll be a cabin pretty soon after we strike
the other road. Keep thinking hard about coffee.”

“I wish I could,” said poor Bolles. He was forgiving himself less and
less.

Their start had been very early; as Drake bid the school-master observe,
to have nothing to detain you, nothing to eat and nothing to pack, is a
great help in journeys of haste. The warming day, and Indian Creek well
behind them, brought Drake to whistling again, but depression sat upon
the self-accusing Bolles. Even when they sighted the Owyhee road below
them, no cheerfulness waked in him; not at the nearing coffee, nor
yet at the companionable tinkle of sleigh-bells dancing faintly upward
through the bright, silent air.

“Why, if it ain't Uncle Pasco!” said Drake, peering down through a gap
in the foot-hill. “We'll get breakfast sooner than I expected. Quick!
Give me Baby Bunting!”

“Are you going to kill him?” whispered the school-master, with a beaming
countenance. And he scuffled with his pocket to hand over his hitherto
belittled weapon.

Drake considered him. “Bolles, Bolles,” said he, “you have got the
New England conscience rank. Plymouth Rock is a pudding to your heart.
Remind me to pray for you first spare minute I get. Now follow me close.
He'll be much more useful to us alive.”

They slipped from their horses, stole swiftly down a shoulder of the
hill, and waited among some brush. The bells jingled unsuspectingly
onward to this ambush.

“Only hear 'em!” said Drake. “All full of silver and Merry Christmas.
Don't gaze at me like that, Bolles, or I'll laugh and give the whole
snap away. See him come! The old man's breath streams out so calm. He's
not worried with New England conscience. One, two, three” Just before
the sleigh came opposite, Dean Drake stepped out. “Morning, Uncle!” said
he. “Throw up your hands!”

Uncle Pasco stopped dead, his eyes blinking. Then he stood up in the
sleigh among his blankets. “H'm,” said he, “the kid.”

“Throw up your hands! Quit fooling with that blanket!” Drake spoke
dangerously now. “Bolles,” he continued, “pitch everything out of the
sleigh while I cover him. He's got a shot-gun under that blanket. Sling
it out.”

It was slung. The wraps followed. Uncle Pasco stepped obediently down,
and soon the chattels of the emptied sleigh littered the snow. The old
gentleman was invited to undress until they reached the six-shooter that
Drake suspected. Then they ate his lunch, drank some whiskey that he had
not sold to the buccaroos, told him to repack the sleigh, allowed him
to wrap up again, bade him take the reins, and they would use his
six-shooter and shot-gun to point out the road to him.

He had said very little, had Uncle Pasco, but stood blinking, obedient
and malignant. “H'm,” said he now, “goin' to ride with me, are you?”

He was told yes, that for the present he was their coachman. Their
horses were tired and would follow, tied behind. “We're weary, too,”
 said Drake, getting in. “Take your legs out of my way or I'll kick off
your shins. Bolles, are you fixed warm and comfortable? Now start her up
for Harper ranch, Uncle.”

“What are you proposing to do with me?” inquired Uncle Pasco.

“Not going to wring your neck, and that's enough for the present.
Faster, Uncle. Get a gait on. Bolles, here's Baby Bunting. Much obliged
to you for the loan of it, old man.”

Uncle Pasco's eye fell on the 22-caliber pistol. “Did you hold me up
with that lemonade straw?” he asked, huskily.

“Yep,” said Drake. “That's what.”

“Oh, hell!” murmured Uncle Pasco. And for the first time he seemed
dispirited.

“Uncle, you're not making time,” said Drake after a few miles. “I'll
thank you for the reins. Open your bandanna and get your concertina.
Jerk the bellows for us.”

“That I'll not!” screamed Uncle Pasco.

“It's music or walk home,” said the boy. “Take your choice.”

Uncle Pasco took his choice, opening with the melody of “The Last Rose
of Summer.” The sleigh whirled up the Owyhee by the winter willows, and
the levels, and the meadow pools, bright frozen under the blue sky.
Late in this day the amazed Brock by his corrals at Harper's beheld
arrive his favorite, his boy superintendent, driving in with the
schoolmaster staring through his glasses, and Uncle Pasco throwing
out active strains upon his concertina. The old man had been bidden to
bellows away for his neck.

Drake was not long in explaining his need to the men. “This thing must
be worked quick,” said he. “Who'll stand by me?”

All of them would, and he took ten, with the faithful Brock. Brock would
not allow Gilbert to go, because he had received another mule-kick in
the stomach. Nor was Bolles permitted to be of the expedition. To all
his protests, Drake had but the single word: “This is not your fight,
old man. You've done your share with Baby Bunting.”

Thus was the school-master in sorrow compelled to see them start back
to Indian Creek and the Malheur without him. With him Uncle Pasco would
have joyfully exchanged. He was taken along with the avengers. They
would not wring his neck, but they would play cat and mouse with him and
his concertina; and they did. But the conscience of Bolles still toiled.
When Drake and the men were safe away, he got on the wagon going for the
mail, thus making his way next morning to the railroad and Boise, where
Max Vogel listened to him; and together this couple hastily took train
and team for the Malheur Agency.

The avengers reached Indian Creek duly, and the fourth day after his
Christmas dinner Drake came once more in sight of Castle Rock.

“I am doing this thing myself, understand,” he said to Brock. “I am
responsible.”

“We're here to take your orders,” returned the foreman. But as the
agency buildings grew plain and the time for action was coming, Brock's
anxious heart spoke out of its fulness. “If they start in to--to--they
might--I wish you'd let me get in front,” he begged, all at once.

“I thought you thought better of me,” said Drake.

“Excuse me,” said the man. Then presently: “I don't see how anybody
could 'a' told he'd smuggle whiskey that way. If the old man [Brock
meant Max Vogel] goes to blame you, I'll give him my opinion straight.”

“The old man's got no use for opinions,” said Drake. “He goes on
results. He trusted me with this job, and we're going to have results
now.”

The drunkards were sitting round outside the ranch house. It was
evening. They cast a sullen inspection on the new-comers, who returned
them no inspection whatever. Drake had his men together and took them
to the stable first, a shed with mangers. Here he had them unsaddle.
“Because,” he mentioned to Brock, “in case of trouble we'll be sure of
their all staying. I'm taking no chances now.”

Soon the drunkards strolled over, saying good-day, hazarding a few
comments on the weather and like topics, and meeting sufficient answers.

“Goin' to stay?”

“Don't know.”

“That's a good horse you've got.”

“Fair.”

But Sam was the blithest spirit at the Malheur Agency. “Hiyah!” he
exclaimed. “Misser Dlake! How fashion you come quick so?” And the
excellent Chinaman took pride in the meal of welcome that he prepared.

“Supper's now,” said Drake to his men. “Sit anywhere you feel like.
Don't mind whose chair you're taking--and we'll keep our guns on.”

Thus they followed him, and sat. The boy took his customary perch at the
head of the table, with Brock at his right. “I miss old Bolles,” he told
his foreman. “You don't appreciate Bolles.”

“From what you tell of him,” said Brock, “I'll examine him more
careful.”

Seeing their boss, the sparrow-hawk, back in his place, flanked with
supporters, and his gray eye indifferently upon them, the buccaroos grew
polite to oppressiveness. While Sam handed his dishes to Drake and
the new-comers, and the new-comers eat what was good before the old
inhabitants got a taste, these latter grew more and more solicitous.
They offered sugar to the strangers, they offered their beds; Half-past
Full urged them to sit companionably in the room where the fire was
burning. But when the meal was over, the visitors went to another room
with their arms, and lighted their own fire. They brought blankets from
their saddles, and after a little concertina they permitted the nearly
perished Uncle Pasco to slumber. Soon they slumbered themselves, with
the door left open, and Drake watching. He would not even share vigil
with Brock, and all night he heard the voices of the buccaroos, holding
grand, unending council.

When the relentless morning came, and breakfast with the visitors again
in their seats unapproachable, the drunkards felt the crisis to be a
strain upon their sobered nerves. They glanced up from their plates, and
down; along to Dean Drake eating his hearty porridge, and back at one
another, and at the hungry, well-occupied strangers.

“Say, we don't want trouble,” they began to the strangers.

“Course you don't. Breakfast's what you're after.”

“Oh, well, you'd have got gay. A man gets gay.”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Drake,” said Half-past Full, sweating with his effort, “we were
sorry while we was a-fogging you up.”

“Yes,” said Drake. “You must have been just overcome by contrition.”

A large laugh went up from the visitors, and the meal was finished
without further diplomacy.

“One matter, Mr. Drake,” stammered Half-past Full, as the party rose.
“Our jobs. We're glad to pay for any things what got sort of broke.”

“Sort of broke,” repeated the boy, eyeing him. “So you want to hold your
jobs?”

“If--” began the buccaroo, and halted.

“Fact is, you're a set of cowards,” said Drake, briefly. “I notice
you've forgot to remove that whiskey jug.” The demijohn still stood
by the great fireplace. Drake entered and laid hold of it, the crowd
standing back and watching. He took it out, with what remained in its
capacious bottom, set it on a stump, stepped back, levelled his gun, and
shattered the vessel to pieces. The whiskey drained down, wetting the
stump, creeping to the ground.

Much potency lies in the object-lesson, and a grin was on the faces of
all present, save Uncle Pasco's. It had been his demijohn, and when the
shot struck it he blinked nervously.

“You ornery old mink!” said Drake, looking at him. “You keep to the
jewelry business hereafter.”

The buccaroos grinned again. It was reassuring to witness wrath turn
upon another.

“You want to hold your jobs?” Drake resumed to them. “You can trust
yourselves?”

“Yes, sir,” said Half-past Full.

“But I don't trust you,” stated Drake, genially; and the buccaroos'
hopeful eyes dropped. “I'm going to divide you,” pursued the new
superintendent. “Split you far and wide among the company's ranches.
Stir you in with decenter blood. You'll go to White-horse ranch, just
across the line of Nevada,” he said to Half-past Full. “I'm tired of the
brothers Drinker. You'll go--let's see--”

Drake paused in his apportionment, and a sleigh came swiftly round the
turn, the horse loping and lathery.

“What vas dat shooting I hear joost now?” shouted Max Vogel, before he
could arrive. He did not wait for any answer. “Thank the good God!” he
exclaimed, at seeing the boy Dean Drake unharmed, standing with a gun.
And to their amazement he sped past them, never slacking his horse's
lope until he reached the corral. There he tossed the reins to the
placid Bolles, and springing out like a surefooted elephant, counted his
saddle-horses; for he was a general. Satisfied, he strode back to the
crowd by the demijohn. “When dem men get restless,” he explained to
Drake at once, “always look out. Somebody might steal a horse.”

The boy closed one gray, confidential eye at his employer. “Just my
idea,” said he, “when I counted 'em before breakfast.”

“You liddle r-rascal,” said Max, fondly, “What you shoot at?”

Drake pointed at the demijohn. “It was bigger than those bottles at
Nampa,” said he. “Guess you could have hit it yourself.”

Max's great belly shook. He took in the situation. It had a flavor that
he liked. He paused to relish it a little more in silence.

“Und you have killed noding else?” said he, looking at Uncle Pasco, who
blinked copiously. “Mine old friend, you never get rich if you change
your business so frequent. I tell you that thirty years now.” Max's hand
found Drake's shoulder, but he addressed Brock. “He is all what you tell
me,” said he to the foreman. “He have joodgement.”

Thus the huge, jovial Teuton took command, but found Drake had left
little for him to do. The buccaroos were dispersed at Harper's, at Fort
Rinehart, at Alvord Lake, towards Stein's peak, and at the Island Ranch
by Harney Lake. And if you know east Oregon, or the land where Chief
E-egante helped out Specimen Jones, his white soldier friend, when the
hostile Bannocks were planning his immediate death as a spy, you will
know what wide regions separated the buccaroos. Bolles was taken into
Max Vogel's esteem; also was Chinese Sam. But Max sat smoking in the
office with his boy superintendent, in particular satisfaction.

“You are a liddle r-rascal,” said he. “Und I r-raise you fifty dollars.”




A Kinsman of Red Cloud


I

It was thirty minutes before a June sundown at the post, and the first
call had sounded for parade. Over in the barracks the two companies
and the single troop lounged a moment longer, then laid their police
literature down, and lifted their stocking feet from the beds to get
ready. In the officers' quarters the captain rose regretfully from
after-dinner digestion, and the three lieutenants sought their helmets
with a sigh. Lieutenant Balwin had been dining an unconventional and
impressive guest at the mess, and he now interrupted the anecdote which
the guest was achieving with frontier deliberation.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I'll have to hear the rest about
the half-breed when I get back.”

“There ain't no more--yet. He got my cash with his private poker deck
that onced, and I'm fixing for to get his'n.”

Second call sounded; the lines filed out and formed, the sergeant of
the guard and two privates took their station by the flag, and when
battalion was formed the commanding officer, towering steeple-stiff
beneath his plumes, received the adjutant's salute, ordered him to his
post, and began drill. At all this the unconventional guest looked on
comfortably from Lieutenant Balwin's porch.

“I doubt if I could put up with that there discipline all the week,” he
mused. “Carry--arms! Present--Arms! I guess that's all I know of it.”
 The winking white line of gloves stirred his approval. “Pretty good
that. Gosh, see the sun on them bayonets!”

The last note of retreat merged in the sonorous gun, and the flag
shining in the light of evening slid down and rested upon the earth.
The blue ranks marched to a single bugle--the post was short of men and
officers--and the captain, with the released lieutenants, again sought
digestion and cigars. Balwin returned to his guest, and together they
watched the day forsake the plain. Presently the guest rose to take his
leave. He looked old enough to be the father of the young officer, but
he was a civilian, and the military man proceeded to give him excellent
advice.

“Now don't get into trouble, Cutler.”

The slouch-shouldered scout rolled his quid gently, and smiled at his
superior with indulgent regard.

“See here, Cutler, you have a highly unoccupied look about you this
evening. I've been studying the customs of this population, and I've
noted a fact or two.”

“Let 'em loose on me, sir.”

“Fact one: When any male inhabitant of Fort Laramie has a few spare
moments, he hunts up a game of cards.”

“Well, sir, you've called the turn on me.”

“Fact two: At Fort Laramie a game of cards frequently ends in
discussion.”

“Fact three: Mr. Calvin, in them discussions Jarvis Cutler has the last
word. You put that in your census report alongside the other two.”

“Well, Cutler, if somebody's gun should happen to beat yours in an
argument, I should have to hunt another wagon-master.”

“I'll not forget that. When was you expecting to pull out north?”

“Whenever the other companies get here. May be three days--may be three
weeks.”

“Then I will have plenty time for a game to-night.”

With this slight dig of his civilian independence into the lieutenant's
military ribs, the scout walked away, his long, lugubrious frockcoat
(worn in honor of the mess) occasionally flapping open in the breeze,
and giving a view of a belt richly fluted with cartridges, and the ivory
handle of a pistol looking out of its holster. He got on his horse,
crossed the flat, and struck out for the cabin of his sociable friends,
Loomis and Kelley, on the hill. The open door and a light inside showed
the company, and Cutler gave a grunt, for sitting on the table was the
half-breed, the winner of his unavenged dollars. He rode slower, in
order to think, and arriving at the corral below the cabin, tied his
horse to the stump of a cottonwood. A few steps towards the door, and he
wheeled on a sudden thought, and under cover of the night did a crafty
something which to the pony was altogether unaccountable. He unloosed
both front and rear cinch of his saddle, so they hung entirely free in
wide bands beneath the pony's belly. He tested their slackness with his
hand several times, stopping instantly when the more and more surprised
pony turned his head to see what new thing in his experience might be
going on, and, seeing, gave a delicate bounce with his hind-quarters.

“Never you mind, Duster,” muttered the scout. “Did you ever see a
skunk-trap? Oughts is for mush-rats, and number ones is mostly used
for 'coons and 'possums, and I guess they'd do for a skunk. But you and
we'll call this here trap a number two, Duster, for the skunk I'm after
is a big one. All you've to do is to act natural.”

Cutler took the rope off the stump by which Duster had been tied
securely, wound and strapped it to the tilted saddle, and instead of
this former tether, made a weak knot in the reins, and tossed them over
the stump. He entered the cabin with a countenance sweeter than honey.

“Good-evening, boys,” he said. “Why, Toussaint, how do you do?”

The hand of Toussaint had made a slight, a very slight, movement towards
his hip, but at sight of Cutler's mellow smile resumed its clasp upon
his knee.

“Golly, but you're gay-like this evening,” said Kelley.

“Blamed if I knowed he could look so frisky,” added Loomis.

“Sporting his onced-a-year coat,” Kelley pursued. “That ain't for our
benefit, Joole.”

“No, we're not that high in society.” Both these cheerful waifs had
drifted from the Atlantic coast westward.

Cutler looked from them to his costume, and then amiably surveyed the
half-breed.

“Well, boys, I'm in big luck, I am. How's yourn nowadays, Toussaint?”

“Pretty good sometime. Sometime heap hell.” The voice of the half-breed
came as near heartiness as its singularly false quality would allow, and
as he smiled he watched Cutler with the inside of his eyes.

The scout watched nobody and nothing with great care, looked about him
pleasantly, inquired for the whiskey, threw aside hat and gloves, sat
down, leaning the chair back against the wall, and talked with artful
candor. “Them sprigs of lieutenants down there,” said he, “they're a
surprising lot for learning virtue to a man. You take Balwin. Why, he
ain't been out of the Academy only two years, and he's been telling me
how card-playing ain't good for you. And what do you suppose he's been
and offered Jarvis Cutler for a job? I'm to be wagon-master.” He
paused, and the half-breed's attention to his next words increased.
“Wagon-master, and good pay, too. Clean up to the Black Hills; and the
troops'll move soon as ever them reinforcements come. Drinks on it,
boys! Set 'em up, Joole Loomis. My contract's sealed with some of Uncle
Sam's cash, and I'm going to play it right here. Hello! Somebody coming
to join us? He's in a hurry.”

There was a sound of lashing straps and hoofs beating the ground, and
Cutler looked out of the door. As he had calculated, the saddle had
gradually turned with Duster's movements and set the pony bucking.

“Stampeded!” said the scout, and swore the proper amount called for by
such circumstances. “Some o' you boys help me stop the durned fool.”

Loomis and Kelley ran. Duster had jerked the prepared reins from the
cottonwood, and was lurching down a small dry gulch, with the saddle
bouncing between his belly and the stones.

Cutler cast a backward eye at the cabin where Toussaint had stayed
behind alone. “Head him off below, boys, and I'll head him off above,”
 the scout sang out. He left his companions, and quickly circled round
behind the cabin, stumbling once heavily, and hurrying on, anxious lest
the noise had reached the lurking half-breed. But the ivory-handled
pistol, jostled from its holster, lay unheeded among the stones where he
had stumbled. He advanced over the rough ground, came close to the logs,
and craftily peered in at the small window in the back of the cabin. It
was evident that he had not been heard. The sinister figure within still
sat on the table, but was crouched, listening like an animal to the
shouts that were coming from a safe distance down in the gulch. Cutler,
outside of the window, could not see the face of Toussaint, but he saw
one long brown hand sliding up and down the man's leg, and its movement
put him in mind of the tail of a cat. The hand stopped to pull out a
pistol, into which fresh cartridges were slipped. Cutler had already
done this same thing after dismounting, and he now felt confident that
his weapon needed no further examination. He did not put his hand to his
holster. The figure rose from the table, and crossed the room to a set
of shelves in front of which hung a little yellow curtain. Behind it
were cups, cans, bottles, a pistol, counters, red, white, and blue, and
two fresh packs of cards, blue and pink, side by side. Seeing these,
Toussaint drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and unwrapped two further
packs, both blue; and at this Cutler's intent face grew into plain shape
close to the window, but receded again into uncertain dimness. From down
in the gulch came shouts that the runaway horse was captured. Toussaint
listened, ran to the door, and quickly returning, put the blue pack
from the shelf into his pocket, leaving in exchange one of his own. He
hesitated about altering the position of the cards on the shelf, but
Kelley and Loomis were unobservant young men, and the half-breed placed
the pink cards on top of his blue ones. The little yellow curtain again
hung innocently over the shelves, and Toussaint, pouring himself a drink
of whiskey, faced round, and for the first time saw the window that had
been behind his back. He was at it in an instant, wrenching its rusty
pin, that did not give, but stuck motionless in the wood. Cursing,
he turned and hurried out of the door and round the cabin. No one was
there. Some hundred yards away the noiseless Cutler crawled farther
among the thickets that filled the head of the gulch. Toussaint whipped
out a match, and had it against his trousers to strike and look if there
were footprints, when second thoughts warned him this might be seen, and
was not worth risking suspicion over, since so many feet came and went
by this cabin. He told himself no one could have been there to see him,
and slowly returned inside, with a mind that fell a hair's breadth short
of conviction.

The boys, coming up with the horse, met Cutler, who listened to how
Duster had stood still as soon as he had kicked free of his saddle,
making no objection to being caught. They suggested that he would not
have broken loose had he been tied with a rope; and hearing this, Cutler
bit off a piece of tobacco, and told them they were quite right: a
horse should never be tied by his bridle. For a savory moment the scout
cuddled his secret, and turned it over like the tobacco lump under his
tongue. Then he explained, and received serenely the amazement of Loomis
and Kelley.

“When you kids have travelled this Western country awhile you'll keep
your cards locked,” said he. “He's going to let us win first. You'll
see, he'll play a poor game with the pink deck. Then, if we don't call
for fresh cards, why, he'll call for 'em himself. But, just for the fun
of the thing, if any of us loses steady, why, we'll call. Then, when he
gets hold of his strippers, watch out. When he makes his big play, and
is stretchin' for to rake the counters in, you grab 'em, Joole; for by
then I'll have my gun on him, and if he makes any trouble we'll feed him
to the coyotes. I expect that must have been it, boys,” he continued, in
a new tone, as they came within possible ear-shot of the half-breed in
the cabin. “A coyote come around him where he was tied. The fool horse
has seen enough of 'em to git used to 'em, you'd think, but he don't.
There; that'll hold him. I guess he'll have to pull the world along with
him if he starts to run again.”

The lamp was placed on the window-shelf, and the four took seats, Cutler
to the left of Toussaint, with Kelley opposite. The pink cards fell
harmless, and for a while the game was a dull one to see. Holding a pair
of kings, Cutler won a little from Toussaint, who remarked that luck
must go with the money of Uncle Sam. After a few hands, the half-breed
began to bet with ostentatious folly, and, losing to one man and
another, was joked upon the falling off of his game. In an hour's time
his blue chips had been twice reinforced, and twice melted from the neat
often-counted pile in which he arranged them; moreover, he had lost a
horse from his string down on Chug Water.

“Lend me ten dollar,” he said to Cutler. “You rich man now.”

In the next few deals Kelley became poor. “I'm sick of this luck,” said
he.

“Then change it, why don't you? Let's have a new deck.” And Loomis rose.

“Joole, you always are for something new,” said Cutler. “Now I'm doing
pretty well with these pink cards. But I'm no hog. Fetch on your fresh
ones.”

The eyes of the half-breed swerved to the yellow curtain. He was by
a French trapper from Canada out of a Sioux squaw, one of Red Cloud's
sisters, and his heart beat hot with the evil of two races, and none of
their good. He was at this moment irrationally angry with the men who
had won from him through his own devices, and malice undisguised shone
in his lean flat face. At sight of the blue cards falling in the first
deal, silence came over the company, and from the distant parade-ground
the bugle sounded the melancholy strain of taps. Faint, far, solemn,
melodious, the music travelled unhindered across the empty night.

“Them men are being checked off in their bunks now,” said Cutler.

“What you bet this game?” demanded Toussaint.

“I've heard 'em play that same music over a soldier's grave,” said
Kelley.

“You goin' to bet?” Toussaint repeated.

Cutler pushed forward the two necessary white chips. No one's hand was
high, and Loomis made a slight winning. The deal went its round several
times, and once, when it was Toussaint's, Cutler suspected that special
cards had been thrown to him by the half-breed as an experiment. He
therefore played the gull to a nicety, betting gently upon his three
kings; but when he stepped out boldly and bet the limit, it was not
Toussaint but Kelley who held the higher hand, winning with three aces.
Why the coup should be held off longer puzzled the scout, unless it was
that Toussaint was carefully testing the edges of his marked cards to
see if he controlled them to a certainty. So Cutler played on calmly.
Presently two aces came to him in Toussaint's deal, and he wondered how
many more would be in his three-card draw. Very pretty! One only, and he
lost to Loomis, who had drawn three, and held four kings. The hands
were getting higher, they said. The game had “something to it now.” But
Toussaint grumbled, for his luck was bad all this year, he said. Cutler
had now made sure that the aces and kings went where the half-breed
wished, and could be slid undetected from the top or the middle or the
bottom of the pack; but he had no test yet how far down the scale the
marking went. At Toussaint's next deal Cutler judged the time had come,
and at the second round of betting he knew it. The three white men
played their parts, raising each other without pause, and again there
was total silence in the cabin. Every face bent to the table, watching
the turn repeat its circle with obstinate increase, until new chips and
more new chips had been brought to keep on with, and the heap in the
middle had mounted high in the hundreds, while in front of Toussaint
lay his knife and a match-box--pledges of two more horses which he had
staked. He had drawn three cards, while the others took two, except
Cutler, who had a pair of kings again, and drawing three, picked up two
more. Kelley dropped out, remarking he had bet more than his hand was
worth, which was true, and Loomis followed him. Their persistence had
surprised Toussaint a little. He had not given every one suspicious
hands: Cutler's four kings were enough. He bet once more, was raised by
the scout, called, and threw down his four aces.

“That beats me,” said Cutler, quietly, and his hand moved under his
frock-coat, as the half-breed, eyeing the central pile of counters in
triumph, closed his fingers over it. They were dashed off by Kelley, who
looked expectantly across at Cutler, and seeing the scout's face wither
into sudden old age, cried out, “For God's sake, Jarvis, where's your
gun?” Kelley sprang for the yellow curtain, and reeled backward at the
shot of Toussaint. His arm thrashed along the window-sill as he fell,
sweeping over the lamp, and flaring channels of oil ran over his body
and spread on the ground. But these could no longer hurt him. The
half-breed had leaped outside the cabin, enraged that Cutler should have
got out during the moment he had been dealing with Kelley. The scout was
groping for his ivory-handled pistol off in the darkness. He found
it, and hurried to the little window at a second shot he heard inside.
Loomis, beating the rising flame away, had seized the pistol from the
shelf, and aimlessly fired into the night at Toussaint. He fired again,
running to the door from the scorching heat. Cutler got round the house
to save him if he could, and saw the half-breed's weapon flash, and the
body pitch out across the threshold. Toussaint, gaining his horse, shot
three times and missed Cutler, whom he could not clearly see; and he
heard the scout's bullets sing past him as his horse bore him rushing
away.


II

Jarvis Cutler lifted the dead Loomis out of the cabin. He made a try
for Kelley's body, but the room had become a cave of flame, and he was
driven from the door. He wrung his hands, giving himself bitter blame
aloud, as he covered Loomis with his saddle-blanket, and jumped bareback
upon Duster to go to the post. He had not been riding a minute when
several men met him. They had seen the fire from below, and on their way
up the half-breed had passed them at a run.

“Here's our point,” said Cutler. “Will he hide with the Sioux, or
will he take to the railroad? Well, that's my business more than being
wagon-master. I'll get a warrant. You tell Lieutenant Balwin--and
somebody give me a fresh horse.”

A short while later, as Cutler, with the warrant in his pocket, rode
out of Fort Laramie, the call of the sentinels came across the night:
“Number One. Twelve o'clock, and all's well.” A moment, and the refrain
sounded more distant, given by Number Two. When the fourth took it up,
far away along the line, the words were lost, leaving something like the
faint echo of a song. The half-breed had crossed the Platte, as if he
were making for his kindred tribe, but the scout did not believe in this
too plain trail.

“There's Chug Water lying right the other way from where he went, and
I guess it's there Mr. Toussaint is aiming for.” With this idea Cutler
swung from north to southwest along the Laramie. He went slowly over
his shortcut, not to leave the widely circling Toussaint too much in his
rear. The fugitive would keep himself carefully far on the other side of
the Laramie, and very likely not cross it until the forks of Chug Water.
Dawn had ceased to be gray, and the doves were cooing incessantly among
the river thickets, when Cutler, reaching the forks, found a bottom
where the sage-brush grew seven and eight feet high, and buried himself
and his horse in its cover. Here was comfort; here both rivers could be
safely watched. It seemed a good leisure-time for a little fire and some
breakfast. He eased his horse of the saddle, sliced some bacon, and put
a match to his pile of small sticks. As the flame caught, he stood up to
enjoy the cool of a breeze that was passing through the stillness, and
he suddenly stamped his fire out. The smell of another fire had come
across Chug Water on the wind. It was incredible that Toussaint should
be there already. There was no seeing from this bottom, and if Cutler
walked up out of it the other man would see too. If it were Toussaint,
he would not stay long in the vast exposed plain across Chug Water, but
would go on after his meal. In twenty minutes it would be the thing
to swim or wade the stream, and crawl up the mud bank to take a look.
Meanwhile, Cutler dipped in water some old bread that he had and sucked
it down, while the little breeze from opposite hook the cottonwood
leaves and brought over the smell of cooking meat. The sun grew warmer,
and the doves ceased. Cutler opened his big watch, and clapped it shut
as the sound of mud heavily slopping into the other river reached
him. He crawled to where he could look at the Laramie from among his
sagebrush, and there was Toussaint leading his horse down to the water.
The half-breed gave a shrill call, and waved his hat. His call was
answered, and as he crossed the Laramie, three Sioux appeared, riding to
the bank. They waited till he gained their level, when all four rode up
the Chug Water, and went out of sight opposite the watching Cutler. The
scout threw off some of his clothes, for the water was still high, and
when he had crossed, and drawn himself to a level with the plain, there
were the four squatted among the sage-brush beside a fire. They sat
talking and eating for some time. One of them rose at last, pointed
south, and mounting his horse, dwindled to a dot, blurred, and
evaporated in the heated, trembling distance. Cutler at the edge of the
bank still watched the other three, who sat on the ground. A faint shot
came, and they rose at once, mounted, and vanished southward. There was
no following them now in this exposed country, and Cutler, feeling sure
that the signal had meant something about Toussaint's horses, made his
fire, watered his own horse, and letting him drag a rope where the feed
was green, ate his breakfast in ease. Toussaint would get a fresh mount,
and proceed to the railroad. With the comfort of certainty and tobacco,
the scout lolled by the river under the cottonwood, and even slept. In
the cool of the afternoon he reached the cabin of an acquaintance twenty
miles south, and changed his horse. A man had passed by, he was told.
Looked as if bound for Cheyenne. “No,” Cutler said, “he's known there”;
and he went on, watching Toussaint's tracks. Within ten miles they
veered away from Cheyenne to the southeast, and Cutler struck out on a
trail of his own more freely. By midnight he was on Lodge-Pole Creek,
sleeping sound among the last trees that he would pass. He slept
twelve hours, having gone to bed knowing he must not come into town
by daylight. About nine o'clock he arrived, and went to the railroad
station; there the operator knew him. The lowest haunt in the town had
a tent south of the Union Pacific tracks; and Cutler, getting his irons,
and a man from the saloon, went there, and stepped in, covering the room
with his pistol. The fiddle stopped, the shrieking women scattered, and
Toussaint, who had a glass in his hand, let it fly at Cutler's head, for
he was drunk. There were two customers besides himself.

“Nobody shall get hurt here,” said Cutler, above the bedlam that was
now set up. “Only that man's wanted. The quieter I get him, the quieter
it'll be for others.”

Toussaint had dived for his pistol, but the proprietor of the
dance-hall, scenting law, struck the half-breed with the butt of
another, and he rolled over, and was harmless for some minutes. Then
he got on his legs, and was led out of the entertainment, which resumed
more gayly than ever. Feet shuffled, the fiddle whined, and truculent
treble laughter sounded through the canvas walls as Toussaint walked
between Cutler and the saloon-man to jail. He was duly indicted, and
upon the scout's deposition committed to trial for the murder of Loomis
and Kelley. Cutler, hoping still to be wagon-master, wrote to Lieutenant
Balwin, hearing in reply that the reinforcements would not arrive for
two months. The session of the court came in one, and Cutler was the
Territory's only witness. He gave his name and age, and hesitated over
his occupation.

“Call it poker-dealer,” sneered Toussaint's attorney.

“I would, but I'm such a fool one,” observed the witness. “Put me down
as wagon-master to the military outfit that's going to White River.”

“What is your residence?”

“Well, I reside in the section that lies between the Missouri River and
the Pacific Ocean.”

“A pleasant neighborhood,” said the judge, who knew Cutler perfectly,
and precisely how well he could deal poker hands.

“It's not a pleasant neighborhood for some.” And Cutler looked at
Toussaint.

“You think you done with me?” Toussaint inquired, upon which silence was
ordered in the court.

Upon Cutler's testimony the half-breed was found guilty, and sentenced
to be hanged in six weeks from that day. Hearing this, he looked at the
witness. “I see you one day agin,” he said.

The scout returned to Fort Laramie, and soon the expected troops
arrived, and the expedition started for White River to join Captain
Brent. The captain was stationed there to impress Red Cloud, and had
written to headquarters that this chief did not seem impressed very
deeply, and that the lives of the settlers were insecure. Reinforcements
were accordingly sent to him. On the evening before these soldiers left
Laramie, news came from the south. Toussaint had escaped from jail. The
country was full of roving, dubious Indians, and with the authentic news
went a rumor that the jailer had received various messages. These were
to the effect that the Sioux nation did not desire Toussaint to be
killed by the white man, that Toussaint's mother was the sister of Red
Cloud, and that many friends of Toussaint often passed the jailer's
house. Perhaps he did get such messages. They are not a nice sort to
receive. However all this may have been, the prisoner was gone.


III

Fort Robinson, on the White River, is backed by yellow bluffs that break
out of the foot-hills in turret and toadstool shapes, with stunt pines
starving between their torrid bastions. In front of the fort the land
slants away into the flat unfeatured desert, and in summer the sky is a
blue-steel covet that each day shuts the sun and the earth and mankind
into one box together, while it lifts at night to let in the cool of the
stars. The White River, which is not wide, runs in a curve, and around
this curve below the fort some distance was the agency, and beyond it
a stockade, inside which in those days dwelt the settlers. All this was
strung out on one side of the White River, outside of the curve; and at
a point near the agency a foot-bridge of two cottonwood trunks crossed
to the concave of the river's bend--a bottom of some extent, filled with
growing cottonwoods, and the tepees of many Sioux families. Along the
river and on the plain other tepees stood.

One morning, after Lieutenant Balwin had become established at Fort
Robinson, he was talking with his friend Lieutenant Powell, when Cutler
knocked at the wire door. The wagon-master was a privileged character,
and he sat down and commented irrelevantly upon the lieutenant's
pictures, Indian curiosities, and other well-meant attempts to conceal
the walk:

“What's the trouble, Cutler?”

“Don't know as there's any trouble.”

“Come to your point, man; you're not a scout now.”

“Toussaint's here.”

“What! in camp?”

“Hiding with the Sioux. Two Knives heard about it.” (Two Knives was a
friendly Indian.) “He's laying for me,” Cutler added.

“You've seen him?”

“No. I want to quit my job and go after him.”

“Nonsense!” said Powell.

“You can't, Cutler,” said Balwin. “I can't spare you.”

“You'll be having to fill my place, then, I guess.”

“You mean to go without permission?” said Powell, sternly.

“Lord, no! He'll shoot me. That's all.”

The two lieutenants pondered.

“And it's to-day,” continued Cutler, plaintively, “that he should be
gettin' hanged in Cheyenne.”

Still the lieutenants pondered, while the wagon-master inspected a
photograph of Marie Rose as Marguerite.

“I have it!” exclaimed Powell. “Let's kill him.”

“How about the commanding officer?”

“He'd back us--but we'll tell him afterwards. Cutler, can you find
Toussaint?”

“If I get the time.”

“Very well, you're off duty till you do. Then report to me at once.”

Just after guard-mounting two days later, Cutler came in without
knocking. Toussaint was found. He was down on the river now, beyond the
stockade. In ten minutes the wagon-master and the two lieutenants were
rattling down to the agency in an ambulance, behind four tall blue
government mules. These were handily driven by a seventeen-year-old boy
whom Balwin had picked up, liking his sterling American ways. He had
come West to be a cow-boy, but a chance of helping to impress Red Cloud
had seemed still dearer to his heart. They drew up at the agency store,
and all went in, leaving the boy nearly out of his mind with curiosity,
and pretending to be absorbed with the reins. Presently they came out,
Balwin with field-glasses.

“Now,” said he, “where?”

“You see the stockade, sir?”

“Well?” said Powell, sticking his chin on Cutler's shoulder to look
along his arm as he pouted. But the scout proposed to be deliberate.

“Now the gate of the stockade is this way, ain't it?”

“Well, well?”

“You start there and follow the fence to the corner--the left corner,
towards the river. Then you follow the side that's nearest the river
down to the other corner. Now that corner is about a hundred yards from
the bank. You take a bee-line to the bank and go down stream, maybe
thirty yards. No; it'll be forty yards, I guess. There's a lone
pine-tree right agin the edge.” The wagon-master stopped.

“I see all that,” said Lieutenant Balwin, screwing the field-glasses.
“There's a buck and a squaw lying under the tree.”

“Naw, sir,” drawled Cutler, “that ain't no buck. That's him lying in his
Injun blanket and chinnin' a squaw.”

“Why, that man's an Indian, Cutler. I tell you I can see his braids.”

“Oh, he's rigged up Injun fashion, fust rate, sir. But them braids of
his ain't his'n. False hair.”

The lieutenants passed each other the fieldglasses three times, and
glared at the lone pine and the two figures in blankets. The boy on the
ambulance was unable to pretend any longer, and leaned off his seat till
he nearly fell.

“Well,” said Balwin, “I never saw anything look more like a buck Sioux.
Look at his paint. Take the glasses yourself, Cutler.”

But Cutler refused. “He's like an Injun,” he said. “But that's just what
he wants to be.” The scout's conviction bore down their doubt.

They were persuaded. “You can't come with us, Cutler,” said Powell. “You
must wait for us here.”

“I know, sir; he'd spot us, sure. But it ain't right. I started this
whole business with my poker scheme at that cabin, and I ought to stay
with it clear through.”

The officers went into the agency store and took down two rifles hanging
at the entrance, always ready for use. “We're going to kill a man,” they
explained, and the owner was entirely satisfied. They left the rueful
Cutler inside, and proceeded to the gate of the stockade, turning there
to the right, away from the river, and following the paling round the
corner down to the farther right-hand corner. Looking from behind it,
the lone pine-tree stood near, and plain against the sky. The striped
figures lay still in their blankets, talking, with their faces to the
river. Here and there across the stream the smoke-stained peak of a
tepee showed among the green leaves.

“Did you ever see a more genuine Indian?” inquired Baldwin.

“We must let her rip now, anyhow,” said Powell, and they stepped out
into the open. They walked towards the pine till it was a hundred yards
from them, and the two beneath it lay talking all the while. Balwin
covered the man with his rifle and called. The man turned his head, and
seeing the rifle, sat up in his blanket. The squaw sat up also. Again
the officer called, keeping his rifle steadily pointed, and the man
dived like a frog over the bank. Like magic his blanket had left his
limbs and painted body naked, except for the breech-clout. Balwin's
tardy bullet threw earth over the squaw, who went flapping and
screeching down the river. Balwin and Powell ran to the edge, which
dropped six abrupt feet of clay to a trail, then shelved into the swift
little stream. The red figure was making up the trail to the foot-bridge
that led to the Indian houses, and both officers fired. The man
continued his limber flight, and they jumped down and followed, firing.
They heard a yell on the plain above, and an answer to it, and then
confused yells above and below, gathering all the while. The figure ran
on above the river trail below the bank, and their bullets whizzed after
it.

“Indian!” asserted Balwin, panting.

“Ran away, though,” said Powell.

“So'd you run. Think any Sioux'd stay when an army officer comes gunning
for him?”

“Shoot!” said Powell. “'S getting near bridge,” and they went on,
running and firing. The yells all over the plain were thickening. The
air seemed like a substance of solid flashing sound. The naked runner
came round the river curve into view of the people at the agency store.

“Where's a rifle?” said Cutler to the agent.

“Officers got 'em,” the agent explained.

“Well, I can't stand this,” said the scout, and away he went.

“That man's crazy,” said the agent.

“You bet he ain't!” remarked the ambulance boy.

Cutler was much nearer to the bridge than was the man in the
breech-clout, and reaching the bank, he took half a minute's keen
pleasure in watching the race come up the trail. When the figure
was within ten yards Cutler slowly drew an ivory-handled pistol. The
lieutenants below saw the man leap to the middle of the bridge, sway
suddenly with arms thrown up, and topple into White River. The current
swept the body down, and as it came it alternately lifted and turned and
sank as the stream played with it. Sometimes it struck submerged stumps
or shallows, and bounded half out of water, then drew under with nothing
but the back of the head in sight, turning round and round. The din of
Indians increased, and from the tepees in the cottonwoods the red Sioux
began to boil, swarming on the opposite bank, but uncertain what had
happened. The man rolling in the water was close to the officers.

“It's not our man,” said Balwin. “Did you or I hit him?”

“We're gone, anyhow,” said Powell, quietly. “Look!”

A dozen rifles were pointing at their heads on the bank above. The
Indians still hesitated, for there was Two Knives telling them these
officers were not enemies, and had hurt no Sioux. Suddenly Cutler pushed
among the rifles, dashing up the nearest two with his arm, and their
explosion rang in the ears of the lieutenants. Powell stood grinning at
the general complication of matters that had passed beyond his control,
and Balwin made a grab as the head of the man in the river washed by.
The false braid came off in his hand!

“Quick!” shouted Cutler from the bank. “Shove him up here!”

Two Knives redoubled his harangue, and the Indians stood puzzled, while
the lieutenants pulled Toussaint out, not dead, but shot through the
hip. They dragged him over the clay and hoisted him, till Cutler caught
hold and jerked him to the level, as a new noise of rattling descended
on the crowd, and the four blue mules wheeled up and halted. The boy had
done it himself. Massing the officers' need, he had pelted down among
the Sioux, heedless of their yells, and keeping his gray eyes on his
team. In got the three, pushing Toussaint in front, and scoured away for
the post as the squaw arrived to shriek the truth to her tribe--what Red
Cloud's relation had been the victim.

Cutler sat smiling as the ambulance swung along. “I told you I belonged
in this here affair,” he said. And when they reached the fort he was
saying it still, occasionally.

Captain Brent considered it neatly done. “But that boy put the finishing
touches,” he said. “Let's have him in.”

The boy was had in, and ate a dinner with the officers in glum
embarrassment, smoking a cigar after it without joy. Toussaint was given
into the doctor's hands, and his wounds carefully dressed.

“This will probably cost an Indian outbreak,” said Captain Brent,
looking down at the plain. Blanketed riders galloped over it, and
yelling filled the air. But Toussaint was not destined to cause this
further harm. An unexpected influence intervened.

All afternoon the cries and galloping went on, and next morning (worse
sign) there seemed to be no Indians in the world. The horizon was
empty, the air was silent, the smoking tepees were vanished from the
cottonwoods, and where those in the plain had been lay the lodge-poles,
and the fires were circles of white, cold ashes. By noon an interpreter
came from Red Cloud. Red Cloud would like to have Toussaint. If the
white man was not willing, it should be war.

Captain Brent told the story of Loomis and Kelley. “Say to Red Cloud,”
 he ended, “that when a white man does such things among us, he is
killed. Ask Red Cloud if Toussaint should live. If he thinks yes, let
him come and take Toussaint.”

The next day with ceremony and feathers of state, Red Cloud came,
bringing his interpreter, and after listening until every word had been
told him again, requested to see the half-breed. He was taken to the
hospital. A sentry stood on post outside the tent, and inside lay
Toussaint, with whom Cutler and the ambulance-boy were playing
whiskey-poker. While the patient was waiting to be hanged, he might as
well enjoy himself within reason. Such was Cutler's frontier philosophy.
We should always do what we can for the sick. At sight of Red Cloud
looming in the doorway, gorgeous and grim as Fate, the game was
suspended. The Indian took no notice of the white men, and walked to the
bed. Toussaint clutched at his relation's fringe, but Red Cloud looked
at him. Then the mongrel strain of blood told, and the half-breed poured
out a chattering appeal, while Red Cloud by the bedside waited till it
had spent itself. Then he grunted, and left the room. He had not spoken,
and his crest of long feathers as it turned the corner was the last
vision of him that the card-players had.

Red Cloud came back to the officers, and in their presence formally
spoke to his interpreter, who delivered the message: “Red Cloud says
Toussaint heap no good. No Injun, anyhow. He not want him. White man
hunt pretty hard for him. Can keep him.”

Thus was Toussaint twice sentenced. He improved under treatment, played
many games of whiskey-poker, and was conveyed to Cheyenne and hanged.

These things happened in the early seventies; but there are Sioux
still living who remember the two lieutenants, and how they pulled the
half-breed out of White River by his false hair. It makes them laugh to
this day. Almost any Indian is full of talk when he chooses, and when he
gets hold of a joke he never lets go.




Sharon's Choice


Under Providence, a man may achieve the making of many things--ships,
books, fortunes, himself even, quite often enough to encourage
others; but let him beware of creating a town. Towns mostly happen. No
real-estate operator decided that Rome should be. Sharon was an intended
town; a one man's piece of deliberate manufacture; his whim, his pet,
his monument, his device for immortally continuing above ground. He
planned its avenues, gave it his middle name, fed it with his railroad.
But he had reckoned without the inhabitants (to say nothing of nature),
and one day they displeased him. Whenever you wish, you can see Sharon
and what it has come to as I saw it when, as a visitor without local
prejudices, they asked me to serve with the telegraph-operator and the
ticket-agent and the hotel-manager on the literary committee of
judges at the school festival. There would be a stage, and flags,
and elocution, and parents assembled, and afterwards ice-cream with
strawberries from El Paso.

“Have you ever awarded prizes for school speaking?” inquired the
telegraph-operator, Stuart.

“Yes,” I told him. “At Concord in New Hampshire.”

“Ever have a chat afterwards with a mother whose girl did not get the
prize?”

“It was boys,” I replied. “And parents had no say in it.”

“It's boys and girls in Sharon,” said he. “Parents have no say in it
here, either. But that don't seem to occur to them at the moment. We'll
all stick together, of course.”

“I think I had best resign.” said I. “You would find me no hand at
pacifying a mother.”

“There are fathers also,” said Stuart. “But individual parents are small
trouble compared with a big split in public opinion. We've missed that
so far, though.”

“Then why have judges? Why not a popular vote?” I inquired.

“Don't go back on us,” said Stuart. “We are so few here. And you know
education can't be democratic or where will good taste find itself?
Eastman knows that much, at least.” And Stuart explained that Eastman
was the head of the school and chairman of our committee. “He is from
Massachusetts, and his taste is good, but he is total abstinence. Won't
allow any literature with the least smell of a drink in it, not even
in the singing-class. Would not have 'Here's a health to King Charles'
inside the door. Narrowing, that; as many of the finest classics speak
of wine freely. Eastman is useful, but a crank. Now take 'Lochinvar.'
We are to have it on strawberry night; but say! Eastman kicked about it.
Told the kid to speak something else. Kid came to me, and I--”

A smile lurked for one instant in the corner of Stuart's eye, and
disappeared again. Then he drew his arm through mine as we walked.

“You have never seen anything in your days like Sharon,” said he. “You
could not sit down by yourself and make such a thing up. Shakespeare
might have, but he would have strained himself doing it. Well, Eastman
says 'Lochinvar' will go in my expurgated version. Too bad Sir Walter
cannot know. Ever read his Familiar Letters, Great grief! but he was a
good man. Eastman stuck about that mention of wine. Remember?

     'So now am I come with this lost love of mine
     To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.'

'Well,' thought I, 'Eastman would agree to water. Water and daughter
would go, but is frequently used, and spoils the meter.' So I fiddled
with my pencil down in the telegraph office, and I fixed the thing up.
How's this?

     'So now am I come with this beautiful maid
     To lead but one measure, drink one lemonade.'

Eastman accepts that. Says it's purer. Oh, it's not all sadness here!”

“How did you come to be in Sharon?” I asked my exotic acquaintance.

“Ah, how did I? How did all our crowd at the railroad? Somebody has got
to sell tickets, somebody has got to run that hotel, and telegraphs have
got to exist here. That's how we foreigners came. Many travellers change
cars here, and one train usually misses the other, because the two
companies do not love each other. You hear lots of language, especially
in December. Eastern consumptives bound for southern California get left
here, and drummers are also thick. Remarks range from 'How provoking!'
to things I would not even say myself. So that big hotel and depot has
to be kept running, and we fellows get a laugh now and then. Our lot is
better than these people's.” He made a general gesture at Sharon.

“I should have thought it was worse,” said I. “No, for we'll be
transferred some day. These poor folks are shipwrecked. Though it is
their own foolishness, all this.”

Again my eye followed as he indicated the town with a sweep of his hand;
and from the town I looked to the four quarters of heaven. I may have
seen across into Old Mexico. No sign labels the boundary; the vacuum
of continent goes on, you might think, to Patagonia. Symptoms of
neighboring Mexico basked on the sand heaps along Sharon's spacious
avenues--little torpid, indecent gnomes in sashes and open rags, with
crowning-steeple straw hats, and murder dozing in their small black
eyes. They might have crawled from holes in the sand, or hatched out
of brown cracked pods on some weeds that trailed through the broken
bottles, the old shoes, and the wire fences. Outside these ramparts
began the vacuum, white, gray, indigo, florescent, where all the year
the sun shines. Not the semblance of any tree dances in the heat; only
rocks and lumps of higher sand waver and dissolve and reappear in the
shaking crystal of mirage. Not the scar of any river-bed furrows the
void. A river there is, flowing somewhere out of the shiny violet
mountains to the north, but it dies subterraneously on its way to
Sharon, misses the town, and emerges thirty miles south across the
sunlight in a shallow, futile lake, a cienaga, called Las Palomas. Then
it evaporates into the ceaseless blue sky.

The water you get in Sharon is dragged by a herd of wind-wheels from
the bowels of the sand. Over the town they turn and turn--Sharon's upper
story--a filmy colony of slats. In some of the homes beneath them you
may go up-stairs--in the American homes, not in the adobe Mexican
caves of song, woman, and knives; and brick and stone edifices occur.
Monuments of perished trade, these rise among their flatter neighbors
cubical and stark; under-shirts, fire-arms, and groceries for sale
in the ground-floor, blind dust-windows above. Most of the mansions,
however, squat ephemerally upon the soil, no cellar to them, and no
staircase, the total fragile box ready to bounce and caracole should the
wind drive hard enough. Inside them, eating, mending, the newspaper, and
more babies, eke out the twelvemonth; outside, the citizens loiter to
their errands along the brief wide avenues of Sharon that empty into
space. Men, women, and children move about in the town, sparse and
casual, and over their heads in a white tribe the wind-wheels on their
rudders veer to the breeze and indolently revolve above the gaping
obsoleteness. Through the dumb town the locomotive bell tolls
pervadingly when a train of freight or passengers trundles in from the
horizon or out along the dwindling fence of telegraph poles. No matter
where you are, you can hear it come and go, leaving Sharon behind, an
airy carcass, bleached and ventilated, sitting on the sand, with the sun
and the hot wind pouring through its bones.

This town was the magnate's child, the thing that was to keep his memory
green; and as I took it in on that first walk of discovery, Stuart told
me its story: how the magnate had decreed the railroad shops should be
here; how, at that, corner lots grew in a night; how horsemen galloped
the streets, shooting for joy, and the hasty tents rose while the
houses were hammered together; how they had song, dance, cards, whiskey,
license, murder, marriage, opera--the whole usual thing--regular as the
clock in our West, in Australia, in Africa, in every virgin corner
of the world where the Anglo-Saxon rushes to spend his animal
spirits--regular as the clock, and in Sharon's case about fifteen
minutes long. For they became greedy, the corner-lot people. They ran
up prices for land which the railroad, the breath of their nostrils,
wanted. They grew ugly, forgetting they were dealing with a magnate, and
that a railroad from ocean to ocean can take its shops somewhere else
with appalling ease. Thus did the corner lots become sand again in a
night. “And in the words of the poet,” concluded Stuart, “Sharon has an
immense future behind it.”

Our talk was changed by the sight of a lady leaning and calling over a
fence.

“Mrs. Jeffries,” said she. “Oh, Mrs. Jeffries!”

“Well?” called a voice next door.

“I want to send Leola and Arvasita into your yard.”

“Well?” the voice repeated.

“Our tool-house blew over into your yard last night. It's jammed behind
your tank.”

“Oh, indeed!”

A window in the next house was opened, a head put out, and this
occasioned my presentation to both ladies. They were Mrs. Mattern
and Mrs. Jeffries, and they fell instantly into a stiff caution of
deportment; but they speedily found I was not worth being cautious
over. Stuart whispered to me that they were widows of high standing, and
mothers of competing favorites for the elocution prize; and I hastened
to court their esteem. Mrs. Mattern was in body more ample, standing
high and yellow and fluffy; but Mrs. Jeffries was smooth and small, and
behind her spectacles she had an eye.

“You must not let us interrupt you, ladies,” said I, after some
civilities. “Did I understand that something was to be carried
somewhere?”

“You did,” said Mrs. Jeffries (she had come out of her house); “and I am
pleased to notice no damage has been done to our fence--this time.”

“It would have been fixed right up at my expense, as always, Mrs.
Jeffries,” retorted her neighbor, and started to keep abreast of Mrs.
Jeffries as that lady walked and inspected the fence. Thus the two
marched parallel along the frontier to the rear of their respective
territories.

“You'll not resign?” said Stuart to me. “It is 'yours till death,' ain't
it?”

I told him that it was.

“About once a month I can expect this,” said Mrs. Jeffries, returning
along her frontier.

“Well, it's not the only case in Sharon, Mrs. Jeffries,” said Mrs.
Mattern. “I'll remind you of them three coops when you kept poultry, and
they got away across the railroad, along with the barber's shop.”

“But cannot we help you get it out?” said I, with a zealous wish for
peace.

“You are very accommodating, sir,” said Mrs. Mattern.

“One of the prize-awarding committee,” said Stuart. “An elegant judge of
oratory. Has decided many contests at Concord, the home of Emerson.”

“Concord, New Hampshire,” I corrected; but neither lady heard me.

“How splendid for Leola!” cried Mrs. Mattern, instantly. “Leola! Oh,
Leola! Come right out here!”

Mrs. Jeffries has been more prompt. She was already in her house, and
now came from it, bringing a pleasant-looking boy of sixteen, it
might be. The youth grinned at me as he stood awkwardly, brought in
shirtsleeves from the performance of some household work.

“This is Guy,” said his mother. “Guy took the prize last year. Guy
hopes--”

“Shut up, mother,” said Guy, with entire sweetness. “I don't hope
twice--”

“Twice or a dozen times should raise no hard feelings if my son is
Sharon's best speaker,” cried Mrs. Jeffries, and looked across the fence
viciously.

“Shut up, mother; I ain't,” said Guy.

“He is a master of humor recitations,” his mother now said to me.
“Perhaps you know, or perhaps you do not know, how high up that is
reckoned.”

“Why, mother, Leola can speak all around me. She can,” Guy added to me,
nodding his head confidentially.

I did not believe him, I think because I preferred his name to that of
Leola.

“Leola will study in Paris, France,” announced Mrs. Mattern, arriving
with her child. “She has no advantages here. This is the gentleman,
Leola.”

But before I had more than noted a dark-eyed maiden who would not look
at me, but stood in skirts too young for her figure, black stockings,
and a dangle of hair that should have been up, her large parent had
thrust into my hand a scrap-book.

“Here is what the Santa Fe Observer says;” and when I would have read,
she read aloud for me. “The next is the Los Angeles Christian Home. And
here's what they wrote about her in El Paso: 'Her histrionic genius for
one so young'--it commences below that picture. That's Leola.” I now
recognized the black stockings and the hair. “Here's what a literary
lady in Lordsburg thinks,” pursued Mrs. Mattern.

“Never mind that,” murmured Leola.

“I shall.” And the mother read the letter to me. “Leola has spoke in
five cultured cities,” she went on. “Arvasita can depict how she was
encored at Albuquerque last Easter-Monday.”

“Yes, sir, three recalls,” said Arvasita, arriving at our group by the
fence. An elder sister, she was, evidently. “Are you acquainted with
'Camill'?” she asked me, with a trifle of sternness; and upon my
hesitating, “the celebrated French drayma of 'Camill',” she repeated,
with a trifle more of sternness. “Camill is the lady in it who dies of
consumption. Leola recites the letter-and-coughing scene, Act Third. Mr.
Patterson of Coloraydo Springs pronounces it superior to Modjeska.”

“That is Leola again,” said Mrs. Mattern, showing me another newspaper
cut--hair, stockings, and a candle this time.

“Sleep-walking scene, 'Macbeth,'” said Arvasita. “Leola's great night
at the church fair and bazar, El Paso, in Shakespeare's acknowledged
masterpiece. Leola's repetwar likewise includes 'Catherine the Queen
before her Judges,' 'Quality of Mercy is not Strained,' 'Death of Little
Nell,' 'Death of Paul Dombey,' 'Death of the Old Year,' 'Burial of Sir
John Moore,' and other standard gems suitable for ladies.”

“Leola,” said her mother, “recite 'When the British Warrior Queen' to
the gentleman.”

“No, momma, please not,” said Leola, and her voice made me look at her;
something of appeal sounded in it.

“Leola is that young you must excuse her,” said her mother--and I
thought the girl winced.

“Come away, Guy,” suddenly snapped little Mrs. Jeffries. “We are wasting
the gentleman's time. You are no infant prodigy, and we have no pictures
of your calves to show him in the papers.”

“Why, mother!” cried the boy, and he gave a brotherly look to Leola.

But the girl, scarlet and upset, now ran inside the house.

“As for wasting time, madam,” said I, with indignation, “you are wasting
yours in attempting to prejudice the judges.”

“There!” said Guy.

“And, Mrs. Mattern,” continued, “if I may say so without offense,
the age (real or imaginary) of the speakers may make a difference in
Albuquerque, but with our committee not the slightest.”

“Thank you, I'm sure,” said Mrs. Mattern, bridling.

“Eastern ideas are ever welcome in Sharon,” said Mrs. Jeffries.
“Good-morning.” And she removed Guy and herself into her house, while
Mrs. Mattern and Arvasita, stiffly ignoring me, passed into their own
door.

“Come have a drink,” said Stuart to me. “I am glad you said it. Old
Mother Mattern will let down those prodigy skirts. The poor girl has
been ashamed of them these two years, but momma has bulldozed her into
staying young for stage effect. The girl's not conceited, for a wonder,
and she speaks well. It is even betting which of the two widows you have
made the maddest.”

Close by the saloon we were impeded by a rush of small boys. They ran
before and behind us suddenly from barrels and unforeseen places, and
wedging and bumping between us, they shouted: “Chicken-legs! Ah, look at
the chicken-legs!”

For a sensitive moment I feared they were speaking of me; but the
folding slat-doors of the saloon burst open outward, and a giant
barkeeper came among the boys and caught and shook them to silence.

“You want to behave,” was his single remark; and they dispersed like a
Sunday-school.

I did not see why they should thus describe him. He stood and nodded to
us, and jerked big thumb towards the departing flock. “Funny how a boy
will never think,” said he, with amiability. “But they'll grow up to be
about as good as the rest of us, I guess. Don't you let them monkey with
you, Josey!” he called.

“Naw, I won't,” said a voice. I turned and saw, by a barrel, a youth in
knee-breeches glowering down the street at his routed enemies. He
was possibly eight, and one hand was bound in a grimy rag. This was
Chickenlegs.

“Did they harm you, Josey?” asked the giant.

“Naw, they didn't.”

“Not troubled your hand any?”

“Naw, they didn't.”

“Well, don't you let them touch you. We'll see you through.” And as
we followed him in towards our drink through his folding slat-doors he
continued discoursing to me, the newcomer. “I am against interfering
with kids. I like to leave 'em fight and fool just as much as they see
fit. Now them boys ain't malicious, but they're young, you see, they're
young, and misfortune don't appeal to them. Josey lost his father last
spring, and his mother died last month. Last week he played with a
freight car and left two of his fingers with it. Now you might think
that was enough hardship.”

“Indeed yes,” I answered.

“But the little stake he inherited was gambled away by his stinking old
aunt.”

“Well!” I cried.

“So we're seeing him through.”

“You bet,” said a citizen in boots and pistol, who was playing
billiards.

“This town is not going to permit any man to fool with Josey,” stated
his opponent in the game.

“Or women either,” added a lounger by the bar, shaggy-bearded and also
with a pistol.

“Mr. Abe Hanson,” said the barkeeper, presenting me to him. “Josey's
father's partner. He's took the boy from the aunt and is going to see
him through.”

“How 'r' ye?” said Mr. Hanson, hoarsely, and without enthusiasm.

“A member of the prize-awarding committee,” explained Stuart, and waved
a hand at me.

They all brightened up and came round me.

“Heard my boy speak?” inquired one. “Reub Gadsden's his name.”

I told him I had heard no speaker thus far; and I mentioned Leola and
Guy.

“Hope the boy'll give us 'The Jumping Frog' again,” said one. “I near
bust.”

“What's the heifer speakin' this trip?” another inquired.

“Huh! Her!” said a third.

“You'll talk different, maybe, this time,” retorted the other.

“Not agin 'The Jumping Frog,' he won't,” the first insisted. “I near
bust,” he repeated.

“I'd like for you to know my boy Reub,” said Mr. Gadsden to me,
insinuatingly.

“Quit fixing' the judge, Al,” said Leola's backer. “Reub forgets his
words, an' says 'em over, an' balks, an' mires down, an' backs out, an
starts fresh, en' it's confusin' to foller him.”

“I'm glad to see you take so much interest, gentlemen,” said I.

“Yes, we're apt to see it through,” said the barkeeper. And Stuart and I
bade them a good-morning.

As we neared the school-master's house, where Stuart was next taking me,
we came again upon the boys with Josey, and no barkeeper at hand to “see
him through.” But Josey made it needless. At the word “Chicken-legs” he
flew in a limber manner upon the nearest, and knocking him immediately
flat, turned with spirit upon a second and kicked him. At this they set
up a screeching and fell all together, and the school-master came out of
his door.

“Boys, boys!” said he. “And the Sabbath too!”

As this did not immediately affect them, Mr. Eastman made a charge, and
they fled from him then. A long stocking of Josey's was torn, and hung
in two streamers round his ankles; and his dangling shoe-laces were
trodden to fringe.

“If you want your hand to get well for strawberry night--” began Mr.
Eastman.

“Ah, bother strawberry night!” said Josey, and hopped at one of his
playmates. But Mr. Eastman caught him skilfully by the collar.

“I am glad his misfortunes have not crushed him altogether,” said I.

“Josey Yeatts is an anxious case, sir,” returned the teacher. “Several
influences threaten his welfare. Yesterday I found tobacco on him.
Chewing, sir.”

“Just you hurt me,” said Josey, “and I'll tell Abe.”

“Abe!” exclaimed Mr. Eastman, lifting his brow. “He means a man old
enough to be his father, sir. I endeavor to instill him with some few
notions of respect, but the town spoils him. Indulges him completely, I
may say. And when Sharon's sympathies are stirred sir, it will espouse a
cause very warmly--Give me that!” broke off the schoolmaster, and there
followed a brief wrestle. “Chewing again to-day, sir,” he added to me.

“Abe lemme have it,” shrieked Josey. “Lemme go, or he'll come over and
fix you.”

But the calm, chilly Eastman had ground the tobacco under his heel. “You
can understand how my hands are tied,” he said to me.

“Readily,” I answered.

“The men give Josey his way in everything. He has a--I may say an
unworthy aunt.”

“Yes,” said I. “So I have gathered.”

At this point Josey ducked and slid free, and the united flock vanished
with jeers at us. Josey forgot they had insulted him, they forgot he had
beaten them; against a common enemy was their friendship cemented.

“You spoke of Sharon's warm way of espousing causes,” said I to Eastman.

“I did, sir. No one could live here long without noticing it.”

“Sharon is a quiet town, but sudden,” remarked Stuart. “Apt to be
sudden. They're beginning about strawberry night,” he said to Eastman.
“Wanted to know about things down in the saloon.”

“How does their taste in elocution chiefly lie?” I inquired.

Eastman smiled. He was young, totally bald, the moral dome of his skull
rising white above visionary eyes and a serious auburn beard. He
was clothed in a bleak, smooth slate-gray suit, and at any climax of
emphasis he lifted slightly upon his toes and relaxed again, shutting
his lips tight on the finished sentence. “Your question,” said he, “has
often perplexed me. Sometimes they seem to prefer verse; sometimes prose
stirs them greatly. We shall have a liberal crop of both this year. I am
proud to tell you I have augmented our number of strawberry speakers by
nearly fifty per cent.”

“How many will there be?” said I.

“Eleven. You might wish some could be excused. But I let them speak to
stimulate their interest in culture. Will you not take dinner with me,
gentlemen? I was just sitting down when little Josey Yeatts brought me
out.”

We were glad to do this, and he opened another can of corned beef for
us. “I cannot offer you wine, sir,” said he to me, “though I am aware it
is a general habit in luxurious homes.” And he tightened his lips.

“General habit wherever they don't prefer whiskey,” said Stuart.

“I fear so,” the school-master replied, smiling. “That poison shall
never enter my house, gentlemen, any more than tobacco. And as I cannot
reform the adults of Sharon, I am doing what I can for their children.
Little Hugh Straight is going to say his 'Lochinvar' very pleasingly,
Mr. Stuart. I went over it with him last night. I like them to be word
perfect,” he continued to me, “as failures on exhibition night elicit
unfavorable comment.”

“And are we to expect failures also?” I inquired.

“Reuben Gadsden is likely to mortify us. He is an earnest boy, but
nervous; and one or two others. But I have limited their length. Reuben
Gadsden's father declined to have his boy cut short, and he will give
us a speech of Burke's; but I hope for the best. It narrows down, it
narrows down. Guy Jeffries and Leola Mattern are the two.”

“The parents seem to take keen interest,” said I.

Mr. Eastman smiled at Stuart. “We have no reason to suppose they have
changed since last year,” said he. “Why, sir,” he suddenly exclaimed,
“if I did not feel I was doing something for the young generation
here, I should leave Sharon to-morrow! One is not appreciated, not
appreciated.”

He spoke fervently of various local enterprises, his failures, his
hopes, his achievements; and I left his house honoring him, but
amazed--his heart was so wide and his head so narrow; a man who would
purify with simultaneous austerity the morals of Lochinvar and of
Sharon.

“About once a month,” said Stuart, “I run against a new side he is blind
on. Take his puzzlement as to whether they prefer verse or prose. Queer
and dumb of him that, you see. Sharon does not know the difference
between verse and prose.”

“That's going too far,” said I.

“They don't,” he repeated, “when it comes to strawberry night. If the
piece is about something they understand, rhymes do not help or hinder.
And of course sex is apt to settle the question.”

“Then I should have thought Leola--” I began.

“Not the sex of the speaker. It's the listeners. Now you take women.
Women generally prefer something that will give them a good cry. We men
want to laugh mostly.”

“Yes,” said I; “I would rather laugh myself, I think.”

“You'd know you'd rather if you had to live in Sharon. The laugh is one
of the big differences between women and men, and I would give you my
views about it, only my Sunday-off time is up, and I've got to go to
telegraphing.”

“Our ways are together,” said I. “I'm going back to the railroad hotel.”

“There's Guy,” continued Stuart. “He took the prize on 'The Jumping
Frog.' Spoke better than Leola, anyhow. She spoke 'The Wreck of
the Hesperus.' But Guy had the back benches--that's where the men
sit--pretty well useless. Guess if there had been a fire, some of
the fellows would have been scorched before they'd have got strength
sufficient to run out. But the ladies did not laugh much. Said they saw
nothing much in jumping a frog. And if Leola had made 'em cry good and
hard that night, the committee's decision would have kicked up more of a
fuss than it did. As it was, Mrs. Mattern got me alone; but I worked us
around to where Mrs. Jeffries was having her ice-cream, and I left them
to argue it out.”

“Let us adhere to that policy,” I said to Stuart; and he replied
nothing, but into the corner of his eye wandered that lurking smile
which revealed that life brought him compensations.

He went to telegraphing, and I to revery concerning strawberry night.
I found myself wishing now that there could have been two prizes; I
desired both Leola and Guy to be happy; and presently I found the matter
would be very close, so far at least as my judgment went. For boy and
girl both brought me their selections, begging I would coach them, and
this I had plenty of leisure to do. I preferred Guy's choice--the story
of that blue-jay who dropped nuts through the hole in a roof, expecting
to fill it, and his friends came to look on and discovered the hole went
into the entire house. It is better even than “The Jumping Frog”--better
than anything, I think--and young Guy told it well. But Leola brought a
potent rival on the tearful side of things. “The Death of Paul Dombey”
 is plated pathos, not wholly sterling; but Sharon could not know this;
and while Leola most prettily recited it to me I would lose my recent
opinion in favor of Guy, and acknowledge the value of her performance.
Guy might have the men strong for him, but this time the women were
going to cry. I got also a certain other sort of entertainment out of
the competing mothers. Mrs. Jeffries and Mrs. Mattern had a way of being
in the hotel office at hours when I passed through to meals. They never
came together, and always were taken by surprise at meeting me.

“Leola is ever so grateful to you,” Mrs. Mattern would say.

“Oh,” I would answer, “do not speak of it. Have you ever heard Guy's
'Blue-Jay' story?”

“Well, if it's anything like that frog business, I don't want to.” And
the lady would leave me.

“Guy tells me you are helping him so kindly,” said Mrs. Jeffries.

“Oh yes, I'm severe,”' I answered, brightly. “I let nothing pass. I only
wish I was as careful with Leola. But as soon as she begins 'Paul had
never risen from his little bed,' I just lose myself listening to her.”

On the whole, there were also compensations for me in these mothers, and
I thought it as well to secure them in advance.

When the train arrived from El Paso, and I saw our strawberries and our
ice-cream taken out, I felt the hour to be at hand, and that whatever
our decision, no bias could be laid to me. According to his prudent
habit, Eastman had the speakers follow each other alphabetically. This
happened to place Leola after Guy, and perhaps might give her the last
word, as it were, with the people; but our committee was there, and
superior to such accidents. The flags and the bunting hung gay around
the draped stage. While the audience rustled or resoundingly trod to
its chairs, and seated neighbors conferred solemnly together over the
programme, Stuart, behind the bunting, played “Silver Threads among the
Gold” upon a melodeon.

“Pretty good this,” he said to me, pumping his feet.

“What?” I said.

“Tune. Sharon is for free silver.”

“Do you think they will catch your allusion?” I asked him.

“No. But I have a way of enjoying a thing by myself.” And he pumped
away, playing with tasteful variations until the hall was full and the
singing-class assembled in gloves and ribbons.

They opened the ceremonies for us by rendering “Sweet and Low” very
happily; and I trusted it was an omen.

Sharon was hearty, and we had “Sweet and Low” twice. Then the speaking
began, and the speakers were welcomed, coming and going, with mild and
friendly demonstrations. Nothing that one would especially mark went
wrong until Reuben Gadsden. He strode to the middle of the boards, and
they creaked beneath his tread. He stood a moment in large glittering
boots and with hair flat and prominently watered. As he straightened
from his bow his suspender-buttons came into view, and remained so for
some singular internal reason, while he sent his right hand down into
the nearest pocket and began his oratory.

“It is sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France,” he
said, impressively, and stopped.

We waited, and presently he resumed:

“It is sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France.” He
took the right hand out and put the left hand in.

“It is sixteen or seventeen years,” said he, and stared frowning at his
boots.

I found the silence was getting on my nerves. I felt as if it were
myself who was drifting to idiocy, and tremulous empty sensations began
to occur in my stomach. Had I been able to recall the next sentence, I
should have prompted him.

“It is sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France,” said
the orator, rapidly.

And down deep back among the men came a voice, “Well, I guess it must
be, Reub.”

This snapped the tension. I saw Reuben's boots march away; Mr. Eastman
came from behind the bunting and spoke (I suppose) words of protest. I
could not hear them, but in a minute, or perhaps two, we grew calm, and
the speaking continued.

There was no question what they thought of Guy and Leola. He conquered
the back of the room. They called his name, they blessed him with
endearing audible oaths, and even the ladies smiled at his pleasant,
honest face--the ladies, except Mrs. Mattern. She sat near Mrs.
Jeffries, and throughout Guy's “Blue-Jay” fanned herself, exhibiting a
well-sustained inattention. She might have foreseen that Mrs. Jeffries
would have her turn. When the “Death of Paul Dombey” came, and
handkerchiefs began to twinkle out among the audience, and various
noises of grief were rising around us, and the men themselves murmured
in sympathy, Mrs. Jeffries not only preserved a suppressed-hilarity
countenance, but managed to cough twice with a cough that visibly bit
into Mrs. Mattern's soul.

But Leola's appealing cadences moved me also. When Paul was dead,
she made her pretty little bow, and we sat spellbound, then gave her
applause surpassing Guy's. Unexpectedly I found embarrassment of choice
dazing me, and I sat without attending to the later speakers. Was not
successful humor more difficult than pathos? Were not tears more cheaply
raised than laughter? Yet, on the other hand, Guy had one prize, and
where merit was so even--I sat, I say, forgetful of the rest of the
speakers, when suddenly I was aware of louder shouts of welcome, and I
awaked to Josey Yeatts bowing at us.

“Spit it out, Josey!” a large encouraging voice was crying in the back
of the hall. “We'll see you through.”

“Don't be scared, Josey!” yelled another.

Then Josey opened his mouth and rhythmically rattled the following:

“I love little pussy her coat is so warm And if I don't hurt her she'll
do me no harm I'll sit by the fi-yer and give her some food And pussy
will love me because I am good.”

That was all. It had come without falter or pause, even for breath.
Josey stood, and the room rose to him.

“Again! again!” they roared. “He ain't a bit scared!” “Go it, Josey!”
 “You don't forgit yer piece!” And a great deal more, while they pounded
with their boots.

“I love little pussy,” began Josey.

“Poor darling!” said a lady next me. “No mother.”

“I'll sit by the fi-yer.”

Josey was continuing. But nobody heard him finish. The room was a Babel.

“Look at his little hand!” “Only three fingers inside them rags!”
 “Nobody to mend his clothes any more.” They all talked to each other,
and clapped and cheered, while Josey stood, one leg slightly advanced
and proudly stiff, somewhat after the manner of those military
engravings where some general is seen erect upon an eminence at the
moment of victory.

Mr. Eastman again appeared from the bunting, and was telling us, I have
no doubt, something of importance; but the giant barkeeper now shouted
above the din, “Who says Josey Yeatts ain't the speaker for this night?”

At that striking of the common chord I saw them heave, promiscuous and
unanimous, up the steps to the stage. Josey was set upon Abe Hanson's
shoulder, while ladies wept around him. What the literary committee
might have done I do not know, for we had not the time even to resign.
Guy and Leola now appeared, bearing the prize between them--a picture of
Washington handing the Bible out of clouds to Abraham Lincoln--and very
immediately I found myself part of a procession. Men and women we were,
marching about Sharon. The barkeeper led; four of Sharon's fathers
followed him, escorting Josey borne aloft on Abe Hanson's shoulder,
and rigid and military in his bearing. Leola and Guy followed with the
picture; Stuart walked with me, whistling melodies of the war--Dixie
and others. Eastman was not with us. When the ladies found themselves
conducted to the saloon, they discreetly withdrew back to the
entertainment we had broken out from. Josey saw them go, and shrilly
spoke his first word:

“Ain't I going to have any ice-cream?”

This presently caused us to return to the ladies, and we finished the
evening with entire unity of sentiment. Eastman alone took the incident
to heart; inquired how he was to accomplish anything with hands tied,
and murmured his constant burden once more: “One is not appreciated, not
appreciated.”

I do not stop over in Sharon any more. My ranch friend, whose presence
there brought me to visit him, is gone away. But such was my virgin
experience of the place; and in later days fate led me to be concerned
with two more local competitions--one military and one civil--which
greatly stirred the population. So that I never pass Sharon on my long
travels without affectionately surveying the sandy, quivering, bleached
town, unshaded by its twinkling forest of wind-wheels. Surely the heart
always remembers a spot where it has been merry! And one thing I should
like to know--shall know, perhaps: what sort of citizen in our republic
Josey will grow to be. For whom will he vote? May he not himself come to
sit in Washington and make laws for us? Universal suffrage holds so many
possibilities.




Napoleon Shave-Tail


Augustus Albumblatt, young and new and sleek with the latest
book-knowledge of war, reported to his first troop commander at Fort
Brown. The ladies had watched for him, because he would increase the
number of men, the officers because he would lessen the number of
duties; and he joined at a crisis favorable to becoming speedily known
by them all. Upon that same day had household servants become an
extinct race. The last one, the commanding officer's cook, had told the
commanding officer's wife that she was used to living where she could
see the cars. She added that there was no society here “fit for man or
baste at all.” This opinion was formed on the preceding afternoon when
Casey, a sergeant of roguish attractions in G troop, had told her that
he was not a marrying man. Three hours later she wedded a gambler,
and this morning at six they had taken the stage for Green River, two
hundred miles south, the nearest point where the bride could see the
cars.

“Frank,” said the commanding officer's wife, “send over to H troop for
York.”

“Catherine,” he answered, “my dear, our statesmen at Washington say
it's wicked to hire the free American soldier to cook for you. It's too
menial for his manhood.”

“Frank, stuff!”

“Hush, my love. Therefore York must be spared the insult of twenty
more dollars a month, our statesmen must be re-elected, and you and I,
Catherine, being cookless, must join the general mess.”

Thus did all separate housekeeping end, and the garrison began unitedly
to eat three times a day what a Chinaman set before them, when the
long-expected Albumblatt stepped into their midst, just in time for
supper.

This youth was spic-and-span from the Military Academy, with a
top-dressing of three months' thoughtful travel in Germany. “I was
deeply impressed with the modernity of their scientific attitude,” he
pleasantly remarked to the commanding officer. For Captain Duane, silent
usually, talked at this first meal to make the boy welcome in this
forlorn two-company post.

“We're cut off from all that sort of thing here,” said he. “I've not
been east of the Missouri since '69. But we've got the railroad across,
and we've killed some Indians, and we've had some fun, and we're glad
we're alive--eh, Mrs. Starr?”

“I should think so,” said the lady.

“Especially now we've got a bachelor at the post!” said Mrs. Bainbridge.
“That has been the one drawback, Mr. Albumblatt.”

“I thank you for the compliment,” said Augustus, bending solemnly from
his hips; and Mrs. Starr looked at him and then at Mrs. Bainbridge.

“We're not over-gay, I fear,” the Captain continued; “but the flat's
full of antelope, and there's good shooting up both canyons.”

“Have you followed the recent target experiments at Metz?” inquired
the traveller. “I refer to the flattened trajectory and the obus
controversy.”

“We have not heard the reports,” answered the commandant, with becoming
gravity. “But we own a mountain howitzer.”

“The modernity of German ordnance--” began Augustus.

“Do you dance, Mr. Albumblatt?” asked Mrs. Starr.

“For we'll have a hop and all be your partners,” Mrs. Bainbridge
exclaimed.

“I will be pleased to accommodate you, ladies.”

“It's anything for variety's sake with us, you see,” said Mrs. Starr,
smoothly smiling; and once again Augustus bent blandly from his hips.

But the commanding officer wished leniency. “You see us all,” he
hastened to say. “Commissioned officers and dancing-men. Pretty
shabby--”

“Oh, Captain!” said a lady.

“And pretty old.”

“Captain!” said another lady.

“But alive and kicking. Captain Starr, Mr. Bainbridge, the Doctor and
me. We are seven.”

Augustus looked accurately about him. “Do I understand seven, Captain?”

“We are seven,” the senior officer repeated.

Again Mr. Albumblatt counted heads. “I imagine you include the ladies,
Captain? Ha! ha!”

“Seven commissioned males, sir. Our Major is on sick-leave, and two of
our Lieutenants are related to the President's wife. She can't bear them
to be exposed. None of us in the church-yard lie--but we are seven.”

“Ha! ha, Captain! That's an elegant double entendre on Wordsworth's
poem and the War Department. Only, if I may correct your addition--ha!
ha!--our total, including myself, is eight.” And Augustus grew as
hilarious as a wooden nutmeg.

The commanding officer rolled an intimate eye at his wife.

The lady was sitting big with rage, but her words were cordial still:
“Indeed, Mr. Albumblatt, the way officers who have influence in
Washington shirk duty here and get details East is something I
can't laugh about. At one time the Captain was his own adjutant and
quartermaster. There are more officers at this table to-night than
I've seen in three years. So we are doubly glad to welcome you at Fort
Brown.”

“I am fortunate to be on duty where my services are so required, though
I could object to calling it Fort Brown.” And Augustus exhaled a new
smile.

“Prefer Smith?” said Captain Starr.

“You misunderstand me. When we say Fort Brown. Fort Russell, Fort Et
Cetera, we are inexact. They are not fortified.”

“Cantonment Et Cetera would be a trifle lengthy, wouldn't it?” put in
the Doctor, his endurance on the wane.

“Perhaps; but technically descriptive of our Western posts. The Germans
criticise these military laxities.”

Captain Duane now ceased talking, but urbanely listened; and from time
to time his eye would scan Augustus, and then a certain sublimated
laugh, to his wife well known; would seize him for a single voiceless
spasm, and pass. The experienced Albumblatt meanwhile continued,
“By-the-way, Doctor, you know the Charite, of course?”

Doctor Guild had visited that great hospital, but being now a goaded man
he stuck his nose in his plate, and said, unwisely: “Sharrity? What's
that?” For then Augustus told him what and where it was, and that
Krankenhaus is German for hospital, and that he had been deeply
impressed with the modernity of the ventilation. “Thirty-five cubic
metres to a bed in new wards,” he stated. “How many do you allow,
Doctor?”

“None,” answered the surgeon.

“Do I understand none, Doctor?”

“You do, sir. My patients breathe in cubic feet, and swallow their doses
in grains, and have their inflation measured in inches.”

“Now there again!” exclaimed Augustus, cheerily. “More antiquity to be
swept away! And people say we young officers have no work cut out for
us!”

“Patients don't die then under the metric system?” said the Doctor.

“No wonder Europe's overcrowded,” said Starr.

But the student's mind inhabited heights above such trifling. “Death,”
 he said, “occurs in ratios not differentiated from our statistics.” And
he told them much more while they booked at him over their plates. He
managed to say 'modernity' and 'differentiate' again, for he came from
our middle West, where they encounter education too suddenly, and it
would take three generations of him to speak clean English. But with
all his polysyllabic wallowing, he showed himself keen-minded, pat with
authorities, a spruce young graduate among these dingy Rocky Mountain
campaigners. They had fought and thirsted and frozen; the books that he
knew were not written when they went to school; and so far as war is to
be mastered on paper, his equipment was full and polished while theirs
was meagre and rusty.

And yet, if you know things that other and older men do not, it is as
well not to mention them too hastily. These soldiers wished that they
could have been taught what he knew; but they watched young Augustus
unfolding himself with a gaze that might have seemed chill to a less
highly abstract thinker. He, however, rose from the table pleasantly
edified by himself, and hopeful for them. And as he left them,
“Good-night, ladies and gentlemen,” he said; “we shall meet again.”

“Oh yes,” said the Doctor. “Again and again.”

“He's given me indigestion,” said Bainbridge.

“Take some metric system,” said Starr.

“And lie flat on your trajectory,” said the Doctor.

“I hate hair parted in the middle for a man,” said Mrs. Guild.

“And his superior eye-glasses,” said Mrs. Bainbridge.

“His staring conceited teeth,” hissed Mrs. Starr.

“I don't like children slopping their knowledge all over me,” said the
Doctor's wife.

“He's well brushed, though,” said Mrs. Duane, seeking the bright side.
“He'll wipe his feet on the mat when he comes to call.”

“I'd rather have mud on my carpet than that bandbox in any of my
chairs,” said Mrs. Starr.

“He's no fool,” mused the Doctor. “But, kingdom come, what an ass!”

“Well, gentlemen,” said the commanding officer (and they perceived a
flavor of the official in his tone), “Mr. Albumblatt is just twenty-one.
I don't know about you; but I'll never have that excuse again.”

“Very well, Captain, we'll be good,” said Mrs. Bainbridge.

“And gr-r-ateful,” said Mrs. Starr, rolling her eyes piously. “I
prophecy he'll entertain us.”

The Captain's demeanor remained slightly official; but walking home, his
Catherine by his side in the dark was twice aware of that laugh of his,
twinkling in the recesses of his opinions. And later, going to bed, a
little joke took him so unready that it got out before he could suppress
it. “My love,” said he, “my Second Lieutenant is grievously mislaid in
the cavalry. Providence designed him for the artillery.”

It was wifely but not right in Catherine to repeat this strict
confidence in strictest confidence to her neighbor, Mrs. Bainbridge,
over the fence next morning before breakfast. At breakfast Mrs.
Bainbridge spoke of artillery reinforcing the post, and her husband
giggled girlishly and looked at the puzzled Duane; and at dinner Mrs.
Starr asked Albumblatt, would not artillery strengthen the garrison?

“Even a light battery,” pronounced Augustus, promptly, “would be absurd
and useless.”

Whereupon the mess rattled knives, sneezed, and became variously
disturbed. So they called him Albumbattery, and then Blattery, which is
more condensed; and Captain Duane's official tone availed him nothing
in this matter. But he made no more little military jokes; he disliked
garrison personalities. Civilized by birth and ripe from weather-beaten
years of men and observing, he looked his Second Lieutenant over, and
remembered to have seen worse than this. He had no quarrel with the
metric system (truly the most sensible), and thinking to leaven it with
a little rule of thumb, he made Augustus his acting quartermaster. But
he presently indulged his wife with the soldier-cook she wanted at home,
so they no longer had to eat their meals in Albumblatt's society; and
Mrs. Starr said that this showed her husband dreaded his quartermaster
worse than the Secretary of War.

Alas for the Quartermaster's sergeant, Johannes Schmoll, that routined
and clock-work German! He found Augustus so much more German than he
had ever been himself, that he went speechless for three days. Upon his
lists, his red ink, and his ciphering, Augustus swooped like a bird
of prey, and all his fond red-tape devices were shredded to the winds.
Augustus set going new quadratic ones of his own, with an index and
cross-references. It was then that Schmoll recovered his speech and
walked alone, saying, “Mein Gott!” And often thereafter, wandering among
the piled stores and apparel, he would fling both arms heavenward and
repeat the exclamation. He had rated himself the unique human soul at
Fort Brown able to count and arrange underclothing. Augustus rejected
his laborious tally, and together they vigiled after hours, verifying
socks and drawers. Next, Augustus found more horseshoes than his papers
called for.

“That man gif me der stomach pain efry day,” wailed Schmoll to Sergeant
Casey. “I tell him, 'Lieutenant, dose horseshoes is expendable. We don't
acgount for efry shoe like they was men's shoes, und oder dings dot is
issued.' 'I prefer to cake them cop!' says Baby Bismarck. Und he smile
mit his two beaver teeth.”

“Baby Bismarck!” cried, joyfully, the rosy-faced Casey. “Yo-hanny, take
a drink.”

“Und so,” continued the outraged Schmoll, “he haf a Board of Soorvey on
dree-pound horseshoes, und I haf der stomach pain.”

“It was buckles the next month. The allowance exceeded the expenditure,
Augustus's arithmetic came out wrong, and another board sat on buckles.

“Yo-hanny, you're lookin' jaded under Colonel Safetypin.” said Casey.
“Have something?”

“Safetypin is my treat,” said Schmoll; “und very apt.”

But Augustus found leisure to pervade the post with his modernity. He
set himself military problems, and solved them; he wrote an essay on
“The Contact Squadron”; he corrected Bainbridge for saying “throw back
the left flank” instead of “refuse the left flank”; he had reading-room
ideas, canteen' ideas, ideas for the Indians and the Agency, and
recruit-drill ideas, which he presented to Sergeant Casey. Casey gave
him, in exchange, the name of Napoleon Shave-Tail, and had his whiskey
again paid for by the sympathetic Schmoll.

“But bless his educated heart,” said Casey, “he don't learn me nothing
that'll soil my innercence!”

Thus did the sunny-humored Sergeant take it, but not thus the mess.
Had Augustus seen himself as they saw him, could he have heard Mrs.
Starr--But he did not; the youth was impervious, and to remove his
complacency would require (so Mrs. Starr said) an operation, probably
fatal. The commanding officer held always aloof from gibing, yet often
when Augustus passed him his gray eye would dwell upon the Lieutenant's
back, and his voiceless laugh would possess him. That is the picture I
retain of these days--the unending golden sun, the wide, gentle-colored
plain, the splendid mountains, the Indians ambling through the flat,
clear distance; and here, close along the parade-ground, eye-glassed
Augustus, neatly hastening, with the Captain on his porch, asleep you
might suppose.

One early morning the agent, with two Indian chiefs, waited on the
commanding officer, and after their departure his wife found him
breakfasting in solitary mirth.

“Without me,” she chided, sitting down. “And I know you've had some good
news.”

“The best, my love. Providence has been tempted at last. The wholesome
irony of life is about to function.”

“Frank, don't tease so! And where are you rushing now before the cakes?”

“To set our Augustus a little military problem, dearest. Plain living
for to-day, and high thinking be jolly well--”

“Frank, you're going to swear, and I must know!”

But Frank had sworn and hurried out to the right to the Adjutant's
office, while his Catherine flew to the left to the fence.

“Ella!” she cried. “Oh, Ella!”

Mrs. Bainbridge, instantly on the other side of the fence, brought
scanty light. A telegram had come, she knew, from the Crow Agency in
Montana. Her husband had admitted this three nights ago; and Captain
Duane (she knew) had given him some orders about something; and could
it be the Crows? “Ella, I don't know,” said Catherine. “Frank talked all
about Providence in his incurable way, and it may be anything.” So the
two ladies wondered together over the fence, until Mrs. Duane, seeing
the Captain return, ran to him and asked, were the Crows on the
war-path? Then her Frank told her yes, and that he had detailed
Albumblatt to vanquish them and escort them to Carlisle School to learn
German and Beethoven's sonatas.

“Stuff, stuff, stuff! Why, there he does go!” cried the unsettled
Catherine. “It's something at the Agency!” But Captain Duane was gone
into the house for a cigar.

Albumblatt, with Sergeant Casey and a detail of six men, was in truth
hastening over that broad mile which opens between Fort Brown and the
Agency. On either side of them the level plain stretched, gray with
its sage, buff with intervening grass, hay-cocked with the smoky,
mellow-stained, meerschaum-like canvas tepees of the Indians, quiet as a
painting; far eastward lay long, low, rose-red hills, half dissolved in
the trembling mystery of sun and distance; and westward, close at hand
and high, shone the great pale-blue serene mountains through the vaster
serenity of the air. The sounding hoofs of the troops brought the
Indians out of their tepees to see. When Albumblatt reached the Agency,
there waited the agent and his two chiefs, who pointed to one lodge
standing apart some three hundred yards, and said, “He is there.” So
then Augustus beheld his problem, the military duty fallen to him from
Providence and Captain Duane.

It seems elementary for him who has written of “The Contact Squadron.”
 It was to arrest one Indian. This man, Ute Jack, had done a murder among
the Crows, and fled south for shelter. The telegram heralded him, but
with boundless miles for hiding he had stolen in under the cover of
night. No welcome met him. These Fort Brown Indians were not his friends
at any time, and less so now, when he arrived wild drunk among their
families. Hounded out, he sought this empty lodge, and here he was,
at bay, his hand against every man's, counting his own life worthless
except for destroying others before he must himself die.

“Is he armed?” Albumblatt inquired, and was told yes.

Augustus considered the peaked cone tent. The opening was on this side,
but a canvas drop closed it. Not much of a problem--one man inside a
sack with eight outside to catch him! But the books gave no rule for
this combination, and Augustus had met with nothing of the sort in
Germany. He considered at some length. Smoke began to rise through the
meeting poles of the tepee, leisurely and natural, and one of the chiefs
said:

“Maybe Ute Jack cooking. He hungry.”

“This is not a laughing matter,” said Augustus to the by-standers, who
were swiftly gathering. “Tell him that I command him to surrender,” he
added to the agent, who shouted this forthwith; and silence followed.

“Tell him I say he must come out at once,” said Augustus then; and
received further silence.

“He eat now,” observed the chief. “Can't talk much.”

“Sergeant Casey,” bellowed Albumblatt, “go over there and take him out!”

“The Lootenant understands,” said Casey, slowly, “that Ute Jack has got
the drop on us, and there ain't no getting any drop on him.”

“Sergeant, you will execute your orders without further comment.”

At this amazing step the silence fell cold indeed; but Augustus was in
command.

“Shall I take any men along, sir?” said Casey in his soldier's machine
voice.

“Er--yes. Er--no. Er--do as you please.”

The six troopers stepped forward to go, for they loved Casey; but he
ordered them sharply to fall back. Then, looking in their eyes, he
whispered, “Good-bye, boys, if it's to be that way,” and walked to the
lodge, lifted the flap, and fell, shot instantly dead through the heart.
“Two bullets into him,” muttered a trooper, heavily breathing as the
sounds rang. “He's down,” another spoke to himself with fixed eyes; and
a sigh they did not know of passed among them. The two chiefs looked at
Augustus and grunted short talk together; and one, with a sweeping lift
of his hand out towards the tepee and the dead man by it, said, “Maybe
Ute Jack only got three--four--cartridges--so!” (his fingers counted
it). “After he kill three--four--men, you get him pretty good.” The
Indian took the white man's death thus; but the white men could not yet
be even saturnine.

“This will require reinforcement,” said Augustus to the audience. “The
place must be attacked by a front and flank movement. It must be knocked
down. I tell you I must have it knocked down. How are you to see where
he is, I'd like to know, if it's not knocked down?” Augustus's voice was
getting high.

“I want the howitzer,” he screeched generally.

A soldier saluted, and Augustus chattered at him.

“The howitzer, the mountain howitzer, I tell you. Don't you hear me? To
knock the cursed thing he's in down. Go to Captain Duane and give him my
compliments, and--no, I'll go myself. Where's my horse? My horse, I tell
you! It's got to be knocked down.”

“If you please, Lieutenant,” said the trooper, “may we have the Red
Cross ambulance?”

“Red Cross? What's that for? What's that?”

“Sergeant Casey, sir. He's a-lyin' there.”

“Ambulance? Certainly. The howitzer--perhaps they're only flesh wounds.
I hope they are only flesh wounds. I must have more men--you'll come
with me.”

From his porch Duane viewed both Augustus approach and the man stop
at the hospital, and having expected a bungle, sat to hear; but at
Albumblatt's mottled face he stood up quickly and said, “What's the
matter?” And hearing, burst out: “Casey! Why, he was worth fifty of--Go
on, Mr. Albumblatt. What next did you achieve, sir?” And as the tale was
told he cooled, bitter, but official.

“Reinforcements is it, Mr. Albumblatt?”

“The howitzer, Captain.”

“Good. And G troop?”

“For my double flank movement I--”

“Perhaps you'd like H troop as reserve?”

“Not reserve, Captain. I should establish--”

“This is your duty, Mr. Albumblatt. Perform it as you can, with what
force you need.”

“Thank you, sir. It is not exactly a battle, but with a, so-to-speak,
intrenched--”

“Take your troops and go, sir, and report to me when you have arrested
your man.”

Then Duane went to the hospital, and out with the ambulance, hoping that
the soldier might not be dead. But the wholesome irony of life reckons
beyond our calculations; and the unreproachful, sunny face of his
Sergeant evoked in Duane's memory many marches through long heat and
cold, back in the rough, good times.

“Hit twice, I thought they told me,” said he; and the steward surmised
that one had missed.

“Perhaps,” mused Duane. “And perhaps it went as intended, too. What's
all that fuss?”

He turned sharply, having lost Augustus among his sadder thoughts; and
here were the operations going briskly. Powder-smoke in three directions
at once! Here were pickets far out-lying, and a double line of
skirmishers deployed in extended order, and a mounted reserve, and men
standing to horse--a command of near a hundred, a pudding of pompous,
incompetent, callow bosh, with Augustus by his howitzer, scientifically
raising and lowering it to bear on the lone white tepee that shone in
the plain. Four races were assembled to look on--the mess Chinaman, two
black laundresses, all the whites in the place (on horse and foot, some
with their hats left behind), and several hundred Indians in blankets.
Duane had a thought to go away and leave this galling farce under the
eye of Starr for the officers were at hand also. But his second thought
bade him remain; and looking at Augustus and the howitzer, his laugh
would have returned to him; but his heart was sore for Casey.

It was an hour of strategy and cannonade, a humiliating hour, which Fort
Brown tells of to this day; and the tepee lived through it all. For it
stood upon fifteen slender poles, not speedily to be chopped down by
shooting lead from afar. When low bullets drilled the canvas, the chief
suggested to Augustus that Ute Jack had climbed up; and when the bullets
flew high, then Ute Jack was doubtless in a hole. Nor did Augustus
contrive to drop a shell from the howitzer upon Ute Jack and explode
him--a shrewd and deadly conception; the shells went beyond, except one,
that ripped through the canvas, somewhat near the ground; and Augustus,
dripping, turned at length, and saying, “It won't go down,” stood
vacantly wiping his white face. Then the two chiefs got his leave to
stretch a rope between their horses and ride hard against the tepee. It
was military neither in essence nor to see, but it prevailed. The tepee
sank, a huge umbrella wreck along the earth, and there lay Ute Jack
across the fire's slight hollow, his knee-cap gone with the howitzer
shell. But no blood had flown from that; blood will not run, you know,
when a man has been dead some time. One single other shot had struck
him--one through his own heart. It had singed the flesh.

“You see, Mr. Albumblatt,” said Duane, in the whole crowd's hearing,
“he killed himself directly after killing Casey. A very rare act for
an Indian, as you are doubtless aware. But if your manoeuvres with his
corpse have taught you anything you did not know before, we shall all be
gainers.”

“Captain,” said Mrs. Starr, on a later day, “you and Ute Jack have ended
our fun. Since the Court of Inquiry let Mr. Albumblatt off, he has not
said Germany once--and that's three months to-morrow.”




Twenty Minutes for Refreshments


Upon turning over again my diary of that excursion to the Pacific, I
find that I set out from Atlantic waters on the 30th day of a backward
and forlorn April, which had come and done nothing towards making its
share of spring, but had gone, missing its chance, leaving the trees as
bare as it had received them from the winds of March. It was not bleak
weather alone, but care, that I sought to escape by a change of sky;
and I hoped for some fellow-traveller who might begin to interest my
thoughts at once. No such person met me in the several Pullmans which
I inhabited from that afternoon until the forenoon of the following
Friday. Through that long distance, though I had slanted southwestward
across a multitude of States and vegetations, and the Mississippi lay
eleven hundred miles to my rear, the single event is my purchasing
some cat's-eyes of the news-agent at Sierra Blanca. Save this, my diary
contains only neat additions of daily expenses, and moral reflections
of a delicate and restrained melancholy. They were Pecos cat's-eyes, he
told me, obtained in the rocky canyons of that stream, and destined to
be worth little until fashion turned from foreign jewels to become aware
of these fine native stones. And I, glad to possess the jewels of my
country, chose two bracelets and a necklace of them, paying but twenty
dollars for fifteen or sixteen cat's-eyes, and resolved to give them
a setting worthy of their beauty. The diary continues with moral
reflections upon the servility of our taste before anything European,
and the handwriting is clear and deliberate. It abruptly becomes
hurried, and at length well-nigh illegible. It is best, I think,
that you should have this portion as it comes, unpolished, unamended,
unarranged--hot, so to speak, from my immediate pencil, instead of cold
from my subsequent pen. I shall disguise certain names, but that is all.

Friday forenoon, May 5.--I don't have to gaze at my cat's-eyes to kill
time any more. I'm not the only passenger any more. There's a lady.
She got in at El Paso. She has taken the drawing-room, but sits outside
reading newspaper cuttings and writing letters. She is sixty, I should
say, and has a cap and one gray curl. This comes down over her left ear
as far as a purple ribbon which suspends a medallion at her throat. She
came in wearing a sage-green duster of pongee silk, pretty nice, only
the buttons are as big as those largest mint-drops. “You porter,” she
said, “brush this.” He put down her many things and received it. Her
dress was sage green, and pretty nice too. “You porter,” said she, “open
every window. Why, they are, I declare! What's the thermometer in this
car?” “Ninety-five, ma'am. Folks mostly travelling--” “That will do,
porter. Now you go make me a pitcher of lemonade right quick.” She went
into the state-room and shut the door. When she came out she was dressed
in what appeared to be chintz bedroom curtains. They hang and flow
loosely about her, and are covered with a pattern of pink peonies. She
has slippers--Turkish--that stare up in the air, pretty handsome and
comfortable. But I never before saw any one travel with fly-paper. It
must be hard to pack. But it's quite an idea in this train. Fully a
dozen flies have stuck to it already; and she reads her clippings,
and writes away, and sips another glass of lemonade, all with the most
extreme appearance of leisure, not to say sloth. I can't imagine how she
manages to produce this atmosphere of indolence when in reality she is
steadily occupied. Possibly the way she sits. But I think it's partly
the bedroom curtains.

These notes were interrupted by the entrance of the new conductor.
“If you folks have chartered a private car, just say so,” he shouted
instantly at the sight of us. He stood still at the extreme end and
removed his hat, which was acknowledged by the lady. “Travel is surely
very light, Gadsden,” she assented, and went on with her writing. But
he remained standing still, and shouting like an orator: “Sprinkle the
floor of this car, Julius, and let the pore passengers get a breath of
cool. My lands!” He fanned himself sweepingly with his hat. He seemed
but little larger than a red squirrel, and precisely that color. Sorrel
hair, sorrel eyebrows, sorrel freckles, light sorrel mustache, thin
aggressive nose, receding chin, and black, attentive, prominent eyes.
He approached, and I gave him my ticket, which is as long as a neck-tie,
and has my height, the color of my eyes and hair, and my general
description, punched in the margin. “Why, you ain't middle-aged!”
 he shouted, and a singular croak sounded behind me. But the lady was
writing. “I have been growing younger since I bought that ticket,” I
explained. “That's it, that's it,” he sang; “a man's always as old as he
feels, and a woman--is ever young,” he finished. “I see you are true to
the old teachings and the old-time chivalry, Gadsden,” said the lady,
continuously busy. “Yes, ma'am. Jacob served seven years for Leah and
seven more for Rachel.” “Such men are raised today in every worthy
Louisiana home, Gadsden, be it ever so humble.” “Yes, ma'am. Give a
fresh sprinkle to the floor, Julius, soon as it goes to get dry. Excuse
me, but do you shave yourself, sir?” I told him that I did, but without
excusing him. “You will see that I have a reason for asking,” he
consequently pursued, and took out of his coat-tails a round tin box
handsomely labelled “Nat. Fly Paper Co.,” so that I supposed it was
thus, of course, that the lady came by her fly-paper. But this was pure
coincidence, and the conductor explained: “That company's me and a man
at Shreveport, but he dissatisfies me right frequently. You know what
heaven a good razor is for a man, and what you feel about a bad one.
Vaseline and ground shells,” he said, opening the box, “and I'm not
saying anything except it will last your lifetime and never hardens. Rub
the size of a pea on the fine side of your strop, spread it to an inch
with your thumb. May I beg a favor on so short a meeting? Join me in
the gentlemen's lavatory with your razorstrop in five minutes. I have
to attend to a corpse in the baggage-car, and will return at once.”
 “Anybody's corpse I know, Gadsden?” said the lady. “No, ma'am. Just a
corpse.”

When I joined him, for I was now willing to do anything, he was
apologetic again. “'Tis a short acquaintance,” he said, “but may I also
beg your razor? Quick as I get out of the National Fly I am going to
register my new label. First there will be Uncle Sam embracing the
world, signifying this mixture is universal, then my name, then the
word Stropine, which is a novelty and carries copyright, and I shall
win comfort and doubtless luxury. The post barber at Fort Bayard took a
dozen off me at sight to retail to the niggers of the Twenty-fourth, and
as he did not happen to have the requisite cash on his person I charged
him two roosters and fifty cents, and both of us done well. He's after
more Stropine, and I got Pullman prices for my roosters, the buffet-car
being out of chicken a la Marengo. There is your razor, sir, and I
appreciate your courtesy.” It was beautifully sharpened, and I bought
a box of the Stropine and asked him who the lady was. “Mrs. Porcher
Brewton!” he exclaimed. “Have you never met her socially? Why she--why
she is the most intellectual lady in Bee Bayou.” “Indeed!” I said. “Why
she visits New Orleans, and Charleston, and all the principal centres of
refinement, and is welcomed in Washington. She converses freely with our
statesmen and is considered a queen of learning. Why she writes po'try,
sir, and is strong-minded. But a man wouldn't want to pick her up for a
fool, all the samey.” “I shouldn't; I don't,” said I. “Don't you do it,
sir. She's run her plantation all alone since the Colonel was killed in
sixty-two. She taught me Sunday-school when I was a lad, and she used to
catch me at her pecan-trees 'most every time in Bee Bayou.”

He went forward, and I went back with the Stropine in my pocket. The
lady was sipping the last of the lemonade and looking haughtily over the
top of her glass into (I suppose) the world of her thoughts. Her eyes
met mine, however. “Has Gadsden--yes, I perceive he has been telling
about me,” she said, in her languid, formidable voice. She set her glass
down and reclined among the folds of the bedroom curtains, considering
me. “Gadsden has always been lavish,” she mused, caressingly. “He seems
destined to succeed in life,” I hazarded. “ah n--a!” she sighed, with
decision. “He will fail.” As she said no more and as I began to resent
the manner in which she surveyed me, I remarked, “You seem rather sure
of his failure.” “I am old enough to be his mother, and yours,” said
Mrs. Porcher Brewton among her curtains. “He is a noble-hearted fellow,
and would have been a high-souled Southern gentleman if born to
that station. But what should a conductor earning $103.50 a month be
dispersing his attention on silly patents for? Many's the time I've
told him what I think; but Gadsden will always be flighty.” No further
observations occurring to me, I took up my necklace and bracelets from
the seat and put them in my pocket. “Will you permit a meddlesome old
woman to inquire what made you buy those cat's-eyes?” said Mrs. Brewton.
“Why--” I dubiously began. “Never mind,” she cried, archly. “If you were
thinking of some one in your Northern home, they will be prized because
the thought, at any rate, was beautiful and genuine. 'Where'er I roam,
whatever realms to see, my heart, untravelled, fondly turns to thee.'
Now don't you be embarrassed by an old woman!” I desired to inform her
that I disliked her, but one can never do those things; and, anxious
to learn what was the matter with the cat's-eyes, I spoke amiably and
politely to her. “Twenty dollars!” she murmured. “And he told you they
came from the Pecos!” She gave that single melodious croak I had heard
once before. Then she sat up with her back as straight as if she was
twenty. “My dear young fellow, never do you buy trash in these trains.
Here you are with your coat full of--what's Gadsden's absurd razor
concoctions--strut--strop--bother! And Chinese paste buttons. Last
summer, on the Northern Pacific, the man offered your cat's-eyes to me
as native gems found exclusively in Dakota. But I just sat and mentioned
to him that I was on my way home from a holiday in China, and he went
right out of the car. The last day I was in Canton I bought a box of
those cat's-eyes at eight cents a dozen.” After this we spoke a little
on other subjects, and now she's busy writing again. She's on business
in California, but will read a paper at Los Angeles at the annual
meeting of the Golden Daughters of the West. The meal station is coming,
but we have agreed to--

Later, Friday afternoon.--I have been interrupted again. Gadsden
entered, removed his hat, and shouted: “Sharon. Twenty minutes for
dinner.” I was calling the porter to order a buffet lunch in the car
when there tramped in upon us three large men of such appearance that
a flash of thankfulness went through me at having so little ready-money
and only a silver watch. Mrs. Brewton looked at them and said, “Well,
gentlemen?” and they took off their embroidered Mexican hats. “We've got
a baby show here,” said one of them, slowly, looking at me, “and we'd
be kind of obliged if you'd hold the box.” “There's lunch put up in
a basket for you to take along,” said the next, “and a bottle of
wine--champagne. So losing your dinner won't lose you nothing.” “We're
looking for somebody raised East and without local prejudice,” said the
third. “So we come to the Pullman.” I now saw that so far from purposing
to rob us they were in a great and honest distress of mind. “But I am
no judge of a baby,” said I; “not being mar--” “You don't have to be,”
 broke in the first, more slowly and earnestly. “It's a fair and secret
ballot we're striving for. The votes is wrote out and ready, and all
we're shy of is a stranger without family ties or business interests to
hold the box and do the counting.” His deep tones ceased, and he wiped
heavy drops from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “We'd be kind of
awful obliged to you,” he urged. “The town would be liable to make it
two bottles,” said the second. The third brought his fist down on the
back of a seat and said, “I'll make it that now.” “But, gentlemen,” said
I, “five, six, and seven years ago I was not a stranger in Sharon. If my
friend Dean Drake was still here--” “But he ain't. Now you might as well
help folks, and eat later. This town will trust you. And if you quit
us--” Once more he wiped the heavy drops away, while in a voice full of
appeal his friend finished his thought: “If we lose you, we'll likely
have to wait till this train comes in to-morrow for a man satisfactory
to this town. And the show is costing us a heap.” A light hand tapped
my arm, and here was Mrs. Brewton saying: “For shame! Show your
enterprise.” “I'll hold this yere train,” shouted Gadsden, “if
necessary.” Mrs. Brewton rose alertly, and they all hurried me out. “My
slippers will stay right on when I'm down the steps,” said Mrs. Brewton,
and Gadsden helped her descend into the blazing dust and sun of Sharon.
“Gracious!” said she, “what a place! But I make it a point to see
everything as I go.” Nothing had changed. There, as of old, lay the
flat litter of the town--sheds, stores, and dwellings, a shapeless
congregation in the desert, gaping wide everywhere to the glassy,
quivering immensity; and there, above the roofs, turned the slatted
wind-wheels. But close to the tracks, opposite the hotel, was an
edifice, a sort of tent of bunting, from which brass music issued,
while about a hundred pink and blue sun-bonnets moved and mixed near
the entrance. Little black Mexicans, like charred toys, lounged and lay
staring among the ungraded dunes of sand. “Gracious!” said Mrs. Brewton
again. Her eye lost nothing; and as she made for the tent the chintz
peonies flowed around her, and her step was surprisingly light. We
passed through the sunbonnets and entered where the music played. “The
precious blessed darlings!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands. “This
will do for the Golden Daughters,” she rapidly added; “yes, this will
distinctly do.” And she hastened away from me into the throng.

I had no time to look at much this first general minute. I could see
there were booths, each containing a separate baby. I passed a whole
section of naked babies, and one baby farther along had on golden wings
and a crown, and was bawling frightfully. Their names were over the
booths, and I noticed Lucille, Erskine Wales, Banquo Lick Nolin, Cuba,
Manilla, Ellabelle, Bosco Grady, James J. Corbett Nash, and Aqua Marine.
There was a great sign at the end, painted “Mrs. Eden's Manna in the
Wilderness,” and another sign, labelled “Shot-gun Smith's twins.” In the
midst of these first few impressions I found myself seated behind a bare
table raised three feet or so, with two boxes on it, and a quantity
of blank paper and pencils, while one of the men was explaining me
the rules and facts. I can't remember them all now, because I couldn't
understand them all then, and Mrs. Brewton was distant among the
sun-bonnets, talking to a gathering crowd and feeling in the mouths of
babies that were being snatched out of the booths and brought to her.
The man was instructing me steadily all the while, and it occurred to me
to nod silently and coldly now and then, as if I was doing this sort of
thing every day. But I insisted that some one should help me count, and
they gave me Gadsden.

Now these facts I do remember very clearly, and shall never forget them.
The babies came from two towns--Sharon, and Rincon its neighbor. Alone,
neither had enough for a good show, though in both it was every family's
pride to have a baby every year. The babies were in three classes: Six
months and under, one prize offered; eighteen months, two prizes; three
years, two prizes. A three-fourths vote of all cast was necessary to
a choice. No one entitled to vote unless of immediate family of a
competing baby. No one entitled to cast more than one vote. There were
rules of entry and fees, but I forget them, except that no one could
have two exhibits in the same class. When I read this I asked, how about
twins? “Well, we didn't kind of foresee that,” muttered my instructor,
painfully; “what would be your idea?” “Look here, you sir,” interposed
Mrs. Brewton, “he came in to count votes.” I was very glad to have her
back. “That's right, ma'am,” admitted the man; “he needn't to say a
thing. We've only got one twins entered,” he pursued, “which we're glad
of. Shot-gun--“, “Where is this Mr. Smith?” interrupted Mrs. Brewton.
“Uptown, drinking, ma'am.” “And who may Mr. Smith be?” “Most popular
citizen of Rincon, ma'am. We had to accept his twins because--well,
he come down here himself, and most of Rincon come with him, and as we
aimed to have everything pass off pleasant-like--” “I quite comprehend,”
 said Mrs. Brewton. “And I should consider twins within the rule; or any
number born at one time. But little Aqua Marine is the finest single
child in that six months class. I told her mother she ought to take that
splurgy ring off the poor little thing's thumb. It's most unsafe. But
I should vote for that child myself.” “Thank you for your valuable
endorsement,” said a spruce, slim young man. “But the public is not
allowed to vote here,” he added. He was standing on the floor and
resting his elbows on the table. Mrs. Brewton stared down at him. “Are
you the father of the child?” she inquired. “Oh no! I am the agent. I--”
 “Aqua Marine's agent?” said Mrs. Brewton, sharply. “Ha, ha!” went the
young man. “Ha, ha! Well, that's good too. She's part of our exhibit.
I'm in charge of the manna-feds, don't you know?” “I don't know,” said
Mrs. Brewton. “Why, Mrs. Eden's Manna in the Wilderness! Nourishes,
strengthens, and makes no unhealthy fat. Take a circular, and welcome.
I'm travelling for the manna. I organized this show. I've conducted
twenty-eight similar shows in two years. We hold them in every State
and Territory. Second of last March I gave Denver--you heard of it,
probably?” “I did not,” said Mrs. Brewton. “Well! Ha, ha! I thought
every person up to date had heard of Denver's Olympic Offspring Olio.”
 “Is it up to date to loll your elbows on the table when you're speaking
to a lady?” inquired Mrs. Brewton. He jumped, and then grew scarlet
with rage. “I didn't expect to learn manners in New Mexico,” said he.
“I doubt if you will,” said Mrs. Brewton, and turned her back on him. He
was white now; but better instincts, or else business, prevailed in his
injured bosom. “Well,” said he, “I had no bad intentions. I was going
to say you'd have seen ten thousand people and five hundred babies at
Denver. And our manna-feds won out to beat the band. Three first medals,
and all exclusively manna-fed. We took the costume prize also. Of course
here in Sharon I've simplified. No special medal for weight, beauty,
costume, or decorated perambulator. Well, I must go back to our exhibit.
Glad to have you give us a call up there and see the medals we're
offering, and our fifteen manna-feds, and take a package away with you.”
 He was gone.

The voters had been now voting in my two boxes for some time, and I
found myself hoping the manna would not win, whoever did; but it seemed
this agent was a very capable person. To begin with, every family
entering a baby drew a package of the manna free, and one package
contained a diamond ring. Then, he had managed to have the finest babies
of all classes in his own exhibit. This was incontestable, Mrs. Brewton
admitted, after returning from a general inspection; and it seemed to us
extraordinary. “That's easy, ma'am,” said Gadsden; “he came around here
a month ago. Don't you see?” I did not see, but Mrs. Brewton saw at
once. He had made a quiet selection of babies beforehand, and then
introduced the manna into those homes. And everybody in the room was
remarking that his show was very superior, taken as a whole they all
added, “taken as a whole”; I heard them as they came up to vote for
the 3-year and the 18-month classes. The 6-month was to wait till
last, because the third box had been accidentally smashed by Mr. Smith.
Gadsden caught several trying to vote twice. “No, you don't!” he would
shout. “I know faces. I'm not a conductor for nothing.” And the victim
would fall back amid jeers from the sun-bonnets. Once the passengers
sent over to know when the train was going. “Tell them to step over here
and they'll not feel so lonesome!” shouted Gadsden; and I think a good
many came. The band was playing “White Wings,” with quite a number
singing it, when Gadsden noticed the voting had ceased, and announced
this ballot closed. The music paused for him, and we could suddenly hear
how many babies were in distress; but for a moment only; as we began
our counting, “White Wings” resumed, and the sun-bonnets outsang their
progeny. There was something quite singular in the way they had voted.
Here are some of the 3-year-old tickets: “First choice, Ulysses Grant
Blum; 2d choice, Lewis Hendricks.” “First choice, James Redfield; 2d,
Lewis Hendricks.” “First, Elk Chester; 2d, Lewis Hendricks.” “Can
it be?” said the excited Gadsden. “Finish these quick. I'll open the
18-monthers.” But he swung round to me at once. “See there!” he cried.
“Read that! and that!” He plunged among more, and I read: “First choice,
Lawrence Nepton Ford, Jr.; 2d, Iona Judd.” “First choice, Mary Louise
Kenton; 2d, Iona Judd.” “Hurry up!” said Gadsden; “that's it!” And as we
counted, Mrs. Brewton looked over my shoulder and uttered her melodious
croak, for which I saw no reason. “That young whipper-snapper will go
far,” she observed; nor did I understand this. But when they stopped the
band for me to announce the returns, one fact did dawn on me even
while I was reading: “Three-year-olds: Whole number of votes cast, 300;
necessary to a choice, 225. Second prize, Lewis Hendricks, receiving
300. First prize, largest number of votes cast, 11, for Salvisa van
Meter. No award. Eighteen-month class: Whole number of votes cast, 300;
necessary to a choice, 225. Second prize, Iona Judd, receiving 300.
Lillian Brown gets 15 for 1st prize. None awarded.” There was a very
feeble applause, and then silence for a second, and then the sun-bonnets
rushed together, rushed away to others, rushed back; and talk swept like
hail through the place. Yes, that is what they had done. They had all
voted for Lewis Hendricks and Iona Judd for second prize, and every
family had voted the first prize to its own baby. The Browns and van
Meters happened to be the largest families present. “He'll go far! he'll
go far!” repeated Mrs. Brewton. Sport glittered in her eye. She gathered
her curtains, and was among the sun-bonnets in a moment. Then it fully
dawned on me. The agent for Mrs. Eden's Manna in the Wilderness was
indeed a shrewd strategist, and knew his people to the roots of the
grass. They had never seen a baby-show. They were innocent. He came
among them. He gave away packages of manna and a diamond ring. He
offered the prizes. But he proposed to win some. Therefore he made that
rule about only the immediate families voting. He foresaw what they
would do; and now they had done it. Whatever happened, two prizes went
to his manna-feds. “They don't see through it in the least, which is
just as well,” said Mrs. Brewton, returning. “And it's little matter
that only second prizes go to the best babies. But what's to be done
now?” I had no idea; but it was not necessary that I should.

“You folks of Rincon and Sharon,” spoke a deep voice. It was the first
man in the Pullman, and drops were rolling from his forehead, and his
eyes were the eyes of a beleaguered ox. “You fathers and mothers,” he
said, and took another breath. They grew quiet. “I'm a father myself,
as is well known.” They applauded this. “Salvisa is mine, and she got
my vote. The father that will not support his own child is not--does
not--is worse than if they were orphans.” He breathed again, while they
loudly applauded. “But, folks, I've got to get home to Rincon. I've
got to. And I'll give up Salvisa if I'm met fair.” “Yes, yes, you'll
be met,” said voices of men. “Well, here's my proposition: Mrs. Eden's
manna has took two, and I'm satisfied it should. We voted, and will stay
voted.” “Yes, yes!” “Well, now, here's Sharon and Rincon, two of the
finest towns in this section, and I say Sharon and Rincon has equal
rights to get something out of this, and drop private feelings, and
everybody back their town. And I say let this lady and gentleman, who
will act elegant and on the square, take a view and nominate the finest
Rincon 3-year-old and the finest Sharon 18-month they can cut out of the
herd. And I say let's vote unanimous on their pick, and let each town
hold a first prize and go home in friendship, feeling it has been
treated right.”

Universal cheers endorsed him, and he got down panting. The band played
“Union Forever,” and I accompanied Mrs. Brewton to the booths. “You'll
remember!” shouted the orator urgently after us; “one apiece.” We
nodded. “Don't get mixed,” he appealingly insisted. We shook our heads,
and out of the booths rushed two women, and simultaneously dashed their
infants in our faces. “You'll never pass Cuba by!” entreated one. “This
is Bosco Grady,” said the other. Cuba wore an immense garment made of
the American flag, but her mother whirled her out of it in a second.
“See them dimples; see them knees!” she said. “See them feet! Only feel
of her toes!” “Look at his arms!” screamed the mother of Bosco. “Doubled
his weight in four months.” “Did he indeed, ma'am?” said Cuba's mother;
“well, he hadn't much to double.” “Didn't he, then? Didn't he indeed?”
 “No at you; he didn't indeed and indeed! I guess Cuba is known to
Sharon. I guess Sharon'll not let Cuba be slighted.” “Well, and I guess
Rincon'll see that Bosco Grady gets his rights.” “Ladies,” said Mrs.
Brewton, towering but poetical with her curl, “I am a mother myself, and
raised five noble boys and two sweet peerless girls.” This stopped them
immediately; they stared at her and her chintz peonies as she put the
curl gently away from her medallion and proceeded: “But never did I
think of myself in those dark weary days of the long ago. I thought of
my country and the Lost Cause.” They stared at her, fascinated. “Yes,
m'm,” whispered they, quite humbly. “Now,” said Mrs. Brewton, “what is
more sacred than an American mother's love? Therefore let her not shame
it with anger and strife. All little boys and girls are precious gems to
me and to you. What is a cold, lifeless medal compared to one of them?
Though I would that all could get the prize! But they can't, you know.”
 “No, m'm.” Many mothers, with their children in their arms, were now
dumbly watching Mrs. Brewton, who held them with a honeyed, convincing
smile. “If I choose only one in this beautiful and encouraging harvest,
it is because I have no other choice. Thank you so much for letting
me see that little hero and that lovely angel,” she added, with a yet
sweeter glance to the mothers of Bosco and Cuba. “And I wish them all
luck when their turn comes. I've no say about the 6-month class, you
know. And now a little room, please.”

The mothers fell back. But my head swam slightly. The 6-month class, to
be sure! The orator had forgotten all about it. In the general joy over
his wise and fair proposition, nobody had thought of it. But they would
pretty soon. Cuba and Bosco were likely to remind them. Then we should
still be face to face with a state of things that--I cast a glance
behind at those two mothers of Sharon and Rincon following us, and I
asked Mrs. Brewton to look at them. “Don't think about it now,” said
she, “it will only mix you. I always like to take a thing when it comes,
and not before.” We now reached the 18-month class. They were the
naked ones. The 6-month had stayed nicely in people's arms; these were
crawling hastily everywhere, like crabs upset in the market, and
they screamed fiercely when taken upon the lap. The mother of Thomas
Jefferson Brayin Lucas showed us a framed letter from the statesman for
whom her child was called. The letter reeked with gratitude, and
said that offspring was man's proudest privilege; that a souvenir
sixteen-to-one spoon would have been cheerfully sent, but 428 babies had
been named after Mr. Brayin since January. It congratulated the swelling
army of the People's Cause. But there was nothing eminent about little
Thomas except the letter; and we selected Reese Moran, a vigorous Sharon
baby, who, when they attempted to set him down and pacify him, stiffened
his legs, dashed his candy to the floor, and burst into lamentation. We
were soon on our way to the 3-year class, for Mrs. Brewton was rapid
and thorough. As we went by the Manna Exhibit, the agent among his
packages and babies invited us in. He was loudly declaring that he would
vote for Bosco if he could. But when he examined Cuba, he became sure
that Denver had nothing finer than that. Mrs. Brewton took no notice of
him, but bade me admire Aqua Marine as far surpassing any other 6-month
child. I proclaimed her splendid (she was a wide-eyed, contented thing,
with a head shaped like a croquet mallet), and the agent smiled modestly
and told the mothers that as for his babies two prizes was luck enough
for them; they didn't want the earth. “If that thing happened to be
brass,” said Mrs. Brewton, bending over the ring that Aqua was still
sucking; and again remonstrating with the mother for this imprudence,
she passed on. The three-year-olds were, many of them, in costume, with
extraordinary arrangements of hair; and here was the child with gold
wings and a crown I had seen on arriving. Her name was Verbena M., and
she personated Faith. She had colored slippers, and was drinking
tea from her mother's cup. Another child, named Broderick McGowan,
represented Columbus, and joyfully shouted “Ki-yi!” every half-minute.
One child was attired as a prominent admiral; another as a prominent
general; and one stood in a boat and was Washington. As Mrs. Brewton
examined them and dealt with the mothers, the names struck me
afresh--not so much the boys; Ulysses

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