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Heart of the West

by O. Henry · English · Gutenberg #1725 · 450,625 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Heart of the West

Author: O. Henry


        
Release date: July 27, 2004 [eBook #1725]
                Most recently updated: October 25, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1725

Credits: John Bickers and Dagny


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEART OF THE WEST ***




HEART OF THE WEST

by O. Henry


CONTENTS

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




HEART OF THE WEST




I
HEARTS AND CROSSES


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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a prince-consort.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Webb turned in his saddle at the signal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bud turned on his high boot-heels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santa looked at him closely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Respectfully,
Webster Yeager,
Manager the Rancho Seco.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was a skunk,” said Webb Yeager.

“Hush,” said Santa, “did you see it?”

“I saw it,” said Webb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He saw Webb and stopped, open-mouthed.

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

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

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

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

“X Bar Y,” said Wilson.

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




II
THE RANSOM OF MACK


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Listen, sissy,” I begins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At six o’clock,” says she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You heard about the wedding?” I asks.

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

“He will,” says I.

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

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




III
TELEMACHUS, FRIEND


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

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

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

“An accident?” I persisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Spring Valley,’ says I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I rose up off the bench at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘And what is that, ma’am?’ I asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Paisley interrupted himself again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IV
THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Homer K. M. what?” I asks.

“Why, just Homer K. M.,” says he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the way home says she:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For nine years,” says I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s Mrs. Sampson?” I asks.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that you, Mr. Pratt?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




V
THE PIMIENTA PANCAKES


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

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

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

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

“Jud, can you make pancakes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I reached for my gun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Haven’t ye heard the news?’

“‘Cattle up?’ I asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was sure I heard a sigh.

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




VI
SEATS OF THE HAUGHTY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was I on to the opportunity? Listen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

“‘Wait a minute,’ says I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Can he sing?’ asks Lolabelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

It happened that I had; and I did.

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




VII
HYGEIA AT THE SOLITO


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarcasm seemed to be McGuire’s vein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bell for what?”

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

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

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

“_Si, señor_, such was your goodness.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Hargis only smiled grimly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What horses are up?” asked Raidler shortly.

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

“Saddle him for me at once.”

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

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

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

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

“The boys—all well?”

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

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

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

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

Raidler nerved himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raidler looked wonderingly toward Ross Hargis.

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




VIII
AN AFTERNOON MIRACLE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three relapsed into resigned inertia and plaintive comment.

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

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

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

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

“Triggernometry?” suggested the Nueces infant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How was he armed?” asked Buckley.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alviry, are you right busy?”

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

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

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

“Better hurry; somebody might hurt him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I no hurt-y you, Señorita,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Splendid!” murmured Alvarita, with flashing eyes.

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

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

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

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

Alvarita scrambled down to the path.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IX
THE HIGHER ABDICATION


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The buckboard greys,” said Sam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That evening ears were quicker than eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Drag him out, Collins,” said Ranse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanky, boss,” he said, quietly.

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

Curly fell back weakly against the steps.

“Since you are here,” continued

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