Somewhere in Red Gap Part 11

"'And she smoked a cigarette,' says Rupert, still sobbing.

"'He smoked one, too, and I mean to tell his mother,' says Margery.

'It's something I think she ought to know.'

"'It made me sick,' says Rupert. 'It was a poison cigarette; I nearly died.'

"'Mine never made me sick,' says Margery--'only it was kind of sting-y to the tongue and I swallowed smoke through my nose repeatedly. And first, this old one wouldn't give us the cigarettes at all, until I threatened to cast a spell on him and turn him into a toad forever. I never did that to any one, but I bet I could. And the fat one cried like anything and begged me not to turn the old one into a toad, and the old one said he didn't think I could in a thousand years, but he wouldn't take any chances in the Far West; so he gave us the cigarettes, and Rupert only smoked half of his and then he acted in a very common way, I must say. And this old one said we would have br'iled b'ar steaks for breakfast. What is a br'iled b'ar steak? I'm hungry.'

"Such was little angel-faced Margery. Does she promise to make life interesting for those who love her, or does she not?

"Well, that's all. Of course these cops when they come up said the two men was desperate crooks wanted in every state in the Union; but I swore I knew them both well and they was harmless; and I made it right with 'em about the reward as soon as I got back to a check book. After that they'd have believed anything I said. And I sent something over to the Blackhanders that had turned out to help look, and something to Conductor Number Twenty-seven. And the next day I squared myself with Mrs. W.B. Hemingway and her husband, and Mrs. L.H. c.u.mmins, when they come back, the aunt not having been sick but only eccentric again.

"And them two poor homeless boys--they kind of got me, I admit, after I'd questioned 'em awhile. So I coaxed 'em out here where they could lead the wild, free life. Kind of sad and pathetic, almost, they was.

The fat one I found was just a kind of natural-born one--a feeb you understand--and the old one had a scar that the doctor said explained him all right--you must have noticed it up over his temple. It's where his old man laid him out once, when he was a kid, with a stovelifter. It seemed to stop his works.

"Yes; they're pretty good boys. Boogies was never bad but once, account of two custard pies off the kitchen window sill. I threatened him with his stepmother and he hid under the house for twenty-four hours. The other one is pretty good, too. This is only the second time I had to punish him for fooling with live ca'tridges. There! It's sundown and he's got on his Wild Wests again."

Jimmie Time swaggered from the bunk house in his fearsome regalia. Under the awed observation of Boogles he wheeled, drew, and shot from the hip one who had cravenly sought to attack him from the rear.

"My, but he's hostile!" murmured my hostess. "Ain't he just the hostile little wretch?"

IV

ONCE A SCOTCHMAN, ALWAYS

Terrific sound waves beat upon the Arrowhead ranch house this night. At five o'clock a hundred and twenty Hereford calves had been torn from their anguished mothers for the first time and shut into a too adjacent feeding pen. Mothers and offspring, kept a hundred yards apart by two stout fences, unceasingly bawled their grief, a n.o.ble chorus of yearning and despair. The calves projected a high, full-throated barytone, with here and there a wailing tenor against the rumbling ba.s.s of their dams.

And ever and again pealed distantly into the chorus the flute obbligato of an emotional coyote down on the flat. There was never a diminuendo.

The fortissimo had been steadily maintained for three hours and would endure the night long, perhaps for two other nights.

At eight o'clock I sleepily wondered how I should sleep. And thus wondering, I marvelled at the indifference to the racket of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill. Through dinner and now as she read a San Francisco newspaper she had betrayed no consciousness of it. She read her paper and from time to time she chuckled.

"How do you like it?" I demanded, referring to the monstrous din.

"It's great," she said, plainly referring to something else. "One of them real upty-up weddings in high life, with orchestras and bowers of orchids and the bride a vision of loveliness--"

"I mean the noise."

"What noise?" She put the paper aside and stared at me, listening intently. I saw that she was honestly puzzled, even as the chorus swelled to unbelievable volume. I merely waved a hand. The coyote was then doing a most difficult tremolo high above the clamour.

"Oh, that!" said my enlightened hostess. "That's nothing; just a little bunch of calves being weaned. We never notice that--and say, they got the groom's mother in here, too. Yes, sir, Ellabelle in all her tiaras and sunbursts and dog collars and diamond chest protectors--Mrs. Angus McDonald, mother of groom, in a stunning creation! I bet they didn't need any flashlight when they took her, not with them stones all over her person. They could have took her in a coal cellar."

"How do you expect to sleep with all that going on?" I insisted.

"All what? Oh, them calves. That's nothing! Angus says to her when they first got money: 'Whatever you economize in, let it not be in diamonds!'

He says nothing looks so poverty-stricken as a person that can only afford a few. Better wear none at all than just a mere handful, he says. What do you think of that talk from a man named Angus McDonald?

You'd think a Scotchman and his money was soon parted, but I heard him say it from the heart out. And yet Ellabelle never does seem to get him.

Only a year ago, when I was at this here rich place down from San Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria: 'Once a Scotchman, always a Scotchman!' Oh, she was hysteric all right! She was like what I seen about one of the movie actresses, 'the empress of stormy emotion.'

Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper guff. And it was a funny blow-up. I don't know as I blamed her at the time."

I now closed a window and a door upon the noisy September night. It helped a little. I went back to a chair nearer to this woman with ears trained in rejection. That helped more. I could hear her now, save in the more pa.s.sionate intervals of the chorus.

"All right, then. What was the funny blow-up?" She caught the significance of the closed door and window.

"But that's music," she insisted. "Why, I'd like to have a good record of about two hundred of them white-faced beauties being weaned, so I could play it on a phonograph when I'm off visiting--only it would make me too homesick." She glanced at the closed door and window in a way that I found sinister.

"I couldn't hear you," I suggested.

"Oh, all right!" She listened wistfully a moment to the now slightly dulled oratorio, then: "Yes, Angus McDonald is his name; but there are two kinds of Scotch, and Angus is the other kind. Of course he's one of the big millionaires now, with money enough to blind any kind of a Scotchman, but he was the other kind even when he first come out to us, a good thirty years ago, without a cent. He's a kind of second or third cousin of mine by marriage or something--I never could quite work it out--and he'd learned his trade back in Ohio; but he felt that the East didn't have any future to speak of, so he decided to come West. He was a painter and grainer and kalsominer and paperhanger, that kind of thing--a good, quiet boy about twenty-five, not saying much, chunky and slow-moving but sure, with a round Scotch head and a snub nose, and one heavy eyebrow that run clean across his face--not cut in two like most are.

"He landed on the ranch and slowly looked things over and let on after a few days that he mebbe would be a cowboy on account of it taking him outdoors more than kalsomining would. Lysander John was pretty busy, but he said all right, and gave him a saddle and bridle and a pair of bull pants and warned him about a couple of cinch-binders that he mustn't try to ride or they would murder him. And so one morning Angus asked a little bronch-squeezer we had, named Everett Sloan, to pick him out something safe to ride, and Everett done so. Brought him up a nice old rope horse that would have been as safe as a supreme-court judge, but the canny Angus says: 'No, none of your tricks now! That beast has the very devil in his eye, and you wish to sit by and laugh your fool head off when he displaces me.' 'Is that so?' says Everett. 'I suspect you,'

says Angus. 'I've read plentifully about the tricks of you cowlads.'

'Pick your own horse, then,' says Everett. 'I'd better,' says Angus, and picks one over by the corral gate that was asleep standing up, with a wisp of hay hanging out of his mouth like he'd been too tired to finish eating it. 'This steed is more to my eye,' says Angus. 'He's old and withered and he has no evil ambitions. But maybe I can wake him up.'

'Maybe you can,' says Everett, 'but are you dead sure you want to?'

Angus was dead sure. 'I shall thwart your murderous design,' says he. So Everett with a stung look helped him saddle this one. He had his alibi all right, and besides, nothing ever did worry that buckaroo as long as his fingers wasn't too cold to roll a cigarette.

"The beast was still asleep when Angus forked him. Without seeming to wake up much he at once traded ends, poured Angus out of the saddle, and stacked him up in some mud that was providentially there--mud soft enough to mire your shadow. Angus got promptly up, landed a strong kick in the ribs of the outlaw which had gone to sleep again before he lit, shook hands warmly with Everett and says: 'What does a man need with two trades anyway? Good-bye!'

"But when Lysander John hears about it he says Angus has just the right stuff in him for a cowman. He says he has never known one yet that you could tell anything to before he found it out for himself, and Angus must sure have the makings of a good one, so he persuades him to stay round for a while, working at easy jobs that couldn't stack him up, and later he sent him to Omaha with the bunch in charge of a trainload of steers.

"The trip back was when his romance begun. Angus had kept fancy-free up to that time, being willing enough but thoroughly cautious. Do you remember the eating-house at North Platte, Nebraska? The night train from Omaha would reach there at breakfast time and you'd get out in the frosty air, hungry as a confirmed dyspeptic, and rush into the big red building past the man that was rapidly beating on a gong with one of these soft-ended ba.s.s-drum sticks. My, the good hot smells inside!

Tables already loaded with ham and eggs and fried oysters and fried chicken and sausage and fried potatoes and steaks and hot biscuits and corn bread and hot cakes and regular coffee--till you didn't know which to begin on, and first thing you knew you had your plate loaded with too many things--but how you did eat!--and yes, thank you, another cup of coffee, and please pa.s.s the sirup this way. And no worry about the train pulling out, because there the conductor is at that other table and it can't go without him, so take your time--and about three more of them big fried oysters, the only good fried ones I ever had in the world! To this day I get hungry thinking of that North Platte breakfast, and mad when I go into the dining-car as we pa.s.s there and try to get the languid mulatto to show a little enthusiasm.

"Well, they had girls at that eating-house. Of course no one ever noticed 'em much, being too famished and busy. You only knew in a general way that females was pa.s.sing the food along. But Angus actually did notice Ellabelle, though it must have been at the end of the meal, mebbe when she was pouring the third cup. Ellabelle was never right pretty to my notion, but she had some figure and kind of a sad dignity, and her brown hair lacked the towers and minarets and golden domes that the other girls built with their own or theirs by right of purchase. And she seems to have noticed Angus from the very first. Angus saw that when she wasn't pa.s.sing the fried chicken or the hot biscuits along, even for half a minute, she'd pick up a book from the window sill and glance studiously at its pages. He saw the book was called 'Lucile.' And he looked her over some more--between mouthfuls, of course--the neat-fitting black dress revealing every line of her lithe young figure, like these magazine stories say, the starched white ap.r.o.n and the look of sad dignity that had probably come of fresh drummers trying to teach her how to take a joke, and the smooth brown hair--he'd probably got wise to the other kind back in the social centres of Ohio--and all at once he saw there was something about her. He couldn't tell what it was, but he knew it was there. He heard one of the over-haired ones call her Ellabelle, and he committed the name to memory.

"He also remembered the book she was reading. He come back with a copy he'd bought at Spokane and kept it on his bureau. Not that he read it much. It was harder to get into than 'Peck's Bad Boy,' which was his favourite reading just then.

"Pretty soon another load of steers is ready--my sakes, what scrubby runts we sent off the range in them days compared to now!--and Angus pleads to go, so Lysander John makes a place for him and, coming back, here's Ellabelle handing the hot things along same as ever, with 'Lucile' at hand for idle moments. This time Angus again made certain there was something about her. He cross-examined her, I suppose, between the last ham and eggs and the first hot cakes. Her folks was corn farmers over in Iowa and she'd gone to high school and had meant to be a teacher, but took this job because with her it was anything to get out of Iowa, which she spoke of in a warm, harsh way.

"Angus nearly lost the train that time, making certain there was something about her. He told her to be sure and stay there till he showed up again. He told me about her when he got back. 'There's something about her,' he says. 'I suspect it's her eyes, though it might be something else.'

"Me? I suspected there was something about her, too; only I thought it was just that North Platte breakfast and his appet.i.te. No meal can ever be like breakfast to them that's two-fisted, and Angus was. He'd think there was something about any girl, I says to myself, seeing her through the romantic golden haze of them North Platte breakfast victuals. Of course I didn't suggest any such base notion to Angus, knowing how little good it does to talk sense to a man when he thinks there's something about a girl. He tried to read 'Lucile' again, but couldn't seem to strike any funny parts.

"Next time he went to Omaha, a month later, he took his other suit and his new boots. 'I shall fling caution to the winds and seal my fate,' he says. 'There's something about her, and some depraved scoundrel might find it out.' 'All right, go ahead and seal,' I says. 'You can't expect us to be s.h.i.+pping steers every month just to give you twenty minutes with a North Platte waiter girl.' 'Will she think me impetuous?' says he. 'Better that than have her think you ain't,' I warns him. 'Men have been turned down for ten million reasons, and being impetuous is about the only one that was never numbered among them. It will be strange o'clock when that happens.' 'She's different,' says Angus. 'Of course,'

I says. 'We're all different. That's what makes us so much alike.' 'You might know,' says he doubtfully.

"He proved I did, on the trip back. He marched up to Ellabelle's end of the table in his other suit and his new boots and a startling necktie he'd bought at a place near the stockyards in South Omaha, and proposed honourable marriage to her, probably after the first bite of sausage and while she was setting his coffee down. 'And you've only twenty minutes,'

he says, 'so hurry and pack your grip. We'll be wed when we get off the train.' 'You're too impetuous,' says Ellabelle, looking more than ever as if there was something about her. 'There, I was afraid I'd be,' says Angus, quitting on some steak and breaking out into scarlet rash. 'What did you think I am?' demands Ellabelle. 'Did you think I would answer your beck and call or your lightest nod as if I were your slave or something? Little you know me,' she says, tossing her head indignantly.

'I apologize bitterly,' says Angus. 'The very idea is monstrous,' says she. 'Twenty minutes--and with all my packing! You will wait over till the four-thirty-two this afternoon,' she goes on, very stern and nervous, 'or all is over between us.' 'I'll wait as long as that for you,' says Angus, going to the steak again. 'Are the other meals here as good as breakfast?' 'There's one up the street,' says Ellabelle; 'a Presbyterian.' 'I would prefer a Presbyterian,' says Angus. 'Are those fried oysters I see up there?'

"That was about the way of it, I gathered later. Anyway, Angus brought her back, eating on the way a whole wicker suitcase full of lunch that she put up. And she seemed a good, capable girl, all right. She told me there was something about Angus. She'd seen that from the first. Even so, she said, she hadn't let him sweep her off her feet like he had meant to, but had forced him to give her time to do her packing and consider the grave step she was taking for better or worse, like every true, serious-minded woman ought to.

"Angus now said he couldn't afford to fritter away any more time in the cattle business, having a wife to support in the style she had been accustomed to, so he would go to work at his trade. He picked out Wallace, just over in Idaho, as a young and growing town where he could do well. He rented a nice four-room cottage there, with an icebox out on the back porch and a hammock in the front yard, and begun to paper and paint and grain and kalsomine and made good money from the start.

Ellabelle was a crackajack housekeeper and had plenty of time to lie out in the hammock and read 'Lucile' of afternoons.

"By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who'd been scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely never would--a grouchy old hardsh.e.l.l with white hair and whiskers whirling about his head in such quant.i.ties that a body just naturally called him Snowstorm without thinking. It made him highly indignant, but he never would get the things cut. Well, and what does this old snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the canon past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous!