Ma Pettengill Part 12

This sport dispelled the early morning gloom that had beset me. I won a dollar almost immediately. It may have been the same coyote, as my opponent painfully suggested; but it showed at a different breach in the willows, and I was firm.

Then the game went fiercely against me. Ma Pettengill detected coyotes at the far edges of fields--so far that I would have ignored them for jack rabbits had I observed them at all. I claimed an occasional close one; but these were few. The outlook was again not cheering. It was an excellent morning for distant coyotes, and presently I owed Mrs.

Lysander John Pettengill seven dollars, she having won two doubleheaders in succession. This ride was costing me too much a mile. Being so utterly outcla.s.sed I was resolving to demand a handicap, but was saved from this ignominy by our imminent arrival at the abode of this here Tilton, who presently sauntered out of a feeding corral and chewed a straw at us idly.

We soon took all that out of him. The air went something like this:

MRS. L. J. P.--brightly: Morning, Chester! Say, look here! About that gap in the fence across Stony Creek field--I got to turn a beef herd in there Thursday.

TILTON--crouching luxuriously on one knee still chewing the straw: Well, now, about that little job--I tell you, Mis' Pett'ngill; I been kind o'

holdin' off account o' Snell bein' rushed with his final plowin'. He claims--

MRS. L. J. P.--still brightly: Oh, that's all right! Snell will be over there, with his men, to-morrow morning at seven o'clock. He said you'd have to be there, too.

TILTON--alarmed, he rises, takes straw from his mouth, examines the chewed end with dismay and casts it from him; removes his hat, looks at this dubiously, burnishes it with a sleeve, and sighs: To-morrow morning! You don't mean to-morrow--

MRS. L. J. P.--carefully yet rapidly: To-morrow morning at seven o'clock.

You don't want to throw Snell down on this; and he's going to be there.

How many men can you take?

TILTON--dazed: Now--now lemme see!

MRS. L. J. P.--quickly: You can take Chris and Shorty and Jake and yourself. Any one else?

TILTON--swept over the falls: Why, no'm; I don't guess there's any other I could spare, account of--

MRS. L. J. P.--almost sweetly: All right, then. To-morrow; seven sharp.

TILTON--from the whirlpool, helplessly: Yes'm! Yes'm!

MRS. L. J. P.: Morning!

We ride on. Tilton fades back toward the corral; he has forgotten to replace his hat.

I now decided to make a little conversation rather than have the stupid and ruinous game of coyote for a pastime.

"I thought you hadn't seen Snell yet."

"I haven't; not since he promised his half of the job two weeks ago."

"But you just told Tilton--"

"Well, Snell is going to be there, ain't he?"

"How do you know?"

"I'm going to tell him now."

And the woman did even so. If you wish the scene with Snell go back and read the scene with Tilton, changing the names. Nothing else need you change. Snell was. .h.i.tching two mules to a wood wagon; but he heard the same speeches and made approximately the same replies. And the deed was done.

"There now!" boomed Mrs. Talleyrand as we rode beyond earshot of the dazed and lingering Snell. "Them two men been trying for two weeks to agree on a day to do this trifling job. They wasn't able; so I agreed on a day myself. Anything wrong with it?"

"You said you were going to talk straight to them."

"Ain't I just talked straight to Snell? Tilton will be there, won't he?"

"How about the way you talked to Tilton before you saw Snell?"

"Well, my lands! How you talk! You got to have a foundation to build on, haven't you?"

I saw it as a feat beyond my prowess to convict this woman in her own eyes of a dubious and considering veracity. So I merely wondered, in tones that would easily reach her, how the gentlemen might relish her diplomacy when they discovered it on the morrow. I preceded the word diplomacy with a slight and very affected cough.

The lady replied that they would never discover her diplomacy, not coughing in the least before the word. She said each of them would be so mad at the other for setting a day that they would talk little. They would simply build fence. She added that a woman in this business had to be looking for the worst of it all the time. She was bound to get the elbow if she didn't use her common sense.

I ignored her casuistry, for she was now rolling a cigarette with an air of insufferable probity. I gave her up and played a new game of smas.h.i.+ng horseflies as they settled on my mount. Dandy Jim plays the game ably.

When a big fly settles on his nose he holds his head round so I can reach it. He does not flinch at the terrific smash of my hat across his face.

If a fly alights on his neck or shoulder, and I do not remark it, he turns his head slightly toward me and winks, so I can stalk and pot it.

He is very crafty here. If the fly is on his right side he turns and winks his left eye at me so the insect will not observe him. And yet there are people who say horses don't reason.

I now opened fifty more gates and we left the cool green of the fields for a dusty side road that skirts the base of the mesa. We jogged along in silence, which I presently heard stir with the faint, sweet strain of a violin; an air that rose and wailed and fell again, on a violin played with a certain back-country expertness. The road bent to show us its source. We were abreast of the forlorn little shack of a dry-farmer, weathered and patched, set a dozen yards from the road and surrounded by hard-packed earth. Before the open door basked children and pigs and a few spiritless chickens.

All the children ran to the door when we halted and called to someone within. The fiddle played on with no faltering, but a woman came out--a gaunt and tattered woman who was yet curiously cheerful. The children lurked in her wake as she came to us and peered from beyond her while we did our business.

Our business was that the redskin, Laura, official laundress of the Arrowhead, had lately attended an evening affair in the valley at which the hitherto smart tipple of Jamaica ginger had been supplanted by a novel and potent beverage, Nature's own remedy for chills, dyspepsia, deafness, rheumatism, despair, carbuncles, jaundice, and ennui. Laura had partaken freely and yet again of this delectable brew, and now suffered not only from a sprained wrist but from detention, having suffered arrest on complaint of the tribal sister who had been nearest to her when she sprained her wrist. Therefore, if Mrs. Dave Pickens wanted to come over to-morrow and wash for us, all right; she could bring her oldest girl to help.

Mrs. Dave thereupon turned her head languidly toward the ign.o.ble dwelling and called: "Dave!" Then again, for the fiddle stayed not: "Dave! Oh, Dave!"

The fiddle ceased to moan--complainingly it seemed to me--and Dave framed his graceful figure in the doorway. He was one appealing droop, from his moustache to his moccasin-clad feet. He wore an air of elegant leisure, but was otherwise not fussily arrayed.

"Dave, Mis' Pett'ngill says there's now a day's was.h.i.+n' to do over to her place to-morrow. What think?"

Dave deliberated, then pondered, then thought, then spoke:

"Well, I d'no', Addie; I d'no' as I got any objections if you ain't.

I d'no' but it's all the same to me."

Hereupon we meanly put something in Dave's unsuspecting way, too.

"You must want a day's work yourself," called out Ma Pettengill. "You go up to Snell's about six in the morning and he'll need you to help do some fencing on that gap in Stony Creek field. If he don't need you Tilton will. One of 'em is bound to be short a man."

"Fencin'?" said Dave with noticeable disrelish.

"You reckon we better both leave the place at once?" suggested Mrs. Dave.

"That's so," said Dave brightly. "Mebbe I--"