Bunch Grass Part 43

A tall, gaunt Missourian, also well known to us as a daring bull- puncher, laughed derisively.

"Here--is he? Wal, we want him, but we don't want no fuss with you, boys. Yer--white, but he's yaller, and he must go."

"He is going," said Ajax. "He's going fast."

"How's that?"

"Come in," retorted my brother impatiently. "It's cold out there and dark. You're not scared of two unarmed men--are you?"

They filed into the house, looking very sheepish.

"I'm glad you've come, even at this late hour," said Ajax, "for I want to have a quiet word with you."

The psychological characteristics of a crowd are receiving attention at the hands of a French philosopher. M. Gustave Le Bon tells us that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual of average brains.

"You have a nerve," remarked c.o.c.k-a-whoop Charlie.

"You c.o.o.n Dogs," continued my brother, "are making this county too hot for the Chinese--eh?"

"You bet yer life!"

"But won't you make it too hot for yourselves?"

The pack growled, inarticulate with astonishment and curiosity.

"Some of you," said Ajax, "have wives and children. What will they do when the Sheriff is hunting--you? You call this the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. So it is. And do you think that the Free and the Brave will suffer you to destroy property and life without calling you to account?"

"We ain't destroying life."

"And a heathen Chinee ain't a man."

"Quong," said Ajax, in his deep voice, "is hardly a man yet. We call him Mary, because he looks like a girl. You want him--eh? You are not satisfied with what you did yesterday? You want him? But--do you want him _dying_?"

The pack cowered.

"He is dying," said Ajax. "No matter how they live, and a wiser Judge than any of us will p.r.o.nounce on that, no matter how they live--are your own lives clean?--the meanest of these Chinese knows how to die.

One moment, please."

He entered the room where Mary lay blind and deaf to the terror which had come at last. When Ajax returned, he said quietly: "Come and see the end of what you began. What? You hang back? By G.o.d!--you shall come."

Dominated by his eye and voice, the pack slunk into the bed-room. Upon Mary's once comely face the purple weals were criss-crossed; and sores had broken out wherever the cactus spines had pierced the flesh. A groan escaped the men who had wrought this evil, and glancing at each in turn, I caught a glimpse of a quickening remorse, of a horror about to a.s.sume colossal dimensions. The c.o.c.k-a-whoop cowboy was seized with a palsy; great tears rolled down the cheeks of the gaunt Missourian; one man began to swear incoherently, cursing himself and his fellows; another prayed aloud.

"He's dead!" shrieked Charlie.

At the grim word, moved by a common impulse, whipped to unreasonable panic as they had been whipped to unreasoning cruelty, the pack broke headlong from the room--and fled!

Long after they had gone, Mary opened his eyes.

"c.o.o.n Dogs coming?" he muttered. "Heap bad men!"

"They have come and gone," said Ajax. "They'll never come again, Mary.

It's all right. Go to sleep."

Mary obediently closed his eyes.

"He'll recover," Ajax said. And he did.

XVI

OLD MAN BOBO'S MANDY

Old man Bobo was the sole survivor of a once famous trio. Two out of the three, Doc d.i.c.kson and Pap Spooner, had pa.s.sed to the shades, and the legend ran that when their disembodied spirits reached the banks of Styx, the ruling pa.s.sion of their lives a.s.serted itself for the last time. They demurred loudly, impatiently, at the exorbitant fee, ten cents, demanded by Charon.

"We weigh light," said Pap Spooner, "awful light! Call it, mister, fifteen cents for the two!"

"Ten cents apiece," replied the ferryman, "or three for a quarter."

Thereupon the worthy couple seated themselves in Cimmerian darkness, and vowed their intention of awaiting old man Bobo.

"He'll soon be along," they remarked. "He must be awful lonesome."

But the old gentleman kept them out of Hades for full five years.

He lived alone with his grand-daughter and a stable helper in the tumble-down adobe just to the left of the San Lorenzo race track. The girl cooked, baked, and washed for him. Twice a week she peddled fruit and garden stuff in San Lorenzo. Of these sales her grandsire exacted the most rigorous accounting, and occasionally, in recognition of her services, would fling her a nickel. The old man himself rarely left home, and might be seen at all hours hobbling around his garden and corrals, keenly interested in his own belongings, halter-breaking his colts, anxiously watching the growth of his lettuce, counting the oranges, and beguiling the fruitful hours with delightful calculation.

"It's all profit," he has often said to me. "We buy nothin' an' we sell every durned thing we raise."

Then he would chuckle and rub together his yellow, wrinkled hands.

Ajax said that whenever Mr. Bobo laughed it behooved other folk to look grave.

"Mandy's dress costs something," I observed.

"Considerable,--I'd misremembered that. Her rig-out las' fall cost me the vally o' three boxes o' apples--winter pearmains!"

"She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo."

"An' leave me?" he cried shrilly. "I'd like to see a man prowlin'

around my Mandy--I'd stimilate him. Besides, mister, Mandy ain't the marryin' kind. She's homely as a mud fence, is Mandy. She ain't put up right for huggin' and kissin'."

"But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo."

"Heiress," he repeated with a cunning leer. "I'm poor, mister, poor.

The tax collector has eat me up--eat me up, I say, eat me up!"