A Man in the Open Part 20

"Good-by, friend."

"_Adios_," said the Mexican. "_Vaya usted con Dios!_" And the English of that is, "May you ride with G.o.d!"

From the other end of the room Captain Taylor and I were watching that little scene. Without hearing a word we could understand so well. "Young woman," said the captain, "when I was a younger fool than I am now, I was a naval attache at St. Petersburg. I'd seen how the Russian Bear behaved at Sebastopol and I liked to watch how he behaved in the Winter Palace. One day a Cossack officer and his son came to make an appeal.

Mrs. officer had been a puss and bolted with one of the court officials, so her husband and son wanted leave to go after the man with their guns.

They were so miserable that they sat at a table and took no notice of anybody or anything. After they'd been sitting a long time, a man came and laid down a case of dueling pistols on the table beside them. I couldn't hear what he said, but he sat down with them. Presently I saw him shake hands with the general.

"Now your husband put something on the table, and sat down with those wretched prisoners, and presently shook hands with one of them.

"Your husband and that Russian chap did the very same things in the very same way. Yes, you've married a gentleman by mistake."

I was puzzled. "Who was the Russian?" I asked.

"Oh, didn't I tell you? He was the emperor."

After a minute, while I watched my royal man, the captain laid his hand on mine. "Don't let these loafers see you crying," he whispered.

"I'm not crying." I looked round to prove that I was not crying, and as I did so, my glance fell upon the old man's miniature medals. One of them was the Victoria Cross.

CHAPTER XI

BILLY O'FLYNN

_Kate's Narrative_

Both Jesse and I have a habit of committing our thoughts to paper and not to speech. Things written can be destroyed, whereas things said stay terribly alive. I think if other husbands and wives I know of wrote more and talked less, their homes would not feel so dreadful, so full of horrible shadows. There are houses where I feel ill as soon as I cross the door-step, because the very air of the rooms is foul with the spite, the nagging, the strife of bitter souls. As to the houses where horrors have taken place--despair, madness, murder, suicide--these are always haunted, and sensitive people are terrified by ghosts.

My pen has rambled. I sat down to write a thing which must not be said.

Jesse is cruel to young O'Flynn. Perhaps he is justly, rightly cruel, in gibing at this young cow-boy, taunting him until the lad is on the very edge of murder. "Got to be done," says Jesse, "I promised his father that I'd break the colt until he's fed up with robbers. So just you watch me lift the dust from his hide, and don't you git gesticulating on my trail with your fool sympathies." Billy does not suspect that the tormentor loves his victim.

My heart aches with his humiliation. His mother is my cook, not a princess, as the boy's pride would have her. His father was one of the most dangerous leaders of the Rocky Mountain outlaws, so there the lad saw glory, and I don't blame him. But all the glamour was stripped away when Jesse tricked O'Flynn and his gang into surrender, handed them over to justice, and showed poor Billy his sordid heroes for what they really were. His father has been hanged.

Remember that this ranch, ablaze with romance for me, is squalid every-day routine for Billy, whose dreams are beyond the sky-line. He imagines railways as we imagine dragons, and the Bloomsbury boarding-house from which my sister wrote on her return from India is, from his point of view, a place in the Arabian Nights. I read to him Taddy's letter, about the new boarder from Selangor, who is down with fever, the German waiter caught reading Colonel Boyce's ma.n.u.script on protective color for howitzers, the tweeny's sailor father drowned at sea, and the excitement in that humdrum house when Lady Blacktail called. "Wish I'd had a shot," said Billy wistfully, his mind on the black-tail, our local kind of deer. Perhaps he saw forest behind the boarding-house. "In the old country," said he, "do the does call? Only the buck calls here. Your folks is easy excited, anyways."

"Lady Blacktail," said I, "is a woman."

"What was she shouting about?"

"She just called--came to take tea, you know."

"Got no job of work?"

"Oh, but her husband, Sir Tom, was a very rich man. He left her millions."

"Mother's first husband," said Billy, his mind running on widows, "had lots of wealth. He kep' a seegar stand down-town near the Battery, and had a bra.s.s band when they buried him. Mother came out West."

That night the lad had come from Hundred Mile House, with Jesse's pack-train bearing a load of stores. There was a dress length, music for my dear dumpy piano, spiced rolls of bacon, much needed flour and groceries, and an orange kerchief for Billy. From his saddle wallets he produced my crumpled letters and the weekly paper, a Vancouver rag.

Therein Jesse labors among tangles of provincial politics, I gloat over the cooking recipes of America's nice cuisine, and spare maybe just a sigh over the London letter. Billy's portion consists of blood-curdling disasters and crimes, and the widow waits ravenous for her kindling, bed stuffing, wall paper, and new pads for her wooden leg. At ten cents that paper is a bargain.

She hovered presiding while her boy had supper, I checked stores against an untruthful invoice, and Jesse prepared to read: "Bribed with a Bridge! Who Stole the Bonds," etc. Dear Jesse takes his reading seriously. His mind must be prepared with a pipe. His stately spectacles are cleaned on his neck-cloth, and so mounted that he can see to read over the edges. Next he crawls under the stove to find the bootjack, and pull off his long boots. After that he fills the lamp, lights that and a cigar of fearful pungency, and settles his great limbs in the chair of state. When all was arranged that night he looked up from his paper.

"Say," he drawled, "Billy. When you ride away and turn robber, what's the matter with politics? You see if you was Sir Billy O'Flynn, and a Right Honorable Premier, you could steal enough to buy spurs as big as car wheels. You're fiercer than our member already with that new cow-scaring scarf, so all you'd need is a machine gun slung on your belt, a man-killer like my mare Jones, and you'll be the tiger of the forest. You git yo' mother's cat to learn you how to yowl."

II

After breakfast when Jesse had gone to work, the widow came to me in deep distress, leaning against the door-post, twisting up her ap.r.o.n with tremulous fingers, her eyes dark with dread. When I led her to a seat, perhaps she felt my sympathy, for a flood of tears broke loose, and wild Irish mixed with her sobs. The leprechawn possessed her bhoy _avick_, night-riders haunted him, divils was in him _acushla_, and the child was fey. His step-uncle went fey to his end in the dreadful quicksands, her brother-in-law went mad in the black Indian hills, running on the spears of the haythen, rest his sowl, and now Billy! He was gone this hour.

Fiercely she ordered me out to search, for she would take the southern pasture, so surely I would find him in the pines. She feared that place; muttered of fires lighted by no mortal hands. She spoke of wandering lights; the cat had bristled sparks flying from his coat because of elfin voices, and Mick had howled all night down at the Apex. Yestreen a falling star had warned her that she was to lose her bhoy, and had I not seen that face in the windy last night?

Soothing the poor thing as best I could, I undertook the search, glad of an excuse to get away outdoors. Presently I came upon Billy perched on a root overhanging the depths of the canon. He was cleaning Jesse's rifle, and I surprised him in a fit of angry laughter.

"Billy," I shouted, "come in off that root before you fall!"

He obeyed, with sulky patience at my whims.

"Why are you not at work? What are you doing with my husband's rifle?"

"I'm at work," he answered sulkily,--then with an odd vagueness of manner, "I'm cleaning the durned thing."

Being a woman, and cursed at that with the artistic temperament, I could not help being moved by this lad's extraordinary beauty,--the curly red-gold hair, skin with the dusty block of a ripe peach, the poise of easy power and lithe grace, the sense he gave me of glowing color veiling rugged strength. As an artist studies a good model, I had observed very closely the moods of Billy's temperament.

His mother was right. That vagueness of manner was abnormal, and the lad was fey.

"But why are you cleaning his rifle?"

"It kicks when it's foul," he said absently.

"You're off hunting?"

"Goin' to shoot Jesse, thet's all."

"I'm sure," I said, "he cleaned it yesterday. Look here," and I took the rifle to show him it was clean. "See." I put my little finger nail in the breech while he looked down the barrel. "Come," said I, and told him that in my sewing-machine there was a bottle of gun oil. The rifle was in my possession, safe.

Then he heard Jesse coming. "Whist! Hide the gun!" he said, and as though we were fellow conspirators, I placed it behind a tree, so that my man saw nothing to cause alarm.

Jesse came, it seemed, in search of Billy.

"h.e.l.lo, Kate," he said in greeting. "Say, youngster, when you sawed off that table leg to make your mother's limb, what did you do with the caster?"

CHAPTER XII

EXPOUNDING THE SCRIPTURES