One Way to Drown Sorrow
Ford walked up to the bar, with a smile upon his face which Sam
misunderstood and so met with a conciliatory grin and a hand extended
toward a certain round, ribbed bottle with a blue-and-silver label. Ford
waved away the bottle and leaned, not on the bar but across it, and
clutching Sam by the necktie, slapped him first upon one ear and next
upon the other, until he was forced by the tingling of his own fingers
to desist. By that time Sam's green necktie was pulled tight just under
his nose, and he had swallowed his gum--which, considering the size of
the lump, was likely to be the death of him.
Ford did not say a word. He permitted Sam to jerk loose and back into a
corner, and he watched the swift crimsoning of his ears with a keen
interest. Since Sam's face had the pasty pallor of the badly scared,
the ears appeared much redder by contrast than they really were. Next,
Ford turned his attention to the man beside him, who happened to be
Bill. For one long minute the grim spirit of war hovered just over the
two.
"Aw, forget it, Ford," Bill urged ingratiatingly at last. "You don't
want to lick anybody--least of all old Bill! Look at them knuckles! You
couldn't thump a feather bed. Anyway, you got the guilty party when you
done slapped Sam up to a peak and then knocked the peak off. Made him
swaller his cud, too, by hokey! Say, Sam, my old dad used to feed a cow
on bacon-rinds when she done lost her cud. You try it, Sam. Mebby it
might help them ears! Shove that there trouble-killer over this way,
Sammy, and don't look so fierce at your uncle Bill; he's liable to turn
you across his knee and dust your pants proper." He turned again to
Ford, scowling at the group and at life in general, while the snow
melted upon his broad shoulders and trickled in little, hurrying drops
down to the nearest jumping-off place. "Come, drownd your sorrer," Bill
advised amiably. "Nobody said nothing but Sammy, and I'll gamble he
wishes he hadn't, now." If his counsel was vicious, his smile was
engaging--which does not, in this instance, mean that it was beautiful.
Ford's fingers closed upon the bottle, and with reprehensible
thoroughness he proceeded to drown what sorrows he then possessed.
Unfortunately he straightway produced a fresh supply, after his usual
method. In two hours he was flushed and argumentative. In three he had
whipped Bill--cause unknown to the chronicler, and somewhat hazy to Ford
also after it was all over. By mid-afternoon he had Sammy entrenched in
the tiny stronghold where barreled liquors were kept, and scared to the
babbling stage. Aleck had been put to bed with a gash over his right eye
where Ford had pointed his argument with a beer glass, and Big Jim had
succumbed to a billiard cue directed first at his most sensitive bunion
and later at his head. Ford was not using his fists, that day, because
even in his whisky-brewed rage he remembered, oddly enough, his skinned
knuckles.
Others had come--in fact, the entire male population of Sunset was
hovering in the immediate vicinity of the hotel--but none had conquered.
There had been considerable ducking to avoid painful contact with flying
glasses from the bar, and a few had retreated in search of bandages and
liniment; the luckier ones remained as near the storm-center as was safe
and expostulated. To those Ford had but one reply, which developed into
a sort of war-chant, discouraging to the peace-loving listeners.
"I'm a rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son-of-a-gun--_and a good
one!_" Ford would declaim, and with deadly intent aim a lump of coal,
billiard ball, or glass at some unfortunate individual in his audience.
"Hit the nigger and get a cigar! You're just hanging around out there
till I drink myself to sleep--but I'm fooling you a few! I'm watching
the clock with one eye, and I take my dose regular and not too frequent.
I'm going to kill off a few of these smart boys that have been talking
about me and my wife. She's a lady, my wife is, and I'll kill the first
man that says she isn't." (One cannot, you will understand, be too
explicit in a case like this; not one thousandth part as explicit as
Ford was.)
"I'm going to begin on Sam, pretty quick," he called through the open
door. "I've got him right where I want him." And he stated, with
terrible exactness, his immediate intentions towards the bartender.
Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy
collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no
more, and like the collie he left the storeroom and fled with a yelp of
sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the
dining-room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced
solemnly up at the barroom clock and, retreating to the nearly denuded
bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the
dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little
more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the
contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped
his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted
coal-hod, went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce
Sam, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.
The group outside withdrew across the street to grapple with the problem
before them. It was obviously impossible for civilized men to sacrifice
Sam, even if they could catch him--which they could not. Sam had bolted
through the dining-room, upset the Chinaman in the kitchen, and fallen
over a bucket of ashes in the coal-shed in his flight for freedom. He
had not stopped at that, but had scurried off up the railroad track. The
general opinion among the spectators was that he had, by this time,
reached the next station and was hiding in a cellar there.
Bill Wright hysterically insisted that it was up to Tom Aldershot, who
was a deputy town marshal. Tom, however, was working on the house he
hoped to have ready for his prospective bride by Thanksgiving, and hated
to be interrupted for the sake of a few broken heads only.
"He ain't shooting up nobody," he argued from the platform, where he was
doing "inside work" on his dining-room while the storm lasted. "He
never does cut loose with his gun when he's drunk. If I arrested him,
I'd have to take him clear up to Garbin--and I ain't got time. And it
wouldn't be nothin' but a charge uh disturbin' the peace, when I got him
there. Y'oughta have a jail in Sunset, like I've been telling yuh right
along. Can't expect a man to stop his work just to take a man to
jail--not for anything less than murder, anyhow."
Some member of the deputation hinted a doubt of his courage, and Tom
flushed.
"I ain't scared of him," he snorted indignantly. "I should say not! I'll
go over and make him behave--as a man and a citizen. But I ain't going
to arrest him as an officer, when there ain't no place to put him." Tom
reluctantly threw down his hammer, grumbling because they would not wait
till it was too dark to drive nails, but must cut short his working day,
and went over to the hotel to quell Ford.
Ingress by way of the front door was obviously impracticable; the
marshal ducked around the corner just in time to avoid a painful
meeting with a billiard ball. Mother McGrew had piled two tables against
the dining-room door and braced them with the mop, and stubbornly
refused to let Tom touch the barricade either as man or officer of the
law.
"Well, if I can't get in, I can't do nothing," stated Tom, with
philosophic calm.
"He's tearing up the whole place, and he musta found all them extra
billiard balls Mike had under the bar, and is throwin' 'em away," wailed
Mrs. McGrew, "and he's drinkin' and not payin'. The damage that man is
doin' it would take a year's profits to make up. You gotta do something,
Tom Aldershot--you that calls yourself a marshal, swore to pertect the
citizens uh Sunset! No, sir--I ain't a-goin' to open this door, neither.
I'm tryin' to save the dishes, if you want to know. I ain't goin' to let
my cups and plates foller the glasses in there. A town full uh men--and
you stand back and let one crazy--"
Tom had heard Mrs. McGrew voice her opinion of the male population of
Sunset on certain previous occasions. He left her at that point, and
went back to the group across the street.
At length Sandy, whose imagination had been developed somewhat beyond
the elementary stage by his reading of romantic fiction, suggested
luring Ford into the liquor room by the simple method of pretending an
assault upon him by way of the storeroom window, which could be barred
from without by heavy planks. Secure in his belief in Ford's friendship
for him, Sandy even volunteered to slam the door shut upon Ford and lock
it with the padlock which guarded the room from robbery. Tom took a chew
of tobacco, decided that the ruse might work, and donated the planks for
the window.
It did work, up to a certain point. Ford heard a noise in the storeroom
and went to investigate, caught a glimpse of Tom Aldershot apparently
about to climb through the little window, and hurled a hammer and
considerable vituperation at the opening. Whereupon Sandy scuttled in
and slammed the door, according to his own plan, and locked it. There
was a season of frenzied hammering outside, and after that Sunset
breathed freer, and discussed the evils of strong drink, and washed down
their arguments by copious draughts of the stuff they maligned.
Later, they had to take him out of the storeroom, because he insisted
upon knocking the bungs out of all the barrels and letting the liquor
flood the floor, and Mike McGrew's wife objected to the waste, on the
ground that whisky costs money. They fell upon him in a body, bundled
him up, hustled him over to the ice-house, and shut him in; and within
ten minutes he kicked three boards off one side and emerged breathing
fire and brimstone like the dragons of old. He had forgotten about
wanting to kill Sam; he was willing--nay, anxious--to murder every male
human in Sunset.
They did not know what to do with him after that. They liked Ford when
he was sober, and so they hated to shoot him, though that seemed the
only way in which they might dampen his enthusiasm for blood. Tom said
that, if he failed to improve in temper by the next day, he would try
and land him in jail, though it did seem rigorous treatment for so
common a fault as getting drunk. Meanwhile they kept out of his way as
well as they could, and dodged missiles and swore. Even that was
becoming more and more difficult--except the swearing--because Ford
developed a perfectly diabolic tendency to empty every store that
contained a man, so that it became no uncommon sight to see a back door
belching forth hurrying figures at the most unseasonable times. No man
could lift a full glass, that night, and feel sure of drinking the
contents undisturbed; whereat Sunset grumbled while it dodged.
It may have been nine o'clock before the sporadic talk of a jail
crystallized into a definite project which, it was unanimously agreed,
could not too soon be made a reality.
They built the jail that night, by the light of bonfires which the
slightly wounded kept blazing in the intervals of standing guard over
the workers; ready to give warning in case Ford appeared as a war-cloud
on their horizon. There were fifteen able-bodied men, and they worked
fast, with Ford's war-chant in the saloon down the street as an
incentive to speed. They erected it close to Tom Aldershot's house,
because the town borrowed lumber from him and they wanted to save
carrying, and because it was Tom's duty to look after the prisoner, and
he wanted the jail handy, so that he need not lose any time from his
house-building.
They built it strong, and they built it tight, without any window save a
narrow slit near the ceiling; they heated it by setting a stove outside
under a shelter, where Tom could keep up the fire without the risk of
going inside, and ran pipe and a borrowed "drum" through the jail high
enough so that Ford could not kick it. And to discourage any thought of
suicide by hanging, they ceiled the place tightly with Tom's matched
flooring of Oregon pine. Tom did not like that, and said so; but the
citizens of Sunset nailed it on and turned a deaf ear to his complaints.
Chill dawn spread over the town, dulling the light of the fires and
bringing into relief the sodden tramplings in the snow around the jail,
with the sharply defined paths leading to Tom Aldershot's lumber-pile.
The watchers had long before sneaked off to their beds, for not a sign
of Ford had they seen since midnight. The storm had ceased early in the
evening and all the sky was glowing crimson with the coming glory of the
sun. The jail was almost finished. Up on the roof three crouching
figures were nailing down strips of brick-red building paper as a fair
substitute for shingles, and on the side nearest town the marshal and
another were holding a yard-wide piece flat against the wall with
fingers that tingled in the cold, while Bill Wright fastened it into
place with shingle nails driven through tin disks the size of a
half-dollar.
Ford, partly sober after a sleep on the billiard table in the hotel
barroom, heard the hammering, wondered what industrious soul was up and
doing carpenter work at that unseemly hour, and after helping himself to
a generous "eye-opener" at the deserted bar, found his cap and went over
to investigate. He was much surprised to see Bill Wright working, and
smiled to himself as he walked quietly up to him through the soft,
step-muffling snow.
"What you doing, Bill--building a chicken house?" he asked, a quirk of
amusement at the corner of his lips.
Bill jumped and came near swallowing a nail; so near that his eyes
bulged at the feel of it next his palate. Tom Aldershot dropped his end
of the strip of paper, which tore with a dull sound of ripping, and
remarked that he would be damned. Necks craned, up on the roof, and
startled eyes peered down like chipmunks from a tree. Some one up there
dropped a hammer which hit Bill on the head, but no one said a word.
"You act like you were nervous, this morning," Ford observed, in the
tone which indicates a conscious effort at good-humored ignorance.
"Working on a bet, or what?"
"What!" snarled Bill sarcastically. "I wisht, Ford, next time you bowl
up, you'd pick on somebody that ain't too good a friend to fight back!
I'm gittin' tired, by hokey--"
"What--did I lick you again, Bill?" Ford's smile was sympathetic to a
degree. "That's too bad, now. Next time you want to hunt a hole and
crawl into it, Bill. I don't want to hurt you--but seems like I've kinda
got the habit. You'll have to excuse me." He hunched his shoulders at
the chill of the morning and walked around the jail, inspecting it with
half-hearted interest.
"What is this, anyway?" he inquired of Tom. "Smoke-house?"
"It's a jail," snapped Tom. "To put you into if you don't watch your
dodgers. What 'n thunder you want to carry on like you did last night,
for? And then go and sober up just when we've got a jail built to put
you into! That ain't no way for a man to do--I'll leave it to Bill if it
is! I've a darned good mind to swear out a warrant, anyway, Ford, and
pinch you for disturbin' the peace! That's what I ought to do, all
right." Tom beat his hands about his body and glared at Ford with his
ultra-official scowl.
"All right, if you want to do it." Ford's tone embellished the reply
with a you-take-the-consequences sort of indifference. "Only, I'd advise
you never to turn me loose again if you do lock me up in this coop
once."
"I know I wouldn't uh worked all night on the thing if I'd knowed you
was goin' to sleep it off," Bill complained, with deep reproach in his
watery eyes. "I made sure you was due to keep things agitated around
here for a couple uh days, at the very least, or I never woulda drove a
nail, by hokey!"
"It is a darned shame, to have a nice, new jail and nobody to use it
on," sympathized Ford, his eyes half-closed and steely. "I'd like to
help you out, all right. Maybe I'd better kill you, Bill; they _might_
stretch a point and call it manslaughter--and I could use the bounty to
help pay a lawyer, if it ever come to a head as a trial."
Whereat Bill almost wept.
Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering
openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it, and
at wives and matrimony and the world which held all these vexations.
He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed
everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for
easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around
him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie
down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own
affairs.
Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man. But he
asked no more questions and he made no more objections. He picked up the
story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black
Forest and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter, and
when Ford went out, with his battered, sole-leather suitcase and his
rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book and
refused even a grunt in response to Ford's grudging: "So long, Sandy."