BILL WILSON GOES VISITING
"I Don't know what you've been doing to José Pacheco, lately," was
Dade's way of broaching the subject, "but Don Andres asked me to
'persuade' you not to go on rodeo, on account of some trouble between
you and José."
"He wants my scalp, is all," Jack explained easily, picking burrs from
the fringe of his sash--burrs he had gotten when he ran a race with
Teresita from the farther side of the orchard to the spring, a short
time before. "Valencia told me--and he got it from Manuel--that José is
right on the warpath. If it wasn't for his being laid up--"
"Oh, I know. You'd like to go over and have it out with him. But you
can't. The Pachecos and the Picardos are almost like one family. I don't
suppose José ever stayed away from here so long since he was a baby, as
he has since we came. It's bad enough to keep old friends away, without
mixing up a quarrel. Have you seen José lately? Don Andres seemed to
think so, but I told him you'd have said something about it to me if
you had."
"I met him in the trail, a week or so ago," Jack admitted with manifest
reluctance. "He wasn't overly friendly, but there wasn't any real
trouble, if that's what you're afraid of." He looked sidelong at the
other, saw the hurt in Dade's eyes at this evidence of the constraint
growing intangibly between them, and laughed defiantly.
"Upon my soul!" he exclaimed, "one would think I was simple-minded, the
way you act! D'you think a man never scowled my way before? D'you think
I'm afraid of José? D'you think I don't know enough to take care of
myself? What the devil do you think? Can't go on rodeo--you're afraid I
might get hurt! I ain't crazy to go, for that matter; but I don't know
as I relish this guardian-angel stunt you're playing. You've got your
hands full without that. You needn't worry about me; I've managed to
squeak along so far without getting my light put out--"
"By being a tolerably fair shot, yes," Dade assented, his face hardening
a little under the injustice. "But since I'm hired to look after Don
Andres' interests, you're going to do what I tell you. You'll stay here
and boss the peons while I'm gone. A friendship between two families
that has lasted as many years as you are old, ain't going to be busted
up now, if I can help it. It's strained to the snapping-point right now,
just because the don is friendly with us gringos. Of course, we can't
help that. He had his ideas on the subject before he ever saw me or you.
Just the same, it's up to us not to do the snapping; and I know one
gringo that's going to behave himself if I have to take him down and set
on him!"
"Whee-ee! Somebody else is hitting the war-post, if I know the signs!"
Dade stirred to anger always tickled Jack immensely, perhaps because of
its very novelty, and restored him to good humor. "Have it your own way,
then, darn you! I don't want to go on rodeo, nohow."
"I know that, all right," snapped Dade, and started off with his hat
tilted over his eyes. No one, he reminded himself, would want to spend a
month or so riding the range when he could stay and philander with as
pretty a Spanish girl as ever played the game of cat-and-mouse with a
man. And Jack never had been the kind to go looking for trouble; truth
to tell, he had never found it necessary, for trouble usually flew to
meet him as a needle flies to the magnet.
But, a wound is not necessarily a deadly one because it sends
excruciating pain-signals to a man's heart and brain; and love seldom is
fatal, however painful it may be. Dade was slowly recovering, under the
rather heroic treatment of watching his successor writhe and exult by
turns, as the mood of the maiden might decree. Strong medicine, that, to
be swallowed with a wry face, if you will; but it is guaranteed to cure
if the sufferer is not a mental and moral weakling.
Dade was quite ready to go out to rodeo work; indeed, he was anxious to
go. But, not being a morbid young man, he did not contemplate carrying a
broken heart with him. Teresita was sweet and winsome and maddeningly
alluring; he knew it, he felt it still. Indeed, he was made to realize
it every time the whim seized her to punish Jack by smiling upon Dade.
But she was as capricious as beauty usually is, and he knew that also;
and after being used several times as a club with which to beat Jack
into proper humility (and always seeing very clearly that he was merely
the club and nothing more) he had almost reached the point where he
could shrug shoulders philosophically at her coquetry; and what is
better, do it without bitterness. At least, he could do it when he had
not seen her for several hours, which made rodeo time a relief for which
he was grateful.
What hurt him most, just now, was the constraint between him and Jack;
time was when Jack would have told him immediately of any unpleasant
meeting with José. It never occurred to Dade that he himself had
fostered the constraint by his moody aloofness when he was fighting the
first jealous resentment he had ever felt against the other in the years
of their constant companionship. An unexpected slap on the shoulder
almost sent him headlong.
"Say, old man, I didn't mean it," Jack began contritely, referring
perhaps to his petulant speech, rather than to his mode of making his
presence known. "But--come over here in the shade, and let's have it out
once for all. I know you aren't stuck up over being majordomo, but all
the same you're not the old Dade, whether you know it or not. You go
around as if--well--you know how you've been. What I wanted to say is,
what's the matter? Is it anything I've said or done?"
He sat down on the stone steps of a hut used for a storehouse and
reached moodily for his smoking material. "I know I didn't say anything
about running up against José--but it wasn't anything beyond a few
words; and, Dade, you've been almighty hard to talk to lately. If you've
got anything against me--"
"Oh, quit it!" Dade's face glowed darkly with the blood which shame
brought there. He opened his lips to say more, took a long breath
instead, closed them, and looked at Jack queerly. For one reckless
moment he meditated a plunge into that perfect candor which may be
either the wisest or the most foolish thing a man may do in all his
life.
"I didn't think you noticed it," he said, his voice lowered
instinctively because of the temptation to tell the truth, and his
glance wandering absently over to the corral opposite, where Surry stood
waiting placidly until his master should have need of him. "There has
been a regular brick wall between us lately. I felt it myself and I
blamed you for it. I--"
"It wasn't my building," Jack cut in eagerly. "It's you, you old pirate.
Why, you'd hardly talk when we happened to be alone, and when I tried to
act as if nothing was wrong, you'd look so darned sour I just had to
close my sweet lips like the petals of a--"
"Cabbage," supplied Dade dryly, and placed his cigarette between lips
that twitched.
Former relations having thus been established after their own fashion,
Dade began to wonder how he had ever been fool enough to think of
confessing his hurt. It would have built that wall higher and thicker;
he saw it now, and with the lighting of his cigarette he swung back to a
more normal state of mind than he had been in for a month.
"I'm going up toward Manuel's camp, pretty soon," he observed lazily,
eying Jack meditatively through a thin haze of smoke. "Want to take a
ride up that way and let the sun shine on your nice new saddle?" Though
he called it Manuel's camp from force of habit, that hot-blooded
gentleman had not set foot over its unhewn doorsill for three weeks and
more.
Jack hesitated, having in mind the possibility of persuading Teresita
that she ought to pay a visit to the Simpson cabin that day to display
her latest accomplishment by asking in real, understandable English, how
the pup was getting along; and to show the pretty señora the proper way
to pat tortillas out thin and smooth, as Margarita had been bribed to
teach Teresita herself to do.
"Sure, I'll go," he responded, before the hesitation had become
pronounced, and managed to inject a good deal of his old heartiness into
the words.
"I'm going to have the cattle pushed down this way," Dade explained, "so
you can keep an eye on them from here and we won't have to keep up that
camp. Since they made Bill Wilson captain of the Vigilantes, there isn't
quite so much wholesale stealing as there was, anyway, and enough
vaqueros went with Manuel so I'll need every one that's left. I'll leave
you Pedro, because he can't do any hard riding, after that fall he got
the other day. The two of you can keep the cattle pretty well down this
way."
"All right. Say, what was it made you act so glum since we came down
here?" Jack, as occasionally happens with a friend, was not content to
forget a grievance while the cause of it remained clouded with mystery.
"Are you sore over that trouble I had in town? I know how you feel
about--well, about killings; but, Dade, I had to. I hate it myself. You
needn't think I like the idea, just because I haven't talked about it. A
fellow feels different," he added slowly, "when it's white men. When we
fought Injuns, I don't believe it worried either one of us to think we'd
killed some. We were generally glad of it. But these others--they were
mean enough and ornery enough; but they were humans. I was glad at the
time, but that wore off. And I've caught you looking at me kinda queer,
lately, as if you hated me, almost. You ought to know--"
"I know you're always going off half-cocked," chuckled Dade, quite
himself again. "No, now you mention it, I don't like the idea of
shooting first and finding out afterwards what it was all about, the way
so many fellows have got in the habit of doing. Guns are all right in
their place. And when you get away out where the law doesn't reach, and
you have to look out for yourself, they come in mighty handy. But like
every other kind of power, most men don't know when and how to use the
gun argument; and they make more trouble than they settle, half the
time. You had a right to shoot, that day, and shoot to kill. Why, didn't
the Committee investigate you, first thing after Bill was elected, and
find that you were justified? Didn't they wipe your reputation clean
with their official document, that Bill sent you a copy of? No, that
never bothered me at all, old man. You want to forget about it. You only
saved the Committee the trouble of hanging 'em, according to Bill. Say,
Valencia was telling me yesterday--"
"Well, what the dickens did ail you, then?"
Dade threw out both hands helplessly and gave a rueful laugh. "You're
harder to dodge than an old cow when you've got her calf on the saddle,"
he complained.
"The trouble was," he explained gravely, "that these last boots of mine
pinched like the devil, and I've been mad for a month because my feet
are half a size bigger than yours. I wanted to stump you for a trade,
only I knew yours would cripple me up worse than these did. But I've got
'em broke in now, so I can walk without tying my face into a hard knot.
There's nothing on earth," he declared earnestly, "will put me on the
fight as quick as a pair of boots that don't fit."
Jack paid tribute to Dade's mendaciousness by looking at him doubtfully,
not quite sure whether to believe him; and Dade chuckled again, well
pleased with himself. Even when Jack finally told him quite frankly that
he was a liar, he only laughed and went over to where Surry stood
rolling the wheel in his bit. He would not answer Jack's chagrined
vilifications, except with an occasional amused invitation to go to the
devil.
So the wall of constraint crumbled to the nothingness out of which it
was built, and the two came close together again in that perfect
companionship that may choose whatever medium the mood of man may
direct, and still hold taut the bond of their friendship.
While they rode together up the valley, Jack told the details of the
encounter with José, and declared that he was doing all that even Dade
could demand of him by resisting the desire to ride down to Santa Clara
and make José swallow his words.
"I'd have done it anyway, as soon as I brought Teresita home," he added,
with a hint of apology for his seeming weakness. "But, darn it, I knew
all the time that she made him think she was running away from me. It
did look that way, when she stopped as soon as she met him; I can't
swear right now whether Tejon was running away, or whether he was just
simply running!" He laughed ruefully. "She's an awful little tease--just
plumb full of the old Nick, even if she does look as innocent and as
meek as their pictures of the Virgin Mary. She had us both guessing,
let me tell you! He was pretty blamed insulting, though, and I'd have
licked the stuffing out of him right then and there, if she hadn't swung
in and played the joker the way she did. Made José look as if he'd been
doused with cold water--and him breathing fire and brimstone the minute
before.
"It was funny, I reckon--to Teresita; we didn't see the joke. Every time
I bring up the subject of that runaway, she laughs; but she won't say
whether it was a runaway, no matter how I sneak the question in. So I
just let it go, seeing José is laid up now; only, next time I bump into
José Pacheco, he's going to act pretty, or there's liable to be a little
excitement.
"I wish I had my pistols. I wrote to Bill Wilson about them again, the
other day; if he doesn't send them down pretty soon, I'm going after
them." He stopped, his attention arrested by the peculiar behavior of a
herd of a hundred or more cattle, a little distance from the road.
"Now, what do you suppose is the excitement over there?" he asked; and
for answer Dade turned from the trail to investigate.
"Maybe they've run across the carcass of a critter that's been killed,"
he hazarded, "though this is pretty close home for beef thieves to get
in their work. Most of the stock is killed north and east of Manuel's
camp."
The cattle, moving restlessly about and jabbing their long, wicked horns
at any animal that got in the way, lifted heads to stare at them
suspiciously, before they turned tail and scampered off through the
mustard. From the live oak under which they had been gathered came a
welcoming shout, and the two, riding under the tent-like branches,
craned necks in astonishment.
"Hello, Jack," spoke the voice again. "I'm almighty glad to see yuh!
Hello, Dade, how are yuh?"
"Bill Wilson, by thunder!" Jack's tone was incredulous.
Bill, roosting a good ten feet from the ground on a great, horizontal
limb, flicked the ashes from the cigar he was smoking and grinned down
at them unabashed.
"You sure took your time about getting here," he remarked, hitching
himself into a more comfortable posture on the rough bark. "I've been
praying for you, two hours and more. Say, don't ever talk to me about
hungry wolf-packs, boys. I'll take 'em in preference to the meek-eyed
cow-bossies, any time."
They besought him for details and got them in Bill's own fashion of
telling. Briefly, he had long had in mind a trip down to the Picardo
ranch, just to see the boys and the country and have a talk over the
stirring events of the past month; and, he added, he wanted to bring
Jack his pistols himself, because it was not reasonable to expect any
greaser to withstand the temptation of keeping them, once he got them in
his hands.
Therefore, having plenty of excuses for venturing so far from his place,
and having "tied the dove of peace to the ridge-pole" of town by means
of some thorough work on the part of the new Committee, he had boldly
set forth that morning, soon after sunrise, upon a horse which somebody
had sworn that a lady could ride.
Bill confessed frankly that he wasn't any lady, however; and so, when
the horse ducked unexpectedly to one side of the trail, because of
something he saw in the long grass, Bill surprised himself very much by
getting his next clear impression of the situation from the ground.
"I dunno how I got there, but I was there, all right, and it didn't feel
good, either. But I'd been making up my mind to get off and try walking
though, so I done it. Say, I don't see nothing so damned attractive
about riding horseback, anyway!"
He yelled at the horse to stop, but it appeared that his whoas were so
terrifying that the horse ran for its life. So Bill started to walk,
beguiling the time, by soliloquizing upon--well, Bill put it this way:
"I walked and I cussed, and I cussed and I walked, for about four hours
and a half. Say! How do you make out it's only twenty miles?"
"Nearer thirty" corrected Dade, and Bill grunted and went on with the
story of his misfortunes. Walking became monotonous, and he wearied of
soliloquy before the cattle discovered him.
"Met quite a band, all of a sudden," said Bill. "They throned up their
heads and looked at me like I was wild Injuns, and I shooed 'em off--or
tried to. They did run a little piece, and then they all turned and
looked a minute, and commenced coming again, heads up and tails
a-rising. And," he added naïvely, "I commenced going!" He said he
thought that he could go faster than they could come; but the faster he
departed, the more eager was their arrival. "Till we was all of us on
the gallop and tongues a-hanging."
Bill was big, and he was inclined to flesh because of no exercise more
strenuous than quelling incipient riots in his place, or weighing the
dust that passed into his hands and ownership. He must have run for some
distance, since he swore by several forbidden things that the chase
lasted for five miles--"And if you don't believe it, you can ride back
up the trail till you come to the dent I made with my toes when I
started in."
Other cattle came up and joined in the race, until Bill had quite a
following; and when he was gasping for breath and losing hope of seeing
another day, he came upon a live oak, whose branches started almost from
the roots and inclined upward so gently that even a fat man who has lost
his breath need not hesitate over the climbing.
"Thank the good Lord he don't cut all his trees after the same pattern,"
finished Bill fervently, "and that live oaks ain't built like redwoods.
If they was, you'd be wiping off my coat-buttons right now, trying to
identify my remains!"
Being polite young men, and having a sincere liking for Bill, they hid
certain exchanges of grins and glances under their hat-brims (Bill being
above them and the brims being wide) and did not by a single word
belittle the escape he had had from man-eating cows. Instead, Dade
coaxed him down from the tree and onto Surry, swearing solemnly that the
horse was quite as safe as the limb to which Bill showed a disposition
to cling. Bill was hard to persuade, but since Dade was a man who
inspired faith instinctively, the exchange was finally accomplished,
Bill still showing that strange, clinging disposition that made him grip
the saddle-horn as a drowning man is said to grasp at a straw.
So they got him to the house, the two riding Jack's peppery palimeno
with some difficulty; while Surry stepped softly that he might not
dislodge that burden in the saddle, whose body lurched insecurely and
made the horse feel at every step the ignorance of the man. They got him
and themselves to the house; and his presence there did its part towards
strengthening Don Andres' liking for gringos, while Bill himself gained
a broader outlook, a keener perception of the rights of the native-born
Californians.
Up in San Francisco there was a tendency to make light of those rights.
It was commonly accepted that the old land grants were outrageous, and
that the dons who prated of their rights were but land pirates who would
be justly compelled by the government to disgorge their holdings. Bill
had been in the habit of calling all Spaniards "greasers," just as the
average Spaniard spoke of all Americans as "gringos," or heathenish
foreigners.
But on the porch of Don Andres, his saddle-galled person reclining at
ease in a great armchair behind the passion vines, with the fragile stem
of a wine-glass twirling between his white, sensitive, gambler-fingers
while he listened to the don's courtly utterances as translated
faithfully by Dade (Jack being absent on some philandering mission of
his own), big Bill Wilson opened his eyes to the other side of the
question and frankly owned himself puzzled to choose.
"Seems like the men that came here when there wasn't anything but Injuns
and animals, and built up the country outa raw material, ought to have
some say now about who's going to reap the harvest," he admitted to
Dade. "Don't look so much like gobbling, when you get right down to
cases, does it? But at the same time, all these men that leave the east
and come out here to make homes--seems like they've got a right to
settle down and plow up a garden patch if they want to. They're going to
do it, anyway. Looks like these grandees'll have to cash in their chips
and quit, but it's a darned shame."
As to the town, Bill told them much that had happened. Politics were
still turbulent; but Perkins' gang of hoodlums was fairly wiped out, and
the Committee was working systematically and openly for the best
interests of the town. There had been a hanging the week before; a
public hanging in the square, after a trial as fair as any court
properly authorized could give.
"Not much like that farce they pulled off that day with Jack," asserted
Bill. "Real lawyers, we had, and real evidence for and against the
feller, and tried him for real murder. Things are cooling down fast, up
there, and you can walk the streets now without hanging onto your money
with one hand and your gun with the other. Jack and you can come back
any time. And say, Jack!" Having heard his voice beyond the vines, Bill
made bold to call him somewhat peremptorily.
"There's some gold left, you know, that belongs to you. I didn't send it
all down; didn't like the looks of that--er--" He checked himself on the
point of saying greaser. "And seeing you're located down here for the
summer, and don't need it, why don't you put it into lots? You two can
pick up a couple of lots that will grow into good money, one of these
days. Fact is, I've got a couple in mind. I'd like to see you fellows
get some money to workin' for you. This horseback riding is too blamed
risky."
"That looks reasonable to me," said Dade. "We've got the mine, of
course, but the town ought to go on growing, and lots should be a good
place to sink a thousand or two. I've got a little that ain't working."
Then seeing the inquiring look in the eyes of Don Andres, he explained
to him what Bill had suggested.
Don Andres nodded his white head approvingly. "The Señor Weelson is
right," he said. "You would do well, amigos, to heed his advice."
"Just as Jack says," Dade concluded; and Jack amended that statement by
saying it was just as Bill said. If Bill knew of a lot or two and
thought it would be a good investment, he could buy them in their names.
And Bill snorted at their absolute lack of business instinct and let the
subject drop into the background with the remark that, for men that had
come west with the gold fever, they surely did seem to care very little
about the gold they came after.
"The fun of finding it is good enough," declared Jack, unashamed, "so
long as we have all we need. And when we need more than we've got,
there's the mine; we can always find more. Just now--"
He waved his cigarette towards the darkening hills; and in the little
silence that followed they heard the sweet, high tenor of a vaquero
somewhere, singing plaintively a Spanish love-song. When the voice
trailed into a mournful, minor "Adios, adios," a robin down in the
orchard added a brief, throaty note of his own.
Bill sighed and eased his stiffened muscles in the big chair. "Well, I
don't blame either one of you," he drawled somewhat wistfully. "If I was
fifteen years limberer and fifty pounds slimmer, I dunno but what I'd
set into this ranch game myself. It's sure peaceful."
Foolishly they agreed that it was.