This was the way the Friar started out with us; and year after year,
this was the way he kept up. He was friendly with every one, and most
every one was friendly with him. Some o’ the boys got the idea that he
packed his guns along as a bluff; so they put up a joke on him.
They lay in wait for him one night as he was comin’ up the goose neck.
I, myself, didn’t rightly savvy just how he did stand with regard to
the takin’ of human life in self-defence; but I knew mighty well ’at
he wasn’t no bluffer, so I didn’t join in with the boys, nor I didn’t
warn him; I just scouted along on the watch and got up the hill out o’
range to see what would happen.
He came up the hill in the twilight, singin’ one of his favorite
marchin’ songs. I’ve heard it hundreds of times since then, and I’ve
often found myself singin’ it softly to myself when I had a long,
lonely ride to make. That was a curious thing about the Friar: he
didn’t seem to be tampin’ any of his idees into a feller, but first
thing the feller knew, he had picked up some o’ the Friar’s ways; and,
as the Friar confided to me once, a good habit is as easy learned as a
bad, and twice as comfortin’.
Well, he came up the pass shufflin’ along at a steady Spanish trot as
was usual with him when not overly rushed, and singin’:
“Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah!
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but Thou art mighty;
Hold me with Thy powerful hand.”
He came up out of the pass with his head thrown back, and his boy’s
face shinin’ with that radiatin’ joy I haven’t ever seen in another
face, exceptin’ it first caught the reflection from the Friar’s; and
the notion about died out o’ the boys’ minds. They were all friends of
his and wouldn’t have hurt his feelin’s for a lot; but they had itched
about his weapons for such a spell that they finally had to have it
out; so when he rounded a point o’ rock, they stepped out and told him
to put his hands up.
They were masked and had him covered, and his hands shot up with a
jerk; but he didn’t stop his singin’, and his voice didn’t take on a
single waver. Fact was, it seemed if possible a shade more jubilant.
He had reached the verse which sez:
“Feed me with the heavenly manna
In this barren wilderness;
Be my sword and shield and banner,
Be the Lord my Righteousness”;
and as he sang with his hands held high above his head, he waved ’em
back and forth, playin’ notes in the air with his fingers, the way he
did frequent; and it was one o’ the most divertin’ sights I ever saw.
Those blame scamps had all they could do to keep from hummin’ time to
his song; for I swear to you in earnest that the Friar could play on a
man’s heart the same as if it was a fiddle. He kept on an’ finished
the last verse while I crouched above ’em behind a big rock, and
fairly hugged myself with the joy of it. Ol’ Tank Williams was a big
man and had been chosen out to be the leader an’ do the talkin’, but
he hadn’t the heart to jab into the Friar’s singin’; so he waited
until it was all over. Then he cleared his throat as though settin’
off a blast of dynamite, and growls out: “Here, you, give us your
money.”
Ten six-shooters were pointin’ at the Friar, but I reckon if he had
known it would of exploded all of ’em, he’d have had to laugh. He
threw back his head and his big free laugh rolled out into the hills,
until I had to gnaw at a corner o’ the stone to keep from joinin’ in.
“My money!” sez he as soon as he could catch his breath. “Well, boys,
boys, whatever put such a notion as that into your heads. Take it,
take it, you’re welcome to it; and if you are able to find more than
two bits, why, I congratulate you most hearty; because two bits was
all I could find this morning, and that will only be a nickle apiece,
and five cents is small pay for robbin’ a volunteer missionary.”
Ol’ Tank Williams was a serious-minded old relic, and he was feelin’
so sheepish just then that it seemed to him as though the Friar had
imposed on him by lurin’ him into such a fix; so he roars out in
earnest: “If you ain’t got no money, why the deuce do ya tote those
guns about with ya all the time?”
“Would you just as soon tie me to a tree, or take some other measures
of defence?” asked the Friar politely. “My arms are gettin’ weary and
I could talk more comfortable with ’em hanging’ down.”
“Aw put ’em down, and talk on,” sez George Hendricks.
“Thank you,” sez the Friar. “Well, now, boys, the man who doesn’t take
the time to put a value on his own life, isn’t likely to make that
life very much worth while. He mustn’t overvalue it to such an extent
that he becomes a coward, nor he mustn’t undervalue it to such an
extent that he becomes reckless—he must take full time to estimate
himself as near as he is able.
“I don’t know that I can allus keep from judgin’ my fellow men; but I
am sure that I would not judge one to the extent of sayin’ that my
life was worth more than his, so I should never use a gun merely to
save my own life by takin’ away the life of another man—much less
would I use a gun in defence of money; but I am a purty good shot, and
sometimes I can get a man interested by shootin’ at a mark with him.
This is why I carry firearms. Do you want the two bits?”
“Aw, go on,” yells ol’ Tank, madder at himself ’n ever. “We didn’t
intend to rob ya. All we wanted was to hear ya sing and preach a bit”;
and he pulled off his mask and shook the Friar’s hand. All the rest o’
the boys did the same; and I clumb up on my rock, flapped my wings,
and crowed like a rooster.
Well, we sat on the ground, and he sang for us; and then he sobered
and began to talk about cussin’. It used to hurt the Friar to hear
some o’ the double-jointed swear words we used when excited. He tried
not to show it, because he didn’t want anything to shut us away from
him at any time; but whiles his face would wrinkle into lines of
actual pain.
“Now, boys,” he began, “I know, ’at you don’t mean what you say in a
profane way. You call each other terrible names, and condemn each
other to eternal punishment; and if a man said these things in
earnest, his life would be forfeit; but you take it merely as a joke.
Now, I do not know just how wicked this is. I know that it is
forbidden to take the name o’ the Lord thy God in vain; so it is a
dangerous thing to be profane even in thoughtlessness; but I have
heard the Lord’s name used by the perfectly respectable in a way which
must have hurt his tender nature more.
“Once in the crowded slum district of a large eastern city, I saw a
freight car back down on a child and kill it. The mother was frantic;
she was a foreigner and extra emotional, and she screamed, and cursed
the railroad. A man had come to comfort her, and he put his hand on
her arm and said, ‘My dear woman, you must not carry on this way. We
must always bow our heads in submission to the Lord’s will.’
“For years the poor people o’ that neighborhood had begged protection
for their children; and I cannot believe that it was the Lord’s will
that even one o’ the least of ’em should have been slain in order to
drive the lesson a little deeper home; so, as I said before, I am not
going to talk to you of the wickedness of swearing—but I am goin’ to
talk about its foolishness, its vulgarity, and its brutality.”
He went on showin’ that swearin’ was foolish because it wasn’t givin’
a man’s thought on things in a man’s way; but merely howlin’ it out
the way wolves and wild-cats had to, on account o’ their not havin’ a
civilized language with which to express the devilment which was in
’em. He showed how it made a feller lazy; because instead of tryin’ to
sort out words which would tell exactly what he meant, he made a lot
of noises which had no more real meanin’ than a bunch o’
fire-crackers.
Then his voice got low and serious, and he said ’at the worst thing
about cussin’ was, that it led a feller into speakin’ lightly about
the sacred things of life. “When you speak the word ‘son,’” he said,
“you are bound to also call up the thought of ‘mother’; and I want to
say to you right now that any one who can be coarse and nasty in
thinkin’ or speakin’ about maternity, is not a man at all—or even a
decent brute—but has some sort of soul-sickness which is more
horrible than insanity. Always be square with women—all women, good
and bad. I know your temptations, and I know theirs. Woman has a heavy
cross to carry, and the least we can do, is to play fair.”
Then he sprang some of his curious theories on us: told us how the
body was full of poisons and remedies; and it depended on our plan of
livin’, whether we used the one or the other. He said he allus cut out
food and tobacco on Fridays, and if he didn’t feel bright and clear
and bubblin’ over with vitality, he fasted until he felt able to eat a
rubber boot, and then he knew he had cleaned all the waste products
out of him, and could live at top speed again. He finished up by
tellin’ of a cross old doctor he once knew, who used to say ’at cattle
and kings didn’t have to control themselves; but all ordinary men had
to use self-denial, even in matters of pleasure.
It was more the way the Friar said things than what he said; his voice
and his eyes helped a lot; but the thing ’at counted for most was the
fact ’at you knew it wasn’t none of it put on. He loved to joke when
it was a jokin’ matter; but he was stiff as stone with what he called
the foundations of life. A man, you know, as a rule, is mighty timid
about the things which lie close to his heart, no matter how bold and
free he’ll talk about other things; but the Friar was like a little
child, an’ he’d speak out as bold and frank as one, about the things
he loved and hated, until he finally put a few drops o’ this queer
brand o’ courage into our own hearts.
Of course we didn’t get to be troubled with wing-growth or anything
like that; but a short time after this fake hold-up, ol’ Tank Williams
went in to fill up with picklin’-fluid, and he started in on Monday
and kept fightin’ it all that week until Friday. Then he said that he
wouldn’t neither eat, drink, nor smoke on that day; and they couldn’t
make him do it. He started in on Saturday to continue what had started
out to be one o’ the best benders he had ever took; but the first
quart made him sick as a dog, and he came out to the ranch and said
’at the Friar had made him a temperate man, and for the rest of his
life he intended to set aside one day a week in the Friar’s favor.
After the boys had started for the ranch, the Friar invited me to
spend the night with him; so we unpacked his bed from the lead-hoss
and we built a little fire and had a right sociable time of it. Me and
him was good pals by this time. He had said to me once: “Happy, you do
more general thinkin’ than some varsity men I’ve known.”
“I reckon,” sez I, modest as I could, “that a man who has bossed a
dozen men and ten thousand cattle through a three days’ blizzard, has
to be able to think some like a general.”
Then he explained to me that general thinkin’ meant to think about
stars an’ flowers an’ the human race an’ the past an’ the future, an’
such things, and not to be all the time lookin’ at life just from the
way it touched a feller himself. This was another thing I liked about
him. Most Easteners is so polite that they haven’t the heart to set a
feller right when he has the wrong notion; but the Friar would divvy
up on his knowledge as free as he would on his bacon or tobacco; so I
opened myself up to him until he knew as much about me as I did
myself.
He didn’t have much use for the shut-eye this night, nor he wasn’t as
talky as common; so we sat smokin’ and lookin’ into the fire for a
long time. Once in a while he’d speak a verse about some big deed a
man had done years ago, or else one describin’ the mountains or
something like that; until finally I asked him how it came that a man
who loved adventure an’ fightin’ an’ feats of skill, the way he did,
had selected to be a preacher.
“We don’t select our lives, Happy,” sez he. “You’re surely philosopher
enough to see that. As far as we can see, it is like that gamblin’
game; we roll down through a lot o’ little pegs bobbin’ off from one
to another until finally we pop into a little hole at the bottom; but
we didn’t pick out that hole. No, we didn’t pick out that hole.”
So I up and asked him to tell me somethin’ about his start.