I
THE thing that side-tracked me and made me so late coming to college was
a somewhat unusual accident, or string of accidents. It began with a
poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico.
One cold, clear night in the fall I started out to hunt up a freight
crew that was to go out soon after midnight. It was just after pay day,
and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would be a poker
game going on in the card-room behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most
of my crew would be there, except Conductor Willis, who had a sick baby
at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back
alley, through a tumble-down ice house and a court, into a ’dobe room
that didn’t open into the saloon proper at all. It was crowded, and hot
and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of
fellows were standing about the walls, rubbing the whitewash off on to
their coat shoulders. There was a bird-cage hanging in one window,
covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was
singing away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer--an old Mexican
had trained him--and he was one of the attractions of the place.
I happened along when a jack-pot was running. Two of the fellows I’d
come for were in it, and they naturally wanted to finish the hand. I
stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the
players I saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of
the bystanders told me you had to buy a hundred dollars’ worth of chips
to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney
Blake, who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn’t
customary; the minute a man got in from his run, he took a bath, put on
citizen’s clothes, and went to a barber. This Blake was a new fireman on
our division. He’d come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue
shirt, with his face streaked up with smoke. He’d been drinking; he
smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were
clean and freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake--said his hands
were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of them wanted to put him out
of the game, but he was a big, heavy-built fellow, and nobody wanted to
be the man to do it. It didn’t please them any better when he took the
jack-pot.
I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along
the wall took their places. One of the chaps who left with me asked me
to go up to his house and get his grip with his work clothes. He’d lost
every cent of his pay cheque and didn’t want to face his wife. I asked
him who was winning.
“Blake. The dirty boomer’s been taking everything. But the fellows will
clean him out before morning.”
About two o’clock, when my work for that night was over and I was going
home to sleep, I just dropped in at the card-room to see how things had
come out. The game was breaking up. Since I left them at midnight, they
had changed to stud poker, and Blake, the fireman, had cleaned everybody
out. He was cashing in his chips when I came in. The bank was a little
short, but Blake made no fuss about it. He had something over sixteen
hundred dollars lying on the table before him in banknotes and gold.
Some of the crowd were insulting him, trying to get him into a fight and
loot him. He paid no attention and began to put the money away, not
looking at anybody. The bills he folded and put inside the band of his
hat. He filled his overalls pockets with the gold, and swept the rest of
it into his big red neckerchief.
I’d been interested in this fellow ever since he came on our division;
he was close-mouthed and unfriendly. He was one of those fellows with a
settled, mature body and a young face, such as you often see among
working-men. There was something calm, and sarcastic, and mocking about
his expression--that, too, you often see among working-men. When he had
put all his money away, he got up and walked toward the door without a
word, without saying good-night to anybody.
“Manners of a hog, and a dirty hog!” little Barney Shea yelled after
him. Blake’s back was just in the doorway; he hitched up one shoulder,
but didn’t turn or make a sound.
I slipped out after him and followed him down the street. His walk was
unsteady, and the gold in his baggy overalls pockets clinked with every
step he took. I ran a little way and caught up with him. “What are you
going to do with all that money, Blake?” I asked him.
“Lose it, to-morrow night. I’m no hog for money. Damned barber-pole
dudes!”
I thought I’d better follow him home. I knew he lodged with an old
Mexican woman, in the yellow quarter, behind the round-house. His room
opened on to the street, by a sky-blue door. He went in, didn’t strike a
light or make a stab at undressing, but threw himself just as he was on
the bed and went to sleep. His hat stuck between the iron rods of the
bed-head, the gold ran out of his pockets and rolled over the bare floor
in the dark.
I struck a match and lit a candle. The bed took up half the room; on the
dresser was a grip with his clean clothes in it, just as he’d brought it
in from his run. I took out the clothes and began picking up the money;
got the bills out of his hat, emptied his pockets, and collected the
coins that lay in the hollow of the bed about his hips, and put it all
into the grip. Then I blew out the light and sat down to listen. I
trusted all the boys who were at the Ruby Light that night, except
Barney Shea. He might try to pull something off on a stranger, down in
Mexican town. We had a quiet night, however, and a cold one. I found
Blake’s winter overcoat hanging on the wall and wrapped up in it. I
wasn’t a bit sorry when the roosters began to crow and the dogs began
barking all over Mexican town. At last the sun came up and turned the
desert and the ’dobe town red in a minute. I began to shake the man on
the bed. Waking men who didn’t want to get up was part of my job, and I
didn’t let up on him until I had him on his feet.
“Hello, kid, come to call me?”
I told him I’d come to call him to a Harvey House breakfast. “You owe me
a good one. I brought you home last night.”
“Sure, I’m glad to have company. Wait till I wash up a bit.” He took his
soap and towel and comb and went out into the patio, a neat little
sanded square with flowers and vines all around, and washed at the
trough under the pump. Then he called me to come and pump water on his
head. After he’d stood the gush of cold water for a few seconds, he
straightened up with his teeth chattering.
“That ought to get the whisky out of a fellow’s head, oughtn’t it? Felt
good, Tom.” Presently he began feeling his side pockets. “Was I dreaming
something, or did I take a string of jack-pots last night?”
“The money’s in your grip,” I told him. “You don’t deserve it, for you
were too drunk to take care of it. I had to come after you and pick it
up out of the mud.”
“All right. I’ll go halvers. Easy come, easy go.”
I told him I didn’t want anything off him but breakfast, and I wanted
that pretty soon.
“Go easy, son. I’ve got to change my shirt. This one’s wet.”
“It’s worse than wet. You oughtn’t to go up town without changing.
You’re a stranger here, and it makes a bad impression.”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked superior. He had a square-built,
honest face and steady eyes that didn’t carry a cynical expression very
well. I knew he was a decent chap, though he’d been drinking and acting
ugly ever since he’d been on our division.
After breakfast we went out and sat in the sun at a place where the
wooden sidewalk ran over a sand gully and made a sort of bridge. I had a
long talk with him. I was carrying the grip with his winnings in it, and
I finally persuaded him to go with me to the bank. We put every cent of
it into a savings account that he couldn’t touch for a year.
From that night Blake and I were fast friends. He was the sort of fellow
who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself. There
are lots like that among working-men. They aren’t trained by success to
a sort of systematic selfishness. Rodney had been unlucky in personal
relations. He’d run away from home when he was a kid because his mother
married again--a man who had been paying attention to her while his
father was still alive. He got engaged to a girl down on the Southern
Pacific, and she double-crossed him, as he said. He went to Old Mexico
and let his friends put all his savings into an oil well, and they
skinned him. What he needed was a pal, a straight fellow to give an
account to. I was ten years younger, and that was an advantage. He liked
to be an older brother. I suppose the fact that I was a kind of stray
and had no family, made it easier for him to unbend to me. He surely got
to think a lot of me, and I did of him. It was that winter I had
pneumonia. Mrs. O’Brien couldn’t do much for me; she was overworked,
poor woman, with a houseful of children. Blake took me down to his room,
and he and the old Mexican woman nursed me. He ought to have had boys of
his own to look after. Nature’s full of such substitutions, but they
always seem to me sad, even in botany.
I wasn’t able to be about until spring, and then the doctor and Father
Duchene said I must give up night work and live in the open all summer.
Before I knew anything about it, Blake had thrown up his job on the
Santa Fé, and got a berth for him and me with the Sitwell Cattle
Company. Jonas Sitwell was one of the biggest cattle men in our part of
New Mexico. Roddy and I were to ride the range with a bunch of grass
cattle all summer, then take them down to a winter camp on the Cruzados
river and keep them on pasture until spring.
We went out about the first of May, and joined our cattle twenty miles
south of Pardee, down toward the Blue Mesa. The Blue Mesa was one of the
landmarks we always saw from Pardee--landmarks mean so much in a flat
country. To the northwest, over toward Utah, we had the Mormon Buttes,
three sharp blue peaks that always sat there. The Blue Mesa was south of
us, and was much stronger in colour, almost purple. People said the rock
itself had a deep purplish cast. It looked, from our town, like a naked
blue rock set down alone in the plain, almost square, except that the
top was higher at one end. The old settlers said nobody had ever climbed
it, because the sides were so steep and the Cruzados river wound round
it at one end and under-cut it.
Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados
river, directly under the mesa, and all summer long, while we drifted
about with our cattle from one water-hole to another, we planned how we
were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After
supper, when we lit our pipes and watched the sunset, climbing the mesa
was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual
work wouldn’t have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to
their hands. John Rapp, the foreman, came along once a month in his
spring-wagon, to see how the cattle were doing and to bring us supplies
and bundles of old newspapers.
Blake was a conscientious reader of newspapers. He always wanted to know
what was going on in the world, though most of it displeased him. He
brooded on the great injustices of his time; the hanging of the
Anarchists in Chicago, which he could just remember, and the Dreyfus
case. We had long arguments about what we read in the papers, but we
never quarrelled. The only trouble I had with Blake was in getting to do
my share of the work. He made my health a pretext for taking all the
heavy chores, long after I was as well as he was. I’d brought my Cæsar
along, and had promised Father Duchene to read a hundred lines a day.
Blake saw that I did it--made me translate the dull stuff aloud to him.
He said if I once knew Latin, I wouldn’t have to work with my back all
my life like a burro. He had great respect for education, but he
believed it was some kind of hocus-pocus that enabled a man to live
without work. We had _Robinson Crusoe_ with us, and Roddy’s favourite
book, _Gulliver’s Travels_, which he never tired of.
Late in October, Rapp, the foreman, came along to accompany us down to
the winter camp. Blake stayed with the cattle about fifteen miles to the
east, where the grass was still good, and Rapp and I went down to air
out the cabin and stow away our winter supplies.