Janet started East the next week, with Midge in a box car and the Old
Man himself going as far as Chicago. And—blow after blow—Slim was
going along, to sleep with Midge and tend him on the train, and later on
in chaps and spurs and full regalia to assist Janet during the
performance. Slim!
Janet’s farewell to the ranch was rather emotional, but the Kid watched
in vain for any indication that he was more than merely included in the
general _tout ensemble_. The boys rode to the station and cheered her
wildly as the train pulled out, the Old Man waved his hat, and something
seemed to fall through the Kid’s diaphragm and settle like a cold
flatiron below his breast bone, to remain there for a long, long time.
Years and years passed, and after a week’s time in Chicago the Old Man
came home. There was nothing on the surface of things to indicate any
radical changes at the ranch. The dogs greeted him uproariously. The
lawn looked pleasantly empty and dudeless. The men were hearty and
cheerful and ambidextrous at the table as usual. Nothing, in short, to
indicate that only the outside of the Kid was among those present, and
that, save of course for the cold flatiron, the rest of the Kid was
unaccountably missing and might have been located in Chicago.
“How’d it go?” asked Dice Barnett, when the Old Man ambled over to the
corral after supper.
“Pretty good,” said the Old Man. “Pretty good. That gold-toothed smile
of Slim’s is going to be worth money to him now.”
He glanced at the Kid, but the Kid was sharpening his knife on the edge
of a boot and seemed completely absorbed.
“As for Janet, she’s a hit,” said the Old Man, who hadn’t been talking
to managers without picking up a phrase or two. “The act’s a knock-out.
They’ve had the same sort of thing, of course; but with Janet’s youth
and beauty—well, I wish you boys had been there. She sent her love to
you all.”
The Kid tested the blade on a finger nail.
“She’s a right good-looking girl, Janet.” Thus, Joe, not without malice.
“Somebody will try to pick her off the branch all right. I knew a girl
once went on the stage, and she got a bushel of mash notes every week.”
The Kid put away his knife, rose and yawned ostentatiously.
“Reckon I’ll turn in,” he said, and disappeared from a circle which
waited to grin until he had gone.
He slept very poorly that night, and spent most of his time reflecting
bitterly on the trust in human nature which had turned Janet loose on
the world without somebody near her to punch the face of any guy who
tried to get fresh with her. A bushel of mash notes every week, eh? He
lay there and saw Janet on a brilliantly lighted stage, while the
theatre was entirely filled with gilded youths who—the Kid’s experience
of theatres was small—almost buried her in flowers. He groaned and
turned over on his face. Oh, well, what was it to him, anyhow? Let it
ride, that’s all.
The winter came. Part of the outfit went down to the Old Man’s herd of
steers in New Mexico, and Al and Joe were following cows in Arizona. The
bunk house beds were empty, except for Dice and the Kid, and instead of
blackjack and poker Dice read by the bunk-house lamp in the evenings,
and the Kid played solitaire morosely. At mealtimes, for they were all
together now, the Old Man read Janet’s letters aloud, and her clippings.
Her advance man had got hold of her family history by that time, and
played pretty heavily on it. The result was that she was being invited
to good houses.
For instance:
“‘Everything on the table was gold,’” the Old Man read aloud one day.
“‘Can you imagine it? But do you know something? I wouldn’t trade the
whole service for the tin cup by the Big Spring.’”
“Rats!” said the savage fear inside the Kid. “Piffle! Tut! And as for
that hundred and sixty acres and a log house, tut again. She’s gone.
She’s lost. She’ll never come back.”
In November Dice Barnett and the Kid drove the horses along the old
cattle trail by the creek to the winter range, and camped for a few days
there. The Old Man had been hunting elk, and he blew into camp one day
to find the Kid alone, sitting on his heel while he disconsolately fried
potatoes in bacon fat, and whistling an extremely dolorous hymn. The Old
Man sat back on a log and eyed him.
“Well,” he inquired, “got your sense of values yet?”
“What d’you mean?”
The Old Man looked around.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Take this creek, now. There’s gold in
it—real gold. I don’t know from where, but it’s there. Fellows have
frozen and starved to death looking for it. But there’s fool’s gold too.
Every now and then somebody brings in some iron pyrites and thinks he’s
made his everlasting fortune.”
“I get you,” said the Kid. “Well, I know the difference all right now,
sir.”
That was all the Old Man said then. But later on, cleaning his rifle
with a corner torn off the Kid’s dish towel, he said: “I got a Chicago
paper a day or two ago. The Carter girl’s engaged to be married.”
The Kid said nothing for a moment. He was scraping the frying pan. Then
he looked up and caught the Old Man’s eye.
“She was a right nice girl,” he said, and grinned.
Winter came on, and the ranch was isolated from the world. Once a week
or so the postman in his flivver would work his way up through the
roads, thaw out his radiator with boiling water and himself with hot
coffee, and leave the mail. Bears came down from the mountains and left
tracks around the storehouse and the kitchen. Deer came fearlessly to
the feeding racks by the corral, and a mountain sheep was reported on
Bishop’s Rock. On the day before Christmas came a great wooden box from
Janet, with a fur coat for her mother and a set of Kipling for the Old
Man, and on Christmas Day came a telegram:
Dearest Love and a Merry Christmas to all of you.