I was sure I heard a sigh.

“Me?” said Jud. “I don’t ever eat ’em.”

VI

SEATS OF THE HAUGHTY

Golden by day and silver by night, a new trail now leads to us across

the Indian Ocean. Dusky kings and princes have found our Bombay of the

West; and few be their trails that do not lead down to Broadway on

their journey for to admire and for to see.

If chance should ever lead you near a hotel that transiently shelters

some one of these splendid touring grandees, I counsel you to seek

Lucullus Polk among the republican tuft-hunters that besiege its

entrances. He will be there. You will know him by his red, alert,

Wellington-nosed face, by his manner of nervous caution mingled with

determination, by his assumed promoter’s or broker’s air of busy

impatience, and by his bright-red necktie, gallantly redressing the

wrongs of his maltreated blue serge suit, like a battle standard still

waving above a lost cause. I found him profitable; and so may you. When

you do look for him, look among the light-horse troop of Bedouins that

besiege the picket-line of the travelling potentate’s guards and

secretaries—among the wild-eyed genii of Arabian Afternoons that gather

to make astounding and egregrious demands upon the prince’s coffers.

I first saw Mr. Polk coming down the steps of the hotel at which

sojourned His Highness the Gaekwar of Baroda, most enlightened of the

Mahratta princes, who, of late, ate bread and salt in our Metropolis of

the Occident.

Lucullus moved rapidly, as though propelled by some potent moral force

that imminently threatened to become physical. Behind him closely

followed the impetus—a hotel detective, if ever white Alpine hat,

hawk’s nose, implacable watch chain, and loud refinement of manner

spoke the truth. A brace of uniformed porters at his heels preserved

the smooth decorum of the hotel, repudiating by their air of

disengagement any suspicion that they formed a reserve squad of

ejectment.

Safe on the sidewalk, Lucullus Polk turned and shook a freckled fist at

the caravansary. And, to my joy, he began to breathe deep invective in

strange words:

“Rides in howdays, does he?” he cried loudly and sneeringly. “Rides on

elephants in howdahs and calls himself a prince! Kings—yah! Comes over

here and talks horse till you would think he was a president; and then

goes home and rides in a private dining-room strapped onto an elephant.

Well, well, well!”

The ejecting committee quietly retired. The scorner of princes turned

to me and snapped his fingers.

“What do you think of that?” he shouted derisively. “The Gaekwar of

Baroda rides in an elephant in a howdah! And there’s old Bikram

Shamsher Jang scorching up and down the pig-paths of Khatmandu on a

motor-cycle. Wouldn’t that maharajah you? And the Shah of Persia, that

ought to have been Muley-on-the-spot for at least three, he’s got the

palanquin habit. And that funny-hat prince from Korea—wouldn’t you

think he could afford to amble around on a milk-white palfrey once in a

dynasty or two? Nothing doing! His idea of a Balaklava charge is to

tuck his skirts under him and do his mile in six days over the

hog-wallows of Seoul in a bull-cart. That’s the kind of visiting

potentates that come to this country now. It’s a hard deal, friend.”

I murmured a few words of sympathy. But it was uncomprehending, for I

did not know his grievance against the rulers who flash, meteor-like,

now and then upon our shores.

“The last one I sold,” continued the displeased one, “was to that

three-horse-tailed Turkish pasha that came over a year ago. Five

hundred dollars he paid for it, easy. I says to his executioner or

secretary—he was a kind of a Jew or a Chinaman—‘His Turkey Gibbets is

fond of horses, then?’

“‘Him?’ says the secretary. ‘Well, no. He’s got a big, fat wife in the

harem named Bad Dora that he don’t like. I believe he intends to saddle

her up and ride her up and down the board-walk in the Bulbul Gardens a

few times every day. You haven’t got a pair of extra-long spurs you

could throw in on the deal, have you?’ Yes, sir; there’s mighty few

real rough-riders among the royal sports these days.”

As soon as Lucullus Polk got cool enough I picked him up, and with no

greater effort than you would employ in persuading a drowning man to

clutch a straw, I inveigled him into accompanying me to a cool corner

in a dim café.

And it came to pass that man-servants set before us brewage; and

Lucullus Polk spake unto me, relating the wherefores of his

beleaguering the antechambers of the princes of the earth.

“Did you ever hear of the S.A. & A.P. Railroad in Texas? Well, that

don’t stand for Samaritan Actor’s Aid Philanthropy. I was down that way

managing a summer bunch of the gum and syntax-chewers that play the

Idlewild Parks in the Western hamlets. Of course, we went to pieces

when the soubrette ran away with a prominent barber of Beeville. I

don’t know what became of the rest of the company. I believe there were

some salaries due; and the last I saw of the troupe was when I told

them that forty-three cents was all the treasury contained. I say I

never saw any of them after that; but I heard them for about twenty

minutes. I didn’t have time to look back. But after dark I came out of

the woods and struck the S.A. & A.P. agent for means of transportation.

He at once extended to me the courtesies of the entire railroad, kindly

warning me, however, not to get aboard any of the rolling stock.

“About ten the next morning I steps off the ties into a village that

calls itself Atascosa City. I bought a thirty-cent breakfast and a

ten-cent cigar, and stood on the Main Street jingling the three pennies

in my pocket—dead broke. A man in Texas with only three cents in his

pocket is no better off than a man that has no money and owes two

cents.

“One of luck’s favourite tricks is to soak a man for his last dollar so

quick that he don’t have time to look it. There I was in a swell St.

Louis tailor-made, blue-and-green plaid suit, and an eighteen-carat

sulphate-of-copper scarf-pin, with no hope in sight except the two

great Texas industries, the cotton fields and grading new railroads. I

never picked cotton, and I never cottoned to a pick, so the outlook had

ultramarine edges.

“All of a sudden, while I was standing on the edge of the wooden

sidewalk, down out of the sky falls two fine gold watches in the middle

of the street. One hits a chunk of mud and sticks. The other falls hard

and flies open, making a fine drizzle of little springs and screws and

wheels. I looks up for a balloon or an airship; but not seeing any, I

steps off the sidewalk to investigate.

“But I hear a couple of yells and see two men running up the street in

leather overalls and high-heeled boots and cartwheel hats. One man is

six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken cast

of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud. The

other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes for the

empty case, and says, ‘I win.’ Then the elevated pessimist goes down

under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty-dollar

gold pieces to his albino friend. I don’t know how much money it was;

it looked as big as an earthquake-relief fund to me.

“‘I’ll have this here case filled up with works,’ says Shorty, ‘and

throw you again for five hundred.’

“‘I’m your company,’ says the high man. ‘I’ll meet you at the Smoked

Dog Saloon an hour from now.’

“The little man hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a

jewelry store. The heartbroken person stoops over and takes a

telescopic view of my haberdashery.

“‘Them’s a mighty slick outfit of habiliments you have got on, Mr.

Man,’ says he. ‘I’ll bet a hoss you never acquired the right, title,

and interest in and to them clothes in Atascosa City.’

“‘Why, no,’ says I, being ready enough to exchange personalities with

this moneyed monument of melancholy. ‘I had this suit tailored from a

special line of coatericks, vestures, and pantings in St. Louis. Would

you mind putting me sane,’ says I, ‘on this watch-throwing contest?

I’ve been used to seeing time-pieces treated with more politeness and

esteem—except women’s watches, of course, which by nature they abuse by

cracking walnuts with ’em and having ’em taken showing in tintype

pictures.’

“‘Me and George,’ he explains, ‘are up from the ranch, having a spell

of fun. Up to last month we owned four sections of watered grazing down

on the San Miguel. But along comes one of these oil prospectors and

begins to bore. He strikes a gusher that flows out twenty thousand —or

maybe it was twenty million—barrels of oil a day. And me and George

gets one hundred and fifty thousand dollars—seventy-five thousand

dollars apiece—for the land. So now and then we saddles up and hits the

breeze for Atascosa City for a few days of excitement and damage.

Here’s a little bunch of the _dinero_ that I drawed out of the bank

this morning,’ says he, and shows a roll of twenties and fifties as big

around as a sleeping-car pillow. The yellowbacks glowed like a sunset

on the gable end of John D.’s barn. My knees got weak, and I sat down

on the edge of the board sidewalk.

“‘You must have knocked around a right smart,’ goes on this oil

Grease-us. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you have saw towns more

livelier than what Atascosa City is. Sometimes it seems to me that

there ought to be some more ways of having a good time than there is

here, ’specially when you’ve got plenty of money and don’t mind

spending it.’

“Then this Mother Cary’s chick of the desert sits down by me and we

hold a conversationfest. It seems that he was money-poor. He’d lived in

ranch camps all his life; and he confessed to me that his supreme idea

of luxury was to ride into camp, tired out from a round-up, eat a peck

of Mexican beans, hobble his brains with a pint of raw whisky, and go

to sleep with his boots for a pillow. When this barge-load of

unexpected money came to him and his pink but perky partner, George,

and they hied themselves to this clump of outhouses called Atascosa

City, you know what happened to them. They had money to buy anything

they wanted; but they didn’t know what to want. Their ideas of

spendthriftiness were limited to three—whisky, saddles, and gold

watches. If there was anything else in the world to throw away fortunes

on, they had never heard about it. So, when they wanted to have a hot

time, they’d ride into town and get a city directory and stand in front

of the principal saloon and call up the population alphabetically for

free drinks. Then they would order three or four new California saddles

from the storekeeper, and play crack-loo on the sidewalk with

twenty-dollar gold pieces. Betting who could throw his gold watch the

farthest was an inspiration of George’s; but even that was getting to

be monotonous.

“Was I on to the opportunity? Listen.

“In thirty minutes I had dashed off a word picture of metropolitan joys

that made life in Atascosa City look as dull as a trip to Coney Island

with your own wife. In ten minutes more we shook hands on an agreement

that I was to act as his guide, interpreter and friend in and to the

aforesaid wassail and amenity. And Solomon Mills, which was his name,

was to pay all expenses for a month. At the end of that time, if I had

made good as director-general of the rowdy life, he was to pay me one

thousand dollars. And then, to clinch the bargain, we called the roll

of Atascosa City and put all of its citizens except the ladies and

minors under the table, except one man named Horace Westervelt St.

Clair. Just for that we bought a couple of hatfuls of cheap silver

watches and egged him out of town with ’em. We wound up by dragging the

harness-maker out of bed and setting him to work on three new saddles;

and then we went to sleep across the railroad track at the depot, just

to annoy the S.A. & A.P. Think of having seventy-five thousand dollars

and trying to avoid the disgrace of dying rich in a town like that!

“The next day George, who was married or something, started back to the

ranch. Me and Solly, as I now called him, prepared to shake off our

moth balls and wing our way against the arc-lights of the joyous and

tuneful East.

“‘No way-stops,’ says I to Solly, ‘except long enough to get you

barbered and haberdashed. This is no Texas feet shampetter,’ says I,

‘where you eat chili-concarne-con-huevos and then holler “Whoopee!”

across the plaza. We’re now going against the real high life. We’re

going to mingle with the set that carries a Spitz, wears spats, and

hits the ground in high spots.’

“Solly puts six thousand dollars in century bills in one pocket of his

brown ducks, and bills of lading for ten thousand dollars on Eastern

banks in another. Then I resume diplomatic relations with the S.A. &

A.P., and we hike in a northwesterly direction on our circuitous route

to the spice gardens of the Yankee Orient.

“We stopped in San Antonio long enough for Solly to buy some clothes,

and eight rounds of drinks for the guests and employees of the Menger

Hotel, and order four Mexican saddles with silver trimmings and white

Angora _suaderos_ to be shipped down to the ranch. From there we made a

big jump to St. Louis. We got there in time for dinner; and I put our

thumb-prints on the register of the most expensive hotel in the city.

“‘Now,’ says I to Solly, with a wink at myself, ‘here’s the first

dinner-station we’ve struck where we can get a real good plate of

beans.’ And while he was up in his room trying to draw water out of the

gas-pipe, I got one finger in the buttonhole of the head waiter’s

Tuxedo, drew him apart, inserted a two-dollar bill, and closed him up

again.

“‘Frankoyse,’ says I, ‘I have a pal here for dinner that’s been

subsisting for years on cereals and short stogies. You see the chef and

order a dinner for us such as you serve to Dave Francis and the general

passenger agent of the Iron Mountain when they eat here. We’ve got more

than Bernhardt’s tent full of money; and we want the nose-bags crammed

with all the Chief Deveries _de cuisine_. Object is no expense. Now,

show us.’

“At six o’clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There’s

nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at

once. The chef called it _dinnay à la poker_. It’s a famous thing among

the gormands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There

was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness’s stout; roast veal, mock

turtle soup, and chicken pâté; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca;

canvas-back duck, canvas-back ham, and cotton-tail rabbit; Philadelphia

capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin—and so on, in threes. The idea was

that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away

the discard and gives you pears to fill on.

“I was sure Solly would be tickled to death with these hands, after the

bobtail flushes he’d been eating on the ranch; and I was a little

anxious that he should, for I didn’t remember his having honoured my

efforts with a smile since we left Atascosa City.

“We were in the main dining-room, and there was a fine-dressed crowd

there, all talking loud and enjoyable about the two St. Louis topics,

the water supply and the colour line. They mix the two subjects so fast

that strangers often think they are discussing water-colours; and that

has given the old town something of a rep as an art centre. And over in

the corner was a fine brass band playing; and now, thinks I, Solly will

become conscious of the spiritual oats of life nourishing and

exhilarating his system. But _nong, mong frang_.

“He gazed across the table at me. There was four square yards of it,

looking like the path of a cyclone that has wandered through a

stock-yard, a poultry-farm, a vegetable-garden, and an Irish linen

mill. Solly gets up and comes around to me.

“‘Luke,’ says he, ‘I’m pretty hungry after our ride. I thought you said

they had some beans here. I’m going out and get something I can eat.

You can stay and monkey with this artificial layout of grub if you want

to.’

“‘Wait a minute,’ says I.

“I called the waiter, and slapped ‘S. Mills’ on the back of the check

for thirteen dollars and fifty cents.

“‘What do you mean,’ says I, ‘by serving gentlemen with a lot of truck

only suitable for deck-hands on a Mississippi steamboat? We’re going

out to get something decent to eat.’

“I walked up the street with the unhappy plainsman. He saw a

saddle-shop open, and some of the sadness faded from his eyes. We went

in, and he ordered and paid for two more saddles—one with a solid

silver horn and nails and ornaments and a six-inch border of

rhinestones and imitation rubies around the flaps. The other one had to

have a gold-mounted horn, quadruple-plated stirrups, and the leather

inlaid with silver beadwork wherever it would stand it. Eleven hundred

dollars the two cost him.

“Then he goes out and heads toward the river, following his nose. In a

little side street, where there was no street and no sidewalks and no

houses, he finds what he is looking for. We go into a shanty and sit on

high stools among stevedores and boatmen, and eat beans with tin

spoons. Yes, sir, beans—beans boiled with salt pork.

“‘I kind of thought we’d strike some over this way,’ says Solly.

“‘Delightful,’ says I, ‘That stylish hotel grub may appeal to some; but

for me, give me the husky _table d’goat_.’

“When we had succumbed to the beans I leads him out of the

tarpaulin-steam under a lamp post and pulls out a daily paper with the

amusement column folded out.

“‘But now, what ho for a merry round of pleasure,’ says I. ‘Here’s one

of Hall Caine’s shows, and a stock-yard company in “Hamlet,” and

skating at the Hollowhorn Rink, and Sarah Bernhardt, and the Shapely

Syrens Burlesque Company. I should think, now, that the Shapely—’

“But what does this healthy, wealthy, and wise man do but reach his

arms up to the second-story windows and gape noisily.

“‘Reckon I’ll be going to bed,’ says he; ‘it’s about my time. St. Louis

is a kind of quiet place, ain’t it?’

“‘Oh, yes,’ says I; ‘ever since the railroads ran in here the town’s

been practically ruined. And the building-and-loan associations and the

fair have about killed it. Guess we might as well go to bed. Wait till

you see Chicago, though. Shall we get tickets for the Big Breeze

to-morrow?’

“‘Mought as well,’ says Solly. ‘I reckon all these towns are about

alike.’

“Well, maybe the wise cicerone and personal conductor didn’t fall hard

in Chicago! Loolooville-on-the-Lake is supposed to have one or two

things in it calculated to keep the rural visitor awake after the

curfew rings. But not for the grass-fed man of the pampas! I tried him

with theatres, rides in automobiles, sails on the lake, champagne

suppers, and all those little inventions that hold the simple life in

check; but in vain. Solly grew sadder day by day. And I got fearful

about my salary, and knew I must play my trump card. So I mentioned New

York to him, and informed him that these Western towns were no more

than gateways to the great walled city of the whirling dervishes.

“After I bought the tickets I missed Solly. I knew his habits by then;

so in a couple of hours I found him in a saddle-shop. They had some new

ideas there in the way of trees and girths that had strayed down from

the Canadian mounted police; and Solly was so interested that he almost

looked reconciled to live. He invested about nine hundred dollars in

there.

“At the depot I telegraphed a cigar-store man I knew in New York to

meet me at the Twenty-third Street ferry with a list of all the

saddle-stores in the city. I wanted to know where to look for Solly

when he got lost.

“Now I’ll tell you what happened in New York. I says to myself: ‘Friend

Heherezade, you want to get busy and make Bagdad look pretty to the sad

sultan of the sour countenance, or it’ll be the bowstring for yours.’

But I never had any doubt I could do it.

“I began with him like you’d feed a starving man. I showed him the

horse-cars on Broadway and the Staten Island ferry-boats. And then I

piled up the sensations on him, but always keeping a lot of warmer ones

up my sleeve.

“At the end of the third day he looked like a composite picture of five

thousand orphans too late to catch a picnic steamboat, and I was

wilting down a collar every two hours wondering how I could please him

and whether I was going to get my thou. He went to sleep looking at the

Brooklyn Bridge; he disregarded the sky-scrapers above the third story;

it took three ushers to wake him up at the liveliest vaudeville in

town.

“Once I thought I had him. I nailed a pair of cuffs on him one morning

before he was awake; and I dragged him that evening to the palm-cage of

one of the biggest hotels in the city—to see the Johnnies and the

Alice-sit-by-the-hours. They were out in numerous quantities, with the

fat of the land showing in their clothes. While we were looking them

over, Solly divested himself of a fearful, rusty kind of laugh—like

moving a folding bed with one roller broken. It was his first in two

weeks, and it gave me hope.

“‘Right you are,’ says I. ‘They’re a funny lot of post-cards, aren’t

they?’

“‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of them dudes and culls on the hoof,’ says he.

‘I was thinking of the time me and George put sheep-dip in Horsehead

Johnson’s whisky. I wish I was back in Atascosa City,’ says he.

“I felt a cold chill run down my back. ‘Me to play and mate in one

move,’ says I to myself.

“I made Solly promise to stay in the café for half an hour and I hiked

out in a cab to Lolabelle Delatour’s flat on Forty-third Street. I knew

her well. She was a chorus-girl in a Broadway musical comedy.

“‘Jane,’ says I when I found her, ‘I’ve got a friend from Texas here.

He’s all right, but—well, he carries weight. I’d like to give him a

little whirl after the show this evening—bubbles, you know, and a buzz

out to a casino for the whitebait and pickled walnuts. Is it a go?’

“‘Can he sing?’ asks Lolabelle.

“‘You know,’ says I, ‘that I wouldn’t take him away from home unless

his notes were good. He’s got pots of money—bean-pots full of it.’

“‘Bring him around after the second act,’ says Lolabelle, ‘and I’ll

examine his credentials and securities.’

“So about ten o’clock that evening I led Solly to Miss Delatour’s

dressing-room, and her maid let us in. In ten minutes in comes

Lolabelle, fresh from the stage, looking stunning in the costume she

wears when she steps from the ranks of the lady grenadiers and says to

the king, ‘Welcome to our May-day revels.’ And you can bet it wasn’t

the way she spoke the lines that got her the part.

“As soon as Solly saw her he got up and walked straight out through the

stage entrance into the street. I followed him. Lolabelle wasn’t paying

my salary. I wondered whether anybody was.

“‘Luke,’ says Solly, outside, ‘that was an awful mistake. We must have

got into the lady’s private room. I hope I’m gentleman enough to do

anything possible in the way of apologies. Do you reckon she’d ever

forgive us?’

“‘She may forget it,’ says I. ‘Of course it was a mistake. Let’s go

find some beans.’

“That’s the way it went. But pretty soon afterward Solly failed to show

up at dinner-time for several days. I cornered him. He confessed that

he had found a restaurant on Third Avenue where they cooked beans in

Texas style. I made him take me there. The minute I set foot inside the

door I threw up my hands.

“There was a young woman at the desk, and Solly introduced me to her.

And then we sat down and had beans.

“Yes, sir, sitting at the desk was the kind of a young woman that can

catch any man in the world as easy as lifting a finger. There’s a way

of doing it. She knew. I saw her working it. She was healthy-looking

and plain dressed. She had her hair drawn back from her forehead and

face—no curls or frizzes; that’s the way she looked. Now I’ll tell you

the way they work the game; it’s simple. When she wants a man, she

manages it so that every time he looks at her he finds her looking at

him. That’s all.

“The next evening Solly was to go to Coney Island with me at seven. At

eight o’clock he hadn’t showed up. I went out and found a cab. I felt

sure there was something wrong.

“‘Drive to the Back Home Restaurant on Third Avenue,’ says I. ‘And if I

don’t find what I want there, take in these saddle-shops.’ I handed him

the list.

“‘Boss,’ says the cabby, ‘I et a steak in that restaurant once. If

you’re real hungry, I advise you to try the saddle-shops first.’

“‘I’m a detective,’ says I, ‘and I don’t eat. Hurry up!’

“As soon as I got to the restaurant I felt in the lines of my palms

that I should beware of a tall, red, damfool man, and I was going to

lose a sum of money.

“Solly wasn’t there. Neither was the smooth-haired lady.

“I waited; and in an hour they came in a cab and got out, hand in hand.

I asked Solly to step around the corner for a few words. He was

grinning clear across his face; but I had not administered the grin.

“‘She’s the greatest that ever sniffed the breeze,’ says he.

“‘Congrats,’ says I. ‘I’d like to have my thousand now, if you please.’

“‘Well, Luke,’ says he, ‘I don’t know that I’ve had such a skyhoodlin’

fine time under your tutelage and dispensation. But I’ll do the best I

can for you—I’ll do the best I can,’ he repeats. ‘Me and Miss Skinner

was married an hour ago. We’re leaving for Texas in the morning.’

“‘Great!’ says I. ‘Consider yourself covered with rice and Congress

gaiters. But don’t let’s tie so many satin bows on our business

relations that we lose sight of ’em. How about my honorarium?’

“‘Missis Mills,’ says he, ‘has taken possession of my money and papers

except six bits. I told her what I’d agreed to give you; but she says

it’s an irreligious and illegal contract, and she won’t pay a cent of

it. But I ain’t going to see you treated unfair,’ says he. ‘I’ve got

eighty-seven saddles on the ranch what I’ve bought on this trip; and

when I get back I’m going to pick out the best six in the lot and send

’em to you.’”

“And did he?” I asked, when Lucullus ceased talking.

“He did. And they are fit for kings to ride on. The six he sent me must

have cost him three thousand dollars. But where is the market for ’em?

Who would buy one except one of these rajahs and princes of Asia and

Africa? I’ve got ’em all on the list. I know every tan royal dub and

smoked princerino from Mindanao to the Caspian Sea.”

“It’s a long time between customers,” I ventured.

“They’re coming faster,” said Polk. “Nowadays, when one of the

murdering mutts gets civilised enough to abolish suttee and quit using

his whiskers for a napkin, he calls himself the Roosevelt of the East,

and comes over to investigate our Chautauquas and cocktails. I’ll place

’em all yet. Now look here.”

From an inside pocket he drew a tightly folded newspaper with much-worn

edges, and indicated a paragraph.

“Read that,” said the saddler to royalty. The paragraph ran thus:

His Highness Seyyid Feysal bin Turkee, Imam of Muskat, is one of the

most progressive and enlightened rulers of the Old World. His stables

contain more than a thousand horses of the purest Persian breeds. It is

said that this powerful prince contemplates a visit to the United

States at an early date.

“There!” said Mr. Polk triumphantly. “My best saddle is as good as

sold—the one with turquoises set in the rim of the cantle. Have you

three dollars that you could loan me for a short time?”

It happened that I had; and I did.

If this should meet the eye of the Imam of Muskat, may it quicken his

whim to visit the land of the free! Otherwise I fear that I shall be

longer than a short time separated from my dollars three.

VII

HYGEIA AT THE SOLITO

If you are knowing in the chronicles of the ring you will recall to

mind an event in the early ’nineties when, for a minute and sundry odd

seconds, a champion and a “would-be” faced each other on the alien side

of an international river. So brief a conflict had rarely imposed upon

the fair promise of true sport. The reporters made what they could of

it, but, divested of padding, the action was sadly fugacious. The

champion merely smote his victim, turned his back upon him, remarking,

“I know what I done to dat stiff,” and extended an arm like a ship’s

mast for his glove to be removed.

Which accounts for a trainload of extremely disgusted gentlemen in an

uproar of fancy vests and neck-wear being spilled from their pullmans

in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also

partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which “Cricket” McGuire

found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot

platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to

San Antonian ears. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that

way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman—may his shadow

never measure under six foot two.

The cattleman, out this early to catch the south-bound for his ranch

station, stopped at the side of the distressed patron of sport, and

spoke in the kindly drawl of his ilk and region, “Got it pretty bad,

bud?”

“Cricket” McGuire, ex-feather-weight prizefighter, tout, jockey,

follower of the “ponies,” all-round sport, and manipulator of the gum

balls and walnut shells, looked up pugnaciously at the imputation cast

by “bud.”

“G’wan,” he rasped, “telegraph pole. I didn’t ring for yer.”

Another paroxysm wrung him, and he leaned limply against a convenient

baggage truck. Raidler waited patiently, glancing around at the white

hats, short overcoats, and big cigars thronging the platform. “You’re

from the No’th, ain’t you, bud?” he asked when the other was partially

recovered. “Come down to see the fight?”

“Fight!” snapped McGuire. “Puss-in-the-corner! ’Twas a hypodermic

injection. Handed him just one like a squirt of dope, and he’s asleep,

and no tanbark needed in front of his residence. Fight!” He rattled a

bit, coughed, and went on, hardly addressing the cattleman, but rather

for the relief of voicing his troubles. “No more dead sure t’ings for

me. But Rus Sage himself would have snatched at it. Five to one dat de

boy from Cork wouldn’t stay t’ree rounds is what I invested in. Put my

last cent on, and could already smell the sawdust in dat all-night

joint of Jimmy Delaney’s on T’irty-seventh Street I was goin’ to buy.

And den—say, telegraph pole, what a gazaboo a guy is to put his whole

roll on one turn of the gaboozlum!”

“You’re plenty right,” said the big cattleman; “more ’specially when

you lose. Son, you get up and light out for a hotel. You got a mighty

bad cough. Had it long?”

“Lungs,” said McGuire comprehensively. “I got it. The croaker says I’ll

come to time for six months longer—maybe a year if I hold my gait. I

wanted to settle down and take care of myself. Dat’s why I speculated

on dat five to one perhaps. I had a t’ousand iron dollars saved up. If

I winned I was goin’ to buy Delaney’s café. Who’d a t’ought dat stiff

would take a nap in de foist round—say?”

“It’s a hard deal,” commented Raidler, looking down at the diminutive

form of McGuire crumpled against the truck. “But you go to a hotel and

rest. There’s the Menger and the Maverick, and—”

“And the Fi’th Av’noo, and the Waldorf-Astoria,” mimicked McGuire.

“Told you I went broke. I’m on de bum proper. I’ve got one dime left.

Maybe a trip to Europe or a sail in me private yacht would fix me up—

pa-per!”

He flung his dime at a newsboy, got his _Express_, propped his back

against the truck, and was at once rapt in the account of his Waterloo,

as expanded by the ingenious press.

Curtis Raidler interrogated an enormous gold watch, and laid his hand

on McGuire’s shoulder.

“Come on, bud,” he said. “We got three minutes to catch the train.”

Sarcasm seemed to be McGuire’s vein.

“You ain’t seen me cash in any chips or call a turn since I told you I

was broke, a minute ago, have you? Friend, chase yourself away.”

“You’re going down to my ranch,” said the cattleman, “and stay till you

get well. Six months’ll fix you good as new.” He lifted McGuire with

one hand, and half-dragged him in the direction of the train.

“What about the money?” said McGuire, struggling weakly to escape.

“Money for what?” asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not

understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled

cog-wheels—at right angles, and moving upon different axes.

Passengers on the south-bound saw them seated together, and wondered at

the conflux of two such antipodes. McGuire was five feet one, with a

countenance belonging to either Yokohama or Dublin. Bright-beady of

eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit,

indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither

new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil. Six

feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he

represented the union of the West and South. Few accurate pictures of

his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the

mutoscope is as yet unknown in Texas. After all, the only possible

medium of portrayal of Raidler’s kind would be the fresco—something

high and simple and cool and unframed.

They were rolling southward on the International. The timber was

huddling into little, dense green motts at rare distances before the

inundation of the downright, vert prairies. This was the land of the

ranches; the domain of the kings of the kine.

McGuire sat, collapsed into his corner of the seat, receiving with acid

suspicion the conversation of the cattleman. What was the “game” of

this big “geezer” who was carrying him off? Altruism would have been

McGuire’s last guess. “He ain’t no farmer,” thought the captive, “and

he ain’t no con man, for sure. W’at’s his lay? You trail in, Cricket,

and see how many cards he draws. You’re up against it, anyhow. You got

a nickel and gallopin’ consumption, and you better lay low. Lay low and

see w’at’s his game.”

At Rincon, a hundred miles from San Antonio, they left the train for a

buckboard which was waiting there for Raidler. In this they travelled

the thirty miles between the station and their destination. If anything

could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious McGuire to a

sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvety wheels across an exhilarant

savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a nimble, tireless trot,

which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild, untrammelled gallop.

The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they absorbed it, with the

delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road perished, and the

buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the grass itself, steered by

the practised hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny distant mott of trees

was a signboard, each convolution of the low hills a voucher of course

and distance. But McGuire reclined upon his spine, seeing nothing but a

desert, and receiving the cattleman’s advances with sullen distrust.

“W’at’s he up to?” was the burden of his thoughts; “w’at kind of a gold

brick has the big guy got to sell?” McGuire was only applying the

measure of the streets he had walked to a range bounded by the horizon

and the fourth dimension.

A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick

and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had

reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped

it at the ranch for the boys to attend to. It was impossible for

McGuire to know or comprehend that, in the eyes of the cattleman, his

case and that of the calf were identical in interest and demand upon

his assistance. A creature was ill and helpless; he had the power to

render aid—these were the only postulates required for the cattleman to

act. They formed his system of logic and the most of his creed. McGuire

was the seventh invalid whom Raidler had picked up thus casually in San

Antonio, where so many thousand go for the ozone that is said to linger

about its contracted streets. Five of them had been guests of Solito

Ranch until they had been able to leave, cured or better, and

exhausting the vocabulary of tearful gratitude. One came too late, but

rested very comfortably, at last, under a ratama tree in the garden.

So, then, it was no surprise to the ranchhold when the buckboard spun

to the door, and Raidler took up his debile _protégé_ like a handful of

rags and set him down upon the gallery.

McGuire looked upon things strange to him. The ranch-house was the best

in the country. It was built of brick hauled one hundred miles by

wagon, but it was of but one story, and its four rooms were completely

encircled by a mud floor “gallery.” The miscellaneous setting of

horses, dogs, saddles, wagons, guns, and cow-punchers’ paraphernalia

oppressed the metropolitan eyes of the wrecked sportsman.

“Well, here we are at home,” said Raidler, cheeringly.

“It’s a h—l of a looking place,” said McGuire promptly, as he rolled

upon the gallery floor in a fit of coughing.

“We’ll try to make it comfortable for you, buddy,” said the cattleman

gently. “It ain’t fine inside; but it’s the outdoors, anyway, that’ll

do you the most good. This’ll be your room, in here. Anything we got,

you ask for it.”

He led McGuire into the east room. The floor was bare and clean. White

curtains waved in the gulf breeze through the open windows. A big

willow rocker, two straight chairs, a long table covered with

newspapers, pipes, tobacco, spurs, and cartridges stood in the centre.

Some well-mounted heads of deer and one of an enormous black javeli

projected from the walls. A wide, cool cot-bed stood in a corner.

Nueces County people regarded this guest chamber as fit for a prince.

McGuire showed his eyeteeth at it. He took out his nickel and spun it

up to the ceiling.

“T’ought I was lyin’ about the money, did ye? Well, you can frisk me if

you wanter. Dat’s the last simoleon in the treasury. Who’s goin’ to

pay?”

The cattleman’s clear grey eyes looked steadily from under his grizzly

brows into the huckleberry optics of his guest. After a little he said

simply, and not ungraciously, “I’ll be much obliged to you, son, if you

won’t mention money any more. Once was quite a plenty. Folks I ask to

my ranch don’t have to pay anything, and they very scarcely ever offers

it. Supper’ll be ready in half an hour. There’s water in the pitcher,

and some, cooler, to drink, in that red jar hanging on the gallery.”

“Where’s the bell?” asked McGuire, looking about.

“Bell for what?”

“Bell to ring for things. I can’t—see here,” he exploded in a sudden,

weak fury, “I never asked you to bring me here. I never held you up for

a cent. I never gave you a hard-luck story till you asked me. Here I am

fifty miles from a bellboy or a cocktail. I’m sick. I can’t hustle.

Gee! but I’m up against it!” McGuire fell upon the cot and sobbed

shiveringly.

Raidler went to the door and called. A slender, bright-complexioned

Mexican youth about twenty came quickly. Raidler spoke to him in

Spanish.

“Ylario, it is in my mind that I promised you the position of _vaquero_

on the San Carlos range at the fall _rodeo_.”

“_Si, señor_, such was your goodness.”

“Listen. This _señorito_ is my friend. He is very sick. Place yourself

at his side. Attend to his wants at all times. Have much patience and

care with him. And when he is well, or—and when he is well, instead of

_vaquero_ I will make you _mayordomo_ of the Rancho de las Piedras.

_Esta bueno?_”

“_Si, si—mil gracias, señor_.” Ylario tried to kneel upon the floor in

his gratitude, but the cattleman kicked at him benevolently, growling,

“None of your opery-house antics, now.”

Ten minutes later Ylario came from McGuire’s room and stood before

Raidler.

“The little _señor_,” he announced, “presents his compliments” (Raidler

credited Ylario with the preliminary) “and desires some pounded ice,

one hot bath, one gin feez-z, that the windows be all closed, toast,

one shave, one Newyorkheral’, cigarettes, and to send one telegram.”

Raidler took a quart bottle of whisky from his medicine cabinet. “Here,

take him this,” he said.

Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few

weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the

cow-punchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest

importation of Raidler’s. He was an absolutely new experience to them.

He explained to them all the intricate points of sparring and the

tricks of training and defence. He opened to their minds’ view all the

indecorous life of a tagger after professional sports. His jargon of

slang was a continuous joy and surprise to them. His gestures, his

strange poses, his frank ribaldry of tongue and principle fascinated

them. He was like a being from a new world.

Strange to say, this new world he had entered did not exist to him. He

was an utter egoist of bricks and mortar. He had dropped out, he felt,

into open space for a time, and all it contained was an audience for

his reminiscences. Neither the limitless freedom of the prairie days

nor the grand hush of the close-drawn, spangled nights touched him. All

the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a sporting

journal. “Get something for nothing,” was his mission in life;

“Thirty-seventh” Street was his goal.

Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt

worse. It was then that he became the ranch’s incubus, its harpy, its

Old Man of the Sea. He shut himself in his room like some venomous

kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing. The

keynote of his plaint was that he had been inveigled into a gehenna

against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts.

With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of

others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and

diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the

skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his

prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer

might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established

the fact that McGuire was breathing with only one lung, but his

appearance remained the same.

In constant attendance upon him was Ylario, whom the coming reward of

the _mayordomo_ship must have greatly stimulated, for McGuire chained

him to a bitter existence. The air—the man’s only chance for life—he

commanded to be kept out by closed windows and drawn curtains. The room

was always blue and foul with cigarette smoke; whosoever entered it

must sit, suffocating, and listen to the imp’s interminable gasconade

concerning his scandalous career.

The oddest thing of all was the relation existing between McGuire and

his benefactor. The attitude of the invalid toward the cattleman was

something like that of a peevish, perverse child toward an indulgent

parent. When Raidler would leave the ranch McGuire would fall into a

fit of malevolent, silent sullenness. When he returned, he would be met

by a string of violent and stinging reproaches. Raidler’s attitude

toward his charge was quite inexplicable in its way. The cattleman

seemed actually to assume and feel the character assigned to him by

McGuire’s intemperate accusations—the character of tyrant and guilty

oppressor. He seemed to have adopted the responsibility of the fellow’s

condition, and he always met his tirades with a pacific, patient, and

even remorseful kindness that never altered.

One day Raidler said to him, “Try more air, son. You can have the

buckboard and a driver every day if you’ll go. Try a week or two in one

of the cow camps. I’ll fix you up plumb comfortable. The ground, and

the air next to it—them’s the things to cure you. I knowed a man from

Philadelphy, sicker than you are, got lost on the Guadalupe, and slept

on the bare grass in sheep camps for two weeks. Well, sir, it started

him getting well, which he done. Close to the ground—that’s where the

medicine in the air stays. Try a little hossback riding now. There’s a

gentle pony—”

“What’ve I done to yer?” screamed McGuire. “Did I ever doublecross yer?

Did I ask you to bring me here? Drive me out to your camps if you

wanter; or stick a knife in me and save trouble. Ride! I can’t lift my

feet. I couldn’t sidestep a jab from a five-year-old kid. That’s what

your d—d ranch has done for me. There’s nothing to eat, nothing to see,

and nobody to talk to but a lot of Reubens who don’t know a punching

bag from a lobster salad.”

“It’s a lonesome place, for certain,” apologised Raidler abashedly. “We

got plenty, but it’s rough enough. Anything you think of you want, the

boys’ll ride up and fetch it down for you.”

It was Chad Murchison, a cow-puncher from the Circle Bar outfit, who

first suggested that McGuire’s illness was fraudulent. Chad had brought

a basket of grapes for him thirty miles, and four out of his way, tied

to his saddle-horn. After remaining in the smoke-tainted room for a

while, he emerged and bluntly confided his suspicions to Raidler.

“His arm,” said Chad, “is harder’n a diamond. He interduced me to what

he called a shore-perplexus punch, and ’twas like being kicked twice by

a mustang. He’s playin’ it low down on you, Curt. He ain’t no sicker’n

I am. I hate to say it, but the runt’s workin’ you for range and

shelter.”

The cattleman’s ingenuous mind refused to entertain Chad’s view of the

case, and when, later, he came to apply the test, doubt entered not

into his motives.

One day, about noon, two men drove up to the ranch, alighted, hitched,

and came in to dinner; standing and general invitations being the

custom of the country. One of them was a great San Antonio doctor,

whose costly services had been engaged by a wealthy cowman who had been

laid low by an accidental bullet. He was now being driven back to the

station to take the train back to town. After dinner Raidler took him

aside, pushed a twenty-dollar bill against his hand, and said:

“Doc, there’s a young chap in that room I guess has got a bad case of

consumption. I’d like for you to look him over and see just how bad he

is, and if we can do anything for him.”

“How much was that dinner I just ate, Mr. Raidler?” said the doctor

bluffly, looking over his spectacles. Raidler returned the money to his

pocket. The doctor immediately entered McGuire’s room, and the

cattleman seated himself upon a heap of saddles on the gallery, ready

to reproach himself in the event the verdict should be unfavourable.

In ten minutes the doctor came briskly out. “Your man,” he said

promptly, “is as sound as a new dollar. His lungs are better than mine.

Respiration, temperature, and pulse normal. Chest expansion four

inches. Not a sign of weakness anywhere. Of course I didn’t examine for

the bacillus, but it isn’t there. You can put my name to the diagnosis.

Even cigarettes and a vilely close room haven’t hurt him. Coughs, does

he? Well, you tell him it isn’t necessary. You asked if there is

anything we could do for him. Well, I advise you to set him digging

post-holes or breaking mustangs. There’s our team ready. Good-day,

sir.” And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off.

Raidler reached out and plucked a leaf from a mesquite bush by the

railing, and began chewing it thoughtfully.

The branding season was at hand, and the next morning Ross Hargis,

foreman of the outfit, was mustering his force of some twenty-five men

at the ranch, ready to start for the San Carlos range, where the work

was to begin. By six o’clock the horses were all saddled, the grub

wagon ready, and the cow-punchers were swinging themselves upon their

mounts, when Raidler bade them wait. A boy was bringing up an extra

pony, bridled and saddled, to the gate. Raidler walked to McGuire’s

room and threw open the door. McGuire was lying on his cot, not yet

dressed, smoking.

“Get up,” said the cattleman, and his voice was clear and brassy, like

a bugle.

“How’s that?” asked McGuire, a little startled.

“Get up and dress. I can stand a rattlesnake, but I hate a liar. Do I

have to tell you again?” He caught McGuire by the neck and stood him on

the floor.

“Say, friend,” cried McGuire wildly, “are you bug-house? I’m sick— see?

I’ll croak if I got to hustle. What’ve I done to yer?”—he began his

chronic whine—“I never asked yer to—”

“Put on your clothes,” called Raidler in a rising tone.

Swearing, stumbling, shivering, keeping his amazed, shining eyes upon

the now menacing form of the aroused cattleman, McGuire managed to

tumble into his clothes. Then Raidler took him by the collar and shoved

him out and across the yard to the extra pony hitched at the gate. The

cow-punchers lolled in their saddles, open-mouthed.

“Take this man,” said Raidler to Ross Hargis, “and put him to work.

Make him work hard, sleep hard, and eat hard. You boys know I done what

I could for him, and he was welcome. Yesterday the best doctor in San

Antone examined him, and says he’s got the lungs of a burro and the

constitution of a steer. You know what to do with him, Ross.”

Ross Hargis only smiled grimly.

“Aw,” said McGuire, looking intently at Raidler, with a peculiar

expression upon his face, “the croaker said I was all right, did he?

Said I was fakin’, did he? You put him onto me. You t’ought I wasn’t

sick. You said I was a liar. Say, friend, I talked rough, I know, but I

didn’t mean most of it. If you felt like I did—aw! I forgot—I ain’t

sick, the croaker says. Well, friend, now I’ll go work for yer. Here’s

where you play even.”

He sprang into the saddle easily as a bird, got the quirt from the

horn, and gave his pony a slash with it. “Cricket,” who once brought in

Good Boy by a neck at Hawthorne—and a 10 to 1 shot—had his foot in the

stirrups again.

McGuire led the cavalcade as they dashed away for San Carlos, and the

cow-punchers gave a yell of applause as they closed in behind his dust.

But in less than a mile he had lagged to the rear, and was last man

when they struck the patch of high chaparral below the horse pens.

Behind a clump of this he drew rein, and held a handkerchief to his

mouth. He took it away drenched with bright, arterial blood, and threw

it carefully into a clump of prickly pear. Then he slashed with his

quirt again, gasped “G’wan” to his astonished pony, and galloped after

the gang.

That night Raidler received a message from his old home in Alabama.

There had been a death in the family; an estate was to divide, and they

called for him to come. Daylight found him in the buckboard, skimming

the prairies for the station. It was two months before he returned.

When he arrived at the ranch house he found it well-nigh deserted save

for Ylario, who acted as a kind of steward during his absence. Little

by little the youth made him acquainted with the work done while he was

away. The branding camp, he was informed, was still doing business. On

account of many severe storms the cattle had been badly scattered, and

the branding had been accomplished but slowly. The camp was now in the

valley of the Guadalupe, twenty miles away.

“By the way,” said Raidler, suddenly remembering, “that fellow I sent

along with them—McGuire—is he working yet?”

“I do not know,” said Ylario. “Mans from the camp come verree few times

to the ranch. So plentee work with the leetle calves. They no say. Oh,

I think that fellow McGuire he dead much time ago.”

“Dead!” said Raidler. “What you talking about?”

“Verree sick fellow, McGuire,” replied Ylario, with a shrug of his

shoulder. “I theenk he no live one, two month when he go away.”

“Shucks!” said Raidler. “He humbugged you, too, did he? The doctor

examined him and said he was sound as a mesquite knot.”

“That doctor,” said Ylario, smiling, “he tell you so? That doctor no

see McGuire.”

“Talk up,” ordered Raidler. “What the devil do you mean?”

“McGuire,” continued the boy tranquilly, “he getting drink water

outside when that doctor come in room. That doctor take me and pound me

all over here with his fingers”—putting his hand to his chest—“I not

know for what. He put his ear here and here and here, and listen— I not

know for what. He put little glass stick in my mouth. He feel my arm

here. He make me count like whisper—so—twenty, _treinta_, _cuarenta_.

Who knows,” concluded Ylario, with a deprecating spread of his hands,

“for what that doctor do those verree droll and such-like things?”

“What horses are up?” asked Raidler shortly.

“Paisano is grazing out behind the little corral, _señor_.”

“Saddle him for me at once.”

Within a very few minutes the cattleman was mounted and away. Paisano,

well named after that ungainly but swift-running bird, struck into his

long lope that ate up the ground like a strip of macaroni. In two hours

and a quarter Raidler, from a gentle swell, saw the branding camp by a

water hole in the Guadalupe. Sick with expectancy of the news he

feared, he rode up, dismounted, and dropped Paisano’s reins. So gentle

was his heart that at that moment he would have pleaded guilty to the

murder of McGuire.

The only being in the camp was the cook, who was just arranging the

hunks of barbecued beef, and distributing the tin coffee cups for

supper. Raidler evaded a direct question concerning the one subject in

his mind.

“Everything all right in camp, Pete?” he managed to inquire.

“So, so,” said Pete, conservatively. “Grub give out twice. Wind

scattered the cattle, and we’ve had to rake the brush for forty mile. I

need a new coffee-pot. And the mosquitos is some more hellish than

common.”

“The boys—all well?”

Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of

cow-punchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It

was not like the boss to make them.

“What’s left of ’em don’t miss no calls to grub,” the cook conceded.

“What’s left of ’em?” repeated Raidler in a husky voice. Mechanically

he began to look around for McGuire’s grave. He had in his mind a white

slab such as he had seen in the Alabama church-yard. But immediately he

knew that was foolish.

“Sure,” said Pete; “what’s left. Cow camps change in two months. Some’s

gone.”

Raidler nerved himself.

“That—chap—I sent along—McGuire—did—he—”

“Say,” interrupted Pete, rising with a chunk of corn bread in each

hand, “that was a dirty shame, sending that poor, sick kid to a cow

camp. A doctor that couldn’t tell he was graveyard meat ought to be

skinned with a cinch buckle. Game as he was, too—it’s a scandal among

snakes—lemme tell you what he done. First night in camp the boys

started to initiate him in the leather breeches degree. Ross Hargis

busted him one swipe with his chaparreras, and what do you reckon the

poor child did? Got up, the little skeeter, and licked Ross. Licked

Ross Hargis. Licked him good. Hit him plenty and everywhere and hard.

Ross’d just get up and pick out a fresh place to lay down on agin.

“Then that McGuire goes off there and lays down with his head in the

grass and bleeds. A hem’ridge they calls it. He lays there eighteen

hours by the watch, and they can’t budge him. Then Ross Hargis, who

loves any man who can lick him, goes to work and damns the doctors from

Greenland to Poland Chiny; and him and Green Branch Johnson they gets

McGuire into a tent, and spells each other feedin’ him chopped raw meat

and whisky.

“But it looks like the kid ain’t got no appetite to git well, for they

misses him from the tent in the night and finds him rootin’ in the

grass, and likewise a drizzle fallin’. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘lemme go and

die like I wanter. He said I was a liar and a fake and I was playin’

sick. Lemme alone.’

“Two weeks,” went on the cook, “he laid around, not noticin’ nobody,

and then—”

A sudden thunder filled the air, and a score of galloping centaurs

crashed through the brush into camp.

“Illustrious rattlesnakes!” exclaimed Pete, springing all ways at once;

“here’s the boys come, and I’m an assassinated man if supper ain’t

ready in three minutes.”

But Raidler saw only one thing. A little, brown-faced, grinning chap,

springing from his saddle in the full light of the fire. McGuire was

not like that, and yet—

In another instant the cattleman was holding him by the hand and

shoulder.

“Son, son, how goes it?” was all he found to say.

“Close to the ground, says you,” shouted McGuire, crunching Raidler’s

fingers in a grip of steel; “and dat’s where I found it—healt’ and

strengt’, and tumbled to what a cheap skate I been actin’. T’anks fer

kickin’ me out, old man. And—say! de joke’s on dat croaker, ain’t it? I

looked t’rough the window and see him playin’ tag on dat Dago kid’s

solar plexus.”

“You son of a tinker,” growled the cattleman, “whyn’t you talk up and

say the doctor never examined you?”

“Ah—g’wan!” said McGuire, with a flash of his old asperity, “nobody

can’t bluff me. You never ast me. You made your spiel, and you t’rowed

me out, and I let it go at dat. And, say, friend, dis chasin’ cows is

outer sight. Dis is de whitest bunch of sports I ever travelled with.

You’ll let me stay, won’t yer, old man?”

Raidler looked wonderingly toward Ross Hargis.

“That cussed little runt,” remarked Ross tenderly, “is the

Jo-dartin’est hustler—and the hardest hitter in anybody’s cow camp.”

VIII

AN AFTERNOON MIRACLE

At the United States end of an international river bridge, four armed

rangers sweltered in a little ’dobe hut, keeping a fairly faithful

espionage upon the lagging trail of passengers from the Mexican side.

Bud Dawson, proprietor of the Top Notch Saloon, had, on the evening

previous, violently ejected from his premises one Leandro Garcia, for

alleged violation of the Top Notch code of behaviour. Garcia had

mentioned twenty-four hours as a limit, by which time he would call and

collect a painful indemnity for personal satisfaction.

This Mexican, although a tremendous braggart, was thoroughly

courageous, and each side of the river respected him for one of these

attributes. He and a following of similar bravoes were addicted to the

pastime of retrieving towns from stagnation.

The day designated by Garcia for retribution was to be further

signalised on the American side by a cattlemen’s convention, a bull

fight, and an old settlers’ barbecue and picnic. Knowing the avenger to

be a man of his word, and believing it prudent to court peace while

three such gently social relaxations were in progress, Captain McNulty,

of the ranger company stationed there, detailed his lieutenant and

three men for duty at the end of the bridge. Their instructions were to

prevent the invasion of Garcia, either alone or attended by his gang.

Travel was slight that sultry afternoon, and the rangers swore gently,

and mopped their brows in their convenient but close quarters. For an

hour no one had crossed save an old woman enveloped in a brown wrapper

and a black mantilla, driving before her a burro loaded with kindling

wood tied in small bundles for peddling. Then three shots were fired

down the street, the sound coming clear and snappy through the still

air.

The four rangers quickened from sprawling, symbolic figures of

indolence to alert life, but only one rose to his feet. Three turned

their eyes beseechingly but hopelessly upon the fourth, who had gotten

nimbly up and was buckling his cartridge-belt around him. The three

knew that Lieutenant Bob Buckley, in command, would allow no man of

them the privilege of investigating a row when he himself might go.

The agile, broad-chested lieutenant, without a change of expression in

his smooth, yellow-brown, melancholy face, shot the belt strap through

the guard of the buckle, hefted his sixes in their holsters as a belle

gives the finishing touches to her toilette, caught up his Winchester,

and dived for the door. There he paused long enough to caution his

comrades to maintain their watch upon the bridge, and then plunged into

the broiling highway.

The three relapsed into resigned inertia and plaintive comment.

“I’ve heard of fellows,” grumbled Broncho Leathers, “what was wedded to

danger, but if Bob Buckley ain’t committed bigamy with trouble, I’m a

son of a gun.”

“Peculiarness of Bob is,” inserted the Nueces Kid, “he ain’t had proper

trainin’. He never learned how to git skeered. Now, a man ought to be

skeered enough when he tackles a fuss to hanker after readin’ his name

on the list of survivors, anyway.”

“Buckley,” commented Ranger No. 3, who was a misguided Eastern man,

burdened with an education, “scraps in such a solemn manner that I have

been led to doubt its spontaneity. I’m not quite onto his system, but

he fights, like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic.”

“I never heard,” mentioned Broncho, “about any of Dibble’s ways of

mixin’ scrappin’ and cipherin’.”

“Triggernometry?” suggested the Nueces infant.

“That’s rather better than I hoped from you,” nodded the Easterner,

approvingly. “The other meaning is that Buckley never goes into a fight

without giving away weight. He seems to dread taking the slightest

advantage. That’s quite close to foolhardiness when you are dealing

with horse-thieves and fence-cutters who would ambush you any night,

and shoot you in the back if they could. Buckley’s too full of sand.

He’ll play Horatius and hold the bridge once too often some day.”

“I’m on there,” drawled the Kid; “I mind that bridge gang in the

reader. Me, I go instructed for the other chap—Spurious Somebody—the

one that fought and pulled his freight, to fight ’em on some other

day.”

“Anyway,” summed up Broncho, “Bob’s about the gamest man I ever see

along the Rio Bravo. Great Sam Houston! If she gets any hotter she’ll

sizzle!” Broncho whacked at a scorpion with his four-pound Stetson

felt, and the three watchers relapsed into comfortless silence.

How well Bob Buckley had kept his secret, since these men, for two

years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus

spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward

in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had

suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a

physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he

forced his craven body to do the bravest deeds. Scourging himself

always, as a monk whips his besetting sin, Buckley threw himself with

apparent recklessness into every danger, with the hope of some day

ridding himself of the despised affliction. But each successive test

brought no relief, and the ranger’s face, by nature adapted to

cheerfulness and good-humour, became set to the guise of gloomy

melancholy. Thus, while the frontier admired his deeds, and his prowess

was celebrated in print and by word of mouth in many camp-fires in the

valley of the Bravo, his heart was sick within him. Only himself knew

of the horrible tightening of the chest, the dry mouth, the weakening

of the spine, the agony of the strung nerves—the never-failing symptoms

of his shameful malady.

One mere boy in his company was wont to enter a fray with a leg perched

flippantly about the horn of his saddle, a cigarette hanging from his

lips, which emitted smoke and original slogans of clever invention.

Buckley would have given a year’s pay to attain that devil-may-care

method. Once the debonair youth said to him: “Buck, you go into a scrap

like it was a funeral. Not,” he added, with a complimentary wave of his

tin cup, “but what it generally is.”

Buckley’s conscience was of the New England order with Western

adjustments, and he continued to get his rebellious body into as many

difficulties as possible; wherefore, on that sultry afternoon he chose

to drive his own protesting limbs to investigation of that sudden alarm

that had startled the peace and dignity of the State.

Two squares down the street stood the Top Notch Saloon. Here Buckley

came upon signs of recent upheaval. A few curious spectators pressed

about its front entrance, grinding beneath their heels the fragments of

a plate-glass window. Inside, Buckley found Bud Dawson utterly ignoring

a bullet wound in his shoulder, while he feelingly wept at having to

explain why he failed to drop the “blamed masquerooter,” who shot him.

At the entrance of the ranger Bud turned appealingly to him for

confirmation of the devastation he might have dealt.

“You know, Buck, I’d ’a’ plum got him, first rattle, if I’d thought a

minute. Come in a-masque-rootin’, playin’ female till he got the drop,

and turned loose. I never reached for a gun, thinkin’ it was sure

Chihuahua Betty, or Mrs. Atwater, or anyhow one of the Mayfield girls

comin’ a-gunnin’, which they might, liable as not. I never thought of

that blamed Garcia until—”

“Garcia!” snapped Buckley. “How did he get over here?”

Bud’s bartender took the ranger by the arm and led him to the side

door. There stood a patient grey burro cropping the grass along the

gutter, with a load of kindling wood tied across its back. On the

ground lay a black shawl and a voluminous brown dress.

“Masquerootin’ in them things,” called Bud, still resisting attempted

ministrations to his wounds. “Thought he was a lady till he gave a yell

and winged me.”

“He went down this side street,” said the bartender. “He was alone, and

he’ll hide out till night when his gang comes over. You ought to find

him in that Mexican lay-out below the depot. He’s got a girl down

there—Pancha Sales.”

“How was he armed?” asked Buckley.

“Two pearl-handled sixes, and a knife.”

“Keep this for me, Billy,” said the ranger, handing over his

Winchester. Quixotic, perhaps, but it was Bob Buckley’s way. Another

man—and a braver one—might have raised a posse to accompany him. It was

Buckley’s rule to discard all preliminary advantage.

The Mexican had left behind him a wake of closed doors and an empty

street, but now people were beginning to emerge from their places of

refuge with assumed unconsciousness of anything having happened. Many

citizens who knew the ranger pointed out to him with alacrity the

course of Garcia’s retreat.

As Buckley swung along upon the trail he felt the beginning of the

suffocating constriction about his throat, the cold sweat under the

brim of his hat, the old, shameful, dreaded sinking of his heart as it

went down, down, down in his bosom.

The morning train of the Mexican Central had that day been three hours

late, thus failing to connect with the I. & G.N. on the other side of

the river. Passengers for _Los Estados Unidos_ grumblingly sought

entertainment in the little swaggering mongrel town of two nations,

for, until the morrow, no other train would come to rescue them.

Grumblingly, because two days later would begin the great fair and

races in San Antone. Consider that at that time San Antone was the hub

of the wheel of Fortune, and the names of its spokes were Cattle, Wool,

Faro, Running Horses, and Ozone. In those times cattlemen played at

crack-loo on the sidewalks with double-eagles, and gentlemen backed

their conception of the fortuitous card with stacks limited in height

only by the interference of gravity. Wherefore, thither journeyed the

sowers and the reapers—they who stampeded the dollars, and they who

rounded them up. Especially did the caterers to the amusement of the

people haste to San Antone. Two greatest shows on earth were already

there, and dozens of smallest ones were on the way.

On a side track near the mean little ’dobe depot stood a private car,

left there by the Mexican train that morning and doomed by an

ineffectual schedule to ignobly await, amid squalid surroundings,

connection with the next day’s regular.

The car had been once a common day-coach, but those who had sat in it

and gringed to the conductor’s hat-band slips would never have

recognised it in its transformation. Paint and gilding and certain

domestic touches had liberated it from any suspicion of public

servitude. The whitest of lace curtains judiciously screened its

windows. From its fore end drooped in the torrid air the flag of

Mexico. From its rear projected the Stars and Stripes and a busy

stovepipe, the latter reinforcing in its suggestion of culinary

comforts the general suggestion of privacy and ease. The beholder’s

eye, regarding its gorgeous sides, found interest to culminate in a

single name in gold and blue letters extending almost its entire

length—a single name, the audacious privilege of royalty and genius.

Doubly, then, was this arrogant nomenclature here justified; for the

name was that of “Alvarita, Queen of the Serpent Tribe.” This, her car,

was back from a triumphant tour of the principal Mexican cities, and

now headed for San Antonio, where, according to promissory

advertisement, she would exhibit her “Marvellous Dominion and Fearless

Control over Deadly and Venomous Serpents, Handling them with Ease as

they Coil and Hiss to the Terror of Thousands of Tongue-tied

Tremblers!”

One hundred in the shade kept the vicinity somewhat depeopled. This

quarter of the town was a ragged edge; its denizens the bubbling froth

of five nations; its architecture tent, _jacal_, and ’dobe; its

distractions the hurdy-gurdy and the informal contribution to the

sudden stranger’s store of experience. Beyond this dishonourable fringe

upon the old town’s jowl rose a dense mass of trees, surmounting and

filling a little hollow. Through this bickered a small stream that

perished down the sheer and disconcerting side of the great cañon of

the Rio Bravo del Norte.

In this sordid spot was condemned to remain for certain hours the

impotent transport of the Queen of the Serpent Tribe.

The front door of the car was open. Its forward end was curtained off

into a small reception-room. Here the admiring and propitiatory

reporters were wont to sit and transpose the music of Señorita

Alvarita’s talk into the more florid key of the press. A picture of

Abraham Lincoln hung against a wall; one of a cluster of school-girls

grouped upon stone steps was in another place; a third was Easter

lilies in a blood-red frame. A neat carpet was under foot. A pitcher,

sweating cold drops, and a glass stood on a fragile stand. In a willow

rocker, reading a newspaper, sat Alvarita.

Spanish, you would say; Andalusian, or, better still, Basque; that

compound, like the diamond, of darkness and fire. Hair, the shade of

purple grapes viewed at midnight. Eyes, long, dusky, and disquieting

with their untroubled directness of gaze. Face, haughty and bold,

touched with a pretty insolence that gave it life. To hasten conviction

of her charm, but glance at the stacks of handbills in the corner,

green, and yellow, and white. Upon them you see an incompetent

presentment of the señorita in her professional garb and pose.

Irresistible, in black lace and yellow ribbons, she faces you; a blue

racer is spiralled upon each bare arm; coiled twice about her waist and

once about her neck, his horrid head close to hers, you perceive Kuku,

the great eleven-foot Asian python.

A hand drew aside the curtain that partitioned the car, and a

middle-aged, faded woman holding a knife and a half-peeled potato

looked in and said:

“Alviry, are you right busy?”

“I’m reading the home paper, ma. What do you think! that pale,

tow-headed Matilda Price got the most votes in the _News_ for the

prettiest girl in Gallipo—_lees_.”

“Shush! She wouldn’t of done it if _you’d_ been home, Alviry. Lord

knows, I hope we’ll be there before fall’s over. I’m tired gallopin’

round the world playin’ we are dagoes, and givin’ snake shows. But that

ain’t what I wanted to say. That there biggest snake’s gone again. I’ve

looked all over the car and can’t find him. He must have been gone an

hour. I remember hearin’ somethin’ rustlin’ along the floor, but I

thought it was you.”

“Oh, blame that old rascal!” exclaimed the Queen, throwing down her

paper. “This is the third time he’s got away. George never _will_

fasten down the lid to his box properly. I do believe he’s _afraid_ of

Kuku. Now I’ve got to go hunt him.”

“Better hurry; somebody might hurt him.”

The Queen’s teeth showed in a gleaming, contemptuous smile. “No danger.

When they see Kuku outside they simply scoot away and buy bromides.

There’s a crick over between here and the river. That old scamp’d swap

his skin any time for a drink of running water. I guess I’ll find him

there, all right.”

A few minutes later Alvarita stopped upon the forward platform, ready

for her quest. Her handsome black skirt was shaped to the most recent

proclamation of fashion. Her spotless shirt-waist gladdened the eye in

that desert of sunshine, a swelling oasis, cool and fresh. A man’s

split-straw hat sat firmly on her coiled, abundant hair. Beneath her

serene, round, impudent chin a man’s four-in-hand tie was jauntily

knotted about a man’s high, stiff collar. A parasol she carried, of

white silk, and its fringe was lace, yellowly genuine.

I will grant Gallipolis as to her costume, but firmly to Seville or

Valladolid I am held by her eyes; castanets, balconies, mantillas,

serenades, ambuscades, escapades—all these their dark depths

guaranteed.

“Ain’t you afraid to go out alone, Alviry?” queried the Queen-mother

anxiously. “There’s so many rough people about. Mebbe you’d better—”

“I never saw anything I was afraid of yet, ma. ’Specially people. And

men in particular. Don’t you fret. I’ll trot along back as soon as I

find that runaway scamp.”

The dust lay thick upon the bare ground near the tracks. Alvarita’s eye

soon discovered the serrated trail of the escaped python. It led across

the depot grounds and away down a smaller street in the direction of

the little cañon, as predicted by her. A stillness and lack of

excitement in the neighbourhood encouraged the hope that, as yet, the

inhabitants were unaware that so formidable a guest traversed their

highways. The heat had driven them indoors, whence outdrifted

occasional shrill laughs, or the depressing whine of a maltreated

concertina. In the shade a few Mexican children, like vivified stolid

idols in clay, stared from their play, vision-struck and silent, as

Alvarita came and went. Here and there a woman peeped from a door and

stood dumb, reduced to silence by the aspect of the white silk parasol.

A hundred yards and the limits of the town were passed, scattered

chaparral succeeding, and then a noble grove, overflowing the bijou

cañon. Through this a small bright stream meandered. Park-like it was,

with a kind of cockney ruralness further endorsed by the waste papers

and rifled tins of picnickers. Up this stream, and down it, among its

pseudo-sylvan glades and depressions, wandered the bright and unruffled

Alvarita. Once she saw evidence of the recreant reptile’s progress in

his distinctive trail across a spread of fine sand in the arroyo. The

living water was bound to lure him; he could not be far away.

So sure was she of his immediate proximity that she perched herself to

idle for a time in the curve of a great creeper that looped down from a

giant water-elm. To reach this she climbed from the pathway a little

distance up the side of a steep and rugged incline. Around her

chaparral grew thick and high. A late-blooming ratama tree dispensed

from its yellow petals a sweet and persistent odour. Adown the ravine

rustled a seductive wind, melancholy with the taste of sodden, fallen

leaves.

Alvarita removed her hat, and undoing the oppressive convolutions of

her hair, began to slowly arrange it in two long, dusky plaits.

From the obscure depths of a thick clump of evergreen shrubs five feet

away, two small jewel-bright eyes were steadfastly regarding her.

Coiled there lay Kuku, the great python; Kuku, the magnificent, he of

the plated muzzle, the grooved lips, the eleven-foot stretch of

elegantly and brilliantly mottled skin. The great python was viewing

his mistress without a sound or motion to disclose his presence.

Perhaps the splendid truant forefelt his capture, but, screened by the

foliage, thought to prolong the delight of his escapade. What pleasure

it was, after the hot and dusty car, to lie thus, smelling the running

water, and feeling the agreeable roughness of the earth and stones

against his body! Soon, very soon the Queen would find him, and he,

powerless as a worm in her audacious hands, would be returned to the

dark chest in the narrow house that ran on wheels.

Alvarita heard a sudden crunching of the gravel below her. Turning her

head she saw a big, swarthy Mexican, with a daring and evil expression,

contemplating her with an ominous, dull eye.

“What do you want?” she asked as sharply as five hairpins between her

lips would permit, continuing to plait her hair, and looking him over

with placid contempt. The Mexican continued to gaze at her, and showed

his teeth in a white, jagged smile.

“I no hurt-y you, Señorita,” he said.

“You bet you won’t,” answered the Queen, shaking back one finished,

massive plait. “But don’t you think you’d better move on?”

“Not hurt-y you—no. But maybeso take one _beso_—one li’l kees, you call

him.”

The man smiled again, and set his foot to ascend the slope. Alvarita

leaned swiftly and picked up a stone the size of a cocoanut.

“Vamoose, quick,” she ordered peremptorily, “you _coon!_”

The red of insult burned through the Mexican’s dark skin.

“_Hidalgo, Yo!_” he shot between his fangs. “I am not neg-r-ro! _Diabla

bonita_, for that you shall pay me.”

He made two quick upward steps this time, but the stone, hurled by no

weak arm, struck him square in the chest. He staggered back to the

footway, swerved half around, and met another sight that drove all

thoughts of the girl from his head. She turned her eyes to see what had

diverted his interest. A man with red-brown, curling hair and a

melancholy, sunburned, smooth-shaven face was coming up the path,

twenty yards away. Around the Mexican’s waist was buckled a pistol belt

with two empty holsters. He had laid aside his sixes—possibly in the

_jacal_ of the fair Pancha—and had forgotten them when the passing of

the fairer Alvarita had enticed him to her trail. His hands now flew

instinctively to the holsters, but finding the weapons gone, he spread

his fingers outward with the eloquent, abjuring, deprecating Latin

gesture, and stood like a rock. Seeing his plight, the newcomer

unbuckled his own belt containing two revolvers, threw it upon the

ground, and continued to advance.

“Splendid!” murmured Alvarita, with flashing eyes.

As Bob Buckley, according to the mad code of bravery that his sensitive

conscience imposed upon his cowardly nerves, abandoned his guns and

closed in upon his enemy, the old, inevitable nausea of abject fear

wrung him. His breath whistled through his constricted air passages.

His feet seemed like lumps of lead. His mouth was dry as dust. His

heart, congested with blood, hurt his ribs as it thumped against them.

The hot June day turned to moist November. And still he advanced,

spurred by a mandatory pride that strained its uttermost against his

weakling flesh.

The distance between the two men slowly lessened. The Mexican stood,

immovable, waiting. When scarce five yards separated them a little

shower of loosened gravel rattled down from above to the ranger’s feet.

He glanced upward with instinctive caution. A pair of dark eyes,

brilliantly soft, and fierily tender, encountered and held his own. The

most fearful heart and the boldest one in all the Rio Bravo country

exchanged a silent and inscrutable communication. Alvarita, still

seated within her vine, leaned forward above the breast-high chaparral.

One hand was laid across her bosom. One great dark braid curved forward

over her shoulder. Her lips were parted; her face was lit with what

seemed but wonder—great and absolute wonder. Her eyes lingered upon

Buckley’s. Let no one ask or presume to tell through what subtle medium

the miracle was performed. As by a lightning flash two clouds will

accomplish counterpoise and compensation of electric surcharge, so on

that eyeglance the man received his complement of manhood, and the maid

conceded what enriched her womanly grace by its loss.

The Mexican, suddenly stirring, ventilated his attitude of apathetic

waiting by conjuring swiftly from his bootleg a long knife. Buckley

cast aside his hat, and laughed once aloud, like a happy school-boy at

a frolic. Then, empty-handed, he sprang nimbly, and Garcia met him

without default.

So soon was the engagement ended that disappointment imposed upon the

ranger’s warlike ecstasy. Instead of dealing the traditional downward

stroke, the Mexican lunged straight with his knife. Buckley took the

precarious chance, and caught his wrist, fair and firm. Then he

delivered the good Saxon knock-out blow—always so pathetically

disastrous to the fistless Latin races—and Garcia was down and out,

with his head under a clump of prickly pears. The ranger looked up

again to the Queen of the Serpents.

Alvarita scrambled down to the path.

“I’m mighty glad I happened along when I did,” said the ranger.

“He—he frightened me so!” cooed Alvarita.

They did not hear the long, low hiss of the python under the shrubs.

Wiliest of the beasts, no doubt he was expressing the humiliation he

felt at having so long dwelt in subjection to this trembling and

colouring mistress of his whom he had deemed so strong and potent and

fearsome.

Then came galloping to the spot the civic authorities; and to them the

ranger awarded the prostrate disturber of the peace, whom they bore

away limply across the saddle of one of their mounts. But Buckley and

Alvarita lingered.

Slowly, slowly they walked. The ranger regained his belt of weapons.

With a fine timidity she begged the indulgence of fingering the great

.45’s, with little “Ohs” and “Ahs” of new-born, delicious shyness.

The _cañoncito_ was growing dusky. Beyond its terminus in the river

bluff they could see the outer world yet suffused with the waning glory

of sunset.

A scream—a piercing scream of fright from Alvarita. Back she cowered,

and the ready, protecting arm of Buckley formed her refuge. What terror

so dire as to thus beset the close of the reign of the

never-before-daunted Queen?

Across the path there crawled a _caterpillar_—a horrid, fuzzy, two-inch

caterpillar! Truly, Kuku, thou went avenged. Thus abdicated the Queen

of the Serpent Tribe—_viva la reina!_

IX

THE HIGHER ABDICATION

Curly the tramp sidled toward the free-lunch counter. He caught a

fleeting glance from the bartender’s eye, and stood still, trying to

look like a business man who had just dined at the Menger and was

waiting for a friend who had promised to pick him up in his motor car.

Curly’s histrionic powers were equal to the impersonation; but his

make-up was wanting.

The bartender rounded the bar in a casual way, looking up at the

ceiling as though he was pondering some intricate problem of

kalsomining, and then fell upon Curly so suddenly that the roadster had

no excuses ready. Irresistibly, but so composedly that it seemed almost

absendmindedness on his part, the dispenser of drinks pushed Curly to

the swinging doors and kicked him out, with a nonchalance that almost

amounted to sadness. That was the way of the Southwest.

Curly arose from the gutter leisurely. He felt no anger or resentment

toward his ejector. Fifteen years of tramphood spent out of the

twenty-two years of his life had hardened the fibres of his spirit. The

slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell blunted from the buckler

of his armoured pride. With especial resignation did he suffer

contumely and injury at the hands of bartenders. Naturally, they were

his enemies; and unnaturally, they were often his friends. He had to

take his chances with them. But he had not yet learned to estimate

these cool, languid, Southwestern knights of the bungstarter, who had

the manners of an Earl of Pawtucket, and who, when they disapproved of

your presence, moved you with the silence and despatch of a chess

automaton advancing a pawn.

Curly stood for a few moments in the narrow, mesquite-paved street. San

Antonio puzzled and disturbed him. Three days he had been a non-paying

guest of the town, having dropped off there from a box car of an I. &

G.N. freight, because Greaser Johnny had told him in Des Moines that

the Alamo City was manna fallen, gathered, cooked, and served free with

cream and sugar. Curly had found the tip partly a good one. There was

hospitality in plenty of a careless, liberal, irregular sort. But the

town itself was a weight upon his spirits after his experience with the

rushing, business-like, systematised cities of the North and East. Here

he was often flung a dollar, but too frequently a good-natured kick

would follow it. Once a band of hilarious cowboys had roped him on

Military Plaza and dragged him across the black soil until no

respectable rag-bag would have stood sponsor for his clothes. The

winding, doubling streets, leading nowhere, bewildered him. And then

there was a little river, crooked as a pot-hook, that crawled through

the middle of the town, crossed by a hundred little bridges so nearly

alike that they got on Curly’s nerves. And the last bartender wore a

number nine shoe.

The saloon stood on a corner. The hour was eight o’clock. Homefarers

and outgoers jostled Curly on the narrow stone sidewalk. Between the

buildings to his left he looked down a cleft that proclaimed itself

another thoroughfare. The alley was dark except for one patch of light.

Where there was light there were sure to be human beings. Where there

were human beings after nightfall in San Antonio there might be food,

and there was sure to be drink. So Curly headed for the light.

The illumination came from Schwegel’s Café. On the sidewalk in front of

it Curly picked up an old envelope. It might have contained a check for

a million. It was empty; but the wanderer read the address, “Mr. Otto

Schwegel,” and the name of the town and State. The postmark was

Detroit.

Curly entered the saloon. And now in the light it could be perceived

that he bore the stamp of many years of vagabondage. He had none of the

tidiness of the calculating and shrewd professional tramp. His wardrobe

represented the cast-off specimens of half a dozen fashions and eras.

Two factories had combined their efforts in providing shoes for his

feet. As you gazed at him there passed through your mind vague

impressions of mummies, wax figures, Russian exiles, and men lost on

desert islands. His face was covered almost to his eyes with a curly

brown beard that he kept trimmed short with a pocket-knife, and that

had furnished him with his _nom de route_. Light-blue eyes, full of

sullenness, fear, cunning, impudence, and fawning, witnessed the stress

that had been laid upon his soul.

The saloon was small, and in its atmosphere the odours of meat and

drink struggled for the ascendancy. The pig and the cabbage wrestled

with hydrogen and oxygen. Behind the bar Schwegel laboured with an

assistant whose epidermal pores showed no signs of being obstructed.

Hot weinerwurst and sauerkraut were being served to purchasers of beer.

Curly shuffled to the end of the bar, coughed hollowly, and told

Schwegel that he was a Detroit cabinet-maker out of a job.

It followed as the night the day that he got his schooner and lunch.

“Was you acquainted maybe with Heinrich Strauss in Detroit?” asked

Schwegel.

“Did I know Heinrich Strauss?” repeated Curly, affectionately. “Why,

say, ’Bo, I wish I had a dollar for every game of pinochle me and Heine

has played on Sunday afternoons.”

More beer and a second plate of steaming food was set before the

diplomat. And then Curly, knowing to a fluid-drachm how far a “con”

game would go, shuffled out into the unpromising street.

And now he began to perceive the inconveniences of this stony Southern

town. There was none of the outdoor gaiety and brilliancy and music

that provided distraction even to the poorest in the cities of the

North. Here, even so early, the gloomy, rock-walled houses were closed

and barred against the murky dampness of the night. The streets were

mere fissures through which flowed grey wreaths of river mist. As he

walked he heard laughter and the chink of coin and chips behind

darkened windows, and music coming from every chink of wood and stone.

But the diversions were selfish; the day of popular pastimes had not

yet come to San Antonio.

But at length Curly, as he strayed, turned the sharp angle of another

lost street and came upon a rollicking band of stockmen from the

outlying ranches celebrating in the open in front of an ancient wooden

hotel. One great roisterer from the sheep country who had just

instigated a movement toward the bar, swept Curly in like a stray goat

with the rest of his flock. The princes of kine and wool hailed him as

a new zoological discovery, and uproariously strove to preserve him in

the diluted alcohol of their compliments and regards.

An hour afterward Curly staggered from the hotel barroom dismissed by

his fickle friends, whose interest in him had subsided as quickly as it

had risen. Full—stoked with alcoholic fuel and cargoed with food, the

only question remaining to disturb him was that of shelter and bed.

A drizzling, cold Texas rain had begun to fall—an endless, lazy,

unintermittent downfall that lowered the spirits of men and raised a

reluctant steam from the warm stones of the streets and houses. Thus

comes the “norther” dousing gentle spring and amiable autumn with the

chilling salutes and adieux of coming and departing winter.

Curly followed his nose down the first tortuous street into which his

irresponsible feet conducted him. At the lower end of it, on the bank

of the serpentine stream, he perceived an open gate in a cemented rock

wall. Inside he saw camp fires and a row of low wooden sheds built

against three sides of the enclosing wall. He entered the enclosure.

Under the sheds many horses were champing at their oats and corn. Many

wagons and buckboards stood about with their teams’ harness thrown

carelessly upon the shafts and doubletrees. Curly recognised the place

as a wagon-yard, such as is provided by merchants for their out-of-town

friends and customers. No one was in sight. No doubt the drivers of

those wagons were scattered about the town “seeing the elephant and

hearing the owl.” In their haste to become patrons of the town’s

dispensaries of mirth and good cheer the last ones to depart must have

left the great wooden gate swinging open.

Curly had satisfied the hunger of an anaconda and the thirst of a

camel, so he was neither in the mood nor the condition of an explorer.

He zigzagged his way to the first wagon that his eyesight distinguished

in the semi-darkness under the shed. It was a two-horse wagon with a

top of white canvas. The wagon was half filled with loose piles of wool

sacks, two or three great bundles of grey blankets, and a number of

bales, bundles, and boxes. A reasoning eye would have estimated the

load at once as ranch supplies, bound on the morrow for some outlying

hacienda. But to the drowsy intelligence of Curly they represented only

warmth and softness and protection against the cold humidity of the

night. After several unlucky efforts, at last he conquered gravity so

far as to climb over a wheel and pitch forward upon the best and

warmest bed he had fallen upon in many a day. Then he became

instinctively a burrowing animal, and dug his way like a prairie-dog

down among the sacks and blankets, hiding himself from the cold air as

snug and safe as a bear in his den. For three nights sleep had visited

Curly only in broken and shivering doses. So now, when Morpheus

condescended to pay him a call, Curly got such a strangle hold on the

mythological old gentleman that it was a wonder that anyone else in the

whole world got a wink of sleep that night.

Six cowpunchers of the Cibolo Ranch were waiting around the door of the

ranch store. Their ponies cropped grass near by, tied in the Texas

fashion—which is not tied at all. Their bridle reins had been dropped

to the earth, which is a more effectual way of securing them (such is

the power of habit and imagination) than you could devise out of a

half-inch rope and a live-oak tree.

These guardians of the cow lounged about, each with a brown cigarette

paper in his hand, and gently but unceasingly cursed Sam Revell, the

storekeeper. Sam stood in the door, snapping the red elastic bands on

his pink madras shirtsleeves and looking down affectionately at the

only pair of tan shoes within a forty-mile radius. His offence had been

serious, and he was divided between humble apology and admiration for

the beauty of his raiment. He had allowed the ranch stock of “smoking”

to become exhausted.

“I thought sure there was another case of it under the counter, boys,”

he explained. “But it happened to be catterdges.”