BILLY O'FLYNN
_Kate's Narrative_
Both Jesse and I have a habit of committing our thoughts to paper and
not to speech. Things written can be destroyed, whereas things said stay
terribly alive. I think if other husbands and wives I know of wrote more
and talked less, their homes would not feel so dreadful, so full of
horrible shadows. There are houses where I feel ill as soon as I cross
the door-step, because the very air of the rooms is foul with the spite,
the nagging, the strife of bitter souls. As to the houses where horrors
have taken place--despair, madness, murder, suicide--these are always
haunted, and sensitive people are terrified by ghosts.
My pen has rambled. I sat down to write a thing which must not be said.
Jesse is cruel to young O'Flynn. Perhaps he is justly, rightly cruel, in
gibing at this young cow-boy, taunting him until the lad is on the very
edge of murder. "Got to be done," says Jesse, "I promised his father
that I'd break the colt until he's fed up with robbers. So just you
watch me lift the dust from his hide, and don't you git gesticulating on
my trail with your fool sympathies." Billy does not suspect that the
tormentor loves his victim.
My heart aches with his humiliation. His mother is my cook, not a
princess, as the boy's pride would have her. His father was one of the
most dangerous leaders of the Rocky Mountain outlaws, so there the lad
saw glory, and I don't blame him. But all the glamour was stripped away
when Jesse tricked O'Flynn and his gang into surrender, handed them over
to justice, and showed poor Billy his sordid heroes for what they really
were. His father has been hanged.
Remember that this ranch, ablaze with romance for me, is squalid
every-day routine for Billy, whose dreams are beyond the sky-line. He
imagines railways as we imagine dragons, and the Bloomsbury
boarding-house from which my sister wrote on her return from India is,
from his point of view, a place in the Arabian Nights. I read to him
Taddy's letter, about the new boarder from Selangor, who is down with
fever, the German waiter caught reading Colonel Boyce's manuscript on
protective color for howitzers, the tweeny's sailor father drowned at
sea, and the excitement in that humdrum house when Lady Blacktail
called. "Wish I'd had a shot," said Billy wistfully, his mind on the
black-tail, our local kind of deer. Perhaps he saw forest behind the
boarding-house. "In the old country," said he, "do the does call? Only
the buck calls here. Your folks is easy excited, anyways."
"Lady Blacktail," said I, "is a woman."
"What was she shouting about?"
"She just called--came to take tea, you know."
"Got no job of work?"
"Oh, but her husband, Sir Tom, was a very rich man. He left her
millions."
"Mother's first husband," said Billy, his mind running on widows, "had
lots of wealth. He kep' a seegar stand down-town near the Battery, and
had a brass band when they buried him. Mother came out West."
That night the lad had come from Hundred Mile House, with Jesse's
pack-train bearing a load of stores. There was a dress length, music for
my dear dumpy piano, spiced rolls of bacon, much needed flour and
groceries, and an orange kerchief for Billy. From his saddle wallets he
produced my crumpled letters and the weekly paper, a Vancouver rag.
Therein Jesse labors among tangles of provincial politics, I gloat over
the cooking recipes of America's nice cuisine, and spare maybe just a
sigh over the London letter. Billy's portion consists of blood-curdling
disasters and crimes, and the widow waits ravenous for her kindling, bed
stuffing, wall paper, and new pads for her wooden leg. At ten cents that
paper is a bargain.
She hovered presiding while her boy had supper, I checked stores against
an untruthful invoice, and Jesse prepared to read: "Bribed with a
Bridge! Who Stole the Bonds," etc. Dear Jesse takes his reading
seriously. His mind must be prepared with a pipe. His stately spectacles
are cleaned on his neck-cloth, and so mounted that he can see to read
over the edges. Next he crawls under the stove to find the bootjack, and
pull off his long boots. After that he fills the lamp, lights that and a
cigar of fearful pungency, and settles his great limbs in the chair of
state. When all was arranged that night he looked up from his paper.
"Say," he drawled, "Billy. When you ride away and turn robber, what's
the matter with politics? You see if you was Sir Billy O'Flynn, and a
Right Honorable Premier, you could steal enough to buy spurs as big as
car wheels. You're fiercer than our member already with that new
cow-scaring scarf, so all you'd need is a machine gun slung on your
belt, a man-killer like my mare Jones, and you'll be the tiger of the
forest. You git yo' mother's cat to learn you how to yowl."
II
After breakfast when Jesse had gone to work, the widow came to me in
deep distress, leaning against the door-post, twisting up her apron with
tremulous fingers, her eyes dark with dread. When I led her to a seat,
perhaps she felt my sympathy, for a flood of tears broke loose, and wild
Irish mixed with her sobs. The leprechawn possessed her bhoy _avick_,
night-riders haunted him, divils was in him _acushla_, and the child was
fey. His step-uncle went fey to his end in the dreadful quicksands, her
brother-in-law went mad in the black Indian hills, running on the spears
of the haythen, rest his sowl, and now Billy! He was gone this hour.
Fiercely she ordered me out to search, for she would take the southern
pasture, so surely I would find him in the pines. She feared that place;
muttered of fires lighted by no mortal hands. She spoke of wandering
lights; the cat had bristled sparks flying from his coat because of
elfin voices, and Mick had howled all night down at the Apex. Yestreen a
falling star had warned her that she was to lose her bhoy, and had I not
seen that face in the windy last night?
Soothing the poor thing as best I could, I undertook the search, glad of
an excuse to get away outdoors. Presently I came upon Billy perched on a
root overhanging the depths of the canyon. He was cleaning Jesse's rifle,
and I surprised him in a fit of angry laughter.
"Billy," I shouted, "come in off that root before you fall!"
He obeyed, with sulky patience at my whims.
"Why are you not at work? What are you doing with my husband's rifle?"
"I'm at work," he answered sulkily,--then with an odd vagueness of
manner, "I'm cleaning the durned thing."
Being a woman, and cursed at that with the artistic temperament, I could
not help being moved by this lad's extraordinary beauty,--the curly
red-gold hair, skin with the dusty block of a ripe peach, the poise of
easy power and lithe grace, the sense he gave me of glowing color
veiling rugged strength. As an artist studies a good model, I had
observed very closely the moods of Billy's temperament.
His mother was right. That vagueness of manner was abnormal, and the lad
was fey.
"But why are you cleaning his rifle?"
"It kicks when it's foul," he said absently.
"You're off hunting?"
"Goin' to shoot Jesse, thet's all."
"I'm sure," I said, "he cleaned it yesterday. Look here," and I took the
rifle to show him it was clean. "See." I put my little finger nail in
the breech while he looked down the barrel. "Come," said I, and told him
that in my sewing-machine there was a bottle of gun oil. The rifle was
in my possession, safe.
Then he heard Jesse coming. "Whist! Hide the gun!" he said, and as
though we were fellow conspirators, I placed it behind a tree, so that
my man saw nothing to cause alarm.
Jesse came, it seemed, in search of Billy.
"Hello, Kate," he said in greeting. "Say, youngster, when you sawed off
that table leg to make your mother's limb, what did you do with the
caster?"