I
Kelley was in off the range and in profound disgust with himself, for
after serving honorably as line-rider and later as cow-boss for ten
years or more, he had ridden over to Keno to meet an old comrade. Just
how it happened he couldn't tell, but he woke one morning without a
dollar and, what was worse, incredibly worse, without horse or saddle!
Even his revolver was gone.
In brief, Tall Ed, for the first time in his life, was set afoot, and
this, you must understand, is a most direful disaster in cowboy life. It
means that you must begin again from the ground up, as if you were a
perfectly new tenderfoot from Nebraska.
Fort Keno was, of course, not a real fort; but it was a real barracks.
The town was an imitation town. The fort, spick, span, in rows, with
nicely planted trees and green grass-plats (kept in condition at vast
expense to the War Department), stood on the bank of the sluggish river,
while just below it and across the stream sprawled the town, drab,
flea-bitten, unkempt, littered with tin cans and old bottles, a
collection of saloons, gambling-houses and nameless dives, with a few
people--a very few--making an honest living by selling groceries,
saddles, and coal-oil.
Among the industries of Keno City was a livery-and-sales stable, and
Kelley, with intent to punish himself, at once applied for the position
of hostler. "You durned fool," he said, addressing himself, "as you've
played the drunken Injun, suppose you play valet to a lot of mustangs
for a while."
As a disciplinary design he felicitated himself as having hit upon the
most humiliating and distasteful position in Keno. It was understood
that Harford of the Cottonwood Corral never hired a real man as hostler.
He seemed to prefer bums and tramps, either because he could get them
cheaper or else because no decent man would work for him. He was an
"arbitrary cuss" and ready with gun or boot. He came down a long trail
of weather-worn experiences in the Southwest, and showed it in both face
and voice. He was a big man who had once been fatter, but his wrinkled
and sour visage seldom crinkled into a smile. He had never been jolly,
and he was now morose.
Kelley hated him. That, too, was another part of his elaborate scheme of
self-punishment--hated, but did not fear him, for Tall Ed Kelley feared
nothing that walked the earth or sailed the air. "You bum," he continued
to say in bitter derision as he caught glimpses of himself of a morning
in the little fragment of broken glass which, being tacked on the wall,
served as mirror in the office. "You durned mangy coyote, you need a
shave, but you won't get it. You need a clean shirt and a new bandanna,
but you won't get them, neither--not yet awhile. You'll earn 'em by
going without a drop of whisky and by forking manure fer the next six
months. You hear me?"
He slept in the barn on a soiled, ill-smelling bunk, and his hours of
repose were broken by calls on the telephone or by some one beating at
the door late at night or early in the morning; but he always responded
without a word of complaint. It was all lovely discipline. It was like
batting a measly bronco over the head in correction of some grievous
fault (like nipping your calf, for example), and he took a grim
satisfaction in going about degraded and forgotten of his fellows, for
no one in Keno knew that this grimy hostler was cow-boss on the Perco.
This, in a certain degree, softened his disgrace and lessened his
punishment, but he couldn't quite bring himself to the task of
explaining just how he had come to leave the range and go into service
with Harford.
The officers of the fort, when tired of the ambulance, occasionally took
out a team and covered rig, and so Kelley came in contact with the
commanding officer, Major Dugan, a fine figure of a man with carefully
barbered head and immaculate uniform. In Kelley's estimation he was
almost too well kept for a man nearing fifty. He was, indeed, a gallant
to whom comely women were still the fairest kind of game.
In truth, Tall Ed as hostler often furnished the major with a carriage,
in which to make some of his private expeditions, and this was another
and final disgrace which the cowman perceived and commented upon. To
assist an old libertine like the major in concealing his night journeys
was the nethermost deep of "self-discipline," but when the pretty young
wife of his employer became the object of the major's attention Kelley
was thrown into doubt.
Anita Harford, part Spanish and part German, as sometimes happens in New
Mexico, was a curious and interesting mixture with lovely golden-brown
hair and big, dark-brown eyes. She had the ingratiating smile of the
senora, her mother, and the moods of gravity, almost melancholy, of her
father.
She had been away in Albuquerque during the first week of Kelley's
hostlership, and though he had heard something of her from the men about
the corral, he had no great interest in her till she came one afternoon
to the door of the stable, where she paused like a snow-white, timid
antelope and softly said:
"Are you the new hostler?"
"I am, miss."
She smiled at his mistake. "I am Mrs. Harford. Please let me have the
single buggy and bay Nellie."