“Why, she raised them puppies all right. Ain’t she showed she knows how
to be a mother anyways? Em’ly ain’t going to get her time took up for
nothing while I’m round hyeh,” said the cow-puncher.
He laid a gentle hold of Em’ly and tossed her to the ground. She, of
course, rushed out among the corrals in a great state of nerves.
“I don’t see what good you do meddling,” I protested.
To this he deigned no reply, but removed the unresponsive stones from
the straw.
“Why, if they ain’t right warm!” he exclaimed plaintively. “The poor,
deluded son-of-a-gun!” And with this unusual description of a lady, he
sent the stones sailing like a line of birds. “I’m regular getting stuck
on Em’ly,” continued the Virginian. “Yu’ needn’t to laugh. Don’t yu’ see
she’s got sort o’ human feelin’s and desires? I always knowed hawsses
was like people, and my collie, of course. It is kind of foolish, I
expect, but that hen’s goin’ to have a real aigg di-rectly, right now,
to set on.” With this he removed one from beneath another hen. “We’ll
have Em’ly raise this hyeh,” said he, “so she can put in her time
profitable.”
It was not accomplished at once; for Em’ly, singularly enough, would
not consent to stay in the box whence she had been routed. At length we
found another retreat for her, and in these new surroundings, with a
new piece of work for her to do, Em’ly sat on the one egg which the
Virginian had so carefully provided for her.
Thus, as in all genuine tragedies, was the stroke of Fate wrought by
chance and the best intentions.
Em’ly began sitting on Friday afternoon near sundown. Early next morning
my sleep was gradually dispersed by a sound unearthly and continuous.
Now it dwindled, receding to a distance; again it came near, took a
turn, drifted to the other side of the house; then, evidently, whatever
it was, passed my door close, and I jumped upright in my bed. The high,
tense strain of vibration, nearly, but not quite, a musical note, was
like the threatening scream of machinery, though weaker, and I bounded
out of the house in my pajamas.
There was Em’ly, dishevelled, walking wildly about, her one egg
miraculously hatched within ten hours. The little lonely yellow ball of
down went cheeping along behind, following its mother as best it could.
What, then, had happened to the established period of incubation? For
an instant the thing was like a portent, and I was near joining Em’ly in
her horrid surprise, when I saw how it all was. The Virginian had taken
an egg from a hen which had already been sitting for three weeks.
I dressed in haste, hearing Em’ly’s distracted outcry. It steadily
sounded, without perceptible pause for breath, and marked her erratic
journey back and forth through stables, lanes, and corrals. The shrill
disturbance brought all of us out to see her, and in the hen-house I
discovered the new brood making its appearance punctually.
But this natural explanation could not be made to the crazed hen. She
continued to scour the premises, her slant tail and its one preposterous
feather waving as she aimlessly went, her stout legs stepping high with
an unnatural motion, her head lifted nearly off her neck, and in
her brilliant yellow eye an expression of more than outrage at
this overturning of a natural law. Behind her, entirely ignored and
neglected, trailed the little progeny. She never looked at it. We went
about our various affairs, and all through the clear, sunny day that
unending metallic scream pervaded the premises. The Virginian put out
food and water for her, but she tasted nothing. I am glad to say that
the little chicken did. I do not think that the hen’s eyes could see,
except in the way that sleep-walkers’ do.
The heat went out of the air, and in the canyon the violet light began
to show. Many hours had gone, but Em’ly never ceased. Now she suddenly
flew up in a tree and sat there with her noise still going; but it had
risen lately several notes into a slim, acute level of terror, and was
not like machinery any more, nor like any sound I ever heard before or
since. Below the tree stood the bewildered little chicken, cheeping, and
making tiny jumps to reach its mother.
“Yes,” said the Virginian, “it’s comical. Even her aigg acted different
from anybody else’s.” He paused, and looked across the wide, mellowing
plain with the expression of easy-going gravity so common with him. Then
he looked at Em’ly in the tree and the yellow chicken.
“It ain’t so damned funny,” said he.
We went in to supper, and I came out to find the hen lying on the
ground, dead. I took the chicken to the family in the hen-house.
No, it was not altogether funny any more. And I did not think less of
the Virginian when I came upon him surreptitiously digging a little hole
in the field for her.
“I have buried some citizens here and there,” said he, “that I have
respected less.”
And when the time came for me to leave Sunk Creek, my last word to the
Virginian was, “Don’t forget Em’ly.”
“I ain’t likely to,” responded the cow-puncher. “She is just one o’ them
parables.”
Save when he fell into his native idioms (which, they told me, his
wanderings had well-nigh obliterated until that year’s visit to his home
again revived them in his speech), he had now for a long while dropped
the “seh,” and all other barriers between us. We were thorough friends,
and had exchanged many confidences both of the flesh and of the spirit.
He even went the length of saying that he would write me the Sunk Creek
news if I would send him a line now and then. I have many letters from
him now. Their spelling came to be faultless, and in the beginning was
little worse than George Washington’s.
The Judge himself drove me to the railroad by another way--across the
Bow Leg Mountains, and south through Balaam’s Ranch and Drybone to Rock
Creek.
“I’ll be very homesick,” I told him.
“Come and pull the latch-string whenever you please,” he bade me. I
wished that I might! No lotus land ever cast its spell upon man’s heart
more than Wyoming had enchanted mine.