they swings up on to their horses and slowly goes away--up the river and
down the river and acrost the bridge--till y’u could see none of em no
more through the fallin’ snow; and in the store was just Edmund writin’,
and me lookin’ at him, and the sound of the rapids.
Did Edmund talk then? That wouldn’t have been Edmund. Nothin’ was said
in that store by him or me for--well, it must have been quite a while
before the door opened and Miss Carey she pokes her head in and wants to
know if she may be so bold as to inquire what all that meant in the
school-room. The kids had gone home early for fear of the snow. So
Edmund he smiles perfectly peaceful and tells her about it. So, of
course, she thinks it very comic and she laughs hearty--but all of a
sudden she remembers and expresses sympathy for Edmund’s misplaced
generosity.
“Don’t let that trouble you,” says he, gay enough. “I meant to
grubstake ’em, and I will. It shall not cost ’em a cent. Don’t tell the
poor old idiots.”
So that was that. But the poor old idiots had somethin’ more to say.
They had a thought. It snowed away all that night--a great big snow--but
next mornin’ it had quit and there was promise of its turnin’ into a
fine large day. The kids had come to school pretty late, but they come.
And then into the store walks Kultus Jake and Frisco Baldy. For a while
they walks around and just inspects all the goods they knowed by heart
anyway.
“Well?” says Edmund. And they looks at each other.
“Could we step into the school-room just a minute?” says Jake then.
Edmund he looks surprised, but asks no questions, and in we all goes.
Miss Carey she gets up again.
“Any more information?” says she, pleasant.
“No,” says Jake.
“Not to-day,” says Baldy.
“We,” says Jake, “well--we--we’d--”
Baldy gets restless and he steps up. “Put your school-house on our
land,” says he.
“We want to give it to y’u,” says Baldy.
“Coal and all,” says Jake.
There was a pink color went over Miss Carey’s face--all over it--and she
didn’t say a word for a while; she looks quick at Edmund and then she
looks back at the two old men, and her eyes has tears in ’em.
“Folks ought to know geography,” says Jake.
“We want the kids in this valley to know it,” says Baldy.
“Knowledge will save ’em from mistakes,” says Jake.
And then Miss Carey she speaks at last. “Thank you,” she says.
“Is this _potlatch_?” inquires Edmund, jokin’.
“_Kultus potlatch!_” says both of ’em together.
Would y’u think it?--after that day I never heard ’em scrappin’ together
again. Maybe they did sometimes, but not in my hearin’. Their experience
seemed to have changed ’em somehow. In the store I’d catch ’em lookin’
at each other. Their eyes was gentle. I think--yes, I think they knowed
that it was coming, that good-by was on its way to them. The
school-house was built in the spring; and after the school got into it,
now and again Jake and Baldy would sneak up to the door, look in and
take a back seat. And one of ’em would say he’d like to ask the kids a
question: Where was Washington, D.C.? And when the answer came, Jake and
Baldy they’d laugh like they’d split and sneak out again. One day in the
store we heard the knockin’ sound of a boat bein’ rowed over the river,
and Baldy came into the store alone. He walks to Edmund, but he looks
down on the floor.
“Jake’s sick,” says he. “Jake’s sick.” Oh, he knowed what it meant.
There was no doctor in the valley, but what could a doctor do? In about
three days we had Baldy sick, too. The tie between ’em was the tie of
life, and Jake died of a Saturday and Baldy died Monday.
“They must be buried by the school-house,” says Miss Carey. And
everybody went. And then up comes the question what to put on the
headboard? It brought up something none of us had thought of.
“Why, we don’t even know their names!” says Miss Carey, very soft.
We didn’t know anything. They had come into the valley, they had made
the valley laugh, they were gone. That was all. Not a fact or a
birthplace or anythin’ to put over them that would tell who they had
been. But Miss Carey wasn’t goin’ to let it be like that. She took it in
charge and she got it right. She found a bit of poetry and she had the
board painted, and it was this way: “Jake and Baldy. Our Friends. Their
heart was free from malice, and all their anger was excess of love.”
And then along in July Edmund got married to Miss Carey. They was sure a
happy two!
“Are y’u still the oldest man in the valley?” I asks Edmund one day in
the store.
“About three and a half,” says Edmund, solemn and deep. But then he
laughs.
Oh, yes, their happiness filled that store, filled the whole cabin,
crowded it. Maybe that’s why I left the valley.
VIII
THE DRAKE WHO HAD MEANS OF HIS OWN
Scipio sat beside the table--Mrs. Culloden’s still very new,
wedding-present table--arguing on and on, and I forgot all about him.
When he slapped the Wyoming game laws for that year down on the table
hard, and complained that I was not listening to him, I continued to
look out of the ranch window at the pond and merely said:--
“Just hear those ducks.”
He stared at me with disgust and scorn. “Ducks!” he then muttered.
“Well, but hear them,” I urged.
“Well, they’re quackin’,” he said. “A duck does.” He picked up the game
laws and resumed: “As I was telling you, it says--page 12, section 25--”
But I gave him no attention and still looked out at the pond.
So then he remarked bitterly: “I suppose ducks crow back East--or
bark.”
He was perfectly welcome to all the satire he could invent; I was not to
be turned from my curiosity about the clamor in the water outside, and
as I watched I said aloud: “There’s something behind it.”
This brought him to the window, where, as he stood silent beside me, I
could feel his impatience as definitely as if it had been a radiator.
The matter was that he had his mind running on something and I had my
mind running on something--and they weren’t the same things; and each of
us wished the other to be interested in his own thing.
“Something behind it,” echoed Scipio slightingly. “Behind every quack
you’ll find a duck.”
To this I returned no answer.
“Maybe they have forgot themselves and laid eggs in the water,”
suggested Scipio.
“Do your Western ducks lay much in September?” I inquired, with chill.
The noise in the pond, which had died down for an instant, was now set
up again--loud, remonstrant, voluble; the two birds sat in the middle of
the water and lifted up their heads and screamed to the sky.
“That’s what they’ve done,” said Scipio; “and they can’t locate the
eggs. Well, it’d make me holler too. Say,” he pleaded, “what’s the point
in your point, anyhow? I want to show you about those game laws.”
“Must I hear it all over again and must I say it all over again?” I
responded, not taking my eye from the pond.
“You’ve never heard it wunst yet, for you’ve never listened.”
“I did. I didn’t begin to wander till you began repeating the whole
thing for the third time. And now I’ll say, for the fourth time, it’s a
close season till 1912. There they go out of the pond, single
file--Duchess in the lead. The Duchess has purple in her wings; the
Countess has none.”
“Oh, soap fat!” said Scipio.
“And they’ve gone to feed on the grain in the haystack. There’s Sir
Francis waiting for them by the woodpile. He’s the drake.”
“Oh, soap fat!” repeated Scipio.
I followed the ducks until they had waddled out of sight.
“Every now and then, during the day,” I said, “they go through that same
performance: sit in the water and scream louder each minute, then come
out and head for the haystack in the most orderly, quiet manner, just
after having given every symptom of falling into convulsions. Now I’m
going to find out what that means. And what I am wondering at,” I
continued, “is why you do not suggest that they are screaming at the
game laws.”
Well, we sat down then and had it out about those game laws; and it is
but right to confess that they were more important to poor Scipio than
the ducks were to me. First we took section 25 to pieces, dug its
sentences to the bottom, and carefully lifted out every scrap which gave
promise of containing sense. It was no child’s task. You didn’t reach
the first full stop for a hundred and twelve words--nothing but commas;
it was like being lost in the sage-brush--and, by the time the full stop
did come, your head--but let me quote the sentence:--
“It shall be unlawful for any person or persons to kill any antelope
until the open season for other game animals in 1915, when only one
antelope may be killed by any person hunting legally, or to kill any
moose, elk or mountain sheep until the open season for other game
animals, in 1912, when only one male moose may be killed by any person
hunting legally, or to kill any elk or mountain sheep in any part of
this state, except in Fremont County, Uinta County, Carbon County and
that part of Bighorn County and Park County west of the Bighorn River,
until the open season for game animals in 1915.”
To tell you all that we said before we had finished with this would be
worse than useless--it would be profane; enough that I stuck to the
conclusion I had reached when I read the section in the East--no hunting
anything anywhere for anybody until 1912. On the strength of it I had
left my rifle at home and brought only my fishing rod.
“If it is your way,” said Scipio, “what do you make of section 26? ‘It
shall be unlawful for any person or persons to hunt, pursue or kill any
elk, deer or mountain sheep except from September twenty-fifth to
November thirtieth of _each year_.’” He yelled the last two words at me.
But I merely clapped my hands to my brow.
“And if it is your way,” Scipio pursued, playing his ace, “what do you
make of Honey Wiggin taking a party out next Monday for six weeks?”
“Why, they’ll simply all be arrested.”
“No; they’ll not. I’ve saw Honey’s license with this year stamped in red
figures right acrost it, just as plain as headlines.”
What could one reply to that? I picked up the pamphlet and stared at the
page.
Scipio ruminated. “Will you tell me,” he said, “why, in a country where
everybody’s born equal, the legislature should be a bigger fool than
anybody else?”
“It’s a free country,” I reminded him. “Every man has the right to be an
ass here.”
But Scipio still brooded. “Well,” he said, “if I was a legislator--” he
stopped.
“You’re not qualified,” said I.
“Not?”
“You haven’t sufficient command of the English language.”
“_What!_” cried Scipio; for vocabulary is his chief pride and I had
actually touched him.
“No. You couldn’t cook up two paragraphs of your mother tongue that
would defy any sane human intelligence.”
“They have done worse than that to me,” he said ruefully. “They have
lost me my season’s job. The party I was to take out read them laws same
as you did, and they stayed back East and made other plans. That’s what
I got in last night’s mail”
“Well, I haven’t stayed back East,” I said. “The fishing’s about done,
but I want an excuse for another month or two of outing. My things can
get here in twelve days--we’ll hunt, and I’ll be your season’s job.
And,” I added, “now I shall have time to study the ducks.”
We launched then into discussion of horses and camp outfit, copiously
arguing what the legislature would let a man hunt, pursue, or kill in a
season it declared to be open for no big game at all, until from eleven
the clock went round to noon; and in the kitchen the voice of Mrs.
Culloden was heard, calling clearly to her young bridegroom in the
corral--calling too clearly.
“Well, Jimsy,” the voice said, “are you going to get me any wood for
this stove--or ain’t you?”
Our discussion dropped; we sat still; it was time for Scipio to be
getting back across the river to his own cabin and dinner. He rose, put
on his hat, and stood looking at me for a moment. Then he took his hat
off and scratched his head, glancing toward the kitchen.
“Jimsy, did you hear me telling you about that wood?” came the voice of
the young bride, a trifle clearer. “I seem to have to remind you of
everything.”
Scipio’s bleached blue eye and his long, eccentric nose turned slowly
once more on me. “My, but it’s turrable easy to get married,” was his
word. He shoved his hat on again and was out of the door and on his
horse; and I watched him ride down to the river and ford it. As he grew
distant, my three ducks waddled back from the haystack to the pond. The
Duchess led, the Countess followed; Sir Francis brought up the rear. But
how could I attend to them while the following reached me through the
door from the kitchen?
“If dinner’s late you can thank yourself, Jimsy.”
“Why, May, I split the wood for you right after breakfast. That corral
gate--”
“Split the wood and leave me to carry it!”
“Well, I’ve been about as busy as I could be on the ditch; and that gate
needs--”
“Never mind. Wash your hands and get ready now. Kiss me first.”
At this point it seemed best to go out of the sitting-room door and come
presently into the kitchen by the other way, at the moment when my
hostess was placing the hot food upon the table. It was good food, well
cooked; and all the spoons and things were bright and clean. Bright and
clean too, and very pretty, was the little bride. She was not twenty
yet; Jimsy was not twenty-four; and as he sat down to his meal I saw her
look at him with a look which I understood plainly: had no stranger been
there to see, some more kissing would have occurred. Yet, what did she
now find to say to him--she that so visibly adored him?
“Jimsy Culloden! Well, I guess you’ll never learn to brush your hair!”
Jimsy suddenly grinned. “Others have enjoyed it pretty well this way,”
said he. “Tangled their hands all through it.” And his gray eyes
twinkled at me. But the little woman’s blue eyes flashed and she sat up
very stiff. “Before I asked you, that was,” Jimsy added.
Have I ever told you how Jimsy became married? I believe not--but it
would take too long now; it will have to wait. His bachelor liveliness
had not contributed to his mother’s peace of mind, but all was now well;
the poker chips had gone I don’t know where; our beloved old card-table
of past years stood now in the bridal bedroom, stifled in feminine
drapery beyond
[Illustration: “My, but it’s turrable easy to get married”]
recognition; the bottles that in these days lay empty beyond the corral
had contained merely tomato ketchup and such things; and here was Jimsy
Culloden a stable citizen, an anchored man, county commissioner, selling
vegetables, alfalfa, and horses, with me for a paying boarder in that
new-established Wyoming industry which is locally termed dude-wrangling.
The eastern “dude” is destined to replace Hereford cattle in
Wyoming--and sheep also.
Jimsy was an anchored man, to be sure: might he possibly some day drag
his anchor? I glanced at his blue-eyed May, so fair and competent, and I
hoped her voice would not grow much clearer. I glanced at Jimsy, quietly
eating, and wondered if a new look lately lurking in his eye--a look of
slight bewilderment--would increase or pass.
“Didn’t I see Scipio Le Moyne ride away?” he asked me.
“Yes. It was dinner-time.”
“Couldn’t he stay here and eat?”
“There you go, Jimsy Culloden; wanting to feed this whole valley every
day, just like you was rich!”
Jimsy’s gray eyes blinked and he attended to his plate. The failure of
that little joke about tangled hair was the probable cause of his
present silence, and the bride appealed to me.
“Ain’t that so?” she said. “You’ve been here before. You know how folks
loaf around up and down this valley and stop to dinner, and stay for
supper, and just eat people up!”
She was so perfectly right in principle that my only refuge from the
perilous error of taking sides was the somewhat lame remark: “Well,
Scipio isn’t a dead-beat, you know.”
“There!” cried Jimsy, triumphantly.
“Mr. Culloden would have fed a dead-beat just the same,” returned the
lady promptly.
Again she was entirely right. From good heart and long habit Jimsy made
welcome every passing traveler and his horse. When Wyoming was young and
its ranches lay wide, desert miles apart, such hospitality was the
natural, unwritten law; but now, in this day of increasing settlements
and of rainbowed folders of railroads painting a promised land for all
comers, a young ranchman could easily be kept poor by the perpetual
drain on his groceries and his oats. Jimsy’s wife was stepping between
him and his bachelor shiftlessness in all directions, and the propitious
signs oi her influence were everywhere. Indoors and out, a crisp, new
appearance of things harbingered good fortune. Why, she had actually
started him on reforming his gates! Did you ever see the thing they were
frequently satisfied to call a gate in Wyoming? A sordid wreck of barbed
wire and rotten wood, hung across the fence-gap by a rusty loop,
raggedly dangling like the ribs of a broken umbrella.
The telephone bell called Mrs. Culloden to the sitting-room near the end
of dinner.
Mrs. Sedlaw, her dear friend and schoolmate living five miles up the
valley, was inviting them to dinner next day to eat roast grouse.
“Let’s go,” said Jimsy.
“And you quit your ditch and me quit my ironing?” answered the clear
voice. “Thank you ever so much, Susie; we’d just love to, but Jimsy
can’t go off the ranch this week and I’d not like to leave him all
alone, even if I wasn’t as busy as I can be with our wash.” There
followed exchange of gossip and laughter over it, and much love sent to
and fro--and the receiver was hung up.
“As for grouse,” I said to Jimsy, for his silence was on my nerves, “I
will now go and catch you some trout superior to any bird that flies.”
Sir Francis, the snow-white drake, stood by the woodpile as I crossed
the enclosure on my way to the river. In the pond the lady ducks were
loudly quacking, but I passed them by. I desired the solitude of Buffalo
Horn, its pools, its cottonwoods, its quiet presiding mountains; and I
walked up its stream for a mile, safe from that clear voice and from the
bewildered eye of Jimsy, my once blithe, careless friend.
Unless it be from respect for Izaak Walton and tradition, I know not why
I ever carry in my fly-book, or ever use, a brown-hackle; it has wasted
hours of fishing time for me. The hours this afternoon it did not waste,
because, under the spell of the large day that shone upon the valley, my
thoughts dwelt not on fish, but with delicious vagueness upon matrimony,
the game laws and those ducks. With the waters of Buffalo Horn talking
near by and singing far off, I watched all things rather than my line
and often wholly stopped to smell the wild, clean odor of the sage-brush
and draw the beauty of everything into my very depths. So from pool to
pool I waded down the south fork of Buffalo Horn and had caught nothing
when I reached Sheep Creek, by Scipio’s ranch. Here I changed to a
grizzly king and soon had killed four trout.
Scipio was out in his meadow gathering horses, and he came to the bank
with a question:--
“Find the eggs them ducks laid in the water?”
“Jimsy wanted to know why you didn’t stay to dinner,” was my answer.
“Huh!” Scipio watched me land a half-pound fish. Then: “They ain’t been
married a year yet.”
I cast below a sunken log and took a small trout, which I threw back,
while Scipio resumed:
“Why I didn’t stop to dinner! Huh! Say, when did they quit havin’
several wives at wunst?”
“Who quit?”
“Why, them sheep-men back in the Bible--Laban and Solomon and them
old-timers. What made ’em quit?”
“They didn’t all quit. There, you’ve made me lose that fish. Are you
thinking two wives would be twice as bad as one?”
“You’ll get another fish. I’m thinking they wouldn’t be half as bad as
one.”
Certain passages in Scipio’s earlier days came into my mind, but I did
not mention them to him. Possibly he was thinking of them himself.
“Two at once is not considered moral in this country,” I said.
Scipio mused. “I’m not sure I’ve ever clearly understood about morals,”
he muttered. “Are you going to keep that whitefish?”
“I always keep a few for the hens. Makes ’em lay.”
This caused Scipio to look frowningly across Buffalo Horn to where the
Culloden Ranch buildings lay clear in the blue crystal of the afternoon
light. “Marriage ain’t learned in a day,” he remarked, “any more than
ropin’ stock is. He ain’t learned how to _be_ married yet.”
Again I thought of Scipio’s past adventures and remembered that the best
critics are they who have failed in art.
“Did you mean what you said about hunting with me?” Scipio now inquired.
“Sure thing!” I returned, “if you’re right about Honey Wiggin.”
“Oh, I’m right enough. You’ll see him come by here Monday.”
“Then I’ll send East for my things,” I said.
“Well, I’ll be looking for a man to cook and horse-wrangle,” said
Scipio.
As I approached the ranch across the level pasture with my fish, I could
hear from afar the quack of the ducks, invisible in the pond, and could
see from afar the snow-white figure of the drake, stationary by the
woodpile. Now for the first time the idea glimmered upon me that he had
something to do with it. But what? I came to the breast of the little
pond and stood upon it to watch the Countess and the Duchess. They were
making a great noise; but over what? Sometimes they sat still and
screamed together; a punctuation of silence would then follow. Next one
or the other would take it up alone. Was it a sort of service they were
holding to celebrate the sunset? I looked up at the lustrous crimson on
the mountain wall--a mile of giant battlements sending forth a rose glow
as if from within, like something in a legend; birds and beasts might
well celebrate such a marvel--but the Countess and Duchess were doing
this at other hours, when nothing particular seemed to be happening. I
looked at the drake by the woodpile. He had not moved a quarter of an
inch. He stood in profile, most becomingly. His neat, spotless white,
his lemon-colored bill, his orange-colored legs, his benign yet
confident attitude, as if of personal achievement taken for granted but
not thrust forward--all this put me in mind of something, but so faintly
that I could not just then make out what it was. Shouts from the
Duchess at the top of her voice hastily recalled my attention to the
pond.
I expected to find something sudden was wrong. Not at all. The water was
without a wrinkle, the ducks floated motionless: yet there had been a
note, a quality, urgent, piercingly remonstrant, in those quacks of the
Duchess. She might have been calling for the constabulary, the fire
brigade, and the health department. And then, without change for better
or for worse in anything around us that I could see, the two birds swam
placidly to land. They got out on the bank, wiggled their tails, stood
on their toes to flap their wings, and, this brief drying process being
over, they took their way to the drake. He stood by the woodpile,
stock-still in profile; he had not yet moved a quarter of an inch; it
seemed to me--but I was not certain--that his ladies raced as they drew
near him. When they reached him he turned with gravity and headed for
the haystack. They fell in behind him and the three waddled and wobbled
solemnly toward their goal, squeezed under the fence and were lost to
view.
I took in my trout to Mrs. Culloden, who praised their size and my
skill. On the subject of giving her hens a diet of whitefish, she told
me it was her great ambition so to manage that before the moulting fowls
should wholly stop laying the spring pullets should have begun to lay.
“Jimsy is real fond of eggs,” she explained, “and I want him to have
them.”
I further learned that whitefish cooked were better than whitefish raw,
which often tainted the eggs with a fishy taste. I stood high in the
little bride’s favor because I was helping her to please Jimsy. Lying
abed that night in my one-room cabin, I said aloud, abruptly: “That was
a protest.”
I know nothing about what they call our subconscious workings, save that
I am choke-full of them; I meant the Duchess. Apparently my subconscious
works had been dealing with her ever since the scene at the pond. Thus a
conclusion had popped out of my mouth full-fledged before I knew it was
there. “Yes,” I repeated; “she was protesting. They both were.”