They was chattering about three hundred thousand dollars in round numbers
when they got near enough for him to overhear their private conversation.
They wondered why they had wasted so much of their lives in the cattle
business, but now them old hard-working days was over, or soon would be,
with nothing to do but travel round in Pullman palace cars and see
America first, and go to movies, and so forth. Safety wished to haggle
some about the mules, but Sandy says he's already stated the price in
clear, ringing tones, and he has no time to waste, being that I must
send him down that night to get an order on the wire for two carloads
of the Little Giant peanut. Safety just blinked at this, not even asking
why the peanuts; and the boys left him cold.
When I told 'em about the offer to me of sixty or a possible sixty-five,
they at once done a medicine dance.
"This here will be the richest coop ever pulled off west of Cheyenne,"
says Buck; and Sandy says he guesses anybody not blind can now see that
well-known street in New York he ought to have his office on. He says
he hopes Safety don't fall too easy, because he wants more chance to
work it up.
But Sandy is doomed to disappointment. Safety holds off only two days
more. Two days he loafs round at mealtimes, listening to their rich
converse and saying he'd like to know who's a better friend of this
outfit than he's been for twenty years. The boys tell him if he's such
a good friend to go ahead and prove it with a little barter that would
be sure to touch my heart. And the first day Safety offers seventy-five
a head for these here jack rabbits, which they calmly ignore and go on
talking about Liberty Bonds being a good safe investment; and the second
day he just cries like a child that he'll pay eighty-five and trust to
their honour that he's to have in on this new sure-thing deal.
That seemed enough, so they all shook hands with the spendthrift and
slapped him on the back in good fellowship, and said they knew all the
time he had a heart of gold and they feel free to say now that once the
money has passed he won't be let to go off the place till he has heard
all about the new enterprise and let in on the ground floor, and they
hope he won't ever forget this moment when the money begins to roll in
fit to smother him in round numbers. So Safety says he knows they're a
good square set of boys, as clean as a hound's tooth, and he'll be over
to-morrow to take over the stock and hear the interesting details.
The boys set up late that night figuring their share of the burglary.
There was twenty-five of these ground squirrels. I was to get my fifty a
head, at least ten of which was illegitimate. Then for the thirty-five,
which was the real robbery, I was to take half, and eight of the boys the
other half. I begun to wonder that night just what could be done to us
under the criminal law. It looked like three years in some good jail
wouldn't be a bit too harsh.
Next day bright and early here comes frugal Safety, gangling along behind
his whiskers and bringing one of his ill-fed hirelings to help drive the
stuff back. Safety is rubbing his hands and acting very sprightly, with
an air of false good fellowship. It almost seems like he was afraid they
had thought better of the trade and might try to crawl out. He wants it
over quick. They all go down and help him drive his purchase out of the
lower field, where they been hiding in the tall grass, and in no time
at all have the bunch headed down the lane on to the county road, with
Safety's man keeping well up to protect 'em from the coyotes.
Next there's kind of a solemn moment when the check is being made out.
Safety performs that serious operation down at the bunk house. Making out
any check is always the great adventure with him. He writes it with his
heart's blood, and not being the greatest scholar in the world he has to
count the letters in his name after it's written--he knows there ought to
be nine together--and then he has to wipe the ink off his hands and sigh
dismally and say if this thing keeps up he'll be spending his old age at
the poor farm, and so forth. It all went according to schedule, except
that he seemed strangely eager and under a severe nervous strain.
Me? I'd been, sort of hanging round on the edge of events while the
dastardly deed was being committed, not seeming to be responsible in any
way. My Lord! I still wanted to be able to face the bereaved man as an
honest woman and tell him it was only some nonsense of the boys for which
I could not be held under the law, no matter how good a lawyer he'd get.
When they come trooping out of the bunk house I was pretending to consult
Abner, the blacksmith, about some mower parts. And right off I was struck
by the fact that Safety seemed to be his old self again; his air of false
gayety and nervous strain had left him and he was cold and silent and
deadly, like the poisonous cobra of India.
But now they was going to spring the new secret enterprise on him, so I
moved off toward the house a bit, not wanting to be too near when his
screams begun. It did seem kind of shameful, taking advantage of the
old miser's grasping habits; still, I remembered a few neat things he'd
done to me and I didn't slink too far into the background. Safety was
standing by his horse with the boys all gathered close round him, and I
heard Sandy say "Elephants--nothing but elephants--that's the new idea!"
Then they all begun to talk at once, jabbering about the peanuts and
popcorn that crowds of people will come to buy from us to feed back to
our stock, and how there's more meat in an elephant than in six steers,
and about how the punchers will be riding round in these little cupalos
up on top of their big saddle elephants; and they kept getting swifter
and more excited in their talk, till at last they just naturally exploded
when they made sure Safety got the idea and would know he'd been made a
fool of. They had a grand time; threw their hats in the air and danced
round their victim and punched each other, and their yells and hearty
laughter could of been heard for miles up and down the creek. Two or
three had guns they let off to add to the gleeful noise. Oh, it was
deuces wild for about three minutes. They nearly died laughing.
Then the whole thing kind of died a strange and painful death. Safety
wasn't taking on one bit like a man that's been stung. He stood there
cold and malignant and listened to the noise and didn't bat an eye till
he just naturally quelled the disorder. It got as still as a church, and
then Safety talked a little in a calm voice.
"Elephants?" says he, kind of amused. "Why, elephants ain't no good stock
proposition because it takes 'em so long to mature! Elephants is often a
hundred and twenty years old. You'd have to feed one at least forty years
to get him fit to ship. I really am surprised at you boys, going into a
proposition like that without looking up the details. It certainly ain't
anything for my money. Why, you couldn't even veal an elephant till he
was about fifteen years old, which would need at least six thousand
dollars' worth of peanuts; and what kind of a stock business is that, I'd
like to know. And even if they could rustle their own feed, what kind of
a business is it where you could only ship once in a lifetime? You boys
make me tired, going hell-bent into an enterprise where you'd all be dead
and forgotten before the first turnover of your stock."
He now looked at 'em in a sad, rebuking manner. It was like an icy blast
from Greenland the way he took it.
Two or three tried to start the big laugh again, but their yips was
feeble and died quickly out. They just stood there foolish. Even Sandy
Sawtelle couldn't think of anything bright to say.
Safety now climbs on his horse, strangely cheerful, and says; "Well, I'll
have to be getting along with them new mules of mine." Then he kind of
giggled at the crowd and says: "I certainly got the laugh on this outfit,
starting a business where this here old Methusalem hisself could hardly
get it going good before death cut him off!"
And away he rides, chuckling like it was an awful joke on us. Not a
single scream of agony about what had been done to him with them stunted
mules.
Of course that was all I needed to know. One deadly chill of fear took me
from head to foot. I knew perfectly well our trench was mined and the
fuse lighted. Up comes this chucklehead of a Sawtelle, and for once in
his life he's puzzled.
"Well," he says, "you got to give old S.F. credit for one thing. Did you
see the way he tried to switch the laugh over on to us, and me with his
trusty check right here in my hand? I never would have thought it, but
he is certainly one awful good game loser!"
"Game loser nothing!" I says. "He's just a game winner. Any time you see
that old boy acting game he's won. And he's won now, no matter how much
the known facts look against it. I don't know how, but he's won."
They all begin to tell me I must be mistaken, because look at the price
we got for stuff we hadn't been able to sell at any price before. I says
I am looking at that, but I'm also obliged to look at Safety after he's
paid that price, and the laws of Nature certainly ain't been suspended
all at once. I offer to bet 'em what they've made on the deal that Safety
has run true to form. "Mark my words," I says, "this is one sad day for
the Arrowhead! I don't know how or why, but we'll soon find out; and if
you don't believe me, now's the time to double your money."
But they hung off on that. They got too much respect for my judgment. And
they admitted that Safety's way of standing the gaff had been downright
uncanny. So there was nothing to do but pay over their share of this
tainted money and wait for the blow, eight hundred and seventy-five
dollars being the amount I split with 'em for their masterly headwork
in the depredation.
That very day in the mail comes a letter that has been delayed because
this here Government of ours pinches a penny even worse than old Timmins
does. Yes, sir; this letter had been mailed at Seattle with a two-cent
stamp the day after the Government had boosted the price to three cents.
And what does the Government do? Does it say: "Oh, send it along! Why
pinch pennies?" Not at all. It takes a printed card and a printed
envelope and the time of a clerk and an R.F.D. mail carrier to send me
word that I must forward one cent if I want this letter--spends at least
two cents to get one cent. Well, it takes two days for that notice to
reach me; and of course I let it lie round a couple of days, thinking
it's probably an advertisement; and then two days for my one-cent stamp
to go back to this parsimonious postmaster; and two days for the letter
to get here; making about eight days, during which things had happened
that I should of known about. Yes, sir; it's a great Government that will
worry over one cent and then meet one of these smooth profiteers and
loosen up on a million dollars like a cowhand with three months' pay
hitting a wet town. Of course it was all over when I read this letter.
* * * * *
I rolled another cigarette for the injured woman it being no time for
words.
"It just goes to show," she observed after the first relishing draft,
"that we should be honest, even with defectives like old Timmins. This
man in Seattle that keeps track of prices for me writes that the top of
the mule market has blown sky-high; that if I got anything looking at all
like a mule not to let it go off the place for less than two hundred
dollars, because mule buyers is sure desperate. Safety must of got the
same tip, only you can bet his correspondent put the full three cents
on the letter. Safety would never have trusted a strange postmaster with
the excess. Anyway he sold that bunch of rabbits a week later for one
hundred and seventy-five a head, thus adding twenty-two hundred and fifty
dollars of my money to his tainted fortune. You can imagine the pins and
needles he'd been on for a week, scared I'd get the tip and knowing if he
even mentioned them runts at any price whatever that I'd be wise at once.
That joke of the boys must of seemed heaven-sent to him.
"You ought to heard the lecture I read them fool punchers on common
honesty and how the biter is always bit. I scared 'em good; there hasn't
been an elephant on the place since that day. They're a chastened lot,
all right. I was chastened myself. I admit it. I don't hardly believe
I'll ever attempt anything crooked on old Safety again---and yet, I don't
know."
The lady viciously expelled the last smoke from her cigarette and again
took up the knitting.
"I don't really know but if there was some wanton, duplicity come up that
I could handle myself and not have to leave to that pack of amateur
thieves out in the bunk house, and it was dead sure and I didn't risk
doing more than two years' penal servitude--yes, I really don't know.
Even now mebbe all ain't over between us."
II
A LOVE STORY
I had for some time been noting a slight theatrical tinge to the
periodical literature supported by the big table in the Arrowhead living
room. Chiefly the table's burden is composed of trade journals of the
sober quality of the _Stockbreeder's Gazette_ or _Mine, Quarry & Derrick_
or the "Farmer's Almanac." But if, for example, one really tired of a
vivacious column headed "Chats on Fertilizers" one could, by shuffling
the litter, come upon a less sordid magazine frankly abandoned to the
interests of the screen drama.
The one I best recall has limned upon its cover in acceptable flesh tints
a fair young face of flawless beauty framed in a mass of curling golden
ringlets. The dewy eyes, shaded to mystery by lashes of uncommon length,
flash a wistful appeal that is faintly belied by the half-smiling lips
and the dimpling chin. The contours are delicate yet firm; a face of
haunting appeal--a face in which tears can be seldom but the sprightly
rain of April, and the smile, when it melts the sensitive lips, will yet
warn that hearts are made to ache and here is one not all too merry in
its gladness. It is the face of one of our famous screen beauties, and we
know, even from this tinted half-tone, that the fame has been deserved.
On one of those tired Arrowhead nights, inwardly debating the possible
discourtesy of an early bedding after ten wet miles of trout stream, I
came again and again to this compelling face of the sad smile and the
glad tears. It recalled an ideal feminine head much looked at in my
nonage. It was lithographed mostly in pink and was labeled "Tempest and
Sunshine." So I loitered by the big table, dreaming upon the poignant
perfections of this idol of a strange new art. I dreamed until awakened
by the bustling return of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, who
paused beside me to build an after-dinner cigarette, herself glancing
meantime at the flawless face on the magazine cover. I perceived
instantly that she also had been caught by its not too elusive charm.
"A beautiful face," I said.
Ma Pettengill took the magazine from me and studied the dainty thing.
"Yes, he's certainly beautiful," she assented. "He's as handsome as a
Greek goddess." Thus did the woman ambiguously praise that famous screen
star, J. Harold Armytage. "And the money he makes! His salary is one of
them you see compared with the President's so as to make the latter seem
a mere trifle. That's a funny thing. I bet at least eighteen million
grown people in this country never did know how much they was paying
their president till they saw it quoted beside some movie star's salary
in a piece that tells how he's getting about four times what we pay the
man in the White House. Ain't it a great business, though! Here's this
horrible male beauty that would have to be mighty careful to escape
extermination if he was anything but an actor. Being that, however, he
not only eludes the vengeance of a sickened populace, but he can come
out and be raw about it. Here, let me show you."
She turned to the page where J. Harold Armytage began to print a choice
few of the letters he daily received from admirers of the reputedly
frailer sex. She now read me one of these with lamentable efforts of
voice to satirize its wooing note: "My darling! I saw that dear face of
yours again to-night in All For Love! So noble and manly you were in the
sawmill scene where first you turn upon the scoundrelly millionaire
father of the girl you love, then save him from the dynamite bomb of the
strikers at the risk of your own. Oh, my dearest! Something tells me your
heart is as pure and sweet as your acting, that your dear face could not
mask an evil thought. Oh, my man of all the world! If only you and I
together might--"
It seemed enough. Ma Pettengill thought so too. The others were not
unlike it. The woman then read me a few of the replies of J. Harold
Armytage to his unknown worshippers. The famous star was invariably
modest and dignified in these. Tactfully, as a gentleman must in any
magazine of wide circulation, he deprecated the worship of these adoring
ones and kindly sought to persuade them that he was but a man--not a god,
even if he did chance to receive one of the largest salaries in the
business. The rogue! No god--with the glorious lines of his face there
on the cover to controvert this awkward disclaimer! His beauty flaunted
to famished hearts, what avail to protest weakly that they should put
away his image or even to hint, as now and again he was stern enough to
do, that their frankness bordered on the unmaidenly?
I called Ma Pettengill's attention to this engaging modesty. I said it
must be an affair of some delicacy to rebuff ardent and not too reticent
fair ones in a public print, and that I considered J. Harold Armytage to
have come out of it with a display of taste that could be called unusual.
The woman replied, with her occasional irrelevance, that if the parties
that hired him should read this stuff they probably wouldn't even then
take him out on the lot and have him bitterly kicked by a succession of
ten large labouring men who would take kindly to the task. She then once
more said that the movies was sure one great business, and turned in the
magazine to pleasanter pages on which one Vida Sommers, also a screen
idol, it seemed, gave warning and advice to young girls who contemplated
a moving-picture career.
Portraits of Vida Sommers in her best-known roles embellished these
pages. In all of the portraits she wept. In some the tears were visible;
in others they had to be guessed, the face being drawn by anguish. Her
feminine correspondents wished particularly to be told of the snares
and temptations besetting the path of the young girl who enters this
perilous career. Many of them seemed rather vague except upon this point.
They all seemed to be sure that snares and temptations would await them,
and would Vida Sommers please say how these could be avoided by young and
impressionable girls of good figure and appearance who were now waiting
on table at the American House in Centralia, Illinois, or accepting
temporary employment in mercantile establishments in Chicago, or merely
living at home in Zanesville, Ohio, amid conditions unbearably cramping
to their aspirations?
And Vida Sommers told every one of them not to consider the pictures but
as a final refuge from penury. She warned them that they would find the
life one of hard work and full of disappointments. It seemed that even
the snares and temptations were disappointing, being more easily evaded
than many of her correspondents appeared to suspect. She advised them all
to marry some good, true man and make a home for him. And surely none of
them could have believed the life to be a joyous one after studying these
sorrowful portraits of Vida Sommers.
"That's my little actress friend," said Ma Pettengill. "Doesn't she cry
something grand!"
"You've been cheating me," I answered. "I never knew you had a little
actress friend. How did you get her? And doesn't she ever play anything
cheerful?"
"Of course not! She only plays mothers, and you know what that means in
moving pictures. Ever see a moving-picture mother that had a chance to be
happy for more than the first ten feet of film? You certainly got to cry
to hold down that job. Ain't she always jolted quick in the first reel by
the husband getting all ruined up in Wall Street, or the child getting
stole, or the daughter that's just budding into womanhood running off
with a polished shoe-drummer with city ways, or the only son robbing a
bank, or husband taking up with a lady adventuress that lives across the
hall in the same flat and outdresses mother?
"Then it's one jolt after another for her till the last ten feet of the
last reel, when everything comes right somewhere on a ranch out in the
great clean West where husband or son has got to be a man again by
mingling with the honest-hearted drunken cowboys in their barroom
frolics, or where daughter has won back her womanhood and made a name for
herself by dancing the Nature dance in the Red Eye Saloon for rough but
tender-hearted miners that shower their gold on her when stewed. Only, in
this glad time of the last ten feet she still has to cry a-plenty because
the clouds have passed and she's Oh, so happy at last! Yes, sir; they
get mother going and coming. And when she ain't weeping she has to be
scared or mad or something that keeps her face busy. Here--I got some
programmes of new pieces Vida just sent me. You can see she's a great
actress; look at that one: 'Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?' And these
other two."
I looked and believed. The dramas were variously and pithily described
as The Picture with the Punch Powerful--The Smashing Five-Reel
Masterpiece--A Play of Peculiar Problems and Tense Situations--Six
Gripping Reels, 7,000 Feet and Every Foot a Punch! Vida Sommers, in
the scenes reproduced from these plays, had indeed a busy face. In the
picture captioned "Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?" the tiny golden-haired
girl is reproaching her father in evening dress. I read the opening lines
of the synopsis: "A young business man, who has been made successful
through his wife's money, is led to neglect her through pressure of
affairs, falls into the toils of a dancer in a public place and becomes
a victim of her habit, that of drinking perfume in her tea--"
But I had not the heart to follow this tragedy. In another, "The Woman
Pays--Powerful and Picturesque, a Virile Masterpiece of Red-Blooded
Hearts," Vida Sommers is powerfully hating her husband whom she has
confronted in the den of a sneering and superbly gowned adventuress
who declares that the husband must choose between them. Of course there
can be no doubt about the husband's choice. No sane movie actor would
hesitate a second. The caption says of Vida Sommers: "Her Love Has Turned
to Hate." It may be good acting, but it would never get her chosen by the
male of her species--the adventuress being what is known in some circles
as a pippin.
I studied still another of these documents--"Hearts Asunder." Vida
Sommers has sent her beautiful daughter to the spring for a pail of
water, though everyone in the audience must know that Gordon Balch, the
detestable villain, is lurking outside for precisely this to occur. The
synopsis beautiful says: "The mother now goes in search of her darling,
only to find her struggling in the grasp of Gordon Balch, who is trying
to force his attentions on her." This is where Vida Sommers has to look
frightened, though in a later picture one sees that her fright changed
to "A Mother's Honest Rage." The result is that Gordon Balch gets his,
and gets it good. The line under his last appearance is "The End of a
Misspent Life." Vida Sommers here registers pity. As Ma Pettengill had
said, her face seemed never to have a moment's rest.
While I studied these exhibits my hostess had not been silent upon the
merits of her little actress friend. Slowly she made me curious as to the
origin and inner life of this valued member of an exalted profession.
"Yes, sir; there she is at the top, drawing down big money, with a
nice vine-clad home in this film town, furnished from a page in a
woman's magazine, with a big black limousine like a hearse--all but
the plumes--and a husband that she worships the ground he walks on.
Everything the heart can desire, even to being mother to some of the
very saddest persons ever seen on a screen. It shows what genius will
do for a woman when she finds out what kind of genius she's got and is
further goaded by the necessity of supporting a husband in the style to
which he has been accustomed by a doting father. She's some person now,
let me tell you.