The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs.
Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts. As a
trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this
excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable. But
standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his
peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear
addressed as Jimmie Time. He alone piqued as well as interested. There
was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me.
I have said he is a man; but wait! The years have had him, have scoured
and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a
boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been
misused for years threescore. Time has basely done all but age him. So
much for the wastrel as Nature has left him. But Art has furthered the
piquant values of him as a spectacle.
In dress, speech, and demeanour Jimmie seems to be of the West,
Western--of the old, bad West of informal vendetta, when a man's
increase of years might lie squarely on his quickness in the "draw";
when he went abundantly armed by day and slept lightly at
night--trigger fingers instinctively crooked. Of course such days have
very definitely passed; wherefore the engaging puzzle of certain
survivals in Jimmie Time--for I found him still a two-gun man. He wore
them rather consciously sagging from his lean hips--almost pompously, it
seemed. Nor did he appear properly unconscious of his remaining
attire--of the broad-brimmed hat, its band of rattlesnake skin; of the
fringed buckskin shirt, opening gallantly across his pinched throat; of
his corduroy trousers, fitting bedraggled; of his beautiful beaded
moccasins.
He was perfect in detail--and yet he at once struck me as being too
acutely aware of himself. Could this suspicion ensue, I wondered, from
the circumstance that the light duties he discharged in and about the
Arrowhead Ranch house were of a semidomestic character; from a marked
incongruity in the sight of him, full panoplied for homicide, bearing
armfuls of wood to the house; or, with his wicked hat pulled desperately
over a scowling brow, and still with his flaunt of weapons, engaging a
sinkful of soiled dishes in the kitchen under the eyes of a mere unarmed
Chinaman who sat by and smoked an easy cigarette at him, scornful of
firearms?
There were times, to be sure, when Jimmie's behaviour was in nice accord
with his dreadful appearance--as when I chanced to observe him late the
second afternoon of my arrival. Solitary in front of the bunk house, he
rapidly drew and snapped his side arms at an imaginary foe some paces
in front of him. They would be simultaneously withdrawn from their
holsters, fired from the hip and replaced, the performer snarling
viciously the while. The weapons were unloaded, but I inferred that the
foe crumpled each time.
Then the old man varied the drama, vastly increasing the advantage of
the foe and the peril of his own emergency by turning a careless back on
the scene. The carelessness was only seeming. Swiftly he wheeled, and
even as he did so twin volleys came from the hip. It was spirited--the
weapons seemed to smoke; the smile of the marksman was evil and
masterly. Beyond all question the foe had crumpled again, despite his
tremendous advantage of approach.
I drew gently near before the arms were again holstered and permitted
the full exposure of my admiration for this readiness of retort under
difficulties. The puissant one looked up at me with suspicion, hostile
yet embarrassed. I stood admiring ingenuously, stubborn in my
fascination. Slowly I won him. The coldness in his bright little eyes
warmed to awkward but friendly apology.
"A gun fighter lets hisself git stiff," he winningly began; "then, first
thing he knows, some fine day--crack! Like that! All his own fault, too,
'cause he ain't kep' in trim." He jauntily twirled one of the heavy
revolvers on a forefinger. "Not me, though, pard! Keep m'self up and
comin', you bet! Ketch me not ready to fan the old forty-four! I guess
not! Some has thought they could. Oh, yes; plenty has thought they
could. Crack! Like that!" He wheeled, this time fatally intercepting the
foe as he treacherously crept round a corner of the bunk house. "Buryin'
ground for you, mister! That's all--bury-in' ground!"
The desperado replaced one of the weapons and patted the other with
grisly affection. In the excess of my admiration I made bold to reach
for it. He relinquished it to me with a mother's yearning. And all too
legible in the polished butt of the thing were notches! Nine sinister
notches I counted--not fresh notches, but emphatic, eloquent, chilling.
I thrust the bloody record back on its gladdened owner.
"Never think it to look at me?" said he as our eyes hung above that grim
bit of bookkeeping.
"Never!" I warmly admitted.
"Me--I always been one of them quiet, mild-mannered ones that you
wouldn't think butter would melt in their mouth--jest up to a certain
point. Lots of 'em fooled that way about me--jest up to a certain point,
mind you--then, crack! Buryin' ground--that's all! Never go huntin'
trouble--understand? But when it's put on me--say!"
He lovingly replaced the weapon--with its mortuary statistics--doffed
the broad-brimmed hat with its snake-skin garniture, and placed a
forefinger athwart an area of his shining scalp which is said by a
certain pseudoscience to shield several of man's more spiritual
attributes. The finger traced an ancient but still evil looking scar.
"One creased me there," he confessed--"a depity marshal--that time they
had a reward out for me, dead or alive."