"What did you do?"
Jimmie Time stayed laconic.
"Left him there--that's all!"
It was arid, yet somehow informing. It conveyed to me that a marshal had
been cleverly put to needing a new deputy.
"Burying ground?" I guessed.
"That's all!" He laughed venomously--a short, dry, restrained laugh.
"They give me a nickname," said he. "They called me Little Sure Shot. No
wonder they did! Ho! I should think they would of called me something
like that." He lifted his voice. "Hey! Boogles!"
I had been conscious of a stooping figure in the adjacent vegetable
garden. It now became erect, a figure of no distinction--short, rounded,
decked in carelessly worn garments of no elegance. It slouched
inquiringly toward us between rows of sprouted corn. Then I saw that the
head surmounting it was a noble head. It was uncovered, burnished to a
half circle of grayish fringe; but it was shaped in the grand manner and
well borne, and the full face of it was beautified by features of a very
Roman perfection. It was the face of a judge of the Supreme Court or
the face of an ideal senator. His large grave eyes bathed us in a
friendly regard; his full lips of an orator parted with leisurely and
promising unction. I awaited courtly phrases, richly rounded periods.
"A regular hell-cat--what he is!"
Thus vocalized the able lips. Jimmie Time glowed modestly.
"Show him how I can shoot," said he.
The amazing Boogies waddled--yet with dignity--to a point ten paces
distant, drew a coin from the pocket of his dingy overalls, and spun it
to the blue of heaven. Ere it fell the deadly weapon bore swiftly on it
and snapped.
"Crack!" said the marksman grimly.
His assistant recovered the coin, scrutinized it closely, rubbed a fat
thumb over its supposedly dented surface, and again spun it. The
desperado had turned his back. He drew as he wheeled, and again I was
given to understand that his aim had been faultless.
"Good Little Sure Shot!" declaimed Boogies fulsomely.
"Hold it in your hand oncet," directed Little Sure Shot. The intrepid
assistant gallantly extended the half dollar at arm's length between
thumb and finger and averted his statesman's face with practiced
apprehension. "Crack!" said Little Sure Shot, and the coin seemed to be
struck from the unscathed hand. "Only nicked the aidge of it," said he,
genially deprecating. "I don't like to take no chancet with the lad's
mitt."
It had indeed been a pretty display of sharpshooting--and noiseless.
"Had me nervous, you bet, first time he tried that," called Boogles.
"Didn't know his work then. Thought sure he'd wing me."
Jimmie Time loftily ejected imaginary shells from his trusty firearm and
seemed to expel smoke from its delicate interior. Boogies waddled his
approach.
"Any time they back Little Sure Shot up against the wall they want to
duck," said he warmly. "He has 'em hard to find in about a minute. Tell
him about that fresh depity marshal, Jimmie."
"I already did," said Jimmie.
"Ain't he the hell-cat?" demanded Boogles, mopping a brow that Daniel
Webster would have observed with instant and perhaps envious respect.
"I been a holy terror in my time, all right, all right!" admitted the
hero. "Never think it to look at me though. One o' the deceivin' kind
till I'm put upon; then--good-night!"
"Jest like that!" murmured Boogles.
"Buryin' ground--that's all." The lips of the bad man shut grimly on
this.
"Say," demanded Boogles, "on the level, ain't he the real Peruvian
doughnuts? Don't he jest make 'em all hunt their--" The tribute was
unfinished.
"You ol' Jim! You ol' Jim Time!" Shrilly this came from Lew Wee, Chinese
cook of the Arrowhead framed in the kitchen doorway of the ranch house.
He brandished a scornful and commanding dish towel at the bad man, who
instantly and almost cravenly cowered under the distant assault. The
garment of his old bad past fell from him, leaving him as one exposed in
the market-place to the scornful towels of Chinamen. "You run, ol' Jim
Time! How you think catch 'um din' not have wood?"
"Now I was jest goin' to," mumbled Jimmie Time; and he amazingly slunk
from the scene of his late triumphs toward the open front of a
woodhouse.
His insulter turned back to the kitchen with a final affronting flourish
of the towel. The whisper of Boogles came hoarsely to me: "Some of these
days Little Sure Shot'll put a dose o' cold lead through that Chink's
heart."
"Is he really dangerous?" I demanded.
"Dangerous!" Boogles choked warmly on this. "Let me tell you, that old
boy is the real Peruvian doughnuts, and no mistake! Some day there won't
be so many Chinks round this dump. No, sir-ee! That little cutthroat'll
have another notch in his gun."
The situation did indeed seem to brim with the cheerfullest promise; yet
something told me that Little Sure Shot was too good, too perfect.
Something warned me that he suffered delusions of grandeur--that he
fell, in fact, somewhat short of being the real doughnuts, either of a
Peruvian or any other valued sort.
Nor had many hours passed ere it befell emphatically even so. There had
been the evening meal, followed by an hour or so of the always pleasing
and often instructive talk of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill,
who has largely known life for sixty years and found it entertaining and
good. And we had parted at an early nine, both tired from the work and
the play that had respectively engaged us the day long.
My candle had just been extinguished when three closely fired shots
cracked the vast stillness of the night. Ensued vocal explosions of a
curdling shrillness from the back of the house. One instantly knew them
to be indignant and Chinese. Caucasian ears gathered this much. I looked
from an open window as the impassioned cries came nearer. The lucent
moon of the mountains flooded that side of the house, and starkly into
its light from round the nearest corner struggled Lew Wee, the Chinaman.
He shone refulgent, being yet in the white or full-dress uniform of his
calling.
In one hand he held the best gun of Jimmie Time; in the other--there
seemed to be a well-gripped connection with the slack of a buckskin
shirt--writhed the alleged real doughnuts of a possibly Peruvian
character. The captor looked aloft and remained vocal, waving the gun,
waving Jimmie Time, playing them together as cymbals, never loosening
them. It was fine. It filled the eye and appeased the deepest longings
of the ear.
Then from a neighbouring window projected the heroic head and shoulders
of my hostess, and there boomed into the already vivacious libretto a
passionate barytone, or thereabout, of sterling timbre.
"What in the name of--"
I leave it there. To do so is not only kind but necessary. The most
indulgent censor that ever guarded the columns of a print intended for
young and old about the evening lamp would swiftly delete from this
invocation, if not the name of Deity itself, at least the greater number
of the attributes with which she endowed it. A few were conventional
enough, but they served only to accentuate others that were too hastily
selected in the heat of this crisis. Enough to say that the lady
overbore by sheer mass of tone production the strident soprano of Lew
Wee, controlling it at length to a lucid disclosure of his grievance.
From the doorway of his kitchen, inoffensively proffering a final
cigarette to the radiant night, he had been the target of three shots
with intent to kill. He submitted the weapon. He submitted the writhing
assassin.
"I catch 'um!" he said effectively, and rested his case.
"Now--I aimed over his head." It was Jimmie Time alias Little Sure Shot,
and he whimpered the words. "I jest went to play a sell on him."
The voice of the judge boomed wrathfully on this:
"You darned pestering mischief, you! Ain't I forbid you time and again
ever to load them guns? Where'd you get the ca'tridges?"
"Now--I found 'em," pleaded the bad man. "I did so; I found 'em."
"Cooned 'em, you mean!" thundered the judge. "You cooned 'em from Buck
or Sandy. Don't tell me, you young reprobate!"
"He all like bad man," submitted the prosecution. "I tell 'um catch
stlovewood; he tell 'um me: 'You go to haitch!' I tell 'um: 'You ownself
go to haitch! He say: 'I flan you my gun plitty soon!' He do."
"I aimed over the coward's head," protested the defendant.
"Can happen!" sanely objected the prosecution.
"Ain't I told you what I'd do if you loaded them guns?" roared the
judge. "Gentle, limping, baldheaded--" [Deleted by censor.] "How many
more times I got to tell you? Now you know what you'll get. You'll get
your needings--that's what you'll get! All day to-morrow! You hear me?
You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow! Put 'em on first thing in the morning
and wear 'em till sundown. No hiding out, neither! Wear 'em where folks
can see what a bad boy you are. And swearing, too! I got to be 'shamed
of you! Yes, sir! Everybody'll know how 'shamed I am to have a tough kid
like you on the place. I won't be able to hold my head up. You wear
'em!"
"I--I--I aimed above--" Jimmie Time broke down. He was weeping bitterly.
His captor released him with a final shake, and he brought a forearm to
his streaming eyes.
"You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow!" again thundered the judge as the
culprit sobbed a stumbling way into obscurity.
"You'self go to haitch!" the unrelenting complainant called after him.
The judge effected a rumbling withdrawal. The night was again calm. Then
I slept on the problem of the Arrowhead's two-gun bad man. It seemed now
pretty certain that the fatuous Boogles had grossly overpraised him. I
must question his being the real doughnuts of any sort--even the
mildest--much less the real Peruvian. But what was "'em" that in
degrading punishment and to the public shame of the Arrowhead he must
wear on the morrow? What, indeed, could "'em" be?
I woke, still pondering the mystery. Nor could I be enlightened during
my breakfast, for this was solitary, my hostess being long abroad to far
places of the Arrowhead, and the stolid mask of Lew Wee inviting no
questions.
Breakfast over, I stationed myself in the bracing sunlight that warmed
the east porch and aimlessly overhauled a book of flies. To three that
had proved most popular in the neighbouring stream I did small bits of
mending, ever with a questing eye on adjacent outbuildings, where Little
Sure Shot--_née_ Time--might be expected to show himself, wearing "'em."
A blank hour elapsed. I no longer affected occupation with the flies.
Jimmie Time was irritating me. Had he not been specifically warned to
"wear 'em" full shamefully in the public eye? Was not the public eye
present, avid? Boogles I saw intermittently among beanpoles in the
garden. He appeared to putter, to have no care or system in his labour.
And at moments I noticed he was dropping all pretense of this to stand
motionless, staring intently at the shut door of the stable.
Could his fallen idol be there, I wondered? Purposefully I also watched
the door of the stable. Presently it opened slightly; then, with evident
infinite caution, it was pushed outward until it hung half yawning. A
palpitant moment we gazed, Boogles and I. Then shot from the stable
gloom an astounding figure in headlong flight. Its goal appeared to be
the bunk house fifty yards distant; but its course was devious, laid
clearly with a view to securing such incidental brief shelter as would
be afforded by the corral wall, by a meagre clump of buck-brush, by a
wagon, by a stack of hay. Good time was made, however. The fugitive
vanished into the bunk house and the door of that structure was slammed
to. But now the small puzzle I had thought to solve had grown to be, in
that brief space--easily under eight seconds--a mystery of enormous, of
sheerly inhuman dimensions. For the swift and winged one had been all
too plainly a correctly uniformed messenger boy of the Western Union
Telegraph Company--that blue uniform with metal buttons, with the
corded red at the trouser sides, the flat cap fronted by a badge of
nickel--unthinkable, yet there. And the speedy bearer of this scenic
investiture had been the desperate, blood-letting, two-gun bad man of
the Arrowhead.
It was a complication not to be borne with any restraint. I hastened to
stand before the shut door of the sanctuary. It slept in an unpromising
stillness. Invincibly reticent it seemed, even when the anguished face
of Jimmie Time, under that incredible cap with its nickeled badge,
wavered an instant back of the grimy window--wavered and vanished with
an effect of very stubborn finality. I would risk no defeat there. I
passed resolutely on to Boogles, who now most diligently trained up
tender young bean vines in the way they should go.
"Why does he hide in there?" I demanded in a loud, indignant voice. I
was to have no nonsense about it.
Boogles turned on me the slow, lofty, considering regard of a United
States senator submitting to photography for publication in a press that
has no respect for private rights. He lacked but a few clothes and the
portico of a capitol. Speech became immanent in him. One should not have
been surprised to hear him utter decorative words meant for the
rejoicing and incitement of voters. Yet he only said--or started to say:
"Little Sure Shot'll get that Chink yet! I tell you, now, that old boy
is sure the real Peruvian--"
This was absurdly too much. I then and there opened on Boogles, opened
flooding gates of wrath and scorn on him--for him and for his idol of
clay who, I flatly told him, could not be the real doughnuts of any
sort. As for his being the real Peruvian--Faugh!
Often I had wished to test in speech the widely alleged merits of this
vocable. I found it do all that has been claimed for it. Its effect on
Boogles was so withering that I used it repeatedly in the next three
minutes. I even faughed him twice in succession, which is very insulting
and beneficial indeed, and has a pleasant feel on the lips.
"And now then," I said, "if you don't give me the truth of this matter
here and now, one of us two is going to be mighty sorry for it."
In the early moments of my violence Boogles had protested weakly; then
he began to quiver perilously. On this I soothed him, and at the
precisely right moment I cajoled. I lured him to the bench by the corral
gate, and there I conferred costly cigarettes on him as man to man.
Discreetly then I sounded for the origins of a certain bad man who had a
way--even though they might crease him--of leaving deputy marshals where
he found them. Boogles smoked one of the cigarettes before he succumbed;
but first:
"Let me git my work," said he, and was off to the bunk house.
I observed his part in an extended parley before the door was opened to
him. He came to me on the bench a moment later, bearing a ball of
scarlet yarn, a large crochet hook of bone, and something begun in the
zephyr but as yet without form.
"I'm making the madam a red one for her birthday," he confided.
He bent his statesman's head above the task and wrought with nimble
fingers the while he talked. It was difficult, this talk of his,
scattered, fragmentary; and his mind would go from it, his voice expire
untimely. He must be prompted, recalled, questioned. His hands worked
with a very certain skill, but in his narrative he dropped stitches.
Made to pick these up, the result was still a droning monotony burdened
with many irrelevancies. I am loath to transcribe his speech. It were
better reported with an eye strictly to salience.
You may see, then--and I hope with less difficulty than I had in
seeing--Jimmie Time and Boogles on night duty at the front of the little
Western Union Office off Park Row in the far city of New York. The law
of that city is tender to the human young. Night messenger boys must be
adults. It is one of the preliminary shocks to the visitor--to ring for
the messenger boy of tradition and behold in his uniform a venerable
gentleman with perhaps a flowing white beard. I still think Jimmie Time
and Boogles were beating the law--on a technicality. Of course Jimmie
was far descended into the vale of years, and even Boogles was
forty--but adults!
It is three o'clock of a warm spring morning. The two legal adults
converse in whispers, like bad boys kept after school. They whisper so
as not to waken the manager, a blasé, mature youth of twenty who sleeps
expertly in the big chair back of the railing. They whisper of the
terrific hazards and the precarious rewards of their adventurous
calling. The hazards are nearly all provided by the youngsters who come
on the day watch--hardy ruffians of sixteen or so who not only "pick on"
these two but, with sportive affectations, often rob them, when they
change from uniform to civilian attire, of any spoil the night may have
brought them. They are powerless against these aggressions. They can but
whisper their indignation.
Boogles eyed the sleeping manager.
"I struck it fine to-night, Jimmie!" he whispered. Jimmie mutely
questioned. "Got a whole case note. You know that guy over to the
newspaper office--the one that's such a tank drama--he had to send a
note up to a girl in a show that he couldn't be there."
"That tank drama? Sure, I know him. He kids me every time he's stewed."
"He kids me, too, something fierce; and he give me the case note."
"Them strong arms'll cop it on you when they get here," warned Jimmie.
"Took my collar off and hid her on the inside of it. Oh, I know tricks!"
"Chee! You're all to the Wall Street!"
"I got to look out for my stepmother, too. She'd crown me with a chair
if she thought I held out on her. Beans me about every day just for
nothing anyway."
"Don't you stand for it!"
"Yah! All right for you to talk. You're the lucky guy. You're an orphan.
S'pose you had a stepmother! I wish I was an orphan."
Jimmie swelled with the pride of orphanship.
"Yes; I'd hate to have any parents knocking me round," he said. "But if
it ain't a stepmother then it's somebody else that beans you. A guy in
this burg is always getting knocked round by somebody."
"Read some more of the novel," pleaded Boogles, to change the
distressing topic.
Jimmie drew a tattered paper romance from the pocket of his faded coat
and pushed the cap back from his seamed old forehead. It went back
easily, having been built for a larger head than his. He found the place
he had marked at the end of his previous half-hour with literature.
Boogles leaned eagerly toward him. He loved being read to. Doing it
himself was too slow and painful:
"'No,' said our hero in a clear, ringing voice; 'all your tainted gold
would not keep me here in the foul, crowded city. I must have the free,
wild life of the plains, the canter after the Texas steers, and the
fierce battles with my peers. For me the boundless, the glorious West!'"
"Chee! It must be something grand--that wild life!" interrupted
Boogles. "That's the real stuff--the cowboy and trapper on them
peraries, hunting bufflers and Injuns. I seen a film--"
Jimmie Time frowned at this. He did not like interruptions. He firmly
resumed the tale:
"With a gesture of disdain our hero waved aside the proffered gold of
the scoundrelly millionaire and dashed down the stairway of the proud
mansion to where his gallant steed, Midnight, was champing at the
hitching post. At that moment--"
Romance was snatched from the hands of Jimmie Time. The manager towered
above him.
"Ain't I told you guys not to be taking up the company's time with them
novels?" he demanded. He sternly returned to his big chair behind the
railing, where he no less sternly took up his own perusal of the
confiscated tale.
"The big stiff!" muttered Jimmie. "That's the third one he's copped on
me this week. A kid in this choint ain't got no rights! I got a good
notion to throw 'em down cold and go with the Postal people."
"Never mind! I'll blow you to an ice cream after work," consoled
Boogles.
"Ice cream!" Jimmie Time was contemptuous. "I want the free, wild life
of the boundless peraries. I want b'ar steaks br'iled on the glowing
coals of the camp fire. I want to be Little Sure Shot, trapper, scout,
and guide--"
"Next out!" yelled the manager. "Hustle now!"
Jimmie Time was next out. He hustled sullenly.
Boogles, alone, slept fitfully on his bench until the young thugs of the
day watch straggled in. Then he achieved the change of his uniform to
civilian garments, with only the accustomed minor maltreatment at the
hands of these tormentors. True, with sportive affectations--yet with
deadly intentness--they searched him for possible loot; but only his
pockets. His dollar bill, folded inside his collar, went unfound. With
assumed jauntiness he strolled from the outlaws' den and safely reached
the street.
The gilding on the castellated towers of the tallest building in the
world dazzled his blinking, foolish eyes. That was a glorious summit
which sang to the new sun, but no higher than his own elation at the
moment. Had he not come off with his dollar? He found balm and a tender
stimulus in the morning air--an air for dreams and revolt. Boogles felt
this as thousands of others must have felt it who were yet tamely
issuing from subway caverns and the Brooklyn Bridge to be wage slaves.
A block away from the office he encountered Jimmie Time, who seemed to
await him importantly. He seethed with excitement.
"I got one, too!" he called. "That tank drama he sent another note
uptown to a restaurant where a party was, and he give me a case note,
too."
He revealed it; and when Boogles withdrew his own treasure the two were
lovingly compared and admired. Nothing in all the world can be so foul
to the touch as the dollar bill that circulates in New York, but these
two were intrepidly fondled.
"I ain't going back to change," said Jimmie Time. "Them other kids would
cop it on me."
"Have some cigarettes," urged Boogies, and royally bought them--with
gilded tips, in a beautiful casket.
"I had about enough of their helling," declared Jimmie, still glowing
with a fine desperation.
They sought the William Street Tunnel under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was
cool and dark there. One might smoke and take his ease. And plan! They
sprawled on the stone pavement and smoked largely.
"Chee! If we could get out West and do all them fine things!" mused
Boogies.
"Let's!" said Jimmie Time.
"Huh!" Boogies gasped blankly at this.
"Let's beat it!"
"Chee!" said Boogies. He stared at this bolder spirit with startled
admiration.
"Me--I'm going," declared Jimmie Time stoutly, and waited.
Boogies wavered a tremulous moment.
"I'm going with you," he managed at last.
He blurted the words. They had to rush out to beat down his native
caution with quick blows.
"Listen!" said Jimmie Time impressively. "We got money enough to start.
Then we just strike out for the peraries."
"Like the guy in the story!" Boogies glowed at the adept who before his
very eyes was turning a beautiful dream into stark reality. He was
praying that his own courage to face it would endure.
"You hurry home," commanded Jimmie, "and cop an axe and all the grub you
can lay your hands on."
Boogies fell from the heights as he had feared he would.
"Aw, chee!" he said sanely. "And s'pose me stepmother gets her lamps on
me! Wouldn't she bean me? Sure she would!"
"Bind her and gag her," said Jimmie promptly. "What's one weak woman?"
"Yah! She's a hellion and you know it."
"Listen!" said Jimmie sternly. "If you're going into the wild and
lawless life of the peraries with me you got to learn to get things.
Jesse James or Morgan's men could get me that axe and that grub, and not
make one-two-three of it."
"Them guys had practice--and likely they never had to go against their
stepmothers."
"Do I go alone, then?"
"Well, now--"
"Will you or won't you?"
Boogies drew a fateful breath.
"I'll take a chance. You wait here. If I ain't back in one hour you'll
know I been murdered."
"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time with the air of an outlaw chief. "Be
off at once."
Boogies was off. And Boogies was back in less than the hour with a
delectable bulging meal sack. He was trembling but radiant.
"She seen me gitting away and she yelled her head off," he gasped; "but
you bet I never stopped. I just thought of Jesse James and General
Grant, and run like hell!"
"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time; and then, with a sudden gleam of the
practical, he inventoried the commissary and quartermaster supplies in
the sack. He found them to be: One hatchet; one well-used boiled
hambone; six greasy sugared crullers; four dill pickles; a bottle of
catchup; two tomatoes all but obliterated in transit; two loaves of
bread; a flatiron.
Jimmie cast the last item from him.
"Wh'd you bring that for?" he demanded.
"I don't know," confessed Boogies. "I just put it in. Mebbe I was afraid
she'd throw it at me when I was making my getaway. It'll be good for
cracking nuts if we find any on the peraries. I bet they have nuts!"
"All right, then. You can carry it if you want to, pard."
Jimmie thrust the bundle into Boogies' arms and valiantly led a
desperate way to the North River. Boogies panted under his burden as
they dodged impatient taxicabs. So they came into the maze of dock
traffic by way of Desbrosses Street. The eyes of both were lit by
adventure. Jimmie pushed through the crowd on the wharf to a ticket
office. A glimpse through a door of the huge shed had given him
inspiration. No common ferryboats for them! He had seen the stately
river steamer, _Robert Fulton_, gay with flags and bunting, awaiting the
throng of excursionists. He recklessly bought tickets. So far, so good.
A momentous start had been made.
At this very interesting point in his discourse to me, however, Boogies
began to miss explosions too frequently. From the disorderly jumble of
his narrative to this moment I believe I have brought something like the
truth; I have caused the widely scattered parts to cohere. After this I
could make little of his maunderings.
They were on the crowded boat and the boat steamed up the Hudson River;
and they disembarked at a thriving Western town--which, I gather, was
Yonkers--because Boogies feared his stepmother might trace him to this
boat, and because Jimmie Time became convinced that detectives were on
his track, wanting him for the embezzlement of a worn but still
practicable uniform of the Western Union Telegraph Company. So it was
agreed that they should take to the trackless forest, where there are
ways of throwing one's pursuers off the scent; where they would travel
by night, guided by the stars, and lay up by day, subsisting on spring
water and a little pemmican--source undisclosed. They were not going to
be taken alive--that was understood.
They hurried through the streets of this thriving Western town,
ultimately boarding an electric car--with a shrewd eye out for the
hellhounds of the law; and the car took them to the beginning of the
frontier, where they found the trackless forest. They reached the depths
of this forest after climbing a stone wall; and Jimmie Time said the
West looked good to him and that he could already smell the "b'ar steaks
br'iling."
Plain enough still, perhaps; but immediately it seemed that a princess
had for some time been sharing this great adventure. She was a beautiful
golden-haired princess, though quite small, and had flowers in her hair
and put some in the cap of Jimmie Time--behind the nickel badge--and
said she would make him her court dwarf or jester or knight, or
something; only the scout who was with her said this was rather silly
and that they had better be getting home or they knew very well what
would happen to them. But when they got lost Jimmie Time looked at this
scout's rifle and said it was a first-class rifle, and would knock an
Indian or a wild animal silly.
And the scout smoked a cigarette and got sick by it, and cried something
fierce; so they made a fire, and the princess didn't get sick when she
smoked hers, but told them a couple of bully stories, like reading in a
book, and ate every one of the greasy sugared crullers, because she was
a genuine princess, and Boogies thought at this time that maybe the
boundless West wasn't what it was cracked up to be; so, after they met
the madam, the madam said, well, if they was wanting to go out West they
might as well come along here; and they said all right--as long as they
was wanting to go out West anyway, why, they might as well come along
with her as with anybody else.
And that Chink would mighty soon find out if Little Sure Shot wasn't the
real Peruvian doughnuts, because that old murderer would sure have him
hard to find, come sundown; still, he was glad he had come along with
the madam, because back there it wasn't any job for you, account of
getting too fat for the uniform, with every one giving you the laugh
that way--and they wouldn't get you a bigger one--.
I left Boogies then, though he seemed not to know it. His needle worked
swiftly on the red one he was making for the madam, and his aimless,
random phrases seemed to flow as before; but I knew now where to apply
for the details that had been too many for his slender gift of
narrative.
At four that afternoon Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, accompanied by one
Buck Devine, a valued retainer, rode into the yard and dismounted. She
at once looked searchingly about her. Then she raised her voice, which
is a carrying voice even when not raised: "You, Jimmie Time!"
Once was enough. The door of the bunk house swung slowly open and the
disgraced one appeared in all his shameful panoply. The cap was pulled
well down over a face hopelessly embittered. The shrunken little figure
drooped.
"None of that hiding out!" admonished his judge. "You keep standing
round out here where decent folks can look at you and see what a bad
boy you are."
With a glance she identified me as one of the decent she would have
edified. Jimmie Time muttered evilly in undertones and slouched forward,
head down.
"Ain't he the hostile wretch?" called Buck Devine, who stood with the
horses. He spoke with a florid but false admiration.