"Now you tell in your own way how this trouble first begin," persisted
Pete rather astonishingly. He seemed to quote from memory.
Once more I yawned, turning coldly away.
"You tell in your own words," he was again gently urging; but on the
instant his axe began to rain blows upon the log at his feet.
Sounds of honest toil were once more to be heard in the wood lot; and,
though I could not hear the other, I surmised that the sledge of Uncle
Abner now rang merrily upon his anvil. Both he and Pete had doubtless
noted at the same moment the approach of Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill,
who was spurring her jaded roan up the long rise from the creek bottom.
* * * * *
My stalwart hostess, entirely masculine to the eye from a little
distance, strode up from the corral, waved a quirt at me in greeting,
indicated by another gesture that she was dusty and tired, and vanished
briskly within the ranch house. Half an hour later she joined me in the
living-room, where I had trifled with ancient magazines and stock
journals on the big table. Laced boots, riding breeches, and army shirt
had gone for a polychrome and trailing tea gown, black satin slippers,
flashing rhinestone rosettes, and silk stockings of a sinful scarlet.
She wore a lace boudoir cap, plenteously beribboned, and her sunburned
nose had been lavishly powdered. She looked now merely like an indulged
matron whose most poignant worry would be a sick Pomeranian or
overnight losses at bridge. She wished to know whether I would have tea
with her. I would.
Tea consisted of bottled beer from the spring house, half a ham, and a
loaf of bread. It should be said that her behaviour toward these
dainties, when they had been assembled, made her seem much less the worn
social leader. There was practically no talk for ten active minutes. A
high-geared camera would have caught everything of value in the scene.
It was only as I decanted a second bottle of beer for the woman that she
seemed to regain consciousness of her surroundings. The spirit of her
first attack upon the food had waned. She did fashion another sandwich
of a rugged pattern, but there was a hint of the dilettante in her work.
And now she spoke. Her gaze upon the magazines of yesteryear massed at
the lower end of the table, she declared they must all be scrapped,
because they too painfully reminded her of a dentist's waiting-room. She
wondered if there mustn't be a law against a dentist having in his
possession a magazine less than ten years old. She suspected as much.
"There I'll be sitting in Doc Martingale's office waiting for him to
kill me by inches, and I pick up a magazine to get my mind off my fate
and find I'm reading a timely article, with illustrations, about
Cervera's fleet being bottled up in the Harbour of Santiago. I bet he's
got Godey's Lady's Book for 1862 round there, if you looked for it."
Now a brief interlude for the ingestion of malt liquor, followed by a
pained recital of certain complications of the morning.
"That darned one-horse post-office down to Kulanche! What do you think?
I wanted to send a postal card to the North American Cleaning and Dye
Works, at Red Gap, for some stuff they been holding out on me a month,
and that office didn't have a single card in stock--nothing but some of
these fancy ones in a rack over on the grocery counter; horrible things
with pictures of brides and grooms on 'em in coloured costumes, with
sickening smiles on their faces, and others with wedding bells ringing
out or two doves swinging in a wreath of flowers--all of 'em having
mushy messages underneath; and me having to send this card to the North
American Cleaning and Dye Works, which is run by Otto Birdsall, a
smirking old widower, that uses hair oil and perfumery, and imagines
every woman in town is mad about him.
"The mildest card I could find was covered with red and purple
cauliflowers or something, and it said in silver print: 'With fondest
remembrance!' Think of that going through the Red Gap post-office to be
read by old Mis' Terwilliger, that some say will even open letters that
look interesting--to say nothing of its going to this fresh old Otto
Birdsall, that tried to hold my hand once not so many years ago.
"You bet I made the written part strong enough not to give him or any
other party a wrong notion of my sentiments toward him. At that, I guess
Otto wouldn't make any mistake since the time I give him hell last
summer for putting my evening gowns in his show window every time he'd
clean one, just to show off his work. It looked so kind of indelicate
seeing an empty dress hung up there that every soul in town knew
belonged to me.
"What's that? Oh, I wrote on the card that if this stuff of mine don't
come up on the next stage I'll be right down there, and when I'm through
handling him he'll be able to say truthfully that he ain't got a gray
hair in his head. I guess Otto will know my intentions are honest, in
spite of that 'fondest remembrance.'
"Then, on top of that, I had a run-in with the Swede for selling his
rotten whiskey to them poor Injin boys that had a fight last night after
they got tight on it. The Swede laughs and says nobody can prove he sold
'em a drop, and I says that's probably true. I says it's always hard to
prove things. 'For instance,' I says, 'if they's another drop of liquor
sold to an Injin during this haying time, and a couple or three nights
after that your nasty dump here is set fire to in six places, and some
cowardly assassin out in the brush picks you off with a rifle when you
rush out--it will be mighty hard to prove that anybody did that, too;
and you not caring whether it's proved or not, for that matter.
[Illustration: "THE SWEDE BRISTLES UP AND SAYS: 'THAT SOUNDS LIKE
FIGHTING TALK!' I SAYS: 'YOUR HEARING IS PERFECT.'"]
"'In fact,' I says, 'I don't suppose anybody would take the trouble to
prove it, even if it could be easy proved. You'd note a singular lack of
public interest in it--if you was spared to us. I guess about as far as
an investigation would ever get--the coroner's jury would say it was the
work of Pete's brother-in-law; and you know what that would mean.' The
Swede bristles up and says: 'That sounds like fighting talk!' I says:
'Your hearing is perfect.' I left him thinking hard."
"Pete's brother-in-law? That reminds me," I said. "Pete was telling me
about him just--I mean during his lunch hour; but he had to go to work
again just at the beginning of something that sounded good--about the
time he was going to kill a bright lawyer. What was that?"
The glass was drained and Ma Pettengill eyed the inconsiderable remains
of the ham with something like repugnance. She averted her face from it,
lay back in the armchair she had chosen, and rolled a cigarette, while I
brought a hassock for the jewelled slippers and the scarlet silken
ankles, so ill-befitting one of her age. The cigarette was presently
burning.
"I guess Pete's b'other-in-law, as he calls him, won't come into these
parts again. He had a kind of narrow squeak this last time. Pete done
something pretty raw, even for this liberal-minded community. He got
scared about it himself and left the country for a couple of
months--looking for his brother-in-law, he said. He beat it up North and
got in with a bunch of other Injins that was being took down to New York
City to advertise a railroad, Pete looking like what folks think an
Injin ought to look when he's dressed for the part. But he got homesick;
and, anyway, he didn't like the job.
"This passenger agent that took 'em East put 'em up at one of the big
hotels all right, but he subjects 'em to hardships they ain't used to.
He wouldn't let 'em talk much English, except to say, 'Ugh! Ugh!'--like
Injins are supposed to--with a few remarks about the Great Spirit; and
not only that, but he makes 'em wear blankets and paint their faces--an
Injin without paint and blanket and some beadwork seeming to a general
passenger agent like a state capitol without a dome. And on top of these
outrages he puts it up with the press agent of this big hotel to have
the poor things sleep up on the roof, right in the open air, so them jay
New York newspapers would fall for it and print articles about these
hardy sons of the forest, the last of a vanishing race, being stifled by
walls--with the names of the railroad and the hotel coming out good and
strong all through the piece.
"Three of the poor things got pneumonia, not being used to such
exposure; and Pete himself took a bad cold, and got mad and quit the
job. They find him a couple of days later, in a check suit and white
shoes and a golf cap, playing pool in a saloon over on Eighth Avenue,
and ship him back as a disgrace to the Far West and a great common
carrier.
"He got in here one night, me being his best friend, and we talked it
over. I advised him to go down and give himself up and have it over;
and he agreed, and went down to Red Gap the next day in his new clothes
and knocked at the jail door. He made a long talk about how his
brother-in-law was the man that really done it, and he's been searching
for him clear over to the rising sun, but can't find him; so he's come
to give himself up, even if they ain't got the least grounds to suspect
him--and can he have his trial for murder over that afternoon, so he can
come back up here the next day and go to work?
"They locked him up and Judge Ballard appointed J. Waldo Snyder to
defend him. He was a new young lawyer from the East that had just come
to Red Gap, highly ambitious and full of devices for showing that
parties couldn't have been in their right mind when they committed the
deed--see the State against Jamstucker, New York Reports Number 23,
pages 19 to 78 inclusive.
"Oh, he told me all about it up in his office one day--how he was going
to get Pete off. Ain't lawyers the goods, though! And doctors? This J.W.
Snyder had a doctor ready to swear that Pete was nutty when he fired the
shot, even if not before nor after. When I was a kid at school, back in
Fredonia, New York State, we used to have debates about which does the
most harm--fire or water? Nowadays I bet they'd have: Which does the
most harm--doctors or lawyers? Well, anyway, there Pete was in
jail--"
"Please tell in your own simple words just how this trouble began," I
broke in. "What did Pete fire the shot for and who stopped it? Now
then!"
"What! Don't you know about that? Well, well! So you never heard about
Pete sending this medicine man over the one-way trail? I'll have to tell
you, then. It was three years ago. Pete was camped about nine miles the
other side of Kulanche, on the Corporation Ranch, and his little
year-old boy was took badly sick. I never did know with what.
Diphtheria, I guess. And I got to tell you Pete is crazy about babies.
Always has been. Thirty years ago, when my own baby hadn't been but a
few weeks born, Lysander John had to be in Red Gap with a smashed leg
and arm, and I was here alone with Pete for two months of one winter.
Say, he was better than any trained nurse with both of us, even if my
papoose was only a girl one! Folks used to wonder afterward if I hadn't
been afraid with just Pete round. Good lands! If they'd ever seen him
cuddle that mite and sing songs to it in Injin about the rain and the
grass! Anyway, I got to know Pete so well that winter I never blamed him
much for what come off.
"Well, this yearling of his got bad and Pete was in two minds. He
believed in white doctors with his good sense, but he believed in Injin
doctors with his superstition, which was older. So he tried to have one
of each. There was an old rogue of a medicine man round here then from
the reservation up north. He'd been doing a little work at haying on
the Corporation, but he was getting his main graft selling the Injins
charms and making spells over their sick; a crafty old crook playing on
their ignorance--understand? And Pete, having got the white doctor from
Kulanche, thought he'd cinch matters by getting the medicine man, too.
At that, I guess one would of been about as useful as the other, the
Kulanche doctor knowing more about anthrax and blackleg than he did
about sick Injin babies.
"The medicine man sees right off how scared Pete is for his kid and
thinks here's a chance to make some big money. He looks at the little
patient and says yes, he can cure him, sure; but it'll be a hard job and
he can't undertake it unless Pete comes through with forty dollars and
his span of mules. But Pete ain't got forty dollars or forty cents, and
the Kulanche doctor has got to the mules already, having a lien on 'em
for twenty-five.
"Pete hurried over and put the proposition up to me. He says his little
chief is badly sick and he's got a fine white doctor, but will I stake
him to enough to get this fine Injin doctor?--thus making a cure
certain. Well, I tore into the old fool for wanting to let this depraved
old medicine man tamper with his baby, and I warned him the Kulanche
doctor probably wasn't much better. Then I tell him he's to send down
for the best doctor in Red Gap at my expense and keep him with the child
till it's well. I tell him he can have the whole ranch if it would cure
his child, but not one cent for the Injin.
"Well, the poor boy is about half convinced I'm right, but he's been an
Injin too long to believe it all through. He went off and sent for the
Red Gap doctor, but he can't resist making another try for the Injin
one; and that old scoundrel holds out for his price. Pete wants him to
wait for his pay till haying is over; but he won't because he thinks
Pete can get the money from me now if he really has to have it. Pete
must of been crazy for fair about that time.
"'All right,' says he; 'you can cure my little chief?'
"The crook says he can if the money is in his hand.
"'All right,' says Pete again; 'but if my little chief dies something
bad is going to happen to you.'
"That's about all they ever found out concerning this threat of Pete's,
though another Injin who heard it said that Pete said his brother-in-law
would make the trouble--not Pete himself. Which was likely true enough.
"Pete's little chief died the night the Red Gap doctor got up here. Ten
minutes later this medicine man had hitched up his team, loaded his
plunder into a wagon, and was pouring leather into his horses to get
back home quick. He knew Pete never talks just to hear himself talk.
They found him about thirty miles on his way--slumped down in the wagon
bed, his team hitched by the roadside. There had been just one careful
shot. As he hadn't been robbed--he had over" a hundred dollars in gold
on him--it pointed a mite too strong at Pete after his threat.
"A deputy sheriff come up. Pete said his brother-in-law had been
hanging round lately and had talked very dangerous about the medicine
man. He said the brother-in-law had probably done the job. But Pete had
pulled this too often before when in difficulties. The deputy said he'd
better come along down to Red Gap and tell the district attorney about
it. Pete said all right and crawled into his tepee for his coat and
hat--crawled right on out the back and into the brush while the deputy
rolled a cigarette.
"That was when he joined this bunch of noble redmen to advertise the
vanishing romance of the Great West--being helped out of the country, I
shouldn't wonder, by some lawless old hound that had feelings for him
and showed it when he come along in the night to the ranch where he'd
nursed her and her baby. They looked for him a little while, then
dropped it; in fact, everybody was kind of glad he'd got off and kind of
satisfied that he'd put this bad Injin, with his skull-duggery, over the
big jump.
"Then he got homesick, like I told you, and showed up here at the door;
and I saw it was better for him to give himself up and get out of it by
fair and legal means. Now! You got it straight that far?"