I
Many fish were still in the pool; and though luck seemed to have left
me, still I stood at the end of the point, casting and casting my vain
line, while the Virginian lay and watched. Noonday's extreme brightness
had left the river and the plain in cooling shadow, but spread and
glowed over the yet undimmed mountains. Westward, the Tetons lifted
their peaks pale and keen as steel through the high, radiant air. Deep
down between the blue gashes of their canons the sun sank long shafts of
light, and the glazed laps of their snow-fields shone separate and white
upon their lofty vastness, like handkerchiefs laid out to dry. Opposite,
above the valley, rose that other range, the Continental Divide, not
sharp, but long and ample. It was bare in some high places, and below
these it stretched everywhere, high and low, in brown and yellow parks,
or in purple miles of pine a world of serene undulations, a great sweet
country of silence.
A passing band of antelope stood herded suddenly together at sight of
us; then a little breeze blew for a moment from us to them, and
they drifted like phantoms away, and were lost in the levels of the
sage-brush.
“If humans could do like that,” said the Virginian, watching them go.
“Run, you mean?” said I.
“Tell a foe by the smell of him,” explained the cow-puncher; “at fifty
yards--or a mile.”
“Yes,” I said; “men would be hard to catch.”
“A woman needs it most,” he murmured. He lay down again in his lounging
sprawl, with his grave eyes intently fixed upon my fly-casting.
The gradual day mounted up the hills farther from the floor of earth.
Warm airs eddied in its wake slowly, stirring the scents of the plain
together. I looked at the Southerner; and there was no guessing what
his thoughts might be at work upon behind that drowsy glance. Then for a
moment a trout rose, but only to look and whip down again into the pool
that wedged its calm into the riffle from below.
“Second thoughts,” mused the Virginian; and as the trout came no more,
“Second thoughts,” he repeated; “and even a fish will have them sooner
than folks has them in this mighty hasty country.” And he rolled over
into a new position of ease.
At whom or what was he aiming these shafts of truth? Or did he moralize
merely because health and the weather had steeped him in that serenity
which lifts us among the spheres? Well, sometimes he went on from these
beginnings and told me wonderful things.
“I reckon,” said he, presently, “that knowing when to change your mind
would be pretty near knowledge enough for plain people.”
Since my acquaintance with him--this was the second summer of it--I had
come to understand him enough to know that he was unfathomable. Still,
for a moment it crossed my thoughts that perhaps now he was discoursing
about himself. He had allowed a jealous foreman to fall out with him at
Sunk Creek ranch in the spring, during Judge Henry's absence. The man,
having a brief authority, parted with him. The Southerner had chosen
that this should be the means of ultimately getting the foreman
dismissed and himself recalled. It was strategic. As he put it to me:
“When I am gone, it will be right easy for the Judge to see which of
us two he wants. And I'll not have done any talking.” All of which duly
befell in the autumn as he had planned: the foreman was sent off,
his assistant promoted, and the Virginian again hired. But this was
meanwhile. He was indulging himself in a several months' drifting, and
while thus drifting he had written to me. That is how we two came to be
on our way from the railroad to hunt the elk and the mountain-sheep,
and were pausing to fish where Buffalo Fork joins its waters with Snake
River. In those days the antelope still ran there in hundreds, the
Yellowstone Park was a new thing, and mankind lived very far away. Since
meeting me with the horses in Idaho the Virginian had been silent, even
for him. So now I stood casting my fly, and trusting that he was not
troubled with second thoughts over his strategy.
“Have yu' studded much about marriage?” he now inquired. His serious
eyes met mine as he lay stretched along the ground.
“Not much,” I said; “not very much.”
“Let's swim,” he said. “They have changed their minds.”
Forthwith we shook off our boots and dropped our few clothes, and
heedless of what fish we might now drive away, we went into the cool,
slow, deep breadth of backwater which the bend makes just there. As
he came up near me, shaking his head of black hair, the cowpuncher was
smiling a little.
“Not that any number of baths,” he remarked, “would conceal a man's
objectionableness from an antelope--not even a she-one.”
Then he went under water, and came up again a long way off.
We dried before the fire, without haste. To need no clothes is better
than purple and fine linen. Then he tossed the flap-jacks, and I served
the trout, and after this we lay on our backs upon a buffalo-hide to
smoke and watch the Tetons grow more solemn, as the large stars opened
out over the sky.
“I don't care if I never go home,” said I.
The Virginian nodded. “It gives all the peace o' being asleep with all
the pleasure o' feeling the widest kind of awake,” said he. “Yu' might
say the whole year's strength flows hearty in every waggle of your
thumb.” We lay still for a while. “How many things surprise yu' any
more?” he next asked.
I began considering; but his silence had at length worked round to
speech.
“Inventions, of course,” said he, “these hyeh telephones an' truck yu'
see so much about in the papers--but I ain't speaking o' such things
of the brain. It is just the common things I mean. The things that a
livin', noticin' man is liable to see and maybe sample for himself. How
many o' them kind can surprise yu' still?”