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SOMEWHERE IN RED GAP

by

HARRY LEON WILSON

Illustrated by John R. Neill, F. R. Gruger, and Henry Raleigh

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers







[Illustration: "SHE WAS STANDING ON THE CENTRE TABLE BY NOW, SO SHE
COULD LAMP HERSELF IN THE GLASS OVER THE MANTEL"]



To
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER


CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. The Red Splash of Romance
II. Ma Pettengill and the Song of Songs
III. The Real Peruvian Doughnuts
IV. Once a Scotchman, Always
V. Non Plush Ultra
VI. Cousin Egbert Intervenes
VII. Kate; or, Up From the Depths
VIII. Pete's B'other-in-law
IX. Little Old New York




I

THE RED SPLASH OF ROMANCE


The walls of the big living-room in the Arrowhead ranch house are
tastefully enlivened here and there with artistic spoils of the owner,
Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill. There are family portraits in crayon,
photo-engravings of noble beasts clipped from the _Breeder's Gazette_,
an etched cathedral or two, a stuffed and varnished trout of such size
that no one would otherwise have believed in it, a print in three
colours of a St. Bernard dog with a marked facial resemblance to the
late William E. Gladstone, and a triumph of architectural perspective
revealing two sides of the Pettengill block, corner of Fourth and Main
streets, Red Gap, made vivacious by a bearded fop on horseback who doffs
his silk hat to a couple of overdressed ladies with parasols in a
passing victoria.

And there is the photograph of the fat man. He is very large--both high
and wide. He has filled the lens and now compels the eye. His broad face
beams a friendly interest. His moustache is a flourishing, uncurbed,
riotous growth above his billowy chin.

The checked coat, held recklessly aside by a hand on each hip, reveals
an incredible expanse of waistcoat, the pattern of which raves
horribly. From pocket to pocket of this gaudy shield curves a watch
chain of massive links--nearly a yard of it, one guesses.

Often I have glanced at this noisy thing tacked to the wall, entranced
by the simple width of the man. Now on a late afternoon I loitered
before it while my hostess changed from riding breeches to the gown of
lavender and lace in which she elects to drink tea after a day's hard
work along the valleys of the Arrowhead. And for the first time I
observed a line of writing beneath the portrait, the writing of my
hostess, a rough, downright, plain fashion of script: "Reading from left
to right--Mr. Ben Sutton, Popular Society Favourite of Nome, Alaska."

"Reading from left to right!" Here was the intent facetious. And Ma
Pettengill is never idly facetious. Always, as the advertisements say,
"There's a reason!" And now, also for the first time, I noticed some
printed verses on a sheet of thickish yellow paper tacked to the wall
close beside the photograph--so close that I somehow divined an intimate
relationship between the two. With difficulty removing my gaze from the
gentleman who should be read from left to right, I scanned these verses:

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD

A child of the road--a gypsy I--
My path o'er the land and sea;
With the fire of youth I warm my nights
And my days are wild and free.
Then ho! for the wild, the open road!
Afar from the haunts of men.
The woods and the hills for my spirit untamed--
I'm away to mountain and glen.

If ever I tried to leave my hills
To abide in the cramped haunts of men,
The urge of the wild to her wayward child
Would drag me to freedom again.

I'm slave to the call of the open road;
In your cities I'd stifle and die.
I'm off to the hills in fancy I see--
On the breast of old earth I'll lie.

WILFRED LENNOX, the Hobo Poet,
On a Coast-to-Coast Walking Tour.
These Cards for sale.

I briefly pondered the lyric. It told its own simple story and could at
once have been dismissed but for its divined and puzzling relationship
to the popular society favourite of Nome, Alaska. What could there be in
this?

Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill bustled in upon my speculation, but as
usual I was compelled to wait for the talk I wanted. For some moments
she would be only the tired owner of the Arrowhead Ranch--in the tea
gown of a debutante and with too much powder on one side of her
nose--and she must have at least one cup of tea so corrosive that the
Scotch whiskey she adds to it is but a merciful dilution. She now drank
eagerly of the fearful brew, dulled the bite of it with smoke from a
hurriedly built cigarette, and relaxed gratefully into one of those
chairs which are all that most of us remember William Morris for. Even
then she must first murmur of the day's annoyances, provided this time
by officials of the United States Forest Reserve. In the beginning I
must always allow her a little to have her own way.

"The annual spring rumpus with them rangers," she wearily boomed. "Every
year they tell me just where to turn my cattle out on the Reserve, and
every year I go ahead and turn 'em out where I want 'em turned out,
which ain't the same place at all, and then I have to listen patiently
to their kicks and politely answer all letters from the higher-ups and
wait for the official permit, which always comes--and it's wearing on a
body. Darn it! They'd ought to know by this time I always get my own
way. If they wasn't such a decent bunch I'd have words with 'em, giving
me the same trouble year after year, probably because I'm a weak,
defenceless woman. However!"

The lady rested largely, inert save for the hand that raised the
cigarette automatically to her lips. My moment had come.

"What did Wilfred Lennox, the hobo poet, have to do with Mr. Ben Sutton,
of Nome, Alaska?" I gently inquired.

"More than he wanted," replied the lady. Her glance warmed with
memories; she hovered musingly on the verge of recital. But the
cigarette was half done and at its best. I allowed her another moment, a
moment in which she laughed confidentially to herself, a little dry,
throaty laugh. I knew that laugh. She would be marshalling certain
events in their just and diverting order. But they seemed to be many and
of confusing values.

"Some said he not only wasn't a hobo but wasn't even a poet," she
presently murmured, and smoked again. Then: "That Ben Sutton, now, he's
a case. Comes from Alaska and don't like fresh eggs for breakfast
because he says they ain't got any kick to 'em like Alaska eggs have
along in March, and he's got to have canned milk for his coffee. Say, I
got a three-quarters Jersey down in Red Gap gives milk so rich that the
cream just naturally trembles into butter if you speak sharply to it or
even give it a cross look; not for Ben though. Had to send out for
canned milk that morning. I drew the line at hunting up case eggs for
him though. He had to put up with insipid fresh ones. And fat, that man!
My lands! He travels a lot in the West when he does leave home, and he
tells me it's the fear of his life he'll get wedged into one of them
narrow-gauge Pullmans some time and have to be chopped out. Well, as I
was saying--" She paused.

"But you haven't begun," I protested. I sharply tapped the printed
verses and the photograph reading from left to right. Now she became
animated, speaking as she expertly rolled a fresh cigarette.

"Say, did you ever think what aggravating minxes women are after they
been married a few years--after the wedding ring gets worn a little bit
thin?"

This was not only brutal; it seemed irrelevant.

"Wilfred Lennox--" I tried to insist, but she commandingly raised the
new cigarette at me.

"Yes, sir! Ever know one of 'em married for as long as ten years that
didn't in her secret heart have a sort of contempt for her life partner
as being a stuffy, plodding truck horse? Of course they keep a certain
dull respect for him as a provider, but they can't see him as dashing
and romantic any more; he ain't daring and adventurous. All he ever does
is go down and open up the store or push back the roll-top, and keep
from getting run over on the street. One day's like another with him,
never having any wild, lawless instincts or reckless moods that make a
man fascinating--about the nearest he ever comes to adventure is when he
opens the bills the first of the month. And she often seeing him without
any collar on, and needing a shave mebbe, and cherishing her own secret
romantic dreams, while like as not he's prosily figuring out how he's
going to make the next payment on the endowment policy.

"It's a hard, tiresome life women lead, chained to these here plodders.
That's why rich widows generally pick out the dashing young devils they
do for their second, having buried the man that made it for 'em. Oh,
they like him well enough, call him 'Father' real tenderly, and see
that he changes to the heavy flannels on time, but he don't ever thrill
them, and when they order three hundred and fifty dollars' worth of duds
from the Boston Cash Emporium and dress up like a foreign countess, they
don't do it for Father, they do it for the romantic guy in the magazine
serial they're reading, the handsome, cynical adventurer that has such
an awful power over women. They know darned well they won't ever meet
him; still it's just as well to be ready in case he ever should make Red
Gap--or wherever they live--and it's easy with the charge account there,
and Father never fussing more than a little about the bills.

"Not that I blame 'em. We're all alike--innocent enough, with freaks
here and there that ain't. Why, I remember about a thousand years ago I
was reading a book called 'Lillian's Honour,' in which the rightful earl
didn't act like an earl had ought to, but went travelling off over the
moors with a passel of gypsies, with all the she-gypsies falling in love
with him, and no wonder--he was that dashing. Well, I used to think what
might happen if he should come along while Lysander John was out with
the beef round-up or something. I was well-meaning, understand, but at
that I'd ought to have been laid out with a pick-handle. Oh, the nicest
of us got specks inside us--if ever we did cut loose the best one of us
would make the worst man of you look like nothing worse than a naughty
little boy cutting up in Sunday-school. What holds us, of course--we
always dream of being took off our feet; of being carried off by main
force against our wills while we snuggle up to the romantic brute and
plead with him to spare us--and the most reckless of 'em don't often get
their nerve up to that. Well, as I was saying--"

But she was not saying. The thing moved too slowly. And still the woman
paltered with her poisoned tea and made cigarettes and muttered
inconsequently, as when she now broke out after a glance at the
photograph:

"That Ben Sutton certainly runs amuck when he buys his vests. He must
have about fifty, and the quietest one in the lot would make a leopard
skin look like a piker." Again her glance dreamed off to visions.

I seated myself before her with some emphasis and said firmly: "Now,
then!" It worked.

"Wilfred Lennox," she began, "calling himself the hobo poet, gets into
Red Gap one day and makes the rounds with that there piece of poetry you
see; pushes into stores and offices and hands the piece out, and like as
not they crowd a dime or two bits onto him and send him along. That's
what I done. I was waiting in Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale's office for a
little painless dentistry, and I took Wilfred's poem and passed him a
two-bit piece, and Doc Martingale does the same, and Wilfred blew on to
the next office. A dashing and romantic figure he was, though kind of
fat and pasty for a man that was walking from coast to coast, but a
smooth talker with beautiful features and about nine hundred dollars'
worth of hair and a soft hat and one of these flowing neckties. Red it
was.

"So I looked over his piece of poetry--about the open road for his
untamed spirit and him being stifled in the cramped haunts of men--and
of course I get his number. All right about the urge of the wild to her
wayward child, but here he was spending a lot of time in the cramped
haunts of men taking their small change away from 'em and not seeming to
stifle one bit.

"Ain't this new style of tramp funny? Now instead of coming round to the
back door and asking for a hand-out like any self-respecting tramp had
ought to, they march up to the front door, and they're somebody with two
or three names that's walking round the world on a wager they made with
one of the Vanderbilt boys or John D. Rockefeller. They've walked
thirty-eight hundred miles already and got the papers to prove it--a
letter from the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the mayor of
Davenport, Iowa, a picture post card of themselves on the courthouse
steps at Denver, and they've bet forty thousand dollars they could start
out without a cent and come back in twenty-two months with money in
their pocket--and ain't it a good joke?--with everybody along the way
entering into the spirit of it and passing them quarters and such, and
thank you very much for your two bits for the picture post card--and
they got another showing 'em in front of the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt
Lake City, if you'd like that, too--and thank you again--and now they'll
be off once more to the open road and the wild, free life. Not! Yes, two
or three good firm Nots. Having milked the town they'll be right down to
the dee-po with their silver changed to bills, waiting for No. 6 to come
along, and ho! for the open railroad and another town that will skin
pretty. I guess I've seen eight or ten of them boys in the last five
years, with their letters from mayors.

"But this here Wilfred Lennox had a new graft. He was the first I'd give
up to for mere poetry. He didn't have a single letter from a mayor, nor
even a picture card of himself standing with his hat off in front of
Pike's Peak--nothing but poetry. But, as I said, he was there with a
talk about pining for the open road and despising the cramped haunts of
men, and he had appealing eyes and all this flowing hair and necktie. So
I says to myself: 'All right, Wilfred, you win!' and put my purse back
in my bag and thought no more of it.

"Yet not so was it to be. Wilfred, working the best he could to make a
living doing nothing, pretty soon got to the office of Alonzo Price,
Choice Improved Real Estate and Price's Addition. Lon was out for the
moment, but who should be there waiting for him but his wife, Mrs.
Henrietta Templeton Price, recognized leader of our literary and
artistic set. Or I think they call it a 'group' or a 'coterie' or
something. Setting at Lon's desk she was, toying petulantly with horrid
old pens and blotters, and probably bestowing glances of disrelish from
time to time round the grimy office where her scrubby little husband
toiled his days away in unromantic squalor.

"I got to tell you about Henrietta. She's one of them like I just said
the harsh things about, with the secret cry in her heart for romance and
adventure and other forbidden things and with a kindly contempt for
peaceful Alonzo. She admits to being thirty-six, so you can figure it
out for yourself. Of course she gets her husband wrong at that, as women
so often do. Alonzo has probably the last pair of side whiskers outside
of a steel engraving and stands five feet two, weighing a hundred and
twenty-six pounds at the ring side, but he's game as a swordfish, and as
for being romantic in the true sense of the word--well, no one that ever
heard him sell a lot in Price's Addition--three miles and a half up on
the mesa, with only the smoke of the canning factory to tell a body they
was still near the busy haunts of men, that and a mile of concrete
sidewalk leading a life of complete idleness--I say no one that ever
listened to Lon sell a lot up there, pointing out on a blue print the
proposed site of the Carnegie Library, would accuse him of not being
romantic.

"But of course Henrietta never sees Lon's romance and he ain't always
had the greatest patience with hers--like the time she got up the Art
Loan Exhibit to get new books for the M.E. Sabbath-school library and
got Spud Mulkins of the El Adobe to lend 'em the big gold-framed oil
painting that hangs over his bar. Some of the other ladies objected to
this--the picture was a big pink hussy lying down beside the
ocean--but Henrietta says art for art's sake is pure to them that are
pure, or something, and they're doing such things constantly in the
East; and I'm darned if Spud didn't have his oil painting down and the
mosquito netting ripped off it before Alonzo heard about it and put the
Not-at-All on it. He wouldn't reason with Henrietta either. He just said
his objection was that every man that saw it would put one foot up
groping for the brass railing, which would be undignified for a
Sabbath-school scheme, and that she'd better hunt out something with
clothes on like Whistler's portrait of his mother, or, if she wanted the
nude in art, to get the Horse Fair or something with animals.

"I tell you that to show you how they don't hit it off sometimes. Then
Henrietta sulks. Kind of pinched and hungry looking she is, drapes her
black hair down over one side of her high forehead, wears daring
gowns--that's what she calls 'em anyway--and reads the most outrageous
kinds of poetry out loud to them that will listen. Likes this Omar
Something stuff about your path being beset with pitfalls and gin fizzes
and getting soused out under a tree with your girl.

"I'm just telling you so you'll get Henrietta when Wilfred Lennox drips
gracefully in with his piece of poetry in one hand. Of course she must
have looked long and nervously at Wilfred, then read his poetry, then
looked again. There before her was Romance against a background of
Alonzo Price, who never had an adventurous or evil thought in his life,
and wore rubbers! Oh, sure! He must have palsied her at once, this wild,
free creature of the woods who couldn't stand the cramped haunts of men.
And I have said that Wilfred was there with the wild, free words about
himself, and the hat and tie and the waving brown hair that give him so
much trouble. Shucks! I don't blame the woman. It's only a few years
since we been let out from under lock and key. Give us a little time to
get our bearings, say I. Wilfred was just one big red splash before her
yearning eyes; he blinded her. And he stood there telling how this here
life in the marts of trade would sure twist and blacken some of the very
finest chords in his being. Something like that it must have been.

"Anyway, about a quarter to six a procession went up Fourth Street,
consisting of Wilfred Lennox, Henrietta, and Alonzo. The latter was
tripping along about three steps back of the other two and every once in
a while he would stop for a minute and simply look puzzled. I saw him.
It's really a great pity Lon insists on wearing a derby hat with his
side whiskers. To my mind the two never seem meant for each other.

"The procession went to the Price mansion up on Ophir Avenue. And that
evening Henrietta had in a few friends to listen to the poet recite his
verses and tell anecdotes about himself. About five or six ladies in
the parlour and their menfolks smoking out on the front porch. The men
didn't seem to fall for Wilfred's open-road stuff the way the ladies
did. Wilfred was a good reciter and held the ladies with his voice and
his melting blue eyes with the long lashes, and Henrietta was envied for
having nailed him. That is, the women envied her. The men sort of
slouched off down to the front gate and then went down to the Temperance
Billiard Parlour, where several of 'em got stewed. Most of 'em, like old
Judge Ballard, who come to the country in '62, and Jeff Tuttle, who's
always had more than he wanted of the open road, were very cold indeed
to Wilfred's main proposition. It is probable that low mutterings might
have been heard among 'em, especially after a travelling man that was
playing pool said the hobo poet had come in on the Pullman of No. 6.

"But I must say that Alonzo didn't seem to mutter any, from all I could
hear. Pathetic, the way that little man will believe right up to the
bitter end. He said that for a hobo Wilfred wrote very good poetry,
better than most hobos could write, he thought, and that Henrietta
always knew what she was doing. So the evening come to a peaceful end,
most of the men getting back for their wives and Alonzo showing up in
fair shape and plumb eager for the comfort of his guest. It was Alonzo's
notion that the guest would of course want to sleep out in the front
yard on the breast of old earth where he could look up at the pretty
stars and feel at home, and he was getting out a roll of blankets when
the guest said he didn't want to make the least bit of trouble and for
one night he'd manage to sleep inside four stifling walls in a regular
bed, like common people do. So Lon bedded him down in the guest chamber,
but opened up the four windows in it and propped the door wide open so
the poor fellow could have a breeze and not smother. He told this
downtown the next morning, and he was beginning to look right puzzled
indeed. He said the wayward child of Nature had got up after about half
an hour and shut all the windows and the door. Lon thought first he was
intending to commit suicide, but he didn't like to interfere. He was
telling Jeff Tuttle and me about it when we happened to pass his office.

"'And there's another funny thing,'" he says. 'This chap was telling us
all the way up home last night that he never ate meat--simply fruits and
nuts with a mug of spring water. He said eating the carcasses of
murdered beasts was abhorrent to him. But when we got down to the table
he consented to partake of the roast beef and he did so repeatedly. We
usually have cold meat for lunch the day after a rib roast, but there
will be something else to-day; and along with the meat he drank two
bottles of beer, though with mutterings of disgust. He said spring water
in the hills was pure, but that water out of pipes was full of typhoid
germs. He admitted that there were times when the grosser appetites
assailed him. And they assailed him this morning, too. He said he might
bring himself to eat some chops, and he did it without scarcely a
struggle. He ate six. He said living the nauseous artificial life even
for one night brought back the hateful meat craving. I don't know. He is
undeniably peculiar. And of course you've heard about Pettikin's affair
for this evening?'

"We had. Just before leaving the house I had received Henrietta's card
inviting me to the country club that evening 'to meet Mr. Wilfred
Lennox, Poet and Nature Lover, who will recite his original verses and
give a brief talk on "The World's Debt to Poetry."' And there you have
the whole trouble. Henrietta should have known better. But I've let out
what women really are. I told Alonzo I would sure be among those
present, I said it sounded good. And then Alonzo pipes up about Ben
Sutton coming to town on the eleven forty-two from the West. Ben makes a
trip out of Alaska every summer and never fails to stop off a day or two
with Lon, they having been partners up North in '98.

"'Good old Ben will enjoy it, too,' says Alonzo; 'and, furthermore, Ben
will straighten out one or two little things that have puzzled me about
this poet. He will understand his complex nature in a way that I confess
I have been unequal to. What I mean is,' he says, 'there was talk when I
left this morning of the poet consenting to take a class in poetry for
several weeks in our thriving little city, and Henrietta was urging him
to make our house his home. I have a sort of feeling that Ben will be
able to make several suggestions of prime value. I have never known him
to fail at making suggestions.'

"Funny, the way the little man tried to put it over on us, letting on he
was just puzzled--not really bothered, as he plainly was. You knew
Henrietta was still seeing the big red splash of Romance, behind which
the figure of her husband was totally obscured. Jeff Tuttle saw the
facts, and he up and spoke in a very common way about what would quickly
happen to any tramp that tried to camp in his house, poet or no poet,
but that's neither here nor there. We left Alonzo looking cheerily
forward to Ben Sutton on the eleven forty-two, and I went on to do some
errands.

"In the course of these I discovered that others besides Henrietta had
fell hard for the poet of Nature. I met Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale
and she just bubbles about him, she having been at the Prices' the night
before.

"'Isn't he a glorious thing!' she says; 'and how grateful we should be
for the dazzling bit of colour he brings into our drab existence!' She
is a good deal like that herself at times. And I met Beryl Mae Macomber,
a well known young society girl of seventeen, and Beryl Mae says: 'He's
awfully good looking, but do you think he's sincere?' And even Mrs.
Judge Ballard comes along and says: 'What a stimulus he should be to us
in our dull lives! How he shows us the big, vital bits!' and her at that
very minute going into Bullitt & Fleishacker's to buy shoes for her
nine year old twin grandsons! And the Reverend Mrs. Wiley Knapp in at
the Racquet Store wanting to know if the poet didn't make me think of
some wild, free creature of the woods--a deer or an antelope poised for
instant flight while for one moment he timidly overlooked man in his
hideous commercialism. But, of course, she was a minister's wife. I said
he made me feel just like that. I said so to all of 'em. What else could
I say? If I'd said what I thought there on the street I'd of been
pinched. So I beat it home in self-protection. I was sympathizing good
and hearty with Lon Price by that time and looking forward to Ben Sutton
myself. I had a notion Ben would see the right of it where these poor
dubs of husbands wouldn't--or wouldn't dast say it if they did.

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