Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

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It was the wail of one thwarted and perishing. "Ain't it the sobbing
tenor?" remarked his employer. "But you can't blame him after the
killing he made before. Of course he'll get to town sooner or later and
play this fourteen number, being that the new reform administration,
with Lon Price as Mayor, is now safely elected and the game has opened
up again. Yes, sir; he's nutty about stitches in a mule. I wouldn't put
it past him that he had old Jerry kicked on purpose to-day!"




VII

KATE; OR, UP FROM THE DEPTHS


This day I fared abroad with Ma Pettengill over wide spaces of the
Arrowhead Ranch. Between fields along the river bottom were gates
distressingly crude; clumsy, hingeless panels of board fence, which I
must dismount and lift about by sheer brawn of shoulder. Such gates
combine the greatest weight with the least possible exercise of man's
inventive faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate.
This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of
imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor--who does the lifting with
guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be. Buck Devine or Sandy
Sawtelle will achieve the mot with an aloof austerity that abates no jot
unto the hundredth repetition; while Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the
Arrowhead, fails not to brighten it with a nervous giggle, impairing its
vocal correctness, moreover, by calling it the "Armcatchum" gate.

Ma Pettengill was more versatile this day. The first gate I struggled
with she called Armstrong in a manner dryly descriptive; for the second
she managed a humorous leer to illumine the term; for the third,
secured with a garland of barbed wire that must be painfully untwisted,
she employed a still broader humour. Even a child would then have known
that calling this criminal device the Armstrong gate was a joke of
uncommon richness.

As I remounted, staunching the inevitable wound from barbed wire, I
began to speak in the bitterly superior tones of an efficiency expert as
we traversed a field where hundreds of white-faced Herefords were
putting on flesh to their own ruin. I said to my hostess that I vastly
enjoyed lifting a hundred-pound gate--and what was the loss of a little
blood between old friends, even when aggravated by probable tetanus
germs? But had she ever paused to compute the money value of time lost
by her henchmen in dismounting to open these clumsy makeshifts? I
suggested that, even appraising the one reliable ranch joke in all the
world at a high figure, she would still profit considerably by putting
in gates that were gates, in place of contrivances that could be handled
ideally only by a retired weight lifter in barbed-wire-proof armour.

I rapidly calculated, with the seeming high regard for accuracy that
marks all efficiency experts, that these wretched devices cost her
twenty-eight cents and a half each _per diem_. Estimating the total of
them on the ranch at one hundred, this meant to her a loss of
twenty-eight dollars and a half _per diem_. I used _per diem_ twice to
impress the woman. I added that it was pretty slipshod business for a
going concern, supposing--sarcastically now--that the Arrowhead was a
going concern. Of course, if it were merely a toy for the idle rich--

She had let me talk, as she will now and then, affecting to be engrossed
with her stock.

"Look at them white-faced darlings!" she murmured. "Two years old and
weighing eleven hundred this minute if they weigh a pound!"

Then I saw we approached a gate that amazingly was a gate. Hinges, yes;
and mechanical complications, and a pendant cord on each side. I tugged
at one and the gate magically opened. As we passed through I tugged at
the other and it magically closed. This was luxury ineffable to one who
had laboured with things that seemed to be kept merely for the sake of a
jest that was never of the best and was staling with use. It would also
be, I hoped, an object lesson to my hostess. I performed the simple rite
in silence, yet with a manner that I meant to be eloquent, even
provocative. It was.

"Oh, sure!" spoke Ma Pettengill. "That there's one of your _per-diem_
gates; and there's another leading out of this field, and about six
beyond--all of 'em just as _per diem_ as this one; and, also, this here
ranch you're on now is one of your going concerns." She chuckled at this
and repeated it in a subterranean rumble: "A going concern--my sakes,
yes! It moved so fast you could see it go, and now it's went." Noisily
she relished this bit of verbal finesse; then permitted her fancy again
to trifle with it. "Yes, sir; this here going concern is plumb gone!"

With active malice I asked no question, maintaining a dignified silence
as I lightly manipulated a second paragon of gates. The lady now rumbled
confidentially to herself, and I caught piquant phrases; yet still I
forbore to question, since the woman so plainly sought to intrigue me.
Even when we skirted a clump of cottonwoods and came--through another
perfect gate--upon a most amazing small collection of ranch buildings,
dying of desertion, I retained perfect control of a rising curiosity.

By unspoken agreement we drew rein to survey a desolation that was still
immaculate. Stables and outbuildings were trim and new, and pure with
paint. All had been swept and garnished; no unsightly litter marred the
scene. The house was a suburban villa of marked pretension and would
have excited no comment on Long Island. In this valley of the mountains
it was nothing short of spectacular. Only one item of decoration hinted
an attempt to adapt itself to environment: in the noble stone chimney
that reared itself between two spacious wings a branding iron had been
embedded. Thus did it proclaim itself to the incredulous hills as a
ranch house.

Flowers had been planted along a gravelled walk. While I reminded myself
that the gravel must have been imported from a spot at least ten miles
distant, I was further shocked by discovering a most improbable golf
green, in gloomy survival. Then I detected a series of kennels facing a
wired dog run. This was overwhelming in a country of simple, steadfast
devotion to the rearing of cattle for market.

Ma Pettengill now spoke in a tone that, for her, could be called hushed,
though it reached me twenty feet away.

"An art bungalow!" she said, and gazed upon it with seeming awe. Then
she waved a quirt to indicate this and the painfully neat outbuildings.
"A toy for the idle rich--was that it? Well, you said something. This
was one little _per-diem_ going concern, all right. They even had the
name somewhere round here worked out in yellow flowers--Broadmoor it
was. You could read it for five miles when the posies got up. There it
is over on that lawn. You can't read it now because the letters are all
overgrown. My Chinaman got delirious about that when he first seen it
and wanted me to plant Arrowhead out in front of our house, and was
quite hurt when I told him I was just a business woman--and a tired
business woman at that. He done what he could, though, to show we was
some class. The first time these folks come over to our place to lunch
he picked all my pink carnations to make a mat on the table, and spelled
out Arrowhead round it in ripe olives, with a neat frame of celery
inclosing same. Yes, sir!"

This was too much. It now seemed time to ask questions, and I did so in
a winning manner; but so deaf in her backward musing was the woman that
I saw it must all come in its own way.

"We got to make up over that bench yet," she said at last; and we rode
out past the ideal stable--its natty weather vane forever pointing the
wind to the profit of no man--through another gate of superb cunning,
and so once more to an understandable landscape, where sane cattle
grazed. Here I threw off the depression that comes upon one in places
where our humankind so plainly have been and are not. Again I questioned
of Broadmoor and its vanished people.

The immediate results were fragmentary, serving to pique rather than
satisfy; a series of _hors d'oeuvres_ that I began to suspect must form
the whole repast. On the verge of coherence the woman would break off to
gloat over a herd of thoroughbred Durhams or a bunch of sportive
Hereford calves or a field teeming with the prized fruits of
intermarriage between these breeds. Or she found diversion in stupendous
stacks of last summer's hay, well fenced from pillage; or grounds for
criticising the sloth of certain of her henchmen, who had been told as
plain as anything that "that there line fance" had to be finished by
Saturday; no two ways about it! She repeated the language in which she
had conveyed this decision. There could have been no grounds for
misunderstanding it.

And thus the annals of Broadmoor began to dribble to me, overlaid too
frequently for my taste with philosophic reflections at large upon what
a lone, defenceless woman could expect in this world--irrelevant,
pointed wonderings as to whether a party letting on he was a good ranch
hand really expected to perform any labour for his fifty a month, or
just set round smoking his head off and see which could tell the biggest
lie; or mebbe make an excuse for some light job like oiling the
twenty-two sets of mule harness over again, when they had already been
oiled right after haying. Furthermore, any woman not a born fool would
get out of the business the first chance she got, this one often being
willing to sell for a mutilated dollar, except for not wishing financial
ruin or insanity to other parties.

Yet a few details definitely emerged. "Her" name was called Posnett,
though a party would never guess this if he saw it in print, because it
was spelled Postlethwaite. Yes, sir! All on account of having gone to
England from Boston and found out that was how you said it, though
Cousin Egbert Floud had tried to be funny about it when shown the name
in the Red Gap _Recorder_. The item said the family had taken apartments
at Red Gap's premier hotel _de luxe_, the American House; and Cousin
Egbert, being told a million dollars was bet that he never could guess
how the name was pronounced in English, he up and said you couldn't fool
him; that it was pronounced Chumley, which was just like the old
smarty--only he give in that he was surprised when told how it really
was pronounced; and he said if a party's name was Postlethwaite why
couldn't they come out and say so like a man, instead of beating round
the bush like that? All of which was promising enough; but then came the
Hereford yearlings to effect a breach of continuity.

These being enough admired, I had next to be told that I wouldn't
believe how many folks was certain she had retired to the country
because she was lazy, just keeping a few head of cattle for
diversion--she that had six thousand acres of land under fence, and had
made a going concern _per diem_ of it for thirty years, even if parties
did make cracks about her gates; but hardly ever getting a good night's
sleep through having a "passel" of men to run it that you couldn't
depend on--though God only knew where you could find any other sort--the
minute your back was turned.

A fat, sleek, prosperous male, clad in expensive garments, and wearing a
derby hat and too much jewellery, became somehow personified in this
tirade. I was led to picture him a residuary legatee who had never done
a stroke of work in his life, and believed that no one else ever did
except from a sportive perversity. I was made to hear him tell her that
she, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, was leading the ideal life on her
country place; and, by Jove! he often thought of doing the same thing
himself--get a nice little spot in this beautiful country, with some
green meadows, and have bands of large handsome cattle strolling about
in the sunlight, so he could forget the world and its strife in the same
idyllic peace she must be finding. Or if he didn't tell her this, then
he was sure to have a worthless son or nephew that her ranch would be
just the place for; and, of course, she would be glad to take him on and
make something of him--that is, so the lady now regrettably put it, as
he had shown he wasn't worth a damn for anything else, why couldn't she
make a cattleman of him?

"Yes, sir; that's what I get from these here visitors that are enchanted
by the view. Either they think my ranch is a reform school for poor
chinless Chester, that got led away by bad companions and can't say no,
or they think, like you said, that it's just a toy for the idle rich.
Show 'em a shoe factory or a steel works and they can understand it's a
business proposition; but a ranch--Shucks! They think I've done my day's
work when I ride out on a gentle horse and look pleased at the
landscape."

Again were we diverted. A dozen alien beeves fed upon the Arrowhead
preserves. Did I see that wattle brand--the jug-handle split? That was
the Timmins brand--old Safety First Timmins. There must be a break in
his fence at the upper end of the field. Made it himself likely.
Wouldn't she give the old penny-pincher hell if she had him here? She
would, indeed! Continuous muttering of a rugged character for half a
mile of jog trot.

Then again:

"Cousin Egbert got all fussed up in his mind about the name and always
called her Postle-nut. He don't seem to have a brain for such things.
But she didn't mind. I give her credit for that. She was fifty if she
was a day, but very, very blond; laboratory stuff, of course. You'd of
called her a superblonde, I guess. And haggard and wrinkled in the face;
but she took good care of that, too--artist's materials.

"You know old Pete--that Indian you see cutting up wood back on the
place. Pete took a long look at her and named her the Painted Desert.
You always hear say an Indian hasn't got any sense of humour. I don't
know; Pete was sure being either a humourist or a poet. However, this
here lady handed me a new one about my business. She thought it was
merely an outdoor sport. I never could get that out of her head. Even
when she left she says she knows it's ripping good sport, but it's such
a terrific drain on one's income, and I must be quite mad about ranching
to keep it up. I said, yes; I got quite mad about it sometimes, and let
it go at that. What was the use?"

A voiceless interval while we climbed a trail to the timbered bench
where fence posts were being cut by half a dozen of the Arrowhead
forces. Two of these were swiftly detached and bade to repair the break
in the fence by which one Timmins was now profiting, the entire six
being first regaled with a brief but pithy character analysis of the
offender, portraying him as a loathsome biological freak; headless, I
gathered, and with the acquisitive instincts of a trade rat.

Then we rounded back on our way to the Arrow head ranch house. Five
miles up the narrowing valley we could see its outposts and its smoke.
Far below us the spick-and-span buildings of deserted Broadmoor
glittered newly, demanding that I be told more of them. Yet for the
five-mile ride I added, as I thought, no item to my slender stock.
Instead, when we had descended from the bench and were again in fields
where the gates might be opened only by galling effort, I learned
apparently irrelevant facts concerning Egbert Floud's pet kitten.

"Yes, sir; he's just like any old maid with that cat. 'Kitty!' here and
'Kitty!' there; and 'Poor Kitty, did I forget to warm its milk?' And so
on. It was give to him two years ago by Jeff Tuttle's littlest girl,
Irene; and he didn't want it at first, but him and Irene is great
friends, so he pretended he was crazy about it and took it off in his
overcoat pocket, thinking it would die anyway, because it was only skin
and bones. Whenever it tried to purr you'd think it was going to shake
all its timbers loose. His house is just over on the other side of
Arrowhead Pass there, and I saw the kitten the first day he brought it
up, kind of light brown and yellow in colour, with some gray on the left
shoulder.

"Well, the minute I see these markings I recognized 'em and remembered
something, and I says right off that he's got some cat there; and he
says how do I know? And I tell him that there kitten has got at least a
quarter wildcat in it. Its grandmother, or mebbe its great-grandmother,
was took up to the Tuttle Ranch when there wasn't another cat within
forty miles, and it got to running round nights; and quite a long time
after that they found it with a mess of kittens in a box out in the
harness room. One look at their feet and ears was all you'd want to see
that their pa was a bobcat. They all become famous fighting characters,
and was marked just like this descendant of theirs that Cousin Egbert
has. And, say, I was going on like this, not suspecting anything except
that I was giving him some interesting news about the family history of
this pet of his, when he grabs the beast up and cuddles it, and says I
had ought to be ashamed of myself, talking that way about a poor little
innocent kitten that never done me a stroke of harm. Yes, sir; he was
right fiery.

"I don't know how he come to take it that cross way, for he hadn't
thought highly of the thing up to that moment. But some way it seemed to
him I was talking scandal about his pet--kind of clouding up its
ancestry, if you know what I mean. He didn't seem to get any broad view
of it at all. You'd almost think I'd been reporting an indiscretion in
some member of his family. Can you beat it? Heating up that way over a
puny kitten, six inches from tip to tip, that he'd been thinking of as a
pest and only taken to please Irene Tuttle! So he starts in from that
minute to doctor it up and nurture it with canned soup and delicacies;
and every time I see him after that he'd look indignant and say what
great hands for spreading gossip us women are, and his kitten ain't got
no more bobcat in its veins than what I have.

"He's a stubborn old toad. Irene had told him the kitten's name was
Kate; so he kept right on calling it that even after it become
incongruous, as you might say. Judge Ballard was up here on a fishing
trip one time and heard him calling it Kate, and he says to Egbert: Why
call it Kate when it ain't? Egbert says that was the name little Irene
give it and it's too much trouble to think up another. The Judge says,
Oh, no; not so much trouble, being that he could just change the name
swiftly from Kate to Cato, thus meeting all conventional requirements
with but slight added labour. But Egbert says there's the sentiment to
think of--whatever he meant by that; and if you was to go over there
to-day and he was home you'd likely hear him say: 'Yes; Kate is
certainly some cat! Why, he's at least half bobcat--mebbe
three-quarters; and the fightingest devil!' What's that? Yes; he's
changed completely round about the wildcat strain. He's proud of it. If
I was to say now it was only a quarter bob he'd be as mad as he was at
first; he says anybody can see it's at least half bob. What changed him?
Oh, well, we're too near home. Some other time."

So it befell that not until we sat out for a splendid sunset that
evening did I learn in an orderly manner of Postlethwaite vicissitudes.
Ma Pettengill built her first cigarette with tender solicitude; and
this, in consideration of her day's hard ride, I permitted her to burn
in relaxed silence. But when her trained fingers began to combine paper
and tobacco for the second I mentioned Broadmoor, Postlethwaite,
Posnett, and parties in general that come round the tired business
woman, harassed with the countless vexations of a large cattle ranch,
telling her how wise she has been to retire to this sylvan quietude,
where she can dream away her life in peace. She started easily:

"That's it; they always intimate that running a ranch is mere cream
puffs compared to a regular business, and they'd like to do the same
thing to-morrow if only they was ready to retire from active life. Mebbe
they get the idea from these here back-to-nature stories about a
brokendown bookkeeper, sixty-seven years old, with neuritis and gastric
complications and bum eyesight, and a wife that ain't ever seen a well
day; so they take every cent of their life savings of eighty-three
dollars and settle on an abandoned farm in Connecticut and clear nine
thousand dollars the first year raising the Little Giant caper for
boiled mutton. There certainly ought to be a law against such romantic
trifling. In the first place, think of a Connecticut farmer abandoning
anything worth money! Old Timmins comes from Connecticut. Any time that
old leech abandons a thing, bookkeepers and all other parties will do
well to ride right along with him. I tell you now--"

The second cigarette was under way, and suddenly, without modulation,
the performer was again on the theme, Posnett _nee_ Postlethwaite.

"Met her two years ago in Boston, where I was suffering a brief visit
with my son-in-law's aunts. She was the sole widow of a large woolen
mill. That's about all I could ever make out--couldn't get any line on
him to speak of. The first time I called on her--she was in pink silk
pyjamas, smoking a perfecto cigar, and unpacking a bale of lion and
tiger skins she'd shot in Africa, or some place--she said she believed
there would be fewer unhappy marriages in this world if women would only
try more earnestly to make a companion of their husbands; she said she'd
tried hard to make one of hers, but never could get him interested in
her pursuits and pastimes, he preferring to set sullenly at his desk
making money. She said to the day of his death he'd never even had a
polo mallet in his hand. And wasn't that pitiful!

"And right now she wanted to visit a snappy little volcano she'd heard
about in South America--only she had a grown son and daughter she was
trying to make companions of, so they would love and trust her; and
they'd begged her to do something nearer home that was less fatiguing;
and mebbe she would. And how did I find ranching now? Was I awfully keen
about it and was it ripping good sport? I said yes, to an extent. She
said she thought it must be ripping, what with chasing the wild cattle
over hill and dale to lasso them, and firing off revolvers in company
with lawless cowboys inflamed by drink. She went on to give me some more
details of ranch life, and got so worked up about it that we settled
things right there, she being a lady of swift decisions. She said it
wouldn't be very exciting for her, but it might be fine for son and
daughter, and bring them all together in a more sacred companionship.

"So I come back and got that place down the creek for her, and she sent
out a professional architect and a landscape gardener, and some other
experts that would know how to build a ranch _de luxe_, and the thing
was soon done. And she sent son on ahead to get slightly acquainted with
the wild life. He was a tall bent thing, about thirty, with a long
squinted face and going hair, and soft, innocent, ginger-coloured
whiskers, and hips so narrow they'd hardly hold his belt up. That rowdy
mother of his, in trying to make a companion of him, had near scared him
to death. He was permanently frightened. What he really wanted to do, I
found out, was to study insect life and botany and geography and
arithmetic, and so on, and raise orchids, instead of being killed off in
a sudden manner by his rough-neck parent. He loved to ride a horse the
same way a cat loves to ride a going stove.

"I started out with him one morning to show him over the valley. He got
into the saddle all right and he meant well, but that don't go any too
far with a horse. Pretty soon, down on the level here, I started to
canter a bit. He grabbed for the saddle horn and caught a handful of
bunch grass fifteen feet to the left of the trail. He was game enough.
He found his glasses and wiped 'em off, and said it was too bad the
mater couldn't have seen him, because it would have been a bright spot
in her life.

"Then he got on again and we took that steep trail up the side of the
canon that goes over Arrowhead, me meaning to please him with some
beautiful and rugged scenery, where one false step might cause utter
ruin. It didn't work, though. After we got pretty well up to the rim of
the canon he looks down and says he supposes they could recover one if
one fell over there. I says: 'Oh, yes; they could recover one. They'd
get you, all right. Of course you wouldn't look like anything!'

"He shudders at that and gets off to lead his horse, begging me to do
the same. I said I never tried to do anything a horse could do better,
and stayed on. Then he got confidential and told me a lot of interesting
crimes this mater of his had committed in her mad efforts to make a
companion of him. Once she'd tramped on the gas of a ninety-horsepower
racer and socked him against a stone wall at a turn some fool had made
in the road; and another time she near drowned him in the Arctic Ocean
when she was off there for the polar-bear hunting; and she'd got him
well clawed by a spotted leopard in India, that was now almost the best
skin in her collection; and once in Switzerland he fell off the side of
an Alp she was making him climb, causing her to be very short with him
all day because it delayed the trip. Tied to a rope he was and hanging
out there over nothing for about fifteen minutes--he must have looked
like a sash weight.

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