Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

H >> Harry Leon Wilson >> Somewhere in Red Gap




We trifled now with a fruity desert and the lady regaled me with a brief
exposure of our great parcels-post system as a piece of the nerviest
penny pinching she had ever known our Government guilty of. Because why?
Because these here poor R.F.D. stage drivers had to do the extra hauling
for nothing.

"Here's old Harvey Steptoe with the mail contract for sixty dollars a
month, three trips a week between Red Gap and Surprise Valley,
forty-five miles each way, barely making enough extra on express matter
and local freight to come out even after buying horse-feed. Then comes
parcels post, and parties that had had to pay him four bits or a dollar
for a large package, or two bits for a small one, can have 'em brought
in by mail for nothing. Of course most of us eased up on him after we
understood the hellish injustice of it. We took pains not to have things
sent parcels post and when they come unbeknown to us, like these here
to-night, we'd always pay him anyway, just like they was express. It was
only fair and, besides, we would live longer, Harvey Steptoe being
morose and sudden.

"Like when old Safety First Timmins got the idea he could have all his
supplies sent from Red Gap for almost nothing by putting stamps on 'em.
He was tickled to death with the notion until, after the second load of
about a hundred pounds, some cowardly assassin shot at him from the
brush one morning about the time the stage usually went down past his
ranch. The charge missed him by about four inches and went into the barn
door. He dug it out and found a bullet and two buckshot. Old Safety
First ain't any Sherlock Holmes, but even Doctor Watson could of solved
this murderous crime. When Harvey come by the next night he went out and
says to him, 'Ain't you got one of them old Mississippi Yaegers about
seventy-five years old that carries a bullet and two buckshot?' Harvey
thought back earnestly for a minute, then says,'Not now I ain't. I used
to have one of them old hairlooms around the house but I found they
ain't reliable when you want to do fine work from a safe distance; so I
threw her away yesterday morning and got me this nice new 30-30 down to
Goshook & Dale's hardware store.'

"He pulled the new gun out and patted it tenderly in the sight of old
Timmins. 'Ain't it a cunning little implement?' he says; 'I tried it out
coming up this afternoon. I could split a hair with it as far, say, as
from that clump of buck-brush over to your barn. And by the way, Mr.
Timmins,' he says, 'I got some more stuff for you here from the Square
Deal Grocery--stuff all gummed up with postage stamps.' He leans his new
toy against the seat and dumps out a sack of flour and a sack of dried
fruit and one or two other things. 'This parcels post is a grand thing,
ain't it?' says he.

"'Well--yes and no, now that you speak of it,' says old Safety First.
'The fact is I'm kind of prejudiced against it; I ain't going to have
things come to me any more all stuck over with them trifling little
postage stamps. It don't look dignified.' 'No?' says Harvey. 'No,' says
Safety First in a firm tone. 'I won't ever have another single thing
come by mail if I can help it.' 'I bet you're superstitious,' says
Harvey, climbing back to his seat and petting the new gun again. 'I bet
you're so superstitious you'd take this here shiny new implement off my
hands at cost if I hinted I'd part with it.' 'I almost believe I would,'
says Safety First. 'Well, it don't seem like I'd have much use for it
after all,' says Harvey. 'Of course I can always get a new one if my
fancy happens to run that way again.'

"So old Safety First buys a new loaded rifle that he ain't got a use on
earth for. It would of looked to outsiders like he was throwing his
money away on fripperies, but he knew it was a prime necessity of life
all right. The parcels post ain't done him a bit of good since, though I
send him marked pieces in the papers every now and then telling how the
postmaster general thinks it's a great boon to the ultimate consumer.
And I mustn't forget to send Harvey six bits for them three packages
that come to-night. That's what we do. Otherwise, him being morose and
turbulent, he'd get a new gun and make ultimate consumers out of all of
us. Darned ultimate! I reckon we got a glorious Government, like
candidates always tell us, but a postmaster general that expected stage
drivers to do three times the hauling they had been doing with no extra
pay wouldn't last long out at the tail of an ... route. There'd be
pieces in the paper telling about how he rose to prominence from the
time he got a lot of delegates sewed up for the people's choice and how
his place will be hard to fill. It certainly would be hard to fill out
here. Old Timmins, for one, would turn a deaf ear to his country's
call."

Lew Wee having now cleared the table of all but coffee, we lingered for
a leisurely overhauling of the mail sack. Ma Pettengill slit envelopes
and read letters to an accompanying rumble of protest. She several times
wished to know what certain parties took her for--and they'd be fooled
if they did; and now and again she dwelt upon the insoluble mystery of
her not being in the poorhouse at that moment; yes, and she'd of been
there long ago if she had let these parties run her business like they
thought they could. But what could a lone defenceless woman expect?
She'd show them, though! Been showing 'em for thirty years now, and
still had her health, hadn't she?

Letters and bills were at last neatly stacked and the poor weak woman
fell upon the newspapers. The Red Gap Recorder was shorn of its wrapper.
Being first a woman she turned to the fourth page to flash a practised
eye over that department which is headed "Life's Stages--At the
Altar--In the Cradle!--To the Tomb." Having gleaned recent vital
statistics she turned next to the column carrying the market quotations
on beef cattle, for after being a woman she is a rancher. Prices for
that day must have pleased her immensely for she grudgingly mumbled that
they were less ruinous than she had expected. In the elation of which
this admission was a sign she next refreshed me with various personal
items from a column headed "Social Gleanings--by Madame On Dit."

I learned that at the last regular meeting of the Ladies' Friday
Afternoon Shakespeare Club, Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale had read a
paper entitled "My Trip to the Panama-Pacific Exposition," after which a
dainty collation was served by mine hostess Mrs. Judge Ballard; that
Miss Beryl Mae Macomber, the well-known young society heiress, was
visiting friends in Spokane where rumour hath it that she would take a
course of lessons in elocution; and that Mrs. Cora Hartwick Wales,
prominent society matron and leader of the ultra smart set of Price's
Addition, had on Thursday afternoon at her charming new bungalow, corner
of Bella Vista Street and Prospect Avenue, entertained a number of her
inmates at tea. Ma Pettengill and I here quickly agreed that the
proofreading on the Recorder was not all it should be. Then she
unctuously read me a longer item from another column which was signed
"The Lounger in the Lobby":

"Mr. Benjamin P. Sutton, the wealthy capitalist of Nome, Alaska, and a
prince of good fellows, is again in our midst for his annual visit to
His Honour Alonzo Price, Red Gap's present mayor, of whom he is an
old-time friend and associate. Mr. Sutton, who is the picture of health,
brings glowing reports from the North and is firm in his belief that
Alaska will at no distant day become the garden spot of the world. In
the course of a brief interview he confided to ye scribe that on his
present trip to the outside he would not again revisit his birthplace,
the city of New York, as he did last year. 'Once was enough, for many
reasons,' said Mr. Sutton grimly. 'They call it "Little old New York,"
but it isn't little and it isn't old. It's big and it's new--we have
older buildings right in Nome than any you can find on Broadway. Since
my brief sojourn there last year I have decided that our people before
going to New York should see America first."

"Now what do you think of that?" demanded the lady. I said I would be
able to think little of it unless I were told the precise reasons for
this rather brutal abuse of a great city. What, indeed, were the "many
reasons" that Mr. Sutton had grimly not confided to ye scribe?

Ma Pettengill chuckled and reread parts of the indictment. Thereafter
she again chuckled fluently and uttered broken phrases to herself.
"Horse-car" was one; "the only born New Yorker alive" was another. It
became necessary for me to remind the woman that a guest was present. I
did this by shifting my chair to face the stone fireplace in which a
pine chunk glowed, and by coughing in a delicate and expectant manner.

"Poor Ben!" she murmured--"going all the day down there just to get one
romantic look at his old home after being gone twenty-five years. I
don't blame him for talking rough about the town, nor for his criminal
act--stealing a street-car track."

It sounded piquant--a noble theft indeed! I now murmured a bit myself,
striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by
facts. The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New
York. She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan
daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. "That's how I always
think of New York," said she--"a kind of a comic supplement to the rest
of this great country. Here--see these two comical little tots standing
on their uncle's stomach and chopping his heart out with their
axes--after you got the town sized up it's just that funny and horrible.
It's like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to
in Boston--ingenious but unpleasant."

But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day's
fishing--this coarse disparagement of something the poor creature was
unfitted to comprehend.

"Ben Sutton," I remarked firmly.

* * * * *

"The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that
are trying to get what you got and them that think you're trying to get
what they got."

"Ben Sutton," I repeated, trying to make it sullen.

"Ask a man on the street in New York where such and such a building is
and he'll edge out of reaching distance, with his hand on his watch,
before he tells you he don't know. In Denver, or San Francisco now, the
man will most likely walk a block or two with you just to make sure you
get the directions right."

"Ben Sutton!"

"They'll fall for raw stuff, though. I know a slick mining promoter from
Arizona that stops at the biggest hotel on Fifth Avenue and has himself
paged by the boys about twenty times a day so folks will know how
important he is. He'll get up from his table in the restaurant and
follow the boy out in a way to make 'em think that nine million dollars
is at stake. He tells me it helps him a lot in landing the wise ones."

"Stole a street-car track," I muttered desperately.

"The typical New Yorker, like they call him, was born in Haverhill,
Massachusetts, and sleeps in New Rochelle, going in on the 8:12 and
coming out on the--"

"I had a pretty fight landing that biggest one this afternoon, from that
pool under the falls up above the big bend. Twice I thought I'd lost
him, but he was only hiding--and then I found I'd forgotten my landing
net. Say, did I ever tell you about the time I was fishing for steel
head down in Oregon, and the bear--" The lady hereupon raised a hushing
hand.

* * * * *

Well, as I was saying, Ben Sutton blew into town early last September
and after shaking hands with his old confederate, Lon Price, he says how
is the good wife and is she at home and Lon says no; that Pettikins has
been up at Silver Springs resting for a couple weeks; so Ben says it's
too bad he'll miss the little lady, as in that case he has something
good to suggest, which is, what's the matter with him and Lon taking a
swift hike down to New York which Ben ain't seen since 1892, though he
was born there, and he'd now like to have a look at the old home in
Lon's company. Lon says it's too bad Pettikins ain't there to go along,
but if they start at once she wouldn't have time to join them, and Ben
says he can start near enough at once for that, so hurry and pack the
suitcase. Lon does it, leaving a delayed telegram to Henrietta to be
sent after they start, begging her to join them if not too late, which
it would be.

While they are in Louis Meyer's Place feeling good over this coop, in
comes the ever care-free Jeff Tuttle and Jeff says he wouldn't mind
going out on rodeo himself with 'em, at least as far as Jersey City
where he has a dear old aunt living--or she did live there when he was a
little boy and was always very nice to him and he ain't done right in
not going to see her for thirty years--and if he's that close to the big
town he could run over from Jersey City for a look--see.

Lon and Ben hail his generous decision with cheers and on the way to
another place they meet me, just down from the ranch. And why don't I
come along with the bunch? Ben has it all fixed in ten seconds, he being
one of these talkers that will odd things along till they sound even,
and the other two chiming in with him and wanting to buy my ticket right
then. But I hesitated some. Lon and Ben Sutton was all right to go with,
but Jeff Tuttle was a different kittle of fish. Jeff is a decent man in
many respects and seems real refined when you first meet him if it's in
some one's parlour, but he ain't one you'd care to follow step by step
through the mazes and pitfalls and palmrooms of a great city if you're
sensitive to public notice. Still, they was all so hearty in their
urging, Ben saying I was the only lady in the world he could travel that
far with and not want to strangle, and Lon says he'd rather have me than
most of the men he knew, and Jeff says if I'll consent to go he'll take
his full-dress suit so as to escort me to operas and lectures in a
classy manner, and at last I give up. I said I'd horn in on their party
since none of 'em seemed hostile.

I'd meant to go a little later anyway, for some gowns I needed and some
shopping I'd promised to do for Lizzie Gunslaugh. You got to hand it to
New York for shopping. Why, I'd as soon buy an evening gown in Los
Angeles as in Portland or San Francisco. Take this same Lizzie
Gunslaugh. She used to make a bare living, with her sign reading "Plain
and Fashionable Dressmaking." But I took that girl down to New York
twice with me and showed her how and what to buy there, instead of going
to Spokane for her styles, and to-day she's got a thriving little
business with a bully sign that we copied from them in the East
--"Madame Elizabeth, Robes et Manteaux." Yes, sir; New York has at least
one real reason for taking up room. That's a thing I always try to get
into Ben Sutton's head, that he'd ought to buy his clothes down there
instead of getting 'em from a reckless devil-dare of a tailor up in
Seattle that will do anything in the world Ben tells him to--and he
tells him a plenty, believe me. He won't ever wear a dress suit,
either, because he says that costume makes all men look alike and he
ain't going to stifle his individuality. If you seen Ben's figure once
you'd know that nothing could make him look like any one else, him being
built on the lines of a grain elevator and having individuality no
clothes on earth could stifle. He's the very last man on earth that
should have coloured braid on his check suits. However!

My trunk is packed in a hurry and I'm down to the 6:10 on time. Lon is
very scared and jubilant over deserting Henrietta in this furtive way,
and Ben is all ebullient in a new suit that looks like a lodge regalia
and Jeff Tuttle in plain clothes is as happy as a child. When I get
there he's already begun to give his imitation of a Sioux squaw with a
hare lip reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night" in her native
language, which he pulls on all occasions when he's feeling too good.
It's some imitation. The Sioux language, even when spoken by a trained
elocutionist, can't be anything dulcet. Jeff's stunt makes it sound like
grinding coffee and shovelling coal into a cellar at the same time.
Anyway, our journey begun happily and proved to be a good one, the days
passing pleasantly while we talked over old times and played ten-cent
limit in my stateroom, though Jeff Tuttle is so untravelled that he'll
actually complain about the food and service in a dining-car. The poor
puzzled old cow-man still thinks you ought to get a good meal in one,
like the pretty bill of fare says you can.

Then one morning we was in New York and Ben Sutton got his first shock.
He believed he was still on the other side of the river because he
hadn't rid in a ferryboat yet. He had to be told sharply by parties in
uniform. But we got him safe to a nice tall hotel on Broadway at last.
Talk about your hicks from the brush--Ben was it, coming back to this
here birthplace of his. He fell into a daze on the short ride to the
hotel--after insisting hotly that we should go to one that was pulled
down ten years ago--and he never did get out of it all that day.

Lon and Jeff was dazed, too. The city filled 'em with awe and they made
no pretense to the contrary. About all they did that day was to buy
picture cards and a few drinks. They was afraid to wander very far from
the hotel for fear they'd get run over or arrested or fall into the new
subway or something calamitous like that. Of course New York was looking
as usual, the streets being full of tired voters tearing up the
car-tracks and digging first-line trenches and so forth.

It was a quiet day for all of us, though I got my shopping started, and
at night we met at the hotel and had a lonesome dinner. We was all too
dazed and tired to feel like larking about any, and poor Ben was so
downright depressed it was pathetic. Ever read the story about a man
going to sleep and waking up in a glass case in a museum a thousand
years later? That was Ben coming back to his old town after only
twenty-five years. He hadn't been able to find a single old friend nor
any familiar faces. He ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, for
himself, but he was so mournful he couldn't eat more than about two
dollars' worth of it. He kept forgetting himself in dismal
reminiscences. The onlysright thing he'd found was the men tearing up
the streets. That was just like they used to be, he said. He maundered
on to us about how horse-cars was running on Broadway when he left and
how they hardly bothered to light the lamps north of Forty-second
Street, and he wished he could have some fish balls like the old
Sinclair House used to have for its free lunch, and how in them golden
days people that had been born right here in New York was seen so
frequently that they created no sensation.

He was feeling awful desolate about this. He pointed out different
parties at tables around us, saying they was merchant princes from
Sandusky or prominent Elks from Omaha or roystering blades from
Pittsburgh or boulevardeers from Bucyrus--not a New Yorker in sight. He
said he'd been reading where a wealthy nut had seat out an expedition to
the North Pole to capture a certain kind of Arctic flea that haunts only
a certain rare fox--but he'd bet a born New Yorker was harder to find.
He said what this millionaire defective ought to of done with his
inherited wealth was to find a male and female born here and have 'em
stuffed and mounted under glass in a fire-proof museum, which would be a
far more exciting spectacle than any flea on earth, however scarce and
arctic. He said he'd asked at least forty men that day where they was
born--waiters, taxi-drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, and just anybody
that would stop and take one with him, and not a soul had been born
nearer to the old town than Scranton, Pennsylvania. "It's
heart-rending," he says, "to reflect that I'm alone here in this big
city of outlanders. I haven't even had the nerve to go down to West
Ninth Street for a look at the old home that shelters my boyhood
memories. If I could find only one born New Yorker it would brace me up
a whole lot."

It was one dull evening, under this cloud that enveloped Ben. We didn't
even go to a show, but turned in early. Lon Price sent a picture card of
the Flatiron Building to Henrietta telling her he was having a dreary
time and he was now glad he'd been disappointed about her not coming, so
love and kisses from her lonesome boy. It was what he would of sent her
anyway, but it happened to be the truth so far.

Well, I got the long night's rest that was coming to me and started out
early in the A.M. to pit my cunning against the wiles of the New York
department stores, having had my evil desires inflamed the day before by
an afternoon gown in chiffon velvet and Georgette crepe with silver
embroidery and fur trimming that I'd seen in a window marked down to
$198.98. I fell for that all right, and for an all-silk jersey sport
suit at $29.98 and a demi-tailored walking suit for a mere bagatelle,
and a white corduroy sport blouse and a couple of imported evening
gowns they robbed me on--but I didn't mind. You expect to be robbed for
anything really good in New York, only the imitation stuff that's worn
by the idle poor being cheaper than elsewhere. And I was so busy in this
whirl of extortion that I forgot all about the boys and their troubles
till I got back to the hotel at five o'clock.

I find 'em in the palm grill, or whatever it's called, drinking
stingers. But now they was not only more cheerful than they had been the
night before but they was getting a little bit contemptuous and Western
about the great city. Lon had met a brother real estate shark from Salt
Lake and Jeff had fell in with a sheep man from Laramie--and treated him
like an equal because of meeting him so far from home in a strange town
where no one would find it out on him--and Ben Sutton had met up with
his old friend Jake Berger, also from Nome. That's one nice thing about
New York; you keep meeting people from out your way that are lonesome,
too. Lon's friend and Jeff's sheep man had had to leave, being
encumbered by watchful-waiting wives that were having 'em paged every
three minutes and wouldn't believe the boy when he said they was out.
But Ben's friend, Jake Berger, was still at the table. Jake is a good
soul, kind of a short, round, silent man, never opening his head for any
length of time. He seems to bring the silence of the frozen North down
with him except for brief words to the waiter ever and anon.

As I say, the boys was all more cheerful and contemptuous about New
York by this time. Ben had spent another day asking casual parties if
they was born in New York and having no more luck than a rabbit, but it
seemed like he'd got hardened to these disappointments. He said he might
leave his own self to a museum in due time, so future generations would
know at least what the male New Yorker looked like. As for the female,
he said any of these blondes along Broadway could be made to look near
enough like his mate by a skilled taxidermist. Jeff Tuttle here says
that they wasn't all blondes because he'd seen a certain brunette that
afternoon right in this palm grill that was certainly worth preserving
for all eternity in the grandest museum on earth--which showed that Jeff
had chirked up a lot since landing in town. Ben said he had used the
term "blonde" merely to designate a species and they let it go at that.

Lon Price then said he'd been talking a little himself to people he met
in different places and they might not be born New Yorkers but they
certainly didn't know anything beyond the city limits. At this he looks
around at the crowded tables in this palm grill and says very bitterly
that he'll give any of us fifty to one they ain't a person in the place
that ever so much as even heard of Price's Addition to Red Gap. And so
the talk went for a little, with Jake Berger ever and again crooning to
the waiter for another round of stingers. I'd had two, so I stayed out
on the last round. I told Jake I enjoyed his hospitality but two would
be all I could think under till they learned to leave the dash of
chloroform out of mine. Jake just looked kindly at me. He's as chatty as
Mount McKinley.

But I was glad to see the boys more cheerful, so I said I'd get my
lumpiest jewels out of the safe and put a maid and hairdresser to work
on me so I'd be a credit to 'em at dinner and then we'd spend a jolly
evening at some show. Jeff said he'd also doll up in his dress suit and
get shaved and manicured and everything, so he'd look like one in my own
walk of life. Ben was already dressed for evening. He had on a totally
new suit of large black and white checks looking like a hotel floor from
a little distance, bound with braid of a quiet brown, and with a vest of
wide stripes in green and mustard colour. It was a suit that the
automobile law in some states would have compelled him to put dimmers
on; it made him look egregious, if that's the word; but I knew it was no
good appealing to his better nature. He said he'd have dinner ordered
for us in another palm grill that had more palms in it.

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