Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

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




"The wives by now was huddled round the side of the clubhouse, too
scared to talk much, just muttering incoherently and wringing their
hands, and Beryl Mae pipes up and says: 'Oh, perhaps I wronged him
after all; perhaps deep down in his heart he was sincere.'

"The moon had come up now and we could see the mob with its victim
starting off toward the Canadian Rockies. Then all at once they began to
run, and I knew Wilfred had made another dash for liberty. Pretty soon
they scattered out and seemed to be beating up the shrubbery down by the
creek. And after a bit some of 'em straggled back. They paid no
attention to us ladies, but made for the grillroom.

"'We lost him in that brush beyond the fifth hole,' says Alonzo. 'None
of us is any match for him on level ground, but we got some good
trackers and we're guarding the line to keep him headed off from the
railroad and into his beloved hills.'

"'We should hurry back with refreshment for the faithful watchers,' says
Judge Ballard. 'The fellow will surely try to double back to the
railroad.'

"'Got to keep him away from the cramped haunts of business men,' says
Alonzo brightly.

"'I wish Clay, my faithful old hound, were still alive,' says the judge
wistfully.

"'Say, I got a peach of a terrier down to the house right now,' says
Jeff Tuttle, 'but he's only trained for bear--I never tried him on
poets.'

"'He might tree him at that,' says Doc Martingale.

"'Percy,' cries his wife, 'have you forgotten your manhood?'

"'Yes,' says Percy.

"'Darling,' calls Henrietta, 'will you listen to reason a moment?'

"'No,' says Alonzo.

"'It's that creature from Alaska leading them on,' says Mrs. Judge
Ballard--'that overdressed drunken rowdy!'

"Ben Sutton looked right hurt at this. He buttoned his coat over his
checked vest and says: 'I take that unkindly, madam--calling me
overdressed. I selected this suiting with great care. It ain't nice to
call me overdressed. I feel it deeply.'

"But they was off again before one thing could lead to another, taking
bottles of hard liquor they had uncorked. 'The open road! The open
road!' they yelled as they went.

"Well, that's about all. Some of the wives begun to straggle off home,
mostly in tears, and some hung round till later. I was one of these, not
wishing to miss anything of an absorbing character. Edgar Tomlinson went
early, too. Edgar writes 'The Lounger in the Lobby' column for the
_Recorder_, and he'd come out to report the entertainment; but at one
o'clock he said it was a case for the sporting editor and he'd try to
get him out before the kill.

"At different times one or two of the hunters would straggle back for
more drink. They said the quarry was making a long detour round their
left flank, trying his darndest to get to the railroad, but they had
hopes. And they scattered out. Ever and anon you would hear the long
howl of some lone drunkard that had got lost from the pack.

"About sunup they all found themselves at the railroad track about a
mile beyond the clubhouse, just at the head of Stender's grade. There
they was voting to picket the track for a mile each way when along come
the four-thirty-two way freight. It had slowed up some making the grade,
and while they watched it what should dart out from a bunch of scrub oak
but the active figure of Wilfred Lennox. He made one of them iron
ladders all right and was on top of a car when the train come by, but
none of 'em dast jump it because it had picked up speed again.

"They said Wilfred stood up and shook both fists at 'em and called 'em
every name he could lay his tongue to--using language so coarse you'd
never think it could have come from a poet's lips. They could see his
handsome face working violently long after they couldn't hear him. Just
my luck! I'm always missing something.

"So they come grouching back to the clubhouse and I took 'em home to
breakfast. When we got down to the table old Judge Ballard says: 'What
might have been an evening of rare enjoyment was converted into a
detestable failure by that cur. I saw from the very beginning that he
was determined to spoil our fun.'

"'The joke is sure on us,' says Ben Sutton, 'but I bear him no grudge.
In fact, I did him an injustice I knew he wasn't a poet, but I didn't
believe he was even a hobo till he jumped that freight.'

"Alonzo was out in the hall telephoning Henrietta. We could hear his
cheerful voice: 'No, Pettikins, no! It doesn't ache a bit. What's that?
Of course I still do! You are the only woman that ever meant anything to
me. What? What's that? Oh, I may have errant fancies now and again, like
the best of men--you know yourself how sensitive I am to a certain type
of flowerlike beauty--but it never touches my deeper nature. Yes,
certainly, I shall be right up the very minute good old Ben
leaves--to-morrow or next day. What's that? Now, now! Don't do that!
Just the minute he leaves--G'--by.'

"And the little brute hung up on her!"




II

MA PETTENGILL AND THE SONG OF SONGS


The hammock between the two jack pines at the back of the Arrowhead
ranch house had lured me to mid--afternoon slumber. The day was hot and
the morning had been toilsome--four miles of trout stream, rocky,
difficult miles. And my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, had
ridden off after luncheon to some remote fastness of her domain, leaving
me and the place somnolent.

In the shadowed coolness, aching gratefully in many joints, I had
plunged into the hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign
oblivion. Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch
house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east
when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through one
of those dreams of a monstrous futility that sometimes madden us from
sleep. Through a fearsome gorge a stream wound and in it I hunted one
certain giant trout. Savagely it took the fly, but always the line broke
when I struck; rather, it dissolved; there would be no resistance. And
the giant fish mocked me each time, jeered and flouted me, came
brazenly to the surface and derided me with antics weirdly human.

Then, as I persisted, it surprisingly became a musical trout. It
whistled, it played a guitar, it sang. How pathetic our mildly amazed
acceptance of these miracles in dreams! I was only the more determined
to snare a fish that could whistle and sing simultaneously, and
accompany itself on a stringed instrument, and was six feet in length.
It was that by now and ever growing. It seemed only an attractive
novelty and I still believed a brown hackle would suffice. But then I
became aware that this trout, to its stringed accompaniment, ever
whistled and sang one song with a desperate intentness. That song was
"The Rosary." The fish had presumed too far. "This," I shrewdly told
myself, "is almost certainly a dream." The soundless words were magic.
Gorge and stream vanished, the versatile fish faded to blue sky showing
through the green needles of a jack pine. It was a sane world again and
still, I thought, with the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn,
corral, and bunk house going long to the east. I stretched in the
hammock, I tingled with a lazy well-being. The world was still; but was
it--quite?

On a bench over by the corral gate crouched Buck Devine, doing something
needful to a saddle. And as he wrought he whistled. He whistled "The
Rosary" shrilly and with much feeling. Nor was the world still but for
this. From the bunk house came the mellow throbbing of a stringed
instrument, the guitar of Sandy Sawtelle, star rider of the Arrowhead,
temporarily withdrawn from a career of sprightly endeavour by a sprained
ankle and solacing his retirement with music. He was playing "The
Rosary"--very badly indeed, but one knew only too well what he meant.
The two performers were distant enough to be no affront to each other.
The hammock, less happily, was midway between them.

I sat up with groans. I hated to leave the hammock.

"The trout also sang it," I reminded myself. Followed the voice, a voice
from the stable, the cracked, whining tenor of a very aged vassal of the
Arrowhead, one Jimmie Time. Jimmie, I gathered, was currying a horse as
he sang, for each bar of the ballad was measured by the double thud of a
currycomb against the side of a stall. Whistle, guitar, and voice now
attacked the thing in differing keys and at varying points. Jimmie might
be said to prevail. There was a fatuous tenderness in his attack and the
thudding currycomb gave it spirit. Nor did he slur any of the affecting
words; they clave the air with an unctuous precision:

The ow-wurs I spu-hend with thu-hee, dee-yur heart,
(The currycomb: Thud, thud!)
Are as a stru-hing of pur-rulls tuh me-e-e,
(The currycomb: Thud, thud!)

Came a dramatic and equally soulful interpolation: "Whoa, dang you! You
would, would you? Whoa-a-a, now!"

Again the melody:

I count them o-vurr, ev-ry one apar-rut,
(Thud, thud!)
My ro-sah-ree--my ro-sah-ree!
(Thud, thud!)

Buck Devine still mouthed his woful whistle and Sandy Sawtelle valiantly
strove for the true and just accord of his six strings. It was no place
for a passive soul. I parted swiftly from the hammock and made over the
sun-scorched turf for the ranch house. There was shelter and surcease;
doors and windows might be closed. The unctuous whine of Jimmie Time
pursued me:

Each ow-wur a pur-rull, each pur-rull a prayer,
(Thud, thud!)
Tuh stu-hill a heart in absence wru-hung,
(Thud, thud!)

As I reached the hospitable door of the living-room I observed Lew Wee,
Chinese chef of the Arrowhead, engaged in cranking one of those devices
with a musical intention which I have somewhere seen advertised. It is
an important-looking device in a polished mahogany case, and I recall in
the advertisement I saw it was surrounded by a numerous
enthralled-looking family in a costly drawing-room, while the ghost of
Beethoven simpered above it in ineffable benignancy. Something now told
me the worst, even as Lew Wee adjusted the needle to the revolving disk.
I waited for no more than the opening orchestral strains. It is a
leisurely rhythmed cacophony, and I had time to be almost beyond range
ere the voice took up a tale I was hearing too often in one day. Even so
I distantly perceived it to be a fruity contralto voice with an expert
sob.

A hundred yards in front of the ranch house all was holy peace, peace in
the stilled air, peace dreaming along the neighbouring hills and lying
like a benediction over the wide river-flat below me, through which the
stream wove a shining course. I exulted in it, from the dangers passed.
Then appeared Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill from the fringe of
cottonwoods, jolting a tired horse toward me over the flat.

"Come have some tea," she cordially boomed as she passed. I returned
uncertainly. Tea? Yes. But--However, the door would be shut and the
Asiatic probably diverted.

As I came again to the rear of the ranch house Mrs. Pettengill, in khaki
riding breeches, flannel shirt, and the hat of her trade, towered
bulkily as an admirable figure of wrath, one hand on her hip, one
poising a quirt viciously aloft. By the corral gate Buck Devine drooped
cravenly above his damaged saddle; at the door of the bunk house Sandy
Sawtelle tottered precariously on one foot, his guitar under his arm, a
look of guilty horror on his set face. By the stable door stood the
incredibly withered Jimmie Time, shrinking a vast dismay.

"You hear me!" exploded the infuriated chatelaine, and I knew she was
repeating the phrase.

"Ain't I got to mend this latigo?" protested Buck Devine piteously.

"You'll go up the gulch and beyond the dry fork and mend it, if you
whistle that tune again!"

Sandy Sawtelle rumpled his pink hair to further disorder and found a few
weak words for his conscious guilt.

"Now, I wasn't aiming to harm anybody, what with with my game laig and
shet up here like I am--"

"Well, my Lord! Can't you play a sensible tune then?"

Jimmie Time hereupon behaved craftily. He lifted his head, showing the
face of a boy who had somehow got to be seventy years old without ever
getting to be more than a boy, and began to whistle softly and
innocently--an air of which hardly anything could be definitely said
except that it was not "The Rosary." It was very flagrantly not "The
Rosary." His craft availed him not.

"Yes, and you, too!" thundered the lady. "You was the worst--you was
singing. Didn't I hear you? How many times I got to tell you? First
thing you know, you little reprobate--"

Jimmie Time cowered again. Visibly he took on unbelievable years.

"Yes, ma'am," he whispered.

"Yes, ma'am," meekly echoed the tottering instrumentalist.

"Yes, ma'am," muttered Buck Devine, "not knowing you was anywheres
near--"

"Makes no difference where I be--you hear me!"

Although her back was toward me I felt her glare. The wretches winced.
She came a dozen steps toward me, then turned swiftly to glare again.
They shuddered, even though she spoke no word. Then she came on,
muttering hotly, and together we approached the ranch house. A dozen
feet from the door she bounded ahead of me with a cry of baffled rage. I
saw why. Lew Wee, unrecking her approach, was cold-bloodedly committing
an encore. She sped through the doorway, and I heard Lew Wee's
frightened squeal as he sped through another. When I stood in the room
she was putting violent hands to the throat of the thing.

"The hours I spend with th--" The throttled note expired in a very
dreadful squawk of agony. It was as if foul murder had been done, and
done swiftly. The maddened woman faced me with the potentially evil disk
clutched in her hands. In a voice that is a notable loss to our revivals
of Greek tragedy she declaimed:

"Ain't it the limit?--and the last thing I done was to hide out that
record up behind the clock where he couldn't find it!"

In a sudden new alarm and with three long steps she reached the door of
the kitchen and flung it open. Through a window thus exposed we beheld
the offender. One so seldom thinks of the Chinese as athletes! Lew Wee
was well down the flat toward the cottonwoods and still going strong.

"Ain't it the limit?" again demanded his employer. "Gosh all--excuse me,
but they got me into such a state. Here I am panting like a tuckered
hound. And now I got to make the tea myself. He won't dare come back
before suppertime."

It seemed to be not yet an occasion for words from me. I tried for a
look of intelligent sympathy. In the kitchen I heard her noisily fill a
teakettle with water. She was not herself yet. She still muttered hotly.
I moved to the magazine--littered table and affected to be taken with
the portrait of a smug--looking prize Holstein on the first page of the
_Stock Breeder's Gazette_.

The volcano presently seethed through the room and entered its own
apartment.

Ten minutes later my hostess emerged with recovered aplomb. She had
donned a skirt and a flowered blouse, and dusted powder upon and about
her sunburned and rather blobby nose. Her crinkly gray hair had been
drawn to a knot at the back of her grenadier's head. Her widely set eyes
gleamed with the smile of her broad and competent mouth.

"Tea in one minute," she promised more than audibly as she bustled into
the kitchen. It really came in five, and beside the tray she pleasantly
relaxed. The cups were filled and a breach was made upon the cake she
had brought. The tea was advertising a sufficient strength, yet she now
raised the dynamics of her own portion.

"I'll just spill a hooker of this here Scotch into mine," she said, and
then, as she did even so: "My lands! Ain't I the cynical old Kate! And
silly! Letting them boys upset me that way with that there fool song."
She decanted a saucerful of the re-enforced tea and raised it to her
pursed lips. "Looking at you!" she murmured cavernously and drank deep.
She put the saucer back where nice persons leave theirs at all times.
"Say, it was hot over on that bench to-day. I was getting out that bunch
of bull calves, and all the time here was old Safety First mumbling
round--"

This was rather promising, but I had resolved differently.

"That song," I insinuated. "Of course there are people--"

"You bet there are! I'm one of 'em, too! What that song's done to
me--and to other innocent bystanders in the last couple weeks--"

She sighed hugely, drank more of the fortified brew--nicely from the cup
this time--and fashioned a cigarette from materials at her hand.

In the flame of a lighted match Mrs. Pettengill's eyes sparkled with a
kind of savage retrospection. She shrugged it off impatiently.

"I guess you thought I spoke a mite short when you asked about Nettie's
wedding yesterday."

It was true. She had turned the friendly inquiry with a rather
mystifying abruptness. I murmured politely. She blew twin jets of smoke
from the widely separated corners of her generous mouth and then
shrewdly narrowed her gaze to some distant point of narration.

"Yes, sir, I says to her, 'Woman's place is the home.' And what you
think she come back with? That she was going to be a leader of the New
Dawn. Yes, sir, just like that. Five feet one, a hundred and eight
pounds in her winter clothes, a confirmed pickle eater--pretty enough,
even if she is kind of peaked and spiritual looking--and going to lead
the New Dawn.

"Where'd she catch it? My fault, of course, sending her back East to
school and letting her visit the W.B. Hemingways, Mrs. H. being the
well-known clubwoman like the newspapers always print under her photo in
evening dress. That's how she caught it all right.

"I hadn't realized it when she first got back, except she was pale and
far-away in the eyes and et pickles heavily at every meal--oh, mustard,
dill, sour, sweet, anything that was pickles--and not enough meat and
regular victuals. Gaunted she was, but I didn't suspect her mind was
contaminated none till I sprung Chester Timmins on her as a good
marrying bet. You know Chet, son of old Dave that has the Lazy Eight
Ranch over on Pipe Stone--a good, clean boy that'll have the ranch to
himself as soon as old Dave dies of meanness, and that can't be long
now. It was then she come out delirious about not being the pampered toy
of any male--_male_, mind you! It seems when these hussies want to knock
man nowadays they call him a male. And she rippled on about the freedom
of her soul and her downtrod sisters and this here New Dawn.

"Well, sir, a baby could have pushed me flat with one finger. At first I
didn' know no better'n to argue with her, I was that affrighted. 'Why,
Nettie Hosford,' I says, 'to think I've lived to hear my only sister's
only child talking in shrieks like that! To think I should have to tell
one of my own kin that women's place is the home. Look at me,' I
says--we was down in Red Gap at the time--'pretty soon I'll go up to the
ranch and what'll I do there?" I says.

"'Well, listen,' I says, 'to a few of the things I'll be doing: I'll be
marking, branding, and vaccinating the calves, I'll be classing and
turning out the strong cattle on the range. I'll be having the colts
rid, breaking mules for haying, oiling and mending the team harness,
cutting and hauling posts, tattooing the ears and registering the
thoroughbred calves, putting in dams, cleaning ditches, irrigating the
flats, setting out the vegetable garden, building fence, swinging new
gates, overhauling the haying tools, receiving, marking, and branding
the new two--year--old bulls, plowing and seeding grain for our work
stock and hogs, breaking in new cooks and blacksmiths'--I was so mad I
went on till I was winded. 'And that ain't half of it,' I says. 'Women's
work is never done; her place is in the home and she finds so much to do
right there that she ain't getting any time to lead a New Dawn. I'll
start you easy,' I says; 'learn you to bake a batch of bread or do a tub
of washing--something simple--and there's Chet Timmins, waiting to give
you a glorious future as wife and mother and helpmeet.'

"She just give me one look as cold as all arctics and says, 'It's
repellent'--that's all, just 'repellent.' I see I was up against it. No
good talking. Sometimes it comes over me like a flash when not to talk.
It does to some women. So I affected a light manner and pretended to
laugh it off, just as if I didn't see scandal threatening--think of
having it talked about that a niece of my own raising was a leader of
the New Dawn!

"'All right,' I says, 'only, of course, Chet Timmins is a good friend
and neighbour of mine, even if he is a male, so I hope you won't mind
his dropping in now and again from time to time, just to say howdy and
eat a meal.' And she flusters me again with her coolness.

"'No,' she says, 'I won't mind, but I know what you're counting on, and
it won't do either of you any good. I'm above the appeal of a man's mere
presence,' she says, 'for I've thrown off the age--long subjection; but
I won't mind his coming. I shall delight to study him. They're all
alike, and one specimen is as good as another for that. But neither of
you need expect anything,' she says, 'for the wrongs of my sisters have
armoured me against the grossness of mere sex appeal.' Excuse me for
getting off such things, but I'm telling you how she talked.

"'Oh, shucks!' I says to myself profanely, for all at once I saw she
wasn't talking her own real thoughts but stuff she'd picked up from the
well-known lady friends of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway. I was mad all right; but
the minute I get plumb sure mad I get wily. 'I was just trying you out,'
I says. 'Of course you are right!' 'Of course I am,' says she, 'though I
hardly expected you to see it, you being so hardened a product of the
ancient ideal of slave marriage.'

"At them words it was pretty hard for me to keep on being wily, but I
kept all right. I kept beautifully. I just laughed and said we'd have
Chet Timmins up for supper, and she laughed and said it would be
amusing.

"And it was, or it would have been if it hadn't been so sad and
disgusting. Chet, you see, had plumb crumpled the first time he ever set
eyes on her, and he's never been able to uncrumple. He always choked up
the minute she'd come into the room, and that night he choked worse'n
ever because the little devil started in to lead him on--aiming to show
me how she could study a male, I reckon. He couldn't even ask for some
more of the creamed potatoes without choking up--with her all the time
using her eyes on him, and telling him how a great rough man like him
scared 'poor little me.' Chet's tan bleaches out a mite by the end of
winter, but she kept his face exactly the shade of that new mahogany
sideboard I got, and she told him several times that he ought to go see
a throat specialist right off about that choking of his.

"And after supper I'm darned if she didn't lure him out onto the porch
in the moonlight, and stand there sad looking and helpless, simply
egging him on, mind you, her in one of them little squashy white dresses
that she managed to brush against him--all in the way of cold study,
mind you. Say, ain't we the lovely tame rattlesnakes when we want to be!
And this big husky lummox of a Chester Timmins--him she'd called a
male--what does he do but stand safely at a distance of four feet in the
grand romantic light of the full moon, and tell her vivaciously all
about the new saddle he's having made in Spokane. And even then he not
only chokes but he giggles. They do say a strong man in tears is a
terrible sight. But a husky man giggling is worse--take it from one who
has suffered. And all the time I knew his heart was furnishing enough
actual power to run a feed chopper. So did she!

"'The creature is so typical,' she says when the poor cuss had finally
stumbled down the front steps. 'He's a real type.' Only she called it
'teep,' having studied the French language among other things. 'He is a
teep indeed!' she says.

"I had to admit myself that Chester wasn't any self-starter. I saw he'd
have to be cranked by an outsider if he was going to win a place of his
own in the New Dawn. And I kept thinking wily, and the next P.M. when
Nettie and I was downtown I got my hunch. You know that music store on
Fourth Street across from the Boston Cash Emporium. It's kept by C.
Wilbur Todd, and out in front in a glass case he had a mechanical banjo
that was playing 'The Rosary' with variations when we come by. We
stopped a minute to watch the machinery picking the strings and in a
flash I says to myself, 'I got it! Eureka, California!' I says, 'it's
come to me!'

"Of course that piece don't sound so awful tender when it's done on a
banjo with variations, but I'd heard it done right and swell one time
and so I says, 'There's the song of songs to bring foolish males and
females to their just mating sense.'"

The speaker paused to drain her cup and to fashion another cigarette,
her eyes dreaming upon far vistas.

"Ain't it fierce what music does to persons," she resumed. "Right off I
remembered the first time I'd heard that piece--in New York City four
years ago, in a restaurant after the theatre one night, where I'd gone
with Mrs. W.B. Hemingway and her husband. A grand, gay place it was,
with an orchestra. I picked at some untimely food and sipped a
highball--they wouldn't let a lady smoke there--and what interested me
was the folks that come in. Folks always do interest me something
amazing. Strange ones like that, I mean, where you set and try to
figure out all about 'em, what kind of homes they got, and how they act
when they ain't in a swell restaurant, and everything. Pretty soon comes
a couple to the table next us and, say, they was just plain Mr. and Mrs.
Mad. Both of 'em stall-fed. He was a large, shiny lad, with pink jowls
barbered to death and wicked looking, like a well-known clubman or
villain. The lady was spectacular and cynical, with a cold, thin nose
and eyes like a couple of glass marbles. Her hair was several shades off
a legal yellow and she was dressed! She would have made handsome loot,
believe me--aigrette, bracelets, rings, dog collar, gold-mesh bag,
vanity case--Oh, you could see at a glance that she was one of them
Broadway social favourites you read about. And both grouchy, like I
said. He scowled till you knew he'd just love to beat a crippled
step-child to death, and she--well, her work wasn't so coarse; she kept
her mad down better. She set there as nice and sweet as a pet scorpion.

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