Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

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




"Then everybody was standing up and moving out--wiping their eyes a lot
of 'em was--so I push on ahead quick, aiming to be more wily than ever
and leave my couple alone. They don't miss me, either. When I look back,
darned if they ain't kind of shaking hands right there in the hall.
'Quick work!' I says. 'You got to hand it to that song.' Even then I
noticed Nettie was looking back to where Wilbur was tripping down from
the platform, and Chester had his eyes glazed over on this manicure
party. Still, they was gripping each other's hands right there before
folks, and I think they're just a bit embarrassed. My old heart went
right on echoing that song as I pushed forward--not looking back again,
I was that certain.

"And to show you the mushy state I was in, here is old Safety First
himself leering at me down by the door, with a clean shave and his other
clothes on, and he says all about how it was a grand evening's musical
entertainment and how much will the Belgians get in cold cash, anyway,
and how about them hundred and fifty head of bull calves that he was
willing to take off my hands, and me, all mushed up by that song as I
am telling you, saying to him in a hearty manner, 'They're yours, Dave!
Take 'em at your own price, old friend.' Honest, I said it just that
way, so you can see. 'Oh, I'll be stuck on 'em at fifty a head,' says
Dave, 'but I knew you'd listen to reason, we being such old neighbours.'
'I ain't heard reason since that last song,' I says. I'm listening to my
heart, and it's a grand pity yours never learned to talk.' 'Fifty a
head,' says the old robber.

"So, thus throwing away at least fifteen hundred dollars like it was a
mere bagatelle or something, I walk out into the romantic night and beat
it for home, wanting to be in before my happy couple reached there, so
they'd feel free to linger over their parting. My, but I did feel
responsible and dangerous, directing human destinies so brashly the way
I had."

There was a pause, eloquent with unworded emotions.

Then "Human destinies, hell!" the lady at length intoned.

Hereupon I amazingly saw that she believed her tale to be done. I
permitted the silence to go a minute, perhaps, while she fingered the
cigarette paper and loose tobacco.

"And of course, then," I hinted, as the twin jets of smoke were rather
viciously expelled.

"I should say so--'of course, then'--you got it. But I didn't get it for
near an hour yet. I set up to my bedroom window in the dark, waiting
excitedly, and pretty soon they slowly floated up to the front gate,
talking in hushed tones and gurgles. 'Male and female created He them,'
I says, flushed with triumph. The moon wasn't up yet, but you hadn't any
trouble making out they was such. He was acting outrageously like a male
and she was suffering it with the splendid courage which has long
distinguished our helpless sex. And there I set, warming my old heart in
it and expanding like one of them little squeezed-up sponges you see in
the drug-store window which swells up so astonishing when you put it in
water. I wasn't impatient for them to quit, oh, no! They seemed to
clench and unclench and clench again, as if they had all the time in the
world--with me doing nothing but applaud silently.

"After spending about twenty years out there they loitered softly up the
walk and round to the side door where I'd left the light burning, and I
slipped over to the side window, which was also open, and looked down on
the dim fond pair, and she finally opened the door softly and the light
shone out."

Again Ma Pettengill paused, her elbows on the arms of her chair, her
shoulders forward, her gray old head low between them. She drew a long
breath and rumbled fiercely:

"And the mushy fool me, forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that
scandalous price--after all, that's what really gaffed me the worst! My
stars! If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that
night--but of course a trade's a trade, and I'd said it. Ain't I the old
silly!"

"The door opened and the light shone out--"

I gently prompted.

She erected herself in the chair, threw back her shoulders, and her wide
mouth curved and lifted at the corners with the humour that never long
deserts this woman.

"Yep! That light flooded out its golden rays on the reprehensible person
of C. Wilbur Todd," she crisply announced. "And like they say in the
stories, little remains to be told.

"I let out a kind of strangled yell, and Wilbur beat it right across my
new lawn, and I beat it downstairs. But that girl was like a
sleepwalker--not to be talked to, I mean, like you could talk to
persons.

"'Aunty,' she says in creepy tones, 'I have brought myself to the
ultimate surrender. I know the chains are about me, already I feel the
shackles, but I glory in them.' She kind of gasped and shivered in
horrible delight. 'I've kissed the cross at last,' she mutters.

"I was so weak I dropped into a chair and I just looked at her. At first
I couldn't speak, then I saw it was no good speaking. She was free,
white, and twenty-one. So I never let on. I've had to take a jolt or two
in my time. I've learned how. But finally I did manage to ask how about
Chet Timmins.

"'I wronged dear Chester,' she says. 'I admit it freely. He has a heart
of gold and a nature in a thousand. But, of course, there could never be
anything between him and a nature like mine; our egos function on
different planes,' she says. 'Dear Chester came to see it, too. It's
only in the last week we've come to understand each other. It was really
that wonderful song that brought us to our mutual knowledge. It helped
us to understand our mutual depths better than all the ages of eternity
could have achieved.' On she goes with this mutual stuff, till you'd
have thought she was reading a composition or something. 'And dear
Chester is so radiant in his own new-found happiness,' she says. 'What!'
I yells, for this was indeed some jolt.

"'He has come into his own,' she says. 'They have eloped to Spokane,
though I promised to observe secrecy until the train had gone. A very
worthy creature I gather from what Chester tells me, a Miss
Macgillicuddy--'

"'Not the manicure party?' I yells again.

"'I believe she has been a wage-earner,' says Nettie. 'And dear Chester
is so grateful about that song. It was her favourite song, too, and it
seemed to bring them together, just as it opened my own soul to Wilbur.
He says she sings the song very charmingly herself, and he thought it
preferable that they be wed in Spokane before his father objected. And
oh, aunty, I do see how blind I was to my destiny, and how kind you were
to me in my blindness--you who had led the fuller life as I shall lead
it at Wilbur's side.'

"'You beat it to your room,' I orders her, very savage and disorganized.
For I had stood about all the jolts in one day that God had meant me
to. And so they was married, Chester and his bride attending the
ceremony and Oscar Teetz' five-piece orchestra playing the--" She
broke off, with a suddenly blazing glance at the disk, and seized it
from the table rather purposefully. With a hand firmly at both edges she
stared inscrutably at it a long moment.

"I hate to break the darned thing," she said musingly at last. "I guess
I'll just lock it up. Maybe some time I'll be feeling the need to hear
it again. I know I can still be had by it if all the circumstances is
right."

Still she stared at the thing curiously.

"Gee! It was hot getting them calves out to-day, and old Safety First
moaning about all over the place how he's being stuck with 'em, till
more than once I come near forgetting I was a lady--and, oh, yes"--she
brightened--"I was going to tell you. After it was all over, Wilbur, the
gallant young tone poet, comes gushing up to me and says, 'Now, aunty,
always when you are in town you must drop round and break bread with
us.' Aunty, mind you, right off the reel. 'Well,' I says, 'if I drop
round to break any bread your wife bakes I'll be sure to bring a
hammer.' I couldn't help it. He'll make a home for the girl all right,
but he does something sinful to my nerves every time he opens his face.
And then coming back here, where I looked for God's peace and quiet, and
being made to hear that darned song every time I turned round!

"I give orders plain enough, but say, it's like a brush fire--you never
know when you got it stamped out."

From the kitchen came the sound of a dropped armful of stove wood. Hard
upon this, the unctuous whining tenor of Jimmie Time:

Oh-h-h mem-o-reez thu-hat blu-hess and bu-hurn!

"You, Jimmie Time!" It is a voice meant for Greek tragedy and a theatre
open to the heavens. I could feel the terror of the aged vassal.

"Yes, ma'am!" The tone crawled abasingly. "I forgot myself."

I was glad, and I dare say he had the wit to be, that he had not to face
the menace of her glare.




III

THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS


The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs.
Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts. As a
trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this
excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable. But
standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his
peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear
addressed as Jimmie Time. He alone piqued as well as interested. There
was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me.

I have said he is a man; but wait! The years have had him, have scoured
and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a
boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been
misused for years threescore. Time has basely done all but age him. So
much for the wastrel as Nature has left him. But Art has furthered the
piquant values of him as a spectacle.

In dress, speech, and demeanour Jimmie seems to be of the West,
Western--of the old, bad West of informal vendetta, when a man's
increase of years might lie squarely on his quickness in the "draw";
when he went abundantly armed by day and slept lightly at
night--trigger fingers instinctively crooked. Of course such days have
very definitely passed; wherefore the engaging puzzle of certain
survivals in Jimmie Time--for I found him still a two-gun man. He wore
them rather consciously sagging from his lean hips--almost pompously, it
seemed. Nor did he appear properly unconscious of his remaining
attire--of the broad-brimmed hat, its band of rattlesnake skin; of the
fringed buckskin shirt, opening gallantly across his pinched throat; of
his corduroy trousers, fitting bedraggled; of his beautiful beaded
moccasins.

He was perfect in detail--and yet he at once struck me as being too
acutely aware of himself. Could this suspicion ensue, I wondered, from
the circumstance that the light duties he discharged in and about the
Arrowhead Ranch house were of a semidomestic character; from a marked
incongruity in the sight of him, full panoplied for homicide, bearing
armfuls of wood to the house; or, with his wicked hat pulled desperately
over a scowling brow, and still with his flaunt of weapons, engaging a
sinkful of soiled dishes in the kitchen under the eyes of a mere unarmed
Chinaman who sat by and smoked an easy cigarette at him, scornful of
firearms?

There were times, to be sure, when Jimmie's behaviour was in nice accord
with his dreadful appearance--as when I chanced to observe him late the
second afternoon of my arrival. Solitary in front of the bunk house, he
rapidly drew and snapped his side arms at an imaginary foe some paces
in front of him. They would be simultaneously withdrawn from their
holsters, fired from the hip and replaced, the performer snarling
viciously the while. The weapons were unloaded, but I inferred that the
foe crumpled each time.

Then the old man varied the drama, vastly increasing the advantage of
the foe and the peril of his own emergency by turning a careless back on
the scene. The carelessness was only seeming. Swiftly he wheeled, and
even as he did so twin volleys came from the hip. It was spirited--the
weapons seemed to smoke; the smile of the marksman was evil and
masterly. Beyond all question the foe had crumpled again, despite his
tremendous advantage of approach.

I drew gently near before the arms were again holstered and permitted
the full exposure of my admiration for this readiness of retort under
difficulties. The puissant one looked up at me with suspicion, hostile
yet embarrassed. I stood admiring ingenuously, stubborn in my
fascination. Slowly I won him. The coldness in his bright little eyes
warmed to awkward but friendly apology.

"A gun fighter lets hisself git stiff," he winningly began; "then, first
thing he knows, some fine day--crack! Like that! All his own fault, too,
'cause he ain't kep' in trim." He jauntily twirled one of the heavy
revolvers on a forefinger. "Not me, though, pard! Keep m'self up and
comin', you bet! Ketch me not ready to fan the old forty-four! I guess
not! Some has thought they could. Oh, yes; plenty has thought they
could. Crack! Like that!" He wheeled, this time fatally intercepting the
foe as he treacherously crept round a corner of the bunk house. "Buryin'
ground for you, mister! That's all--bury-in' ground!"

The desperado replaced one of the weapons and patted the other with
grisly affection. In the excess of my admiration I made bold to reach
for it. He relinquished it to me with a mother's yearning. And all too
legible in the polished butt of the thing were notches! Nine sinister
notches I counted--not fresh notches, but emphatic, eloquent, chilling.
I thrust the bloody record back on its gladdened owner.

"Never think it to look at me?" said he as our eyes hung above that grim
bit of bookkeeping.

"Never!" I warmly admitted.

"Me--I always been one of them quiet, mild-mannered ones that you
wouldn't think butter would melt in their mouth--jest up to a certain
point. Lots of 'em fooled that way about me--jest up to a certain point,
mind you--then, crack! Buryin' ground--that's all! Never go huntin'
trouble--understand? But when it's put on me--say!"

He lovingly replaced the weapon--with its mortuary statistics--doffed
the broad-brimmed hat with its snake-skin garniture, and placed a
forefinger athwart an area of his shining scalp which is said by a
certain pseudoscience to shield several of man's more spiritual
attributes. The finger traced an ancient but still evil looking scar.

"One creased me there," he confessed--"a depity marshal--that time they
had a reward out for me, dead or alive."

I was for details.

"What did you do?"

Jimmie Time stayed laconic.

"Left him there--that's all!"

It was arid, yet somehow informing. It conveyed to me that a marshal had
been cleverly put to needing a new deputy.

"Burying ground?" I guessed.

"That's all!" He laughed venomously--a short, dry, restrained laugh.
"They give me a nickname," said he. "They called me Little Sure Shot. No
wonder they did! Ho! I should think they would of called me something
like that." He lifted his voice. "Hey! Boogles!"

I had been conscious of a stooping figure in the adjacent vegetable
garden. It now became erect, a figure of no distinction--short, rounded,
decked in carelessly worn garments of no elegance. It slouched
inquiringly toward us between rows of sprouted corn. Then I saw that the
head surmounting it was a noble head. It was uncovered, burnished to a
half circle of grayish fringe; but it was shaped in the grand manner and
well borne, and the full face of it was beautified by features of a very
Roman perfection. It was the face of a judge of the Supreme Court or
the face of an ideal senator. His large grave eyes bathed us in a
friendly regard; his full lips of an orator parted with leisurely and
promising unction. I awaited courtly phrases, richly rounded periods.

"A regular hell-cat--what he is!"

Thus vocalized the able lips. Jimmie Time glowed modestly.

"Show him how I can shoot," said he.

The amazing Boogies waddled--yet with dignity--to a point ten paces
distant, drew a coin from the pocket of his dingy overalls, and spun it
to the blue of heaven. Ere it fell the deadly weapon bore swiftly on it
and snapped.

"Crack!" said the marksman grimly.

His assistant recovered the coin, scrutinized it closely, rubbed a fat
thumb over its supposedly dented surface, and again spun it. The
desperado had turned his back. He drew as he wheeled, and again I was
given to understand that his aim had been faultless.

"Good Little Sure Shot!" declaimed Boogies fulsomely.

"Hold it in your hand oncet," directed Little Sure Shot. The intrepid
assistant gallantly extended the half dollar at arm's length between
thumb and finger and averted his statesman's face with practiced
apprehension. "Crack!" said Little Sure Shot, and the coin seemed to be
struck from the unscathed hand. "Only nicked the aidge of it," said he,
genially deprecating. "I don't like to take no chancet with the lad's
mitt."

It had indeed been a pretty display of sharpshooting--and noiseless.

"Had me nervous, you bet, first time he tried that," called Boogles.
"Didn't know his work then. Thought sure he'd wing me."

Jimmie Time loftily ejected imaginary shells from his trusty firearm and
seemed to expel smoke from its delicate interior. Boogies waddled his
approach.

"Any time they back Little Sure Shot up against the wall they want to
duck," said he warmly. "He has 'em hard to find in about a minute. Tell
him about that fresh depity marshal, Jimmie."

"I already did," said Jimmie.

"Ain't he the hell-cat?" demanded Boogles, mopping a brow that Daniel
Webster would have observed with instant and perhaps envious respect.

"I been a holy terror in my time, all right, all right!" admitted the
hero. "Never think it to look at me though. One o' the deceivin' kind
till I'm put upon; then--good-night!"

"Jest like that!" murmured Boogles.

"Buryin' ground--that's all." The lips of the bad man shut grimly on
this.

"Say," demanded Boogles, "on the level, ain't he the real Peruvian
doughnuts? Don't he jest make 'em all hunt their--" The tribute was
unfinished.

"You ol' Jim! You ol' Jim Time!" Shrilly this came from Lew Wee, Chinese
cook of the Arrowhead framed in the kitchen doorway of the ranch house.
He brandished a scornful and commanding dish towel at the bad man, who
instantly and almost cravenly cowered under the distant assault. The
garment of his old bad past fell from him, leaving him as one exposed in
the market-place to the scornful towels of Chinamen. "You run, ol' Jim
Time! How you think catch 'um din' not have wood?"

"Now I was jest goin' to," mumbled Jimmie Time; and he amazingly slunk
from the scene of his late triumphs toward the open front of a
woodhouse.

His insulter turned back to the kitchen with a final affronting flourish
of the towel. The whisper of Boogles came hoarsely to me: "Some of these
days Little Sure Shot'll put a dose o' cold lead through that Chink's
heart."

"Is he really dangerous?" I demanded.

"Dangerous!" Boogles choked warmly on this. "Let me tell you, that old
boy is the real Peruvian doughnuts, and no mistake! Some day there won't
be so many Chinks round this dump. No, sir-ee! That little cutthroat'll
have another notch in his gun."

The situation did indeed seem to brim with the cheerfullest promise; yet
something told me that Little Sure Shot was too good, too perfect.
Something warned me that he suffered delusions of grandeur--that he
fell, in fact, somewhat short of being the real doughnuts, either of a
Peruvian or any other valued sort.

Nor had many hours passed ere it befell emphatically even so. There had
been the evening meal, followed by an hour or so of the always pleasing
and often instructive talk of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill,
who has largely known life for sixty years and found it entertaining and
good. And we had parted at an early nine, both tired from the work and
the play that had respectively engaged us the day long.

My candle had just been extinguished when three closely fired shots
cracked the vast stillness of the night. Ensued vocal explosions of a
curdling shrillness from the back of the house. One instantly knew them
to be indignant and Chinese. Caucasian ears gathered this much. I looked
from an open window as the impassioned cries came nearer. The lucent
moon of the mountains flooded that side of the house, and starkly into
its light from round the nearest corner struggled Lew Wee, the Chinaman.
He shone refulgent, being yet in the white or full-dress uniform of his
calling.

In one hand he held the best gun of Jimmie Time; in the other--there
seemed to be a well-gripped connection with the slack of a buckskin
shirt--writhed the alleged real doughnuts of a possibly Peruvian
character. The captor looked aloft and remained vocal, waving the gun,
waving Jimmie Time, playing them together as cymbals, never loosening
them. It was fine. It filled the eye and appeased the deepest longings
of the ear.

Then from a neighbouring window projected the heroic head and shoulders
of my hostess, and there boomed into the already vivacious libretto a
passionate barytone, or thereabout, of sterling timbre.

"What in the name of--"

I leave it there. To do so is not only kind but necessary. The most
indulgent censor that ever guarded the columns of a print intended for
young and old about the evening lamp would swiftly delete from this
invocation, if not the name of Deity itself, at least the greater number
of the attributes with which she endowed it. A few were conventional
enough, but they served only to accentuate others that were too hastily
selected in the heat of this crisis. Enough to say that the lady
overbore by sheer mass of tone production the strident soprano of Lew
Wee, controlling it at length to a lucid disclosure of his grievance.

From the doorway of his kitchen, inoffensively proffering a final
cigarette to the radiant night, he had been the target of three shots
with intent to kill. He submitted the weapon. He submitted the writhing
assassin.

"I catch 'um!" he said effectively, and rested his case.

"Now--I aimed over his head." It was Jimmie Time alias Little Sure Shot,
and he whimpered the words. "I jest went to play a sell on him."

The voice of the judge boomed wrathfully on this:

"You darned pestering mischief, you! Ain't I forbid you time and again
ever to load them guns? Where'd you get the ca'tridges?"

"Now--I found 'em," pleaded the bad man. "I did so; I found 'em."

"Cooned 'em, you mean!" thundered the judge. "You cooned 'em from Buck
or Sandy. Don't tell me, you young reprobate!"

"He all like bad man," submitted the prosecution. "I tell 'um catch
stlovewood; he tell 'um me: 'You go to haitch!' I tell 'um: 'You ownself
go to haitch! He say: 'I flan you my gun plitty soon!' He do."

"I aimed over the coward's head," protested the defendant.

"Can happen!" sanely objected the prosecution.

"Ain't I told you what I'd do if you loaded them guns?" roared the
judge. "Gentle, limping, baldheaded--" [Deleted by censor.] "How many
more times I got to tell you? Now you know what you'll get. You'll get
your needings--that's what you'll get! All day to-morrow! You hear me?
You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow! Put 'em on first thing in the morning
and wear 'em till sundown. No hiding out, neither! Wear 'em where folks
can see what a bad boy you are. And swearing, too! I got to be 'shamed
of you! Yes, sir! Everybody'll know how 'shamed I am to have a tough kid
like you on the place. I won't be able to hold my head up. You wear
'em!"

"I--I--I aimed above--" Jimmie Time broke down. He was weeping bitterly.
His captor released him with a final shake, and he brought a forearm to
his streaming eyes.

"You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow!" again thundered the judge as the
culprit sobbed a stumbling way into obscurity.

"You'self go to haitch!" the unrelenting complainant called after him.

The judge effected a rumbling withdrawal. The night was again calm. Then
I slept on the problem of the Arrowhead's two-gun bad man. It seemed now
pretty certain that the fatuous Boogles had grossly overpraised him. I
must question his being the real doughnuts of any sort--even the
mildest--much less the real Peruvian. But what was "'em" that in
degrading punishment and to the public shame of the Arrowhead he must
wear on the morrow? What, indeed, could "'em" be?

I woke, still pondering the mystery. Nor could I be enlightened during
my breakfast, for this was solitary, my hostess being long abroad to far
places of the Arrowhead, and the stolid mask of Lew Wee inviting no
questions.

Breakfast over, I stationed myself in the bracing sunlight that warmed
the east porch and aimlessly overhauled a book of flies. To three that
had proved most popular in the neighbouring stream I did small bits of
mending, ever with a questing eye on adjacent outbuildings, where Little
Sure Shot--_nee_ Time--might be expected to show himself, wearing "'em."

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.