Book: Somewhere in Red Gap

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




"Pretty soon I could hear the merry prattle of the little ones again out
in the side yard. Ain't it funny how they get the gambling spirit so
young? I'd hear little Margery say: 'I bet you can't!' And Rupert,
Junior, would say:' I bet I can, too!' And off they'd go ninety miles on
a straight track: 'I bet you'd be afraid to!'--'I bet I wouldn't
be!'--'I bet you'd run as fast!'--'I bet I never would!' Ever see such
natural-born gamblers? And it's all about what Rupert, Junior, would do
if he seen a big tiger in some woods--Rupert betting he'd shoot it dead,
right between the eyes, and Margery taking the other end. She has by far
the best end of it, I think, it being at least a forty-to-one shot that
Rupert, the boy scout, is talking high and wide. And I drop into the
Crimes again at a good, murderous place with stilettos.

"I can't tell even now how it happened. All I know is that it was two
o'clock, and all at once it was five-thirty P.M. by a fussy gold clock
over on the mantel with a gold young lady, wearing a spear, standing on
top of it. I woke up without ever suspicioning that I'd been asleep.
Anyway, I think I'm feeling better, and I stretch, though careful,
account of the dame in the plush bonnet with forget-me-nots; and I lie
there thinking mebbe I'll enter the ring again to-morrow for some other
truck I was needing, and thinking how quiet and peaceful it is--how
awful quiet! I got it then, all right. That quiet! If you'd known little
Margery better you'd know how sick that quiet made me all at once. My
gizzard or something turned clean over.

"I let out a yell for them kids right where I lay. Then I bounded to my
feet and run through the rooms downstairs yelling. No sign of 'em! And
out into the kitchen--and here was Tillie, the maid, and Yetta, the
cook, both saying it's queer, but they ain't heard a sound of 'em
either, for near an hour. So I yelled out back to an old hick of a
gardener that's deef, and he comes running; but he don't know a thing on
earth about the kids or anything else. Then I am sick! I send Tillie one
way along the street and the gardener the other way to find out if any
neighbours had seen 'em. Then in a minute this here Yetta, the cook,
says: 'Why, now, Miss Margery was saying she'd go downtown to buy some
candy,' and Yetta says: 'You know, Miss Margery, your mother never 'ets
you have candy.' And Margery says: 'Well, she might change her mind any
minute--you can't tell; and it's best to have some on hand in case she
does.' And she'd got some poker chips out of the box to buy the candy
with--five blue chips she had, knowing they was nearly money anyway.

"And when Yetta seen it was only poker chips she knew the kid couldn't
buy candy with 'em--not even in Yonkers; so she didn't think any more
about it until it come over her--just like that--how quiet everything
was. Oh, that Yetta would certainly be found bone clear to the centre if
her skull was ever drilled--the same stuff they slaughter the poor
elephants for over in Africa--going so far away, with Yetta right there
to their hands, as you might say. And I'm getting sicker and sicker! I'd
have retained my calm mind, mind you, if they had been my own kids--but
kids of others I'd been sacredly trusted with!

"And then down the back stairs comes this here sandy-complected,
horse-faced plumber that had been frittering away his time all day up in
a bathroom over one little leak, and looking as sad and mournful as if
he hadn't just won eight dollars, or whatever it was. He must have been
born that way--not even being a plumber had cheered him up.

"'Blackhanders!'" he says right off, kind of brightening a little bit.

"I like to fainted for fair! He says they had lured the kids off with
candy and popcorn, and would hold 'em in a tenement house for ten
thousand dollars, to be left on a certain spot at twelve P.M. He seemed
to know a lot about their ways.

"'They got the Honourable Simon T. Griffenbaugh's youngest that way,'
he says, 'only a month ago. Likely the same gang got these two.'

"'How do you know?' I asks him.

"'Well,' he says, 'they's a gang of over two hundred of these I-talian
Blackhanders working right now on a sewer job something about two miles
up the road. That's how I know,' he says. 'That's plain enough, ain't
it? It's as plain as the back of my hand. What chance would them two
defenceless little children have with a gang of two hundred
Blackhanders?'

"But that looked foolish, even to me. 'Shucks!' I says. 'That don't
stand to reason.' But then I got another scare. 'How about water?' I
says. 'Any places round here they could fall into and get drownded?'

"He'd looked glum again when I said two hundred Blackhanders didn't
sound reasonable; but he cheers up at this and says: 'Oh, yes; lots of
places they could drownd--cricks and rivers and lakes and ponds and
tanks--any number of places they could fall into and never come up
again.' Say, he made that whole neighbourhood sound like Venice, Italy.
You wondered how folks ever got round without gondolas or something.
'One of Dr. George F. Maybury's two kids was nearly drownded last
Tuesday--only the older one saved him; a wonder it was they didn't have
to drag the river and find 'em on the bottom locked in each other's
arms! And a boy by the name of Clifford Something, only the other day,
playing down by the railroad tracks--'

"I shut him off, you bet! I told him to get out quick and go to his home
if he had one.

"'I certainly hope I won't have to read anything horrible in to-morrow's
paper!' he says as he goes down the back stoop. 'Only last week they was
a nigger caught--'

"I shut the door on him. Rattled good and plenty I was by then. Back
comes this silly old gardener--he'd gone with his hoe and was still
gripping it. The neighbours down that way hadn't seen the kids. Back
comes Tillie. One neighbour where she'd been had seen 'em climb on to a
street car--only it wasn't going downtown but into the country; and this
neighbour had said to herself that the boy would be likely to let some
one have it in the eye with his gun, the careless way he was lugging it.

"Thank the Lord, that was a trace! I telephoned to the police and told
'em all about it. And I telephoned for a motor car for me and got into
some clothes. Good and scared--yes! I caught sight of my face in the
looking-glass, and, my! but it was pasty--it looked like one of these
cheap apple pies you see in the window of a two-bit lunch place! And
while I'm waiting for this motor car, what should come but a telegram
from Mr. W.B. himself saying that the aunt was worse and he would go to
New Jersey himself for the night! Some said this aunt was worth a good
deal more than she was supposed to be. And I not knowing the name of
this town in Jersey where they would all be!--it was East Something or
West Something, and hard to remember, and I'd forgot it.

"I called the police again and they said descriptions was being sent
out, and that probably I'd better not worry, because they often had
cases like this. And I offered to bet them they hadn't a case since
Yonkers was first thought of that had meant so much spot cash to 'em as
this one would mean the minute I got a good grip on them kids. So this
cop said mebbe they had better worry a little, after all, and they'd
send out two cars of their own and scour the country, and try to find
the conductor of this street car that the neighbour woman had seen the
kids get on to.

"I r'ared round that house till the auto come that I'd ordered. It was
late coming, naturally, and nearly dark when it got there; but we
covered a lot of miles while the daylight lasted, with the man looking
sharp out along the road, too, because he had three kids of his own that
would do any living thing sometimes, though safe at home and asleep at
that minute, thank God!

"It was moisting when we started, and pretty soon it clouded up and the
dark came on, and I felt beat. We got fair locoed. We'd go down one road
and then back the same way. We stopped to ask everybody. Then we found
the two autos sent out by the police. I told the cops again what would
happen to 'em from me the minute the kids was found--the kids or their
bodies. I was so despairing--what with that damned plumber and
everything! I'll bet he's the merry chatterbox in his own home. The
police said cheer up--nothing like that, with the country as safe as a
church. But we went over to this Blackhanders' construction camp, just
the same, to make sure, and none of the men was missing, the boss said,
and no children had been seen; and anyway his men was ordinary decent
wops and not Blackhanders--and blamed if about fifty of 'em didn't turn
out to help look! Yes, sir, there they was--foreigners to the last man
except the boss, who was Irish--and acting just like human beings.

"It was near ten o'clock now; so we went to a country saloon to
telephone police headquarters, and they had found the car conductor, he
remembering because he had threatened to put the boy scout off the car
if he didn't quit pointing his gun straight at an old man with gold
spectacles setting across the aisle. And finally they had got off
themselves about three miles down the road; he'd watched 'em climb over
a stone wall and start up a hill into some woods that was there. And he
was Conductor Number Twenty-seven, if we wanted to know that.

"We beat it to that spot after I'd powdered my nose and we'd had a quick
round of drinks. The policemen knew where it was. It wasn't moisting any
more--it was raining for fair; and we done some ground-and-lofty
skidding before we got there. We found the stone wall all right and the
slope leading up to the woods; but, my Lord, there was a good half mile
of it! We strung out--four cops and my driver and me--hundreds of yards
apart and all yelling, so maybe the poor lost things would hear us.

"We made up to the woods without raising a sign; and, my lands, wasn't
it dark inside the woods! I worked forward, trying to keep straight from
tree to tree; but I stumbled and tore my clothes and sprained my wrist,
and blacked one eye the prettiest you'd want to see--mighty near being a
blubberhead myself, I was--it not being my kids, you understand. Oh, I
kept to it though! I'd have gone straight up the grand old state of New
York into Lake Erie if something hadn't stopped me.

"It was a light off through the pine and oak trees, and down in a kind
of little draw--not a lamplight but a fire blazing up. I yelled to both
sides toward the others. I can yell good when I'm put to it. Then I
started for the light. I could make out figures round the fire. Mebbe
it's a Blackhanders' camp, I think; so I didn't yell any more. I
cat-footed. And in a minute I was up close and seen 'em--there in the
dripping rain.

"Rupert, Junior, was asleep, leaned setting up against a tree, with a
messenger boy's cap on. And Margery was asleep on a pile of leaves, with
her cheek on one hand and something over her. And a fat man was asleep
on his back, with his mouth open, making an awful fuss about it. And the
only one that wasn't asleep was a funny little old man setting against
another tree. He had on the scout's campaign hat and he held the gun
across his chest in the crook of his arm. He hadn't any coat on. Then I
see his coat was what was over Margery; and I looked closer and it was a
messenger boy's coat.

"I was more floored than ever when I took that in. I made a little move,
and this funny old man must have heard me--he looked like one of them
silly little critters that play hob with Rip Van Winkle out on the
mountain before he goes to sleep. And he cocks his ears this way and
that; then he jumped to his feet, and I come forward where he could see
me. And darned if he didn't up with this here air gun of Rupert's, like
a flash, and plunk me with a buckshot it carried--right on my sprained
wrist, too!

"Say, I let out a yell, and I had him by the neck of his shirt in one
grab. I was still shaking him when the others come to. The fat man set
up and rubbed his eyes and blinked. That's all he done. Rupert woke up
the same minute and begun to cry like a baby; and Margery woke up, but
she didn't cry. She took a good look at me and she says: 'You let him
alone! He's my knight--he slays all the dragons. He's a good knight!'

"There I was, still shaking the little old man--I'd forgot all about
him. So I dropped him on the ground and reached for Margery; and I was
so afraid I was going to blubber like Rupert, the scout, that I let out
some words to keep from it. Yes, sir; I admit it.

"'Oh! Oh! Oh! Swearing!' says Rupert. I shall tell mother and Aunt Hilda
just what you said!'

"Mebby you can get Rupert's number from that. I did anyway. I stood up
from Margery and cuffed him. He went on sobbing, but not without reason.

"'Margery Hemingway,' I says, 'how dare you!' And she looks up all cool
and cunning, and says: 'Ho! I bet I know worse words than what you said!
See if I don't.' So then I shut her off mighty quick. But still she
didn't cry. 'I s'pose I must go back home,' she says. 'And perhaps it is
all for the best. I have a very beautiful home. Perhaps I should stay
there oftener.'

"I turned on the Blackhanders.

"'Did these brutes entice you away with candy?' I demanded. 'Was they
holding you here for ransom?'

"'Huh! I should think not!' she says. 'They are a couple of 'fraid-cats.
They were afraid as anything when we all got lost in these woods and
wanted to keep on finding our way out. And I said I bet they were awful
cowards, and the fat one said of course he was; but this old one became
very, very indignant and said he bet he wasn't any more of a coward than
I am, but we simply ought to go where there were more houses. And so I
consented and we got lost worse than ever--about a hundred miles, I
think--in this dense forest and we couldn't return to our beautiful
homes. And this one said he was a trapper, scout, and guide; so he built
this lovely fire and I ate a lot of crullers the silly things had
brought with them. And then this old one flung his robe over me because
I was a princess, and it made me invisible to prowling wolves; and
anyway he sat up to shoot them with his deadly rifle that he took away
from Cousin Rupert. And Cousin Rupert became very tearful indeed; so we
took his hat away, too, because it's a truly scout hat.'

"'And she smoked a cigarette,' says Rupert, still sobbing.

"'He smoked one, too, and I mean to tell his mother,' says Margery.
'It's something I think she ought to know.'

"'It made me sick,' says Rupert. 'It was a poison cigarette; I nearly
died.'

"'Mine never made me sick,' says Margery--'only it was kind of sting-y
to the tongue and I swallowed smoke through my nose repeatedly. And
first, this old one wouldn't give us the cigarettes at all, until I
threatened to cast a spell on him and turn him into a toad forever. I
never did that to any one, but I bet I could. And the fat one cried like
anything and begged me not to turn the old one into a toad, and the old
one said he didn't think I could in a thousand years, but he wouldn't
take any chances in the Far West; so he gave us the cigarettes, and
Rupert only smoked half of his and then he acted in a very common way, I
must say. And this old one said we would have br'iled b'ar steaks for
breakfast. What is a br'iled b'ar steak? I'm hungry.'

"Such was little angel-faced Margery. Does she promise to make life
interesting for those who love her, or does she not?

"Well, that's all. Of course these cops when they come up said the two
men was desperate crooks wanted in every state in the Union; but I swore
I knew them both well and they was harmless; and I made it right with
'em about the reward as soon as I got back to a check book. After that
they'd have believed anything I said. And I sent something over to the
Blackhanders that had turned out to help look, and something to
Conductor Number Twenty-seven. And the next day I squared myself with
Mrs. W.B. Hemingway and her husband, and Mrs. L.H. Cummins, when they
come back, the aunt not having been sick but only eccentric again.

"And them two poor homeless boys--they kind of got me, I admit, after
I'd questioned 'em awhile. So I coaxed 'em out here where they could
lead the wild, free life. Kind of sad and pathetic, almost, they was.
The fat one I found was just a kind of natural-born one--a feeb you
understand--and the old one had a scar that the doctor said explained
him all right--you must have noticed it up over his temple. It's where
his old man laid him out once, when he was a kid, with a stovelifter. It
seemed to stop his works.

"Yes; they're pretty good boys. Boogies was never bad but once, account
of two custard pies off the kitchen window sill. I threatened him with
his stepmother and he hid under the house for twenty-four hours. The
other one is pretty good, too. This is only the second time I had to
punish him for fooling with live ca'tridges. There! It's sundown and
he's got on his Wild Wests again."

Jimmie Time swaggered from the bunk house in his fearsome regalia. Under
the awed observation of Boogles he wheeled, drew, and shot from the hip
one who had cravenly sought to attack him from the rear.

"My, but he's hostile!" murmured my hostess. "Ain't he just the hostile
little wretch?"




IV

ONCE A SCOTCHMAN, ALWAYS


Terrific sound waves beat upon the Arrowhead ranch house this night. At
five o'clock a hundred and twenty Hereford calves had been torn from
their anguished mothers for the first time and shut into a too adjacent
feeding pen. Mothers and offspring, kept a hundred yards apart by two
stout fences, unceasingly bawled their grief, a noble chorus of yearning
and despair. The calves projected a high, full-throated barytone, with
here and there a wailing tenor against the rumbling bass of their dams.
And ever and again pealed distantly into the chorus the flute obbligato
of an emotional coyote down on the flat. There was never a diminuendo.
The fortissimo had been steadily maintained for three hours and would
endure the night long, perhaps for two other nights.

At eight o'clock I sleepily wondered how I should sleep. And thus
wondering, I marvelled at the indifference to the racket of my hostess,
Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill. Through dinner and now as she read a San
Francisco newspaper she had betrayed no consciousness of it. She read
her paper and from time to time she chuckled.

"How do you like it?" I demanded, referring to the monstrous din.

"It's great," she said, plainly referring to something else. "One of
them real upty-up weddings in high life, with orchestras and bowers of
orchids and the bride a vision of loveliness--"

"I mean the noise."

"What noise?" She put the paper aside and stared at me, listening
intently. I saw that she was honestly puzzled, even as the chorus
swelled to unbelievable volume. I merely waved a hand. The coyote was
then doing a most difficult tremolo high above the clamour.

"Oh, that!" said my enlightened hostess. "That's nothing; just a little
bunch of calves being weaned. We never notice that--and say, they got
the groom's mother in here, too. Yes, sir, Ellabelle in all her tiaras
and sunbursts and dog collars and diamond chest protectors--Mrs. Angus
McDonald, mother of groom, in a stunning creation! I bet they didn't
need any flashlight when they took her, not with them stones all over
her person. They could have took her in a coal cellar."

"How do you expect to sleep with all that going on?" I insisted.

"All what? Oh, them calves. That's nothing! Angus says to her when they
first got money: 'Whatever you economize in, let it not be in diamonds!'
He says nothing looks so poverty-stricken as a person that can only
afford a few. Better wear none at all than just a mere handful, he
says. What do you think of that talk from a man named Angus McDonald?
You'd think a Scotchman and his money was soon parted, but I heard him
say it from the heart out. And yet Ellabelle never does seem to get him.
Only a year ago, when I was at this here rich place down from San
Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely
blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria: 'Once a Scotchman,
always a Scotchman!' Oh, she was hysteric all right! She was like what I
seen about one of the movie actresses, 'the empress of stormy emotion.'
Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper
guff. And it was a funny blow-up. I don't know as I blamed her at the
time."

I now closed a window and a door upon the noisy September night. It
helped a little. I went back to a chair nearer to this woman with ears
trained in rejection. That helped more. I could hear her now, save in
the more passionate intervals of the chorus.

"All right, then. What was the funny blow-up?" She caught the
significance of the closed door and window.

"But that's music," she insisted. "Why, I'd like to have a good record
of about two hundred of them white-faced beauties being weaned, so I
could play it on a phonograph when I'm off visiting--only it would make
me too homesick." She glanced at the closed door and window in a way
that I found sinister.

"I couldn't hear you," I suggested.

"Oh, all right!" She listened wistfully a moment to the now slightly
dulled oratorio, then: "Yes, Angus McDonald is his name; but there are
two kinds of Scotch, and Angus is the other kind. Of course he's one of
the big millionaires now, with money enough to blind any kind of a
Scotchman, but he was the other kind even when he first come out to us,
a good thirty years ago, without a cent. He's a kind of second or third
cousin of mine by marriage or something--I never could quite work it
out--and he'd learned his trade back in Ohio; but he felt that the East
didn't have any future to speak of, so he decided to come West. He was a
painter and grainer and kalsominer and paperhanger, that kind of
thing--a good, quiet boy about twenty-five, not saying much, chunky and
slow-moving but sure, with a round Scotch head and a snub nose, and one
heavy eyebrow that run clean across his face--not cut in two like most
are.

"He landed on the ranch and slowly looked things over and let on after a
few days that he mebbe would be a cowboy on account of it taking him
outdoors more than kalsomining would. Lysander John was pretty busy, but
he said all right, and gave him a saddle and bridle and a pair of bull
pants and warned him about a couple of cinch-binders that he mustn't try
to ride or they would murder him. And so one morning Angus asked a
little bronch-squeezer we had, named Everett Sloan, to pick him out
something safe to ride, and Everett done so. Brought him up a nice old
rope horse that would have been as safe as a supreme-court judge, but
the canny Angus says: 'No, none of your tricks now! That beast has the
very devil in his eye, and you wish to sit by and laugh your fool head
off when he displaces me.' 'Is that so?' says Everett. 'I suspect you,'
says Angus. 'I've read plentifully about the tricks of you cowlads.'
'Pick your own horse, then,' says Everett. 'I'd better,' says Angus, and
picks one over by the corral gate that was asleep standing up, with a
wisp of hay hanging out of his mouth like he'd been too tired to finish
eating it. 'This steed is more to my eye,' says Angus. 'He's old and
withered and he has no evil ambitions. But maybe I can wake him up.'
'Maybe you can,' says Everett, 'but are you dead sure you want to?'
Angus was dead sure. 'I shall thwart your murderous design,' says he. So
Everett with a stung look helped him saddle this one. He had his alibi
all right, and besides, nothing ever did worry that buckaroo as long as
his fingers wasn't too cold to roll a cigarette.

"The beast was still asleep when Angus forked him. Without seeming to
wake up much he at once traded ends, poured Angus out of the saddle, and
stacked him up in some mud that was providentially there--mud soft
enough to mire your shadow. Angus got promptly up, landed a strong kick
in the ribs of the outlaw which had gone to sleep again before he lit,
shook hands warmly with Everett and says: 'What does a man need with two
trades anyway? Good-bye!'

"But when Lysander John hears about it he says Angus has just the right
stuff in him for a cowman. He says he has never known one yet that you
could tell anything to before he found it out for himself, and Angus
must sure have the makings of a good one, so he persuades him to stay
round for a while, working at easy jobs that couldn't stack him up, and
later he sent him to Omaha with the bunch in charge of a trainload of
steers.

"The trip back was when his romance begun. Angus had kept fancy-free up
to that time, being willing enough but thoroughly cautious. Do you
remember the eating-house at North Platte, Nebraska? The night train
from Omaha would reach there at breakfast time and you'd get out in the
frosty air, hungry as a confirmed dyspeptic, and rush into the big red
building past the man that was rapidly beating on a gong with one of
these soft-ended bass-drum sticks. My, the good hot smells inside!
Tables already loaded with ham and eggs and fried oysters and fried
chicken and sausage and fried potatoes and steaks and hot biscuits and
corn bread and hot cakes and regular coffee--till you didn't know which
to begin on, and first thing you knew you had your plate loaded with too
many things--but how you did eat!--and yes, thank you, another cup of
coffee, and please pass the sirup this way. And no worry about the
train pulling out, because there the conductor is at that other table
and it can't go without him, so take your time--and about three more of
them big fried oysters, the only good fried ones I ever had in the
world! To this day I get hungry thinking of that North Platte breakfast,
and mad when I go into the dining-car as we pass there and try to get
the languid mulatto to show a little enthusiasm.

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