Harry Leon Wilson

“ No one knows how many more than eighty years Pete has lived; but from where we stood he was the figure of puissant youth, rhythmically flashing his axe into bits of wood that flew apart at its touch. Uncle Abner, beside me, had again shrugged off the dread incubus of duty. He let himself go restfully against the corral bars and chuckled a note of harsh derision.
"Ain't it disgusting! I bet he never saw the boss when she rode off this A.M. Yes, sir; that poor benighted pagan must think she's still in the house—prob'ly watching him out of the east winder this very minute." ”

“ Then comes the fatal polo doings, with young Angus playing on the side that won, and Ellabelle being set up higher than ever till she actually begins to snub people here and there at the game that look like they'd swallow it, and old Angus ashamed and proud and glaring round as if he'd like to hear some one besides himself call his son a worthless young hound—if they wanted to start something. ”

“ And now let there be no further words about it, but there was when she hears this horrible disclosure—lots of words, and the brute won't even give her the street-car tickets, which she could play in for a dollar, and she has to go to the retiring room to bathe her temples, and treats Tracy all the rest of the evening like a crippled stepchild, thinking of all she could of won if he hadn't acted like a snake in the grass toward her! ”

“ Well, so Hetty gives mister man a look of dainty superiority as she flicks crumbs from her white fingers with my real lace handkerchief, and he stops his hearty laughter and just stares, and she says what nonsense to think the poor horses don't like food as well as any one. Them little moments have their effect on a man in a certain condition. He knew there probably wasn't another horse in the world would touch that truck, but he couldn't help feeling a strange new respect for her in addition to that glorious masculine protection she'd had him wallowing in all day. ”

“ And we was all prepared for a merry evening at this entertainment which the wise New Yorker would be sure to know was a good one.
But that curtain hadn't been up three minutes before I get my next shock of disbelief about this well-known club man. You know what a good play means in New York: a rattling musical comedy with lively songs, a tenor naval lieutenant in a white uniform, some real funny comedians, and a lot of girls without their stockings on, and so forth. Any one that thinks of a play in New York thinks of that, don't he? ”

“ So they ride down about a mile from the agency to a shack where they's a young squaw out in front graining a deerhide and minding her own business. She looked up when they come and started to jaw Pete something fierce; but the agent tells her the Gov'ment frowns on wives running off, and Pete grabbed her; and the agent he helps, with her screeching and biting and clawing like a female demon. The agent is going to see that Pete has his rights, even if it don't seem like a joyous household; and finally they get her scrambled onto Pete's horse in front of him and off they go up the trail. ”

“ The face of the American Indian is said to be unrevealing—to be a stoic mask under which his emotions are ever hidden. For a second time this day I found tradition at fault. Pete's face was lively and eloquent under his shock of dead-black hair—dead black but for half a dozen gray or grayish strands, for Pete's eighty years have told upon him, even if he is not yet sufficiently gray at the temples to be a hero in a magazine costing over fifteen cents. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ain't women the wonders! Gazing at Ellabelle when she had everything on, you'd never dream that she'd come up from the vilest dregs only a few years before—helping cook for the harvest hands in Iowa, feeding Union Pacific passengers at twenty-two a month, or splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well. ”

“ Trust Cora Wales not to overlook a bet like that. She's a tall, sandy-haired party, with very extravagant contours, and the thing she loves best on earth is to get under a pasteboard crown, with gilt stars on it, and drape herself in the flag of her country, with one fat arm bare, while Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and the rest is gathered about and looking up to her for protection. Mebbe she don't look so bad as the Goddess of Liberty on a float in the middle of one of our wide streets when the Chamber of Commerce is giving a Greater Red Gap pageant ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poor Hetty stutters and turns red and her chin begins to quiver, so I gentled her down and tried to explain, though seeing quick that I must tell her everything but the truth. I reckon nothing in this world can look funnier than a woman wearing them things that had never ought to for one reason or another. There was more reasons than that in Hetty's case. Dignity was the first safe bet I could think of with her, so I tried that. ”

“ And thus the annals of Broadmoor began to dribble to me, overlaid too frequently for my taste with philosophic reflections at large upon what a lone, defenceless woman could expect in this world—irrelevant, pointed wonderings as to whether a party letting on he was a good ranch hand really expected to perform any labour for his fifty a month, or just set round smoking his head off and see which could tell the biggest lie; or mebbe make an excuse for some light job like oiling the twenty-two sets of mule harness over again, when they had already been oiled right after haying. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met frayed ends of it in her years abroad. But she couldn't seem to put it over. Lots of male and female society foreigners that she'd met would come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but Ellabelle never fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making the least dent in New York itself. ”

“ As a matter of fact, Henrietta hates a horse like a rattlesnake, but she had done her pioneer work for once and all.
"Every one was now laughing and sneering at the old-fashioned divided skirt with which woman had endangered her life on a horse, and wondering how they had endured the clumsy things so long; and come spring all the prominent young society buds and younger matrons of the most exclusive set who could stay on a horse at all was getting theirs ready for the approaching season, Red Gap being like London in having its gayest season in the summer, when people can get out more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yes, sir; here was Mac Gordon and Riley Hardin and Charlie Dickman and Roth Hyde, men about town of the younger dancing set, that had knowed Hetty for years and hardly ever looked at her—here they was paying attentions to her now like she was some prize beauty, come down from Spokane for over Sunday, to say nothing of Mr. D., who hardly ever left her side except to get her another sardine sandwich or a paper cup of coffee. It was then I see the scientific explanation of it, like these high-school professors always say that science is at the bottom of everything. ”

“ Decent, God-fearing men, who'd led regular lives and had whiskers and grown children, setting down to a little spindle-legged table with this creature, dipping their clumsy old hands into a pink saucedish of suds and then going brazenly back to their innocent families with their nails glittering like piano keys. Oh, that young dame was bound to be a social pet among the ladies of the town, yes—no? ”

“ Often I have glanced at this noisy thing tacked to the wall, entranced by the simple width of the man. Now on a late afternoon I loitered before it while my hostess changed from riding breeches to the gown of lavender and lace in which she elects to drink tea after a day's hard work along the valleys of the Arrowhead. And for the first time I observed a line of writing beneath the portrait, the writing of my hostess, a rough, downright, plain fashion of script: "Reading from left to right—Mr. Ben Sutton, Popular Society Favourite of Nome, Alaska." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Stitches in a mule's hide is his bug. He could stitch up any horse on the place and never have the least hunch; but let it be a mule—Say! Down there right now he's thinking about the thousand dollars or so I'm keeping him out of. I judge from his song that he'd figured on a trip East to New York City or Denver. At that, I don't know as I blame him. Yes, sir; that's what reminded me of foreigners and bazaars and vice, and so on—and poor Egbert Floud. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the game goes merrily on, with Sandy collecting steadily on his hunch and Cora Wales telling her husband the truth about himself every time one of these three numbers didn't win; she exposed some very distressing facts about his nature the time she put five apiece on the three numbers and the single-o come up. It was a mad life, that last hour, with a lot of other enraged ladies round the layout, some being mad because they hadn't had money to play the hunch with, and others because they hadn't had the nerve. ”

“ Having got Angora chaps and cowboy hats for herself and offsprings, what do they do but get on ponies and chase this herd all over creation, whirling their ropes, yelling, shooting in the air—just like you see on any well-conducted ranch. Once in a while the old lady herself, being a demon rider, would rope an animal and fetch it down; but brother and sister was very careful not to tangle their own ropes on anything. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Could you beat that for nerve—in a day, in a million years?
"'What's Wilbur writing that kind of music for?' I asks in a cold voice. 'He don't know that kind. What he had ought to of written is a bunch of them hollow slats and squares like they punch in the only kind of music he plays,' I says.
"'Hush!' says Nettie. 'It's that last divine phrase, "To kiss the cross!"'
"I choked up myself then. And I went to bed and thought. And this is what I thought: When you think you got the winning hand, keep on raising. To call is to admit you got no faith in your judgment. Better lay down than call. ”

“ Ben says he has a grand idea and we can carry it out fine with this New York man to guide us. His grand idea is that we all go down on the Bowery and visit tough dives where the foul creatures of the underworld consort and crime happens every minute or two. We was still mad enough about that play to like the idea. A good legitimate murder would of done wonders for our drooping spirits. ”

“ Racing back to Ye Olde Tyme Gambling Denne, she gets another hard blow; for Sandy has not only win another of his magic numbers but has bought up the bar for the evening, inviting all hands to brim a cup at his expense, whenever they crave it—nobody's money good but his; so Cora is not only out what she would of made by following his play but the ten cents cash she has paid Aggie Tuttle. She was not a woman to be trifled with then. She took another lemonade because it was free, and made Len take one that he didn't want. ”

“ I says. "Out in that big room is about eighteen tired maids and matrons of Red Gap's most exclusive inner circles yawning their heads off over goods, wares, and merchandise that no one will look at while this sinful game is running. If you got a spark of manhood in you go on out and trade a little with 'em, just to take the curse off your depredations in here."
"Why, sure!" says Sandy. He goes back to the layout and loads Buck's hat full of red and blue chips at one and two dollars each. "Go buy the place clean," he says to Buck. "Do it good; don't leave a single object of use or luxury. ”

“ So I remember this hidden evil of Egbert Floud's and that the crowd has gone there; and while I'm deciding to give in and gratify my morbid curiosity, here comes Cousin Egbert himself, romping along in his dinner-jacket suit and tan shoes, like a wild mustang.
"What was I telling you?" he demands. "Didn't I tell you the rest of this show was going to die standing up? Yes, sir; she's going to pass out on her feet." And he waved a sneering arm round at the deserted booths. "What does parties want of this truck when they can come down to my joint and get real entertainment for their money? ”