Owen Wister

“ I could hear the heavy jolts of the wagon a long way. Six rocky fords lay between here and Washakie, and Scipio thus summed up the seventy-five miles the patient had before him: “I don’t expect he’ll improve any on the road.”
In new camps among other mountains I now tried my luck through deeper snow, thicker ice, and colder days, coming out at length lean and limber, and ravenous for every good that flesh is heir to, yet reluctant to turn eastward to that city life which would unfailingly tarnish the bright, hard steel of health. ”

“ Into his whisper Scipio now put more electricity. “He’s big medicine-man,” he hissed again, and he drilled his bleached blue eye into the brown one of the savage. “See him now!” He stretched out a vibrating finger.
It was a pack of cards that Horacles was lightly manipulating. He fluttered it open in the air and fluttered it shut again, drawing it out like a concertina and pushing it flat like an opera hat—nor did a card fall to the ground.
High Bear watched it hard; but soon High Bear laughed. “He pretty good,” he declared. “All same tin-horn monte-man. I see one Miles City.” ”

“ Much ready money is a burning argument for a disappearance. To these cautious sentiments of the Judge his foreman had replied scarcely more than “I have studied Scipio mighty thorough.” To Scipio himself, the friend for whose character he was thus pledging his good judgment, he merely remarked, “Stay with the money.”
“Stay with it!” exclaimed Scipio, nearly overcome by his feelings. He wanted to hug the foreman; and lest his eyes should betray something, he narrowed them to a wicked slit, and put on the disguise of jocularity. “If y’u say so, I’ll stay with it till I come home with it.” ”

“ But when a joke was born in Scipio it must out:
“Say, Timberline,” he called back, “better insure your clothes. Y’u couldn’t replace ’em.”
“I’m no two-bit man,” retorted the boy with anger—that pitiful anger which feels a blow but cannot give one.
We drove away along the empty stage-road, with the mountains and the dying storm, in which a piece of setting sun would redly glow and vanish, making our leftward horizon, and to our right the great undulations of a world so large as to seem the universe itself. ”

“ Still Hunt Spring; down there, somewhere in that drowsy distance, it lay. One trail alone led into it; from one end of the secret ravine to the other—they said—grew a single file of trees lank and tall as if they stood on stilts to see out over the top, and at the further end was a spring, small, cold, and sweet; though it welled up in the midst of sage-brush desert, there was no alkali—they said—in that water. Still Hunt Spring!
That night I announced to my two camp companions my new project: next summer I should see Still Hunt Spring for myself.
“Alone?” Scipio inquired. ”

“ By the time he reached Willcox, Belleville was his name. No tramp should be called what his mother had named him.
Such his life had been; dust, thirst, hunger, repulse—and onward to more. Existence shook her head at him with a changeless “No.” Latterly, in Tucson, a pretty woman had shown him kindness which she should not, since he was not her husband and she had one. She fell in love with the April bloom of his years and with his hard luck—and this was the single instance of human interest in him which had touched his life in fifteen months. ”

“ Such a man would live here with canned food and the small stove, seldom having other company than his own, and, if he had ears for the music of nature, the singing pines would often companion him, he could hear now and again some unseen bird crying as it passed among them, and always the voice of Spit-Cat. This stream foamed by the cabin to fall and wander deviously away into the great, distant silence of the mountains. ”

“ Lem Speed approached me. “No hard feelings,” he said jocularly, and he held out his hand.
But is it a true joke—this American attempt at shirking responsibility under a bluff of facetiousness? It masquerades as humor every day—a pretty mongrel humor, more like true cowardice.
I turned to Scipio. “Tell this man that anything he wishes to say to me he will say through you.”
Speed flushed darkly. Had he kept his temper, he could easily have turned my speech to ridicule. But such a manner of meeting him was novel to a man used to having his own brutal way wherever he went, and he was disconcerted. ”

“ I looked apprehensively at the figure by the woodpile, but it might have been a painted figure in very truth. I think Jimsy was holding his breath. When a moral conflict becomes visible to the naked eye there is something in it that far outmatches any mere thumping of fists; here was Sir Francis battling for his empire in silence and immobility, with his ladies getting all the fish. And just then the Countess wavered. She saw Sir Francis, white and monumental, thirty yards away; and she saw the Duchess and the fish about three more steps from her nose. ”

“ Yet nevertheless Scipio saw him shoot one or two more doubtful glances at Horacles as that happy clerk continued his activities.
Horacles had an audience (which he liked) , and he held his audience—and who could help liking that? The bucks and squaws watched him, sometimes nudging one another, and they smiled and grunted their satisfaction at his news. Cheaper prices was something which their primitive minds could take in as well as any of us.
“Why you not sell cheap like him?” they asked their friend “Sippo.” “We stay then. Not go his store.” ”

“ It is likely always to be true that in each hundred of mankind ninety-nine can see nothing new until the hundredth shakes it in their faces—and he must keep shaking it. No plan of shaking was yet in the tenderfoot’s mind, he was dedicated to other calling; but he besieged the ears of our great painter and our great novelist. He told the painter of the strong, strange shapes of the buttes, the epic landscape, the color, the marvellous light, the red men blanketed, the white men in chapareros, the little bronze Indian children ”

“ Living men, not very old yet, have seen the Indian on the war-path, the buffalo stopping the train, the cow-boy driving his cattle, the herder watching his sheep, the government irrigation dam, and the automobile—have seen every one of these slides which progress puts for a moment into its magic-lantern and removes to replace with a new one. The final tale in this book could not possibly have happened in the day of the first tale, although scarcely twenty years separate the new, present Wyoming from that cow-boy Wyoming which then flourished so boisterously, and is now like the antelope. ”

“ The three of us left camp. It was warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet day smelled of the pines. We should not have taken horses, they served us so little in such a climb as that. On the level top our legs and breathing got relief, and far away up the next valley were sheep. This second top we reached, but they were gone to the next beyond, where we saw them across a mile or so of space. In the bottom below us ran the north fork of Owl Creek like a fine white wire drawn through the distant green of the pines. ”

“ Think of him! Will y’u please to think of him after that shell game? He begging honest work and denied all over, everywhere, till his hat and his clothes and his boots were in holes, and his body was pretty near in holes—think of him, just a kind of hollo’ vessel of hunger lying in that stable while the shell-game cheat goes off with his pockets full of gold.” Scipio spoke with heat.
“Yes, I know. But, if Bellyful afterward could only feel sorry and try—”
“Are you figuring to fix that up?”—he was still hotter—“because I forbid you to monkey with the truth. Because I never was sorry.” ”

“ No one, no railroad, ranch, restaurant, saloon, stage company—nothing—had employment for him. He had sought it from San Marcial, over in New Mexico, westward to Yuma, hundreds of miles. He had parted early with his real name. On a freight train at Bowie the conductor found him stealing a ride, and kicked him off, calling him a hobo. The epithet hurt worse than the kick. In fact, hiding on the brake-beam under another car (for in spite of the conductor he carried out his plan of riding free to Willcox) he shed tears, the bitter tears of pride departing; he was a hobo. ”

“ At the edge of our platform the world fell straight a thousand feet down to a valley like the bottom of a cauldron; on the far side of the cauldron the air, like a stroke of magic, became thick white, and through it leaped the first lightning, a blinding violet. ”

“ A fine thought had come to me during the evening: to leave my wagon here, to leave a note for Scipio at the E-A outfit, to descend Wind River to the Sand Gulch, strike Washakie’s trail to the northeast of Crow Heart Butte, and on my vigorous sorrel find Still Hunt Spring by myself. The whole ride need take but two days. I think I must have swelled with pride at the prospect of this secret achievement, to be divulged, when accomplished, to the admiring dwellers on Wind River. ”

“ So now we had Timberline accounted for satisfactorily to ourselves; he was “after the reward.” We never said this to him, but we worked out his steps from the start. As stock-tender at Rongis he had seen that yellow poster pasted up, and had read it, day after day, with its promise of what to him was a fortune. To Owl Creek he could not go alone, having no money to buy a horse, and being afraid, too, perhaps. If he could only find that missing dead man—or the two of them—he might find a clew. My sheep hunt had dropped like a Providence into his hand. ”

“ Scipio Le Moyne was making his first stay in the Spit-Cat cabin, and in his mind there welled a complacency not to be justified; for when a thick roll of money is in a man’s trousers, and the man’s trousers are upon the man, and the man is writing a letter at a table, you see at once how unsafe the money is if the man’s six-shooter is lying out of reach on the bed behind him. ”

“ The cabin on Spit-Cat Creek lies lonely among the high pastures, and looks down to further loneliness across many slanting levels of pine-tops. These descend successively in smooth, odorous, evergreen miles until they reach the open valley. Here runs the stage road, if you can discern it, from the railway to the continuously jubilant cow-town of Likely, Wyoming; and here, when viewed from the cabin through a field-glass, you can readily distinguish an antelope from a stone in the clear atmosphere which commonly prevails. ”

“ Aaron was going to Push Root. In that town a fiesta was being held; horses raced, liquors drunk, ladies courted, cards dealt, silver and gold lost by many and won by few, all to music. Bellyful was bound presently for Push Root,{208} too. Now he lay off the road under some mesquite, thinking, while Aaron approached. Made of thorns, slender rods, and gauze foliage, Bellyful’s bushes cast little more shade than mosquito nets, but they cast all the shade there was. He was resting his starved, weak horse, whose legs must somehow walk the five more miles to Push Root. ”

“ An arm of the storm reached over to us, the cauldron sank from sight in a white sea, and the hail cut my face so{154} I bowed it down. Mixed with the hail fell softer flakes, which, as they touched the earth, glowed for a moment like tiny bulbs, and went out. On the ground I saw what looked like a tangle of old, human footprints in the hard-crusted mud. ”

“ Mile-high in space circled a dark speck, a Mexican eagle, alone in the empty sky. He was looking down upon four hundred square miles of Arizona sand, called Repose Valley. He saw clots of cactus, thickets of mesquite, stunt oak bush, and white skeletons of cattle, but not a thing to eat. He also saw Aaron Tace, the shell-game man, in a Mexican hat. He saw also a man who, drifting lately to Tucson, had said his name was Belleville; but somebody in Tucson had pronounced this “Bellyful” ”

“ I guess I’ll have a cook when your camping stuff comes.”
My stuff was due in not many days; and as I walked home from Scipio’s cabin I felt gratitude to the game laws for the part they had played in delaying me in this valley where each day seemed the essence distilled from the beauty of seven usual days. Even as I waded Buffalo Horn I stopped to look up and down the course that it made between its bordering cottonwoods. A week ago these had been green; but autumn had come one night and now here was Buffalo Horn unwinding its golden miles between the castle walls of the mountains. ”

“ With no spread-eagle brag do I gather conviction each year that we Americans, judged not hastily, are sound at heart, kind, courageous, often of the truest delicacy, and always ultimately of excellent good sense. With such belief, or, rather, knowledge, it is sorrowful to see our fatal complacence, our as yet undisciplined folly, in sending to our State Legislatures and to that general business office of ours at Washington, a herd of mismanagers that seems each year{12} to grow more inefficient and contemptible, whether branded Republican or Democrat. ”

“ Force, as you may know, is like the King, and never dies. It endlessly transmits itself through the same or some other shape. Drop a stone in a pond, and the wave-rings may seem to expire as they widen, but they do not; through friction or impact or something, they merely become invisible. You can stop a cannon-ball, but you cannot kill its speed ”