"Open it?" she says, kind of blank. "Oh, you mean that silly old trunk!
Yes, I believe I did. At least I think I did."
It was good stage acting; an audience would of thought she had forgotten.
So I took it as calm as she did and went in to change.
By the time I got out the men was just coming in, the Prof being enthusiastic about some clamshells of the year six million B. C. and Oswald bearing his great sorrow with an effort to do it bravely.
Lydia nodded distantly and then ignored the men in a pointed way, breaking out into rapid chatter to me about the lack of society up here—didn't I weary of the solitude, never meeting people of the right sort? It was a new line with her and done for effect, but I couldn't see what effect.
Supper was ready and we hurried in to it; so I guess Oswald must of forgot for one time to shake his trunk and listen to the pretty little keys. And all through the meal Lydia confined her attentions entirely to me. She ignored Oswald mostly, but if she did notice him she patronized him. She was painfully superior to him, and severe and short, like he was a little boy that had been let to come to the table with the grown-ups for this once. She rattled along to me about the club dances at home, and how they was going to have better music this year, and how the assembly hall had been done over in a perfectly dandy colour scheme by the committee she was on, and a lot of girlish babble that took up much room but weighed little.
Oswald would give her side looks of dumb appeal from time to time, for she had not once referred to anything so common as a trunk. He must of felt that her moral support had been withdrawn and he was left to face the dread future alone. He probably figured that she'd had to give up about the trunk and was diverting attention from her surrender. He hardly spoke a word and disappeared with a look of yearning when we left the table. The rest of us went out on the porch. Lydia was teasing the ukulele when Oswald appeared a few minutes later, with great excitement showing in his worn face.
"I can hear the keys no longer," says he; "not a sound of them! Mustn't they have fallen from the hook?"
Lydia went on stripping little chords from the strings while she answered him in lofty accents.
"Keys?" she says. "What keys? What is the man talking of? Oh, you mean that silly old trunk! Are you really still maundering about that? Of course the keys aren't there! I took them out when I opened it to-day. I thought you wanted them taken out. Wasn't that what you wanted the trunk open for—to get the keys? Have I done something stupid? Of course I can put them back and shut it again if you only want to listen to them."
Oswald had been glaring at her with his mouth open like an Upper Triassic catfish. He tried to speak, but couldn't move his face, which seemed to be frozen. Lydia goes on dealing off little tinkles of string music in a tired, bored way and turns confidentially to me to say she supposes there is really almost no society up here in the true sense of the word.
"You opened that trunk?" says Oswald at last in tones like a tragedian at his big scene.
Lydia turned to him quite prettily impatient, as if he was something she'd have to brush off in a minute.
"Dear, dear!" she says. "Of course I opened it. I told you again and again it was perfectly simple. I don't see why you made so much fuss about it."
Oswald turned and galloped off to his room with a glad shout. That showed the male of him, didn't it?—not staying for words of gratitude to his saviour, but beating it straight to the trunk.
Lydia got up and swaggered after him. She had been swaggering all the evening. She acted like a duchess at a slumming party. The Prof and I followed her.
Oswald was teetering the trunk in the old familiar way, with one ear fastened to its shiny side.
"It's true! It's true!" he says in hushed tones. "The keys are gone."
"Naughty, naughty!" says Lydia. "Haven't I told you I took them out?"
Oswald went over and set limply down on his bed, while we stood in the doorway.
"How did you ever do it?" says he with shining eyes.
"It was perfectly simple," says Lydia. "I simply opened it—that's all!"
"I have always suspected that the great secret of life would be almost too simple when once solved," says the Prof.
"It only needed a bit of thought," says the chit.
Then Oswald must of had a sudden pang of fear. He flew over and examined the lock and all the front surface of his treasure. He was looking for signs of rough work, thinking she might of broken into it in some coarse manner. But not a scratch could he find. He looked up at Lydia out of eyes moist with gratitude.
"You wonderful, wonderful woman!" says he, and any one could know he meant it from the heart out.
Lydia was still superior and languid, and covered up a slight yawn. She said she was glad if any little thing she could do had made life pleasanter for him. This has been such a perfectly simple thing—very, very far from wonderful.
Oswald now begun to caper round the room like an Airedale pup, and says let's have the keys and open the trunk up, so he can believe his own eyes.
Then Lydia trifled once more with a human soul. She froze in deep thought a long minute then says:
"Oh, dear! Now what did I do with those wretched old keys?"
Oswald froze, too, with a new agony. Lydia put a hand to her pale forehead and seemed to try to remember. There was an awful silence. Oswald was dashed over the cliff again.
"Can't you think?" says the wounded man. "Can't you remember? Try! Try!"
"Now let me see," says Lydia. "I know I had them out in the living room—"
"Why did you ever take them out there?" demands Oswald in great terror; but the heroine pays no attention whatever to this.
"—and later, I think—I think—I must have carried them into my room. Oh, yes; now I remember I did. And then I emptied my wastebasket into the kitchen stove. Now I wonder if they could have been in with that rubbish I burned! Let me think!" And she thought again deeply.
Oswald give a hollow groan, like some of the very finest chords in his being had been tore asunder. He sunk limp on the bed again.
"Wouldn't it be awkward if they were in that rubbish?" says Lydia. "Do you suppose that fire would destroy the silly things? Let me think again."
The fiend kept this up for three minutes more. It must of seemed longer to Oswald than it takes for a chinch bug to become a carboniferous Jurassic. She was committing sabotage on him in the cruellest way. Then, after watching his death agony with cold eyes and pretending to wonder like a rattled angel, she brightens up and says:
"Oh, goody! Now I remember everything. I placed them right here." And she picked the keys off the table, where they had been hid under some specimens of the dead and gone.
Oswald give one athletic leap and had the precious things out of her feeble grasp in half a second. His fingers trembled horrible, but he had a key in the lock and turned it and threw the sides of the grand old monument wide open. He just hung there a minute in ecstasy, fondling the keys and getting his nerve back. Then he turns again on Lydia the look of a proud man who is ready to surrender his whole future life to her keeping.
Lydia had now become more superior than ever. She swaggered round the room, and when she didn't swagger she strutted. And she says to Oswald:
"I'm going to make one little suggestion, because you seem so utterly helpless: You must get a nice doormat to lay directly in front of your trunk, and you must always keep the key under this mat. Lock the trunk and hide the key there. It's what people always do, and it will be quite safe, because no one would ever think of looking under a doormat for a key. Now isn't that a perfectly darling plan?"
Oswald had looked serious and attentive when she begun this talk, but he finally got suspicious that she was making some silly kind of a joke. He grinned at her very foolish and again says: "You wonderful woman!" It was a caressing tone—if you know what I mean.
Lydia says "Oh, dear, won't he ever stop his silly chatter about his stupid old trunk?" It seems to her that nothing but trunk has been talked of in this house for untold ages. She's tired to death of the very word. Then she links her arm in mine in a sweet girlish fashion and leads me outside, where she becomes a mere twittering porch wren once more.
Oswald followed, you can bet. And every five minutes he'd ask her how did she ever—really now—open the trunk. But whenever he'd ask she would put the loud pedal on the ukulele and burst into some beachy song about You and I Together in the Moonlight, Love. Even the Prof got curious and demanded how she had done what real brains had failed to pull off—and got the same noisy answer. Later he said he had been wrong to ask. He said the answer would prove to be too brutally simple, and he always wanted to keep it in his thought life as a mystery. It looked like he'd have to. I was dying to know myself, but had sense enough not to ask.
The girl hardly spoke to Oswald again that night, merely giving him these cold showers of superiority when he would thrust himself on her notice. And she kept me out there with her till bedtime, not giving the happy trunk owner a chance at her alone. That girl had certainly learned a few things beyond fudge and cheese straws in her time. She knew when she had the game won.
Sure, it was all over with Oswald. He had only one more night when he could call himself a free man; he tried hard enough not to have even that. He looked like he wanted to put a fence round the girl, elk-high and bull-tight. Of course it's possible he was landed by the earnest wish to find out how she had opened his trunk; but she never will tell him that. She discussed it calmly with me after all was over. She said poor Oswald had been the victim of scientific curiosity, but really it was time for her to settle down.
We was in her room at the time and she was looking at the tiny lines round her eyes when she said it. She said, further, that she was about to plan her going-away gown. I asked what it would be, and she said she hadn't decided yet, but it would be something youth-giving. Pretty game, that was! And now Oswald has someone to guard his trunk keys for him—to say nothing of this here new specimen of organic fauna.
* * * * *
Then I talked. I said I was unable to reach the lofty altitude of the Prof when even a fair mystery was concerned. I was more like Oswald with his childish curiosity. How, then, did the young woman open the trunk? Of course, I could guess the answer. She had found she could really do it with a hairpin, and had held off for effect. Still, I wanted to be told.
"Nothing easy like that," said Ma Pettengill. "She'd been honest with the hairpins. She didn't tell me till the day before they were leaving. 'It was a perfectly simple problem, requiring only a bit of thought,' she says. 'It was the simple thing people do when they find their front door locked. They go round to the back of the house and pry up a kitchen window, or something.' She pledged me to secrecy, but I guess you won't let it go any farther.
"Anyway, this is what she done: It was a time for brutal measures, so she'd had Abner wheel that trunk over to the blacksmith shop and take the hinges off. Abner just loves to do any work he don't have to do, and he had entered cordially into the spirit of this adventure. It used up his whole day, for which he was drawing three dollars from me. He took off one side of four pair of hinges, opened the trunk at the back far enough to reach in for the keys, unlocked it and fastened the hinges back on again.
"It was some job. These hinges was riveted on and didn't come loose easy. The rear of that trunk must of been one sad mutilation. It probably won't ever again be the trunk it once was. Abner had to hustle to get through in one day. I wish I could get the old hound to work for me that way. They'd just got the trunk back when I rode in that night. It was nervy, all right! I asked her if she wasn't afraid he would see the many traces of this rough work she had done.
"'Not a chance on earth!' says Lydia. 'I knew he would never look at any place but the front. He has the mind of a true scientist. It wouldn't occur to him in a million years that there is any other way but the front way to get into a trunk. I painted over the rivets and the bruises as well as I could, but I'm sure he will never look there. He may notice it by accident in the years to come, but the poor chap will then have other worries, I hope.'
"Such was the chit. I don't know. Mebbe woman has her place in the great world after all. Anyway, she'll be a help to Oswald. Whatever he ain't she is."
VII
CHANGE OF VENUS
Ma Pettengill and I rode labouring horses up a steep way between two rocky hillsides that doubled the rays of the high sun back upon us and smothered the little breeze that tried to follow us up from the flat lands of the Arrowhead. We breathed the pointed smell of the sage and we breathed the thick, hot dust that hung lazily about us; a dust like powdered chocolate, that cloyed and choked.
As recreation it was blighting; and I said almost as much. Ma Pettengill was deaf to it, her gray head in its broad-brimmed hat sternly bowed in meditation as she wove to her horse's motion. Then I became aware that she talked to another; one who was not there. She said things I was sure he would not have liked to hear. She hung choice insults upon his name and blistered his fair repute with calumnies. She was a geyser of invective, quiet perhaps for fifty yards, then grandly in action.
"Call yourself a cowman, hey? What you ought to be is matron of a foundling asylum. Yes, sir!"
This was among the least fearful of her dusty scornings. And I knew she would be addressing one Homer Gale, temporary riding boss of the Arrowhead. Indeed, Homer's slightly pleading accents were now very colourably imitated by his embittered employer:
"Yes'm, Mis' Pettengill, it's a matter of life and death; no less. I got to git off for two days—a matter of life and death. Yes'm; I just got to!"
On the completion of this a hoarse hoot of scorn boomed through the haze and Homer was told that men like himself often caused perfectly decent people to be tried for murder. And again Homer's rightful job was echoed as "Matron of a foundling asylum!"
I felt the embarrassment of one unwittingly come upon the adjustment of a private grievance. I dropped delicately a few paces behind, unnoticed, I thought; but Ma Pettengill waited for me to overtake her again.
Then, as we pushed through the dust together, she told me that her days were swifter than a weaver's shuttle and spent without hope. If it wasn't one thing it was another. What she'd like—she'd like to wake up in a strange place and find she'd clean forgot her name and address, like these here parties you read about in the papers. And why wouldn't she? A dry year; feed short on the range; water holes dusty that never did go dry before; half a hay crop and winter threatening right spang in the summertime! Think of having to gather cattle off the range in the middle of August when other times you could let 'em run till the middle of October! In fact, this was the kind of a year that cattle raisers had a technical term for. It was known technically as one hell of a year, if I wanted to be told.
And having to do the work with mental defectives and cripples and Bolsheviki, because every able-bodied puncher in the country had gone over to create a disturbance in Europe! Hadn't she combed out the county hospital and poor farm to get a haying crew? Didn't the best cowboy now on the pay roll wear a derby hat and ride a motorcycle by preference? And paying seventy-five dollars to these imitation punchers to fight her gentle saddle horses, no colt, it seemed, having been ridden on the place in the memory of man.
She didn't know; taking one thing with another, sometimes she almost wished that the world was going to stay unsafe for democracy.
Of course this technically described bad year wasn't so bad one way, because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed. When cattle wasn't hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time. Just a little attention from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed after that. And so on, back to Homer Gale, who had gone to Red Gap for two days on a matter of life and death—and of this the less repeated here the better.
Now our narrow way spread to a valley where the sun's rays were more widely diffused and the dust less pervasive. We could see a mile ahead to a vaster cloud of dust. This floated over a band of Arrowhead cattle being driven in from a range no longer sustaining. They were being driven by Bolsheviki, so my informant disclosed.
We halted above the road and waited for the dusty creatures to plod by us down to the pleasant lea where feed was still to be had and water was sweet. Then came the Bolshevik rear guard. It consisted of Silas Atterbury and four immature grandchildren.
Grandpa Atterbury was ninety-three and doing his first labour since he retired, at eighty-five. The grandchildren, two male and two female, should have been playing childish games. And they were Bolsheviki, all because they had refused to bring in this bunch of stock except for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it made her an I.W.W.
But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a stranglehold on her. There was, indeed, nothing to do but tell Sissy to tell one of her incendiary brothers to get up close to grandpa, and yell good and loud at him, and make him understand he was to get a count on that bunch at the first gate, because it didn't look to us that there was over three hundred head where there ought to be at least five hundred.
And then there was nothing to do but ride ahead of the toiling beasts and again down the narrow way that would bring us to the lowlands of the Arrowhead, where the dust no longer choked and one could see green and smell water. From the last mesa we looked out over the Arrowhead's flat fields, six thousand acres under fence, with the ranch house and outbuildings hazy in the distance.
It was a pleasant prospect and warmed Ma Pettengill from her mood of chill negation. She remarked upon the goodliness of the scene, quite as if the present were not a technical year for cattle raisers. Then, as we jogged the six miles home by peaceful thoroughfares, the lady, being questioned persistently and suitably, spoke with utter freedom of Homer Gale, who had shamefully deserted his job for two days at the busiest end of the season, when a white man wouldn't of thought of leaving, even on a matter of life and death.
Had Homer the shadow of an excuse? We shall see.
Well, then, this here celluloid imitation of a cowman that I been using violent words about come into the valley three years ago and rapidly got a lot of fame by reason of being a confirmed bachelor and hating the young of the human species with bitterness and constancy. I was the one that brought him in; I admit that. First time I seen him he was being a roistering blade in the Fashion Waffle Kitchen down at Red Gap. He was with Sandy Sawtelle and a couple other boys from the ranch here, and Sandy tells me later that he is looking for work, being a good cowhand. I said he looked like something else, being dressed in an uproarious check suit of clothes that would instantly of collected a crowd in most city streets. But Sandy says that's all right; he's a regler cowman and had to wear these startling garments for a disguise to get him safe out of Idaho.
It seems he'd been crowded out of that thriving state by a yearning and determined milliner that had witnesses a-plenty and intended to do something about it. Defendant claimed he hadn't even meant anything of the sort and was just being a good pal; but it looked like the cruel teeth of the law was going to bite right into his savings if this breach-of-promise suit ever come to trial, the lady having letters from him in black and white. So Homer had made a strategic retreat, avoiding contact with the enemy, and here he was. And how about taking him on at the Arrowhead, where he could begin a new life?
Needing another hand just then, I fussed none at all about Homer's scandalous past. I said he could throw in with us; and he did. When he got dressed in a legal manner he looked like he couldn't be anything else but a cowhand. About forty and reliable, he looked. So I sent him to a summer camp over on the Madeline plains, where I had a bunch of cattle on government range. Bert Glasgow lived in a shack with his wife and family there and had general charge, and Homer was to begin his new life by helping Bert.
His new life threatened to be short. He showed up here late the third night after he went over, looking sad and desperate and hunted. He did look that way more or less at all times, having one of these long, sad moustaches and a kind of a bit-into face. This night he looked worse than usual. I thought the hellhounds of the law from Idaho might of took up his winding trail; but no. It was the rosy-cheeked tots of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Glasgow that had sent him out into the night.
"Say," he says, "I wouldn't have you think I was a quitter, but if you want to suicide me just send me back to that horrible place. Children!" he says. "That's all; just children! Dozens of 'em! Running all over the place, into everything, under everything, climbing up on you, sticking their fingers into your eyes—making life unbearable for man and beast. You never once let on to me," he says reproachfully, "that this Bert had children."
"No," I says; "and I never let on to you that he's got a mole on his chin either. What of that?"
Then the poor lollop tries to tell me what of it. I saw he really had been under a nervous strain, all right. Suffering had put its hot iron on him. First, he just naturally loathed children anyway. Hadn't he run away from a good home in Iowa when he was sixteen, account of being the oldest of seven? He said some things in general about children that would of got him no applause at a mothers' meeting. He was simply afraid to look a child in the eye; and, from what he'd like to do to 'em all, it seemed like his real middle name was Molech. Wasn't that the party with hostile views about children? Anyway, you could see that Homer's idea of a real swell festivity would be to hide out by an orphan asylum some night until the little ones had said their prayers and was tucked all peaceful into their trundle beds and then set fire to the edifice in eight places after disconnecting the fire alarm. That was Homer, and he was honest; he just couldn't help it.
And Bert's tikes had drove him mad with their playful antics. He said he'd be set down for a bite of dinner and one of 'em would climb up his back and feel his hair—not saying a word, just taking hold of it; then it would jump down and another would climb up and do the same thing, and him not daring to defend himself. He'd got so worked up he was afraid to stay on the place.
"And you know," he says—"what I can't understand—danged if Bert don't seem to kind of like 'em. You may think I'm a liar, but he waited for one the other morning when it squealed at him and kept a hold of its hand clean down to the hay barn. What do you think of that? And besides these that go round infesting the place outside he's got a short yearling and a long two-year-old that have to be night-herded. I listened to 'em every night. One yelled and strangled all last night, till I s'posed, of course, it was going to perish everlastingly; but here this morning it was acting like nothing at all had happened.
"All I can say is, Bert don't have much luck. And that littlest yeller always unswallowing its meals with no effort whatever! It's horrible! And the mother, with no strength of character—feeble-minded, I reckon—coddles 'em! She never did cuss 'em out proper or act human toward 'em. Kids like them, what they need—upside down and three quick hard ones. I know!"
I was fool enough to argue with him a bit, trying to see if he didn't have a lick of sense. I told him to look how happy Bert was; and how his family had made a man of him, him getting more money and saving more than ever in his past life. Homer said what good would all that money do him? He'd only fool it away on his wife and children.
"He regrets it, all right," says Homer. "I says to myself the other day:
'I bet a cookie he'd like to be carefree and happy like me!'"
Homer was a piker, even when he made bets with himself. And the short of it was I sent a man that didn't hate children over to Bert's and kept Homer on the place here.
He stayed three months and said it was heaven, account of not having them unnecessary evils on the place that would squirm round a man's legs and feel of his hair and hide round corners and peek at him and whisper about him. Then I changed foremen and Scott Humphrey, the new one, brought three towheads with him of an age to cause Homer the anguish of the damned, which they done on the first day they got here by playing that he was a horse and other wild animals, and trying to pull the rest of his hair out.
He come in and cut himself out of my life the day after, shaking his head and saying he couldn't think what the world was coming to. As near as I could make him, his idea was that the world was going to be swamped with young ones if something wasn't done about it, like using squirrel poison or gopher traps.
I felt like I wanted to cuff him up to a peak and knock the peak off; but I merely joked and said it was too bad his own folks hadn't come to think that way while he could still be handled easy. I also warned him it was going to be hard to find a job without more or less children on the outskirts, because ours was a growing state. He said there must be a few sane people left in the world. And, sure enough, he gets a job over to the Mortimers'—Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie being past seventy and having nothing to distress Homer.
Of course the secret of this scoundrel's get-away from Idaho had got round the valley, making him a marked man. It was seen that he was a born flirt, but one who retained his native caution even at the most trying moments. Here and there in the valley was a hard-working widow that the right man could of consoled, and a few singles that would of listened to reason if properly approached; and by them it was said that Homer was a fiend for caution. He would act like one of them that simply won't take no for an answer—up to a certain point. He would seem to be going fur in merry banter, but never to words that the law could put any expensive construction on. He would ride round to different ranches and mingle at dances and picnics, and giggle and conduct himself like one doomed from the cradle to be woman's prey—but that was all.
Funny how he'd escaped through the years, him having apparently the weak and pliant nature that makes the ideal husband, and having reached the time of life when he was putting sheep dip on his hair where the lining shone through on top. But so it was. And his views on children had also become widely known. Mothers used to grab up their youngest ones when he'd go into the post office down at Kulanch or meet one on the road. He made no hit at all with such views among them that had learned better. Still there was hopeful ones that thought he might be made to take a joke sooner or later, and the fact that he was known to save his wages and had a nice little stake laid by didn't work against him any with such parties as might have a chance to be swept off their feet by him in a mad moment.
Then over at the Mortimers' place he meets Mrs. Judson Tolliver, a plausible widow lady who come into the valley every once in a while to do sewing round at different ranches. She was a good-built, impressive person, with a persuading manner; one of these competent ones that can take charge of affairs and conduct them unassisted, and will do so if not stopped. Uncle Henry Mortimer brought her to the house in his light wagon one morning, with her sewing machine in the back. And Homer was there to help her out and help out with the machine and see it was placed right in the sitting room; and then help out with her satchel and ask in a gentlemanly manner if everything was all right—and everything was: Thank you so much, Mr. Gale!
This party was no simpering schoolgirl. She was thirty-five or so and square-jawed, and did her hair plain, and had a managing voice that would go good at club meetings. She read library books and was a good conversationalist. And what did she do the first evening, when Homer was mending one of his shirts by the kitchen lamp, but wrench it away from him roguishly and do the job herself, while she entertained him with conversation. It was bound to be entertaining, for she started in about what trials children was to their tormented parents and how the world would be brighter and better if it consisted entirely of adults.
Any one might of thought she'd been hearing gossip about Homer's likes and dislikes. I know that's what I thought afterward, when he opened his soul to me. She said what a mercy it was that half a dozen yelling demons wasn't in this house at that moment to make life an evil thing for all. And Homer sunned right up and took the talk away from her. While she done his mending he spoke heatedly of little children in his well-known happy vein, relating many incidents in his blasted career that had brought him to these views. The lady listened with deep attention, saying "Ah, yes, Mr. Gale!" from time to time, and letting on there must be a strong bond of sympathy between them because he expressed in choice words what she had so often felt.
Homer must of been kind of swept off his feet at that very moment, and the rapids just below him. I guess he'd already been made mushy sentimental by seeing the ideal romantic marriage between Uncle Henry and his wife—forty years or so together and still able to set down in peace and quiet without having something squirm over you to see what you had in your pockets or ask what made your hair come out that funny way, till you wished a couple she-bears would rush out and devour forty-two of 'em.
It was the first of quite many evenings when Homer and the lady would set with a dish of apples and fried cakes between 'em and denounce the world's posterity. The lady was even suffering grave doubts about marriage. She said having to make her own way after she lost her husband had made her relish her independence too much to think of ever giving it up again lightly. Of course she wouldn't say that possibly at some time in the dim future a congenial mate that thought as she did on vital topics—and so forth—just enough to give Homer a feeling of security that was wholly unwarranted. Wasn't he the heedless Hugo?
He was quite wordy about the lady to me when he come over on an errand one day. He told me all about these delightful talks of theirs, and what an attractive person she was, sound as a nut, and companionable and good-looking without being one of these painted dolls. He said, to see her above her sewing, she was a lovely view that he never tired of gazing at, and to hear her loathe children was music to the ear. He said she was a rare woman. I said she must be and asked him if he had committed himself.
"Well, I don't say I have and I don't say I haven't," he says; "but here I be, standing with reluctant feet at the parting of the ways. And who knows what might happen? I know I've had some darned close shaves from doing a whole lot worse in my time."
So I wished him the best of luck with this lady child hater; not that I thought he'd really get what was coming to him. He was so crafty. He was one of them that love not well but too wisely, as the saying is. Still, there was a chance. He was scared to death of fire and yet he would keep on playing with it. Some day the merry old flames might lick him up. I hoped for the best.
A few days after that I went down to the foreman's house late in the afternoon to see him about a shipment we had to make. Scott was off somewhere, but his sister was in; so I set talking with her, and waiting. This here Minna Humphrey was a hectic, blighted girl of thirty, sandy-haired, green-eyed, and little—no bigger than a bar of soap after a day's washing. What had blighted the poor thing was having to teach public school for a dozen years. She'd been teaching down to Kulanche that year and had just closed up. We set out in front of the house and Minna told me she was all in; and how she'd ever got through the season she didn't know.
She went on to speak of little children. Fire in her voice? Murder! According to Minna, children had ought to be put in cages soon as they can walk and kept there till they are grown; fed through the bars and shot down if they break out. That's what twelve years' enforced contact with 'em had done to Minna's finer instincts. She said absolutely nothing in the world could be so repugnant to her as a roomful of the little animals writing on slates with squeaky pencils. She said other things about 'em that done her no credit.
And while I listened painfully who should be riding up but Homer Gale!
"Here," I says to Minna; "here's a man you'll be a joyous treat to; just let him come in and listen to your song a while. Begin at the beginning and say it all slow, and let Homer have some happy moments."
So I introduced the two, and after a few formalities was got over I had Minna telling in a heartfelt manner what teaching a public school was like, and what a tortured life she led among creatures that should never be treated as human. Homer listened with glistening eyes that got quite moist at the last. Minna went on to say that children's mothers was almost as bad, raging in to pick a fuss with her every time a child had been disciplined for some piece of deviltry. She said mothers give her pretty near as much trouble as the kids themselves.
It was a joyous and painful narrative to Homer. He said why didn't Minna take up something else? And Minna said she was going to. She'd been working two summers in Judge Ballard's office, down to Red Gap, and was going to again this summer, soon as she regained a little vitality; and she hoped now she'd have a steady job there and never have to go back to the old life of degradation. Homer sympathized warmly; his heart had really been touched. He hoped she'd rise out of the depths to something tolerable; and then he told her about Bert's five horrible children that drove him out into the brush—and so forth.
I listened in a while; and then I says to Homer ain't it nice for him to meet someone else that thinks as he does on this great vital topic, Minna seeming to find young ones as repulsive as Mrs. Judson Tolliver? And how about that lady anyway? And how is his affair coming on? I never dreamed of starting anything. I was being friendly.
Homer gets vivacious and smirks something horrible, and says, well, he don't see why people make a secret of such things; and the fact is that that lady and him have about decided that Fate has flung 'em together for a lofty purpose. Of course nothing was settled definite yet—no dates nor anything; but probably before long there'd be a nice little home adorning a certain place he'd kept his eye on, and someone there keeping a light in the window for him—and so on. It sounded almost too good to be true that this old shellback had been harpooned at last.
Then Minna spoke up, when Homer had babbled to a finish, and smirked and looked highly offensive. She says brightly:
"Oh, yes; Mrs. Judson Tolliver. I know her well; and I'm sure, Mr. Gale,
I wish you all the happiness in the world with the woman of your choice.
She's a very sterling character indeed—and such a good mother!"
"How's that?" says Homer. "I didn't hear you just right. Such a good what?"
"I said she's such a good mother," Minna answers him.
Homer's smirk kind of froze on his face.
"Mother to what?" he says in a low, passionate tone, like an actor.
"Mother to her three little ones," says Minna. Then she says again quick: "Why, what's the matter, Mr. Gale?" For Homer seemed to have been took bad.
"Great Godfrey!" he says, hardly able to get his voice.
"And, of course, you won't mind my saying it," Minna goes on, "because you seem so broad-minded about children, but when I taught primary in Red Gap last year those three little boys of hers gave me more trouble than any other two dozen of the pests in the whole room."
Homer couldn't say anything this time. He looked like a doctor was knifing him without anesthetics.
"And to make it worse," says Minna, "the mother is so crazy about them, and so sensitive about any little thing done to them in the way of discipline—really, she has very little control of her language where those children are concerned. Still, of course, that's how any good mother will act, to be sure; and especially when they have no father.
"I'm glad indeed the poor woman is to have someone like you that will take the responsibility off her shoulders, because those boys are now at an age where discipline counts. Of course she'll expect you to be gentle with them, even though firm. Oswald—he's eleven now, I believe—will soon be old enough to send to reform school; but the younger ones, seven and nine—My! such spirits as they have! They'll really need someone with strength."
Homer was looking as if this bright chatter would add twenty years to his age. He'd slumped down on the stoop, where he'd been setting, like he'd had a stroke.
"So she's that kind, is she?" he kind of mutters. "A good thing I found it out on her!"
"The children live with their grandmother in Red Gap while their mother is away," says Minna. "They really need a strong hand."
"Not mine!" says Homer. Then he got slowly up and staggered down a few steps toward the gate. "It's a good thing I found out this scandal on her in time," says he. "Talk about underhandedness! Talk about a woman hiding her guilty secret! Talk about infamy! I'll expose her, all right. I'm going straight to her and tell her I know all. I'll make her cower in shame!" He's out on his horse with his reckless threat.
"Now you've sunk the ship," I says to Minna. "I knew the woman was leading a double life as fur as Homer was concerned, but I wasn't going to let on to the poor zany. It's time he was speared, and this would of been a judgment on him that his best friends would of relished keenly. Lots of us was looking forward to the tragedy with great pleasure. You spoiled a lot of fun for the valley."
"But it would not have been right," says Minna. "It would truly have been the blackest of tragedies to a man of Mr. Gale's sensitive fibres. You can't enter into his feelings because you never taught primary. Also, I think he is very far from being a poor zany, as you have chosen to call him." The poor thing was warm and valiant when she finished this, looking like Joan of Arc or someone just before the battle.
And Homer never went back and made the lady cower like he said he meant to. Mebbe it occurred to him on the way that she was not one of them that cower easy. Mebbe he felt he was dealing with a desperate adventuress, as cunning as she was false-hearted. Anyway, he weakened like so many folks that start off brave to tell someone so-and-so right to their faces. He didn't go back at all till the middle of the night, when he pussyfooted in and got his things out, and disappeared like he had stumbled down a well.
Uncle Henry had to feed his own stock next morning, while Mrs. Tolliver took on in great alarm and wanted a posse formed to rescue Homer from wherever he was. Her first idea was that he had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom; but someway she couldn't get any one else very hearty about this notion. So then she said he had been murdered, or was lying off in the brush somewhere with a broken leg.
It was pointed out to her that Homer wouldn't be likely to come and collect all his things in the night in order to keep a date with an assassin, or even to have his leg broke. About the third day she guessed pretty close to the awful truth and spoke a few calm words about putting her case in the hands of some good lawyer.
The valley was interested. It looked like a chance for the laugh of the year. It looked like the lightnings of a just heaven had struck where they was long overdue. Then it was discovered that Homer was hiding out over in the hills with a man after coyotes with traps and poison. His job must of appealed to Homer's cynical nature at that moment—anything with traps and poison in it.
Dave Pickens was the man that found him, he not having much else to do. And he let Homer know the worst he could think of without mincing words. He said the deserted fiancée was going to bring suit against Homer for one hundred thousand dollars—that being the biggest sum Dave could think of—for breach of promise, and Homer might as well come out and face the music.
Homer did come out, bold as brass. He'd been afraid the lady might gun him or act violent with something; but if she wasn't threatening anything but legal violence he didn't care. He just couldn't conceive that a lady with three children could make a suit like that stick against any man—especially three children that was known to be hellions. He didn't even believe the lady would start a suit—not with the facts of her shame known far and wide. He was jaunty and defiant about this, and come right out of hiding and agreed to work for me again, Scott Humphrey having sent his wife and children on a visit to Grandma Humphrey.
But, lands. He didn't earn his salt. Friends and well-wishers took the jauntiness all out of him in no time. Parties rode from far and near to put him wise. Ranchers from ten miles up and down the creek would drop important work just to ride over and tell him harsh facts about the law, and how, as man to man, it looked dark indeed for him. These parties told him that the possession of three children by a lawful widow was not regarded as criminal by our best courts. It wasn't even considered shameful. And it was further pointed out by many of the same comforters that the children would really be a help to the lady in her suit, cinching the sympathy of a jury.
Also, they didn't neglect to tell him that probably half the jury would be women—wives and mothers. And what chance would he have with women when they was told how he regarded children? He spent a good half of the time I paid him for in listening to these friendly words. They give Homer an entirely new slant on our boasted civilization and lowered it a whole lot in his esteem.
About the only person in the whole valley that wasn't laughing at him and giving him false sympathy with a sting in its tail was Minna Humphrey. Homer told her all about the foul conspiracy against his fortune, and how his life would be blasted by marrying into a family with three outcasts like he'd been told these was. And what was our courts coming to if their records could be stained by blackmailers.
And Minna give him the honest sympathy of a woman who had taught school twelve years, loathed the sight of any human under twenty, and even considered that the institution of marriage had been greatly overpraised. Certainly she felt it was not for her; and she could understand Homer's wanting to escape. She and him would set out and discuss his chances long after he had ought to of been in bed if he was going to earn his pay.
Minna admitted that things looked dark for him on account of the insane prejudice that would be against him for his views on children. She said he couldn't expect anything like a fair trial where these was known even with a jury of his peers; and it was quite true that probably only five or six of the jury would be his peers, the rest being women.
Homer told me about these talks—out of working hours, you can bet! How Minna was the only person round that would stand by anyone in trouble; how she loathed kids, and even loathed the thought of human marriage.
"Minna is a nice girl," I told him; "but I should think you'd learn not to pay attention to a woman that talks about children that way. Remember this other lady talked the same way about 'em before the scandal come out."
But he was indignant that any one could suspect Minna's child hating wasn't honest.
"That little girl is pure as a prism!" he says. "When she says she hates 'em, she hates 'em. The other depraved creature was only working on my better nature."
"Well," I says, "the case does look black; but mebbe you could settle for a mere five thousand dollars."
"It wouldn't be a mere five thousand dollars," says Homer; "it would be the savings of a lifetime of honest toil and watching the pennies. That's all I got."
"Serves you right, then," I says, "for not having got married years ago and having little ones of your own about your knee!"
Homer shuddered painfully when I said this. He started to answer something back, but just choked up and couldn't.
The adventuress had, of course, sent letters and messages to Homer. The early ones had been pleading, but the last one wasn't. It was more in the nature of a base threat if closely analyzed. Then she finished up her sewing at the Mortimers' and departed for Red Gap, leaving a final announcement to anybody it concerned that she would now find out if there was any law in the land to protect a defenseless woman in her sacred right to motherhood.
Homer shivered when he heard it and begun to think of making another get-away, like he had done from Idaho. He thought more about it when someone come back from town and said she was really consulting a lawyer.
He'd of gone, I guess, if Minna hadn't kept cheering him up with sympathy and hating children with him. Homer was one desperate man, but still he couldn't tear himself away from Minna.
Then one morning he gets a letter from the Red Gap lawyer. It says his client, Mrs. Judson Tolliver, has directed him to bring suit against Homer for five thousand dollars; and would Homer mebbe like to save the additional cost—which would be heavy, of course—by settling the matter out of court and avoiding pain for all?
Homer was in a state where he almost fell for this offer. It was that or facing a jury that would have it in for him, anyway, or disappearing like he had done in Idaho; only this lady was highly determined, and reports had already come to him that he would be watched and nailed if he tried to leave. It would mean being hounded from pillar to post, even if he did get away. He went down and put it up to Minna, as I heard later.
"I'm a desperate man," he says, "being hounded by this here catamount; and mebbe it's best to give in."
"It's outrageous!" says Minna. "Of course you don't care about the money; but it's the principle of the thing."
"Well, yes and no," says Homer. "You might say I care some about the money. That's plain nature, and I never denied I was human."
So they went on to discuss it back and forth warmly, when a misunderstanding arose that I was very careful to get the rights of a couple of weeks later.
Minna went over the old ground that Homer could never get a fair trial; then she brightened up all at once and says:
"Don't you pay it. Don't you do it; because you won't have to if you do what I say."
Homer gets excited and says:
"Yes, yes; go on!"
And Minna goes on.
"When people can't get fair trials in a place," she says, "they always take change of venues."
"Change of venues?" says Homer, kind of uneasy, it seemed.
"Certainly," says Minna: "they take change of venues. I've worked in Judge Ballard's office long enough to know that much. Why didn't I think of it before? It's your one chance to escape this creature's snare."
"Change of venues?" says Homer again, kind of aghast.
"It's your only way out," says Minna; "and I'll do everything I can—"
"You will?" says Homer.
"Why, of course!" says Minna. "Any thing—"
"All right, then," says Homer. "You get your things on, and I'll saddle your horse and bring him round."
"What for?" demands Minna.
"I'm a desperate man!" says Homer. "You say it's the only way out, and you know the law; so come along to Kulanche with me." And he beat if off to the barn.
Well, Minna had said she'd do anything she could, thinking she'd write herself to Judge Ballard and find out all the details; but if Homer wanted her to go to Kulanche with him and try to start the thing there—why, all right. She was ready when Homer come with her horse and off they rode on the twelve-mile trip.
I gather that not much was said on the way by Homer who only muttered like a fever patient from time to time, with Minna saying once in a while how glad she was she had thought up this one sure way out of his trouble.
At Kulanche they rode up in front of Old Man Geiger's office, who is justice of the peace.
"Wait here a minute," says Homer, and went inside. Pretty soon he come out and got her. "Come on, now," he says, "I got it all fixed."
And Minna goes in, thinking mebbe she's got to swear to an affidavit or something that Homer couldn't get a fair trial among people knowing he regarded little ones as so many cockroaches or something to step on.
She got some shock when Homer took her inside and held her tight by the wrist while Old Man Geiger married 'em. That's about the way it was. She says she was so weak she could hardly stand up, and she hadn't hardly any voice at all left. But she kept on saying "Why, Homer!" and "Oh, Homer!" and "No, no, Homer!" as soon as she discovered that she had been dragged off to a fate she had always regarded as worse than death; but a lot of good it done her to say them things in a voice not much better than a whisper.
And the dreadful thing was over before she could get strength to say anything more powerful. There she was, married to a man she thought highly of, it's true, and had a great sympathy for in the foul wrong one of her sex had tried to slip over on him; but a man she had never thought of marrying. I'm telling you what she told me. And after sentence had been pronounced she kept on saying "Why, Homer!" and "Oh, Homer!" and "No, no, Homer!" till there was nothing to do but get some clothes out of her trunk that she'd left down there in time to take the narrow gauge for their wedding tour to Spokane.
The news spread over the valley next day like a brush fire in August. It was startling! Like the newspapers say of a suicide, "No cause could be assigned for the rash act." They was away ten days and come back to find the whole country was again giving Homer the laugh because Mrs. Tolliver had up and married a prosperous widower from over in Surprise Valley, and had never brought any suit against him. It was said that even the late Mrs. Tolliver was laughing heartily at him.
Homer didn't seem to care, and Minna certainly didn't. She was the old-fashioned kind of wife, a kind you don't hear much of nowadays; the kind that regards her husband as perfect, and looks up to him. She told me about the tumultuous wedding. Neither of 'em had had time for any talk till they got on the train. Then it come out. She says why ever did Homer do such a monstrous thing? And Homer says:
"Well, you told me a change of Venus was the only way out for me—"
"I said a change of venue," says Minna.
"It sounded like change of Venus," says Homer, "and I knew Venus was the god of love. And you said you was willing and I knew we was congenial, and I was a desperate man; and so here we are!"
So she cried on his shoulder for twenty miles while he ate a box of figs.
Homer is now a solid citizen, with his money put into a place down at the lower end of the valley, instead of lying in the bank at the mercy of some unscrupulous woman with little ones. And here this summer, with his own work light, he's been helping me out as riding boss; or, at least I been lavishing money on him for that.
A fine, dependable hand, too! Here was this bunch of stock to be got in from Madeline—them Bolshevik ain't gathered more'n two thirds of 'em; and there's more to come in from over Horse Fly Mountain way, and still another bunch from out of the Sheep Creek country—the busiest month in a bad year, when I needed every man, woman, and child to be had, and here comes Homer, the mush-head, taking two days off!
"Yes'm, Mis' Pettengill; I just got to take time off to go down to Red Gap. It's a matter of life and death. Yes'm; it is. No'm; I wouldn't dast send any one, and Minna agrees I'm the only one to go—" Shucks!
The lady built a cigarette and, after lighting it, turned back to scan the mesa we had descended. The cattle now crowded down the narrow way into the valley, their dust mounting in a high, slow cloud.
"Call yourself a cowman, do you?" she demanded of the absent Homer.
"Huh!" Then we rode on.
"What was the matter of life and death?" I asked.
Ma Pettengill expelled cigarette smoke venomously from inflated nostrils like a tired dragon.
"The matter of life and death was that he had to get two teething rings for the twins."
"Twins!"
"Oh, the valley got it's final laugh at Homer! Twins, sure! Most of us laughed heartily, though there was mothers that said it was God's judgment on the couple. Of course Homer and Minna ain't took it that way. They took it more like they had been selected out of the whole world as a couple worthy to have a blessed miracle happen to 'em. There might of been single babies born now and then to common folks, but never a case of twins—and twins like these! Marvels of strength and beauty, having to be guarded day and night against colic and kidnappers.
"They had 'em down to the post office at Kulanche the other day showing 'em off, each one in a red shawl; and sneering at people with only one. And this imbecile Homer says to me:
"'Of course it can't be hoped,' he says, 'that this great world war will last that long; but if it could last till these boys was in shape to fight I bet it wouldn't last much after that. Yes, sir; little Roosevelt and Pershing would soon put an end to that scrap!'
"And now they're teething and got to have rubber rings. And no, he couldn't send any one down for 'em; and he couldn't order 'em by mail either, because they got to be just the right kind.
"'Poor little Pershing is right feverish with his gums,' says Homer, 'but little Roosevelt has got a front one through already. He bit my thumb yesterday with it—darned near to the bone. He did so!'
"Calls himself a cowman, does he? He might of been—once. Now he ain't no more than a woman's home companion!"
VIII
CAN HAPPEN!
Lew Wee, prized Chinese chef of the Arrowhead Ranch, had butchered, cooked, and served two young roosters for the evening meal with a finesse that cried for tribute. As he replaced the evening lamp on the cleared table in the big living room he listened to my fulsome praise of his artistry as Marshal Foch might hear me say that I considered him a rather good strategist. Lew Wee heard but gave no sign, as one set above the petty adulation of compelled worshipers. Yet I knew his secret soul made festival of my words and would have been hurt by their withholding. This is his way. Not the least furtive lightening of his subtle eyes hinted that I had pleased him.
He presently withdrew to his tiny room off the kitchen, where, as was his evening custom for half an hour, he coaxed an amazing number of squealing or whining notes from his two-stringed fiddle. I pictured him as he played. He would be seated in his wicker armchair beside a little table on which a lamp glowed, the room tightly closed, window down, door shut, a fast-burning brown-paper cigarette to make the atmosphere more noxious. After many more of the cigarettes had made it all but impossible, Lew Wee, with the lamp brightly burning, as it would burn the night through—for devils of an injurious sort and in great numbers will fearlessly enter a dark room—he would lie down to refreshing sleep. That fantasy of ventilation! Lew Wee always sleeps in an air-tight room packed with cigarette smoke, and a lamp turned high at his couchside; and Lew Wee is hardy.
He played over and over now a plaintive little air of minors that put a gentle appeal through two closed doors. It is one he plays a great deal. He has told me its meaning. He says—speaking with a not unpleasant condescension—that this little tune will mean: "Life comes like a bird-song through the open windows of the heart." It sounds quite like that and is a very satisfying little song, with no beginning or end.
He played it now, over and over, wanderingly and at leisure, and I pictured his rapt face above the whining fiddle; the face, say, of the Philosopher Mang, sage of the second degree and disciple of Confucius, who was lifted from earth by the gods in a time we call B.C. but which was then thought to be a fresh, new, late time; the face of subtle eyes and guarded dignity. And I wondered, as I had often wondered, whether Lew Wee, lone alien in the abiding place of mad folks, did not suffer a vast homesickness for his sane kith, who do not misspend their days building up certain grotesque animals to slaughter them for a dubious food. True, he had the compensation of believing invincibly that the Arrowhead Ranch and all its concerns lay upon his own slightly bowed shoulders; that the thing would fast crumble upon his severance from it. But I questioned whether this were adequate. I felt him to be a man of sorrow if not of tragedy. Vaguely he reached me as one who had survived some colossal buffeting.
As I mused upon this Ma Pettengill sorted the evening mail and to Lew Wee she now took his San Francisco newspaper, Young China, and a letter. Half an hour later Lew Wee brought wood to replenish the fire. He disposed of this and absently brushed the hearth with a turkey wing. Then he straightened the rug, crossed the room, and straightened on the farther wall a framed portrait in colour of Majestic Folly, a prize bull of the Hereford strain. Then he drew a curtain, flicked dust from a corner of the table, and made a slow way to the kitchen door, pausing to alter slightly the angle of a chair against the wall.
Ma Pettengill, at the table, was far in the Red Gap Recorder for the previous day. I was unoccupied and I watched Lew Wee. He was doing something human; he was lingering for a purpose. He straightened another chair and wiped dust from the gilt frame of another picture, Architect's Drawing of the Pettengill Block, Corner Fourth and Main streets, Red Gap, Washington. From this feat he went softly to the kitchen door, where he looked back; hung waiting in the silence. He had made no sound, yet he had conveyed to his employer a wish for speech. She looked up at him from the lamp's glow, chin down, brows raised, and eyes inquiring of him over shining nose glasses.
"My Uncle's store, Hankow, burn' down," said Lew Wee.
"Why, wasn't that too bad!" said Ma Pettengill.
"Can happen!" said Lew Wee positively.
"Too bad!" said Ma Pettengill again.
"I send him nine hundred dollars your money. Money burn, too," said Lew
Wee.
"Now, now! Well, that certainly is too bad! What a shame!"
"Can happen!" affirmed Lew Wee.
It was colourless. He was not treating his loss lightly nor yet was he bewailing it.
"You put your money in the bank next time," warned his employer sharply, "instead of letting it lie round in some flimsy Chinee junk shop. They're always burning."
Lew Wee regarded her with a stilled face.
"Can happen!" he again murmured.
He was the least bit insistent, as if she could not yet have heard this utterly sufficing truth. Then he was out; and a moment later the two-stringed fiddle whined a little song through two closed doors.
I said something acute and original about the ingrained fatalism of the
Oriental races.
Ma Pettengill laid down her paper, put aside her glasses, and said, yes, Chinee one fatal race; feeling fatal thataway was what made 'em such good help. Because why? Because, going to work at such-and-such a place, this here fatal feeling made 'em think one place was no worse than another; so why not stick here? If other races felt as fatal as the Chinee race it would make a grand difference in the help problem. She'd bet a million dollars right now that a lot of people wished the Swedes and Irish had fatal feelings like that.
I said Lew Wee had the look of one ever expecting the worst; even more than the average of his race.
"It ain't that," said my hostess. "He don't expect anything at all; or mebbe everything. He takes what comes. If it's good or bad, he says, 'Can happen!' in the same tone of voice; and that ends it. There he is now, knowing that all this good money he saved by hard labour has gone up in smoke, and paying the loss no more attention that if he'd merely broke a string on that squeaky long-necked contraption he saws."
"He seems careless enough with his money, certainly."
"Sure, because he don't believe it does the least good to be careful."
From a cloth sack the speaker poured tobacco into a longitudinally creased brown paper and adeptly fashioned something in the nature of a cigarette.
"Ain't I been telling him for a year to buy Liberty Bonds with his money? He did buy two, being very pro-American on account of once having a violent difference with a German; and he's impressed with the button the Government lets him wear for it. He feels like the President has made him a mandarin or something; but if the whole Government went flooey to-morrow he'd just say, 'Can happen!' and pick up his funny fiddle. Of course it ain't human, but it helps to keep help. I had him six years now, and the only thing that can't happen is his leaving. I don't say there wasn't reasons why he first took the place."
Reasons? So there had been reasons in the life of Lew Wee. I had suspected as much. I found something guarded and timid and long-suffering in his demeanour. He bore, I thought, the searing memory of an ordeal.
"Reasons!" I said, waiting.
"Reasons for coming this far in the first place. Wanted to save his life.
I don't know why, with that fatal idea he sticks to. Habit, probably.
Anyway, he had trouble saving it—kind of a feverish week."
She lighted the cigarette and chuckled hoarsely between the first relishing whiffs of it.
"Yes, sir; that poor boy believes the country between here and the coast is inhabited by savages; wild hill tribes that try to exterminate peaceful travellers; a low kind of outlaws that can't understand a word you tell 'em and act violent if you try to say it over. And having got here, past the demons, I figure he's afraid to go back. I don't blame him."
Ordinarily, this would have been enough. Now the lady merely smoked and chuckled. When I again uttered "Well?" with a tinge of rebuke, she came down from her musing, but into another and distant field. It was the field of natural history, of zoology, of vertebrates, mammals, furred quadrupeds—or, in short, skunks. One may as well be blunt in this matter.
Ma Pettengill said the skunk got too little credit for its lovely character, it being the friendliest wild animal known to man and never offensive except when put upon. Wasn't we all offensive at those times? And just because the skunk happened to be superbly gifted in this respect, was that any reason to ostracize him?
"I ain't sayin' I'd like to mix with one when he's vexed," continued the lady judicially; "but why vex 'em? They never look for trouble; then why force it on their notice? Take one summer, years ago, when Lysander John and I had a camp up above Dry Forks. My lands! Every night after supper the prettiest gang of skunks would frolic down off the hillside and romp round us. Here would come Pa and Ma in the lead, and mebbe a couple of aunts and uncles and four or five of the cunningest little ones, and they'd all snoop fearlessly round the cook fire and the grub boxes, picking up scraps of food—right round under my feet, mind you—and looking up now and then and saying, 'Thank you!' plain as anything, and what lovely weather we're having, and why don't you come up and see us some time?—and so on. They kept it up for a month while we was there; and I couldn't want neater, nicer neighbours.
"Lysander John, he used to get some nervous, especially after one chased him back into the tent late one night; but it was only wanting to play like a mere puppy, I tells him. He'd heard a noise and rushed out, and there the little thing was kind of waltzing in the moonlight, whirling round and round and having a splendid time. When it came bounding toward him—I guess that was the only time in his life Lysander John was scared helpless. He busted back into the tent a mere palsied wreck of his former self; but the cute little minx just come up and sniffed at the flap in a friendly way, like it wanted to reassure him. I wanted him to go out and play with it in the moonlight. He wouldn't. I liked 'em round the place, they was so neighbourly and calm. Of course if I'd ever stepped on one, or acted sudden—
"They also tame easy and make affectionate pets. Ralph Waldo Gusted, over on Elkhorn, that traps 'em in winter to make First-Quality Labrador Sealskin cloaks—his children got two in the house they play with like kittens; and he says himself the skunk has been talked about in a loose and unthinking way. He says a pet skunk is not only a fine mouser but leads a far more righteous life than a cat, which is given to debauchery and cursing in the night. Yes, sir; they're the most trusting and friendly critters in all the woods if not imposed upon—after that, to be sure!"
I said yes, yes, and undoubtedly, and all very interesting, and well and good in its place; but, really, was this its place? I wanted Lew Wee's reasons for believing in the existence of savage hill tribes between there and San Francisco.
"Yes; and San Francisco is worse," said the lady. "He believes that city to be ready for mob violence at any moment. Wild crowds get together and yell and surge round on the least provocation. He says it's different in China, the people there not being crazy."
"Well, then, we can get on with this mystery."
So Ma Pettengill said we could; and we did indeed.
This here chink seems to of been a carefree child up to the time the civilized world went crazy with a version for him. He was a good cook and had a good job at a swell country club down the peninsula from San Francisco. The hours was easy and he was close enough to the city to get in once or twice a week and mingle with his kind. He could pass an evening with the older set, playing fan-tan and electing a new president of the Chinee race, or go to the Chinee theatre and set in a box and chew sugar cane; or he could have a nice time at the clubrooms of the Young China Progressive Association, playing poker for money. Once in a while he'd mix in a tong war, he being well thought of as a hatchet man—only they don't use hatchets, but automatics; in fact, all Nature seemed to smile on him.
Well, right near this country club one of his six hundred thousand cousins worked as gardener for a man, and this man kept many beautiful chickens—so Lew Wee says. And he says a strange and wicked night animal crept into the home of these beautiful birds and slew about a dozen of 'em by biting 'em under their wings. The man told his cousin that the wicked night animal must be a skunk and that his cousin should catch him in a trap. So the cousin told Lew Wee that the wicked night animal was a skunk and that he was going to catch him in a trap. Lew Wee thought it was interesting.