Somewhere in Red Gap

THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Never!" I warmly admitted.

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

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

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

I was for details.

"What did you do?"

Jimmie Time stayed laconic.

"Left him there—that's all!"

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

"Burying ground?" I guessed.

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

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

"A regular hell-cat—what he is!"

Thus vocalized the able lips. Jimmie Time glowed modestly.

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

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

"Crack!" said the marksman grimly.

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

"Good Little Sure Shot!" declaimed Boogies fulsomely.

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

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

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

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

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

"I already did," said Jimmie.

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

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

"Jest like that!" murmured Boogles.

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

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

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

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

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

"Is he really dangerous?" I demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What in the name of—"

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

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

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

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

The voice of the judge boomed wrathfully on this:

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

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

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

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

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

"Can happen!" sanely objected the prosecution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A blank hour elapsed. I no longer affected occupation with the flies. Jimmie Time was irritating me. Had he not been specifically warned to "wear 'em" full shamefully in the public eye? Was not the public eye present, avid? Boogles I saw intermittently among beanpoles in the garden. He appeared to putter, to have no care or system in his labour. And at moments I noticed he was dropping all pretense of this to stand motionless, staring intently at the shut door of the stable.

Could his fallen idol be there, I wondered? Purposefully I also watched the door of the stable. Presently it opened slightly; then, with evident infinite caution, it was pushed outward until it hung half yawning. A palpitant moment we gazed, Boogles and I. Then shot from the stable gloom an astounding figure in headlong flight. Its goal appeared to be the bunk house fifty yards distant; but its course was devious, laid clearly with a view to securing such incidental brief shelter as would be afforded by the corral wall, by a meagre clump of buck-brush, by a wagon, by a stack of hay. Good time was made, however. The fugitive vanished into the bunk house and the door of that structure was slammed to. But now the small puzzle I had thought to solve had grown to be, in that brief space —easily under eight seconds—a mystery of enormous, of sheerly inhuman dimensions. For the swift and winged one had been all too plainly a correctly uniformed messenger boy of the Western Union Telegraph Company—that blue uniform with metal buttons, with the corded red at the trouser sides, the flat cap fronted by a badge of nickel—unthinkable, yet there. And the speedy bearer of this scenic investiture had been the desperate, blood-letting, two-gun bad man of the Arrowhead.

It was a complication not to be borne with any restraint. I hastened to stand before the shut door of the sanctuary. It slept in an unpromising stillness. Invincibly reticent it seemed, even when the anguished face of Jimmie Time, under that incredible cap with its nickeled badge, wavered an instant back of the grimy window—wavered and vanished with an effect of very stubborn finality. I would risk no defeat there. I passed resolutely on to Boogles, who now most diligently trained up tender young bean vines in the way they should go.

"Why does he hide in there?" I demanded in a loud, indignant voice. I was to have no nonsense about it.

Boogles turned on me the slow, lofty, considering regard of a United States senator submitting to photography for publication in a press that has no respect for private rights. He lacked but a few clothes and the portico of a capitol. Speech became immanent in him. One should not have been surprised to hear him utter decorative words meant for the rejoicing and incitement of voters. Yet he only said—or started to say:

"Little Sure Shot'll get that Chink yet! I tell you, now, that old boy is sure the real Peruvian—"

This was absurdly too much. I then and there opened on Boogles, opened flooding gates of wrath and scorn on him—for him and for his idol of clay who, I flatly told him, could not be the real doughnuts of any sort. As for his being the real Peruvian—Faugh!

Often I had wished to test in speech the widely alleged merits of this vocable. I found it do all that has been claimed for it. Its effect on Boogles was so withering that I used it repeatedly in the next three minutes. I even faughed him twice in succession, which is very insulting and beneficial indeed, and has a pleasant feel on the lips.

"And now then," I said, "if you don't give me the truth of this matter here and now, one of us two is going to be mighty sorry for it."

In the early moments of my violence Boogles had protested weakly; then he began to quiver perilously. On this I soothed him, and at the precisely right moment I cajoled. I lured him to the bench by the corral gate, and there I conferred costly cigarettes on him as man to man. Discreetly then I sounded for the origins of a certain bad man who had a way—even though they might crease him—of leaving deputy marshals where he found them. Boogles smoked one of the cigarettes before he succumbed; but first:

"Let me git my work," said he, and was off to the bunk house.

I observed his part in an extended parley before the door was opened to him. He came to me on the bench a moment later, bearing a ball of scarlet yarn, a large crochet hook of bone, and something begun in the zephyr but as yet without form.

"I'm making the madam a red one for her birthday," he confided.

He bent his statesman's head above the task and wrought with nimble fingers the while he talked. It was difficult, this talk of his, scattered, fragmentary; and his mind would go from it, his voice expire untimely. He must be prompted, recalled, questioned. His hands worked with a very certain skill, but in his narrative he dropped stitches. Made to pick these up, the result was still a droning monotony burdened with many irrelevancies. I am loath to transcribe his speech. It were better reported with an eye strictly to salience.

You may see, then—and I hope with less difficulty than I had in seeing—Jimmie Time and Boogles on night duty at the front of the little Western Union Office off Park Row in the far city of New York. The law of that city is tender to the human young. Night messenger boys must be adults. It is one of the preliminary shocks to the visitor—to ring for the messenger boy of tradition and behold in his uniform a venerable gentleman with perhaps a flowing white beard. I still think Jimmie Time and Boogles were beating the law—on a technicality. Of course Jimmie was far descended into the vale of years, and even Boogles was forty—but adults!

It is three o'clock of a warm spring morning. The two legal adults converse in whispers, like bad boys kept after school. They whisper so as not to waken the manager, a blasé, mature youth of twenty who sleeps expertly in the big chair back of the railing. They whisper of the terrific hazards and the precarious rewards of their adventurous calling. The hazards are nearly all provided by the youngsters who come on the day watch—hardy ruffians of sixteen or so who not only "pick on" these two but, with sportive affectations, often rob them, when they change from uniform to civilian attire, of any spoil the night may have brought them. They are powerless against these aggressions. They can but whisper their indignation.

Boogles eyed the sleeping manager.

"I struck it fine to-night, Jimmie!" he whispered. Jimmie mutely questioned. "Got a whole case note. You know that guy over to the newspaper office—the one that's such a tank drama—he had to send a note up to a girl in a show that he couldn't be there."

"That tank drama? Sure, I know him. He kids me every time he's stewed."

"He kids me, too, something fierce; and he give me the case note."

"Them strong arms'll cop it on you when they get here," warned Jimmie.

"Took my collar off and hid her on the inside of it. Oh, I know tricks!"

"Chee! You're all to the Wall Street!"

"I got to look out for my stepmother, too. She'd crown me with a chair if she thought I held out on her. Beans me about every day just for nothing anyway."

"Don't you stand for it!"

"Yah! All right for you to talk. You're the lucky guy. You're an orphan. S'pose you had a stepmother! I wish I was an orphan."

Jimmie swelled with the pride of orphanship.

"Yes; I'd hate to have any parents knocking me round," he said. "But if it ain't a stepmother then it's somebody else that beans you. A guy in this burg is always getting knocked round by somebody."

"Read some more of the novel," pleaded Boogles, to change the distressing topic.

Jimmie drew a tattered paper romance from the pocket of his faded coat and pushed the cap back from his seamed old forehead. It went back easily, having been built for a larger head than his. He found the place he had marked at the end of his previous half-hour with literature. Boogles leaned eagerly toward him. He loved being read to. Doing it himself was too slow and painful:

"'No,' said our hero in a clear, ringing voice; 'all your tainted gold would not keep me here in the foul, crowded city. I must have the free, wild life of the plains, the canter after the Texas steers, and the fierce battles with my peers. For me the boundless, the glorious West!'"

"Chee! It must be something grand—that wild life!" interrupted Boogles. "That's the real stuff—the cowboy and trapper on them peraries, hunting bufflers and Injuns. I seen a film—"

Jimmie Time frowned at this. He did not like interruptions. He firmly resumed the tale:

"With a gesture of disdain our hero waved aside the proffered gold of the scoundrelly millionaire and dashed down the stairway of the proud mansion to where his gallant steed, Midnight, was champing at the hitching post. At that moment—"

Romance was snatched from the hands of Jimmie Time. The manager towered above him.

"Ain't I told you guys not to be taking up the company's time with them novels?" he demanded. He sternly returned to his big chair behind the railing, where he no less sternly took up his own perusal of the confiscated tale.

"The big stiff!" muttered Jimmie. "That's the third one he's copped on me this week. A kid in this choint ain't got no rights! I got a good notion to throw 'em down cold and go with the Postal people."

"Never mind! I'll blow you to an ice cream after work," consoled Boogles.

"Ice cream!" Jimmie Time was contemptuous. "I want the free, wild life of the boundless peraries. I want b'ar steaks br'iled on the glowing coals of the camp fire. I want to be Little Sure Shot, trapper, scout, and guide—"

"Next out!" yelled the manager. "Hustle now!"

Jimmie Time was next out. He hustled sullenly.

Boogles, alone, slept fitfully on his bench until the young thugs of the day watch straggled in. Then he achieved the change of his uniform to civilian garments, with only the accustomed minor maltreatment at the hands of these tormentors. True, with sportive affectations—yet with deadly intentness—they searched him for possible loot; but only his pockets. His dollar bill, folded inside his collar, went unfound. With assumed jauntiness he strolled from the outlaws' den and safely reached the street.

The gilding on the castellated towers of the tallest building in the world dazzled his blinking, foolish eyes. That was a glorious summit which sang to the new sun, but no higher than his own elation at the moment. Had he not come off with his dollar? He found balm and a tender stimulus in the morning air —an air for dreams and revolt. Boogles felt this as thousands of others must have felt it who were yet tamely issuing from subway caverns and the Brooklyn Bridge to be wage slaves.

A block away from the office he encountered Jimmie Time, who seemed to await him importantly. He seethed with excitement.

"I got one, too!" he called. "That tank drama he sent another note uptown to a restaurant where a party was, and he give me a case note, too."

He revealed it; and when Boogles withdrew his own treasure the two were lovingly compared and admired. Nothing in all the world can be so foul to the touch as the dollar bill that circulates in New York, but these two were intrepidly fondled.

"I ain't going back to change," said Jimmie Time. "Them other kids would cop it on me."

"Have some cigarettes," urged Boogies, and royally bought them—with gilded tips, in a beautiful casket.

"I had about enough of their helling," declared Jimmie, still glowing with a fine desperation.

They sought the William Street Tunnel under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was cool and dark there. One might smoke and take his ease. And plan! They sprawled on the stone pavement and smoked largely.

"Chee! If we could get out West and do all them fine things!" mused Boogies.

"Let's!" said Jimmie Time.

"Huh!" Boogies gasped blankly at this.

"Let's beat it!"

"Chee!" said Boogies. He stared at this bolder spirit with startled admiration.

"Me—I'm going," declared Jimmie Time stoutly, and waited.

Boogies wavered a tremulous moment.

"I'm going with you," he managed at last.

He blurted the words. They had to rush out to beat down his native caution with quick blows.

"Listen!" said Jimmie Time impressively. "We got money enough to start. Then we just strike out for the peraries."

"Like the guy in the story!" Boogies glowed at the adept who before his very eyes was turning a beautiful dream into stark reality. He was praying that his own courage to face it would endure.

"You hurry home," commanded Jimmie, "and cop an axe and all the grub you can lay your hands on."

Boogies fell from the heights as he had feared he would.

"Aw, chee!" he said sanely. "And s'pose me stepmother gets her lamps on me! Wouldn't she bean me? Sure she would!"

"Bind her and gag her," said Jimmie promptly. "What's one weak woman?"

"Yah! She's a hellion and you know it."

"Listen!" said Jimmie sternly. "If you're going into the wild and lawless life of the peraries with me you got to learn to get things. Jesse James or Morgan's men could get me that axe and that grub, and not make one-two-three of it."

"Them guys had practice—and likely they never had to go against their stepmothers."

"Do I go alone, then?"

"Well, now—"

"Will you or won't you?"

Boogies drew a fateful breath.

"I'll take a chance. You wait here. If I ain't back in one hour you'll know I been murdered."

"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time with the air of an outlaw chief. "Be off at once."

Boogies was off. And Boogies was back in less than the hour with a delectable bulging meal sack. He was trembling but radiant.

"She seen me gitting away and she yelled her head off," he gasped; "but you bet I never stopped. I just thought of Jesse James and General Grant, and run like hell!"

"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time; and then, with a sudden gleam of the practical, he inventoried the commissary and quartermaster supplies in the sack. He found them to be: One hatchet; one well-used boiled hambone; six greasy sugared crullers; four dill pickles; a bottle of catchup; two tomatoes all but obliterated in transit; two loaves of bread; a flatiron.

Jimmie cast the last item from him.

"Wh'd you bring that for?" he demanded.

"I don't know," confessed Boogies. "I just put it in. Mebbe I was afraid she'd throw it at me when I was making my getaway. It'll be good for cracking nuts if we find any on the peraries. I bet they have nuts!"

"All right, then. You can carry it if you want to, pard."

Jimmie thrust the bundle into Boogies' arms and valiantly led a desperate way to the North River. Boogies panted under his burden as they dodged impatient taxicabs. So they came into the maze of dock traffic by way of Desbrosses Street. The eyes of both were lit by adventure. Jimmie pushed through the crowd on the wharf to a ticket office. A glimpse through a door of the huge shed had given him inspiration. No common ferryboats for them! He had seen the stately river steamer, Robert Fulton, gay with flags and bunting, awaiting the throng of excursionists. He recklessly bought tickets. So far, so good. A momentous start had been made.

At this very interesting point in his discourse to me, however, Boogies began to miss explosions too frequently. From the disorderly jumble of his narrative to this moment I believe I have brought something like the truth; I have caused the widely scattered parts to cohere. After this I could make little of his maunderings.

They were on the crowded boat and the boat steamed up the Hudson River; and they disembarked at a thriving Western town—which, I gather, was Yonkers—because Boogies feared his stepmother might trace him to this boat, and because Jimmie Time became convinced that detectives were on his track, wanting him for the embezzlement of a worn but still practicable uniform of the Western Union Telegraph Company. So it was agreed that they should take to the trackless forest, where there are ways of throwing one's pursuers off the scent; where they would travel by night, guided by the stars, and lay up by day, subsisting on spring water and a little pemmican—source undisclosed. They were not going to be taken alive—that was understood.

They hurried through the streets of this thriving Western town, ultimately boarding an electric car —with a shrewd eye out for the hellhounds of the law; and the car took them to the beginning of the frontier, where they found the trackless forest. They reached the depths of this forest after climbing a stone wall; and Jimmie Time said the West looked good to him and that he could already smell the "b'ar steaks br'iling."

Plain enough still, perhaps; but immediately it seemed that a princess had for some time been sharing this great adventure. She was a beautiful golden-haired princess, though quite small, and had flowers in her hair and put some in the cap of Jimmie Time—behind the nickel badge—and said she would make him her court dwarf or jester or knight, or something; only the scout who was with her said this was rather silly and that they had better be getting home or they knew very well what would happen to them. But when they got lost Jimmie Time looked at this scout's rifle and said it was a first-class rifle, and would knock an Indian or a wild animal silly.

And the scout smoked a cigarette and got sick by it, and cried something fierce; so they made a fire, and the princess didn't get sick when she smoked hers, but told them a couple of bully stories, like reading in a book, and ate every one of the greasy sugared crullers, because she was a genuine princess, and Boogies thought at this time that maybe the boundless West wasn't what it was cracked up to be; so, after they met the madam, the madam said, well, if they was wanting to go out West they might as well come along here; and they said all right—as long as they was wanting to go out West anyway, why, they might as well come along with her as with anybody else.

And that Chink would mighty soon find out if Little Sure Shot wasn't the real Peruvian doughnuts, because that old murderer would sure have him hard to find, come sundown; still, he was glad he had come along with the madam, because back there it wasn't any job for you, account of getting too fat for the uniform, with every one giving you the laugh that way—and they wouldn't get you a bigger one—.

I left Boogies then, though he seemed not to know it. His needle worked swiftly on the red one he was making for the madam, and his aimless, random phrases seemed to flow as before; but I knew now where to apply for the details that had been too many for his slender gift of narrative.

At four that afternoon Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, accompanied by one Buck Devine, a valued retainer, rode into the yard and dismounted. She at once looked searchingly about her. Then she raised her voice, which is a carrying voice even when not raised: "You, Jimmie Time!"

Once was enough. The door of the bunk house swung slowly open and the disgraced one appeared in all his shameful panoply. The cap was pulled well down over a face hopelessly embittered. The shrunken little figure drooped.

"None of that hiding out!" admonished his judge. "You keep standing round out here where decent folks can look at you and see what a bad boy you are."

With a glance she identified me as one of the decent she would have edified. Jimmie Time muttered evilly in undertones and slouched forward, head down.

"Ain't he the hostile wretch?" called Buck Devine, who stood with the horses. He spoke with a florid but false admiration.

Jimmie Time, snarling, turned on him: "You go to—."

I perceived that Lew Wee the night before had delicately indicated by a mere initial letter a bad word that could fall trippingly from the lips of Jimmie.

"Sure!" agreed Buck Devine cordially. "And say, take this here telegram up to the corner of Broadway and Harlem; and move lively now—don't you stop to read any of them nickel liberries."

I saw what a gentleman should do. I turned my back on the piteous figure of Jimmie Time. I moved idly off, as if the spectacle of his ignominy had never even briefly engaged me.

"Shoot up a good cook, will you?" said the lady grimly. "I'll give you your needings." She followed me to the house.

On the west porch, when she had exchanged the laced boots, khaki riding breeches, and army shirt for a most absurdly feminine house gown, we had tea. Her nose was powdered, and her slippers were bronzed leather and monstrous small. She mingled Scotch whiskey with the tea and drank her first cupful from a capacious saucer.

"That fresh bunch of campers!" she began. "What you reckon they did last night? Cut my wire fence in two places over on the west flat—yes, sir!—had a pair of wire clippers in the whip socket. What I didn't give 'em! Say, ain't it a downright wonder I still retain my girlish laughter?"

But then, after she had refused my made cigarette for one of her own deft handiwork, she spoke as I wished her to:

"Yes; three years ago. Me visiting a week at the home of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway and her husband, just outside of Yonkers, back in York State. A very nice swell home, with a nice front yard and everything. And also Mrs. W.B.'s sister and her little boy, visiting her from Albany, the sister's name being Mrs. L.H. Cummins, and the boy being nine years old and named Rupert Cummins, Junior; and very junior he was for his age, too—I will say that. He was a perfectly handsome little boy; but you might call him a blubberhead if you wanted to, him always being scared silly and pestered and rough-housed out of his senses by his little girl cousin, Margery Hemingway—Mrs. W.B.'s little girl, you understand—and her only seven, or two years younger than Junior, but leading him round into all kinds of musses till his own mother was that demoralized after a couple of days she said if that Margery child was hers she'd have her put away in some good institution.

"Of course she only told that to me, not to Margery's mother. I don't know—mebbe she would of put her away, she was that frightened little Margery would get Junior killed off in some horrible manner, like the time she got him to see how high he dast jump out of the apple tree from, or like the time she told him, one ironing day, that if he drank a whole bowlful of starch it would make him have whiskers like his pa in fifteen minutes. Things like that—not fatal, mebbe, but wearing.

"Well, this day come a telegram about nine A.M. for Mrs. W.B., that her aunt, with money, is very sick in New Jersey, which is near Yonkers; so she and Mrs. L.H. Cummins, her sister, must go to see about this aunt—and would I stay and look after the two kids and not let them get poisoned or killed or anything serious? And they might have to stay overnight, because the aunt was eccentric and often thought she was sick; but this time she might be right. She was worth all the way from three to four hundred thousand dollars.

"So I said I'd love to stay and look after the little ones. I wanted to stay. Shopping in New York City the day before, two bargain sales—one being hand-embroidered Swiss waists from two-ninety-eight upward—I felt as if a stampede of longhorns had caught me. Darned near bedfast I was! Say, talk about the pale, weak, nervous city woman with exhausted vitality! See 'em in action first, say I. There was a corn-fed hussy in a plush bonnet with forget-me-nots, two hundred and thirty or forty on the hoof, that exhausted my vitality all right—no holds barred, an arm like first-growth hick'ry across my windpipe, and me up against a solid pillar of structural ironwork! Once I was wrastled by a cinnamon bear that had lately become a mother; but the poor old thing would have lost her life with this dame after the hand-embroidereds. Gee! I was lame in places I'd lived fifty-eight years and never knew I had.

"So off went these ladies, with Mrs. L.H. Cummins giving me special and private warning to be sure and keep Junior well out of it in case little mischievous Margery started anything that would be likely to kill her. And I looked forward to a quiet day on the lounge, where I could ache in peace and read the 'Famous Crimes of History,' which the W.B.'s had in twelve volumes—you wouldn't have thought there was that many, would you? I dressed soft, out of respect to my corpse, and picked out a corking volume of these here Crimes and lay on the big lounge by an open window where the breeze could soothe me and where I could keep tabs on the little ones at their sports; and everything went as right as if I had been in some A-Number-One hospital where I had ought to of been.

"Lunchtime come before I knew it; and I had mine brought to my bed of pain by the Swede on a tray, while the kids et theirs in an orderly and uproarious manner in the dining-room. Rupert, Junior, was dressed like one of these boy scouts and had his air gun at the table with him, and little Margery was telling him there was, too, fairy princes all round in different places; and she bet she could find one any day she wanted to. They seemed to be all safe enough, so I took up my Crimes again. Really, ain't history the limit?—the things they done in it and got away with—never even being arrested or fined or anything!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I turned on the Blackhanders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONCE A SCOTCHMAN, ALWAYS

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

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

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

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

"I mean the noise."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, they had girls at that eating-house. Of course no one ever noticed 'em much, being too famished and busy. You only knew in a general way that females was passing the food along. But Angus actually did notice Ellabelle, though it must have been at the end of the meal, mebbe when she was pouring the third cup. Ellabelle was never right pretty to my notion, but she had some figure and kind of a sad dignity, and her brown hair lacked the towers and minarets and golden domes that the other girls built with their own or theirs by right of purchase. And she seems to have noticed Angus from the very first. Angus saw that when she wasn't passing the fried chicken or the hot biscuits along, even for half a minute, she'd pick up a book from the window sill and glance studiously at its pages. He saw the book was called 'Lucile.' And he looked her over some more—between mouthfuls, of course—the neat-fitting black dress revealing every line of her lithe young figure, like these magazine stories say, the starched white apron and the look of sad dignity that had probably come of fresh drummers trying to teach her how to take a joke, and the smooth brown hair—he'd probably got wise to the other kind back in the social centres of Ohio—and all at once he saw there was something about her. He couldn't tell what it was, but he knew it was there. He heard one of the over-haired ones call her Ellabelle, and he committed the name to memory.

"He also remembered the book she was reading. He come back with a copy he'd bought at Spokane and kept it on his bureau. Not that he read it much. It was harder to get into than 'Peck's Bad Boy,' which was his favourite reading just then.

"Pretty soon another load of steers is ready—my sakes, what scrubby runts we sent off the range in them days compared to now!—and Angus pleads to go, so Lysander John makes a place for him and, coming back, here's Ellabelle handing the hot things along same as ever, with 'Lucile' at hand for idle moments. This time Angus again made certain there was something about her. He cross-examined her, I suppose, between the last ham and eggs and the first hot cakes. Her folks was corn farmers over in Iowa and she'd gone to high school and had meant to be a teacher, but took this job because with her it was anything to get out of Iowa, which she spoke of in a warm, harsh way.

"Angus nearly lost the train that time, making certain there was something about her. He told her to be sure and stay there till he showed up again. He told me about her when he got back. 'There's something about her,' he says. 'I suspect it's her eyes, though it might be something else.'

"Me? I suspected there was something about her, too; only I thought it was just that North Platte breakfast and his appetite. No meal can ever be like breakfast to them that's two-fisted, and Angus was. He'd think there was something about any girl, I says to myself, seeing her through the romantic golden haze of them North Platte breakfast victuals. Of course I didn't suggest any such base notion to Angus, knowing how little good it does to talk sense to a man when he thinks there's something about a girl. He tried to read 'Lucile' again, but couldn't seem to strike any funny parts.