Part 31 (2/2)

”How'll we ever find out who they belong to, then?” asked Horace.

”Look at the letter anyway.”

It was in a blank envelope, an' it began, ”My dear son,” and ended, ”Your lovin' mother.” The letter was just the same as all mothers write to their sons, I reckon: full of heartache, an' tenderness, an'

good advice, an' scoldin'; but nothin' to identify n.o.body by; so we said 'at the Friar should read the papers. One of 'em was an honorable discharge from the army; but all the names an' dates an' localities had been crossed out. It was what they call an ”Excellent” discharge, which is the best they give, an' you could tell by the thumb print 'at this part had been read the most by whoever had treasured it.

The other paper was simply a clippin' from a newspaper. It was a column of items tellin' about Dovey wis.h.i.+n' to see Tan Shoes at the same place next Sunday, an' such things. The Friar said 'at this was the personal column, an' he sure labeled it; 'cause if a feller chose to guess any, some o' those items was personal enough to make a bar-tender blush; but they didn't convey any news to us as to where the trade-rat had procured the buck-skin bag.

The photographs were wrapped in tissue paper an' then tied together with pink string, face to each. The Friar balked a little at openin'

'em up; but we deviled him into it. The first he opened was a cheap, faded little one of an old lady. She had a sad, patient face, an'

white hair. Horace was standin' on a chair, lookin' over the Friar's shoulder, an' he piped out that the photograph had been took in New York, an' asked if we knew any one who lived there, which most of us did; but not the subject of the photograph.

Then the Friar opened the other one. He took one look at it, an' then his face turned gray. ”This one was took in Rome,” sez Horace. ”Does any one here have a list o' friends livin' in Rome, Italy?”

He hadn't looked at the face on the photograph, nor at the Friar's face; but when we didn't answer, he looked up, saw that we had sobered in sympathy with the Friar, an' then he looked at the face on the photograph an' got down off the chair. The face was of a beautiful lady in a low-necked, short-sleeved dress. Not as low nor as short as some dresses I've seen in pictures, but still a purty generous outlook.

The Friar's hands shook some; but he gradually got a grip on himself, an' purty soon, he sez in a steady voice: ”This is a picture of Signorina Morrissena. Does any one here know of her?”

Well, of course none of us had ever heard of her; so the Friar wrapped up the package again an' put it back into the buck-skin bag. We had expected to have some high jinks that day, an' Kit had baked a lot o'

vinegar pies for dinner, we had plenty o' fresh deer-meat, an' we had agreed to let the Friar hold a regular preachin' first; but when we saw how the picture had shook him up we drifted back to our own shack an' sat talkin' about where the deuce that blame trade-rat could possibly have got a holt o' the buck-skin bag. I was purty sure that it was a picture o' the Friar's girl, the extra trimmin's on the name not bein' much in the way of a disguise, an' as soon as I got a chance to see Horace I questioned him, an' he said it was the girl, all right; but that she had developed a lot.

The Friar had taken a hoss an' gone up into the mountains, an' had left word that he didn't want any dinner. We were as full o' sympathy with him as we could stand, but not in the mood to sidestep such a meal as Kit had framed up; so we ate till after three in the afternoon. We didn't want to do anything to fret him a speck; so we hardly knew what to do. Generally it tickled him to have us ask him to preach to us; but we couldn't tell how he'd feel about it now, and we were still discussin' it about the fire when the Friar came back.

He looked mighty weary, an' we knew he had been drivin' himself purty hard, although it wasn't just tiredness which showed in his face.

Still, the' was a sort of peace there, too; so after he'd warmed himself a while, ol' Tank asked him if he wouldn't like to preach to us a bit.

The Friar once said that back East some folks used good manners as clothin' for their souls, but that out our way good-heartedness was the clothin', an' good manners nothin' more than a silver band around the hat. ”And some o' the bands are mighty narrow, Friar,” I added to draw him out. ”Yes,” sez he, ”but the hats are mighty broad.”

You just couldn't floor the Friar in a case like this. He knew 'at the politeness an' the good-heartedness in Tank's request was divided off about the same as the band an' the hat; and that all we wanted was to ease off the Friar's mind an' let him feel contented; so he heaved a sigh and shook his head at Tank.

When a blacksmith goes out into company, folks don't pester him with questions as to why tempered steel wasn't stored up in handy caves, instead of havin' nothin' but rough ore hid away in the cellar of a mountain; and a carpenter is not held responsible because a sharp saw cuts better 'n a dull one; but it seems about next to impossible for a human bein' to pa.s.s up a parson without insultin' him a little about the ways o' Providence, and askin' him a lot o' questions which would moult feathers out o' the ruggedest angel in the bunch.

We could all see 'at the Friar had been havin' a rough day of it; so Tank began by askin' him questions simply to toll him away from himself; but soon he was shootin' questions into the Friar as rough shod as though they was both strangers to each other.

”You say it was sheep-herders what saw the angels that night the Lord was born,” sez Tank. ”How come the' wasn't any cow-punchers saw 'em?”

Tank had about the deep-rootedest prejudice again' sheep-herders I ever saw.

”The' wasn't any cow-punchers in that land,” sez the Friar. ”It was a hilly land an'-”

”Well I'd like to know,” broke in ol' Tank, ”why the Lord picked out such a place as that, when he had the whole world to choose from.”

O' course the Friar tried his best to smooth this out; but by the time he was through, Tank had got tangled up with another perdicament.

”Then, there was ol' Faro's dream,” he said, ”the one about the seven lean cows eatin' the seven fat ones. I've punched cows all my life, and I saw 'em so thin once, when the snow got crusted an' the chinook got switched off for a month, that the spikes on their backbones punched holes through their hides; but they'd as soon thought o'

flyin' up an' grazin' on clouds, as to turn in an' eat one another.”

By the time the Friar had got through explainin' the difference between dreams and written history, Tank was ready with another query.

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