Part 8 (1/2)
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 s.p.a.ce--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 b.u.t.tons, 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 invest.i.ture 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 pa.s.sed 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 succ.u.mbed; 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 st.i.tches.
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 blase, 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!”