Part 11 (1/2)
”'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. c.u.mmins, 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?”
IV
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 n.o.ble chorus of yearning and despair. The calves projected a high, full-throated barytone, with here and there a wailing tenor against the rumbling ba.s.s 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.”