Part 24 (2/2)
”'A little of your best cooking whiskey,' says he to the Swede, while I'm waiting beside him for my own drink.
”The Swede sets out the bottle and gla.s.s and a whisk broom on the bar.
That was sure a new combination on me. 'Why the whisk broom?' I says to myself. 'I been in lots of swell dives and never see no whisk broom served with a drink before.' So I watch. Well, this sad-looking sot pours out his liquor, shoots it into him with one tip of the gla.s.s; and, like he'd been shot, he falls flat on the floor, all bent up in a convulsion--yes, sir; just like that! And the Swede not even looking over the bar at him!
”In a minute he comes out of this here fit, gets on his feet and up to the bar, grabs the whisk broom, brushes the dust off his clothes where he's rolled on the floor, puts back the whisk broom, says, 'So long, Ed!' to the Swede--and goes out in a very businesslike manner.
”Then the Swede shoves the bottle and a gla.s.s and the whisk broom over in front of me, but I says: 'No, thanks! I just come in to pa.s.s the time of day. Lovely weather we're having, ain't it?' Yes, sir; down he goes like he's shot, wriggles a minute, jumps up, dusts hisself off, flies out the door; and the Swede pa.s.sing me the same bottle and the same broom, and me saying: 'Oh, I just come in to pa.s.s the time of--'”
The veterinary and I had been gravely attentive. The faces of the others wore not even the tribute of pretended ennui. They had betrayed an elaborate deafness. They now affected to believe that Sandy Sawtelle had not related an anecdote. They spoke casually and with an effect of polished ease while yet here capitulated, as tale-tellers so often will.
”I remember a kid, name of Henry Lippincott, used to set in front of me at school,” began Buck Devine, with the air of delicately breaking a long silence; ”he'd wiggle his ears and get me to laughing out loud, and then I'd be called up for it by teacher and like as not kept in at recess.”
”You ought to seen that bunch of tame alligators down to the San Francisco Fair,” observed Squat genially. ”The old boy that had 'em says 'Oh, yes, they would make fine pets, and don't I want a couple for ten dollars to take home to the little ones?' But I don't. You come right down to household pets--I ruther have me a white rabbit or a canary bird than an alligator you could step on in the dark some night and get all bit up, and mebbe blood poison set in.”
”I recollect same as if it was yesterday,” began Uncle Abner quickly.
”We was coming up through northern Arizona one fall, with a bunch of longhorns and we make this here water hole about four P.M.--or mebbe a mite after that or a little before; but, anyway, I says to Jeff Bradley, 'Jeff,' I says to him, 'it looks to me almighty like--'”
Sandy Sawtelle savagely demanded a cup of coffee, gulped it heroically, rose in a virtuous hurry, and at the door wondered loudly if he was leaving a bunch of rich millionaires that had nothing to do but loaf in their club all the afternoon and lie their heads off, or just a pa.s.sell of lazy no-good cowhands that laid down on the job the minute the boss stepped off the place. Whereupon, it being felt that the rabid anecdotist had been sufficiently rebuked, we all went out to help the veterinary look at Adolph for twenty minutes more.
Adolph is four years old and weighs one ton. He has a frowning and fearsome front and the spirit of a friendly puppy. The Arrowhead force loafed about in the corral and imparted of its own lore to the veterinary while he took Adolph's temperature. Then Adolph, after nosing three of the men to have his head rubbed, went to stand in the rush-grown pool at the far end of the corral, which the gallery took to mean that he still had a bit of fever, no matter what the gla.s.s thing said.
The veterinary opposed a masterly silence to this majority diagnosis, and in the absence of argument about it there seemed nothing left for the Arrowhead retainers but the toil for which they were paid. They went to it lingeringly, one by one, seeming to feel that perhaps they wronged the ailing Adolph by not staying there to talk him over.
Uncle Abner, who is the Arrowhead blacksmith, was the last to leave--or think of leaving--though he had mule shoes to shape and many mules to shoe. He glanced wistfully again at Adolph, in cool water to his knees, tugged at his yellowish-white beard, said it was a dog's life, if any one should ask me, and was about to slump mournfully off to his shop--when his eye suddenly brightened.
”Will you look once at that poor degraded red heathen, acting like a whirlwind over in the woodlot?”
I looked once. Pete, our Indian, was apparently the sole being on the ranch at that moment who was honestly earning his wage. No one knows how many more than eighty years Pete has lived; but from where we stood he was the figure of puissant youth, rhythmically flas.h.i.+ng his axe into bits of wood that flew apart at its touch. Uncle Abner, beside me, had again shrugged off the dread incubus of duty. He let himself go restfully against the corral bars and chuckled a note of harsh derision.
”Ain't it disgusting! I bet he never saw the boss when she rode off this A.M. Yes, sir; that poor benighted pagan must think she's still in the house--prob'ly watching him out of the east winder this very minute.”
”What's this about his brother-in-law?” I asked.
”Oh, I dunno; some silly game he tries to come the roots over folks with. Say, he's a regular old murderer, and not an honest hair in his head! Look at the old cheat letting on to be a good steady worker because he thinks the boss is in the house there, keeping an eye on him.
Ain't it downright disgusting!”
Uncle Abner said this as one supremely conscious of his own virtue. He himself was descending to no foul pretense.
”A murderer, is he?”
I opened my cigarette case to the man of probity. He took two, crumpled the tobacco from the papers and stuffed it into his calabash pipe.
”Sure is he a murderer! A tough one, too.”
The speaker moved round a corner of the barn and relaxed to a sitting posture on the platform of the pump. It brought him into the sun; but it also brought him where he could see far down the road upon which his returning employer would eventually appear. His eyes ever haunted the far vistas of that road; otherwise he remained blissfully static.
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