Part 27 (1/2)
”What's use I tell you--you know already.”
I yawned again flagrantly.
”Now you tell in your own way how this trouble first begin,” persisted Pete rather astonis.h.i.+ngly. He seemed to quote from memory.
Once more I yawned, turning coldly away.
”You tell in your own words,” he was again gently urging; but on the instant his axe began to rain blows upon the log at his feet.
Sounds of honest toil were once more to be heard in the wood lot; and, though I could not hear the other, I surmised that the sledge of Uncle Abner now rang merrily upon his anvil. Both he and Pete had doubtless noted at the same moment the approach of Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, who was spurring her jaded roan up the long rise from the creek bottom.
My stalwart hostess, entirely masculine to the eye from a little distance, strode up from the corral, waved a quirt at me in greeting, indicated by another gesture that she was dusty and tired, and vanished briskly within the ranch house. Half an hour later she joined me in the living-room, where I had trifled with ancient magazines and stock journals on the big table. Laced boots, riding breeches, and army s.h.i.+rt had gone for a polychrome and trailing tea gown, black satin slippers, flas.h.i.+ng rhinestone rosettes, and silk stockings of a sinful scarlet.
She wore a lace boudoir cap, plenteously beribboned, and her sunburned nose had been lavishly powdered. She looked now merely like an indulged matron whose most poignant worry would be a sick Pomeranian or overnight losses at bridge. She wished to know whether I would have tea with her. I would.
Tea consisted of bottled beer from the spring house, half a ham, and a loaf of bread. It should be said that her behaviour toward these dainties, when they had been a.s.sembled, made her seem much less the worn social leader. There was practically no talk for ten active minutes. A high-geared camera would have caught everything of value in the scene.
It was only as I decanted a second bottle of beer for the woman that she seemed to regain consciousness of her surroundings. The spirit of her first attack upon the food had waned. She did fas.h.i.+on another sandwich of a rugged pattern, but there was a hint of the dilettante in her work.
And now she spoke. Her gaze upon the magazines of yesteryear ma.s.sed at the lower end of the table, she declared they must all be sc.r.a.pped, because they too painfully reminded her of a dentist's waiting-room. She wondered if there mustn't be a law against a dentist having in his possession a magazine less than ten years old. She suspected as much.
”There I'll be sitting in Doc Martingale's office waiting for him to kill me by inches, and I pick up a magazine to get my mind off my fate and find I'm reading a timely article, with ill.u.s.trations, about Cervera's fleet being bottled up in the Harbour of Santiago. I bet he's got G.o.dey's Lady's Book for 1862 round there, if you looked for it.”
Now a brief interlude for the ingestion of malt liquor, followed by a pained recital of certain complications of the morning.
”That darned one-horse post-office down to Kulanche! What do you think?
I wanted to send a postal card to the North American Cleaning and Dye Works, at Red Gap, for some stuff they been holding out on me a month, and that office didn't have a single card in stock--nothing but some of these fancy ones in a rack over on the grocery counter; horrible things with pictures of brides and grooms on 'em in coloured costumes, with sickening smiles on their faces, and others with wedding bells ringing out or two doves swinging in a wreath of flowers--all of 'em having mushy messages underneath; and me having to send this card to the North American Cleaning and Dye Works, which is run by Otto Birdsall, a smirking old widower, that uses hair oil and perfumery, and imagines every woman in town is mad about him.
”The mildest card I could find was covered with red and purple cauliflowers or something, and it said in silver print: 'With fondest remembrance!' Think of that going through the Red Gap post-office to be read by old Mis' Terwilliger, that some say will even open letters that look interesting--to say nothing of its going to this fresh old Otto Birdsall, that tried to hold my hand once not so many years ago.
”You bet I made the written part strong enough not to give him or any other party a wrong notion of my sentiments toward him. At that, I guess Otto wouldn't make any mistake since the time I give him h.e.l.l last summer for putting my evening gowns in his show window every time he'd clean one, just to show off his work. It looked so kind of indelicate seeing an empty dress hung up there that every soul in town knew belonged to me.
”What's that? Oh, I wrote on the card that if this stuff of mine don't come up on the next stage I'll be right down there, and when I'm through handling him he'll be able to say truthfully that he ain't got a gray hair in his head. I guess Otto will know my intentions are honest, in spite of that 'fondest remembrance.'
”Then, on top of that, I had a run-in with the Swede for selling his rotten whiskey to them poor Injin boys that had a fight last night after they got tight on it. The Swede laughs and says n.o.body can prove he sold 'em a drop, and I says that's probably true. I says it's always hard to prove things. 'For instance,' I says, 'if they's another drop of liquor sold to an Injin during this haying time, and a couple or three nights after that your nasty dump here is set fire to in six places, and some cowardly a.s.sa.s.sin out in the brush picks you off with a rifle when you rush out--it will be mighty hard to prove that anybody did that, too; and you not caring whether it's proved or not, for that matter.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE SWEDE BRISTLES UP AND SAYS: 'THAT SOUNDS LIKE FIGHTING TALK!' I SAYS: 'YOUR HEARING IS PERFECT.'”]
”'In fact,' I says, 'I don't suppose anybody would take the trouble to prove it, even if it could be easy proved. You'd note a singular lack of public interest in it--if you was spared to us. I guess about as far as an investigation would ever get--the coroner's jury would say it was the work of Pete's brother-in-law; and you know what that would mean.' The Swede bristles up and says: 'That sounds like fighting talk!' I says: 'Your hearing is perfect.' I left him thinking hard.”
”Pete's brother-in-law? That reminds me,” I said. ”Pete was telling me about him just--I mean during his lunch hour; but he had to go to work again just at the beginning of something that sounded good--about the time he was going to kill a bright lawyer. What was that?”
The gla.s.s was drained and Ma Pettengill eyed the inconsiderable remains of the ham with something like repugnance. She averted her face from it, lay back in the armchair she had chosen, and rolled a cigarette, while I brought a ha.s.sock for the jewelled slippers and the scarlet silken ankles, so ill-befitting one of her age. The cigarette was presently burning.
”I guess Pete's b'other-in-law, as he calls him, won't come into these parts again. He had a kind of narrow squeak this last time. Pete done something pretty raw, even for this liberal-minded community. He got scared about it himself and left the country for a couple of months--looking for his brother-in-law, he said. He beat it up North and got in with a bunch of other Injins that was being took down to New York City to advertise a railroad, Pete looking like what folks think an Injin ought to look when he's dressed for the part. But he got homesick; and, anyway, he didn't like the job.
”This pa.s.senger agent that took 'em East put 'em up at one of the big hotels all right, but he subjects 'em to hards.h.i.+ps they ain't used to.
He wouldn't let 'em talk much English, except to say, 'Ugh! Ugh!'--like Injins are supposed to--with a few remarks about the Great Spirit; and not only that, but he makes 'em wear blankets and paint their faces--an Injin without paint and blanket and some beadwork seeming to a general pa.s.senger agent like a state capitol without a dome. And on top of these outrages he puts it up with the press agent of this big hotel to have the poor things sleep up on the roof, right in the open air, so them jay New York newspapers would fall for it and print articles about these hardy sons of the forest, the last of a vanis.h.i.+ng race, being stifled by walls--with the names of the railroad and the hotel coming out good and strong all through the piece.
”Three of the poor things got pneumonia, not being used to such exposure; and Pete himself took a bad cold, and got mad and quit the job. They find him a couple of days later, in a check suit and white shoes and a golf cap, playing pool in a saloon over on Eighth Avenue, and s.h.i.+p him back as a disgrace to the Far West and a great common carrier.
”He got in here one night, me being his best friend, and we talked it over. I advised him to go down and give himself up and have it over; and he agreed, and went down to Red Gap the next day in his new clothes and knocked at the jail door. He made a long talk about how his brother-in-law was the man that really done it, and he's been searching for him clear over to the rising sun, but can't find him; so he's come to give himself up, even if they ain't got the least grounds to suspect him--and can he have his trial for murder over that afternoon, so he can come back up here the next day and go to work?