Chapter 15

The Coon Dogs were a pack of cowboys engaged in hunting Chinamen out of the peaceful, but sometimes ill-smelling, places which, by thrift, patience, and unremitting labour, they had made peculiarly their own. From the Coon Dogs Ajax and I received a letter commanding us to discharge Mary. A skull and cross-bones, and a motto, "Beware the bite of the Coon Dogs!" embellished this billet, which was written in red ink. Courtesy constrained us to acknowledge the receipt of it. Next day we put up a sign by the corral gate--

NO HUNTING ALLOWED ON THIS RANCH!

In the afternoon Mary disappeared.

Uncle Jake was of opinion that Mary had divined the meaning of our sign. He had said to Uncle Jake: "I go. Me makee heap trouble for boss."

Later, upon the same day, we learned from a neighbour that the Coon Dogs had tarred and feathered one poor wretch; another had been stripped and whipped; a third was found half-strangled by his own queue; the market-gardens near San Lorenzo, miracles of industry, had been ravaged and destroyed. Before taking leave our neighbour mentioned the sign.

"Boys," said he, "take that down--and ship Mary. I'm mighty glad," he added reflectively, "that my ole woman does the cookin."

"Mary skedaddled after dinner," said Ajax, frowning, "but I'm going into town to-morrow to bring him back."

However, Mary brought himself back that same night. We were smoking our second pipes after supper, when Ajax, pointing an expressive finger at the window, exclaimed sharply: "Great Scot! What's that?"

Pressed against the pane, glaring in at us, was a face--a face so blanched and twisted by terror and pain that it seemed scarcely human. We hurried out. Mary staggered towards us. In his face were the cruel, venomous spines of the prickly pear. The tough boughs of the manzanita thickets through which he had plunged had scourged him like a cat-o'- nine tails. What clothes he wore were dripping with mud and slime.

"Coon Dogs come," he gasped. "I tellee you."

Then he bolted into the shadows of the oaks and sage brush. We pursued, but he ran fast, dodging like a rabbit, till he tumbled over and over--paralysed by fear and fatigue. We carried him back to the ranch-house, propped him up in a chair, and despatched Uncle Jake for a doctor. Before midnight we learned what little there was to know. Mary had been chased by the Coon Dogs. He, of course, was a-foot; the cowboys were mounted. A couple of barbed-wire fences had saved him from capture. We had listened, that afternoon, too coolly, perhaps, to a tale of many outrages, but the horror and infamy of them were not brought home to us till we saw Mary, tattered scarred, bedraggled, lying crumpled up against the gay chintz of the arm-chair. The poor fellow kept muttering: "Coon Dogs come. I know. Killee you, killee me. Heap bad men!"

Next morning Uncle Jake and the doctor rode up.

"I can do nothing," said the latter, presently. "It's a case of shock. He may get over it; he may not. Another shock would kill him. I'll leave some medicine."

Upon further consultation we put Mary into Ajax's bed. The Chinaman's bunk-house was isolated, and the vaqueroes slept near the horse corral, a couple of hundred yards away. Mary feebly protested: "No likee. Coon Dogs--allee same debils--killee you, killee me. Heap bad men!"

We tried to assure him that the Coon Dogs were at heart rank curs. Mary shook his head: "I know. You see."

The day passed. Night set in. About ten, Mary said, convincingly--

"Coon Dogs coming! Coon Dogs coming!"

"No, no," said Ajax.

I slipped out of the house. From the marsh beyond the creek came the familiar croaking of the frogs; from the foothills in the cow-pasture came the shrilling of the crickets. A coyote was yapping far down the valley.

"It's all right, Mary," said I.

"Boss, Coon Dogs come, velly quick. I know."

Did he really know? What subtle instinct warned him of the approach of danger? Who can answer such questions? It is a fact that the Coon Dogs were on the road to our ranch, and that they arrived just one hour later. We heard them yelling and shouting at the big gate. Then the popping of pistols told us that the sign, clearly to be seen in the moonlight, was being riddled with bullets.

"We must face the music," said Ajax grimly. "Come on!"

Mary lay back on the pillow, senseless. Passing through the sitting- room, I reminded Ajax that my duck-gun, an eight-bore, could carry two ounces of buck-shot about one hundred yards.

"We mustn't fight 'em with their own weapons," he answered curtly.

The popping ceased suddenly; silence succeeded.

"They're having their bad time, too," said Ajax. "They are hitching their plugs to the fence. Hullo!"

Uncle Jake slipped on to the verandah, six-shooter in hand. Before he spoke, he spat contemptuously; then he drawled out: "Our boys say it's none o' their doggoned business; they won't interfere."

"Good," said Ajax cheerfully. "Nip back, Uncle; we can play this hand alone."

"Sure?" The old man's voice expressed doubt.

"Quite sure. Shush-h-h!"

Uncle Jake slid off the verandah, but he retired--so we discovered later--no farther than the water-butt behind it. Ajax and I went into the sitting-room. From the bed-room beyond came no sound whatever. Through the windows the pack was seen--slowly advancing.

"Come in, gentlemen," said Ajax loudly.

He stood in the doorway, an unarmed man confronting a dozen desperadoes.

"Wheer's the Chinaman--Quong?"

I recognised the voice of a cowboy whom we had employed: a man known in the foothills as Cock-a-whoop Charlie.

"He's here," Ajax answered quietly.

A tall, gaunt Missourian, also well known to us as a daring bull- puncher, laughed derisively.

"Here--is he? Wal, we want him, but we don't want no fuss with you, boys. Yer--white, but he's yaller, and he must go."

"He is going," said Ajax. "He's going fast."

"How's that?"

"Come in," retorted my brother impatiently. "It's cold out there and dark. You're not scared of two unarmed men--are you?"

They filed into the house, looking very sheepish.

"I'm glad you've come, even at this late hour," said Ajax, "for I want to have a quiet word with you."

The psychological characteristics of a crowd are receiving attention at the hands of a French philosopher. M. Gustave Le Bon tells us that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual of average brains.

"You have a nerve," remarked Cock-a-whoop Charlie.

"You Coon Dogs," continued my brother, "are making this county too hot for the Chinese--eh?"

"You bet yer life!"

"But won't you make it too hot for yourselves?"

The pack growled, inarticulate with astonishment and curiosity.

"Some of you," said Ajax, "have wives and children. What will they do when the Sheriff is hunting--you? You call this the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. So it is. And do you think that the Free and the Brave will suffer you to destroy property and life without calling you to account?"

"We ain't destroying life."

"And a heathen Chinee ain't a man."

"Quong," said Ajax, in his deep voice, "is hardly a man yet. We call him Mary, because he looks like a girl. You want him--eh? You are not satisfied with what you did yesterday? You want him? But--do you want him _dying_?"

The pack cowered.

"He is dying," said Ajax. "No matter how they live, and a wiser Judge than any of us will pronounce on that, no matter how they live--are your own lives clean?--the meanest of these Chinese knows how to die. One moment, please."

He entered the room where Mary lay blind and deaf to the terror which had come at last. When Ajax returned, he said quietly: "Come and see the end of what you began. What? You hang back? By God!--you shall come."

Dominated by his eye and voice, the pack slunk into the bed-room. Upon Mary's once comely face the purple weals were criss-crossed; and sores had broken out wherever the cactus spines had pierced the flesh. A groan escaped the men who had wrought this evil, and glancing at each in turn, I caught a glimpse of a quickening remorse, of a horror about to assume colossal dimensions. The Cock-a-whoop cowboy was seized with a palsy; great tears rolled down the cheeks of the gaunt Missourian; one man began to swear incoherently, cursing himself and his fellows; another prayed aloud.

"He's dead!" shrieked Charlie.

At the grim word, moved by a common impulse, whipped to unreasonable panic as they had been whipped to unreasoning cruelty, the pack broke headlong from the room--and fled!

Long after they had gone, Mary opened his eyes.

"Coon Dogs coming?" he muttered. "Heap bad men!"

"They have come and gone," said Ajax. "They'll never come again, Mary. It's all right. Go to sleep."

Mary obediently closed his eyes.

"He'll recover," Ajax said. And he did.

XVI

OLD MAN BOBO'S MANDY

Old man Bobo was the sole survivor of a once famous trio. Two out of the three, Doc Dickson and Pap Spooner, had passed to the shades, and the legend ran that when their disembodied spirits reached the banks of Styx, the ruling passion of their lives asserted itself for the last time. They demurred loudly, impatiently, at the exorbitant fee, ten cents, demanded by Charon.

"We weigh light," said Pap Spooner, "awful light! Call it, mister, fifteen cents for the two!"

"Ten cents apiece," replied the ferryman, "or three for a quarter."

Thereupon the worthy couple seated themselves in Cimmerian darkness, and vowed their intention of awaiting old man Bobo.

"He'll soon be along," they remarked. "He must be awful lonesome."

But the old gentleman kept them out of Hades for full five years.

He lived alone with his grand-daughter and a stable helper in the tumble-down adobe just to the left of the San Lorenzo race track. The girl cooked, baked, and washed for him. Twice a week she peddled fruit and garden stuff in San Lorenzo. Of these sales her grandsire exacted the most rigorous accounting, and occasionally, in recognition of her services, would fling her a nickel. The old man himself rarely left home, and might be seen at all hours hobbling around his garden and corrals, keenly interested in his own belongings, halter-breaking his colts, anxiously watching the growth of his lettuce, counting the oranges, and beguiling the fruitful hours with delightful calculation.

"It's all profit," he has often said to me. "We buy nothin' an' we sell every durned thing we raise."

Then he would chuckle and rub together his yellow, wrinkled hands. Ajax said that whenever Mr. Bobo laughed it behooved other folk to look grave.

"Mandy's dress costs something," I observed.

"Considerable,--I'd misremembered that. Her rig-out las' fall cost me the vally o' three boxes o' apples--winter pearmains!"

"She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo."

"An' leave me?" he cried shrilly. "I'd like to see a man prowlin' around my Mandy--I'd stimilate him. Besides, mister, Mandy ain't the marryin' kind. She's homely as a mud fence, is Mandy. She ain't put up right for huggin' and kissin'."

"But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo."

"Heiress," he repeated with a cunning leer. "I'm poor, mister, poor. The tax collector has eat me up--eat me up, I say, eat me up!"

He looked such an indigestible morsel, so obviously unfit for the maw of even a tax collector, that I laughed and took my leave. He was worth, I had reason to know, at least fifty thousand dollars.

* * * * *

"Say, Mandy, I like ye awful well! D'ye know it?"

The speaker, Mr. Rinaldo Roberts, trainer and driver of horses, was sitting upon the top rail of the fence that divided the land of old man Bobo from the property of the Race Track Association.

Mandy, freckled, long-legged, and tow-headed, balanced herself easily upon one ill-shod foot and rubbed herself softly with the other. The action to those who knew her ways denoted mental perplexity and embarrassment. This assignation was bristling with peril as well as charm. Her grandfather had the eyes of a turkey-buzzard, eyes which she contrasted involuntarily with the soft, kindly orbs now bent upon her. She decided instantly that blue was a prettier colour than yellow. Rinaldo's skin, too, commended itself. She had never seen so white a forehead, such ruddy cheeks. David, she reflected, must have been such a man; but Rinaldo was a nicer name than David, ever so much nicer.

"Shakespeare never repeats," observed Mr. Roberts, "but I'll tell ye again, Mandy, that I like ye awful well."

"Pshaw!" she replied.

"Honest, Mandy, I ain't lyin'."

He smoothed his hair, well oiled by the barber an hour before, wiped his hand upon his brown overalls, and laughed. The overalls were worn so as to expose four inches of black trouser.

"Ye think more of your sorrel than ye do of me, Nal."

"I do?"

"Yes, indeed, you do. You know you do."

"I know I don't! Say--I've gone an' christened the cuss."

"You have?" said Mandy, in a tone of intense interest. "Tell me its name."

"It's a her, Mandy, an' me an' Pete fixed on _By-Jo_. That's French, Mandy," he added triumphantly, "an' it means a gem, a _jool_, an' that's what she is--a regler ruby!"

"It don't sound like French," said Amanda doubtfully.

"That French feller," replied Nal, with the fine scorn of the Anglo- Saxon, "him as keeps the 'Last Chance' saloon, pronounces it By-Jew, but he's as ignorant as a fool, an' By-Jo seems to come kind o' nateral."

"Ye might ha' called the filly, Amandy, Nal."

The honest face of Rinaldo flushed scarlet. He squirmed--I use the word advisedly--and nearly fell off the fence.

"If there was a nickel-in-the-slot kickin' machine around San Lorenzy," he cried, "I'd take a dollar dose right now! Gosh! What a clam I am! I give ye my word, Mandy, that the notion o' callin' the filly after you never entered my silly head. Never onst! _Jee_whillikins! this makes me feel awful bad."

He wiped his broad forehead with a large white silk pocket- handkerchief, horribly scented with patchouli. His distress was quite painful to witness.

"Never mind," said Amanda softly. "I was only joking, Nal. It's all right."

Looking at her now, what son of Adam could call her homely? Her slender figure, the head well poised upon shapely shoulders, suddenly straightened itself; her red lips parted, revealing a row of small, white teeth; her eyes were uplifted to meet the glance of her lover; her bosom rose and fell as Nal sprang from the fence and seized her hand.

A simple courtship truly! Love had written in plain characters upon their radiant faces an artless tale. With fingers interlaced they gazed tranquilly at each other, eloquently silent.

Then the man bent his head and kissed her.

* * * * *

"Marry my Mandy!" cried old man Bobo, a few hours later. "Why, Nal, ye must be crazy! Ye're both children."

"I'm twenty-two," said Mr. Roberts, expanding his broad chest, and towering six inches at least above his companion, "an' Mandy will be eighteen next December, and," he added with dignity, "I love Mandy an' Mandy loves me."

"Now, I ain't a goin' to git mad," said Mr. Bobo, stamping upon the ground and gnashing his teeth, "but I'll give ye a pointer, Nal Roberts; you go right home an' stay there! I need Mandy the worst kind, an' ye know it. I couldn't spare the girl nohow. An' there's another thing; I won't have no sparkin' aroun' this place. No huggin' an' kissin'. There's none for me an' there'll be none for you. Love, pah! I reckon that's all ye've got. Love! Ye make me sick to my stomach, Nal Roberts. Ye've bin readin' dime novels, that's what ails ye. Love! There ain't no dividen's in love."

"Naterally," observed Mr. Roberts, "ye know nothin' of love, Mister Bobo, an' ye never will. I'm sorry for ye, too. Life without love is like eatin' bull-beef jerky without _salsa_!"

"I've raised Mandy," continued Mr. Bobo, ignoring this interruption, "very keerful. I give her good schoolin', victuals, an' a heap o' clothes. I've knocked some horse sense into the child. There ain't no nonsense in Mandy, an' ye won't find her equal in the land for peddlin' fruit an' sech. I've kep' her rustlin' from morn till night. When a woman idles, the ole Nick gits away with her mighty quick. I've salted that down many a long year. No, sir, Mandy is mine, an' Mandy will do jest as I say. She minds me well, does Mandy. She won't marry till I give the word--an' I ain't agoin' to give the word."

He snapped his lantern jaws, and grinned in Nal's face. The selfishness which rated its sordid interest paramount to any consideration for others appalled the young man. How could he stem this tide of avarice, this torrent of egoism?

"So love don't go?" said Nal shortly.

"No, sonny, love don't go--leastways not with me."

"Mebbe you think I'm after the grease," remarked Nal with deliberation, "but I ain't. Folks say ye're rich, Mr. Bobo, but I don't keer for that. I'm after Mandy, an' I'll take her in her chimmy."

"I'll be damned if ye will, Nal! Ye won't take Mandy at all, an' that's all there is about it."

"Say," said Mr. Roberts, his fine eyes aglow with inspiration, "say, I'll make ye a cold business proposition, fair an' square betwixt man an' man. I'll buy Mandy from ye, at the market price--there!"

From beneath his penthouse brows Mr. Bobo peered curiously at this singular youth.

"Buy her!" he repeated scornfully. "With what? Ye've got nothin', Nal Roberts--that is, nothin' but yer sorrel filly and a measly two, or three mebbe, hundred dollars. I vally Mandy at twenty dollars a month. At one per cent.--I allus git one per cent. a month--that makes two thousand dollars. Have ye got the cold cash, Nal?"

Honest Nal hung his head.

"Not the half of it, but I earn a hundred a month at the track."

"Bring me two thousand dollars, gold coin o' the United States, no foolin', an' I'll give ye Mandy."

"Ye mean that, Mr. Bobo?"

The old man hesitated.

"I was kind o' bluffin'," he admitted reluctantly, "but I'll stand by my words. Bring me the cash, an' I'll give ye Mandy."

"I'll guess I'll go," said Mr. Roberts.

"Yes, Nal, ye'd better go, an' sonny, ye needn't to come back; I like ye first rate, but ye needn't to come back!"

Rinaldo walked home to the race track, and as he walked, cursed old man Bobo, cursed him heartily, in copious Western vernacular, from the peaky crown of his bald head to the tip of his ill-shaped, sockless toe. When, however, he had fed the filly and bedded her down in cool, fresh straw, he felt easier in his mind. Running his hand down her iron forelegs, he reflected hopefully that a few hundred dollars were easily picked up on a race track. Bijou was a well-bred beast, with a marvellous turn of speed. For half-a-mile she was a wonder, a record breaker--so Nal thought. Presently he pulled a list of entries from his pocket and scanned it closely. Old man Bobo had a bay gelding in training for the half-mile race, Comet, out of Shooting Star, by Meteor. Nal had taken the measure of the other horses and feared none of them; but Comet, he admitted ruefully to be a dangerous colt. He was stabled at home, and the small boy that exercised him was both deaf and dumb.

"If I could hold my watch on him," said Nal to himself, "I'd give a hundred dollars."

A smile illumined his pleasant features as he remembered that Mr. Bobo, like himself, was sitting upon the anxious seat. That same afternoon he had tried, in vain, to extract from Nal some information about the filly's speed. The old man's weakness, if he had one, was betting heavily upon a certainty.

"By Jimminy," mused Mr. Roberts, patting affectionately the satin neck of Bijou, "it would be a nice howdy-do to win a thousand off the old son of a gun! Gosh, Mandy! how ye startled me."

Amanda, out of breath and scarlet of face, slipped quietly into the loose box and sat down in the straw.

"Hush," she said, panting, "grandfather would take a quirt to me if he knew I was here, but, Nal dear, I jest had to come. I've been talkin' with the old man, an' he won't let me leave him, but I'll be true to you, Nal, true as steel, an' you'll be true to me, won't you? Grandfather won't last long, he's----"

"Tough," said Mr. Roberts, "tough as abalone, tough as the hondo of my lariat. I suspicioned he'd peter out when Pap Spooner died, but he fooled us the worst kind. No, Mandy, the old gentleman ain't a-goin', as he says, till he gits ready. He told me that to-day, an' he ain't a liar. He's close as a clam, is Mr. Bobo, but he ain't no liar. As for bein' true to you, Mandy--why--dern it--my heart's jest froze to yours, it don't belong to Nal Roberts no longer."

The girl blushed with pleasure and rose to her feet.

"You won't quarrel, Nal," she said anxiously, "you an' grandfather. He gets awful hot at times, but your head is level. He's comin' down to the track to-morrow morning at five to work out Comet, an' you might have words about me."

"To work out Comet?" said Nal, pricking up his ears.

"Mercy!--" cried Amanda, "I've given it away, an' it's a deathly secret."

"It's safe enough with me," replied the young man carelessly. None the less his eyes brightened and he smiled beneath his blonde mustache. "An', Mandy, don't worry, I wouldn't touch the old gentleman with a pair o' tongs."

"Well, good night, Nal--no, you mustn't--somebody might see. Only one then! Let me go, let me go!--Good night, Nal."

She ran swiftly away, holding high her skirts on account of the sticker grass. Nal watched her retreating figure admiringly.

"A good gait," he murmured critically, "no interferin' an' nothin' gummy about the pastern!"

He then squatted down, cowboy fashion, upon his hams, and smoothing carefully a piece of level ground, began to--what he called "figger." He wrote with a pointed stick and presently broke into a loud laugh.

"A low down trick," he muttered, "to play upon a white man, but Mr. Bobo ain't a white man, an' mustn't be treated as sech."

He erased his hieroglyphics, and proceeded leisurely to prepare his simple supper. He ate his bacon and beans with even more than usual relish, laughing softly to himself repeatedly, and when he had finished and the dishes were washed and put away, he selected, still laughing, a spade and crowbar from a heap of tools in the corner of his shanty. These he shouldered and then strode out into the night.

* * * * *

The crowd at the race track upon the opening afternoon of the fair was beginning to assume colossal proportions--colossal, that is to say, for San Lorenzo. Beneath the grand stand, where the pools are always sold, the motley throng surged thickest. Jew and gentile, greaser and dude, tin-horn gamblers and tenderfeet, hayseeds and merchants, jostled each other good humouredly. In the pool box were two men. One --the auctioneer--a perfect specimen of the "sport"; a ponderous individual, brazen of face and voice, who presented to the crowd an amazing front of mottled face, diamond stud, bulging shirt sleeves, and a bull-neck encircled by a soiled eighteen-and-a-half inch paper collar. The other gentleman, who handled the tickets, was unclean, unshorn, and cadaverous-looking, with a black cigar, unlighted, stuck aggressively into the corner of his mouth.

"Once more," yelled the pool-selling person, in raucous tones. "Once more, boys! I'm sellin' once more the half-mile dash! I've one hundred dollars for Comet; how much fer second choice? Be lively there. Sixty dollars!!! Go the five, five, five! Thank ye, sir, you're a dead game sport. Bijou fer sixty-five dollars. How much am I bid fer the field?"

The field sold for fifty, and the auctioneer glanced at Mr. Bobo, who shook his head and shuffled away. Ten consecutive times he had bought pools. Ten consecutive times Mr. Rinaldo Roberts had paid, by proxy, sixty-five dollars for the privilege of naming By-Jo as second choice to the son of Meteor.