Chapter 11

Ben was one worried man, especially after he heard of Ed's private car. It was one thing to lick an exbrakeman, but entirely different to have an affray with a prominent capitalist that come after you regardless of expense. Furthermore, this was the time for the annual tour of inspection by the officers of the road, and they was now on the way to Ben's division, with him hoping to create a fine impression by showing his miracles of management. And here was Ed, meaning to start something scandalous at sight! No wonder Ben lost his nerve and tried to run out on his antagonist. He was trying to put it off at least till after his officials had come and gone.

So for six days he kept about thirty miles of standard-gauge track between his car and Ed's. Ed would get word that he was at such a station and have his car dropped there, only to find that Ben had gone on. Ed would follow on the next train, or mebbe hire a special engine; and Ben would hide off on some blind spur track. They covered the whole division about three times without clashing, thanks to Ben's superior information bureau; it being no trick at all to keep track of this wheeled apartment house of Ed's.

Ed couldn't understand it at first. Here he'd come up to lick Ben, and Ben was acting queer about it. Ed would send messages every day wanting to know when and where he could have a nice quiet chat with Ben that would not be interfered with by bystanders; and Ben would wire back that his time wasn't his own and company business was keeping him on the jump, but as soon as this rush was over he would arrange an interview; and kind regards, and so on. Or he might say he would be at some station all the following day; which would be a clumsy falsehood, because he was at that moment pulling out, as Ed would find when he got there. The operating department must of thought them a couple of very busy men, wanting so much to meet, yet never seeming able to get together.

Ed got peeved at last by the way Ben was putting him off. It wasn't square and it wasn't businesslike. He had large mining interests in charge and here was Ben acting like he had all summer to devote just to this one little matter. He called Ben's attention to this by telegraph, but Ben continued to be somewhere else from where he said he was going to be.

After a week of this pussy-wants-a-corner stuff Ed got wise that the thing had come to be a mere vulgar chase, and that his private car was hampering him by being so easy to keep track of. So he disguised himself by taking off his diamond ornaments and leaving his private car at Colfax, and started out to stalk Ben as a common private citizen in a day coach. He got results that way, Ben supposing he was still with his car. After a couple of scouting trips up and down the line he gets reliable word that Ben, with his bunch of high officials, is over at Wallace.

So much the better, thinks Ed. It will be fine to have this next disturbance right on the spot where a great wrong was done him fifteen years before. So he starts for Wallace, wiring for his car to follow him there. He'd found this car poor for the bloodhound stuff, but he wanted Ben to have a good look at it and eat his heart out with envy, either before or after what was going to happen to him.

He gets to Wallace on the noon train and finds that Ben with his officials has gone up the canon, past Burke, on the president's private car, to return in about an hour. After Ed's inquiries the agent kindly wires up to Ben that his cousin from Arizona is waiting for him. Ed spends the time walking round Ben's shabby little private car and sneering at it. He has his plans all made, now that he has run his man to earth. He won't pull anything rough before the officials, but about twenty miles out on the line is a siding with a shipping corral beside it and nothing else in sight but vistas. They'll get an engine to run the two cars out there that night and leave 'em, and everything can be done decently and in order. No hurry and no worry and no scandal.

Ed is just playing the coming fight over in his mind for the fifth time, correcting some of his blows here and there, when he hears a whistle up the canon and in comes the special. The officials pile off and Ben comes rushing up to Ed with a glad smile and effusive greetings and hearty slaps on the back; and how is everything, old man?--and so on--with a highly worried look lurking just back of it all; and says what rare good luck to find Ed here, because he's the very man they been talking about all the way down from Burke.

Ed says if they come down as fast as he did one time they didn't get a chance to say much about him; but Ben is introducing him to the president of the road and the general manager and the chief engineer and three or four directors, and they all shake hands with him till it seems like quite a reception. The president says is this really the gentleman who has made that last big strike in Arizona! And if it is he knows something still more interesting about him, because he has just listened to a most remarkable tale of his early days as a brakeman on this very line. Their division superintendent has been telling of his terrific drop down the canon and his incredible flight through the air of three hundred and thirty-five feet.

"How far did he say I was hurled?" says Ed, and the president again says three hundred and thirty-five feet, which was a hundred more than Ed had ever claimed; so he looks over at Ben pretty sharp.

Ben is still talking hurriedly about the historic accident, saying that in all his years of railroad experience he never heard of anything approaching it, and if they will step up the track a piece he will show them just where the cars left the rails. Ben must of done a lot of quick thinking that day. He had the bunch over to see the exact spot, and they all stood and looked over to the ice house and said it was incredible; and a director from Boston said it was perfectly preposterous; really now! And Ben kept on reciting rapidly about the details. He said Ed had come down the seven miles in less than three minutes, which was lopping a minute and a half off the official time; and that when picked up he hadn't a whole bone left in his body, which was also a lie; and that his cousin never could of survived if he hadn't probably had the most marvellous constitution a man was ever endowed with. He then made the bunch go over to the ice house to see the other exact spot, and they looked back to where he started from, and again said it was incredible and preposterous.

I don't know. Mebbe they wouldn't of thought it preposterous that a mere brakeman was hurled that far, but Ed was a capitalist now. Anyway, the president had him into his car for lunch with the party, and they might possibly of got to talking about other things of less importance, but Ben wouldn't have any thing else. He made 'em insist that Ed should tell his version of the whole thing; how he felt when the cars started, and how the scenery was blurred, and how his whole past life flashed before him, and the last thing he remembered before he hit the sawdust. And Ben set there looking so proud of Ed, like a mother having her little tot recite something. And when Ed had finally lit, Ben made him tell about his slow recovery. And after Ed got himself well again Ben would go back to the start and ask for more details, such as whether he hadn't wanted to jump off on the way down, or whether he had been conscious while going through the air for nearly four hundred feet.

Ed got little food; but much he cared! He'd come into his own at last. And suddenly he was surprised by finding a warm glow in his heart for Ben, especially after Ben had said for about the third time: "I was certainly a green hand in those days; so green that I didn't begin to realize what a whale of an occurrence this was." Ed was getting a new light on Ben.

After lunch Ed's own car got in from Colfax and he had the party over there for cigars and more talk about himself, which was skillfully led by Ben. Then the president invited Ed to hitch his car on and come along with them for a little trip, and talk over mining and investments, and so on, and what the outlook was in the Southwest. So Ed went with 'em and continued to hear talk of his accident. Ben would bring it up and harp back to it, and bring it forward and sandwich it in whenever the conversation had an open moment. It was either the wild thoughts Ed must of had sliding down the canon, or the preposterous constitution he had been endowed with, or the greenness of himself for not recognizing it as the prize accident of the ages. And I don't wonder Ben went on that way for the next two days. He knew what a tenacious idiot Ed was, and that he had come miles out of his way to try something he had often tried before. The most he could hope for was to stave off the collision till his officials got away.

And it looked, the second night, like he wasn't going to be able to do even this much. He'd been detecting cold looks from Ed all day, in spite of his putting on another record about the accident every ten minutes or so. They was laid out at some little station, and just before dinner Ed give Ben the office that he wanted a word private with him. Ben thinks to himself it's coming now in spite of all his efforts to smooth it over. But he leaves the car with Ed and they walk a piece up the track, Ben hoping they can make the lee of a freight car before Ed starts his crime of violence. He makes up his mind quick. If Ed jumps him there in the open he will certainly do his best to win the contest. But if he waits till they get this freight car between them and the public, then he will let Ed win the fight and get the scandal out of his life forever.

Ben walks quite briskly, but Ed begins to slow up when they ain't more than a hundred yards from the president's car. Finally Ed stops short.

"The little foci is going to pull the fight here in the open!" thinks Ben; so he gets ready to do his best.

Then Ed says:

"Say, Ben, what's the matter with you, anyway? Are you losing your mind? It ain't so much on my account; I could make allowance for you. But here's these officials of yours, and you want to make a good impression on 'em; instead of which you are making yourself the grandest bore that ever needed strangling for continuous talk on one subject."

Ben didn't get him yet. He says come on up the other side of them freight cars, where they can be more private for their consultation.

Ed says no; this is far enough to tell him for his own good not to be such a bore; an' Ben says how is he a bore?

"A bore?" says Ed. "Why, for forty-eight hours you ain't been able to talk about anything but that stale old accident of mine, and you got me so sick of it I could jump on you every time you begin. You got everybody in the party sick of it. Don't you see how they all try to get away from you? For the Lord's sake, can't you think up something else to talk about now and then--at least for five minutes, just to give your silly chatter a little different flavour? I never been so sick of anything in my life as I am of this everlasting prattle of yours about something that was over and forgotten fifteen long years ago! What's got into you to keep dragging that accident up out of the dead past that way? Anyway, you better cut it out. I have to listen because you're my cousin; but these officials don't. Your next pay check is liable to be your last on this road if you don't think up some other kind of gossip. Darned if it don't seem like you had been getting weak-minded in your old age!"

Ben had got his bearings by this time. He apologized warmly to Ed; he said it was true this magnificent catastrophe had lately taken possession of his mind, but now that he finds Ed is so sensitive about it he'll try to keep it out of his talk, and he hopes Ed won't cherish hard feelings against him.

Ed says no, he won't cherish anything if Ben will only quit his loathsome gushing about the accident; and Ben says he will quit. And so they shook hands on it.

That's the way the feud ended. The champion grudge hoarder of the universe had been dosed to a finish with his own medicine. It showed Ben has a weakness for diplomacy; kind of an iron hand in a velvet glove, or something.

Ed is still a nut, though. There was a piece in a Sunday paper not long ago about this new mining millionaire. He spoke some noble words to the youth of our land. He said young American manhood could still make its fortune in this glorious country of opportunity by strict attention to industry and good habits and honest dealing and native pluck--him that had had these mules forced on him in the first place, and then his interest in this claim forced on him for the mules, and then hadn't been able to get shut of the claim. Ain't it lovely how men will dig up a license to give themselves all credit for hog luck they couldn't help!

Ma Pettengill busied herself with a final cigarette and remarked that she never knew when to stop talking. Some parties did, but not her; and she having to be up and on the way to Horsefly Mountain by six-thirty in the A.M.! Her last apology was for a longing she had not been able to conquer: She couldn't help a debased wish to know how that last fight would of come out.

"Of course it ain't nice to want men to act like the brutes," said the lady. "Still, I can't help wondering; not that I'm inquisitive, but just out of curiosity."

V

ONE ARROWHEAD DAY

It began with the wonted incitement to murder. A wooden staff projects some five feet above the topmost roof peak of the Arrowhead ranch house, and to this staff is affixed a bell of brazen malignity. At five-thirty each morning the cord controlling this engine of discord is jerked madly and forever by Lew Wee, our Chinese chef. It is believed by those compelled to obey the horrid summons that this is Lew Wee's one moment of gladness in a spoiled life. The sound of the noon bell, the caressing call of the night bell--these he must know to be welcome. The morning clangour he must know to be a tragedy of foulest import. It is undeniably rung with a keener relish. There will be some effort at rhythm with the other bells, but that morning bell jangles in a broken frenzy of clangs, ruthlessly prolonged, devilish to the last insulting stroke. Surely one without malice could manage this waking bell more tactfully.

A reckless Chinaman, then, takes his life in his hands each morning at five-thirty. Something like a dozen men are alarmed from deep sleep to half-awakened incredulity, in which they believe the bell to be a dream bell and try to dream on of something noiseless. Ten seconds later these startled men have become demons, with their nice warm feet on the icy floor of the bunk-house, and with prayers of simple fervour that the so-and-so Chink may be struck dead while his hand is still on the rope. This prayer is never answered; so something like a dozen men dress hurriedly and reach the Arrowhead kitchen hurriedly, meaning to perform instantly there a gracious deed which Providence has thus far unaccountably left undone.

That the Arrowhead annals are, as yet, unspiced with a crime of violence is due, I consider, to Lew Wee's superb control of his facial muscles. His expression when he maniacally yanks the bell cord is believed by his victims to be one of hellish glee; so they eagerly seek each morning for one little remaining trace of this. The tiniest hint would suffice. But they encounter only a rather sad-faced, middle-aged Chinaman, with immovable eyes and a strained devotion to delicate tasks, of whom it is impossible to believe that ever a ray of joy gladdened his life.

There is a secondary reason why the spirit of Lew Wee has not long since been disembodied by able hands: His static Gorgon face stays the first murderous impulse; then his genial kitchen aroma overpowers their higher natures and the deed of high justice is weakly postponed. This genial kitchen aroma is warm, and composed cunningly from steaming coffee and frying ham or beef, together with eggs and hot cakes almost as large as the enamelled iron plates from which they are eaten. It is no contemptible combination on a frosty morning. No wonder strong men forget the simple act of manslaughter they come there to achieve and sit sullenly down to be pandered to by him who was erst their torturer.

On a morning in late May, when I had been invited to fare abroad with my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill--who would breakfast in her own apartment--I joined this assemblage of thwarted murderers as they doggedly ate. It is a grim business, that ranch breakfast. Two paling lamps struggle with the dawn, now edging in, and the half light is held low in tone by smoke from the cake griddle, so that no man may see another too plainly. But no man wishes to see another. He stares dully into his own plate and eats with stern aversion. We might be so many strangers in a strange place, aloof, suspicious, bitter, not to say truculent.

No quip or jest will lighten the gloom. Necessary requests for the sugar or the milk or the stewed apples are phrased with a curtly formal civility. We shall be other men at noon or at night, vastly other, sunnier men, with abundance of quip and jest and playful sally with the acid personal tang. But from warm beds of repose! We avoid each other's eyes, and one's subdued "please pass that sirup pitcher!" is but tolerated like some boorish profanation of a church service.

The simple truth, of course, is that this is the one hour of the day when we are face to face with the evil visage of life unmasked; our little rosy illusions of yestereve are stale and crumpled. Not until we are well out in the sun, with the second cigarette going good, shall we again become credulous about life and safe to address. It is no meal to linger over. We grimly rise from the wrecked table and clatter out.

Only one of us--that matchless optimist, Sandy Sawtelle--sounds a flat note in the symphony of disillusion. His humanness rebounds more quickly than ours, who will not fawn upon life for twenty minutes yet. Sandy comes back to the table from the hook whence he had lifted his hat. He holds aloft a solitary hot cake and addresses Lew Wee in his best Anglo-Chinese, and with humorous intent:

"I think take-um hot cake, nail over big knot hole in bunk-house--last damn long time better than sheet iron!"

Swiftly departing pessimists accord no praise or attention to this ill-timed sketch; least of all Lew Wee, who it is meant to insult. His face retains the sad impassivity of a granite cliff as yet beyond the dawn.

Now I am out by the saddle rack under the poplars, where two horses are tied. Ma Pettengill's long-barrelled roan is saddled. My own flea-bitten gray, Dandy Jim, is clad only in the rope by which he was led up from the caviata. I approach him with the respectful attention his reputed character merits and try to ascertain his mood of the moment. He is a middle-aged horse, apparently of sterling character, and in my presence has always conducted himself as a horse should. But the shadow of scandal has been flung athwart him. I have been assured that he has a hideous genius for cinch binding. Listening at first without proper alarm, it has been disclosed to me that a cinch binder ain't any joke, by a darned sight! A cinch binder will stand up straight and lean over backward on me. If I'm there when he hits the ground I'll wish I wasn't--if I am able to wish anything at all and don't simply have to be shipped off to wherever my family wants it to take place.

I am further enlightened: Dandy Jim ain't so likely to start acting if not saddled when too cold. If I saddle him then he will be expecting to have more fun out of it than I have any right to. But if the sun is well up, why, sometimes a baby could handle him. So for three weeks I have saddled Dandy Jim with the utmost circumspection and with the sun well up. Now the sun is not well up. Shall I still survive? I pause to wish that the range of high hills on the east may be instantly levelled. The land will then be worth something and the sun will be farther up. But nothing of a topographical nature ensues. The hills remain to obscure the sun. And the brute has to be saddled. The mood of that grim breakfast, voiceless, tense, high with portent, is still upon me.

I approach and speak harshly to the potential cinch binder, telling him to get over there! He does not; so I let it pass. After all, he is only a horse. Why should I terrorize him? I bridle him with a manner far from harsh. He doesn't like the taste of the bit--not seasoned right, or something. But at last he takes it without biting my fingers off; which shows that the horse has no mind to speak of.

I look him calmly in the eye for a moment; then pull his head about, so that I can look him calmly in the other eye for a moment. This is to show the animal that he has met his master and had better not try any of that cinch-binding stuff if he knows when he's well off. Still, I treat him fairly. I smooth his back of little vegetable bits that cling there, shake out the saddle blanket and tenderly adjust it. Whistling carelessly I swing up the saddle. Dandy Jim flinches pitifully when it rests upon him and reaches swiftly round to bite my arm off. I think this is quite perfunctory on his part. He must have learned long since that he will never really bite any one's arm off. His neck is not enough like a swan's.

I adjust saddle and blanket carefully from both sides, pulling the blanket well up under the horn of the saddle and making sure that it sets comfortably. One should be considerate of the feelings of a dumb beast placed at one's mercy. Then I reach for the cinch, pass it twice through the rings, and delicately draw it up the merest trifle. Dandy Jim shudders and moans pathetically. He wishes to convey the impression that his ribs have been sprung. This, of course, is nonsense. I measureably increase the pressure. Dandy Jim again registers consternation, coughs feebly, and rolls his eyes round appealingly, as if wondering whether the world is to sit, without heart, and watch a poor defenseless horse being slain. He is about to expire.

I now lead him gently about by the bridle. It occurs to me that a horse with this curious mania for binding cinches or cinching binders--or, in other words, a cinch binder--will be as willing to indulge in his favourite sport with the saddle unoccupied as otherwise. He may like it even better with no one up there; and I know I will. Nothing happens, except that Dandy Jim stumbles stiffly and pretends to be lame. The sun is not yet well up; still, it is a lot better. Perhaps danger for the day is over. I again lead the dangerous beast--

"What you humouring that old skate for?"

Ma Pettengill, arrayed in olive-drab shirt and breeches, leather puttees, and the wide-brimmed hat of her calling with the four careful dents in the top, observed me with friendly curiosity as she ties a corduroy coat to the back of her saddle.

Hereupon I explained my tactful handling of the reputed cinch binder. It evoked the first cheerful sound I had heard that day:

Ma Pettengill laughed heartily.

"That old hair trunk never had the jazz to be any cinch binder. Who told you he was?"

I named names--all I could remember. Almost everyone on the ranch had passed me the friendly warning, and never had I saddled the brute without a thrill.

"Sure! Them chuckleheads always got to tell everybody something. It's a wonder they ain't sent you in to the Chink to borrow his meat auger, or out to the blacksmith shop for a left-handed monkey wrench, or something. Come on!"

So that was it! Just another bit of stale ranch humour--alleged humour--as if it could be at all funny to have me saddle this wreck with the tenderest solicitude morning after morning!