Chapter 12

"Just one moment!" I said briskly.

I think Dandy Jim realized that everything of a tender nature between us was over. Some curious and quite charming respect I had been wont to show him was now gone out of my manner. He began to do deep breathing exercises before I touched the cinch. I pulled with the strength of a fearless man. Dandy Jim forthwith inflated his chest like a gentleman having his photograph taken in a bathing suit. I waited, apparently foiled. I stepped back, spoke to Ma Pettengill of the day's promise, and seemed carelessly to forget what I was there for. Slowly Dandy Jim deflated himself; and then, on the fair and just instant, I pulled. I pulled hard and long. The game was won. Dandy Jim had now the waist of that matron wearing the Sveltina corset, over in the part of the magazine where the stories die away. I fearlessly bestrode him and the day was on.

I opened something less than a hundred gates, so that we could take our way through the lower fields. Ma Pettengill said she must see this here Tilton and this here Snell, and have that two hundred yards of fence built like they had agreed to, as man to man; and no more of this here nonsense of putting it off from day to day.

She was going to talk straight to them because, come Thursday, she had to turn a herd of beef cattle into that field.

Then I opened a few dozen more gates and we were down on the flats. Here the lady spied a coyote, furtively skirting some willows on our left. So, for a few merry miles, we played the game of coyote. It is a simple game to learn, but requires a trained eye. When one player sees a coyote the other becomes indebted to him in the sum of one dollar.

This sport dispelled the early morning gloom that had beset me. I won a dollar almost immediately. It may have been the same coyote, as my opponent painfully suggested; but it showed at a different breach in the willows, and I was firm.

Then the game went fiercely against me. Ma Pettengill detected coyotes at the far edges of fields--so far that I would have ignored them for jack rabbits had I observed them at all. I claimed an occasional close one; but these were few. The outlook was again not cheering. It was an excellent morning for distant coyotes, and presently I owed Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill seven dollars, she having won two doubleheaders in succession. This ride was costing me too much a mile. Being so utterly outclassed I was resolving to demand a handicap, but was saved from this ignominy by our imminent arrival at the abode of this here Tilton, who presently sauntered out of a feeding corral and chewed a straw at us idly.

We soon took all that out of him. The air went something like this:

* * * * *

MRS. L. J. P.--brightly: Morning, Chester! Say, look here! About that gap in the fence across Stony Creek field--I got to turn a beef herd in there Thursday.

TILTON--crouching luxuriously on one knee still chewing the straw: Well, now, about that little job--I tell you, Mis' Pett'ngill; I been kind o' holdin' off account o' Snell bein' rushed with his final plowin'. He claims--

MRS. L. J. P.--still brightly: Oh, that's all right! Snell will be over there, with his men, to-morrow morning at seven o'clock. He said you'd have to be there, too.

TILTON--alarmed, he rises, takes straw from his mouth, examines the chewed end with dismay and casts it from him; removes his hat, looks at this dubiously, burnishes it with a sleeve, and sighs: To-morrow morning! You don't mean to-morrow--

MRS. L. J. P.--carefully yet rapidly: To-morrow morning at seven o'clock. You don't want to throw Snell down on this; and he's going to be there. How many men can you take?

TILTON--dazed: Now--now lemme see!

MRS. L. J. P.--quickly: You can take Chris and Shorty and Jake and yourself. Any one else?

TILTON--swept over the falls: Why, no'm; I don't guess there's any other I could spare, account of--

MRS. L. J. P.--almost sweetly: All right, then. To-morrow; seven sharp.

TILTON--from the whirlpool, helplessly: Yes'm! Yes'm!

MRS. L. J. P.: Morning!

* * * * *

We ride on. Tilton fades back toward the corral; he has forgotten to replace his hat.

I now decided to make a little conversation rather than have the stupid and ruinous game of coyote for a pastime.

"I thought you hadn't seen Snell yet."

"I haven't; not since he promised his half of the job two weeks ago."

"But you just told Tilton--"

"Well, Snell is going to be there, ain't he?"

"How do you know?"

"I'm going to tell him now."

And the woman did even so. If you wish the scene with Snell go back and read the scene with Tilton, changing the names. Nothing else need you change. Snell was hitching two mules to a wood wagon; but he heard the same speeches and made approximately the same replies. And the deed was done.

"There now!" boomed Mrs. Talleyrand as we rode beyond earshot of the dazed and lingering Snell. "Them two men been trying for two weeks to agree on a day to do this trifling job. They wasn't able; so I agreed on a day myself. Anything wrong with it?"

"You said you were going to talk straight to them."

"Ain't I just talked straight to Snell? Tilton will be there, won't he?"

"How about the way you talked to Tilton before you saw Snell?"

"Well, my lands! How you talk! You got to have a foundation to build on, haven't you?"

I saw it as a feat beyond my prowess to convict this woman in her own eyes of a dubious and considering veracity. So I merely wondered, in tones that would easily reach her, how the gentlemen might relish her diplomacy when they discovered it on the morrow. I preceded the word diplomacy with a slight and very affected cough.

The lady replied that they would never discover her diplomacy, not coughing in the least before the word. She said each of them would be so mad at the other for setting a day that they would talk little. They would simply build fence. She added that a woman in this business had to be looking for the worst of it all the time. She was bound to get the elbow if she didn't use her common sense.

I ignored her casuistry, for she was now rolling a cigarette with an air of insufferable probity. I gave her up and played a new game of smashing horseflies as they settled on my mount. Dandy Jim plays the game ably. When a big fly settles on his nose he holds his head round so I can reach it. He does not flinch at the terrific smash of my hat across his face. If a fly alights on his neck or shoulder, and I do not remark it, he turns his head slightly toward me and winks, so I can stalk and pot it. He is very crafty here. If the fly is on his right side he turns and winks his left eye at me so the insect will not observe him. And yet there are people who say horses don't reason.

I now opened fifty more gates and we left the cool green of the fields for a dusty side road that skirts the base of the mesa. We jogged along in silence, which I presently heard stir with the faint, sweet strain of a violin; an air that rose and wailed and fell again, on a violin played with a certain back-country expertness. The road bent to show us its source. We were abreast of the forlorn little shack of a dry-farmer, weathered and patched, set a dozen yards from the road and surrounded by hard-packed earth. Before the open door basked children and pigs and a few spiritless chickens.

All the children ran to the door when we halted and called to someone within. The fiddle played on with no faltering, but a woman came out--a gaunt and tattered woman who was yet curiously cheerful. The children lurked in her wake as she came to us and peered from beyond her while we did our business.

Our business was that the redskin, Laura, official laundress of the Arrowhead, had lately attended an evening affair in the valley at which the hitherto smart tipple of Jamaica ginger had been supplanted by a novel and potent beverage, Nature's own remedy for chills, dyspepsia, deafness, rheumatism, despair, carbuncles, jaundice, and ennui. Laura had partaken freely and yet again of this delectable brew, and now suffered not only from a sprained wrist but from detention, having suffered arrest on complaint of the tribal sister who had been nearest to her when she sprained her wrist. Therefore, if Mrs. Dave Pickens wanted to come over to-morrow and wash for us, all right; she could bring her oldest girl to help.

Mrs. Dave thereupon turned her head languidly toward the ignoble dwelling and called: "Dave!" Then again, for the fiddle stayed not: "Dave! Oh, Dave!"

The fiddle ceased to moan--complainingly it seemed to me--and Dave framed his graceful figure in the doorway. He was one appealing droop, from his moustache to his moccasin-clad feet. He wore an air of elegant leisure, but was otherwise not fussily arrayed.

"Dave, Mis' Pett'ngill says there's now a day's washin' to do over to her place to-morrow. What think?"

Dave deliberated, then pondered, then thought, then spoke:

"Well, I d'no', Addie; I d'no' as I got any objections if you ain't. I d'no' but it's all the same to me."

Hereupon we meanly put something in Dave's unsuspecting way, too.

"You must want a day's work yourself," called out Ma Pettengill. "You go up to Snell's about six in the morning and he'll need you to help do some fencing on that gap in Stony Creek field. If he don't need you Tilton will. One of 'em is bound to be short a man."

"Fencin'?" said Dave with noticeable disrelish.

"You reckon we better both leave the place at once?" suggested Mrs. Dave.

"That's so," said Dave brightly. "Mebbe I--"

"Nonsense!" boomed Ma Pettengill, dispelling his brightness. "Addie can drop you at Snell's when she comes over to Arrowhead. Now that's settled!"

And we rode off as unvoiced expostulations were gathering. I began to wonder whether it must, throughout a beautiful day, be the stern mission of this woman to put tribulation upon her neighbours. She was becoming a fell destroyer. The sun was well up. I thirsted. Also, breakfast seemed to have been a thing in the remote past.

We now rode three torrid miles up a narrow green slit in the hills for a scant ten minutes of talk with a most uninteresting person, whose sole claim to notice seemed to be that he had gone and fenced the wrong water hole over back of Horsefly Mountain, where we have a summer range. The talk was quick and pointed and buttressed with a blue-print map, and the too-hasty fencer was left helpless after a pitiful essay at quibbling. We rode off saying that he could do just as he liked about sending someone over right away to take that fence down, because we had already took it down the minute we set eyes on it. We was just letting him know so he needn't waste any more wire and posts and time in committing felonious depredations that would get him nothing but high trouble if he was so minded. Another scalp to our belt!

I now briefly recalled to the woman that we had stopped at no peaceful home that morning save to wreck its peace. I said I was getting into the spirit of the ride myself. I suggested that at the next ranch we passed we should stop and set fire to the haystacks, just to crown the day's brutalities with something really splendid. I also said I was starving to death in a land of plenty.

Ma Pettengill gazed aloft at the sun and said it was half-past twelve. I looked at my watch and said the sun was over ten minutes slow, which was probably due to the heavy continuous gunfire on the Western Front. This neat bit went for just nothing. As we rode on I fondly recalled that last cold hot cake which Sandy Sawtelle had sacrificed to his gift for debased whimsy. I also recalled other items of that gloomy repast, wondering how I could so weakly have quit when I did.

We rode now under a sun that retained its old fervour if not its velocity. We traversed an endless lane between fields, in one of which grazed a herd of the Arrowhead cattle. These I was made to contemplate for many valuable moments. I had to be told that I was regarding the swallow-fork herd, pure-breds that for one reason or another--the chief being careless help--had not been registered. The omission was denoted by the swallow fork in the left ear.

The owner looked upon them with fond calculation. She was fondly calculating that they would have been worth about fifty per cent. more to her with ears unmutilated. She grew resentful that their true worth should not be acclaimed by the world. In the sight of heaven they were pure-breds; so why should they suffer through the oversight of a herd boss that hadn't anywhere near such distinguished ancestry? And so on, as the lady says.

We left the lane at last and were on the county road, but headed away from the Arrowhead and food. No doubt there remained other homes for us to wreck. We mounted a rise and the road fell from us in a long, gentle slope. And then a mile beyond, where the slope ended, I beheld a most inviting tiny pleasance in this overwhelming welter of ranch land, with its more or less grim business of cattle.

It was a little homestead fit to adorn an art calendar to be entitled Peace and Plenty--a veritable small farm from some softer little country far to the east. It looked strangely lost amid these bleaker holdings. There was a white little house and it sported nothing less than green blinds. There was a red barn, with toy outbuildings. There was a vegetable garden, an orchard of blossoming fruit trees, and, in front of the glistening little house, a gay garden of flowers. Even now I could detect the yellow of daffodils and the martial--at least it used to be martial--scarlet of tulips. The little place seemed to drowse here in the noontide, dreaming of its lost home and other little farms that once companioned it.

To my pleased surprise this unbelievable little farm proved to be our next stopping place. At its gate Ma Pettengill dismounted, eased the cinch of her saddle and tied her horse to the hitching rack. I did likewise by the one-time cinch binder.

"Now," I wondered, "what devastating bomb shall we hurl into this flower-spiced Arcady? What woe will she put upon its unsuspecting dwellers, even as she has ruined four other homes this day? This should be something really choice." But I said no word and followed where the avenger stalked.

We unlatched the white gate and went up a gravelled walk between the rows of daffodils and tulips and hyacinths. We did not ascend the spotless front porch to assault its innocent white door, but turned aside on a narrow-gauge branch of the gravelled pathway and came to a side porch, shaded by maples. And here, in strict conformity to the soundest behests of tradition, sat two entirely genuine Arcadians in wooden rocking-chairs. The male was a smiling old thing with winter-apple cheeks and white hair, and the female was a smiling old thing with winter-apple cheeks and white hair; both had bright eyes of doll blue, and both wore, among other neat things, loose and lovely carpet slippers and white stockings.

And, of course, the male was named Uncle Henry and the other one was named Aunt Mollie, for I was now presented to them. They shyly greeted me as one returned to them after many years in which they had given me up. And again I wondered what particular iniquity we had come here to do.

Then Ma Pettengill eased my worry. She said in a few simple but affecting words, that we had stopped in for a bite to eat. No self-torturing stylist could have put the thing better. And results were sudden. Uncle Henry, the male one, went to take our horses round to the barn, and the other one said they had et an hour ago; but give her ten minutes and she'd have a couple of them young pullets skinned and on the fire.

Ma Pettengill said, with very questionable taste, I thought: "Oh, no; nothing like that!"--because we didn't want to make the least bit of trouble. The woman is dense at times. What else had we come there for? But Aunt Mollie said, then, how about some prime young pork tenderline? And Ma Pettengill said she guessed that would do, and I said I guessed that would do. And there we were! The ladies went to the kitchen, where they made quick and grateful noises.

Pretty soon Uncle Henry came round a lovely corner and said try a tumbler of this here grape wine, which he poured from a pressed-glass pitcher; so I tried it and gave him a town cigarette, which he tucked between his beautiful white moustache and his beautiful white whiskers. And I hoped he didn't use gasoline to get them so clean, because if he did something might happen when he lighted the cigarette; but nothing did, so probably he didn't. I tried the grape wine again; and dear old Uncle Henry said he was turning out quite a bit of it since the Gov'ment had shet down on regular dram-shops, quite considerable of parties happening along from time to time to barter with him, getting it for dances or colds, or something.

A yellow cat, with blue eyes like Uncle Henry's, came and slept on his lap. A large fussy hen with a litter of chickens--or however a hen designates her assemblage of little ones--clucked her way to our feet. I could see three hives of bees, a grape arbour, and a row of milk pans drying in the sun, each leaning on its neighbour along a white bench. Uncle Henry said drink it up while it was cold. All Nature seemed to smile. The hen found a large and charming bug, and chuckled humorously while her cunning little ones tore it limb from limb. It was idyllic.

Then Aunt Mollie pushed open the screen door and said come in and set up; so I came in and set up quickly, having fried pork tenderloin and fried potatoes, and hot biscuit and pork gravy, and cucumber pickles, and cocoanut cake and pear preserves, peach preserves, apricot preserves, loganberry jelly, crab-apple jelly, and another kind of preserves I was unable to identify, though trying again and again.

Ma Pettengill ate somewhat, but talked also, keeping Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie shiny with smiles. They both have polished white teeth of the most amazing regularity. I ate almost exclusively, affecting to be preoccupied about something. The time was urgent. I formed an entangling alliance with the pork tenderloin, which endured to a point where but one small fragment was left on the platter. I coolly left it there, so that Aunt Mollie might believe she had cooked more than enough.

I have never ceased to regret that hollow bit of chivalry. Was it honest, genuine, open? No! Why will men at critical junctures stoop to such trickery? Aunt Mollie said I might think that tenderline was fresh-killed; but not so--she has fried it last December and put it down in its own juice in a four-gallon crock, and now look how fresh it come out! She seemed as proud as if she had invented something. She had a right to be. It was a charming notion and I could have eaten the rest of the crock--but, no matter. Half a dozen biscuits copiously gummed up with preserves of one kind or another would do as well--almost.

So Aunt Mollie showed me objects of interest in the room, including her new carpet sweeper, a stuffed road runner, a ship built in a bottle, and the coloured crayon portraits of herself and Uncle Henry, wearing blue clothes and gold jewellery and white collars and ecru neckties. Also, the marriage certificate. This was no mere official certificate. It was the kind that costs three dollars flat, over and above what you give to the party that does it for you, being genuine steel-engraved, with a beautiful bridal couple under a floral bell, the groom in severe evening dress, and liberally spotted with cupids and pigeons. It is worth the money and an ornament to any wall, especially in the gilt frame.

Aunt Mollie seemed as proud of this document as she had been with the tenderloin. I scanned it word by word for her pleasure. I noticed especially the date. Aunt Mollie said that her and Henry were now in the fortieth year on this place, and it had changed in looks a whole lot since they came here. I again looked at the date of the certificate.

Ma Pettengill said, well, we must be getting on, and they must both come over to the Arrowhead for a day right soon. And Uncle Henry said here was a quart bottle of his peach brandy, going on eight year old, and would I take it along back with me and try it? Parties had told him it was good; but he didn't know--mebbe so, mebbe not. He'd like to know what I thought. It seemed little enough to do to bring a bit of gladness into this old gentleman's life, and I was not the man to wound him by refusal. It was as if Michelangelo had said "Come on round to the Sistine Chapel this afternoon and look over a little thing I've dashed off." If he had brought two bottles instead of one my answer would have been the same.

So we were out on our refreshed horses and heading home; and I said, without loss of time, that Aunt Mollie might have a good heart and a cunning way with pork interiors, and it was none of my business, anyway; but, nevertheless, she had mentioned forty long years with this amateur saloon keeper, whereas her marriage certificate was dated but one year previous, in figures all too shamefully legible. So what about it? I said I mind observing the underworld from time to time; but I like to be warned in advance, even when its denizens were such a charming, bright-eyed winter-apple-cheeked old couple as the two we were now leaving.

The sun was on our backs, a light breeze fanned us, the horses knew which way they were going, and work for the day was over; so Ma Pettengill spoke, in part, as follows:

"Oh, well, of course everyone knows about that. Simple enough! Aunt Mollie and her first husband trekked in here forty years ago. He was a consumptive and the first winter put him out. They had a hard time; no neighbours to speak of, harsh weather, hard work, poor shelter, and a dying man. Henry Mortimer happened by and stayed to help--nursed the invalid, kept the few head of stock together, nailed up holes in the shack, rustled grub and acted like a friend in need. At the last he nailed a coffin together; did the rest of that job; then stayed on to nurse Aunt Mollie, who was all in herself. After he got her to stepping again he put in a crop for her. Then he stayed to build a barn and do some fencing. Then he harvested the crop. And getting no wages! They was both living off the land. Pretty soon they got fond of each other and decided to marry. It's one of Aunt Mollie's jokes that she owed him two years' wages and had to marry him.

"Marriage was easier said than done. No preacher, or even a justice of the peace, was within ninety miles, which meant a four days' trip over the roads of that day, and four days back, providing high water or some other calamity didn't make it a month; and no one to leave on the place, which meant there wouldn't be a head of stock left when they got back, what with Indians and rustlers. Uncle Henry will tell you how it seemed too bad that just one of 'em wouldn't make the trip down and have the ceremony done, leaving the other to protect the place.

"Then along comes a horse trader, who stops over to rest his stock, and learns their trouble. He tells 'em to quit their worry; that he's a notary public and can perform a marriage as good as any Baptist preacher they ever saw. I never been able to make out whether he was crazy or just a witty, practical joker. Anyway, he married the pair with something like suitable words, wouldn't take a cent for it, and gave 'em a paper saying he had performed the deed. It had a seal on it showing he was a genuine notary public, though from back in Iowa somewhere. That made no difference to the new bride and groom. A notary public was a notary public to them, highly important and official.