Chapter 2

him to speak of. The first time I called on her--she was in pink silk pyjamas, smoking a perfecto cigar, and unpacking a bale of lion and tiger skins she'd shot in Africa, or some place--she said she believed there would be fewer unhappy marriages in this world if women would only try more earnestly to make a companion of their husbands; she said she'd tried hard to make one of hers, but never could get him interested in her pursuits and pastimes, he preferring to set sullenly at his desk making money. She said to the day of his death he'd never even had a polo mallet in his hand. And wasn't that pitiful!

"And right now she wanted to visit a snappy little volcano she'd heard about in South America--only she had a grown son and daughter she was trying to make companions of, so they would love and trust her; and they'd begged her to do something nearer home that was less fatiguing; and mebbe she would. And how did I find ranching now? Was I awfully keen about it and was it ripping good sport? I said yes, to an extent. She said she thought it must be ripping, what with chasing the wild cattle over hill and dale to lasso them, and firing off revolvers in company with lawless cowboys inflamed by drink. She went on to give me some more details of ranch life, and got so worked up about it that we settled things right there, she being a lady of swift decisions. She said it wouldn't be very exciting for her, but it might be fine for son and daughter, and bring them all together in a more sacred companionship.

"So I come back and got that place down the creek for her, and she sent out a professional architect and a landscape gardener, and some other experts that would know how to build a ranch _de luxe_, and the thing was soon done. And she sent son on ahead to get slightly acquainted with the wild life. He was a tall bent thing, about thirty, with a long squinted face and going hair, and soft, innocent, ginger-coloured whiskers, and hips so narrow they'd hardly hold his belt up. That rowdy mother of his, in trying to make a companion of him, had near scared him to death. He was permanently frightened. What he really wanted to do, I found out, was to study insect life and botany and geography and arithmetic, and so on, and raise orchids, instead of being killed off in a sudden manner by his rough-neck parent. He loved to ride a horse the same way a cat loves to ride a going stove.

"I started out with him one morning to show him over the valley. He got into the saddle all right and he meant well, but that don't go any too far with a horse. Pretty soon, down on the level here, I started to canter a bit. He grabbed for the saddle horn and caught a handful of bunch grass fifteen feet to the left of the trail. He was game enough. He found his glasses and wiped 'em off, and said it was too bad the mater couldn't have seen him, because it would have been a bright spot in her life.

"Then he got on again and we took that steep trail up the side of the cañon that goes over Arrowhead, me meaning to please him with some beautiful and rugged scenery, where one false step might cause utter ruin. It didn't work, though. After we got pretty well up to the rim of the cañon he looks down and says he supposes they could recover one if one fell over there. I says: 'Oh, yes; they could recover one. They'd get you, all right. Of course you wouldn't look like anything!'

"He shudders at that and gets off to lead his horse, begging me to do the same. I said I never tried to do anything a horse could do better, and stayed on. Then he got confidential and told me a lot of interesting crimes this mater of his had committed in her mad efforts to make a companion of him. Once she'd tramped on the gas of a ninety-horsepower racer and socked him against a stone wall at a turn some fool had made in the road; and another time she near drowned him in the Arctic Ocean when she was off there for the polar-bear hunting; and she'd got him well clawed by a spotted leopard in India, that was now almost the best skin in her collection; and once in Switzerland he fell off the side of an Alp she was making him climb, causing her to be very short with him all day because it delayed the trip. Tied to a rope he was and hanging out there over nothing for about fifteen minutes--he must have looked like a sash weight.

"Then he told about learning to run a motor car all by himself, just to please the mater. The first time he made the sharp turns round their country house he took nine shingles off the corner and crumpled a fender like it was tissue paper; but he stuck to it till he got the score down to two or three shingles only. He seemed right proud of that, like it was bogey for the course, as you might say. He wasn't the greatest humourist in the world, being too high-minded, but he appealed to all my better instincts; he was trying so hard to make the grade out of respect for his bedizened and homicidal mother.

"And his poor sister, that come along later, was very much like him, being severe of outline and wearing the same kind of spectacles, and not fussing much about the fripperies of dress that engross so many of our empty-headed sex and get 'em the notice of the male. Her complexion was brutally honest, which was about all her very best-wishers could say for it, but she was kind-hearted and earnest, and thought a good deal about the real or inner meaning of life. What she really yearned for was to stay in Boston and go to concerts, holding the music on her lap and checking off the notes with a gold pencil when the fiddlers played them. I watched her do it one night. I don't know what her notion was, keeping cases on the orchestra that way; but it seemed to give her a secret satisfaction. She was also interested in bird life and other studies of a high character, and she didn't want to be made a companion of by her rabid parent any more than brother did. They was just a couple of lambkins born to a tiger.

"Pretty soon the ranch buildings was all complete and varnished and polished, like you seen to-day, and the family moved in with all kinds of uniformed servants that looked unhappy and desperate. They had a pained butler in a dress suit that never once set foot outside the house the whole five months they was here. He'd of been thought too gloomy for good taste, even at a funeral. He had me nervous every time I went there, thinking any minute he was going to break down and sob.

"And this lady loses no time making companions of her children that didn't want to be. First she tried to make 'em chase steers on horseback. A fact! That was one of her ideas of ranch life. When I asked her what she was going to stock her ranch with she said didn't I have some good heads of stock I could sell her? And I said yes, I had some good heads, and showed her a bunch of my thoroughbreds, thinking none but the best would satisfy her. She looked 'em over with a glittering eye and said they was too fat to run well. I didn't get her. I said it was true; I hadn't raised 'em for speed. I said I didn't have an animal on the place that could hit better than three miles an hour, and not that for long. I cheerfully admitted I didn't have a thoroughbred on the place that wouldn't be a joke on any track in the country; but I wanted to know what of it.

"'How do you get any sport out of them,' demands the lady, 'if they can't give you a jolly good chase?'

"That's what she asked me in so many words. I says, does she aim to breed racing cattle? And she says, where will the sport be with creatures all out of condition with fat, like mine are? It took me about ten minutes to get her idea, it was that heinous or criminal. When I did get it I sent her to old Safety First; and what does she do but buy a herd of twenty yearling steers from the old crook! Scrubby little runts that had been raised out in the hills and was all bone and muscle, and any one of 'em able to do a mile in four minutes flat, I guess.

"Old Safety was tickled to death at first when he put off this refuse on her at a price not much more than double what they would have brought in a tanyard, which was all they'd ever be good for except bone fertilizer, mebbe; but he was sick unto death when he found they was just what she wanted, the skinnier the better and he could have got anything he asked for 'em. He says to me afterward why don't I train some of mine and trim her good? But I told him I'm cinched for hell, anyway, and don't have to make it tighter by torturing poor dumb brutes.

"That's what it amounted to. Having got Angora chaps and cowboy hats for herself and offsprings, what do they do but get on ponies and chase this herd all over creation, whirling their ropes, yelling, shooting in the air--just like you see on any well-conducted ranch. Once in a while the old lady herself, being a demon rider, would rope an animal and fetch it down; but brother and sister was very careful not to tangle their own ropes on anything. They didn't shoot their guns with any proper spirit, either; and when they tried to yip like cowboys they sounded like rabbits. And brother having to smoke brown-paper cigarettes, which he hated like poison and had trouble in rolling!

"Mother could roll 'em, all right--do it with one hand. And she urged sister to; but sister rebelled for once. The old lady admitted this was due to a fault in her early training. It seems her grandmother had been one of the old-fashioned sort; and, having studied the modern young woman of society in Boston and New York, she'd promised sister a string of pearls if she didn't either smoke or drink till her twenty-first birthday. Sister had not only won the pearls but had come on to twenty-eight without being like other young girls of the day, and wasn't going to begin now. So ma and brother had to do all the smoking.

"After a fine morning's run following the steers they'd like as not have a little branding in the afternoon, the old-fashioned kind that ain't done in the higher ranch circles any more, where a couple of silly punchers rope an animal fore and aft and throw it, thereby setting it back at least four months in its growth. The old lady was puzzled again by me having my branding done in a chute, where the poor things ain't worried more than is necessary. I bet she thought I was a short sport, not doing a thing on my place that would look well in a moving picture. She got a lot of ripping sport out of this branding. Made no difference if they was already branded, they got it again; she'd brand 'em over and over. Two or three of that herd got it so often that they looked like these leather suitcases parties bring back from Europe stuck all over with hotel labels.

"Well, this branch of sport lasted quite a while, with them steers developing speed every day till they got too fast for any one but the old lady. Brother and sister would be left far behind, or mebbe get stacked up and discouraged or sprained for the day. The old dame said it was disheartening, indeed, trying to make companions of one's children when they showed such a low order of intelligence for it. Still, she was fair-minded; so she had a golf links made, and put 'em at that. She wouldn't play herself, saying it was an effeminate game, good for fat old men or schoolboys, but mebbe her chits would benefit by it and get a taste for proper sports, where you can break a bone now and then by not using care.

"But golf wasn't much better. Sister would carry a book of poetry with her and read it as she loafed from one hit to another. The old lady near shed tears at the sight. And brother was about as bad, getting hypnotized by passing insect life and forgetting his score while prodding some new kind of bug.

"The old lady said I'd never believe what a care and responsibility children was. She had wanted 'em to go in for ranching and be awfully keen about it, and look how they acted! Still, she wouldn't give up. She suggested polo next; but sister said it wasn't a lady's game, making no demand upon the higher attributes of womanhood, and brother said he might go in for it if she'd let him play his on a bicycle, as being more reliable or stauncher than a pony.

"So she throws up her hands in despair, but thinks hard again; and at last she says she has the right sport for 'em and why didn't she think of it before! This new idea is to bring up her pack of prize-winning beagles, the sport being full of excitement, and yet safe enough for all concerned if they'll look where they walk and not stop to read slushy poems or collect insect life. Sister and brother said beagles, by all means, like drowning sailors clutching at a straw or something; and the old lady sent off a telegram.

"I admit I didn't know what kind of a game beagles was, but I didn't betray the fact when she told me about it. I was over to Egbert Floud's place next day and I asked him. But he didn't know and he couldn't even get the name right. He says: 'You mean beetles.' I says, 'Not at all'; that it's beagles. Then he says I must of got the name twisted, and probably it's one of these curly horns. That's as close as he ever did come to the name; and until he actually saw the things he insisted they was either something to blow on or something that crawled. 'Mark my words,' he says,'they're either a horn or a bug; and I wonder what this here blond guy will be doing next.' So I saw nothing sensible was to be had out of him, and I left him there, doddering.

"Then in about ten days, which was days of peace for brother and sister, because they didn't have to go in keenly for any new way of killing themselves off, what comes up but several crates of beagles, in charge of their valet or tutor! I'd looked forward to something of a thrilling or unknown character, and they turned out to be mere dogs; just little brown-and-white dogs that you wouldn't notice if you hadn't been excited by their names; kind of yapping mutts that some parties would poison off if they lived in the same neighbourhood with 'em. They all had names like Rex II and Lady Blessington, and so on; and each one had cost more than any three steers I had on the place. What do you think of that? They was yapping in their kennels when I first seen 'em, with the old lady as excited as they was, and brother and sister trying to look excited in order to please mother, and at least looking relieved because no fatalities was in immediate prospect.

"I listened to the noise a while and acted nice by saying they was undoubtedly the very finest beagles I'd ever laid eyes on--which was the simple God's truth; and then I says won't she take one out of the cage and let him beagle some, me not having any idea what it would be like? But the old lady says not yet, because the costumes ain't come. I thought at first it was the pups that had to be dressed up, but it seems it was costumes for her and brother and sister to wear; so I asked a few more silly questions and found out the mystery. It seemed the secret of a beagle's existence was rabbits. Yes, sir; they was mad about rabbits and went in keenly for 'em. Only they wouldn't notice one, I gathered, if the parties that followed 'em wasn't dressed proper for it.

"Then we went in where we could hear each other without screaming, and the lady tells me more about it, and how beagles is her last hope of her chits ever amounting to anything in the great world of sport. If they don't go in keenly for beagles she'll just have to give up and let Nature take its course with the poor things. And she said these was A-Number-One beagles, being sure to get a rabbit if one was in the country. She'd just had 'em at a big fashionable country resort down South, some place where the sport attracted much notice from the simple-minded peasantry, and it hadn't been a good country for rabbits; so the beagles had trooped into a backyard and destroyed a Belgian hare that had belonged to a little boy, whose father come out and swore at the costumed hunters in a very common manner, and offered to lick any three of 'em at once.

"And in hurrying acrost a field to get away from this rowdy, that seemed liable to forget himself and do something they'd all regret later, they was put up a tree by a bull that was sensitive about costumes, and had to stay there two hours, with the bull trying to grub up the tree, and would of done so if his owner hadn't come along and rescued 'em.

"She made it sound like an exciting sport, all right, yet nothing I thought I'd ever go in keenly for. It didn't seem like anything I'd get up in the night to indulge myself in. And I agreed with her that if her chits found beagling too adventurous, then all hope was gone and she might as well let 'em die peacefully in their beds.

"Two days later the costumes come along and I was kindly sent word to show up the next morning if I wanted to see some ripping sport that I'd be quite mad about and go in for keenly, and all that sort of thing, by Jove! Of course I go over, on account of this dame's atrocities never yet having failed to interest me, and I didn't think she'd fall down now. I felt strangely out of it, though, when I seen the costumes. Ma and sister had, from the top down, black velvet jockey caps; green velvet coats with gold buttons; white pique skirts, coming to the knee; black silk stockings; and neat black shoes with white spats. Brother had been abused the same, barring the white skirt, which left him looking like something out of a collection called The Dolls of All Nations.

"I saw right off that all these clothes must be necessary--they looked so careful and expensive. Yes, Sir; that lady would no more of went out beagling without being draped for it than she'd of gone steer hunting without a vanity-box lashed to her saddle horn.

"I sort of hung back with the awe-stricken help when the start was made. They was all out in front except the butler, who lurked in the entry looking like he'd passed a night of grief at the new-made grave of his mother.

"The beagles surged all over the place the minute they was let loose, and then made for down in the willows below the house. And, sure enough, they started a cottontail down there and went in for him keenly, followed by ma and brother and sister. Brother started to yell 'Yoicks! Yoicks!' But ma shut him off with a good deal of severity that caused him to blush at his words. It seems Yoicks is a cry you give at some other critical juncture in life. When beagles start you must yell 'Gone away!' in a clear, ringing voice. Brother meant well, but didn't know.

"Anyhow, they followed those pups, and I trailed along at a decent distance on my horse; and pretty soon they got the rabbit which had been fool enough to come round in a wide circle back to where it started from. Say! It was mere child's play for that plucky little band of nine dogs to clean up that rabbit. They never had a minute's fear of it and the rabbit didn't have the least chance of winning the fight, not at any stage. Yes, sir! any time you see nine beagles setting on a tuckered rabbit--I don't care how wild he is--you'll know how to put your money down.

"I never did see a rabbit put up a worse fight than that one did. I rode up to its fragments, and the old lady was saying how ripping it was and calling sister a mollycoddle, because here was sister crying like a baby over the rabbit's fate--a rabbit she'd never set eyes on before in her life. Brother didn't look like he had gone in keenly for the sport, either. He was kind of green and yellow, like one of these parties on shipboard about the time he's saying he don't feel the boat's motion the least bit; and, anyway, he's got a sure-fire remedy for it if anything does happen. I just kind of stood around, neutral and revolted.

"Pretty soon the pack beagles off again with glad cries; and this time, up on the hillside, what do they start but a little spike buck that has been down to a salt lick on the creek flat! They wasn't any more afraid of him than they had been of the rabbit and started to chase him out of the country. Of course they didn't do well after they got him interested. The last I saw of the race he was making 'em look like they was in reverse gear and backing up full speed. Anyway, that seemed to end the sport for the day, because the dogs and the buck must of been over near the county line in ten minutes. The old lady was mad and blamed it on the valet, who come up and had to take as sweet a roasting as you ever heard a man get from a lady word painter. It seems he'd ought to have taught 'em to ignore deer.

"Then I lied like a lady and said it was a ripping sport that I would sure go in keenly for if I had time; and we all went back to the house and sat down to what they called a hunt breakfast. Ma said at last her chits could hold up their heads in the world of sport and not be a reproach to her training. The chits looked very thoughtful, indeed. Sister still had red eyes and couldn't eat a mouthful of hunt breakfast, and brother just toyed with little dabs of it.

"Next day I learned the pack didn't get back till late that evening, straggling in one by one, and the valet having to go out and look for the last two with a lantern. Also, these last two had been treated brutally by some denizen of the wildwood. Rex II had darn near lost his eyesight and Lady Blessington was clawed something scandalous. Brother said mebbe a rabbit mad with hydrophobia had turned on 'em. He said it in hopeful tones, and sister cheered right up and said if these two had it they would give it to the rest of the pack, and shouldn't they all be shot at once?

"Mother said what jolly nonsense; that they'd merely been scratched by thorns. I thought, myself, that mebbe they'd gone out of their class and tackled a jack rabbit; but I didn't say it, seeing that the owner was sensitive. Afterward she showed me a lot of silver things her pets had won--eye-cups and custard dishes, and coffee urns and things, about a dozen, with their names engraved on 'em. She said it was very annoying to have 'em take after deer that way. What she wanted 'em to do was to butcher rabbits where parties in the right garments could stand and look on.

"Next day they tried again; and one fool rabbit was soon gone in for keenly to the renewed sound of sister's bitter sobs, and brother looking like he'd been in jail two years--no colour left at all in his face. But pretty soon the pack took up the scent of a deer again, and that was the end of another day's sport. Brother and sister looked glad and resumed their peaceful sports. He hunted butterflies with a net, and she set down and looked at birds through an opera glass and wrote down things about their personal appearance in a notebook. The old lady changed to her cowboy suit and went out and roped three steers--just to work her mad off, I guess.

"Well, this time the beagles not only limped in at a shocking hour of the night but three of the others had had their beauty marred by a demon rabbit or something. They had been licked very thoroughly, indeed; and the old lady now said it must be a grizzly bear, and brother and sister beamed on her and said: 'What a shame!' And would they hunt again next day? For the first time they seemed quite mad about the sport. Mother said they better wait till she went out and shot the grizzly, but I told her we hadn't had any grizzlies round here for years; so she said, all right, they could lick anything less than a grizzly. And they beagled again next day, with terrible and inspiring results, not only to Rex II and Lady Blessington again, but to two of the others that hadn't been touched before.

"This left only two of the pack that hadn't been horribly abused by some unknown varmint; so a halt had to be called for three days while Red Cross work was done. Brother and sister tried to look regretful and complained about this break in the ripping sport; but their manner was artificial. They spent the time riding peacefully round up in the cañon, pretending to look for the wild creature that had chewed their little pets. They come back one day and cheered their mother a whole lot by telling her the pack had been over the pass as far as the house of a worthy rancher, Mr. Floud by name. They said Mr. Floud didn't believe there was any bears round, and further said he greatly admired the beagles, even though at first they seriously annoyed his pet kitten.

"The old lady said this was ripping of Mr. Floud, to take it in such a sporting way, because many people in the past had tried to make all sorts of nasty rows when her pets had happened to kill their kittens. Brother said, yes; Mr. Floud took the whole thing in a true sporting way, and he hoped the pack would soon be well enough to hunt again. Right then I detected falsity in his manner; I couldn't make out what it was, but I knew he was putting something over on mother.

"Two days later the dogs was fit again, and another gay hunt was had, with a rabbit to the good in the first twenty minutes, and then the usual break, when they struck a deer scent. Brother said he'd follow on his horse this time and try to get whatever was bothering 'em. He didn't. He said he lost 'em. They crawled back at night, well chewed; and mother was now frantic.

"There had to be another three days in bed for the cunning little murderers, after which brother and sister both went out with 'em on horseback, with the same mysterious results--except that Rex II didn't get in till next day and looked like he'd come through a feed chopper. For the next hunt, four days after that, the old lady went, too, all of 'em on horseback; but the same slinking marauder got at the pack before they could come up with it, and two of 'em had to be brought back in arms. They all stopped here on the way home to tell about the mystery. Brother and sister was very cheerful and mad about the sport, but their manner was falser than ever. Mother says the pack is being ruined, and she wouldn't continue the sport, except it has roused the first gleam of interest her chits has ever showed in anything worth while. I caught the chits looking at each other in a guilty manner when she says this, and my curiosity wakes up. I says next time they go out I will be pleased to go with 'em; and the old lady thanks me and says mebbe I can solve this reprehensible mystery.

"In another three days they come by for me. The beagles was looking an awful lot different from what I had first seen 'em. They was not only beautifully scarred but they acted kind of timid and reproachful, and their yapping had a note of caution in it that I hadn't noticed before. So I got on my pony and went along to help probe the crime. We worked up the cañon trail and over the pass, with the pack staying meekly behind most of the time. Just the other side of the pass they actually got a rabbit, though not working with their old-time recklessness, I thought. Of course we had to stop and watch this. Brother looked the other way and sister just set there biting her lips, with an evil gleam in her pale-blue eyes. Not a beagle in the pack would have trusted himself alone with her at that minute if he'd known his business.

"Then we rode on down toward Cousin Egbert's shack, with nothing further happening and the pups staying back in a highly conservative manner. Brother says that yonder is the Mr. Floud's place he had spoken of, and ma wants to know if he, too, goes in for ranching, and I says yes, he's awfully keen about it; so she says we'll ride over and chat with him and perhaps he can suggest some solution of the mystery in hand. I said all right, and we ride up.

"Cousin Egbert is tipped back in a chair outside the door, reading a Sunday paper. Whenever he gets one up here he always reads it clean through, from murders to want ads. And he'd got into this about as far as the beauty hints and secrets of the toilet. Well, he was very polite and awkward, and asked us into his dinky little shack; and the old lady says she hears he is quite mad about ranching, and he says, Oh, yes--only it don't help matters any to get mad; and he finds a chair for her, and the rest of us set on stools and the bed; and just then she notices that the beagle pack has halted about thirty feet from the door, and some of 'em is milling and acting like they think of starting for home at once.

"So out she goes and orders the little pets up. They didn't want to come one bit; it seemed like they was afraid of something, but they was well disciplined and they finally crawled forward, looking like they didn't know what minute something cruel might happen.

"The old lady petted 'em and made 'em lie down, and asked Cousin Egbert if he'd ever seen better ones, or even as good; and he said No, ma'am; they was sure fine beetles. Then she begun to tell him about some wild animal that had been attacking 'em, a grizzly, or mebbe a mountain lion, with cubs; and he is saying in a very false manner that he can't think what would want to harm such playful little pets, and so on. All this time the pets is in fine attitudes of watchful waiting, and I'm just beginning to suspect a certain possibility when it actually happens.

"There was an open window high up in the log wall acrost from the door, and old Kate jumps up onto the sill from the outside. He was one fierce object, let me tell you; weighing about thirty pounds, all muscle, with one ear gone, and an eye missing that a porcupine quill got into, and a lot of fresh new battle scars. We all got a good look at him while he crouched there for a second, purring like a twelve-cylinder car and twitching his whiskers at us in a lazy way, like he wanted to have folks make a fuss over him. And then, all at once, catching sight of the dogs, he changed to a demon; his back up, his whiskers in a stiff tremble, and his half of a tail grown double in girth.

"I looked quick to the dogs, and they was froze stiff with horror for at least another second. Then they made one scramble for the open door, and Kate made a beautiful spring for the bunch, landing on the back of the last one with a yell of triumph. Mother shrieked, too, and we all rushed to the door to see one of the prettiest chases you'd want to look at, with old Kate handing out the side wipes every time he could get near one of the dogs. They fled down over the creek bank and a minute later we could see the pack legging it up the other side to beat the cars, losing Kate--I guess because he didn't like to get his hide wet.

"When the first shock of this wore off, here was silly old Egbert, in a weak voice, calling: 'Kitty, Kitty, Kitty! Here, Kitty! Here, Kitty!' Then we notice brother and sister. Brother is waving his hat in the air and yelling 'Yoicks!' and 'Gone away!' and 'Fair sport, by Jove!'--just like some crazy man; and sister, with her chest going up and down, is clapping her hands and yelling 'Goody! Goody! Goody!' and squealing with helpless laughter. Mother just stood gazing at 'em in horrible silence. Pretty soon they felt it and stopped, looking like a couple of kids that know it's spanking time.

"'So!' says mother. That's all she said--just, 'So!'

"But she stuffed the simple word with eloquence; she left it pregnant with meaning, as they say. Then she stalked loftily out and got on her horse, brother and sister slinking after her. I guess I slunk, too, though it was none of my doings. Cousin Egbert kind of sidled along, mumbling about Kitty:

"'Kitty was quite frightened of the pets first time he seen 'em; but someway to-day it seemed like he had lost much of his fear--seemed more like he had wanted to play with 'em, or something.'

"Nobody listened to the doddering old wretch, but I caught brother winking at him behind mother's back. Then we all rode off in lofty silence, headed by mother, who never once looked back to her late host, even if he was mad about ranching. We got up over the pass and the pack of ruined beagles begun to straggle out of the underbrush. A good big buck rabbit with any nerve could have put 'em all on the run again. You could tell that. They slunk along at the tail of the parade. I dropped out informally when it passed the place here. It seemed like something might happen where they'd want only near members of the family present.

"I don't hear anything from Broadmoor next day; so the morning after that I ride over to Cousin Egbert's to see if I couldn't get a better line on the recent tragedy. He was still on his Sunday paper, having finished an article telling that man had once been scaly, like a fish; and was just beginning the fashion notes, with pictures showing that the smart frock was now patterned like an awning. Old Kate was lying on a bench in the sun, trying to lick a new puncture he'd got in his chest.

"I started right in on the old reprobate. I said it was a pretty how-de-do if a distinguished lady amateur, trying to raise ranching to the dignity of a sport, couldn't turn loose a few prize beagles without having 'em taken for a hunt breakfast by a nefarious beast that ought to be in a stout cage in a circus this minute! I thought, of course, this would insult him; but he sunned right up and admitted that Kate was about half to three-quarters bobcat; and wasn't he a fine specimen? And if he could only get about eight more as good he'd have a pack of beagle-cats that would be the envy of the whole sporting world.

"'It ain't done!' I remarked, aiming to crush him.

"'It is, too!' Egbert says. 'I did it myself. Look what I already done, just with Kitty alone!'

"'How'd it start?' I asked him.

"'Easy! says he. 'They took Kate for a rabbit and Kate took them for rabbits. It was a mutual error. They found out theirs right soon; but I bet Kate ain't found out his, even to this day. I bet he thinks they're just a new kind of rabbit that's been started. The first day they broke in here he was loafin' round out in front, and naturally he started for 'em, though probably surprised to see rabbits travelling in a bunch. Also, they see Kate and start for him, which must of startled him good and plenty. He'd never had rabbits make for him before. He pulled up so quick he skidded. I could see his mind working. Don't tell me that cat ain't got brains like a human! He was saying to himself: "Is this here a new kind of rabbits, or is it a joke--or what? Mebbe I better not try anything rash till I find out."

"'They was still coming for him acrost the flat, with their tongues out; so he soopled himself up a bit with a few jumps and made for that there big down spruce. He lands on the trunk and runs along it to where the top begins. He has it all worked out. He's saying: "If this here is a joke, all right; but if it ain't a joke I better have some place back of me for a kind of refuge."

"'So up come these strange rabbits and started to jump for him on the trunk of the spruce; but it's pretty high and they can't quite make it. And in a minute they sort of suspicion something on their part, because Kate has rared his back and is giving 'em a line of abuse they never heard from any rabbit yet. Awful wicked it was, and they sure got puzzled. I could hear one of 'em saying: "Aw, come on! That ain't no regular rabbit; he don't look like a rabbit, and he don't talk like a rabbit, and he don't act like a rabbit!" Then another would say: "What of it? What do we care if he's a regular rabbit or not? Let's get him, anyway, and take him apart!"

"'So they all begin to jump again and can't quite make it till their leader says he'll show 'em a real jump. He backs off a little to get a run and lands right on the log. Then he wished he hadn't. Old Kate worked so quick I couldn't hardly follow it. In about three seconds this leader lands on his back down in the bunch, squealing like one of these Italian sopranos when the flute follows her up. He crawls off on his stomach, still howling, and I see he's had a couple of wipes over the eye, and one of his ears is shredded.

"'A couple of the others come over to ask him how it happened, and what he quit for, and did his foot slip; and he says: "Mark my words, gentlemen; we got our work cut out for us here. That animal is acting less and less like a rabbit every minute. He's more turbulent and he's got spurs on." He goes on talking this way while the others bark at Kate, and Kate dares any one of 'em to come on up there and have it out, man to man. Finally another lands on the tree trunk and gets what the first one got. I could see it this time. Kate done some dandy shortarm work in the clinches and hurled him off on his back like the other one; then he stands there sharpening his claws on the bark and grinning in a masterful way. He was saying: "You will, will you?"

"'Then one of these beetles must of said, "Come on, boys--all together now!" for four of 'em landed up on the trunk all to once. And Kate wasn't there. He'd had the top of this fallen tree at his back, and he kites up a limb about ten feet above their heads and stretches out for a rest, cool as anything, licking his paws and purring like he enjoyed the beautiful summer day, and wasn't everything calm and lovely? It was awful insulting the way he looked down on 'em, with his eyes half shut. And you never seen beetles so astonished in your life. They just couldn't believe their eyes, seeing a rabbit act that way! The leader limps over and says: "There! What did I tell you, smarties? I guess next time you'll take my word for it. I guess you can see plain enough now he ain't no rabbit, the way he skinned up that tree."

"'They calm down a mite at this, and one or two says they thought he was right from the first; and some others says: "Well, it wouldn't make no difference what he was, rabbit or no rabbit, if he'd just come down and meet the bunch of us fair and square; but the dirty coward is afraid to fight us, except one at a time." The leader is very firm, though. He tells 'em that if this here object ain't a rabbit they got no right to molest him, and if he is a rabbit he's gone crazy, and wouldn't be good to eat, anyway; so they better go find one that acts sensible. And he gets 'em away, all talking about it excitedly.

"'Well, sir, you wouldn't believe how tickled Kate was all that day. It was like he'd found a new interest in life. And next time these beetles come up they pull off another grand scrap. Kate laid for 'em just this side of the creek and let 'ern chase him back to his tree. He skun up three others that day, still pursuin' his cowardly tactics of fighting 'em one at a time, and retirin' to his perch when three or four would come at once. Also, when they give him up again and started off he come down and chased 'em to the creek bank, like you seen the other day, telling 'em to be sure and not forget the number, because he ain't had so much fun since he met up with a woodchuck. The next time they showed up he'd got so contemptuous of 'em that he'd leap down and engage one that had got separated from the pack. He had two of 'em darn' near out before they was rescued by their friends.

"'Then, a few days later, along comes the pack again--only this time they're being herded by the lad with the ginger-coloured whiskers. He gets off his horse and says how do I do, and what lovely weather, and how bracing the air is; and I says what pretty beetles he has; and he says it's ripping sport; and I says, yes; Kate has ripped up a number of 'em, but I hope he don't blame me none, because my Kitty has to defend himself. Say, this guy brightened up and like to took me off my feet! He grabs both my hands and shakes 'em warmly for a long time and says do I think my cat can put the whole bunch on the blink?--or words to that effect. And I says it's the surest thing in the world; but why? And he says, then the sooner the better, because it's a barbarous sport and every last beetle ought to be thoroughly killed; and when they are, in case his mother don't find out the crooked work, mebbe he'll be let to raise orchids or do something useful in the world, instead of frittering his life away in the vain pursuit of pleasure.

"'Oh, he was the chatty lad, all right! And I felt kind of sorry for him; so I says Kate would dearly love to wipe these beetles out one by one; and he says: 'Capital, by Jove!' And I call Kitty and we pull off another nice little scrap on the fallen tree, though it's hard to make the beetles take much interest in it now, except in the way of self-defense. Even at that, they're kept plenty occupied.

"'Say, this guy is the happiest you ever see one when Kate has about four more of 'em licked to a standstill in jigtime. He says he has one more favour to ask of me: Will I allow his sister to come up some day and see the lovely carnage? And I says, Sure! Kate will be glad to oblige any time. He says he'll fetch her up the first time the pack is able to get out again, and he keeps on chattering like a child that's found a new play-pretty.

"'I can't hardly get him off the place, he's so greatful to me. He tells me his biography and about how this here blond guy has been roughing him all over Europe and Asia, and how it had got to stop right here, because a man has a right to live his own life, after all; and then he branches off in a nutty way to tell me that he always takes a cold shower every morning, winter and summer, and he never could read a line of Sir Walter Scott, and why don't some genius invent a fountain pen that will work at all times? and so on, till it sounded delirious. But he left at last.

"'And we had some good ripping sport when him and sister come up. I never seen such a blood-thirsty female. She'd nearly laugh her head off when Kitty was gouging the eye out of one of these cunning little scamps. She said if I'd ever seen the nasty curs pile on to one poor defenseless little bunny I'd understand why she was so keen about my beetle-cat. That's what she called Kate.

"'Kate, he got kind of bored with the whole business after that. He hadn't actually eat one yet, and mebbe that was all that kept him going--wanting to see if they'd taste any better than regular rabbits. But you bet they knew now that Kate wasn't any kind of a rabbit. They didn't have any more arguments on that point--they knew darn' well he didn't have a drop of rabbit blood in his veins. Oh, he's some beetle-cat, all right!'

"That's Cousin Egbert for you! Can you beat him--changing round and being proud of this mixed marriage that he had formerly held to be a scandal!

"Well, I go back home, and here is mother waiting for me. And she's a changed woman. She's actually give up trying to make anything out of her chits, because after considerable browbeating and third-degree stuff, they've come through with the whole evil conspiracy--how they'd got her prize-winning beagles licked by a common cat that wouldn't be let into any bench show on earth! Her spirit was broke.

"'My poor son,' she says, 'I shall allow to go his silly way after this outrageous bit of double-dealing. I think it useless to strive further with him. He has not only confessed all the foul details, but he came brazenly out with the assertion that a man has a right to lead his own life--and he barely thirty!'

"She goes on to say that it's this terrible twentieth-century modernism that has infected him. She says that, first woman sets up a claim to live her own life, and now men are claiming the same right, even one as carefully raised and guarded as her boy has been; and what are we coming to? But, anyway, she did her best for him.

"Pretty soon Broadmoor was closed like you seen it to-day. Sister is now back in Boston, keeping tabs on orchestras and attending lectures on the higher birds; and brother at last has his orchid ranch somewhere down in California. He's got one pet orchid that I heard cost twelve thousand dollars--I don't know why. But he's very happy living his own life. The last I heard of mother she was exploring the headwaters of the Amazon River, hunting crocodiles and jaguars and natives, and so on.

"She was a good old sport, though. She showed that by the way she simmered down about Cousin Egbert's cat before she left. At first, she wanted to lay for it and put a bullet through its cowardly heart. Then she must of seen the laugh was on her, all right; for what did she do? Why, the last thing she done was to box up all these silver cups her beagles had won and send 'em over to Kate, in care of his owner--all the eye-cups and custard bowls, and so on. Cousin Egbert shows 'em off to every one.

"'Just a few cups that Kate won,' he'll say. 'I want to tell you he's some beetle-cat! Look what he's come up to--and out of nothing, you might say!'"

VIII

PETE'S B'OTHER-IN-LAW

On the Arrowhead Ranch it was noon by the bell that Lew Wee loves to clang. It may have been half an hour earlier or later on other ranches, for Lew Wee is no petty precisian. Ma Pettengill had ridden off at dawn; and, rather than eat luncheon in solitary state, I joined her retainers for the meal in the big kitchen, which is one of my prized privileges. A dozen of us sat at the long oilcloth-covered table and assuaged the more urgent pangs of hunger in a haste that was speechless and far from hygienic. No man of us chewed the new beef a proper number of times; he swallowed intently and reached for more. It was rather like twenty minutes for dinner at what our railway laureates call an eating house. Lew Wee shuffled in bored nonchalance between range and table. It was an old story to him.

The meal might have gone to a silent end, though moderating in pace; but we had with us to-day--as a toastmaster will put it--the young veterinary from Spokane. This made for talk after actual starvation had been averted--fragmentary gossip of the great city; of neighbouring ranches in the valley, where professional duty had called him; of Adolph, our milk-strain Durham bull, whose indisposition had brought him several times to Arrowhead; and then of Squat, our youngest cowboy, from whose fair brow the intrepid veterinary, on his last previous visit, had removed a sizable and embarrassing wen with what looked to me like a pair of pruning shears.

The feat had excited much uncheerful comment among Squat's _confrères_, bets being freely offered that he would be disfigured for life, even if he survived; and what was the sense of monkeying with a thing like that when you could pull your hat down over it? Of course you couldn't wear a derby with it; but no one but a darned town dude would ever want to wear a derby hat, anyway, and the trouble with Squat was, he wished to be pretty. It was dollars to doughnuts the thing would come right back again, twice as big as ever, and better well enough alone. But Squat, who is also known as Timberline, and is, therefore, a lanky six feet three, is young and sensitive and hopeful, and the veterinary is a matchless optimist; and the thing had been brought to a happy conclusion.

Squat, being now warmly urged, blushingly turned his head from side to side that all might remark how neatly his scar had healed. The veterinary said it had healed by first intention; that it was as pretty a job as he'd ever done on man or beast; and that Squat would be more of a hit then ever with the ladies because of this interesting chapter in his young life. Then something like envy shone in the eyes of those who had lately disparaged Squat for presuming to thwart the will of God; I detected in more than one man there the secret wish that he had something for this ardent expert to eliminate. Squat continued to blush pleasurably and to bolt his food until another topic diverted this entirely respectful attention from him. The veterinary asked if we had heard about the Indian ruction down at Kulanche last night--Kulanche Springs being the only pretense to a town between our ranch and Red Gap--a post-office, three general stores, a score of dwellings, and a low drinking place known as The Swede's. The news had not come to us; so the veterinary obliged. A dozen Indians, drifting into the valley for the haying about to begin, had tarried near Kulanche and bought whiskey of the Swede. The selling of this was a lawless proceeding and the consumption of it by the purchasers had been hazardous in the extreme. Briefly, the result had been what is called in newspaper headlines a stabbing affray. I quote from our guest's recital:

"Then, after they got calmed down and hid their knives, and it looked peaceful again, they decided to start all over; but the liquor was out, so that old scar-faced Pyann jumps on a pony and rides over from the camp for a fresh supply. He pulled up out in front of the Swede's and yelled for three bottles to be brought out to him, pronto! If he'd sneaked round to the back door and whispered he'd have got it all right, but this was a little too brash, because there were about a dozen men in the bar and the Swede was afraid to sell an Injin whiskey so openly. All he could do was go to the door and tell this pickled aborigine that he never sold whiskey to Injins and to get the hell out of there! Pyann called the Swede a liar and some other things, mentioning dates, and started to climb off his pony, very ugly.

"The Swede wasn't going to argue about it, because we'd all come out in front to listen; so he pulled his gun and let it off over Pyann's head; and a couple of the boys did the same thing, and that started the rest--about six others had guns--till it sounded like a bunch of giant crackers going off. Old Pyann left in haste, all right. He was flattened out on his pony till he looked like a plaster.

"We didn't hear any more of him last night, but coming up here this morning I found out he'd done a regular Paul Revere ride to save his people; he rode clear up as far as that last camp, just below here, on your place, yelling to every Injin he passed that they'd better take to the brush, because the whites had broken out at Kulanche. At that, the Swede ought to be sent up, knowing they'll fight every time he sells them whiskey. Two of these last night were bad cut in this rumpus."

"Yes; and he'd ought to be sent up for life for selling it to white men, too--the kind he sells." This was Sandy Sawtelle, speaking as one who knew and with every sign of conviction. "It sure is enterprising whiskey. Three drinks of it make a decent man want to kill his little golden-haired baby sister with an axe. Say, here's a good one--lemme tell you! I remember the first time, about three, four years ago--"

The speaker was interrupted--it seemed to me with intentional rudeness. One man hurriedly wished to know who did the cutting last night; another, if the wounded would recover; and a third, if Pete, an aged red vassal of our own ranch, had been involved. Each of the three flashed a bored glance at Sandy as he again tried for speech:

"Well, as I was saying, I remember the first time, about three, four years ago--"

"If old Pete was down there I bet his brother-in-law did most of the knifework," put in Buck Devine firmly.

It was to be seen that they all knew what Sandy remembered the first time and wished not to hear it again. Others of them now sought to stifle the memoir, while Sandy waited doggedly for the tide to ebb. I gathered that our Pete had not been one of the restive convives, he being known to have spent a quiet home evening with his mahala and their numerous descendants, in their camp back of the wood lot; I also gathered that Pete's brother-in-law had committed no crime since Pete quit drinking two years before. There was veiled mystery in these allusions to the brother-in-law of Pete. It was almost plain that the brother-in-law was a lawless person for whose offenses Pete had more than once been unjustly blamed. I awaited details; but meantime--

"Well, as I was saying, I remember the first time, about three, four years ago--"

Sandy had again dodged through a breach in the talk, quite as if nothing had happened. Buck Devine groaned as if in unbearable anguish. The others also groaned as if in unbearable anguish. Only the veterinary and I were polite.

"Oh, let him get it offen his chest," urged Buck wearily. "He'll perish if he don't--having two men here that never heard him tell it." He turned upon the raconteur, with a large sweetness of manner: "Excuse me, Mr. Sawtelle! Pray do go on with your thrilling reminiscence. I could just die listening to you. I believe you was wishing to entertain the company with one of them anecdotes or lies of which you have so rich a store in that there peaked dome of yours. Gents, a moment's silence while this rare personality unfolds hisself to us!"

"Say, lemme tell you--here's a good one!" resumed the still placid Sandy. "I remember the first time, about three, four years ago, I ever went into The Swede's. A stranger goes in just ahead of me and gets to the bar before I do, kind of a solemn-looking, sandy-complected little runt in black clothes.

"'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 glass 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 glass; 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 glass and the whisk broom over in front of me, but I says: 'No, thanks! I just come in to pass 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 passing me the same bottle and the same broom, and me saying: 'Oh, I just come in to pass 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 passell 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 glass 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 flashing 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.

It should perhaps be frankly admitted that Uncle Abner is not the blacksmith of song and story and lithographed art treasure, suitable for framing. That I have never beheld this traditional smith--the rugged, upstanding tower of brawn with muscles like iron bands--is beside the point. I have not looked upon all the blacksmiths in the world, and he may exist. But Uncle Abner can't pose for him. He weighs a hundred and twenty pounds without his hammer, is lean to scrawniness, and his arms are those of the boys you see at the track meet of Lincoln Grammar School Number Seven. The mutilated derby hat he now wore, a hat that had been weathered from plum colour to a poisonous green--a shred of peacock feather stuck in the band--lent his face no dignity whatever.

In truth, his was not an easy face to lend dignity to. It would still look foolish, no matter what was lent it. He has a smug fringe of white curls about the back and sides of his head, the beard of a prophet, and the ready speech of a town bore. The blacksmith we read of can look the whole world in the face, fears not any man, and would far rather do honest smithing any day in the week--except Sunday--than live the life of sinful ease that Uncle Abner was leading for the moment.

Uncle Abner may have feared no man; but he feared a woman. It was easy to see this as he chatted the golden hours away to me. His pale eyes seldom left the road where it came over a distant hill. When the woman did arrive--Oh, surely the merry clang of the hammer on the anvil would be heard in Abner's shop, where he led a dog's life. But, for a time at least--

"So he's one of these tough murderers, is he?"

"You said it! Always a-creating of disturbances up on the reservation, where he rightly belongs. Mebbe that's why they let him go off. Anyway, he never stays there. Even in his young days they tell me he wouldn't stay put. He'd disappear for a month and always come back with a new wife. Talk about your Mormons! One time they sent out a new agent to the reservation, and he hears talk back and forth of Pete philandering thisaway; and he had his orders from the Gov'ment at Washington, D.C., to stamp out this here poly-gamy--or whatever you call it; so he orders Pete up on the carpet and says to him: 'Look here now, Pete! You got a regular wife, ain't you?' Pete says sure he has; and how could he say anything else--the old liar! 'Well,' says Mr. Agent, 'I want you to get this one regular wife of yours and lead a decent, orderly home life with her; and don't let me hear no more scandalous reports about your goings on.'

"Pete says all right; but he allows he'll have to have help in getting her back home, because she's got kind of antagonistic and left him. The agent says he'll put a stop to that if Pete'll just point her out. So they ride down about a mile from the agency to a shack where they's a young squaw out in front graining a deerhide and minding her own business. She looked up when they come and started to jaw Pete something fierce; but the agent tells her the Gov'ment frowns on wives running off, and Pete grabbed her; and the agent he helps, with her screeching and biting and clawing like a female demon. The agent is going to see that Pete has his rights, even if it don't seem like a joyous household; and finally they get her scrambled onto Pete's horse in front of him and off they go up the trail. The agent yells after 'em that Pete is to remember that this is his regular wife and he'd better behave himself from now on.

"And then about sunup next morning this agent is woke up by a pounding on his door. He goes down and here's Pete clawed to a frazzle and whimpering for the law's protection because his squaw has chased him over the reservation all night trying to kill him. She'd near done it, too. They say old Pete was so scared the agent had to soothe him like a mother."

Uncle Abner paused to relight his pipe, meantime negotiating a doubly vigilant survey of the distant road. But I considered that he had told me nothing to the discredit of Pete, and now said as much.

"You couldn't blame the man for wanting his wife back, could you?" I demanded. "Of course he might have been more tactful."

"Tactful's the word," agreed Uncle Abner cordially. "You see, this wasn't Pete's wife at all. She was just a young squaw he'd took a fancy to."

"Oh!" Nothing else seemed quite so fitting to say.

"'Nother time," resumed the honest blacksmith, "the Gov'ment at Washington, D.C., sent out orders for all the Injun kids to be sent off to school. Lots of the fathers made trouble about this, but Pete was the worst of all--the old scoundrel! The agent said to him would Pete send his kids peaceful; and Pete said not by no means. So the agent says in that case they'll have to take 'em by force. Pete says he'll be right there a-plenty when they're took by force. So next day the agent and his helper go down to Pete's tepee. It's pitched up on a bank just off the road and they's a low barrier of brush acrost the front of it. They look close at this and see the muzzle of a rifle peeking down at 'em; also, they can hear little scramblings and squealings of about a dozen or fourteen kids in the tepee that was likely nestled up round the old murderer like a bunch of young quail.

"Well, they was something kind of cold and cheerless about the muzzle of this rifle poked through the brush at 'em; so the agent starts in and makes a regular agent speech to Pete. He says the Great White Father at Washington, D.C., has wished his children to be give an English education and learnt to write a good business hand, and all like that; and read books, and so on; and the Great White Father will be peeved if Pete takes it in this rough way. And the agent is disappointed in him, too, and will never again think the same of his old friend, and why can't he be nice and submit to the decencies of civilization--and so on--a lot of guff like that; but all the time he talks this here rifle is pointing right into his chest, so you can bet he don't make no false motions.

"At last, when he's told Pete all the reasons he can think up and guesses mebbe he's got the old boy going, he winds up by saying: 'And now what shall I tell the Great White Father at Washington you say to his kind words?' Old Pete, still not moving the rifle a hair's breadth, he calls out: 'You tell the Great White Father at Washington to go to hell!' Yes, sir; just like that he says it; and I guess that shows you what kind of a murderer he is. And what I allus say is, 'what's the use of spending us taxpayers' good money trying to educate trash like that, when they ain't got no sense of decency in the first place, and the minute they learn to talk English they begin to curse and swear as bad as a white man? They got no wish to improve their condition, which is what I allus have said and what I allus will say.

"Anyway, this agent didn't waste no more time on Pete's brats. He come right away from there, though telling his helper it was a great pity they couldn't have got a good look into the tepee, because then they'd have known for the first time just what kids round there Pete really considered his. Of course he hadn't felt he should lay down his life in the interests of this trifling information, and I don't blame him one bit. I wouldn't have done it myself. You can't tell me a reservation with Pete on it would be any nice place. Look at the old crook now, still lamming that axe round to beat the cars because he thinks he's being watched! I bet he'll be mad down to his moccasins when he finds out the Old Lady's been off all day."

Uncle Abner yawned and stretched his sun-baked form with weary rectitude. Then he looked with pleased dismay into the face of his silver watch.

"Now, I snum! Here she's two-thirty! Don't it beat all how time flits by, as it were, when you meet a good conversationalist and get started on various topics! Well, I guess like as not I better amble along over toward the little shop and see if they ain't some little thing to be puttered at round there. Yes, sir; all play and no work makes Jack a dull boy, as the saying is."

The honest fellow achieved a few faltering paces in the general direction of his shop. Then he turned brightly.

"A joke's a joke, all right; but, after all, I hate to see old Pete working hisself into the grave that way, even if he ain't a regular human being. Suppose you loaf over there and put him wise that the Madam's been off the place since sunup. The laugh's on him enough already."

Which showed that Uncle Abner had not really a bad heart. And I did even as he had said.

* * * * *

Pete was instantly stilled by my brief but informing speech. He leaned upon his axe and gazed at me with shocked wonder. The face of the American Indian is said to be unrevealing--to be a stoic mask under which his emotions are ever hidden. For a second time this day I found tradition at fault. Pete's face was lively and eloquent under his shock of dead-black hair--dead black but for half a dozen gray or grayish strands, for Pete's eighty years have told upon him, even if he is not yet sufficiently gray at the temples to be a hero in a magazine costing over fifteen cents. His face is a richly burnished mahogany and tells little of his years until he smiles; then from brow to pointed chin it cracks into a million tiny wrinkles, an intricate network of them framing his little black eyes, which are lashless, and radiating from the small mouth to the high cheek bones of his race.

His look as he eyed me became utter consternation; then humour slowly lightened the little eyes. He lifted the eyes straight into the glare of the undimmed sun; nor did they blink as they noted the hour. "My good gosh!" he muttered; then stalked slowly round the pile of stove wood that had been spreading since morning. He seemed aggrieved--yet humorously aggrieved--as he noted its noble dimensions. He cast away the axe and retrieved some outflung sticks, which he cunningly adjusted to the main pile to make it appear still larger to the casual eye.

"My good gosh!" he muttered again. "My old mahala she tell me Old Lady Pettengill go off early this morning; but I think she make one big mistake. Now what you know about that?" He smiled winningly now and became a very old man indeed, the smile lighting the myriad minute wrinkles that instantly came to life. Again he ruefully surveyed the morning's work. "I think that caps the climax," said he, and grimanced humorous dismay for the entertainment of us both.

I opened my cigarette case to him. Like his late critic, Pete availed himself of two, though he had not the excuse of a pipe to be filled. One he coyly tucked above his left ear and one he lighted. Then he sat gracefully back upon his heels and drew smoke into his innermost recesses, a shrunken little figure of a man in a calico shirt of gay stripes, faded blue overalls, and shoes that were remarkable as ruins. With a pointed chip in the slender fingers of one lean brown hand--a narrow hand of quite feminine delicacy--he cleared the ground of other chips and drew small figures in the earth.

"Some of your people cut up in a fight down at Kulanche last night," I remarked after a moment of courteous waiting.

"Mebbe," said Pete, noncommittal.

"Were you down there?"

"I never kill a man with a knife," said Pete; "that ain't my belief."

He left an opening that tempted, but I thought it wise to ignore that for the moment.

"You an old man, Pete?"

"Mebbe."

"How old?"

"Oh, so-so."

"You remember a long time ago--how long?"

He drew a square in his cleared patch of earth, subdivided it into little squares, and dotted each of these in the centre before he spoke.

"When Modocs have big soldier fight."

"You a Modoc?"

"B'lieve me!"

"When Captain Jack fought the soldiers over in the Lava Beds?"

"Some fight--b'lieve me!" said Pete, erasing his square and starting a circle.

"You fight, too?"

"Too small; I do little odd jobs--when big Injin kill soldier I skin um head."

I begged for further items, but Pete seemed to feel that he had been already verbose. He dismissed the historic action with a wise saying:

"Killing soldiers all right; but it don't settle nothing." He drew a triangle.

Indelicately then I pried into his spiritual life.

"You a Christian, Pete?"

"Injin-Christian," he amended--as one would say "Progressive-Republican."

"Believe in God?"

"Two." This was a guarded admission; I caught his side glance.

"Which ones?" I asked it cordially; and Pete smiled as one who detects a brother liberal in theology.

"Injin God; Christian God. Injin God go like this--" He brushed out his latest figure and drew a straight line a foot long. And Christian God go so--he drew a second straight line perpendicular to the first. I was made to see the line of his own God extending over the earth some fifty feet above its surface, while the line of the Christian God went straight and endlessly into the heavens. "Injin God stay close--Christian God go straight up. Whoosh!" He looked toward the zenith to indicate the vanishing line. "I think mebbe both O.K. You think both O.K.?"

"Mebbe," I said.

Pete retraced the horizontal line of his own God and the perpendicular line of the other.

"Funny business," said he tolerantly.

"Funny business," I echoed. And then--the moment seeming ripe for intimate personal research: "Pete, how about that brother-in-law of yours? Is he a one-God Christian or a two-God, like you?"

He hurriedly brushed out his lines, flashed me one of his uneasy side glances, and seemed not to have heard my question. He sprang lightly from his heels, affected to scan a murky cloud-bank to the south, ignited his second cigarette from the first, and seemed relieved by the actual diversion of Laura, his present lawful consort, now plodding along the road just outside the fence.

Laura is ponderous and billowy, and her moonlike face of rusty bronze is lined to show that she, too, has gone down a little into the vale of years. She was swathed in many skirts, her shoulders enveloped by a neutral-tinted shawl, and upon her head was a modist toque of light straw, garlanded with pink roses. This may have been her hunt constume, for the carcasses of two slain rabbits swung jauntily from her girdle. She undulated by us with no sign. Pete's glistening little eyes lingered in appraisal upon her noble rotundities and her dangling quarry. Then, with a graceful flourish of the new cigarette, he paid tribute to the ancient fair.

"That old mahala of mine, she not able to chew much now; but she's some swell chicken--b'lieve me!"

I persisted in the impertinence he had sought to turn.

"How about this brother-in-law of yours, Pete?"

Again he was deaf. He picked up his axe, appearing to weigh the resumption of his task against a reply to this straight question. He must have found the alternative too dreadful; he leaned upon the axe, thus winning something of the dignity of labour, with none of its pains, and grudgingly asked:

"Mebbe some liars tell you in conversation about that old b'other-in-law?"

"Of course! Many nice people tell me every day. They tell me all about him. I rather hear you tell me. Is he a Christian?"

"He's one son-of-gun, pure and simple--that old feller. He caps the climax."

"Yes; I know all about that. He's a bad man. I hear everything about him. Now you tell me again. You can tell better than liars."

"One genuine son-of-gun!" persisted Pete, shrewdly keeping to general terms.

"Oh, very well!" I rose from the log I was sitting on, yawning my indifference. "I know everything he ever did. Other people tell me all the time."

I moved off a few steps under the watchful side glance. It worked. One of Pete's slim, womanish hands fluttered up in a movement of arrest.

"Those liars tell you about one time he shoot white man off horse going by?"

"Certainly!"

"That white man still have smallpox to give all Injins he travel to; so they go 'n' vote who kill him off quick, and my b'other-in-law he win it."

I tried to look as if this were a bit of stale gossip.

"Then whites raise hell to say Pete he do same. What you know about that? My old b'other-in-law send word he do same--twenty, fifty Injin witness tell he said so--and now he gon' hide far off. Dep'ty sheriff can't find him. That son-of-gun come back next year, raise big fight over one span mules with Injin named Walter that steal my mules out of pasture; and Walter not get well from it--so whites say yes, old Pete done that same killing scrape to have his mules again; plain as the nose on the face old Pete do same. But I catch plenty Injin witness see my b'other-in-law do same, and I think they can't catch him another time once more, because they look in all places he ain't. I think plenty too much trouble he make all time for me--perform something not nice and get found out about it; and all people say, Oh, yes--that old Pete he's at tricks again; he better get sent to Walla Walla, learn some good trade in prison for eighteen years. That b'other-in-law cap the climax! He know all good place to hide from dep'ty sheriff, so not be found when badly wanted--the son-of-gun!"

Pete's face now told that, despite the proper loathing inspired by his misdeeds, this brother-in-law compelled a certain horrid admiration for his gift of elusiveness.

"What's your brother-in-law's name?"

Pete deliberated gravely.

"In my opinion his name Edward; mebbe Sam, mebbe Charlie; I think more it's Albert."

"Well, what about that next time he broke out?"

"Whoosh! Damn no-good squaw man get all Injins drunk on whiskey; then play poker with four aces. 'What you got? No good--four aces--hard luck--deal 'em up!'" Pete's flexible wrists here flashed in pantomime. "Pretty soon Injin got no mules, no blanket, no spring wagon, no gun, no new boots, no nine dollars my old mahala gets paid for three bushel wild plums from Old Lady Pettengill to make canned goods of--only got one big sick head from all night; see four aces, four kings, four jacks. 'What you got, Pete? No good. Full house here. Hard luck--my deal. Have another drink, old top!'"

"Well, what did your brother-in-law do when he heard about this?"

"Something!"

"Shoot?"

"Naw; got no gun left. Choke him on the neck--I think this way."

The supple hands of Pete here clutched his corded throat, fingertips meeting at the back, and two potent thumbs uniting in a sinister pressure upon his Adam's apple. To further enlarge my understanding he contorted his face unprettily. From rolling eyes and outthrust tongue it was apparent that the squaw man had survived long enough to regret the inveteracy of his good luck at cards.

"Then what?"

"Man tell you before?" He eyed me with frank suspicion.

"Certainly; you tell, too!"

"That b'other-in-law he win everything back this poor squaw man don't need no more, and son-of-gun beat it quick; so all liars say Old Pete turn that trick, but can't prove same, because my b'other-in-law do same in solitude. And old judge say: 'Oh, well, can't prove same in courthouse, and only good squaw man is dead squaw man; so what-the-bad-place!' I think mebbe."

"Go on; what about that next time?"

"You know already," said Pete firmly.

"You tell, too."

He pondered this, his keen little eyes searching my face as he pensively fondled the axe.

"You know about this time that son-of-gun go 'n' kill a bright lawyer in Red Gap? I think that cap the climax!"

"Certainly, I know!" This with bored impatience.

"I think, then, you tell me." His seamed face was radiant with cunning.

"What's the use? You know it already."

He countered swiftly:

"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 astonishingly. 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 shirt had gone for a polychrome and trailing tea gown, black satin slippers, flashing 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 assembled, 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 fashion 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 massed at the lower end of the table, she declared they must all be scrapped, 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 illustrations, about Cervera's fleet being bottled up in the Harbour of Santiago. I bet he's got Godey'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 hell 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 nobody 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 assassin 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.

"'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 glass 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 hassock 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 passenger agent that took 'em East put 'em up at one of the big hotels all right, but he subjects 'em to hardships 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 passenger 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 vanishing 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 ship 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?

"They locked him up and Judge Ballard appointed J. Waldo Snyder to defend him. He was a new young lawyer from the East that had just come to Red Gap, highly ambitious and full of devices for showing that parties couldn't have been in their right mind when they committed the deed--see the State against Jamstucker, New York Reports Number 23, pages 19 to 78 inclusive.

"Oh, he told me all about it up in his office one day--how he was going to get Pete off. Ain't lawyers the goods, though! And doctors? This J.W. Snyder had a doctor ready to swear that Pete was nutty when he fired the shot, even if not before nor after. When I was a kid at school, back in Fredonia, New York State, we used to have debates about which does the most harm--fire or water? Nowadays I bet they'd have: Which does the most harm--doctors or lawyers? Well, anyway, there Pete was in jail--"

"Please tell in your own simple words just how this trouble began," I broke in. "What did Pete fire the shot for and who stopped it? Now then!"

"What! Don't you know about that? Well, well! So you never heard about Pete sending this medicine man over the one-way trail? I'll have to tell you, then. It was three years ago. Pete was camped about nine miles the other side of Kulanche, on the Corporation Ranch, and his little year-old boy was took badly sick. I never did know with what. Diphtheria, I guess. And I got to tell you Pete is crazy about babies. Always has been. Thirty years ago, when my own baby hadn't been but a few weeks born, Lysander John had to be in Red Gap with a smashed leg and arm, and I was here alone with Pete for two months of one winter. Say, he was better than any trained nurse with both of us, even if my papoose was only a girl one! Folks used to wonder afterward if I hadn't been afraid with just Pete round. Good lands! If they'd ever seen him cuddle that mite and sing songs to it in Injin about the rain and the grass! Anyway, I got to know Pete so well that winter I never blamed him much for what come off.

"Well, this yearling of his got bad and Pete was in two minds. He believed in white doctors with his good sense, but he believed in Injin doctors with his superstition, which was older. So he tried to have one of each. There was an old rogue of a medicine man round here then from the reservation up north. He'd been doing a little work at haying on the Corporation, but he was getting his main graft selling the Injins charms and making spells over their sick; a crafty old crook playing on their ignorance--understand? And Pete, having got the white doctor from Kulanche, thought he'd cinch matters by getting the medicine man, too. At that, I guess one would of been about as useful as the other, the Kulanche doctor knowing more about anthrax and blackleg than he did about sick Injin babies.

"The medicine man sees right off how scared Pete is for his kid and thinks here's a chance to make some big money. He looks at the little patient and says yes, he can cure him, sure; but it'll be a hard job and he can't undertake it unless Pete comes through with forty dollars and his span of mules. But Pete ain't got forty dollars or forty cents, and the Kulanche doctor has got to the mules already, having a lien on 'em for twenty-five.

"Pete hurried over and put the proposition up to me. He says his little chief is badly sick and he's got a fine white doctor, but will I stake him to enough to get this fine Injin doctor?--thus making a cure certain. Well, I tore into the old fool for wanting to let this depraved old medicine man tamper with his baby, and I warned him the Kulanche doctor probably wasn't much better. Then I tell him he's to send down for the best doctor in Red Gap at my expense and keep him with the child till it's well. I tell him he can have the whole ranch if it would cure his child, but not one cent for the Injin.

"Well, the poor boy is about half convinced I'm right, but he's been an Injin too long to believe it all through. He went off and sent for the Red Gap doctor, but he can't resist making another try for the Injin one; and that old scoundrel holds out for his price. Pete wants him to wait for his pay till haying is over; but he won't because he thinks Pete can get the money from me now if he really has to have it. Pete must of been crazy for fair about that time.

"'All right,' says he; 'you can cure my little chief?'

"The crook says he can if the money is in his hand.

"'All right,' says Pete again; 'but if my little chief dies something bad is going to happen to you.'

"That's about all they ever found out concerning this threat of Pete's, though another Injin who heard it said that Pete said his brother-in-law would make the trouble--not Pete himself. Which was likely true enough.

"Pete's little chief died the night the Red Gap doctor got up here. Ten minutes later this medicine man had hitched up his team, loaded his plunder into a wagon, and was pouring leather into his horses to get back home quick. He knew Pete never talks just to hear himself talk. They found him about thirty miles on his way--slumped down in the wagon bed, his team hitched by the roadside. There had been just one careful shot. As he hadn't been robbed--he had over" a hundred dollars in gold on him--it pointed a mite too strong at Pete after his threat.

"A deputy sheriff come up. Pete said his brother-in-law had been hanging round lately and had talked very dangerous about the medicine man. He said the brother-in-law had probably done the job. But Pete had pulled this too often before when in difficulties. The deputy said he'd better come along down to Red Gap and tell the district attorney about it. Pete said all right and crawled into his tepee for his coat and hat--crawled right on out the back and into the brush while the deputy rolled a cigarette.

"That was when he joined this bunch of noble redmen to advertise the vanishing romance of the Great West--being helped out of the country, I shouldn't wonder, by some lawless old hound that had feelings for him and showed it when he come along in the night to the ranch where he'd nursed her and her baby. They looked for him a little while, then dropped it; in fact, everybody was kind of glad he'd got off and kind of satisfied that he'd put this bad Injin, with his skull-duggery, over the big jump.

"Then he got homesick, like I told you, and showed up here at the door; and I saw it was better for him to give himself up and get out of it by fair and legal means. Now! You got it straight that far?"

I nodded.

"So Pete took my advice, and a couple days later I hurried down to Red Gap and had a talk with Judge Ballard and the district attorney. The judge said it had been embarrassing to justice to have my old Injin walk in on 'em, because every one knew he was guilty. Why couldn't he of stayed up here where the keen-eyed officers of the law could of pretended not to know he was? And the old fool was only making things worse with his everlasting chatter about his brother-in-law, every one knowing there wasn't such a person in existence--old Pete having had dozens of every kind of relation in the world but a brother-in-law. But they're going to have this bright young lawyer defend him, and they have hopes.

"Then I talked some. I said it was true that everybody knew Pete bumped off this old crook that had it coming to him, but they could never prove it, because Pete had come to my place and set up with me all night, when I had lumbago or something, the very night this crime was done thirty-odd miles distant by some person or persons unknown--except it could be known they had good taste about who needed killing.

"At this Judge Ballard jumps up and calls me an old liar and shook hands warmly with me; and Cale Jordan, that was district attorney then, says if Mrs. Pettengill will give him her word of honour to go on the witness stand and perjure herself to this effect then he don't see no use of even putting Kulanche County, State of Washington, to the expense of a trial, the said county already being deep in the hole for its new courthouse--but for mercy's sake to stop the old idiot babbling about his brother-in-law, that every one knows he never had one, because such a joke is too great an affront to the dignity of the law in such cases made and provided--to wit: tell the old fool to say nothing except 'No, he never done it.' And he shakes hands with me, too, and says he'll have an important talk with Myron Bughalter, the sheriff.

"I says that's the best way out of it, being myself a heavy taxpayer; and I go see this Snyder lawyer, and then over to the jail and get into Pete's cell, where he's having a high old time with a sack of peppermint candy and a copy of the Scientific American. I tell him to cut out the brother-in-law stuff and just say 'No' to any question whatever. He said he would, and I went off home to rest up after my hard ride.

"Judge Ballard calls that night and says everything is fixed. No use putting the county to the expense of a trial when Pete has such a classy perjured alibi as I would give him. Myron Bughalter is to go out of the jail in a careless manner at nine-thirty that night, leaving all cells unlocked and the door wide open so Pete can make his escape without doing any damage to the new building. It seems the only other prisoner is old Sing Wah, that they're willing to save money on, too. He'd got full of perfumed port and raw gin a few nights before, announced himself as a prize-hatchet man, and started a tong war in the laundry of one of his cousins. But Sing was sober now and would stay so until the next New Year's; so they was going to let him walk out with Pete. The judge said Pete would probably be at the Arrowhead by sunup, and if he'd behave himself from now on the law would let bygones be bygones. I thanked the judge and went to bed feeling easy about old Pete.

"But at seven the next morning I'm waked up by the telephone--wanted down to the jail in a hurry. I go there soon as I can get a drink of hot coffee and find that poor Myron Bughalter is having his troubles. He'd got there at seven, thinking, of course, to find both his prisoners gone; and here in the corridor is Pete setting on the chest of Sing Wah, where he'd been all night, I guess! He tells Myron he's a fool sheriff to leave his door wide open that way, because this bad Chinaman tried to walk out as soon as he'd gone, and would of done so it Pete hadn't jumped him.

"It leaves Myron plenty embarrassed, but he finally says to Pete he can go free, anyway, now, for being such an honest jailbird; and old Sing Wah can go, too, having been punished enough by Pete's handling. Sing Wah slides out quickly enough at this, promising to send Myron a dozen silk handkerchiefs and a pound of tea. But not Pete. No, sir! He tells Myron he's give himself up to be tried, and he wants that trial and won't budge till he gets it.

"Then Myron telephoned for the judge and the district attorney, and for me. We get there and tell Pete to beat it quick. But the old mule isn't going to move one step without that trial. He's fled back to his cell and stands there as dignified as if he was going to lay a cornerstone. He's a grave rebuke to the whole situation, as you might say. Then the Judge and Cale go through some kind of a hocus-pocus talk, winding up with both of them saying 'Not guilty!' in a loud voice; and Myron says to Pete: 'There! You had your trial; now get out of my jail this minute.'

"But canny old Pete is still balking. He says you can't have a trial except in the courthouse, which is upstairs, and they're trying to cheat a poor old Injin. He's talking loud by this time, and Judge Ballard says, all right, they must humour the poor child of Nature. So Myron takes Pete by the wrist in a firm manner--though Pete's insisting he ought to have the silver handcuffs on him--and marches him out the jail door, round to the front marble steps of the new courthouse, up the steps, down the marble hall and into the courtroom, with the judge and Cale Jordan and me marching behind.

"We ain't the whole procession, either. Out in front of the jail was about fifteen of Pete's friends and relatives, male and female, that had been hanging round for two days waiting to attend his coming-out party. Mebbe that's why Pete had been so strong for the real courthouse, wanting to give these friends something swell for their trouble. Anyway, these Injins fall in behind us when we come out and march up into the courtroom, where they set down in great ecstasy. Every last one of 'em has a sack of peppermint candy and a bag of popcorn or peanuts, and they all begin to eat busily. The steam heat had been turned on and that hall of justice in three minutes smelt like a cheap orphan asylum on Christmas-morning.

"Then, before they can put up another bluff at giving Pete his trial, with Judge Ballard setting up in his chair with his specs on and looking fierce, who rushes in but this J. Waldo person that is Pete's lawyer. He's seen the procession from across the street and fears some low-down trick is being played on his defenseless client.

"He comes storming down the aisle exclaiming; 'Your Honour, I protest against this grossly irregular proceeding!' The judge pounds on his desk with his little croquet mallet and Myron Bughalter tells Snyder, out of the corner of his mouth, to shut up. But he won't shut up for some minutes. This is the first case he'd had and he's probably looked forward to a grand speech to the jury that would make 'em all blubber and acquit Pete without leaving the box, on the grounds of emotional or erratic insanity--or whatever it is that murderers get let off on when their folks are well fixed. He sputters quite a lot about this monstrous travesty on justice before they can drill the real facts into his head; and even then he keeps coming back to Pete's being crazy.

"Then Pete, who hears this view of his case for the first time, begins to glare at his lawyer in a very nasty way and starts to interrupt; so the judge has to knock wood some more to get 'em all quiet. When they do get still--with Pete looking blacker than ever at his lawyer--Cale Jordan says: 'Pete, did you do this killing?' Pete started to say mebbe his brother-in-law did, but caught himself in time and said 'No!' at the same time starting for J. Waldo, that had called him crazy. Myron Bughalter shoves him back in his chair, and Cale Jordan says: 'Your Honour, you have heard the evidence, which is conclusive. I now ask that the prisoner at the bar be released.' Judge Ballard frowns at Pete very stern and says: 'The motion is granted. Turn him loose, quick, and get the rest of that smelly bunch out of here and give the place a good airing. I have to hold court here at ten o'clock.'

"Pete was kind of convinced now that he'd had a sure-enough trial, and his friends had seen the marble walls and red carpet and varnished furniture, and everything; so he consented to be set free--not in any rush, but like he was willing to do 'em a favour.

"And all the time he's keeping a bad little eye on J. Waldo. The minute he gets down from the stand he makes for him and says what does he mean by saying he was crazy when he done this killing? J. Waldo tries to explain that this was his only defense and was going on to tell what an elegant defense it was; but Pete gets madder and madder. I guess he'd been called everything in the world before, but never crazy; that's the very worst thing you can tell an Injin.

"They work out toward the front door; and then I hear Pete say: 'You know what? You said I'm crazy. My b'other-in-law's going to make something happen to you in the night.' Pete was seeing red by that time. The judge tells Myron to hurry and get the room cleared and open some windows. Myron didn't have to clear it of J.W. Snyder. That bright young lawyer dashed out and was fifty feet ahead of the bunch when they got to the front door.

"So Pete was a free man once more, without a stain on his character except to them that knew him well. But the old fool had lost me a tenant. Yes, sir; this J.W. Snyder young man, with the sign hardly dry on the glass door of his office in the Pettengill Block, had a nervous temperament to start with, and on top of that he'd gone fully into Pete's life history and found out that parties his brother-in-law was displeased with didn't thrive long. He packed up his law library that afternoon and left for another town that night.

"Yes, Pete's a wonder! Watch him slaving away out there. And he must of been working hard all day, even with me not here to keep tabs on him. Just look at the size of that pile of wood he's done up, when he might easy of been loafing on the job!"

IX

LITTLE OLD NEW YORK

Monday's mail for the Arrowhead was brought in by the Chinaman while Ma Pettengill and I loitered to the close of the evening meal: a canvas sack of letters and newspapers with three bulky packages of merchandise that had come by parcels post. The latter evoked a passing storm from my hostess. Hadn't she warned folks time and again to send all her stuff by express instead of by parcels post, which would sure get her gunned some day by the stage driver who got nothing extra for hauling such matter? She had so!

We trifled now with a fruity desert and the lady regaled me with a brief exposure of our great parcels-post system as a piece of the nerviest penny pinching she had ever known our Government guilty of. Because why? Because these here poor R.F.D. stage drivers had to do the extra hauling for nothing.

"Here's old Harvey Steptoe with the mail contract for sixty dollars a month, three trips a week between Red Gap and Surprise Valley, forty-five miles each way, barely making enough extra on express matter and local freight to come out even after buying horse-feed. Then comes parcels post, and parties that had had to pay him four bits or a dollar for a large package, or two bits for a small one, can have 'em brought in by mail for nothing. Of course most of us eased up on him after we understood the hellish injustice of it. We took pains not to have things sent parcels post and when they come unbeknown to us, like these here to-night, we'd always pay him anyway, just like they was express. It was only fair and, besides, we would live longer, Harvey Steptoe being morose and sudden.

"Like when old Safety First Timmins got the idea he could have all his supplies sent from Red Gap for almost nothing by putting stamps on 'em. He was tickled to death with the notion until, after the second load of about a hundred pounds, some cowardly assassin shot at him from the brush one morning about the time the stage usually went down past his ranch. The charge missed him by about four inches and went into the barn door. He dug it out and found a bullet and two buckshot. Old Safety First ain't any Sherlock Holmes, but even Doctor Watson could of solved this murderous crime. When Harvey come by the next night he went out and says to him, 'Ain't you got one of them old Mississippi Yaegers about seventy-five years old that carries a bullet and two buckshot?' Harvey thought back earnestly for a minute, then says,'Not now I ain't. I used to have one of them old hairlooms around the house but I found they ain't reliable when you want to do fine work from a safe distance; so I threw her away yesterday morning and got me this nice new 30-30 down to Goshook & Dale's hardware store.'

"He pulled the new gun out and patted it tenderly in the sight of old Timmins. 'Ain't it a cunning little implement?' he says; 'I tried it out coming up this afternoon. I could split a hair with it as far, say, as from that clump of buck-brush over to your barn. And by the way, Mr. Timmins,' he says, 'I got some more stuff for you here from the Square Deal Grocery--stuff all gummed up with postage stamps.' He leans his new toy against the seat and dumps out a sack of flour and a sack of dried fruit and one or two other things. 'This parcels post is a grand thing, ain't it?' says he.

"'Well--yes and no, now that you speak of it,' says old Safety First. 'The fact is I'm kind of prejudiced against it; I ain't going to have things come to me any more all stuck over with them trifling little postage stamps. It don't look dignified.' 'No?' says Harvey. 'No,' says Safety First in a firm tone. 'I won't ever have another single thing come by mail if I can help it.' 'I bet you're superstitious,' says Harvey, climbing back to his seat and petting the new gun again. 'I bet you're so superstitious you'd take this here shiny new implement off my hands at cost if I hinted I'd part with it.' 'I almost believe I would,' says Safety First. 'Well, it don't seem like I'd have much use for it after all,' says Harvey. 'Of course I can always get a new one if my fancy happens to run that way again.'

"So old Safety First buys a new loaded rifle that he ain't got a use on earth for. It would of looked to outsiders like he was throwing his money away on fripperies, but he knew it was a prime necessity of life all right. The parcels post ain't done him a bit of good since, though I send him marked pieces in the papers every now and then telling how the postmaster general thinks it's a great boon to the ultimate consumer. And I mustn't forget to send Harvey six bits for them three packages that come to-night. That's what we do. Otherwise, him being morose and turbulent, he'd get a new gun and make ultimate consumers out of all of us. Darned ultimate! I reckon we got a glorious Government, like candidates always tell us, but a postmaster general that expected stage drivers to do three times the hauling they had been doing with no extra pay wouldn't last long out at the tail of an ... route. There'd be pieces in the paper telling about how he rose to prominence from the time he got a lot of delegates sewed up for the people's choice and how his place will be hard to fill. It certainly would be hard to fill out here. Old Timmins, for one, would turn a deaf ear to his country's call."

Lew Wee having now cleared the table of all but coffee, we lingered for a leisurely overhauling of the mail sack. Ma Pettengill slit envelopes and read letters to an accompanying rumble of protest. She several times wished to know what certain parties took her for--and they'd be fooled if they did; and now and again she dwelt upon the insoluble mystery of her not being in the poorhouse at that moment; yes, and she'd of been there long ago if she had let these parties run her business like they thought they could. But what could a lone defenceless woman expect? She'd show them, though! Been showing 'em for thirty years now, and still had her health, hadn't she?

Letters and bills were at last neatly stacked and the poor weak woman fell upon the newspapers. The Red Gap Recorder was shorn of its wrapper. Being first a woman she turned to the fourth page to flash a practised eye over that department which is headed "Life's Stages--At the Altar--In the Cradle!--To the Tomb." Having gleaned recent vital statistics she turned next to the column carrying the market quotations on beef cattle, for after being a woman she is a rancher. Prices for that day must have pleased her immensely for she grudgingly mumbled that they were less ruinous than she had expected. In the elation of which this admission was a sign she next refreshed me with various personal items from a column headed "Social Gleanings--by Madame On Dit."

I learned that at the last regular meeting of the Ladies' Friday Afternoon Shakespeare Club, Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale had read a paper entitled "My Trip to the Panama-Pacific Exposition," after which a dainty collation was served by mine hostess Mrs. Judge Ballard; that Miss Beryl Mae Macomber, the well-known young society heiress, was visiting friends in Spokane where rumour hath it that she would take a course of lessons in elocution; and that Mrs. Cora Hartwick Wales, prominent society matron and leader of the ultra smart set of Price's Addition, had on Thursday afternoon at her charming new bungalow, corner of Bella Vista Street and Prospect Avenue, entertained a number of her inmates at tea. Ma Pettengill and I here quickly agreed that the proofreading on the Recorder was not all it should be. Then she unctuously read me a longer item from another column which was signed "The Lounger in the Lobby":

"Mr. Benjamin P. Sutton, the wealthy capitalist of Nome, Alaska, and a prince of good fellows, is again in our midst for his annual visit to His Honour Alonzo Price, Red Gap's present mayor, of whom he is an old-time friend and associate. Mr. Sutton, who is the picture of health, brings glowing reports from the North and is firm in his belief that Alaska will at no distant day become the garden spot of the world. In the course of a brief interview he confided to ye scribe that on his present trip to the outside he would not again revisit his birthplace, the city of New York, as he did last year. 'Once was enough, for many reasons,' said Mr. Sutton grimly. 'They call it "Little old New York," but it isn't little and it isn't old. It's big and it's new--we have older buildings right in Nome than any you can find on Broadway. Since my brief sojourn there last year I have decided that our people before going to New York should see America first."

"Now what do you think of that?" demanded the lady. I said I would be able to think little of it unless I were told the precise reasons for this rather brutal abuse of a great city. What, indeed, were the "many reasons" that Mr. Sutton had grimly not confided to ye scribe?

Ma Pettengill chuckled and reread parts of the indictment. Thereafter she again chuckled fluently and uttered broken phrases to herself. "Horse-car" was one; "the only born New Yorker alive" was another. It became necessary for me to remind the woman that a guest was present. I did this by shifting my chair to face the stone fireplace in which a pine chunk glowed, and by coughing in a delicate and expectant manner.

"Poor Ben!" she murmured--"going all the day down there just to get one romantic look at his old home after being gone twenty-five years. I don't blame him for talking rough about the town, nor for his criminal act--stealing a street-car track."

It sounded piquant--a noble theft indeed! I now murmured a bit myself, striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by facts. The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New York. She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. "That's how I always think of New York," said she--"a kind of a comic supplement to the rest of this great country. Here--see these two comical little tots standing on their uncle's stomach and chopping his heart out with their axes--after you got the town sized up it's just that funny and horrible. It's like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to in Boston--ingenious but unpleasant."

But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day's fishing--this coarse disparagement of something the poor creature was unfitted to comprehend.

"Ben Sutton," I remarked firmly.

* * * * *

"The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that are trying to get what you got and them that think you're trying to get what they got."

"Ben Sutton," I repeated, trying to make it sullen.

"Ask a man on the street in New York where such and such a building is and he'll edge out of reaching distance, with his hand on his watch, before he tells you he don't know. In Denver, or San Francisco now, the man will most likely walk a block or two with you just to make sure you get the directions right."

"Ben Sutton!"

"They'll fall for raw stuff, though. I know a slick mining promoter from Arizona that stops at the biggest hotel on Fifth Avenue and has himself paged by the boys about twenty times a day so folks will know how important he is. He'll get up from his table in the restaurant and follow the boy out in a way to make 'em think that nine million dollars is at stake. He tells me it helps him a lot in landing the wise ones."

"Stole a street-car track," I muttered desperately.

"The typical New Yorker, like they call him, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and sleeps in New Rochelle, going in on the 8:12 and coming out on the--"

"I had a pretty fight landing that biggest one this afternoon, from that pool under the falls up above the big bend. Twice I thought I'd lost him, but he was only hiding--and then I found I'd forgotten my landing net. Say, did I ever tell you about the time I was fishing for steel head down in Oregon, and the bear--" The lady hereupon raised a hushing hand.

* * * * *

Well, as I was saying, Ben Sutton blew into town early last September and after shaking hands with his old confederate, Lon Price, he says how is the good wife and is she at home and Lon says no; that Pettikins has been up at Silver Springs resting for a couple weeks; so Ben says it's too bad he'll miss the little lady, as in that case he has something good to suggest, which is, what's the matter with him and Lon taking a swift hike down to New York which Ben ain't seen since 1892, though he was born there, and he'd now like to have a look at the old home in Lon's company. Lon says it's too bad Pettikins ain't there to go along, but if they start at once she wouldn't have time to join them, and Ben says he can start near enough at once for that, so hurry and pack the suitcase. Lon does it, leaving a delayed telegram to Henrietta to be sent after they start, begging her to join them if not too late, which it would be.

While they are in Louis Meyer's Place feeling good over this coop, in comes the ever care-free Jeff Tuttle and Jeff says he wouldn't mind going out on rodeo himself with 'em, at least as far as Jersey City where he has a dear old aunt living--or she did live there when he was a little boy and was always very nice to him and he ain't done right in not going to see her for thirty years--and if he's that close to the big town he could run over from Jersey City for a look--see.

Lon and Ben hail his generous decision with cheers and on the way to another place they meet me, just down from the ranch. And why don't I come along with the bunch? Ben has it all fixed in ten seconds, he being one of these talkers that will odd things along till they sound even, and the other two chiming in with him and wanting to buy my ticket right then. But I hesitated some. Lon and Ben Sutton was all right to go with, but Jeff Tuttle was a different kittle of fish. Jeff is a decent man in many respects and seems real refined when you first meet him if it's in some one's parlour, but he ain't one you'd care to follow step by step through the mazes and pitfalls and palmrooms of a great city if you're sensitive to public notice. Still, they was all so hearty in their urging, Ben saying I was the only lady in the world he could travel that far with and not want to strangle, and Lon says he'd rather have me than most of the men he knew, and Jeff says if I'll consent to go he'll take his full-dress suit so as to escort me to operas and lectures in a classy manner, and at last I give up. I said I'd horn in on their party since none of 'em seemed hostile.

I'd meant to go a little later anyway, for some gowns I needed and some shopping I'd promised to do for Lizzie Gunslaugh. You got to hand it to New York for shopping. Why, I'd as soon buy an evening gown in Los Angeles as in Portland or San Francisco. Take this same Lizzie Gunslaugh. She used to make a bare living, with her sign reading "Plain and Fashionable Dressmaking." But I took that girl down to New York twice with me and showed her how and what to buy there, instead of going to Spokane for her styles, and to-day she's got a thriving little business with a bully sign that we copied from them in the East --"Madame Elizabeth, Robes et Manteaux." Yes, sir; New York has at least one real reason for taking up room. That's a thing I always try to get into Ben Sutton's head, that he'd ought to buy his clothes down there instead of getting 'em from a reckless devil-dare of a tailor up in Seattle that will do anything in the world Ben tells him to--and he tells him a plenty, believe me. He won't ever wear a dress suit, either, because he says that costume makes all men look alike and he ain't going to stifle his individuality. If you seen Ben's figure once you'd know that nothing could make him look like any one else, him being built on the lines of a grain elevator and having individuality no clothes on earth could stifle. He's the very last man on earth that should have coloured braid on his check suits. However!

My trunk is packed in a hurry and I'm down to the 6:10 on time. Lon is very scared and jubilant over deserting Henrietta in this furtive way, and Ben is all ebullient in a new suit that looks like a lodge regalia and Jeff Tuttle in plain clothes is as happy as a child. When I get there he's already begun to give his imitation of a Sioux squaw with a hare lip reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night" in her native language, which he pulls on all occasions when he's feeling too good. It's some imitation. The Sioux language, even when spoken by a trained elocutionist, can't be anything dulcet. Jeff's stunt makes it sound like grinding coffee and shovelling coal into a cellar at the same time. Anyway, our journey begun happily and proved to be a good one, the days passing pleasantly while we talked over old times and played ten-cent limit in my stateroom, though Jeff Tuttle is so untravelled that he'll actually complain about the food and service in a dining-car. The poor puzzled old cow-man still thinks you ought to get a good meal in one, like the pretty bill of fare says you can.

Then one morning we was in New York and Ben Sutton got his first shock. He believed he was still on the other side of the river because he hadn't rid in a ferryboat yet. He had to be told sharply by parties in uniform. But we got him safe to a nice tall hotel on Broadway at last. Talk about your hicks from the brush--Ben was it, coming back to this here birthplace of his. He fell into a daze on the short ride to the hotel--after insisting hotly that we should go to one that was pulled down ten years ago--and he never did get out of it all that day.

Lon and Jeff was dazed, too. The city filled 'em with awe and they made no pretense to the contrary. About all they did that day was to buy picture cards and a few drinks. They was afraid to wander very far from the hotel for fear they'd get run over or arrested or fall into the new subway or something calamitous like that. Of course New York was looking as usual, the streets being full of tired voters tearing up the car-tracks and digging first-line trenches and so forth.

It was a quiet day for all of us, though I got my shopping started, and at night we met at the hotel and had a lonesome dinner. We was all too dazed and tired to feel like larking about any, and poor Ben was so downright depressed it was pathetic. Ever read the story about a man going to sleep and waking up in a glass case in a museum a thousand years later? That was Ben coming back to his old town after only twenty-five years. He hadn't been able to find a single old friend nor any familiar faces. He ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, for himself, but he was so mournful he couldn't eat more than about two dollars' worth of it. He kept forgetting himself in dismal reminiscences. The onlysright thing he'd found was the men tearing up the streets. That was just like they used to be, he said. He maundered on to us about how horse-cars was running on Broadway when he left and how they hardly bothered to light the lamps north of Forty-second Street, and he wished he could have some fish balls like the old Sinclair House used to have for its free lunch, and how in them golden days people that had been born right here in New York was seen so frequently that they created no sensation.

He was feeling awful desolate about this. He pointed out different parties at tables around us, saying they was merchant princes from Sandusky or prominent Elks from Omaha or roystering blades from Pittsburgh or boulevardeers from Bucyrus--not a New Yorker in sight. He said he'd been reading where a wealthy nut had seat out an expedition to the North Pole to capture a certain kind of Arctic flea that haunts only a certain rare fox--but he'd bet a born New Yorker was harder to find. He said what this millionaire defective ought to of done with his inherited wealth was to find a male and female born here and have 'em stuffed and mounted under glass in a fire-proof museum, which would be a far more exciting spectacle than any flea on earth, however scarce and arctic. He said he'd asked at least forty men that day where they was born--waiters, taxi-drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, and just anybody that would stop and take one with him, and not a soul had been born nearer to the old town than Scranton, Pennsylvania. "It's heart-rending," he says, "to reflect that I'm alone here in this big city of outlanders. I haven't even had the nerve to go down to West Ninth Street for a look at the old home that shelters my boyhood memories. If I could find only one born New Yorker it would brace me up a whole lot."

It was one dull evening, under this cloud that enveloped Ben. We didn't even go to a show, but turned in early. Lon Price sent a picture card of the Flatiron Building to Henrietta telling her he was having a dreary time and he was now glad he'd been disappointed about her not coming, so love and kisses from her lonesome boy. It was what he would of sent her anyway, but it happened to be the truth so far.

Well, I got the long night's rest that was coming to me and started out early in the A.M. to pit my cunning against the wiles of the New York department stores, having had my evil desires inflamed the day before by an afternoon gown in chiffon velvet and Georgette crepe with silver embroidery and fur trimming that I'd seen in a window marked down to $198.98. I fell for that all right, and for an all-silk jersey sport suit at $29.98 and a demi-tailored walking suit for a mere bagatelle, and a white corduroy sport blouse and a couple of imported evening gowns they robbed me on--but I didn't mind. You expect to be robbed for anything really good in New York, only the imitation stuff that's worn by the idle poor being cheaper than elsewhere. And I was so busy in this whirl of extortion that I forgot all about the boys and their troubles till I got back to the hotel at five o'clock.

I find 'em in the palm grill, or whatever it's called, drinking stingers. But now they was not only more cheerful than they had been the night before but they was getting a little bit contemptuous and Western about the great city. Lon had met a brother real estate shark from Salt Lake and Jeff had fell in with a sheep man from Laramie--and treated him like an equal because of meeting him so far from home in a strange town where no one would find it out on him--and Ben Sutton had met up with his old friend Jake Berger, also from Nome. That's one nice thing about New York; you keep meeting people from out your way that are lonesome, too. Lon's friend and Jeff's sheep man had had to leave, being encumbered by watchful-waiting wives that were having 'em paged every three minutes and wouldn't believe the boy when he said they was out. But Ben's friend, Jake Berger, was still at the table. Jake is a good soul, kind of a short, round, silent man, never opening his head for any length of time. He seems to bring the silence of the frozen North down with him except for brief words to the waiter ever and anon.

As I say, the boys was all more cheerful and contemptuous about New York by this time. Ben had spent another day asking casual parties if they was born in New York and having no more luck than a rabbit, but it seemed like he'd got hardened to these disappointments. He said he might leave his own self to a museum in due time, so future generations would know at least what the male New Yorker looked like. As for the female, he said any of these blondes along Broadway could be made to look near enough like his mate by a skilled taxidermist. Jeff Tuttle here says that they wasn't all blondes because he'd seen a certain brunette that afternoon right in this palm grill that was certainly worth preserving for all eternity in the grandest museum on earth--which showed that Jeff had chirked up a lot since landing in town. Ben said he had used the term "blonde" merely to designate a species and they let it go at that.

Lon Price then said he'd been talking a little himself to people he met in different places and they might not be born New Yorkers but they certainly didn't know anything beyond the city limits. At this he looks around at the crowded tables in this palm grill and says very bitterly that he'll give any of us fifty to one they ain't a person in the place that ever so much as even heard of Price's Addition to Red Gap. And so the talk went for a little, with Jake Berger ever and again crooning to the waiter for another round of stingers. I'd had two, so I stayed out on the last round. I told Jake I enjoyed his hospitality but two would be all I could think under till they learned to leave the dash of chloroform out of mine. Jake just looked kindly at me. He's as chatty as Mount McKinley.

But I was glad to see the boys more cheerful, so I said I'd get my lumpiest jewels out of the safe and put a maid and hairdresser to work on me so I'd be a credit to 'em at dinner and then we'd spend a jolly evening at some show. Jeff said he'd also doll up in his dress suit and get shaved and manicured and everything, so he'd look like one in my own walk of life. Ben was already dressed for evening. He had on a totally new suit of large black and white checks looking like a hotel floor from a little distance, bound with braid of a quiet brown, and with a vest of wide stripes in green and mustard colour. It was a suit that the automobile law in some states would have compelled him to put dimmers on; it made him look egregious, if that's the word; but I knew it was no good appealing to his better nature. He said he'd have dinner ordered for us in another palm grill that had more palms in it.

Jake Berger spoke up for the first time to any one but a waiter. He asked why a palm room necessarily? He said the tropic influence of these palms must affect the waiters that had to stand under 'em all day, because they wouldn't take his orders fast enough. He said the languorous Southern atmosphere give 'em pellagra or something. Jeff Tuttle says Jake must be mistaken because the pellagra is a kind of a Spanish dance, he believes. Jake said maybe so; maybe it was tropic neurasthenia the waiters got. Ben said he'd sure look out for a fresh waiter that hadn't been infected yet. When I left 'em Jake was holding a split-second watch on the waiter he'd just given an order to.

By seven P.M. I'd been made into a work of art by the hotel help and might of been observed progressing through the palatial lobby with my purple and gold opera cloak sort of falling away from the shoulders. Jeff Tuttle observed me for one. He was in his dress suit all right, standing over in a corner having a bell-hop tie his tie for him that he never can learn to do himself. That's the way with Jeff; he simply wasn't born for the higher hotel life. In his dress suit he looks exactly like this here society burglar you're always seeing a picture of in the papers. However, I let him trail me along into this jewelled palm room with tapestries and onyx pillars and prices for food like the town had been three years beleagured by an invading army. Jake Berger is alone at our table sipping a stinger and looking embarrassed because he'll have to say something. He gets it over as soon as he can. He says Ben has ordered dinner and stepped out and that Lon has stepped out to look for him but they'll both be back in a minute, so set down and order one before this new waiter is overcome by the tropic miasma. We do the same, and in comes Lon looking very excited in the dress suit he was married in back about 1884.

"Ben's found one," he squeals excitedly--"a real genuine one that was born right here in New York and is still living in the same house he was born in. What do you know about that? Ben is frantic with delight and is going to bring him to dine with us as soon as he gets him brushed off down in the wash room and maybe a drink or two thrown into him to revive him from the shock of Ben running across him. Ain't it good, though! Poor old Ben, looking for a born one and thinking he'd never find him and now he has!"

We all said how glad we was for Ben's sake and Lon called over a titled aristocrat of foreign birth and ordered him to lay another place at the table. Then he tells us how the encounter happened. Ben had stepped out on Broadway to buy an evening paper and coming back he was sneaking a look at his new suit in a plate-glass window, walking blindly ahead at the same time. That's the difference between the sexes in front of a plate-glass window. A woman is entirely honest and shameless; she'll stop dead and look herself over and touch up anything that needs it as cool as if she was the last human on earth; while man, the coward, walks by slow and takes a long sly look at himself, turning his head more and more till he gets swore at by some one he's tramped on. This is how Ben had run across the only genuine New Yorker that seemed to be left. He'd run across his left instep and then bore him to the ground like one of these juggernuts or whatever they are. Still, at that, it seemed kind of a romantic meeting, like mebbe the hand of fate was in it. We chatted along, waiting for the happy pair, and Jake ordered again to be on the safe side because the waiter would be sure to contract hookworm or sleeping sickness in this tropic jungle before the evening was over. Jeff Tuttle said this was called the Louis Château room and he liked it. He also said, looking over the people that come in, that he bet every dress suit in town was hired to-night. Then in a minute or two more, after Jake Berger sent a bill over to the orchestra leader with a card asking him to play all quick tunes so the waiters could fight better against jungle fever, in comes Ben Sutton driving his captive New Yorker before him and looking as flushed and proud as if he'd discovered a strange new vest pattern.

The captive wasn't so much to look at. He was kind of neat, dressed in one of the nobby suits that look like ninety dollars in the picture and cost eighteen; he had one of these smooth ironed faces that made him look thirty or forty years old, like all New York men, and he had the conventional glue on his hair. He was limping noticeably where Ben had run across him, and I could see he was highly suspicious of the whole gang of us, including the man who had treated him like he was a cockroach. But Ben had been persuasive and imperious--took him off his feet, like you might say--so he shook hands all around and ventured to set down with us. He had the same cold, slippery cautious hand that every New York man gives you the first time so I says to myself he's a real one all right and we fell to the new round of stingers Jake had motioned for, and to the nouveaux art-work food that now came along.

Naturally Ben and the New Yorker done most of the talking at first; about how the good old town had changed; how they was just putting up the Cable Building at Houston Street when Ben left in '92, and wasn't the old Everett House a good place for lunch, and did the other one remember Barnum's Museum at Broadway and Ann, and Niblo's Garden was still there when Ben was, and a lot of fascinating memories like that. The New Yorker didn't relax much at first and got distinctly nervous when he saw the costly food and heard Ben order vintage champagne which he always picks out by the price on the wine list. I could see him plain as day wondering just what kind of crooks we could be, what our game was and how soon we'd spring it on him--or would we mebbe stick him for the dinner check? He didn't have a bit good time at first, so us four others kind of left Ben to fawn upon him and enjoyed ourselves in our own way.

It was all quite elevating or vicious, what with the orchestra and the singers and the dancing and the waiters with vitality still unimpaired. And New York has improved a lot, I'll say that. The time I was there before they wouldn't let a lady smoke except in the very lowest table d'hotes of the underworld at sixty cents with wine. And now the only one in the whole room that didn't light a cigarette from time to time was a nervous dame in a high-necked black silk and a hat that was never made farther east than Altoona, that looked like she might be taking notes for a club paper on the attractions or iniquities of a great metropolis. Jeff Tuttle was fascinated by the dancing; he called it the "tangle" and some of it did look like that. And he claimed to be shocked by the flagrant way women opened up little silver boxes and applied the paints, oils, and putty in full view of the audience. He said he'd just as lief see a woman take out a manicure set and do her nails in public, and I assured him he probably would see it if he come down again next year, the way things was going--him talking that way that had had his white tie done in the open lobby; but men are such. Jake Berger just looked around kindly and didn't open his head till near the end of the meal. I thought he wasn't noticing anything at all till the orchestra put on a shadow number with dim purple lights.

"You'll notice they do that," says Jake, "whenever a lot of these people are ready to pay their checks. It saves fights, because no one can see if they're added right or not." That was pretty gabby for Jake. Then I listened again to Ben and his little pet. They was talking their way up the Bowery from Atlantic Garden and over to Harry Hill's Place which, it seemed the New Yorker didn't remember, and Ben then recalled an old leper with gray whiskers and a skull cap that kept a drug store in Bleecker Street when Ben was a kid and spent most of his time watering down the sidewalk in front of his place with a hose so that ladies going by would have to raise their skirts out of the wet. His eyes was quite dim as he recalled these sacred boyhood memories.

The New Yorker had unbent a mite like he was going to see the mad adventure through at all costs, though still plainly worried about the dinner check. Ben now said that they two ought to found a New York club. He said there was all other kinds of clubs here--Ohio clubs and Southern clubs and Nebraska societies and Michigan circles and so on, that give large dinners every year, so why shouldn't there be a New York club; maybe they could scare up three or four others that was born here if they advertised. It would of course be the smallest club in the city or in the whole world for that matter. The New Yorker was kind of cold toward this. It must of sounded like the scheme to get money out of him that he'd been expecting all along. Then the waiter brought the check, during another shadow number with red and purple lights, and this lad pulled out a change purse and said in a feeble voice that he supposed we was all paying share and share alike and would the waiter kindly figure out what his share was. Ben didn't even hear him. He peeled a large bill off a roll that made his new suit a bad fit in one place and he left a five on the plate when the change come. The watchful New Yorker now made his first full-hearted speech of the evening. He said that Ben was foolish not to of added up the check to see if it was right, and that half a dollar tip would of been ample for the waiter. Ben pretended not to hear this either, and started again on the dear old times. I says to myself I guess this one is a real New Yorker all right.

Lon Prince now says what's the matter with going to some corking good show because nothing good has come to Red Gap since the Parisian Blond Widows over a year ago and he's eager for entertainment. Ben says "Fine! And here's the wise boy that will steer us right. I bet he knows every show in town."

The New Yorker says he does and has just the play in mind for us, one that he had meant to see himself this very night because it has been endorsed by the drama league of which he is a regular member. Well, that sounded important, so Ben says "What did I tell you? Ain't we lucky to have a good old New Yorker to put us right on shows our first night out. We might have wasted our evening on a dead one."

So we're all delighted and go out and get in a couple of taxicabs, Ben and this city man going in the first one. When ours gets to the theatre Ben is paying the driver while the New Yorker feebly protests that he ought to pay his half of the bill, but Ben don't hear him and don't hear him again when he wants to pay for his own seat in the theatre. I got my first suspicion of this guy right there; for a genuine New Yorker he was too darned conscientious about paying his mere share of everything. You can say lots of things about New Yorkers, but all that I've ever met have been keenly and instantly sensitive to the presence of a determined buyer. Still I didn't think so much about it at that moment. This one looked the part all right, with his slim clothes and his natty cloth hat and the thin gold cigarette case held gracefully open. Then we get into the theatre. Of course Ben had bought a box, that being the only place, he says, that a gentleman can set, owing to the skimpy notions of theatre-seat builders. And we was all prepared for a merry evening at this entertainment which the wise New Yorker would be sure to know was a good one.

But that curtain hadn't been up three minutes before I get my next shock of disbelief about this well-known club man. You know what a good play means in New York: a rattling musical comedy with lively songs, a tenor naval lieutenant in a white uniform, some real funny comedians, and a lot of girls without their stockings on, and so forth. Any one that thinks of a play in New York thinks of that, don't he? And what do we get here and now? Why, we get a gruesome thing about a ruined home with the owner going bankrupt over the telephone that's connected with Wall Street, and a fluffy wife that has a magnetic gentleman friend in a sport suit, and a lady crook that has had husband in her toils, only he sees it all now, and tears and strangulations and divorce, and a faithful old butler that suffers keenly and would go on doing it without a cent of wages if he could only bring every one together again, and a shot up in the bathroom or somewhere and gripping moments and so forth--I want to tell you we was all painfully shocked by this break of the knowing New Yorker. We could hardly believe it was true during the first act. Jeff Tuttle kept wanting to know when the girls was coming on, and didn't they have a muscle dancer in the piece. Ben himself was highly embarrassed and even suspicious for a minute. He looks at the New Yorker sharply and says ain't that a crocheted necktie he's wearing, and the New Yorker says it is and was made for him by his aunt. But Ben ain't got the heart to question him any further. He puts away his base suspicions and tries to get the New Yorker to tell us all about what a good play this is so we'll feel more entertained. So the lad tells us the leading woman is a sterling actress of legitimate methods--all too hard to find in this day of sensationalism, and the play is a triumph of advanced realism written by a serious student of the drama that is trying to save our stage from commercial degradation. He explained a lot about the lesson of the play. Near as I could make out the lesson was that divorce, nowadays, is darned near as uncertain as marriage itself.

"The husband," explains the lad kindly, "is suspected by his wife to have been leading a double life, though of course he was never guilty of more than an indiscretion--"

Jake Berger here exploded rudely into speech again. "Thai wife is leading a double chin," says Jake.

"Say, people," says Lon Price, "mebbe it ain't too late to go to a show this evening."

But the curtain went up for the second act and nobody had the nerve to escape. There continued to be low murmurs of rebellion, just the same, and we all lost track of this here infamy that was occurring on the stage.

"I'm sure going to beat it in one minute," says Jeff Tuttle, "if one of 'em don't exclaim: 'Oh, girls, here comes the little dancer!'"

"I know a black-face turn that could put this show on its feet," says Lon Price, "and that Waldo in the sport suit ain't any real reason why wives leave home--you can't tell me!"

"I dare say this leading woman needs a better vehicle," says the New Yorker in a hoarse whisper.

"I dare say it, too," says Jeff Tuttle in a still hoarser whisper. "A better vehicle! She needs a motor truck, and I'd order one quick if I thought she'd take it."

Of course this was not refined of Jeff. The New Yorker winced and loyal Ben glares at all of us that has been muttering, so we had to set there till the curtain went down on the ruined home where all was lost save honour--and looking like that would have to go, too, in the next act. But Ben saw it wasn't safe to push us any further so he now said this powerful play was too powerful for a bunch of low-brows like us and we all rushed out into the open air. Everybody cheered up a lot when we got there--seeing the nice orderly street traffic without a gripping moment in it. Lon Price said it was too late to go to a theatre, so what could we do to pass the time till morning? Ben says he has a grand idea and we can carry it out fine with this New York man to guide us. His grand idea is that we all go down on the Bowery and visit tough dives where the foul creatures of the underworld consort and crime happens every minute or two. We was still mad enough about that play to like the idea. A good legitimate murder would of done wonders for our drooping spirits. So Ben puts it up to the New Yorker and he says yes, he knows a vicious resort on the Bowery, but we'd ought to have a detective from central office along to protect us from assault. Ben says not at all--no detective--unless the joints has toughened up a lot since he used to infest 'em, and we all said we'd take a chance, so again we was in taxicabs. Us four in the second cab was now highly cynical about Ben's New Yorker. The general feeling was that sooner or later he would sink the ship.

Then we reach the dive he has picked out; a very dismal dive with a room back of the bar that had a few tables and a piano in it and a sweet-singing waiter. He was singing a song about home and mother, that in mem-o-ree he seemed to see, when we got to our table. A very gloomy and respectable haunt of vice it was, indeed. There was about a dozen male and female creatures of the underworld present sadly enjoying this here ballad and scowling at us for talking when we come in.

Jake Berger ordered, though finding you couldn't get stingers here and having to take two miner's inches of red whiskey, and the New Yorker begun to warn us in low tones that we was surrounded by danger on every hand--that we'd better pour our drink on the floor because it would be drugged, after which we would be robbed if not murdered and thrown out into the alley where we would then be arrested by grafting policemen. Even Ben was shocked by this warning. He asks the New Yorker again if he is sure he was born in the old town, and the lad says honest he was and has been living right here all these years in the same house he was born in. Ben is persuaded by these words and gives the singing waiter a five and tells him to try and lighten the gloom with a few crimes of violence or something. The New Yorker continued to set stiff in his chair, one hand on his watch and one on the pocket where his change purse was that he'd tried to pay his share of the taxicabs out of.

The gloom-stricken piano player now rattled off some ragtime and the depraved denizens about us got sadly up and danced to it. Say, it was the most formal and sedate dancing you ever see, with these gun men holding their guilty partners off at arm's length and their faces all drawn down in lines of misery. They looked like they might be a bunch of strict Presbyterians that had resolved to throw all moral teaching to the winds for one purple moment let come what might. I want to tell you these depraved creatures of the underworld was darned near as depressing as that play had been. Even the second round of drinks didn't liven us up none because the waiter threw down his cigarette and sung another tearful song. This one was about a travelling man going into a gilded cabaret and ordering a port wine and a fair young girl come out to sing in short skirts that he recognized to be his boyhood's sweetheart Nell; so he sent a waiter to ask her if she had forgot the song she once did sing at her dear old mother's knee, or knees, and she hadn't forgot it and proved she hadn't, because the chorus was "Nearer My God to Thee" sung to ragtime; then the travelling man said she must be good and pure, so come on let's leave this place and they'd be wed.

Yes, sir; that's what Ben had got for his five, so this time he give the waiter a twenty not to sing any more at all. The New Yorker was horrified at the sight of a man giving away money, but it was well spent and we begun to cheer up a little. Ben told the New Yorker about the time his dog team won the All Alaska Sweepstake Race, two hundred and six miles from Nome to Candle and back, the time being 76 hours, 16 minutes, and 28 seconds, and showed him the picture of his lead dog pasted in the back of his watch. And Jake Berger got real gabby at last and told the story about the old musher going up the White Horse Trail in a blizzard and meeting the Bishop, only he didn't know it was the Bishop. And the Bishop says, "How's the trail back of you, my friend?" and the old musher just swore with the utmost profanity for three straight minutes. Then he says to the Bishop, "And what's it like back of you?" and the Bishop says, "Just like that!" Jake here got embarrassed from talking so much and ordered another round of this squirrel poison we was getting, and Jeff Tuttle begun his imitation of the Sioux squaw with a hare lip reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night." It was a pretty severe ordeal for the rest of us, but we was ready to endure much if it would make this low den seem more homelike. Only when Jeff got about halfway through the singing waiter comes up, greatly shocked, and says none of that in here because they run an orderly place, and we been talking too loud anyway. This waiter had a skull exactly like a picture of one in a book I got that was dug up after three hundred thousand years and the scientific world couldn't ever agree whether it was an early man or a late ape. I decided I didn't care to linger in a place where a being with a head like this could pass on my diversions and offenses so I made a move to go. Jeff Tuttle says to this waiter, "Fie, fie upon you, Roscoe! We shall go to some respectable place where we can loosen up without being called for it." The waiter said he was sorry, but the Bowery wasn't Broadway. And the New Yorker whispered that it was just as well because we was lucky to get out of this dive with our lives and property--and even after that this anthropoid waiter come hurrying out to the taxis after us with my fur piece and my solid gold vanity-box that I'd left behind on a chair. This was a bitter blow to all of us after we'd been led to hope for outrages of an illegal character. The New Yorker was certainly making a misdeal every time he got the cards. None of us trusted him any more, though Ben was still loyal and sensitive about him, like he was an only child and from birth had not been like other children.

The lad now wanted to steer us into an Allied Bazaar that would still be open, because he'd promised to sell twenty tickets to it and had 'em on him untouched. But we shut down firmly on this. Even Ben was firm. He said the last bazaar he'd survived was their big church fair in Nome that lasted two nights and one day and the champagne booth alone took in six thousand dollars, and even the beer booth took in something like twelve hundred, and he didn't feel equal to another affair like that just yet.

So we landed uptown at a very swell joint full of tables and orchestras around a dancing floor and more palms--which is the national flower of New York--and about eighty or a hundred slightly inebriated débutantes and well-known Broadway social favourites and their gentlemen friends. And here everything seemed satisfactory at last, except to the New Yorker who said that the prices would be something shameful. However, no one was paying any attention to him by now. None of us but Ben cared a hoot where he had been born and most of us was sorry he had been at all.

Jake Berger bought a table for ten dollars, which was seven more than it had ever cost the owner, and Ben ordered stuff for us, including a vintage champagne that the price of stuck out far enough beyond other prices on the wine list, and a porterhouse steak, family style, for himself, and everything seemed on a sane and rational basis again. It looked as if we might have a little enjoyment during the evening after all. It was a good lively place, with all these brilliant society people mingling up in the dance in a way that would of got 'em thrown out of that gangsters' haunt on the Bowery. Lon Price said he'd never witnessed so many human shoulder blades in his whole history and Jeff Tuttle sent off a lot of picture cards of this here ballroom or saloon that a waiter give him. The one he sent Egbert Floud showed the floor full of beautiful reckless women in the dance and prominent society matrons drinking highballs, and Jeff wrote on it, "This is my room; wish you was here." Jeff was getting right into the spirit of this bohemian night life; you could tell that. Lon Price also. In ten minutes Lon had made the acquaintance of a New York social leader at the next table and was dancing with her in an ardent or ribald manner before Ben had finished his steak.

I now noticed that the New Yorker was looking at his gun-metal watch about every two minutes with an expression of alarm. Jake Berger noticed it, too, and again leaned heavily on the conversation. "Not keeping you up, are we?" says Jake. And this continual watch business must of been getting on Ben's nerves, too, for now, having fought his steak to a finish, he says to his little guest that they two should put up their watches and match coins for 'em. The New Yorker was suspicious right off and looked Ben's watch over very carefully when Ben handed it to him. It was one of these thin gold ones that can be had any place for a hundred dollars and up. You could just see that New Yorker saying to himself, "So this is their game, is it?" But he works his nerve up to take a chance and gets a two-bit piece out of his change purse and they match. Ben wins the first time, which was to of settled it, but Ben says right quick that of course he had meant the best two out of three, which the New Yorker doesn't dispute for a minute, and they match again and Ben wins that, too, so there's nothing to do but take the New Yorker's watch away from him. He removes it carefully off a leather fob with a gilt acorn on it and hands it slowly to Ben. It was one of these extra superior dollar watches that cost three dollars. The New Yorker looked very stung, indeed. You could hear him saying to himself, "Serves me right for gambling with a stranger!" Ben feels these suspicions and is hurt by 'em so he says to Jeff, just to show the New Yorker he's an honest sport, that he'll stake his two watches against Jeff's solid silver watch that he won in a bucking contest in 1890. Jeff says he's on; so they match and Ben wins again, now having three watches. Then Lon Price comes back from cavorting with this amiable jade of the younger dancing set at the next table and Ben makes him put up his gold seven-jewelled hunting-case watch against the three and Ben wins again, now having four watches.

Lon says "Easy come, easy go!" and moves over to the next table again to help out with the silver bucket of champagne he's ordered, taking Jeff Tuttle with him to present to his old friends that he's known for all of twenty minutes. The New Yorker is now more suspicious then ever of Ben; his wan beauty is marred by a cynical smile and his hair has come unglued in a couple of places. Ben is more sensitive than ever to these suspicions of his new pal so he calls on Jake Berger to match his watch against the four. Jake takes out his split-second repeater and him and Ben match coins and this time Ben is lucky enough to lose, thereby showing his dear old New Yorker that he ain't a crook after all. But the New Yorker still looks very shrewd and robbed and begins to gulp the champagne in a greedy manner. You can hear him calling Jake a confederate. Jake sees it plain enough, that the lad thinks he's been high-graded, so he calls over our waiter and crowds all five watches onto him. "Take these home to the little ones," says Jake, and dismisses the matter from his mind by putting a wine glass up to his ear and listening into it with a rapt expression that shows he's hearing the roar of the ocean up on Alaska's rockbound coast.

The New Yorker is a mite puzzled by this, but I can see it don't take him long to figure out that the waiter is also a confederate. Anyway, he's been robbed of his watch forever and falls to the champagne again very eager and moody. It was plain he didn't know what a high-powered drink he was trifling with. And Ben was moody, too, by now. He quit recalling old times and sacred memories to the New Yorker. If the latter had tried to break up the party by leaving at this point I guess Ben would of let him go. But he didn't try; he just set there soggily drinking champagne to drown the memory of his lost watch. And pretty soon Ben has to order another quart of this twelve-dollar beverage. The New Yorker keeps right on with the new bottle, daring it to do its worst and it does; he was soon speaking out of a dense fog when he spoke at all.

With his old pal falling into this absent mood Ben throws off his own depression and mingles a bit with the table of old New York families where Lon Price is now paying the checks. They was the real New Yorkers; they'd never had a moment's distrust of Lon after he ordered the first time and told the waiter to keep the glasses brimming. Jeff Tuttle was now dancing in an extreme manner with a haggard society bud aged thirty-five, and only Jake and me was left at our table. We didn't count the New Yorker any longer; he was merely raising his glass to his lips at regular intervals. He moved something like an automatic chess player I once saw. The time passed rapidly for a couple hours more, with Jake Berger keeping up his ceaseless chatter as usual. He did speak once, though, after an hour's silence. He said in an audible tone that the New Yorker was a human hangnail, no matter where he was born.

And so the golden moments flitted by, with me watching the crazy crowd, until they began to fall away and the waiters was piling chairs on the naked tables at the back of the room. Then with some difficulty we wrenched Ben and Lon and Jeff from the next table and got out into the crisp air of dawn. The New Yorker was now sunk deep in a trance and just stood where he was put, with his hat on the wrong way. The other boys had cheered up a lot owing to their late social career. Jeff Tuttle said it was all nonsense about its being hard to break into New York society, because look what he'd done in one brief evening without trying--and he flashed three cards on which telephone numbers is written in dainty feminine hands. He said if a modest and retiring stranger like himself could do that much, just think what an out-and-out social climber might achieve!

Right then I was ready to call it an absorbing and instructive evening and get to bed. But no! Ben Sutton at sight of his now dazed New Yorker has resumed his brooding and suddenly announces that we must all make a pilgrimage to West Ninth Street and romantically view his old home which his father told him to get out of twenty-five years ago, and which we can observe by the first tender rays of dawn. He says he has been having precious illusions shattered all evening, but this will be a holy moment that nothing can queer--not even a born New Yorker that hasn't made the grade and is at this moment so vitrified that he'd be a mere glass crash if some one pushed him over.

I didn't want to go a bit. I could see that Jeff Tuttle would soon begin dragging a hip, and the streets at that hour was no place for Lon Price, with his naturally daring nature emphasized, as it were, from drinking this here imprisoned laughter of the man that owned the joint we had just left. But Ben was pleading in a broken voice for one sight of the old home with its boyhood memories clustering about its modest front and I was afraid he'd get to crying, so I give in wearily and we was once more encased in taxicabs and on our way to the sacred scene. Ben had quite an argument with the drivers when he give 'em the address. They kept telling him there wasn't a thing open down there, but he finally got his aim understood. The New Yorker's petrified remains was carefully tucked into the cab with Ben.

And Ben suffered another cruel blow at the end of the ride. He climbed out of the cab in a reverent manner, hoping to be overcome by the sight of the cherished old home, and what did he find? He just couldn't believe it at first. The dear old house had completely disappeared and in its place was a granite office building eighteen stories high. Ben just stood off and looked up at it, too overcome for words. Up near the top a monster brass sign in writing caught the silver light of dawn. The sign sprawled clear across the building and said PANTS EXCLUSIVELY. Still above this was the firm's name in the same medium--looking like a couple of them hard-lettered towns that get evacuated up in Poland.

Poor stricken Ben looked in silence a long time. We all felt his suffering and kept silent, too. Even Jeff Tuttle kept still--who all the way down had been singing about old Bill Bailey who played the Ukelele in Honolulu Town. It was a solemn moment. After a few more minutes of silent grief Ben drew himself together and walked off without saying a word. I thought walking would be a good idea for all of us, especially Lon and Jeff, so Jake paid the taxi drivers and we followed on foot after the chief mourner. The fragile New Yorker had been exhumed and placed in an upright position and he walked, too, when he understood what was wanted of him; he didn't say a word, just did what was told him like one of these boys that the professor hypnotizes on the stage. I herded the bunch along about half a block back of Ben, feeling it was delicate to let him wallow alone in his emotions.

We got over to Broadway, turned up that, and worked on through that dinky little grass plot they call a square, kind of aimless like and wondering where Ben in his grief would lead us. The day was well begun by this time and the passing cars was full of very quiet people on their way to early work. Jake Berger said these New Yorkers would pay for it sooner or later, burning the candle at both ends this way--dancing all night and then starting off to work.

Then up a little way we catch sight of a regular old-fashioned horse-car going crosstown. Ben has stopped this and is talking excitedly to the driver so we hurry up and find he's trying to buy the car from the driver. Yes, sir; he says its the last remnant of New York when it was little and old and he wants to take it back to Nome as a souvenir. Anybody might of thought he'd been drinking. He's got his roll out and wants to pay for the car right there. The driver is a cold-looking old boy with gray chin whiskers showing between his cap and his comforter and he's indignantly telling Ben it can't be done. By the time we get there the conductor has come around and wants to know what they're losing all this time for. He also says they can't sell Ben the car and says further that we'd all better go home and sleep it off, so Ben hands 'em each a ten spot, the driver lets off his brake, and the old ark rattles on while Ben's eyes is suffused with a suspicious moisture, as they say.

Ben now says we must stand right on this corner to watch these cars go by--about once every hour. We argued with him whilst we shivered in the bracing winelike air, but Ben was stubborn. We might of been there yet if something hadn't diverted him from this evil design. It was a string of about fifty Italians that just then come out of a subway entrance. They very plainly belonged to the lower or labouring classes and I judged they was meant for work on the up-and-down street we stood on, that being already torn up recklessly till it looked like most other streets in the same town. They stood around talking in a delirious or Italian manner till their foreman unlocked a couple of big piano boxes. Out of these they took crowbars, axes, shovels, and other instruments of their calling. Ben Sutton has been standing there soddenly waiting for another dear old horse-car to come by, but suddenly he takes notice of these bandits with the tools and I see an evil gleam come into his tired eyes. He assumes a businesslike air, struts over to the foreman of the bunch, and has some quick words with him, making sweeping motions of the arm up and down the cross street where the horse-cars run. After a minute of this I'm darned if the whole bunch didn't scatter out and begin to tear up the pavement along the car-track on this cross street. Ben tripped back to us looking cheerful once more.

"They wouldn't sell me the car," he says, "so I'm going to take back a bunch of the dear old rails. They'll be something to remind me of the dead past. Just think! I rode over those very rails when I was a tot."

We was all kind of took back at this, and I promptly warned Ben that we'd better beat it before we got pinched. But Ben is confident. He says no crime could be safer in New York than setting a bunch of Italians to tearing up a street-car track; that no one could ever possibly suspect it wasn't all right, though he might have to be underhanded to some extent in getting his souvenir rails hauled off. He said he had told the foreman that he was the contractor's brother and had been sent with this new order and the foreman had naturally believed it, Ben looking like a rich contractor himself.

And there they was at work, busy as beavers, gouging up the very last remnant of little old New York when it was that. Ben rubbed his hands in ecstasy and pranced up and down watching 'em for awhile. Then he went over and told the foreman there'd be extra pay for all hands if they got a whole block tore up by noon, because this was a rush job. Hundreds of people was passing, mind you, including a policeman now and then, but no one took any notice of a sight so usual. All the same the rest of us edged north about half a block, ready to make a quick getaway. Ben kept telling us we was foolishly scared. He offered to bet any one in the party ten to one in thousands that he could switch his gang over to Broadway and have a block of that track up before any one got wise. There was no takers.

Ben was now so pleased with himself and his little band of faithful workers that he even begun to feel kindly again toward his New Yorker who was still standing in one spot with glazed eyes. He goes up and tries to engage him in conversation, but the lad can't hear any more than he can see. Ben's efforts, however, finally start him to muttering something. He says it over and over to himself and at last we make out what it is. He is saying: "I'd like to buy a little drink for the party m'self."

"The poor creature is delirious," says Jake Berger.

But Ben slaps him on the back and tells him he's a good sport and he'll give him a couple of these rails to take to his old New York home; he says they can be crossed over the mantel and will look very quaint. The lad kind of shivered under Ben's hearty blow and seemed to struggle out of his trance for a minute. His eyes unglazed and he looks around and says how did he get here and where is it? Ben tells him he's among friends and that they two are the only born New Yorkers left in the world, and so on, when the lad reaches into the pocket of his natty topcoat for a handkerchief and pulls out with it a string of funny little tickets--about two feet of 'em. Ben grabs these up with a strange look in his eyes.

"Bridge tickets!" he yells. Then he grabs his born New Yorker by the shoulders and shakes him still further out of dreamland.

"What street in New York is your old home on?" he demands savagely. The lad blinks his fishy eyes and fixes his hat on that Ben has shook loose.

"Cranberry Street," says he.

"Cranberry Street! Hell, that's Brooklyn, and you claimed New York," says Ben, shaking the hat loose again.

"Greater New York," says the lad pathetically, and pulls his hat firmly down over his ears.

Ben looked at the imposter with horror in his eyes. "Brooklyn!" he muttered--"the city of the unburied dead! So that was the secret of your strange behaviour? And me warming you in my bosom, you viper!"

But the crook couldn't hear him again, haying lapsed into his trance and become entirely rigid and foolish. In the cold light of day his face now looked like a plaster cast of itself. Ben turned to us with a hunted look. "Blow after blow has fallen upon me to-night," he says tearfully, "but this is the most cruel of all. I can't believe in anything after this. I can't even believe them street-car rails are the originals. Probably they were put down last week."

"Then let's get out of this quick," I says to him. "We been exposing ourselves to arrest here long enough for a bit of false sentiment on your part."

"I gladly go," says Ben, "but wait one second." He stealthily approaches the Greater New Yorker and shivers him to wakefulness with another hearty wallop on the back. "Listen carefully," says Ben as the lad struggles out of the dense fog. "Do you see those workmen tearing up that car-track?"

"Yes, I see it," says the lad distinctly. "I've often seen it."

"Very well. Listen to me and remember your life may hang on it. You go over there and stand right by them till they get that track up and don't you let any one stop them. Do you hear? Stand right there and make them work, and if a policeman or any one tries to make trouble you soak him. Remember! I'm leaving those men in your charge. I shall hold you personally responsible for them."

The lad doesn't say a word but begins to walk in a brittle manner toward the labourers. We saw him stop and point a threatening finger at them, then instantly freeze once more. It was our last look at him. We got everybody on a north-bound car with some trouble. Lon Price had gone to sleep standing up and Jeff Tuttle, who was now looking like the society burglar after a tough night's work at his trade, was getting turbulent and thirsty. He didn't want to ride on a common street car. "I want a tashicrab," he says, "and I want to go back to that Louis Château room and dance the tangle." But we persuaded him and got safe up to a restaurant on Sixth Avenue where breakfast was had by all without further adventure. Jeff strongly objected to this restaurant at first, though, because he couldn't hear an orchestra in it. He said he couldn't eat his breakfast without an orchestra. He did, however, ordering apple pie and ice cream and a gin fizz to come. Lon Price was soon sleeping like a tired child over his ham and eggs, and Jeff went night-night, too, before his second gin fizz arrived.

Ben ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, consuming it in a moody rage like a man that has been ground-sluiced at every turn. He said he felt like ending it all and sometimes wished he'd been in the cab that plunged into one of the forty-foot holes in Broadway a couple of nights before. Jake Berger had ordered catfish and waffles, with a glass of Invalid port. He burst into speech once more, too. He said the nights in New York were too short to get much done. That if they only had nights as long as Alaska the town might become famous. "As it is," he says, "I don't mind flirting with this city now and then, but I wouldn't want to marry it."

Well, that about finished the evening, with Lon and Jeff making the room sound like a Pullman palace car at midnight. Oh, yes; there was one thing more. On the day after the events recorded in the last chapter, as it says in novels, there was a piece in one of the live newspapers telling that a well-dressed man of thirty-five, calling himself Clifford J. Hotchkiss and giving a Brooklyn address, was picked up in a dazed condition by patrolman Cohen who had found him attempting to direct the operations of a gang of workmen engaged in repairing a crosstown-car track. He had been sent to the detention ward of Bellevue to await examination as to his sanity, though insisting that he was the victim of a gang of footpads who had plied him with liquor and robbed him of his watch. I showed the piece to Ben Sutton and Ben sent him up a pillow of forget-me-nots with "Rest" spelled on it--without the sender's card.

No; not a word in it about the street-car track being wrongfully tore up. I guess it was like Ben said; no one ever would find out about that in New York. My lands! here it is ten-thirty and I got to be on the job when them hayers start to-morrow A.M. A body would think I hadn't a care on earth when I get started on anecdotes of my past.