Part 1

THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA

A Story of a Fish out of Water

By Irvin S. Cobb

Illustrations by James E. Allen

From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind back. It became evident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down through the spicy dry air.

“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up, you scenery-lovin’ _so-and-soes_!”

There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and then fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Western wilds!” she said.

“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter, Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother’s were.

“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such picturesque types everywhere!”

“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at all, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”

“_Mong père_, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”

Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.

Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have been the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.

“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you’ll remember, we darn’ near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices--chow and lots of it!”

Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on his brow.

“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her attention--that _mmphing_ sound was. Lacking vowels though it did, its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.

“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that dreadful horseback riding?”

“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the one I’m worried about.”

“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with Shirley?”

“Look at her. That’s all I ask--just look at her.”

Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.

“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,” she protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday--or was it Tuesday; no, Monday--I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming through Swift Current Pass--only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy she was looking.”

“I don’t mean that--she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s doing!”

“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to know?” demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her young.

“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these last four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these roundabout tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you? All right then, use ’em.”

“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?”

“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try to remember it, too--diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to observe her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides she’s so interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And it’s getting serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my drift, or must I make plans and specifications?”

“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. “Oh, Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t mean it! A child who’s traveled and seen the world! A child who’s had every advantage that wealth and social position and all could give her! A child who’s a member of the Junior League! A child who’s--who Hector, you’re crazy. Hector, you know it’s utterly impossible--utterly! It’s preposterous!” Womanlike, she debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen something--you’ve overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you overheard!”

“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that on her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve seen a-plenty.”

“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen it myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.

“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,” continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual. That’s the worst symptom yet--that slang is.

“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did--you mushed-up.” His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or else I’m the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”

“Maybe--maybe----” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. “Of course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector--the mere suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible--but on the bare chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her head maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she is that----”

* * * * *

“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating that young people are different from the way young people were when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we were--same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same everything--but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster of ours--not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling, that masterful, self-educated man.

“But if I pointed out a few things to her--if I warned her----”

“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I’d come courting and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose he’d tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the match--what would have happened? You’d have thought you were oppressed and persecuted and you’d have grabbed for me even quicker than you did.”

“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed----”

“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kinsfolks and all the other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma’am, if you’ll take a tip from an old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy, with one road, you’ll----”

“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”

“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our reserved seats up in the grand stand and see how the game comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting--that’s our line and we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for future developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”

* * * * *

With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady’s bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely studied these.

The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock. Soon they swung away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and two jeweled glaciers.

They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate and remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along the farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed among the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw a solitary bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia springing out of his skull and likewise they saw a pair of indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete particulars consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.

Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within sight of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain. So they pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove there in a sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and watched the sun go down in his glory. When the moon rose it was too good to believe. You almost could reach up and jingle the tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for lovemaking among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs. Gating had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary form amidships. She’d been apprehensive all day but now the sinking was more pronounced.

She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper was over and it was near hushabye-time for the tired forms of the middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she spoke then to her husband, touching on the topic so steadfastly uppermost in her brain.

“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither one of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he helped her on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried for her! And the way she let him do it! And they’re--they’re together outside now. Oh, Hector!”

“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtledoves. Why in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight--good and hard? Romola, I don’t want to harry you up any more than’s necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like this and they’re liable to do considerable damage to tender hearts.”

“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”

“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was quite plain that he did.

He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and peeped through the opening.

The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse; his Angora chaps with wings that almost were voluminous enough for an eagle’s wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy--they all matched and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.

His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary.

Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and given to deporting himself accordingly.

At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura all about him.

The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded void beyond her.

Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and _mmphed_ several times.

“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked absently.

“Who?”

“Him.”

“You actually mean that cowboy?”

“None other than which.”

“Oh, Hector! That--that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that clodhopper!”

“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no farm-hand; he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists around through these mountains--and that’s a very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows blame’ well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle he’s riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket. And I’d give about five years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly high-grade proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much blame him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself, who else is going to?”

“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really--but no, you couldn’t be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their different environments! Look at their different viewpoints!”

“I’m looking--just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any more than you would--although at that I’m not saying I couldn’t maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn’t mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I didn’t have any station in life to start from myself--it was a whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to stagger along fairly well. I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be guitar-pickers--and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of ’em carry any weight is on the hip.

“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been raised to talk the same language--that’s the trouble. I don’t want her to make a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s fairly started. I don’t want her to have a husband that she’s liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she’d maybe have to go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she’s in, she’s probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next thirty, forty or fifty years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After a while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach and Paris.”

“But if she’s set her mind--and you know how stubborn she is when she gets her mind set--thank heavens she didn’t get that from my side of the family!--I say, if she’s set her mind on him, heavens above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s hypnotized; it’s this free and easy Western life that’s fascinated her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a half-gallon hat and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with her, or a close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we can.”

“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured, she’s----”

“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”

“But how?”

“Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her little dream. By not letting either one of ’em see how anxious we are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected as we can.”

“And in the meanwhile?”

“Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few winks. I hurt all over and there’s quite a lot of me measured that way--all over.”

“You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over us?”

“I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you’ll hear me doing it.” He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the blankets over him.

Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can.

* * * * *

Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars and the unseen heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep defiles where ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young man to steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies in his symposium of contributory dangers.