Part 2

Then, realizing that he might have called up painful memories, McShay hastened to add:

"But you're all right, Parson; you're grit clean through. Don't suppose you could throw a lariat or pull a gun--parsons ain't supposed to be up in the useful things, are they?--but we like you. We like you, and the feller as don't has got to explain it to us or put us out of business. Personally, we ain't no better'n we ought to be, don't profess no religion. We're on the make; we're in the little game of grab along with all the rest of 'em, but we know the spiritual goods when we see 'em, and you can touch us for anything we've got--in the pocket, on the cards, or in the fryin' pan, and at any spot in the road. Now, I can't make it stronger than that, can I? I guess I've about expressed the prevailing sentiment," and he turned to his two companions for the approval of which he felt serenely certain, as befits an admitted leader.

Neither Lee nor Smith had spoken up to this time, and even now neither felt called upon to pass upon the subject of the great man's remarks. That was obviously superfluous.

"Say, Silent," said Lee to that sphinx, with open admiration, "ain't he a wonder? Ain't Mike got a cinch on the language? Why, when he wants a word all he's got to do is to whistle to it, and it'll come up and eat out of his hand. He's got the English language broke to single or double harness--in fact, he kin make it do tricks like a circus hoss. Say, Parson, Mike's a orator."

"Oh, git out," protested McShay, obviously pleased. "You're locoed."

"He sure is all right," insisted Lee.

"I'm sure of that," said the clergyman heartily, glad that the centre of interest had been shifted to the other.

"Oh, shucks," laughed McShay, with good-humored toleration. "When it comes to savin' the nation or plantin' a prominent citizen, I kin sprinkle a little language over the occasion, but I ain't a braggin' about it, Orson, before a feller as is a artist. I have the savin' grace to know where I come in, and it's at the back door, son. I daresay, Parson, you've heard that I keep a saloon over at 'Calamity'?"

"Yes, I've heard so," said the other simply, without a trace of pharisaism even in the tone of his voice.

"Well, any time you want to keep your hand in at the preachin' game, come right along, and I'll personally guarantee the character of the proceedings. They tell me that as a preacher you're a stampede."

The big eyes in the pallid face glowed for a moment, then they suffused with melancholy. There was a sensible pause before he said:

"Thank you, Mr. McShay; thank you. Perhaps I'll take advantage of your offer some Sunday, but at present I've had to give up preaching: it seems to exhaust my vitality." He paused for a second and then added with a shy little smile, as if he were confessing to a fault: "I like to preach, too, and, as you say, it's been 'tough' to be compelled to give it up, but, after all," suddenly alarmed at the thought that he was bidding for sympathy, "living is more important than preaching, isn't it?"

McShay filled in the pause, that threatened to be too obvious, by jerking out his Waterbury.

"Hello, gitting on to the time! Guess we'll be moseying along. Well, Parson, I've expressed myself pretty free, ain't I? And in something of a complimentary vein, not with a view to inflooincin' your attitude in this approachin' conference. Mind you, I ain't above doin' it if I could. I don't do it 'cause I know it wouldn't go, that's all," and he laughed generously as he hoisted himself into the saddle. McShay was a man with few illusions. He fancied he was pretty familiar with the ordinary phases of human nature, and his code of morality was a working code; it would bear comparison, he felt sure, with that of the average citizen, and it wasn't so high as to be inconvenient. He had never felt called upon to experiment with a code obviously theoretical. He wouldn't hesitate at cards or in a trade to cheat one who was engaged in trying to cheat him. In fact he looked upon it as a joyous and holy duty to skin the skinner. He was not inexperienced in the ways of the world. He knew more of Doctor McCloud than that worthy man dreamed of, for when a very young man he had been a policeman in St. Paul and during the uncomfortable times following a reform upheaval had felt obliged to leave that saintly city. Indeed, he had brought about the upheaval by his own obstinacy, for there are degrees of graft, and the young Irish-American wouldn't violate his own wholly illogical standards of what was fair or decent any more than he would accept the standards of the too-good. He had come into his own in the cattle country, opened a saloon, became a political leader, a boss, and a cattle king. He had prospered. He was loved by his friends and feared by his enemies, and he was fond of both. And when the cowboys on one of their summer round-ups found something that looked like coal or jet, and which, unlike coal or jet would light like a candle, they took it at once to McShay, who promptly, without knowing whether it had value or not, located claims for everybody and everybody's relatives and claimed everything in sight. "To those that have shall be given," he explained irreverently, and indeed that version of the text was his point of view. And when further investigation showed that the discovery was an important one and that a considerable part of the mine or the vein or series of pockets was on the Red Butte Ranch, he promptly sent Andy Openheim and Charley Short, very quietly, to London to buy the ranch or that portion of it containing minerals from the Earl of Kerhill. It was pretty well known that the ranch had not been a profitable venture to the Earl, in the days when he had been a cowboy, and it was thought that his old herders, "Andy" and "Shorty," could buy it for a song. They had returned with a deed, but by this time these two amiable citizens had caught the prevailing spirit of enterprise and announced that they had indeed secured the prize, but that they had bought the ranch for _themselves_, a sample of commercial wakefulness which was denounced as several kinds of treachery, and came near to leading to the death of some eminent citizens. However, as by that time the secret was out and the lust of gain had spread from the range to the settlements and from there to the cities and the State, and indeed to the busy halls of Congress, and every one pretty much was evolving a plan to get in on the good thing, it was thought best to buy out the holders of the deed, even at the advance in price which they impudently demanded. McShay paid the price for himself and his cowboy associates, but at the conclusion of the purchase he strongly advised Shorty and Andy to leave the country, which they lost no time in doing. The fate of these two worthies will always be a stock warning to the rising generation in Calamity. Before they reached the Canadian border they had quarrelled, and when the smoke had cleared away Shorty was alive and had the money. There was profound regret at first that either should have survived, but this sorrow was mitigated later by the report that Shorty had lost every cent at a single sitting in a three-card monte game up in the North-west. Then only was the moral tone of Coyote County felt to be in the way of rehabilitation, and confidence was restored in the dispensations of Providence. It was even darkly hinted that McShay had sent out some skilful short-card men on their trail, and to that extent had assisted Providence to make plain that "transgressors shall be taken in their own naughtiness."

Whether this was true or not, McShay never contradicted it, and it added not a little to his prestige with his constituents. As McShay turned to speak to the preacher, his more active companions, Orson Lee and "Silent" Smith, had already mounted and turned their mustangs toward the agency. As he glanced toward their retreating figures, McShay said with a twinkle in his eye:

"Say, Parson, you'll like 'Silent.' He ain't much on gab, but say, he kin shoot like hell, and if the argyment is agoin' against you, 'Silent' is good company; he sure is good company."

*CHAPTER III*

After a ride through the Bad Lands, Standing Bear Agency was a gracious sight. One could see from afar the white flag-pole which marked the centre of its activities. Close by nestled the agent's cosey little cottage which peeped out from the shade of maple and cottonwood trees, backed by its well-kept barns and corrals. Opposite it sprawled the Indian-trader's store, a log-cabin affair, the relic of other days, by comparison a really beautiful bit of architecture in the surrounding ugliness. These two aristocratic buildings stood a bit apart, and had a small sense of aloofness. Between ran what had once been a trail, then a road, and now was trying to be a street; a street that had moved boldly out toward the prairie, taken one frightened look, and then shrunk back cowed, and had refused to be teased or coaxed further. It quit almost before it began and was hideous with sheet-iron and clapboard monstrosities, which here and there bulged into a pretentious bow-window, as irritating as the challenge of a flagrant hat on a particularly ugly woman. These buildings huddled together as if they felt the enveloping loneliness. Back of them was a tin-can desolation. Further along was the blacksmith shop, and near the "bench" which rose on the other side of the "crik" was the saw-mill, and off to one side the slaughter-house and its corrals. The valley was sprinkled with the huts, tepees, rude houses of the Indian farmers and the agency employees, which followed the course of the Standing Bear and the crude irrigating ditches. Beyond all, across the mesa, rose majestic peaks covered with perpetual snows. But for these noble heights, Nature hereabouts might have been accused of an undignified proceeding, but the Moquitch Mountains spoke eternally and serenely of God.

In front of the trader's store was a platform littered with merchandise, buckets, rope, tubs, etc., things that slopped over from the crowded shelves within. Even on bargain-counter days, if such evidences of a high civilization ever reached this emporium, business was desultory, but the trader made up in percentage of profit what he lacked in volume of trade. It was late in the afternoon, business apparently at a standstill, "nuthin' doin." Cadger, the proprietor, was leaning casually out of the window, and, though neither looked at the other, was talking to the agent who stood on the platform just outside. The merchant must have had another name, but no one had ever heard him called anything but Cadger. His father and mother--it was difficult to believe that he had ever had a father and mother, and inconceivable that he had ever been a child, much less a baby--if, I say, he ever had parents, they probably called him something endearing or at least human, but in a country where almost no one escaped a nickname, he remained just Cadger. In appearance he suggested negation, the excluded middle. He seemed to have been plucked too soon and faded early. He had a half-hearted nose, a discouraged chin, and his faded little eyes blinked weakly. There is such a thing as carrying insignificance to excess. In personality he was so unobtrusive as to appear not to be around, unless one stepped on him. It is said, however, that any one so careless remembered it, if he lived to remember anything; for, strange to say, Cadger was supposed to be a man-killer. He wasn't at all the usual bad man type, looking for an audience and a chance to show off. He was a plain business man, and all he had ever asked, like other business men, was just "to be let alone." There was a vague rumor that he had once been in business in the Black Hills, where he had gone into competition with the express companies in the carrying of gold, and after a more or less successful career had found it safer to retire to the slower and less exciting pursuits of a post-trader's store. At all events, he was a quiet, modest man that no one cared to investigate or annoy, and no one had successfully questioned his commercial methods. He took no pains to remedy his natural deficiencies, for he had found it useful to look like a fool.

"I think we can do business with Calthorpe," said the agent, looking off into space.

"Can't make him out," said Cadger in a tone as vacant as his face. Then after quite a pause which he filled with smoke from a filthy pipe. "Suppose you know all about him, but you ain't never give it away to me."

The agent swung a contemptuous look in the direction of the other.

"He's out here, isn't he? Along with the rest of us. No one knows the exact particulars about you before you came here."

The other overlooked the obvious inference and did not trouble to reply in kind, but murmured gently, "Takin' chances."

"Big Bill applied for the job for him," continued the agent. "All Bill knows about him, or all he'll tell, is that he brought a letter of introduction to him from his old boss, the earl of something or other, who used to own the Red Butte Ranch. Of course he isn't out here because he wants to be here any more than we are. A couple of years ago I read a story in one of the Sunday papers about an English lord who was ambassador to Spain and got mixed up with a Spanish dancer and raised a family by her. The son, when he got around to it, tried to prove he was legitimate. Maybe Calthorpe's story isn't any worse than that. Maybe it is. He looks like he was half Spanish. Of course he's had English bringing up, has the remnants of an accent with him, though he's trying to drop it. What do you suppose would induce a man who was an educated gentleman to come out to this damned waste and accept the wages of a chief of Indian police? Well, to my humble mind, nothing but crime, my Christian friend."

"Kin you hold him?"

"Well, we can't frighten him. We got to make it worth his while, that's all."

"Will he _stay_ bought?" persisted the business man.

"We got to trust somebody," said Ladd impatiently. "He knows more about the country in general and the asphalt lands in particular than any man living, and when I found out he was a surveyor----"

"How did you get onto that?"

"Heard him talking the lingo with Bill, then asked him point-blank. It was a find for us, for his position as chief of police made it possible for him to survey these lands without arousing any suspicion. Don't think the other people know we have been at it. I wouldn't have consented to this powwow this afternoon if I hadn't thought we could have fixed things up beforehand. What in hell do you suppose is keeping him?" But Cadger's mind was still back on the first tack.

"You're in too much of a sweat. You want to go awful slow when it comes to puttin' yourself" (deprecating pause) "and me into his hands."

The force of this observation seemed to impress David Ladd, for he said quietly:

"Well, you know the talk we had last night. The confab will be out here. I'll see to that. Cleaning a gun at that window just where you are now--why, an accident might happen. People are so careless with fire-arms, especially a plum fool like you. Why, it's easy. If you see me take off my hat and hold it in my hand, get ready: if you see me put my hat back again on my head, why get him, that's all. You're the best shot in the country, unless it's 'Silent' Smith." This as one business man to another.

"Hello, here's Big Bill. Maybe he knows." And Ladd stepped down from the store to meet the cattle-boss.

"Has Calthorpe come in with his men?"

"Hardly think so. I'm on my way to our shack now to see."

"When he arrives, tell him I want to see him at once, will you--_at once_!" and the agent entered his house across the way.

Big Bill was bigger and a good deal slower than in the old days on the Red Butte Ranch, and his coarse hair was very gray, but it still crowned the same kindly, simple face. Bill was feeling his way to the retired list, though he didn't realize it himself, and he had kept his job because no one cared to explain to him that he was getting old. It was hoped that some day he'd tumble to it himself and resign. No one liked to contemplate what would happen then, so no one did. The agent was not a sentimental man, but he knew the working value of sentiment, and so Bill stayed on.

He and Calthorpe shared their house, a little wooden box pitched in the shelter of a clump of quaking ash ("quaking asp" in the vernacular) some little distance below the Agency and on the bank of an irrigating ditch. As Bill came in sight of it he saw Calthorpe calmly sitting in the door-way. Instead of riding into the Agency the young man had deliberately avoided it.

"Hello, Bill," he shouted cheerily.

"Hello, son. Say, Ladd's terrible anxious to see you."

To this the other replied irrelevantly:

"Seen Wah-na-gi?"

"No."

"Seen Appah?"

"No," and the smile of welcome faded from Bill's face, and he sat down on a convenient soap box, picked up a stick on the point of his pocket-knife, and began to whittle. The young man saw he was displeased and waited.

"Say, son, you're kind of runnin' wild on the range, ain't ye? And ye ain't a-gittin' anywhere, or a-servin' any useful purpose 's far as I kin see. Ain't ye kind o' fergittin' what ye come out here fer? What you lingerin' round here fer any way?"

"Oh, for several reasons, Bill, several reasons," said Calthorpe pleasantly.

"You found out all you want to know about the asphalt lands long ago. When you goin' to chuck this job and go over and take what belongs to you?"

There was a pause while Calthorpe looked dreamily off into space.

"Well," he drawled slowly, "before leaving I'd like to turn a trick or two--make the agent show his hand."

The slang and the metaphor of the people about him came very easily to this alleged stranger.

"Ladd?" said Bill doubtfully, with a tone and inflection that expressed volumes for the danger and uselessness of such a proceeding.

"Wouldn't you like to see him put his cards on the table?" asked the boy. Bill's eyes twinkled and it was manifest that the suggestion was alluring.

"Sounds good. To rope David might be a pleasin' diversion as a form of entertainment; he's a skunk all right, but that ain't a-keepin' you here, Hal, my boy."

"No?"

"No."

There was a pause.

"You ain't asked me what it is, but I'm goin' to tell you. It's Wah-na-gi."

"Bill!" And the light died out of the blue eyes which glittered ominously, and Bill was sensitive to the warning in the cold even tone of the boy's pleasant voice.

"That's all right," he hastened to say as he put up his guard. "You needn't git the blind staggers. Somebody's got to round you up. I was your dad's foreman before you was born. Your dad sure was a gentleman. He sure was, and as to his bein' an Englishman, why, he lived that down."

"You and father were pals, I know that, Bill," said the youngster, softening.

"You and me was pards too, son. I made you your first quirt; taught you how to ride. I helped to bury your little Injin mother. I ain't your kin exactly----"

"You're closer than kin, Bill. I didn't mean to be ugly. Don't mind me. Say what you like."

"Well," said the big fellow with an awkward air of apology, "your dad made me promise to ride herd on you. You know that, don't you?"

"That's right."

"Sure." He blurted, as he felt on firmer ground. "He wrote me you had been a-hittin' it up in London."

"That's right, Bill; I was riding for a fall--going to hell fast." And he watched the smoke of his cigarette and saw in it those evil days. "I didn't belong and I couldn't fit in. It was all wrong. _I_ was all wrong. I knew it, felt it, but couldn't somehow change it. It was the West in me, I fancy--in my blood." Then he turned to the big fellow and said with a smile that won the people who could inspire it: "But I've been a pretty good boy since I've been out here, haven't I, Bill?"

The other looked at him with an affection that was unmistakable.

"Well, say, since you been out here you've made everything that wears a hat take it off to you."

"Then why in blazes are you giving me the spur?"

"Wah-na-gi--that's the answer. Now wait. I got to git this out of my system. Hal, son, don't you go to makin' no such mistake as your dad made."

"And don't you forget, Bill," said Hal stiffly, "that I had a mother as well as a father--a mother I have no reason to regard as a mistake."

It was Bill's turn to look off into the mountains, to go back into the past.

"Say," he said softly, "she was all right. Nat-u-ritch was sure all right. She didn't know anything but bein' a wife and bein' a mother, and that's pretty good, I guess. I suppose you know why she killed herself? Couldn't understand why her kid should be sent away to England. She was a thoroughbred in a way, but, son, it was an Injin way."

"I fancy that was what was the matter with me in London, Bill. My way was an Indian way."

"Well," said the cattle-boss, seeing that he was being diverted from his text, "Don't walk into trouble with your eyes wide open."

"Don't you worry about me, old chap; I'm not in love with Wah-na-gi, but----"

"You jess feel sorry fer her." Bill said this with the amiable sneer of a man who has nothing to learn about women and the world.

"Yes," said Hal simply; "don't you?"

The directness of this appeal caught the guileless Bill unprepared.

"Sure," he admitted. "Sure, I do. She's been to school. Couldn't anything worse happen to her. Edjjication? Why, it's worse'n whiskey fer the Injin."

"And don't you see," said the boy, following up his advantage, "she's alone and she needs friends, and while I'm here, while I'm chief of police, I can keep an eye on her, protect her in a way, but when I leave" (pause) "what will become of Wah-na-gi?"

While Bill was groping in his slow way for an easy and pleasant and convincing way of saying that one couldn't plunge headlong into the tangled affairs of all the misfit people in this crazy world, the figure of a woman appeared in the foot-path that crossed the low ridge on the opposite side of the narrow valley. Before Bill had arranged his arguments Hal, without a change of countenance, suddenly developed initiative.

"Well," he said, rising, "I thought I'd learn all the news from you, but, as usual, I'll have to find out all about it and tell it to you. And now I'm going over to see the amiable Ladd. Oh, by the by," he added casually, "how is 'Calico'--fit?"

"Never better."

"He hasn't been ridden to-day?"

"No. Why?"

"Have him fed and watered; saddled and bridled, then hitch him just behind the trader's store. Do the same for the best horse you've got."

"Why? What's up? Ain't you had enough of the trail for the present?"

"Don't know, Bill. Don't know what may happen. Tell you later--after it's happened."

And he swung off on foot toward the Agency. Bill did not change his position for several moments; then he rose and looked affectionately after the boy, and, as he turned, the figure of a woman paused for a moment on the ridge and then disappeared in the direction of Cadger's store.

"Of course," he muttered, "_of_ course," with all the sarcasm of which he was capable. "Ain't a man a damn fool!"

*CHAPTER IV*