Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (16 page)

She saw the tall one delaying beside the driver, and speaking. He spoke so quietly that not a word reached her, until of a sudden the driver protested loudly. The man had thrown something, which turned out to be a bottle. This twisted loftily and dived into the stream. He said something more to the driver, then put his hand on the saddle-horn, looked half-lingeringly at the passenger on the bank, dropped his grave eyes from hers, and swinging upon his horse, was gone just as the passenger opened her mouth and with inefficient voice murmured, “Oh, thank you!” at his departing back.

The driver drove up now, a chastened creature. He helped Miss Wood in, and inquired after her welfare with a hanging head; then meek as his own drenched horses, he climbed back to his reins, and nursed the stage on toward the Bow Leg Mountains much as if it had been a perambulator.

As for Miss Wood, she sat recovering, and she wondered what the man on the horse must think of her. She knew that she was not ungrateful, and that if he had given her an opportunity she would have explained to him. If he supposed that she did not appreciate his act—Here into the midst of these meditations came an abrupt memory that she had screamed—she could not be sure when. She rehearsed the adventure from the beginning, and found one or two further uncertainties—how it had all been while she was on the horse, for instance. It was confusing to determine precisely what she had done with her arms. She knew where one of his arms had been. And the handkerchief with the flowers was gone. She made a few rapid dives in search of it. Had she, or had she not, seen him putting something in his pocket? And why had she behaved so unlike herself? In a few miles Miss Wood entertained sentiments of maidenly resentment toward her rescuer, and of maidenly hope to see him again.

 

To that river crossing he came again, alone, when the days were growing short. The ford was dry sand, and the stream a winding lane of shingle. He found a pool,—pools always survive the year round in this stream,—and having watered his pony, he lunched near the spot to which he had borne the frightened passenger that day. Where the flowing current had been, he sat, regarding the now extremely safe channel.

“She cert‘nly wouldn’t need to grip me so close this mawnin’,” he said, as he pondered over his meal. “I reckon it will mightily astonish her when I tell her how harmless the torrent is lookin’.” He held out to his pony a slice of bread matted with sardines, which the pony expertly accepted. “You’re a plumb pie-biter, you Monte,” he continued. Monte rubbed his nose on his master’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t trust you with berries and cream. No, seh; not though yu’ did rescue a drownin’ lady.”

Presently he tightened the forward cinch, got in the saddle, and the pony fell into his wise mechanical jog; for he had come a long way, and was going a long way, and he knew this as well as the man did.

To use the language of Cattle Land, steers had “jumped to seventy-five.”
³
This was a great and prosperous leap in their value. To have flourished in that golden time you need not be dead now, nor even middle-aged; but it is Wyoming mythology already—quite as fabulous as the high-jumping cow. Indeed, people gathered together and behaved themselves much in the same pleasant and improbable way. Johnson County, and Natrona, and Converse, and others, to say nothing of the Cheyenne Club,
⁴
had been jumping over the moon for some weeks, all on account of steers; and on the strength of this vigorous price of seventy-five, the Swinton Brothers were giving a barbecue at the Goose Egg outfit, their ranch on Bear Creek. Of course the whole neighborhood was bidden, and would come forty miles to a man; some would come farther—the Virginian was coming a hundred and eighteen. It had struck him—rather suddenly, as shall be made plain—that he should like to see how they were getting along up there on Bear Creek. “They,” was how he put it to his acquaintances. His acquaintances did not know that he had bought himself a pair of trousers and a scarf, unnecessarily excellent for such a general visit. They did not know that in the spring, two days after the adventure with the stage, he had learned accidentally who the lady in the stage was. This he had kept to himself; nor did the camp ever notice that he had ceased to sing that eightieth stanza he had made about the A B C—the stanza which was not printable. He effaced it imperceptibly, giving the boys the other seventy-nine at judicious intervals. They dreamed of no guile, but merely saw in him, whether frequenting camp or town, the same not overangelic comrade whom they valued and could not wholly understand.

All spring he had ridden trail, worked at ditches during summer, and now he had just finished with the beef round-up. Yesterday, while he was spending a little comfortable money at the Drybone hog-ranch, a casual traveller from the north gossiped of Bear Creek, and the fences up there, and the farm crops, the Westfalls, and the young schoolmarm from Vermont, for whom the Taylors had built a cabin next door to theirs. The traveller had not seen her, but Mrs. Taylor and all the ladies thought the world of her, and Lin McLean had told him she was “away up in G.” She would have plenty of partners at this Swinton barbecue. Great boom for the country, wasn’t it, steers jumping that way?

The Virginian heard, asking no questions; and left town in an hour, with the scarf and trousers tied in his slicker behind his saddle. After looking upon the ford again, even though it was dry and not at all the same place, he journeyed inattentively. When you have been hard at work for months with no time to think, of course you think a great deal during your first empty days. “Step along, you Monte hawss!”
⁵
he said, rousing after some while. He disciplined Monte, who flattened his ears affectedly and snorted. “Why, you surely ain’ thinkin’ of you‘-self as a hero? She wasn’t really a-drowndin’, you pie-biter.
^af
He rested his serious glance upon the alkali. “She’s not likely to have forgot that mix-up, though. I guess I’ll not remind her about grippin’ me, and all that. She wasn’t the kind a man ought to josh about such things. She had a right clear eye.” Thus, tall and loose in the saddle, did he jog along the sixty miles which still lay between him and the dance.

—10—

WHERE FANCY WAS BRED

TWO CAMPS IN THE open, and the Virginian’s Monte horse, untired, brought him to the Swintons’ in good time for the barbecue. The horse received good food at length, while his rider was welcomed with good whiskey. Good whiskey—for had not steers jumped to seventy-five?

Inside the Goose Egg kitchen many small delicacies were preparing, and a steer was roasting whole outside. The bed of flame under it showed steadily brighter against the dusk that was beginning to veil the lowlands. The busy hosts went and came, while men stood and men lay near the fire-glow. Chalkeye was there, and Nebrasky, and Trampas, and Honey Wiggin, with others, enjoying the occasion; but Honey Wiggin was enjoying himself: he had an audience, he was sitting up discoursing to it.

“Hello!” he said, perceiving the Virginian. “So you’ve dropped in for your turn! Number—six, ain’t he, boys?”

“Depends who’s a-runnin’ the countin’,” said the Virginian, and stretched himself down among the audience.

“I’ve saw him number one when nobody else was around,” said Trampas.

“How far away was you standin’ when you beheld that?” inquired the lounging Southerner.

“Well, boys,” said Wiggin, “I expect it will be Miss Schoolmarm says who’s number one to-night.”

“So she’s arrived in this hyeh country?” observed the Virginian, very casually.

“Arrived!” said Trampas again. “Where have you been grazing lately?”

“A right smart way from the mules.”

“Nebrasky and the boys was tellin’ me they’d missed yu’ off the range,” again interposed Wiggin. “Say, Nebrasky, who have yu’ offered your canary to the schoolmarm said you mustn’t give her?”

Nebrasky grinned wretchedly.

“Well, she’s a lady, and she’s square, not takin’ a man’s gift when she don’t take the man. But yu’d ought to get back all them letters yu’ wrote her. Yu’ sure ought to ask her for them tell-tales.”

“Ah, pshaw, Honey!” protested the youth. It was well known that he could not write his name.

“Why, if here ain’t Bokay Baldy!” cried the agile Wiggin, stooping to fresh prey. “Found them slippers yet, Baldy? Tell yu’ boys, that was turruble sad luck Baldy had. Did yu’ hear about that? Baldy, yu’ know, he can stay on a tame horse ‘most as well as the schoolmarm. But just you give him a pair of young knittin’-needles and see him make ‘em sweat! He worked an elegant pair of slippers with pink cabbages on ’em for Miss Wood.”

“I bought ’em at Medicine Bow,” blundered Baldy.

“So yu’ did!” assented the skilful comedian. “Baldy he bought ‘em. And on the road to her cabin there at the Taylors’ he got thinkin’ they might be too big, and he got studyin’ what to do. And he fixed up to tell her about his not bein’ sure of the size, and how she was to let him know if they dropped off her, and he’d exchange ’em, and when he got right near her door, why, he couldn’t find his courage. And so he slips the parcel under the fence and starts serenadin’ her. But she ain’t inside her cabin at all. She’s at supper next door with the Taylors, and Baldy singin’ ‘Love has conqwered pride and angwer’ to a lone house. Lin McLean was comin’ up by Taylor’s corral, where Taylor’s Texas bull was. Well, it was turruble sad. Baldy’s pants got tore, but he fell inside the fence, and Lin druv the bull back and somebody stole them Medicine Bow goloshes. Are you goin’ to knit her some more, Bokay?”

“About half that ain’t straight,” Baldy commented, with mildness.

“The half that was tore off yer pants? Well, never mind, Baldy; Lin will get left too, same as all of yu’.”

“Is there many?” inquired the Virginian. He was still stretched on his back, looking up at the sky.

“I don’t know how many she’s been used to where she was raised,” Wiggin answered. “A kid stage-driver come from Point of Rocks one day and went back the next. Then the foreman of the 76 outfit, and the horse-wrangler from the Bar-Circle-L, and two deputy marshals, with punchers, stringin’ right along,—all got their tumble. Old Judge Burrage from Cheyenne come up in August for a hunt and stayed round here and never hunted at all. There was that horse thief—awful good-lookin’. Taylor wanted to warn her about him, but Mrs. Taylor said she’d look after her if it was needed. Mr. Horsethief gave it up quicker than most; but the schoolmarm couldn’t have knowed he had a Mrs. Horse-thief camped on Poison Spider till afterwards. She wouldn’t go ridin’ with him. She’ll go with some, takin’ a kid along.”

“Bah!” said Trampas.

The Virginian stopped looking at the sky, and watched Trampas from where he lay.

“I think she encourages a man some,” said poor Nebrasky.

“Encourages? Because she lets yu’ teach her how to shoot?” said Wiggin. “Well—I don’t guess I’m a judge. I’ve always kind o’ kep’ away from them good women. Don’t seem to think of anything to chat about to ’em. The only folks I’d say she encourages is the school kids. She kisses them.”

“Riding and shooting and kissing the kids,” sneered Trampas.

“That’s a heap too pussy-kitten for me.”

They laughed. The sage-brush audience is readily cynical.

“Look for the man, I say,” Trampas pursued. “And ain’t he there? She leaves Baldy sit on the fence while she and Lin McLean—”

They laughed loudly at the blackguard picture which he drew; and the laugh stopped short, for the Virginian stood over Trampas.

“You can rise up now, and tell them you lie,” he said.

The man was still for a moment in the dead silence. “I thought you claimed you and her wasn’t acquainted,” said he then.

“Stand on your laigs, you polecat, and say you’re a liar!”

Trampas’s hand moved behind him.

“Quit that,” said the Southerner, “or I’ll break your neck!”

The eye of a man is the prince of deadly weapons, Trampas looked in the Virginian’s, and slowly rose. “I didn’t mean—” he began, and paused, his face poisonously bloated.

“Well, I’ll call that sufficient. Keep a-standin’ still. I ain’ going to trouble yu’ long. In admittin’ yourself to be a liar you have spoke God’s truth for onced. Honey Wiggin, you and me and the boys have hit town too frequent for any of us to play Sunday on the balance of the gang.” He stopped and surveyed Public Opinion, seated around in carefully inexpressive attention. “We ain’t a Christian outfit a little bit, and maybe we have most forgotten what decency feels like. But I reckon we haven’t
plumb
forgot what it means. You can sit down now, if you want.”

The liar stood and sneered experimentally, looking at Public Opinion. But this changeful deity was no longer with him, and he heard it variously assenting, “That’s so,” and “She’s a lady,” and otherwise excellently moralizing. So he held his peace. When, however, the Virginian had departed to the roasting steer, and Public Opinion relaxed into that comfort which we all experience when the sermon ends, Trampas sat down amid the reviving cheerfulness, and ventured again to be facetious.

“Shut your rank mouth,” said Wiggin to him amiably. “I don’t care whether he knows her or if he done it on principle. I’ll accept the roundin’ up he gave us—and say! you’ll swallo’ your dose, too! Us boys’ll stand in with him in this.”

So Trampas swallowed. And what of the Virginian?

He had championed the feeble, and spoken honorably in meeting, and according to all the constitutions and bylaws of morality he should have been walking in virtue’s especial calm. But there it was! he had spoken; he had given them a peep through the keyhole at his inner man; and as he prowled away from the assemblage before whom he stood convicted of decency, it was vicious rather than virtuous that he felt. Other matters also disquieted him—so Lin McLean was hanging round that schoolmarm! Yet he joined Ben Swinton in a seemingly Christian spirit. He took some whiskey and praised the size of the barrel, speaking with his host like this:—