Читать книгу In Old Kentucky - Edward Marshall - Страница 6

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Her laugh, too, roused more than vagrant birds into attention. She had emerged from the abrupt little valley and was entering upon a plateau which had been left comparatively open by the removal of great trees, sacrificed to furnish ties for the new railroad building in the lowlands. The place was littered with the discarded tops of pines and other woodland rubbish and seemed forlorn and wrecked. She swept her eyes about with the glance of a proprietor, for Madge Brierly owned all of this as well as most of the land through which the brook which deepened into the pool of her adventure flowed. Indeed the girl was counted rich among her fellows and owned, also, land down in the valley on which she would not live, but which she rented for an annual sum to her significant, although it would not have kept a lowland belle in caramels.

In the center of the disordered clearing just before her, was the person who, like the birds, had been roused to keen attention by the maiden's ringing laugh. She saw him first while he was peering here and there, astonished, to learn whence the sound had come, and, with the instinctive caution of the mountain-bred, she quickly stepped behind a clump of laurel, through which she peered at him.

He was a man of sixty years, or thereabouts, wiry, tough and well preserved. His hair, of grizzled grey, was longer than most men wore theirs, even among the mountains, where there are few conventionalities in male attire. He was dressed in the ordinary garb of the Kentucky planter of the better class—broad soft hat, flowing necktie, long frock-coat, which formed a striking contrast to the coarse high-boots into the tops of which his trousers had been tucked—and yet he hardly seemed to her to belong to the class of gentlemen to which his dress apparently assigned him. His face was coarse and hard, his eyes, as he peered about in search of her, were "shifty," she assured herself. His hands were large and crudely fashioned.

"'Pears like 'most ev'ry one is roamin' 'round my land to-day," she thought. "I wonder what this one is up to, thar?"

For fully fifteen minutes her curiosity remained unsatisfied, for, startled by the ringing laugh, the stranger spent at least a quarter of an hour in furtive peering, here and there, about the clearing, plainly searching for the laughter. At no time, however, did he approach her hiding place near enough to see her, and, finally, apparently satisfied that his ears had fooled him, or that whoever it had been who had disturbed him with the merry peal had gone away, he went back to his work.

Just what this work could be was what she waited curiously to see. She felt not the least resentment of the trespass it involved, for the land was wild, and on it, as elsewhere in the mountains, any one was free to come and go who did not commit the foolishness of neglecting camp fires, likely to start forests into blaze, or the supreme treachery of giving information to the revenue officials about hidden stills. Her eager curiosity was aroused, more by the mysterious nature of the stranger's operations than by the fact that they were conducted on her land.

Having satisfied himself that no one, now, was near, and, therefore, that he was not watched, the unpleasantly mysterious old man went back to the work which evidently had brought him hither. With utmost care he moved about the place, scrutinizing outcropping rocks, and this, as they were everywhere, meant a minute examination of the land. In his hand he carried a small hammer, and, with this, now and then, after a careful visual examination of a rock, he knicked it, here and there, investigating carefully and even eagerly the scars he made, the bits of rock which were clipped off, now and then even looking at the latter through a magnifying glass, which he took for the purpose from a pocket of his vest.

She had watched these operations, fascinated, for, possibly, a full half hour, despite the discomfort of damp clothing, which had begun to chill her, when she saw signs of violent excitement on the old man's face and in his actions, after he had chipped a rock, from which he first had had to scrape a thin superstratum of light soil.

Like a miner who has found the gold for which, for years, he has been searching, he arose, with the tiny fragments in his hand, to look at them with greedy eyes, in a more comfortable, upright posture. His face had very plainly paled and in his eyes was an expression of such avaricious eagerness and satisfaction as she had never seen before upon a human countenance.

Before he made a sound she knew that he had found that thing for which he had been seeking. His grizzled countenance, intent as any alchemist's of old upon his search, and, as its absorption grew, continually less a pleasant face to contemplate, now twisted, suddenly, into an expression of incredulous joy. He took the fragment he had been examining in both his hands and held it close before his eyes. Then he made a minute search of it with his little magnifying glass. Then he fell upon his knees, and, with his clawlike fingers, scraped more earth from the rock whence he had chipped it.

Satisfied by what he saw there, after he had done this, he rose with a new expression on his face—so crafty, so exultant, and, withal, so evil, that Madge involuntarily shrank back to better screening in her leafy hiding place.

The old man, with sweeping movements of his heavily booted feet, swept the thin earth he had scraped from the rock's surface back into its place, thrust the fragments deep into his pocket, and started hurriedly away, plainly greatly pleased, along the trail which led into the valley. She watched him with a beating heart, much puzzled.

What could it be that he had found, there, on her land? Visions of gold mines and of diamonds, rose within her mind, crude, unformed, childish, based on the imperfect knowledge she had gained of such things from the story-tellers of the mountains. As mountain people go she was, already, a rich woman, but now dreams of mightier wealth swept through her brain tumultuously. Ah, she would buy happiness for all her friends when she had, later on, unearthed the secret treasures of her backwoods clearing! Maybe she would, sometime, have a real silk dress!

She hurried forward in a stooping run to make examination of the place, as soon as the old man had vanished down the mountain side, to see (she thoroughly expected it) the glitter of bright gems or yellow gold beneath the sand which he had with such care spread back upon the little scar which he had made there in the earth. With trembling fingers she pushed back the yellow earth, and found—nothing but black rock, uncouth, and unattractive.

She sat there on the ground in her damp skirts, too disappointed, for a moment, to make an exclamation. In many ways the girl, although well past her sixteenth year, was but a child. The reaction from the mighty dreams of fortune she had built almost unnerved her.

It was her native humor which now saved her. Instead of weeping she burst into sudden laughter.

"Dellaw!" said she, aloud. "Ain't I a fool? The man was just a crazy!"

For some time she sat there in the rocky clearing amidst the litter of pine-tops and small undergrowth, contemplating her own silliness with keen amusement.

"Why, he had me that stirred up," said she, "that I reckoned I was rich a'ready!"

But she put the joke aside, to be told upon herself when the first chance came. Her long hiding in the thicket while she watched the queer proceedings of the stranger had chilled her through and through.

Close to the black rock which had so excited him and which she had uncovered after he had gone, a little forked stick stood upright, and in its fork, with one end slanted to the ground, a twig of green witch-hazel still reposed. Beneath the twig a tiny spiral of arizing smoke showed that here, with these primitive appliances, the treasure seeker had prepared his dinner, later carefully covering his fire.

"No matter how queer he was dressed, or what queer things he did," she told herself, "he sure was mountain-born. This here's a mountain fireplace, sartin sure."

She broke dead branches from a pine-top, not far away, but still far enough so that, with reasonable watching, it would not be endangered by a fire built on this spot (the old man plainly had considered this when he made the fire, for the place was almost the only one in all the clearing free enough from dry pine branches to make fire building safe) and laid them on the coals which he had buried, but which she now had carefully uncovered. She would, she had decided, dry her clothes before she started on the long, cool, woods-road climb up to her cabin.

Kneeling by the coals and blowing on them, skillfully adjusting splinters so that they would catch the draft, she soon had started a small flame. Fed carefully, this grew rapidly. Within five minutes there was burning on the site of the old man's little cooking-fire a cheerful blaze of size. Its rushing warmth was very grateful to her, and she held her hands out to it, then her feet, one after the other, with skirts lifted daintily, so that her chilled limbs might catch the warmth.

Invigorated by the pleasant heat, she once more yielded to the urgings of the bounding spirit of rich youth within her. Even as she had sported in the water ere the interloper came to interrupt her sylvan bath, now she sported there about the fire in an impromptu dance, never for a second uncouth, despite the fact that she was quite untrained; scarcely less graceful than her merrymaking in the water, although then she had not been, as now, hampered in her grace of movement by the unlovely draperies of homespun linsey-woolsey. As she had been a water-nymph, so, now, she might have been some Druid maid dancing by an altar fire. The roughness of the ground did not annoy her—her feet had not known dancing upon polished waxen wood; the lack of spectators did not deter her—those whom she had learned to know and love, the mountains, trees, the squirrels, and birds, were there.

In the very midst of the abandon of this rustic symphony of movement, the thought came to her that the precious spelling-book was lying on the rock, near by, quite soaked, neglected. She sped to it and took it to the fire's edge, where, opening its pages one by one, so that each would get the warmth, she held it as close as she opined was safe. Having dried it until she no longer feared the wetting it had had would seriously harm its usefulness (the lovely smoothness of its magic leaves was gone, alas! beyond recall) she paused there for a moment, herself still far from dry, with a bare foot held out to the blaze, and studied curiously one of the book's pages.

Thereon the letters of the alphabet, large, ominous, suggestive to her mind of nothing in the world but curlycues, loomed, mystifying. For the first time it occurred to her that in securing the small volume she had not, as she had thought to do, solved the problem of an education. The characters, she saw to her dismay, meant nothing to her. In the absence of a teacher she could not learn from them!

Alas, alas! The matter was a tragedy to her. How could she have been so stupid as to fail to think of this at first? She stood there with flushed face, despairing, looking at the mystic symbols with slowly sinking heart.

Suddenly, though the crackling of the fire filled her ears, she was aware, by some subtle sense, that she was now not wholly solitary there. Without a sound to tell her, she was conscious that some other person had within the moment come into the clearing. Hastily she looked about. To her amazement, and, for a moment, to her great dismay, she saw, standing on the clearing's edge, the young man who had, not long before, unknowingly invaded her seclusion at the pool.

Instantly her body became fiercely conscious. Prickling thrills, not due to bonfire heat, shot over it. Shame sent the blood in mantling blushes to her cheeks, although she tried to stop it. Why should she blush at sight of him? True, she had been there in the water, bare as any new-born babe, when he had reached the pool's edge—but he had not seen her. To him she, quite undoubtedly, was a mere strange mountain maid, unrecognized. Self-consciousness then was quite absurd.

And this man was a stranger and was on her land. She must not forget her mountain courtesy and fail to make him welcome.

"Howdy," she said briefly.

"Howdy, little girl?" said he, and looked at her and smiled.

This form of address much amused her. She was not far beyond sixteen, but sixteen is counted womanhood, there in the mountains, and often is an age for wife—and motherhood as well. "Little girl," to her, seemed laughable. But then she suddenly remembered that to stop their flapping, when they were all soaked, against her ankles, she had pinned her skirts up—and she was not tall. The mistake, perhaps, was natural.

"Got a fire here?" he inquired, inanely, for the fire was very much in evidence.

"Looks like it, don't it?" she said somewhat saucily, but robbed the comment of offense by smiling somewhat shyly at him as he stood there.

He was better looking, she reflected, now that she had an unobstructed view of him, even than he had appeared when she had peered at him from her concealment behind the log and barricade of rushes. Of course he was a "foreigner," and, therefore, a mere weakling, not to be considered seriously as a specimen of sturdy manhood (how often had she heard the mountain men speak of the lowlands men with scorn as weaklings?) but, none the less, he interested and attracted her, even if he did not inspire her with respect.

He laughed. "It does," said he, "looks very much like it. Been burning brush?"

"No," she replied, "jest warmin' up a little."

"Why, it's not cold."

"I—I was wet."

"Wet?" said he, astonished.

She saw her slip, and flushed. "Fell in the crik," she answered briefly, hastily and falsely.

"Why, that's too bad," said he, with ready sympathy, unfeigned and real.

All the time the girl was eying him through often-lowered lashes, and the more she looked at him the more she felt that he was not, like many "foreigners," to be distrusted and be held aloof. His clothes did not suggest to her the "revenuer," although they certainly were different from any she had ever seen before on man or beast (his knee breeches gave her some amusement), and he was totally unarmed, having laid his rifle down and left it at a distance, leaning against a stump.

His hands and face were not sunburned—indeed, his hands were delicately fashioned and much whiter than any she had ever seen before on man or woman. His appearance certainly did not, to her, convey the thought of strength—and manhood, there among the mountains, is thought to find its first and last expression through its muscle; yet, for some reason, although her first glance made her think he was a puny creature, she neither scorned nor pitied him. He was, perhaps, too smoothly dressed, too carefully shaved; the gun he had laid down so carelessly had too much "bright work" on it—but on the whole, she liked him. A city maiden might have well been dazzled by the really handsome chap. This simple country girl was not—but, on the whole, she liked him.

Her hand which held the spelling-book dropped, unconsciously, so that the open pages of the volume were revealed, upside down, against her knee.

"Studying your lessons?" he inquired, quite casually, good-naturedly, coming nearer.

Again her disappointment rushed upon her. Impulsively she told him of it.

"Oh," said she, "I don't know how! I bought me this yere book down in th' settlement, an' thought I'd learn things outen it. But how'm I goin' to learn? I can't make nothin' out of it to get a start with."

Instantly the pathos of this situation, not its humor, made appeal to him.

"Isn't there a school here?" he inquired.

"Nearest school is twenty mile acrost, over on Turkey Creek," she said briefly. "Oncet there was a nearer one, but teacher was a Hatfield, and McCoys got him, of course. This was McCoy kentry 'fore they all got so killed off. He ought to 'a' knowed better than come over here to teach."

This casual reference to a famous feud—news of whose infamy had spread far, far beyond the mountains which had hatched it—from the lips of one so young and lovely (for he had long ago admitted to himself that as she stood there she was lovelier than any being he had ever seen before) appalled Frank Layson, son of level regions, graduate of Harvard, casual sportsman, amateur mountaineer, who had come to look over his patrimony and the country round about.

"Ah—yes," said he, and frowned. And then: "It leaves you in hard luck, though, doesn't it, if you want to learn and can't," said he.

"It sartin does, for—oh, I do hanker powerful to learn!"

"May I stay here by the fire with you a while and get warm, too," he asked. (The unaccustomed exercise of tramping through the mountains had kept him in a fever heat all day.)

"An' welcome," she said cordially, moving aside a bit, so that he could approach without the circumnavigation of a mighty stump.

He could not tell whether or not she had made note of many sweat-beads on his brow and wondered at them on a chilly man.

"Perhaps," said he, "I might, in a few minutes, show you a little about what you want to know. I've been lucky. I have had a chance to learn."

She liked the way he said it. There was no hint of superiority about it. He was not "stuck up," in his claim of knowledge. He "had had a chance," and took no credit to himself for it. This pleased her, won her confidence—if, already, that had not been done by his frank face, in spite of his fancy clothes and her assumption that he was a namby-pamby weakling.

"Oh—if you would!" she said, so eagerly that it seemed to him most pitiful.

So, five minutes later, when all her clothing save her heavy outer skirt, had been quite dried there by the fire, and that same fire's abounding warmth had sent his temperature up to high discomfort mark, they sat down, side by side, upon a log, the spelling-book between them, and he began the pleasant task of teaching her her A, B, Cs.

"'A,'" said he, "is this one at the very start."

"The peaked one," said she.

"Yes, that one.

"And 'B,'" he went on, much amused, but with a perfectly grave face, "is this one with two loops fastened, so, to a straight stalk."

"I know where thar is a bee-tree," she remarked, irrelevantly.

"It will help recall this in your mind," said he, maintaining perfect gravity, "imagine it with two big loops of rope fastened to one side of it—"

"Rope wouldn't stick out that-a-way," said she, "it would just droop. They'd have to be of somethin' stiffen"

"Well—" said he, and tried to think of something.

"You could use that railroad-iron that I saw 'em heat red-hot an' bend, down in the valley," she suggested.

"That's it," said he. "Two loops of railroad-iron fastened to a bee-tree" (he pointed) "just as these loops, here, are fastened to the straight black stem. That's 'B.'"

"I won't forget," said she, her beautiful young brow puckered earnestly as she stored the knowledge in her brain.

"And this is 'C,'" said he.

"'C,' 'C'" said she. "Jest take off one of th' loops an' use it by itself."

"That's so," said he. "And here is 'D'"

"Cut off th' top th' tree," said she. "Just cut it plumb off, loop an' all."

He laughed. It was clear that she would be an earnest and quick-thinking pupil to whomever had the task of giving her her education.

As he looked at her, now, he for the first time fully realized her beauty. He had known, from the first, that she was most attractive, most unusual for a mountain maid; but now, laughing, although her head was still bent to the book, her big eyes, sparkling with her merriment, raised frankly to his face, were revelations to him. He had not seen such eyes before, and all the old-time similes for deep-brown orbs sprang instantly to mind. "Fathomless pools," "translucent amber"—no simile would really describe them. Late hours had never dimmed them, illness had never made them heavy, he was sure a lie had never made them shift from their straight gaze for one short second. He had not seen such eyes in cities!

And from careful contemplation of the eyes, he kept on with a careful contemplation of the other beauties of his fair and unexpected pupil. Her homespun gown, always ill-shaped and now unusually protuberant in spots, unusually tight in others, because of its late wetting and impromptu, partial drying, could not hide the sylvan grave of her small-boned and lissome figure, just budding into womanhood. Her feet, crossed on the ground, were as patrician in their nakedness as any bluegrass belle's in satin slippers. Her ankles, scratched by casual thorns and already beginning to blush brown from the June sun's ardent kisses, were as delicate as any he had ever seen enmeshed in silken hose. Her hands, long, slender, taper-fingered, actually dainty, although brown and roughened by hard labor, were, it seemed to him, better fitted for the fingering of a piano's keys than for the coarse and heavy tasks to which he knew they must be well accustomed. He gazed at her in veritable wonder. How had she blossomed, thus, here in this wilderness?

"Where do you live?" he asked, interrupting their scholastic efforts.

"Up thar," she pointed, and, above, he could just see the top of a mud-and-stick chimney rise above a crag between the trees.

"Have you brothers or sisters?"

"Ain't got nobody," she answered, and to her face there came a look of keen resentment rather than of sorrow or of resignation. "I'm all th' feud left," she said simply. She looked at Layson quickly, wondering if he would be surprised that she should not have fought and also died. "Girl cain't fight alone, much," she went on, in hurried explanation, or, rather, quick excuse. "I might take a shot if I should git a chanst, but I ain't had none, an', besides, I guess it air plum wrong to kill, even if there's blood scores to be settled up. I toted 'round a rifle with me till last fall, but then I give it up. They won't git me—but maybe you don't know what feuds are in the mountings, here."

He was looking at her with new interest. All his life he had heard much about the dreadful mountain feuds. As the bogey-man is used in Eastern nurseries, so are the mountaineers used in the nurseries of old Kentucky and of Tennessee to frighten children with. Their family fights, not less persistent or less deadly than the enmities between the warring barons of the Rhine in middle ages, form a magnificent foundation for dire tales.

"Yes," said he, "I know about the feuds, of course. But you—"

It did not seem possible to him, even after her frank statements, that this bright and joyous creature could in any way be joined to such a bloody history as he knew the histories of some of these long feuds to be.

"It's been thirty years an' better," said the girl, "since the Brierlys and Lindsays had some trouble about a claybank filly an' took to shootin' one another—shootin' straight an' shootin' often an' to kill. For years th' fight went on. They fired on sight, an' sometimes 'twas a Lindsay went an' sometimes 'twas a Brierly. Bimeby there was just two men left—my pappy an' Lem Lindsay.

"One day Lem sent word to my pappy to meet him without no weepons an' shake han's an' make it up."

Her face took on a look of bitterness and hate which almost made her hearer shiver, so foreign was it to the fresh, young brightness he had watched till now.

"My daddy come, at th' ap'inted time," she went on slowly, "but dad—he knowed Lem Lindsay, an' never for a minute trusted him. He ast a friend of his, Ben Lorey, to be a hidden witness. Ben hid behind a rock to watch. 'Twas right near here—just over thar." She pointed.

"Soon Lem, he come along, a-smilin' like a Judast, an', after some fine speakin', as daddy offered him his hand, Lem whipped out a knife, an'—an' struck it into my daddy's heart."

The girl's recital had been tense, dramatic, not because she had tried or thought to make it so—she had never learned not to be genuine—but because of the real and tragic drama in the tale she told, the matter-of-course way in which she told it.

It made Layson shudder. What sort of people were these mountaineers who went armed to friendly meetings and struck down the men whose hands they offered to clasp? Where was the other man while his friend's enemy was at this dreadful work?

"But Lorey," said her fascinated listener, "the man who was in hiding as a witness, made him pay for his outrageous act!"

"No," said the girl, with drooping head. "He stepped out from behind the rock where he was hidin', an' he pulled the trigger of his rifle. But luck was dead against us that day. Wet powder—somethin'—nobody knows what. The gun did not go off. Before he got it well down from his shoulder so's to find out what it was that ailed it, Lem Lindsay was upon him like a mountain lion—an' he laid him thar beside my daddy. He didn't mean that there should be no witnesses."

She paused so long that Layson was about to speak, feeling the silence troublesome and painful, but before he had decided what to say in comment on a tale so dreadful, she went on:

"He didn't mean there should be no witnesses, Lem Lindsay didn't, but as it happened there was two. My mother, me clasped in her arms, had stole after my daddy, fearin' that somethin' wicked would come out o' that there meetin' with his old-time enemy. She spoke up sudden, an' surprised th' murderer, standin' there by th' two poor men he'd killed. At first it scared him. I can't remember everythin' about that awful day, but I can see Lem Lindsay's face as she screamed at him, just as plain this minute as I seed it then. I'll never forget that look if I live a thousand years!

"At first he was struck dumb, but then that passed. He give a yell of rage an' started toward us on th' run. She jumped, with me a-hinderin' her. Like a mountain deer she run, in spite of that. She was lighter on her feet than he was upon his, an' soon outdistanced him. He hadn't stopped to pick his rifle up—he only had th' knife he'd done th' killin' with, so he couldn't do what he'd 'a' liked to done—shoot down a woman an' a baby!

"We lived where I live now, alone, an' then, as now, there was a little bridge that took th' footpath over th' deep gully. Them days was wicked ones in these here mountains, an' daddy'd had that foot-bridge fixed so it would raise. My mother just had time to pull it up, when we had crossed, before Lem Lindsay reached there. He stopped, to keep from fallin' in the gully, but stood there, shakin' his bare fist an' swearin' that he'd kill us yet. But that he couldn't do. Folks was mightily roused, and he had to leave th' mountings, then an' thar, an' ain't been in 'em since, so far as anybody knows."

Her brows drew down upon her eyes. Her sweet mouth hardened. "He'd better never come!" she added, grimly.

After a moment's pause she went on, slowly: "So, now, here we be—Joe Lorey, Ben's son, an' me. My mother died, you see, not very many years after Lindsay'd killed my daddy. Seein' of it done, that way, had been too much for her. I reckon seein' it would have killed me, too, if I'd been more'n a baby, but I wasn't, an' lived through it. Ben's lived here, workin' his little mounting farm, an'—an'—"

She hesitated, evidently ill at ease, strangely stammering over an apparently simple and unimportant statement of the condition of her fellow orphan. She changed color slightly. Layson, watching her, decided that the son of the one victim must be the sweetheart of the daughter of the other, and would have smiled had not the very thought, to his surprise, annoyed him unaccountably. Whether that was what had caused her stammering, he could not quite decide, although he gave the matter an absurd amount of thought. She went on quickly:

"He's lived here, workin' of his little mounting farm an'—an'—an' doin' jobs aroun', an' such, an' I've lived here, a-workin' mine, a little, but not much. After my mother died there was some folks down in th' valley took keer of me for a while, but then they moved away, an' I was old enough to want things bad, an' what I wanted was to come back here, where I could see th' place where mother an' my daddy had both loved me an' been happy. I've got some land down in th' valley—fifty acres o' fine pasture—but I never cared to live down there. Th' rent I get for that land makes me rich—I ain't never wanted for a single thing but just th' love an' carin' that my daddy an' my mother would 'a' give me if that wicked man hadn't killed 'em both. For he did kill my mother, just as much as he killed daddy. She died o' that an' that alone."

Again she fell into a silence for a time, looking out at the tremendous prospect spread before them, quite unseeing.

"Oh," she went on, at length, her face again darkened by a frown, her small hands clenched, every muscle of her lithe young body drawn as taut as a wild animal's before a spring. "I sometimes feel as if I'd like to do as other mountain women have been known to do when killin' of that sort has blackened all their lives—I sometimes feel as if I'd like to take a rifle in my elbow an' go lookin' for that man—go lookin' for him in th' mountings, in th' lowlands, anywhere—even if I had to cross th' oceans that they tell about, in order to come up with him!"

Her voice had been intensely vibrant with strong passion as she said this, and her quivering form told even plainer how deep-seated was the hate that gave birth to her words. But soon she put all this excitement from her and dropped her hands in a loose gesture of hopeless relaxation.

"But I know such thoughts are foolish," she said drearily. "He got away. A girl can't carry on a feud alone, nohow. There's nothin' I can do."

Again, now, with a passing thought, her features lighted as another maiden's, whose young life had been cast by fate in gentler places might have lighted at the thought of some great pleasure pending in the future.

"There is a chance, though," she said, with a fierce joy, "that Lem Lindsay, if he is alive, 'll git th' bullet that he earned that day. Joe Lorey's livin'—that's Ben's son—an' he—well, maybe, some time—ah, he can shoot as straight as anybody in these mountings!"