Читать книгу Claim Number One - George W. Ogden - Страница 8

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There remained but one day until chance should settle the aspirations of the dusty thousands who waited in Comanche; one day more would see Claim Number One allotted for selection to some more or less worthy American citizen.

The young man, Walker, had been received on a footing of fellowship into the commune of the circus-tent. He said that he had concluded happily the arrangements for the purchase of the sheep-ranch, and that he intended to go and take possession of it in a few days. Meantime, he appeared to be considerably shot up over June. In spite of Mrs. Reed’s frowns, he hung around her like a hornet after a soft pear.

There was considerable excitement in the camp of the communists that morning, owing to preparations which were going forward for an excursion over the land where somebody’s Number One lay shrouded in green greasewood and gray sage. For this important occasion Walker had engaged the most notable stage-driver in that part of the country, whose turn it was that day to lie over from the run between Comanche and Meander.

The party was to use his stage also, and carry lunch along, and make a grand day of it along the river, 64 trying for trout if conditions held favorable. Smith was the name of the driver.

Smith was smiling like a baker as he drove up, for Smith could not behold ladies without blushing and smiling. Smith had the reputation of being a terror to holdup men. Also, the story was current in Comanche that he had, in a bare-handed, single encounter with a bear, choked the animal to death. There was some variance over the particulars as to the breed of bear, its color, age, size, and weight. Some–and they were the unromantic, such as habitually lived in Wyoming and kept saloons–held that it was a black cub with a broken back; others that it was a cinnamon bear with claws seven inches long; while the extremists would be satisfied with nothing short of a grizzly which stood five feet four at the shoulders and weighed eighteen hundred pounds!

But, no matter what romance had done for Smith, it could not overdo his ancient, green vehicle, with the lettering,

BIG HORN VALLEY

along its side near the roof. It was a Concord stage, its body swinging on creaking straps. It had many a wound of arrowhead in its tough oak, and many a bullet-hole, all of which had been plugged with putty and painted over long years ago for the assurance and comfort of nervous passengers, to whom the evidence of conflict might have been disturbing. 65

Now that there was no longer any reason for concealment, the owners had allowed the paint to crumble and the putty to fall away, baring the veteran’s scars. These were so thick that it seemed a marvel that anybody who took passage in it in those perilous days escaped. In a sun-cracked and time-curled leather holster tacked to the seat at Smith’s right hand, a large revolver with a prodigious black handle hung ready for the disciplining of bandits or bears, as they might come across Smith’s way.

Smith rounded up before the tent with a curve like a skater, bringing his four horses to a stop in fine style. No matter how Smith’s parts might be exaggerated by rumor or humor in other ways, as a teamster he stood without a peer between Cody and Green River. He leaped to the ground with surprising agility and set himself about arranging the interior of the coach for the accommodation of his passengers. He was chewing on something which might have been bear-meat or buckskin, from its apparent tenacious and unyielding nature.

Agnes Horton was to ride on the box with Smith, for she had a camera and wanted to catch some views. Smith grew so red over handing her up that Dr. Slavens began to fear lest he might take fire from internal heat and leave them with only the ashes of a driver on their hands. But they all got placed without any such melancholy tragedy, with a great many cries of “Oh, Mr. Smith!” here, and “Oh, Mr. Smith!” 66 there, and many head-puttings-out on the part of the ladies inside, and gallantries from Mr. Walker and Mr. Horace Bentley, the lawyer.

William Bentley, the toolmaker, with the basket of lunch upon his knees, showered the blessing of his kindly smile upon them all, as if he held them to be only children. Mrs. Mann, her black bag on her arm, squeaked a little when the coach lurched on the start, knocking her head and throwing her hat awry.

Smith, proud of his load, and perhaps a little vain on account of so much unusual loveliness at his side, swung down the main street with its early morning crowds. People waved at them the friendly signals of the highroad of adventure, and June, in defiance of terrible eyebrows and admonishing pokes, waved back at them, her wild hair running over her cheeks. So they set out in the bright morning to view the promised land.

They struck off down the Meander stage-road, which ran for the greater part of its way through the lands awaiting the disposition of chance. Mainly it followed the survey of the railroad, which was to be extended to Meander, and along which men and teams were busy even then, throwing up the roadbed.

To the north there was a rise of land, running up in benched gradations to white and barren distant heights; behind them were brown hills. Far away in the blue southwest–Smith said it was more than eighty miles–there stood the mountains with their 67 clean robes of snow, while scattered here and there about the vast plain through which they drove, were buttes of blue shale and red ledges, as symmetrical of side and smooth of top as if they had been raised by the architects of Tenochtitlán for sacrifice to their ugly gods.

“Old as Adam,” said Smith, pointing to one gray monument whose summit had been pared smooth by the slow knife of some old glacier. The sides of the butte looked almost gay in the morning light in their soft tones of blue and red.

“From appearances it might very well be,” agreed Agnes.

She looked at Smith and smiled. There was the glory of untrammeled space in her clear eyes, a yearning as of the desert-born on the far bounds of home. Smith drove on, his back very straight.

“Older,” said he with laconic finality after holding his peace for a quarter of a mile.

Smith spoke as if he had known both Adam and the butte for a long time, and so was an unquestionable authority. Agnes was not disposed to dispute him, so they lurched on in silence along the dust-cushioned road.

“That ain’t the one the Indian girl jumped off of, though,” said Smith, meditatively.

“Isn’t it?”

She turned to him quickly, ready for a story from the picturesque strangler of bears. Smith was looking 68 between the ears of the off-leader. He volunteered no more.

“Well, where is the one she jumped from?” she pressed.

“Nowhere,” said Smith.

“Oh!” she said, a bit disappointed.

“Everywhere I’ve went,” said he, “they’ve got some high place where the Indian girl jumped off of. In Mezoury they’ve got one, and even in Kansas. They’ve got one in Minnesota and Illinoy and Idaho, and bend my eyebrows if I know all the places they ain’t got ’em! But don’t you never let ’em!take you in on no such yarns. Them yarns is for suckers.”

Somehow Agnes felt grateful toward Smith, whose charitable purpose doubtless was to prevent her being taken in. But she was sorry for the fine tradition and hated to give it up.

“But didn’t one ever jump off a cliff or–anything?” she asked.

Smith struck out with a free-arm swing and cracked his whip so loudly that three female heads were at once protruded from the windows below.

“What I want to know,” said he argumentatively, “is, who seen ’em jump?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted; “but I suppose they found their bodies.”

“Don’t you believe it!” depreciated Smith. “Indian maidens ain’t the jumpin’ kind. I never seen one of ’em in my day that wouldn’t throw down the best feller 69 she ever had for a red umbreller and a dime’s worth of stick candy.”

“I’m sorry for the nice stories your knowledge of the Indian character spoils,” she laughed.

“The thing of it in this country is, miss, not to let ’em take you in,” Smith continued. “That’s what they’re out for–to take in suckers. No matter how wise you may be in some other place, right here in this spot you may be a sucker. Do you git my words?”

“I think so,” she responded, “and thank you. I’ll try to keep my eyes open.”

“They’s places in this country,” Smith went on, for he liked to talk as well as the next one, once he got under way, “where you could put your pocketbook down at the fork of the road with your card on top of it and go back there next week and find it O. K. But they’s other places where if you had your money inside of three safes they’d git at it somehow. This is one of that kind of places.”

They had been dropping down a slope scattered with gray lava chunks and set with spiked soapweed, which let them to the river level. Ahead of them, twisted cottonwoods and red willows marked the brink of the stream.

“This is the first bench,” said Smith, “and it’s mainly good land. Before the books was opened for registration the gover’ment give the Indians choice of a homestead apiece, and they picked off all this land down here. Oh, well, on up the river they’s a little left, and 70 if I draw a low number I know where to put my hand on a piece.”

“It looks nice and green here,” said she, admiring the feathery vegetation, which grew as tall as the stage along the roadway.

“Yes, but you want to watch out for greasewood,” advised Smith, “when you come to pick land in this country. It’s a sign of alkali. Pick that gray, dusty-lookin’ stuff. That’s sage, and where it grows big, anything’ll grow when you git the water on it.”

“But how do you get the water on this hilly land?” she asked.

The question had been troubling her ever since she had taken her first look at the country, and nobody had come forward with a satisfactory explanation.

“You got to go up the river till you strike your level,” explained Smith, “and then you tap it and take the water to your land.”

“But if you’re on the ‘third bench’ that I hear them talking about so much–then what do you do up there, a thousand or two feet above the river?”

“You go back where you come from if you’re wise,” said Smith.

When they reached the section which, according to Smith, had not all been taken up by the Indians already, the party got out occasionally for closer inspection of the land. The men gravely trickled the soil through their fingers, while the women grabbed at the sweet-smelling herbs which grew in abundance everywhere, 71 and tore their sleeves reaching for the clusters of bullberries, then turning red.

Dr. Slavens and William Bentley tried for fish, with a total catch between them of one small trout, which was carried in triumph to the place picked upon by Smith for the noonday camp. Smith would not trust the coffee to any hand but his own, and he blackened up the pot shamefully, Mrs. Reed declared.

But what did Smith care for the criticism of Mrs. Reed when he was making coffee for Agnes? What did he care, indeed, for the judgment of the whole world when he was laying out his best efforts to please the finest woman who ever sat beside him on the box, and one for whom he was ready to go any distance, and do any endeavors, to save her from being made a sucker of and taken in and skinned?

It was pleasant there by the river; so pleasant that there was not one of them but voted Wyoming the finest and most congenial spot in the world, with the kindest skies, the softest summer winds, and the one place of all places for a home.

“Yes,” Smith remarked, tossing pebbles into the river from the place where he sat cross-legged on the ground with his pipe, “it takes a hold of you that way. It goes to twenty below in the winter, sometimes, and the wind blows like the plug had popped out of the North Pole, and the snow covers up the sheep on the range and smothers ’em, and you lose all you got down to the last chaw of t’backer. But you stick, some way, 72 and you forgit you ever had a home back in Indiana, where strawberries grow.”

“Why, don’t they grow here?” asked the miller’s wife, holding a bunch of red bullberries caressingly against her cheek.

“I ain’t seen a natural strawberry in fourteen years,” said Smith, more proud than regretful, as if such a long abstinence were a virtue.

“Natural?” repeated Mrs. Reed. “Surely you don’t mean that they manufacture them here?”

“They send ’em here in cans,” explained Smith, “pale, with sour water on ’em no more like real, ma’am, than a cigarette’s like a smoke.”

The men with pipes chuckled their appreciation of the comparison. Horace Bentley, with a fresh cigarette–which he had taken out of a silver case–in his fingers, turned it, quizzically smiling as he struck a match.

“It’s an imitation,” said he; “but it’s good enough for me.”

The sun was slanting near the rough hills beyond the river when they started back to Comanche.

“You’ve seen the best of the reservation,” explained Smith, “and they ain’t no earthly use in seein’ the worst of it.”

They were well along on the way, passing through a rough and outcast stretch of country, where upheaved ledges stood on edge, and great blocks of stone poised menacingly on the brows of shattered cliffs, when Smith, 73 who had been looking sharply ahead, pulled in suddenly and turned to Agnes with apologetic questioning in his eyes. It seemed to her that he had something on his mind which he was afraid to put into words.

“What is it, Mr. Smith?” she asked.

“I was just goin’ to say, would you mind goin’ inside and lettin’ that doctor man take your place for a while?”

Smith doubtless had his reason, she thought, although it hurt her pride that he should withhold his confidence. But she yielded her place without further questioning, with a great amount of blushing over the stocking which a protruding screwhead was responsible for her showing to Dr. Slavens as he assisted her to the ground.

The sudden stop, the excitement incident to changing places, threw the women within the coach into a cackle.

“Is it robbers?” demanded Mrs. Reed, getting hold of June’s hand and clinging to it protectingly as she put her head out and peered up at Smith, who was sitting there stolidly, his eyes on the winding trail ahead, his foot on the brake.

“No, ma’am,” answered Smith, not looking in her direction at all.

“What is it, then?” quavered Mrs. Mann from the other side of the stage.

She could not see Smith, and the desolation of their surroundings set her fancy at work stationing dusty cowboy bandits behind each riven, lowering stone. 74

“Oh, I hope it’s robbers!” said June, bouncing up and down in her seat. “That would be just fine!”

“Hush, hush!” commanded her mother, shaking her correctively. “Such a wicked wish!”

Milo Strong, the teacher from Iowa, had grown very pale. He buttoned his coat and kept one hand in the region of his belt. One second he peered wildly out of the windows on his side, the next he strained to see if devastation and ruin were approaching from the other.

“Smith doubtless had some very commonplace reason for making the change,” said William Bentley, making room for Agnes beside him. “I expect Miss Horton talked too much.”

With that the stage started and their fears subsided somewhat. On the box Smith was looking sharply at the doctor. Then he asked:

“Can you drive better than you can shoot, or shoot better than you can drive?”

“I guess it’s about a stand-off,” replied the doctor without a ripple of excitement; “but I was brought up with four mules.”

Without another word Smith stood on the footboard, and Dr. Slavens slid along to his place. Smith handed the physician the lines and took the big revolver from its pocket by the seat.

“Two fellers on horseback,” said he, keeping his eyes sharply on the boulder-hedged road, “has been dodgin’ along the top of that ridge kind of suspicious. No reason why any honest man would want to ride 75 along up there among the rocks when he could ride down here where it’s smooth. They may be straight or they may be crooked. I don’t know. But you meet all kinds along this road.”

The doctor nodded. Smith said no more, but stood, one knee on the seat, with his pistol held in readiness for instant action. When they reached the top of the ridge nobody was in sight, but there were boulders enough, and big enough, on every hand to conceal an army. Smith nodded; the doctor pulled up.

The stage had no sooner stopped than Walker was out, his pistol in hand, ready to show June and all her female relatives so dear that he was there to stand between them and danger as long as their peril might last.

Smith looked around carefully.

“Funny about them two fellers!” he muttered.

From the inside of the stage came June’s voice, raised in admiration of Mr. Walker’s intrepidity, and her mother’s voice, commanding her to be silent, and not draw down upon them the fury of the bandits, who even then might be taking aim at them from behind a rock.

Nobody appearing, between whom and June he might precipitate himself, Walker mounted a rock for a look around. He had no more than reached the top when the two horsemen who had caused the flurry rode from behind the house-size boulder which had hidden them, turned their backs, crouching in their 76 saddles as if to hide their identity, and galloped off.

“Huh! Old Hun Shanklin’s one of ’em,” sniffed Smith, plainly disgusted that the affair had turned out so poorly.

He put his weapon back in its place and took the lines.

“And that feller, he don’t have to go around holdin’ people up with a gun in his hand,” he added. “He’s got a safer and surer game of it than that.”

“And that’s no cross-eyed view of it, either,” Dr. Slavens agreed.

Walker came over and stood beside the near wheel.

“One of them was Hun Shanklin!” said he, whispering up loudly for the doctor’s ear, a look of deep concern on his youthful face.

Slavens nodded with what show of unconcern he could assume. For, knowing what he knew, he wondered what the gambler was there for, and why he seemed so anxious to keep the matter of his identity to himself.

When they arrived at Comanche the sun was down. Mrs. Reed hurried June indoors, all exclamations and shudders over what she believed to have been a very narrow escape. Vowing that she never would go exploring around in that wild land again, she whisked off without a word for Smith.

The others shook hands with the driver, Agnes coming last. He took off his hat when it came her turn.

“Keep your eyes skinned,” he advised her, “and 77 don’t let ’em play you for a sucker. Any time you need advice, or any help that I can give you, if I’m not here I’m on the road between here and Meander. You can git me over there by telephone.”

“Thank you, Mr. Smith,” said she warmly and genuinely, wondering why he should take such an unaccountable interest in her.

The others had gone about their business, thinking strongly of supper, leaving Smith and her alone beside the old green stage.

“But don’t ask for Smith if you call me up,” said he, “for that’s only my first name, and they’s a horse-wrangler over there with that for his last. They might think you wanted him.”

“Oh, I didn’t know!” she stammered, all confusion over the familiarity that she had been taking all day. “I didn’t know your other name–nobody ever told me.”

“No; not many of ’em down here knows it,” he responded. “But up at Meander, at the barn, they know it. It’s Phogenphole.”

“Oh!”

“But if you don’t like it,” added Smith, speaking with great fervor, and leaning toward her a little eagerly and earnestly, “I’ll have a bill put through the Legislature down at Cheyenne and change it!”

They ate supper that evening by lantern-light, with the night noise of Comanche beginning to rise around them earlier than usual. Those who were there for 78 the reaping realized that it would be their last big night, for on the morrow the drawing would fall. After the first day’s numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander, which would run up into the thousands, the waiting crowds would melt away from Comanche as fast as trains could carry them. So those who were on the make had both hands out in Comanche that night.

They all wondered how it would turn out for them, the lumberman and the insurance agent–who had not been of the party that day in Smith’s coach–offering to lay bets that nobody in the mess would draw a number below five hundred. There were no takers. Then they offered to bet that all in the mess would draw under five hundred. Mrs. Reed rebuked them for their gambling spirit, which, she said, was rampant in Comanche, like a plague.