by O. Henry
“ ‘Better go in careful, gentlemen,’ says I. ‘He seems impatient at times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.’
“So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers their ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house. And I follows, like Delilah when she set the Philip Steins on to Samson.
“The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up. And then he jumps up and two more of the reward-hunters grab him. Ogden was mighty tough with all his slimness, and gives ‘em as neat a single-footed tussle against odds as I ever see.
“ ‘What does this mean?’ he says, after they had him down.
“ ‘You’re scooped in, Mr. Black Bill,’ says the captain. ‘That’s all.’
“ ‘It’s an outrage,’ says H. Ogden, madder yet.
“ ‘It was,’ says the peace-and-good-will man. ‘The Katy wasn’t bothering you, and there’s a law against monkeying with express packages.’
“And he sits on H. Ogden’s stomach and goes through his pockets symptomatically and careful.
“ ‘I’ll make you perspire for this,’ says Ogden, perspiring some himself. ‘I can prove who I am.’
“ ‘So can I,’ says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden’s inside coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. ‘Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays visiting-card wouldn’t have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity than this here currency. You can get up now and prepare to go with us and expatriate your sins.’
“H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie. He says no more after they have taken the money off of him.
“ ‘A well-greased idea,’ says the sheriff captain, admiring, ‘to slip off down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is seldom heard. It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,’ says the captain.
“So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden’s horse, and the sheriffs all ride up close around him with their guns in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town.
“Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies’ hands and gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just as if he intended to be back in a few days. And a couple of hours afterward one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars—wages and blood money—in his pocket, riding south on another horse belonging to said ranch.”
The red-faced man paused and listened. The whistle of a coming freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.
The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head slowly and disparagingly.
“What is it, Snipy?” asked the other. “Got the blues again?”
“No, I ain’t,” said the seedy one, sniffing again. “But I don’t like your talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen year; and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the law—not no one. And here was a man whose saleratus you had et and at whose table you had played games of cards—if casino can be so called. And yet you inform him to the law and take money for it. It never was like you, I say.”
“This H. Ogden,” resumed the red-faced man, “through a lawyer, proved himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard afterward. He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I hated to hand him over.”
“How about the bills they found in his pocket?” asked the seedy man.
“I put ‘em there,” said the red-faced man, “while he was asleep, when I saw the posse riding up. I was Black Bill. Look out, Snipy, here she comes! We’ll board her on the bumpers when she takes water.”
Hygeia at the Solito
If you are knowing in the chronicles of the ring you will recall to mind an event in the early ’nineties when, for a minute and sundry odd seconds, a champion and a “would-be” faced each other on the alien side of an international river. So brief a conflict had rarely imposed upon the fair promise of true sport. The reporters made what they could of it, but, divested of padding, the action was sadly fugacious. The champion merely smote his victim, turned his back upon him, remarking, “I know what I done to dat stuff,” and extended an arm like a ship’s mast for his glove to be removed.
Which accounts for a trainload of extremely disgusted gentlemen in uproar of fancy vests and neckwear being spilled from their Pullman in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which “Cricket” McGuire found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to San Antonian ears. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman—may his shadow never measure under six feet two.
The cattleman, out this early to catch the south-bound for his ranch station, stopped at the side of the distressed patron of sport and spoke in the kindly drawl of his ilk and region, “Got it pretty bad, bud?”
“Cricket” McGuire, exfeather-weight prize-fighter, tout, jockey, follower of the “ponies,” all-around sport, and manipulator of the gum balls and walnut shells, looked up pugnaciously at the imputation cast by “bud.”
“G’wan,” he rasped, “telegraph pole. I didn’t ring for yer.”
Another paroxysm wrung him, and he leaned limply against a convenient baggage truck. Raidler waited patiently, glancing around at the white hats, short overcoats, and big cigars thronging the platform. “You’re from the No‘th, ain’t you, bud?” he asked when the other was partially recovered. “Come down to see the fight?”
“Fight!” snapped McGuire. “Puss-in-the-corner! ‘Twas a hypodermic injection. Handed him just one like a squirt of dope, and he’s asleep, and no tanbark needed in front of his residence. Fight!” He rattled a bit, coughed, and went on, hardly addressing the cattleman, but rather for the relief of voicing his troubles. “No more dead sure t’ings for me. But Rus Sage himself would have snatched at it. Five to one dat de boy from Cork wouldn’t stay t‘ree rounds is what I invested in. Put my last cent on, and could already smell the sawdust in dat all-night joint of Jimmy Delaney’s on T’irty seventh Street I was goin’ to buy. And den—say, telegraph pole, what a gazaboo a guy is to put his whole roll on one turn of the gaboozlum!”
“You’re plenty right,” said the big cattleman; “more ’specially when you lose. Son, you get up and light out for a hotel. You got a mighty bad cough. Had it long?”
“Lungs,” said McGuire comprehensively. “I got it. The croaker says I’ll come to time for six months longer—maybe a year if I hold my gait. I wanted to settle down and take care of myself. Dat’s why I speculated on dat five to one perhaps. I had a t‘ousand iron dollars saved up. If I winned I was goin’ to buy Delaney’s café. Who’d a t’ought dat stiff would take a nap in de foist round—say?”
“It’s a hard deal,” commented Raidler, looking down at the diminutive form of McGuire crumpled against the truck. “But you go to a hotel and rest. There’s the Menger and the Maverick, and—”
“And the Fi‘th Av’noo, and the Waldorf-Astoria,” mimicked McGuire. “Told you I went broke. I’m on de bum proper. I’ve got one dime left. Maybe a trip to Europe or a sail in me private yacht would fix me up—pa‘per!”
He flung his dime at a newsboy, got his Express, propped his back against the truck, and was at once rapt in the account of his Waterloo, as expanded by the ingenious press.
Curtis Raidler interrogated an enormous gold watch, and laid his hand on McGuire’s shoulder.
“Come on, bud,” he said. “We got three minutes to catch a train.”
Sarcasm seemed to be McGuire’s vein.
“You ain’t seen me cash in any chips or call a turn since I told you I was broke, a minute ago, have you? Friend, chase yourself away.”
“You’re going down
to my ranch,” said the cattleman, “and stay till you get well. Six months’ll fix you good as new.” He lifted McGuire with one hand, and half-dragged him in the direction of the train.
“What about the money?” said McGuire, struggling weakly to escape.
“Money for what?” asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled cog-wheels—at right angles, and moving upon different axes.
Passengers on the south-bound saw them seated together, and wondered at the conflux of two such antipodes. McGuire was five feet one, with a countenance belonging to either Yokohama or Dublin. Bright-beady of eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit, indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil. Six feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he represented the union of the West and South. Few accurate pictures of his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the mutoscope is as yet unknown in Texas. After all, the only possible medium of portrayal of Raidler’s kind would be the fresco—something high and simple and cool and unframed.
They were rolling southward on the International. The timber was huddling into little, dense green motts at rare distances before the inundation of the downright, vert prairies. This was the land of the ranches; the domain of the kings of the kine.
McGuire sat, collapsed into his corner of the seat, receiving with acid suspicion the conversation of the cattleman. What was the “game” of this big “geezer” who was cany ing him off? Altruism would have been McGuire’s last guess. “He ain’t no farmer,” thought the captive, “and he ain’t no con man, for sure. W‘at’s his lay? You trail in, Cricket, and see how many cards he draws. You’re up against it, anyhow. You get a nickel and gallopin’ consumption, and you better lay low. Lay low and see w’at’s his game.”
At Rincon, a hundred miles from San Antonio, they left the train for a buckboard which was waiting there for Raidler. In this they travelled the thirty miles between the station and their destination. If anything could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious McGuire to a sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvet wheels across an eachilarant savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a nimble, tireless trot, which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild, untrammelled gallop. The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they absorbed it, with the delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road perished, and the buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the grass itself, steered by the practical hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny distant mott of trees was a signboard, each convolution of the low hills a voucher of course and distance. But McGuire reclined upon his spine, seeing nothing but a desert, and receiving the cattleman’s advances with sullen distrust. “W‘at’s he up to?” was the burden of his thoughts; “w’at kind of a gold brick has the big guy got to sell?” McGuire was only applying the measure of the streets he had walked to a range bounded by the horizon and the fourth dimension.
A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped it at the ranch for the boys to attend to. It was impossible for McGuire to know or comprehend that, in the eyes of the cattleman, his case and that of the calf were identical in interest and demand upon his assistance. A creature was ill and helpless; he had the power to render aid—these were the only postulates required for the cattleman to act. They formed his system of logic and the most of his creed. McGuire was the seventh invalid whom Raidler had picked up thus casually in San Antonio, where so many thousand go for the ozone that is said to linger about its contracted streets. Five of them had been guests of Solito Ranch until they had been able to leave, cured or better, and exhausting the vocabulary of tearful gratitude. One came too late, but rested very comfortably, at last, under a ratama tree in the garden.
So, then, it was no surprise to the ranchhold when the buckboard spun to the door, and Raidler took up his debile protégé like a handful of rags and set him down upon the gallery.
McGuire looked upon things strange to him. The ranch-house was the best in the country. It was built of brick hauled one hundred miles by wagon, but it was of but one story, and its four rooms were completely encircled by a mud floor “gallery.” The miscellaneous setting of horses, dogs, saddles, wagons, guns, and cow-punchers’ paraphernalia oppressed the metropolitan eye of the wrecked sportsman.
“Well, here we are at home,” said Raidler, cheeringly.
“It’s a h—1 of a looking place,” said McGuire promptly, as he rolled upon the gallery floor, in a fit of coughing.
“We’ll try to make it comfortable for you, buddy,” said the cattleman, gently. “It ain’t fine inside; but it’s the outdoors, anyway, that’ll do you the most good. This’ll be your room, in here. Anything we got, you ask for it.”
He led McGuire into the east room. The floor was bare and clean. White curtains waved in the gulf breeze through the open windows. A big willow rocker, two straight chairs, a long table covered with newspapers, pipes, tobacco, spurs, and cartridges stood in the centre. Some well-mounted heads of deer and one of an enormous black javeli projected from the walls. A wide, cool cot-bed stood in a corner. Nueces County people regarded this guest chamber as fit for a prince. McGuire showed his eye teeth at it. He took out his nickel and spun it up to the ceiling.
“T‘ought I was lyin’ about the money, did ye? Well, you can frisk me if you wanter. Dat’s the last simoleon in the treasury. Who’s goin’ to pay?”
The cattleman’s clear gray eyes looked steadily from under his grizzly brows into the huckleberry optics of his guest. After a little he said simply, and not ungraciously, “I’ll be much obliged to you, son, if you won’t mention money any more. Once was quite a plenty. Folks I ask to my ranch don’t have to pay anything, and they very scarcely ever offers it. Supper’ll be ready in half an hour. There’s water in the pitcher, and some, cooler, to drink in that red jar hanging on the gallery.”
“Where’s the bell?” asked McGuire, looking about.
“Bell for what?”
“Bell to ring for things. I can’t—see here,” he exploded in a sudden weak fury, “I never asked you to bring me here. I never held you up for a cent. I never gave you a hard-luck story till you asked me. Here I am fifty mile from a bellboy or a cocktail. I’m sick. I can’t hustle. Gee! but I’m up against it!” McGuire fell upon the cot and sobbed shiveringly.
Raidler went to the door and called. A slender, bright complexioned Mexican youth about twenty came quickly. Raidler spoke to him in Spanish.
“Ylario, it is in my mind that I promised you the position of vaquero on the San Carlos range at the fall rodeo.”
“Sí señor, such was your goodness.”
“Listen. This señorito is my friend. He is very sick. Place yourself at his side. Attend to his wants at all times. Have much patience and care with him. And when he is well, or—and when he is well, instead of vaquero I will make you mayordomo of the Rancho de las Piedras. Está bueno?”
“Sí, sí—mil gracias, señor.” Ylario tried to kneel upon the floor in his gratitude, but the cattleman kicked at him benevolently, growling, “None of your opery-house antics, now.”
Ten minutes later Ylario came from McGuire’s room and stood before Raidler.
“The little señor,” he announced, “presents his compliments” (Raidler credited Ylario with the preliminary) “and desires some pounded ice, one hot bath, one gin feez-z, that the windows be all closed, toast, one shave, one Newyorkheral’, cigarettes, and to send one telegram.”
Raidler took a quart bottle of whisky from his medicine cabinet. “Here, take him this,” he said.
Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the cow-punchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest
importation of Raidler’s. He was an absolutely new experience to them. He explained to them all the intricate points of sparring and the tricks of training and defence. He opened to their minds’ view all the indecorous life of a tagger after professional sports. His jargon of slang was a continuous joy and surprise to them. His gestures, his strange poses, his frank ribaldry of tongue and principle fascinated them. He was like a being from a new world.
Strange to say, this new world he had entered did not exist to him. He was an utter egoist of bricks and mortar. He had dropped out, he felt, into open space for a time, and all it contained was an audience for his reminiscences. Neither the limitless freedom of the prairie days nor the grand hush of the close-drawn, spangled nights touched him. All the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a sporting journal. “Get something for nothing,” was his mission in life; “T‘irty-seventh” Street was his goal.
Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt worse. It was then that he became the ranch’s incubus, its harpy, its Old Man of the Sea. He shut himself in his room like some venomous kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing. The keynote of his plaint was that he had been inveigled into a gehenna against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact that McGuire was breathing with only one lung, but his appearance remained the same.