by Various
Upon further consultation we put Mary into Ajax's bed. The Chinaman's bunk-house was isolated, and the vaqueroes slept near the horse corral, a couple of hundred yards away. Mary feebly protested: "No likee. Coon Dogs--allee same debils--killee you, killee me. Heap bad men!"
We tried to assure him that the Coon Dogs were at heart rank curs. Mary shook his head: "I know. You see."
The day passed. Night set in. About ten, Mary said, convincingly--
"Coon Dogs coming! Coon Dogs coming!"
"No, no," said Ajax.
I slipped out of the house. From the marsh beyond the creek came the familiar croaking of the frogs; from the foothills in the cow-pasture came the shrilling of the crickets. A coyote was yapping far down the valley.
"It's all right, Mary," said I.
"Boss, Coon Dogs come, velly quick. I know."
Did he really know? What subtle instinct warned him of the approach of danger? Who can answer such questions? It is a fact that the Coon Dogs were on the road to our ranch, and that they arrived just one hour later. We heard them yelling and shouting at the big gate. Then the popping of pistols told us that the sign, clearly to be seen in the moonlight, was being riddled with bullets.
"We must face the music," said Ajax grimly. "Come on!"
Mary lay back on the pillow, senseless. Passing through the sitting- room, I reminded Ajax that my duck-gun, an eight-bore, could carry two ounces of buck-shot about one hundred yards.
"We mustn't fight 'em with their own weapons," he answered curtly.
The popping ceased suddenly; silence succeeded.
"They're having their bad time, too," said Ajax. "They are hitching their plugs to the fence. Hullo!"
Uncle Jake slipped on to the verandah, six-shooter in hand. Before he spoke, he spat contemptuously; then he drawled out: "Our boys say it's none o' their doggoned business; they won't interfere."
"Good," said Ajax cheerfully. "Nip back, Uncle; we can play this hand alone."
"Sure?" The old man's voice expressed doubt.
"Quite sure. Shush-h-h!"
Uncle Jake slid off the verandah, but he retired--so we discovered later--no farther than the water-butt behind it. Ajax and I went into the sitting-room. From the bed-room beyond came no sound whatever. Through the windows the pack was seen--slowly advancing.
"Come in, gentlemen," said Ajax loudly.
He stood in the doorway, an unarmed man confronting a dozen desperadoes.
"Wheer's the Chinaman--Quong?"
I recognised the voice of a cowboy whom we had employed: a man known in the foothills as Cock-a-whoop Charlie.
"He's here," Ajax answered quietly.
A tall, gaunt Missourian, also well known to us as a daring bull- puncher, laughed derisively.
"Here--is he? Wal, we want him, but we don't want no fuss with you, boys. Yer--white, but he's yaller, and he must go."
"He is going," said Ajax. "He's going fast."
"How's that?"
"Come in," retorted my brother impatiently. "It's cold out there and dark. You're not scared of two unarmed men--are you?"
They filed into the house, looking very sheepish.
"I'm glad you've come, even at this late hour," said Ajax, "for I want to have a quiet word with you."
The psychological characteristics of a crowd are receiving attention at the hands of a French philosopher. M. Gustave Le Bon tells us that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual of average brains.
"You have a nerve," remarked Cock-a-whoop Charlie.
"You Coon Dogs," continued my brother, "are making this county too hot for the Chinese--eh?"
"You bet yer life!"
"But won't you make it too hot for yourselves?"
The pack growled, inarticulate with astonishment and curiosity.
"Some of you," said Ajax, "have wives and children. What will they do when the Sheriff is hunting--you? You call this the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. So it is. And do you think that the Free and the Brave will suffer you to destroy property and life without calling you to account?"
"We ain't destroying life."
"And a heathen Chinee ain't a man."
"Quong," said Ajax, in his deep voice, "is hardly a man yet. We call him Mary, because he looks like a girl. You want him--eh? You are not satisfied with what you did yesterday? You want him? But--do you want him dying?"
The pack cowered.
"He is dying," said Ajax. "No matter how they live, and a wiser Judge than any of us will pronounce on that, no matter how they live--are your own lives clean?--the meanest of these Chinese knows how to die. One moment, please."
He entered the room where Mary lay blind and deaf to the terror which had come at last. When Ajax returned, he said quietly: "Come and see the end of what you began. What? You hang back? By God!--you shall come."
Dominated by his eye and voice, the pack slunk into the bed-room. Upon Mary's once comely face the purple weals were criss-crossed; and sores had broken out wherever the cactus spines had pierced the flesh. A groan escaped the men who had wrought this evil, and glancing at each in turn, I caught a glimpse of a quickening remorse, of a horror about to assume colossal dimensions. The Cock-a-whoop cowboy was seized with a palsy; great tears rolled down the cheeks of the gaunt Missourian; one man began to swear incoherently, cursing himself and his fellows; another prayed aloud.
"He's dead!" shrieked Charlie.
At the grim word, moved by a common impulse, whipped to unreasonable panic as they had been whipped to unreasoning cruelty, the pack broke headlong from the room--and fled!
Long after they had gone, Mary opened his eyes.
"Coon Dogs coming?" he muttered. "Heap bad men!"
"They have come and gone," said Ajax. "They'll never come again, Mary. It's all right. Go to sleep."
Mary obediently closed his eyes.
"He'll recover," Ajax said. And he did.
Contents
MINTIE
By Horace Annesley Vachell
Mintie stood upon the porch of the old adobe, shading her brown eyes from the sun, now declining out of stainless skies into the brush- hills to the west of the ranch. The hand shading the eyes trembled; the red lips were pressed together; faint lines upon the brow and about the mouth indicated anxiety, and possibly fear. A trapper would have recognised in the expression of the face a watchful intensity or apprehension common to all animals who have reason to know themselves to be the prey of others.
Suddenly a shot rang out, repeating itself in echoes from the cañon behind the house. Mintie turned pale, and then laughed derisively.
"Gee!" she exclaimed. "How easy scairt I am!"
She sank, gaspingly, upon a chair, and began to fan herself with the skirt of her gown. Then, as if angry on account of a weakness, physical rather than mental, she stood up and smiled defiantly, showing her small white teeth. She was still trembling; and remarking this, she stamped upon the floor of the porch, and became rigid. Her face charmed because of its irregularity. Her skin was a clear brown, matching the eyes and hair. She had the grace and vigour of an unbroken filly at large upon the range. And, indeed, she had been born in the wilderness, and left it but seldom. Her father's ranch lay forty miles from San Lorenzo, high up in the foothills--a sterile tract of scrub--oak and cedar, of manzanita and chaparral, with here and there good grazing ground, and lower down, where the creek ran, a hundred acres of arable land. Behind the house bubbled a big spring which irrigated the orchard and garden.
Teamsters, hauling grain from the Carisa Plains to the San Lorenzo landing, a distance of nearly a hundred miles, would beguile themselves thinking of the apples which old man Ransom would be sure to offer, and the first big drink from the cold spring.
Mintie was about to enter the house, when she saw down the road a tiny reek of white dust. "Gee!" she exclaimed for the second time.
"Who's this?"
Being summer, the hauling had not yet begun. Mintie, wh
o had the vision of a turkey-buzzard, stared at the reek of dust.
"Smoky Jack, I reckon," she said disdainfully. Nevertheless, she went into the house, and when she reappeared a minute later her hair displayed a slightly more ordered disorder, and she had donned a clean apron.
She expressed surprise rather than pleasure when a young man rode up, shifted in his saddle, and said:--
"How air you folks makin' it?"
"Pretty fair. Goin' to town?"
"I thought, mebbe, of goin' to town nex' week. I come over jest to pass the time o' day with the old man."
"Rode ten miles to pass the time o' day with--Pap?"
"Yas."
"Curiously fond men air of each other!"
"That's so," said Smoky admiringly. "An' livin' alone puts notions o' love and tenderness into my head that never comed thar when Maw was alive an' kickin'. I tell yer, its awful lonesome on my place."
He sat up in his saddle, a handsome young fellow, the vaquero rather than the cowboy, a distinction well understood in California. John Short had been nicknamed Smoky Jack because of his indefatigable efforts to clear his own brush-hills by fire. Across his saddle was a long-barrelled, old-fashioned rifle. Mintie glanced at it.
"Was that you who fired jest now?"
"Nit," said Smoky. "I heard a shot," he added. "'Twas the old man. I'd know the crack of his Sharp anywheres. 'Tis the dead spit o' mine. There'll be buck's liver for supper sure."
"Why are you carryin' a gun?"
"I thought I might run acrost a deer."
"No other reason?"
Beneath her steady glance his blue eyes fell. He replied with restraint--
"I wouldn't trust some o' these squatters any further than I could sling a bull by the tail. Your Pap had any more trouble with 'em?"
Mintie answered savagely:--
"They're a-huntin' trouble. Likely as not they'll find it, too."
Smoky grinned. Being the son of an old settler, he held squatters in detestation. Of late years they had invaded the foothills. Pap Ransom was openly at feud with them. They stole his cattle, cut his fences, and one of them, Jake Farge, had dared to take up a claim inside the old man's back-pasture.
Smoky stared at Mintie. Then he said abruptly--
"You look kinder peaky-faced. Anything wrong?"
"Nothing," replied Mintie.
"You ain't a-worryin' about your Pap, air ye? I reckon he kin take keer of himself."
"I reckon he kin; so kin his daughter."
"Shall I put my plug into the barn?"
"We're mighty short of hay," said Mintie inhospitably.
Smoky Jack stared at her and laughed. Then he slipped from the saddle, pulled the reins over the horse's head, and threw the ends on the ground. With a deprecating smile he said softly--
"Air you very extry busy, Mints?"
"Not very extry. Why?"
"I've a notion to read ye something. It come to me las' Sunday week in the middle of the night. An' now it's slicked up to the Queen's taste."
"Poetry?"
"I dunno as it's that--after the remarks you passed about that leetle piece I sent to the Tribune."
"You sent it? Of all the nerve----! Did they print it?"
Smoky Jack shook his head.
"Never expected they would," he admitted mournfully. "I won't deny that it was kind o'----"
"Slushy?" hazarded Mintie.
"Wal--yes. You'd made all sorts of a dodgasted fool outer me."
"Yer father and mother done that."
"I've said as much to Maw, many's the time. 'Maw' I'd say, 'I ain't a masterpiece--and I know it.' But las' Sunday night I was inspired."
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. Mintie frowned. With a shy glance and heightened colour the man who had been inspired whispered softly--
"It's entitled, 'To My Own Brown Bird.'"
"And who's your brown bird?" demanded Mintie sharply.
"As if you didn't know."
"Meanin' me?"
"Couldn't naturally be nobody else."
"I'm not yours; and as for bein' brown, why, my skin is white as milk."
"I'll bet my life it is."
"As for bein' a bird, that ain't no compliment. Birds is first cousins to snakes. Never knew that, did ye?"
"Never--s'elp me! Is that really so?"
Covered with mortification, he put the paper back into his pocket.
"Read it," commanded the young lady. "Let's get it over an' done with. Then, mebbe, I'll help ye to rechristen the durned thing."
Emboldened by this gracious speech, Smoky began in a nasal, drawling voice--
"I've wandered far--I've wandered wide----"
"Ananias!" said Mintie. "You was born in these yere foothills, and raised in 'em; and you've never known enough to git out of 'em."
"Git out of 'em?"
"Git out of 'em," she repeated scornfully. "D'ye think if I was a man I'd stop in such a God-forsaken place as yours, with nothing but rattlesnakes and coyotes to keep me company? Go on!"
"I've wandered far--I've wandered wide-- I've dwelt in many a stately tower; And now I turn me back to ride To my own brown bird in her humble bower."
"That'll do," said Mintie. "You ain't improved much. Bill Shakespeare can rest easy in his tomb. I've got my chores to do. 'Bout time you was doin' yours."
Smoky Jack, refusing to budge, said jocosely, "Things air fixed up to home. 'Twouldn't worry me any if I never got back till to-morrer."
Mintie frowned and went into the house. Smoky led his horse to the barn with perplexity and distress writ large upon his face.
"Notice to quit," he muttered. Then he grinned pleasantly. "Reckon a perfect gen'leman 'd take the hint and clear out. But I ain't a perfect gen'leman. What in thunder ails the girl?"
* * * * *
It was nearly seven when Pap Ransom reached his corral. Smoky had milked the cow and fed the pigs. In the kitchen Mintie was frying some potatoes and stirring the big pot full of beans and bacon. From time to time Smoky had caught a glimpse of her white apron as she whisked in and out of the kitchen. Although a singularly modest youth, he conceived the idea that Mintie was interested in his doings, whereas we must admit that she was more concerned about her father. However, when she saw Pap ascend the hill, carrying his rifle over his shoulder, her face resumed its ordinary expression, and from that minute she gave to the simple preparations for supper undivided attention.
"Whar's the liver?" said Smoky, as the old man nodded to him.
"Liver?"
"Heard a shot, jest one, and made certain a good buck was on his back."
"I never fired no shot," said Ransom slowly.
"Wal, I'm hanged! Is there another Sharp besides mine in these yere hills?"
"I dessay. I heard one shot myself, 'bout two hours ago."
"Guess it was one o' them derned squatters."
"Curse 'em!" said Ransom. He spat upon the ground and walked into the abode. Smoky nodded reflectively.
Supper was not a particularly cheery meal. Mintie, usually a nimble talker, held her tongue. Ransom aired his pet grievance--the advent of Easterners, who presumed to take up land which was supposed to belong to, or at least go with, the old Spanish grants. Smoky and Mintie knew well enough that the land was Uncle Sam's; but they knew also that Ransom had run his cattle over it during five-and-twenty years. If that didn't constitute a better title than a United States patent, there was no justice anywhere. Smoky, filled with beans and bacon, exclaimed vehemently--
"Shoot 'em on sight, that's what I say."
Mintie stared at his bright eyes and flushed cheeks.
"Do you allus mean jest what you say?" she inquired sarcastically.
"Wal," replied Smoky, more cautiously, "they ain't been monkeyin' with me; but if they did----"
"If they did----?" drawled Mintie, with her elbows on the table and her face between her hands.
"If they cut my fence as they've cut yours, and, after doo warnings, kep' o
n trespassin' and makin' trouble, why then, by Gosh! I'd shoot. Might give 'other feller a show, but there's trouble as only kin be settled with shootin' irons."
"That's so" said Mintie savagely.
After supper Mintie retired to the kitchen to wash up. Ransom put a jar of tobacco on the table, two glasses, and some whisky.
"Any call for ye to ride home to-night?"
"None," said Smoky.
"Reckon ye'd better camp here, then."
Smoky nodded and muttered--
"Don't keer if I do," a polite form of acceptance in the California foothills.
Presently Ransom went out. Smoky was left alone. He filled his corn- cob pipe, stretched out his legs, and smiled, thinking of his own brown bird. Suddenly a glint came into his bright blue eyes. In the corner of the room, against the wall, leaned the two Sharp rifles. Smoky glanced about him, rose, walked to the corner, bent down, and smelt the muzzle of Ransom's rifle. Then he slipped his forefinger into the barrel and smelt that.
"Sufferin' Moses!" he exclaimed.
His mouth was slightly twisted, as he picked up the rifle and opened the breech. He drew out a used cartridge, which he examined with another exclamation.
"Holy Mackinaw!"
He put the cartridge into his pocket and glanced round for the second time. He could hear Mintie washing-up in the kitchen. Ransom was feeding his horses. Smoky took a cleaning-rod, ran it through the rifle, and examined the bit of cloth, which was wet and greasy. Then he replaced the rifle and went back to the table, where Ransom found him when he returned a few minutes later. The two men smoked in silence. Presently Ransom said abruptly:--
"Dead struck on Mints, ain't ye?"
"I am," said Smoky laconically.
"Told her so--hay?"
"'Bout a million times."
"What does she say?"
Smoky blew some rings of smoke before he answered.
"She says--'Shucks!'"
"That don't sound encouragin'."
"It ain't. Fact is, she thinks me a clam."
"A clam?"
"That's right. She'd think a heap more o' me if I was to pull out o' these yere hills and try to strike it somewheres else."
"Wal, squatters have made this no kind o' country for a white man. Ye're white, John."