by O. Henry
“It’s a lonesome place, for certain,” apologised Raidler abashedly. “We got plenty, but it’s rough enough. Anything you think of you want, the boys’ll ride up and fetch it down for you.”
It was Chad Murchison, a cow-puncher from the Circle Bar outfit, who first suggested that McGuire’s illness was fraudulent. Chad had brought a basket of grapes for him thirty miles, and four out of his way, tied to his saddle-horn. After remaining in the smoke-tainted room for a while, he emerged and bluntly confided his suspicions to Raidler.
“His arm,” said Chad, “is harder’n a diamond. He interduced me to what he called a shore-perplexus punch, and ’twas like being kicked twice by a mustang. He’s playin’ it low down on you, Curt. He ain’t no sicker’n I am. I hate to say it, but the runt’s workin’ you for range and shelter.”
The cattleman’s ingenuous mind refused to entertain Chad’s view of the case, and when, later, he came to apply the test, doubt entered not into his motives.
One day, about noon, two men drove up to the ranch, alighted, hitched, and came in to dinner; standing and general invitations being the custom of the country. One of them was a great San Antonio doctor, whose costly services had been engaged by a wealthy cowman who had been laid low by an accidental bullet. He was now being driven back to the station to take the train back to town. After dinner Raidler took him aside, pushed a twenty-dollar bill against his hand, and said:
“Doc, there’s a young chap in that room I guess has got a bad case of consumption. I’d like for you to look him over and see just how bad he is, and if we can do anything for him.”
“How much was that dinner I just ate, Mr. Raidler?” said the doctor bluffly, looking over his spectacles. Raidler returned the money to his pocket. The doctor immediately entered McGuire’s room, and the cattleman seated himself upon a heap of saddles on the gallery, ready to reproach himself in the event the verdict should be unfavourable.
In ten minutes the doctor came briskly out. “Your man,” he said promptly, “is as sound as a new dollar. His lungs are better than mine. Respiration, temperature, and pulse normal. Chest expansion four inches. Not a sign of weakness anywhere. Of course I didn’t examine for the bacillus, but it isn’t there. You can put my name to the diagnosis. Even cigarettes and a vilely close room haven’t hurt him. Coughs, does he? Well, you tell him it isn’t necessary. You asked if there is anything we could do for him. Well, I advise you to set him digging post-holes or breaking mustangs. There’s our team ready. Good- day, sir.” And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off.
Raidler reached out and plucked a leaf from a mesquite bush by the railing, and began chewing it thoughtfully.
The branding season was at hand, and the next morning Ross Hargis, foreman of the outfit, was mustering his force of some twenty-five men at the ranch, ready to start for the San Carlos range, where the work was to begin. By six o’clock the horses were all saddled, the grub wagon ready, and the cow-punchers were swinging themselves upon their mounts, when Raidler bade them wait. A boy was bringing up an extra pony, bridled and saddled, to the gate. Raidler walked to McGuire’s room and threw open the door. McGuire was lying on his cot, not yet dressed, smoking.
“Get up,” said the cattleman, and his voice was clear and brassy, like a bugle.
“How’s that?” asked McGuire, a little startled.
“Get up and dress. I can stand a rattlesnake, but I hate a liar. Do I have to tell you again?” He caught McGuire by the neck and stood him on the floor.
“Say, friend,” cried McGuire wildly, “are you bug-house? I’m sick — see? I’ll croak if I got to hustle. What’ve I done to yer?” — he began his chronic whine— “I never asked yer to— “
“Put on your clothes,” called Raidler in a rising tone.
Swearing, stumbling, shivering, keeping his amazed, shining eyes upon the now menacing form of the aroused cattleman, McGuire managed to tumble into his clothes. Then Raidler took him by the collar and shoved him out and across the yard to the extra pony hitched at the gate. The cow-punchers lolled in their saddles, open-mouthed.
“Take this man,” said Raidler to Ross Hargis, “and put him to work. Make him work hard, sleep hard, and eat hard. You boys know I done what I could for him, and he was welcome. Yesterday the best doctor in San Antone examined him, and says he’s got the lungs of a burro and the constitution of a steer. You know what to do with him, Ross.”
Ross Hargis only smiled grimly.
“Aw,” said McGuire, looking intently at Raidler, with a peculiar expression upon his face, “the croaker said I was all right, did he? Said I was fakin’, did he? You put him onto me. You t’ought I wasn’t sick. You said I was a liar. Say, friend, I talked rough, I know, but I didn’t mean most of it. If you felt like I did — aw! I forgot — I ain’t sick, the croaker says. Well, friend, now I’ll go work for yer. Here’s where you play even.”
He sprang into the saddle easily as a bird, got the quirt from the horn, and gave his pony a slash with it. “Cricket,” who once brought in Good Boy by a neck at Hawthorne — and a 10 to 1 shot — had his foot in the stirrups again.
McGuire led the cavalcade as they dashed away for San Carlos, and the cow-punchers gave a yell of applause as they closed in behind his dust.
But in less than a mile he had lagged to the rear, and was last man when they struck the patch of high chaparral below the horse pens. Behind a clump of this he drew rein, and held a handkerchief to his mouth. He took it away drenched with bright, arterial blood, and threw it carefully into a clump of prickly pear. Then he slashed with his quirt again, gasped “G’wan” to his astonished pony, and galloped after the gang.
That night Raidler received a message from his old home in Alabama. There had been a death in the family; an estate was to divide, and they called for him to come. Daylight found him in the buckboard, skimming the prairies for the station. It was two months before he returned. When he arrived at the ranch house he found it well-nigh deserted save for Ylario, who acted as a kind of steward during his absence. Little by little the youth made him acquainted with the work done while he was away. The branding camp, he was informed, was still doing business. On account of many severe storms the cattle had been badly scattered, and the branding had been accomplished but slowly. The camp was now in the valley of the Guadalupe, twenty miles away.
“By the way,” said Raidler, suddenly remembering, “that fellow I sent along with them — McGuire — is he working yet?”
“I do not know,” said Ylario. “Mans from the camp come verree few times to the ranch. So plentee work with the leetle calves. They no say. Oh, I think that fellow McGuire he dead much time ago.”
“Dead!” said Raidler. “What you talking about?”
“Verree sick fellow, McGuire,” replied Ylario, with a shrug of his shoulder. “I theenk he no live one, two month when he go away.”
“Shucks!” said Raidler. “He humbugged you, too, did he? The doctor examined him and said he was sound as a mesquite knot.”
“That doctor,” said Ylario, smiling, “he tell you so? That doctor no see McGuire.”
“Talk up,” ordered Raidler. “What the devil do you mean?”
“McGuire,” continued the boy tranquilly, “he getting drink water outside when that doctor come in room. That doctor take me and pound me all over here with his fingers” — putting his hand to his chest— “I not know for what. He put his ear here and here and here, and listen — I not know for what. He put little glass stick in my mouth. He feel my arm here. He make me count like whisper — so — twenty, /treinta/, /cuarenta/. Who knows,” concluded Ylario, with a deprecating spread of his hands, “for what that doctor do those verree droll and such-like things?”
“What horses are up?” asked Raidler shortly.
“Paisano is grazing out behind the little corral, /senor/.”
“Saddle him for me at once.”
Within a very few minutes the cattleman was mounted and a
way. Paisano, well named after that ungainly but swift-running bird, struck into his long lope that ate up the ground like a strip of macaroni. In two hours and a quarter Raidler, from a gentle swell, saw the branding camp by a water hole in the Guadalupe. Sick with expectancy of the news he feared, he rode up, dismounted, and dropped Paisano’s reins. So gentle was his heart that at that moment he would have pleaded guilty to the murder of McGuire.
The only being in the camp was the cook, who was just arranging the hunks of barbecued beef, and distributing the tin coffee cups for supper. Raidler evaded a direct question concerning the one subject in his mind.
“Everything all right in camp, Pete?” he managed to inquire.
“So, so,” said Pete, conservatively. “Grub give out twice. Wind scattered the cattle, and we’ve had to rake the brush for forty mile. I need a new coffee-pot. And the mosquitos is some more hellish than common.”
“The boys — all well?”
Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of cow- punchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It was not like the boss to make them.
“What’s left of ‘em don’t miss no calls to grub,” the cook conceded.
“What’s left of ‘em?” repeated Raidler in a husky voice. Mechanically he began to look around for McGuire’s grave. He had in his mind a white slab such as he had seen in the Alabama church-yard. But immediately he knew that was foolish.
“Sure,” said Pete; “what’s left. Cow camps change in two months. Some’s gone.”
Raidler nerved himself.
“That — chap — I sent along — McGuire — did — he— “
“Say,” interrupted Pete, rising with a chunk of corn bread in each hand, “that was a dirty shame, sending that poor, sick kid to a cow camp. A doctor that couldn’t tell he was graveyard meat ought to be skinned with a cinch buckle. Game as he was, too — it’s a scandal among snakes — lemme tell you what he done. First night in camp the boys started to initiate him in the leather breeches degree. Ross Hargis busted him one swipe with his chaparreras, and what do you reckon the poor child did? Got up, the little skeeter, and licked Ross. Licked Ross Hargis. Licked him good. Hit him plenty and everywhere and hard. Ross’d just get up and pick out a fresh place to lay down on agin.
“Then that McGuire goes off there and lays down with his head in the grass and bleeds. A hem’ridge they calls it. He lays there eighteen hours by the watch, and they can’t budge him. Then Ross Hargis, who loves any man who can lick him, goes to work and damns the doctors from Greenland to Poland Chiny; and him and Green Branch Johnson they gets McGuire into a tent, and spells each other feedin’ him chopped raw meat and whisky.
“But it looks like the kid ain’t got no appetite to git well, for they misses him from the tent in the night and finds him rootin’ in the grass, and likewise a drizzle fallin’. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘lemme go and die like I wanter. He said I was a liar and a fake and I was playin’ sick. Lemme alone.’
“Two weeks,” went on the cook, “he laid around, not noticin’ nobody, and then— “
A sudden thunder filled the air, and a score of galloping centaurs crashed through the brush into camp.
“Illustrious rattlesnakes!” exclaimed Pete, springing all ways at once; “here’s the boys come, and I’m an assassinated man if supper ain’t ready in three minutes.”
But Raidler saw only one thing. A little, brown-faced, grinning chap, springing from his saddle in the full light of the fire. McGuire was not like that, and yet —
In another instant the cattleman was holding him by the hand and shoulder.
“Son, son, how goes it?” was all he found to say.
“Close to the ground, says you,” shouted McGuire, crunching Raidler’s fingers in a grip of steel; “and dat’s where I found it — healt’ and strengt’, and tumbled to what a cheap skate I been actin’. T’anks fer kickin’ me out, old man. And — say! de joke’s on dat croaker, ain’t it? I looked t’rough the window and see him playin’ tag on dat Dago kid’s solar plexus.”
“You son of a tinker,” growled the cattleman, “whyn’t you talk up and say the doctor never examined you?”
“Ah — g’wan!” said McGuire, with a flash of his old asperity, “nobody can’t bluff me. You never ast me. You made your spiel, and you t’rowed me out, and I let it go at dat. And, say, friend, dis chasin’ cows is outer sight. Dis is de whitest bunch of sports I ever travelled with. You’ll let me stay, won’t yer, old man?”
Raidler looked wonderingly toward Ross Hargis.
“That cussed little runt,” remarked Ross tenderly, “is the Jo-dartin’est hustler — and the hardest hitter in anybody’s cow camp.”
AN AFTERNOON MIRACLE
At the United States end of an international river bridge, four armed rangers sweltered in a little ‘dobe hut, keeping a fairly faithful espionage upon the lagging trail of passengers from the Mexican side.
Bud Dawson, proprietor of the Top Notch Saloon, had, on the evening previous, violently ejected from his premises one Leandro Garcia, for alleged violation of the Top Notch code of behaviour. Garcia had mentioned twenty-four hours as a limit, by which time he would call and collect a painful indemnity for personal satisfaction.
This Mexican, although a tremendous braggart, was thoroughly courageous, and each side of the river respected him for one of these attributes. He and a following of similar bravoes were addicted to the pastime of retrieving towns from stagnation.
The day designated by Garcia for retribution was to be further signalised on the American side by a cattlemen’s convention, a bull fight, and an old settlers’ barbecue and picnic. Knowing the avenger to be a man of his word, and believing it prudent to court peace while three such gently social relaxations were in progress, Captain McNulty, of the ranger company stationed there, detailed his lieutenant and three men for duty at the end of the bridge. Their instructions were to prevent the invasion of Garcia, either alone or attended by his gang.
Travel was slight that sultry afternoon, and the rangers swore gently, and mopped their brows in their convenient but close quarters. For an hour no one had crossed save an old woman enveloped in a brown wrapper and a black mantilla, driving before her a burro loaded with kindling wood tied in small bundles for peddling. Then three shots were fired down the street, the sound coming clear and snappy through the still air.
The four rangers quickened from sprawling, symbolic figures of indolence to alert life, but only one rose to his feet. Three turned their eyes beseechingly but hopelessly upon the fourth, who had gotten nimbly up and was buckling his cartridge-belt around him. The three knew that Lieutenant Bob Buckley, in command, would allow no man of them the privilege of investigating a row when he himself might go.
The agile, broad-chested lieutenant, without a change of expression in his smooth, yellow-brown, melancholy face, shot the belt strap through the guard of the buckle, hefted his sixes in their holsters as a belle gives the finishing touches to her toilette, caught up his Winchester, and dived for the door. There he paused long enough to caution his comrades to maintain their watch upon the bridge, and then plunged into the broiling highway.
The three relapsed into resigned inertia and plaintive comment.
“I’ve heard of fellows,” grumbled Broncho Leathers, “what was wedded to danger, but if Bob Buckley ain’t committed bigamy with trouble, I’m a son of a gun.”
“Peculiarness of Bob is,” inserted the Nueces Kid, “he ain’t had proper trainin’. He never learned how to git skeered. Now, a man ought to be skeered enough when he tackles a fuss to hanker after readin’ his name on the list of survivors, anyway.”
“Buckley,” commented Ranger No. 3, who was a misguided Eastern man, burdened with an education, “scraps in such a solemn manner that I have been led to doubt its spontaneity. I’m not quite onto his system, but he fights, like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic.”
“I never heard,” mentioned Broncho
, “about any of Dibble’s ways of mixin’ scrappin’ and cipherin’.”
“Triggernometry?” suggested the Nueces infant.
“That’s rather better than I hoped from you,” nodded the Easterner, approvingly. “The other meaning is that Buckley never goes into a fight without giving away weight. He seems to dread taking the slightest advantage. That’s quite close to foolhardiness when you are dealing with horse-thieves and fence-cutters who would ambush you any night, and shoot you in the back if they could. Buckley’s too full of sand. He’ll play Horatius and hold the bridge once too often some day.”
“I’m on there,” drawled the Kid; “I mind that bridge gang in the reader. Me, I go instructed for the other chap — Spurious Somebody — the one that fought and pulled his freight, to fight ‘em on some other day.”
“Anyway,” summed up Broncho, “Bob’s about the gamest man I ever see along the Rio Bravo. Great Sam Houston! If she gets any hotter she’ll sizzle!” Broncho whacked at a scorpion with his four-pound Stetson felt, and the three watchers relapsed into comfortless silence.
How well Bob Buckley had kept his secret, since these men, for two years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he forced his craven body to do the bravest deeds. Scourging himself always, as a monk whips his besetting sin, Buckley threw himself with apparent recklessness into every danger, with the hope of some day ridding himself of the despised affliction. But each successive test brought no relief, and the ranger’s face, by nature adapted to cheerfulness and good-humour, became set to the guise of gloomy melancholy. Thus, while the frontier admired his deeds, and his prowess was celebrated in print and by word of mouth in many camp- fires in the valley of the Bravo, his heart was sick within him. Only himself knew of the horrible tightening of the chest, the dry mouth, the weakening of the spine, the agony of the strung nerves — the never- failing symptoms of his shameful malady.