Lin McLean - Owen Wister (read after TXT) 📗

idle upon a siding, and the box-like darkness of these freight-cars was timely. Nights were short now. Camping out, the dawn by three o’clock would flow like silver through the universe, and, sinking through my blankets, remorselessly pervade my buried hair and brain. But with clean straw in the bottom of an empty, I could sleep my fill until five or six. I decided for the empty, and opened the supper-room door, where the table was set for more than enough to include me; but the smell of the butter that awaited us drove me out of the Hotel Brunswick to spend the remaining minutes in the air.

“I was expecting you,” said the girl. “Well, if I haven’t frightened him!” She laughed so delightfully that I recovered and laughed too. “Why,” she explained, “I just knew you’d not stay in there. Which side are you going to butter your bread this evening?”

“You had smelt it?” said I, still cloudy with surprise. “Yes. Unquestionably. Very rancid.” She glanced oddly at me, and, with less fellowship in her tone, said, “I was going to warn you—” when suddenly, down at the corrals, the boys began to shoot at large. “Oh, dear!” she cried, starting up. “There’s trouble.”

“Not trouble,” I assured her. “Too many are firing at once to be in earnest. And you would be safe here.”

“Me? A lady without escort? Well, I should reckon so! Leastways, we are respected where I was raised. I was anxious for the gentlemen ovah yondah. Shawhan, K. C. branch of the Louavull an’ Nashvull, is my home.” The words “Louisville and Nashville” spoke creamily of Blue-grass.

“Unescorted all that way!” I exclaimed.

“Isn’t it awful?” said she, tilting her head with a laugh, and showing the pistol she carried. “But we’ve always been awful in Kentucky. Now I suppose New York would never speak to poor me as it passed by?” And she eyed me with capable, good-humored satire.

“Why New York?” I demanded. “Guess again.”

“Well,” she debated, “well, cowboy clothes and city language—he’s English!” she burst out; and then she turned suddenly red, and whispered to herself, reprovingly, “If I’m not acting rude!”

“Oh!” said I, rather familiarly.

“It was, sir; and please to excuse me. If you had started joking so free with me, I’d have been insulted. When I saw you—the hat and everything— I took you—You see I’ve always been that used to talking to—to folks around!” Her bright face saddened, memories evidently rose before her, and her eyes grew distant.

I wished to say, “Treat me as ‘folks around,’” but this tall country girl had put us on other terms. On discovering I was not “folks around,” she had taken refuge in deriding me, but swiftly feeling no solid ground there, she drew a firm, clear woman’s line between us. Plainly she was a comrade of men, in her buoyant innocence secure, yet by no means in the dark as to them.

“Yes, unescorted two thousand miles,” she resumed, “and never as far as twenty from home till last Tuesday. I expect you’ll have to be scandalized, for I’d do it right over again tomorrow.”

“You’ve got me all wrong,” said I. “I’m not English; I’m not New York. I am good American, and not bounded by my own farm either. No sectional line, or Mason and Dixon, or Missouri River tattoos me. But you, when you say United States, you mean United Kentucky!”

“Did you ever!” said she, staring at what was Greek to her—as it is to most Americans. “And so if you had a sister back East, and she and you were all there was of you any more, and she hadn’t seen you since—not since you first took to staying out nights, and she started to visit you, you’d not tell her ‘Fie for shame’?”

“I’d travel my money’s length to meet her!” said I.

A wave of pain crossed her face. “Nate didn’t know,” she said then, lightly. “You see, Nate’s only a boy, and regular thoughtless about writing.”

Ah! So this Nate never wrote, and his sister loved and championed him! Many such stray Nates and Bobs and Bills galloped over Wyoming, lost and forgiven.

“I’m starting for him in the Buffalo stage,” continued the girl.

“Then I’ll have your company on a weary road,” said I; for my journey was now to that part of the cattle country.

“To Buffalo?” she said, quickly. “Then maybe you—maybe—My brother is Nate Buckner.” She paused. “Then you’re not acquainted with him?”

“I may have seen him,” I answered, slowly. “But faces and names out here come and go.”

I knew him well enough. He was in jail, convicted of forgery last week, waiting to go to the penitentiary for five years. And even this wild border community that hated law courts and punishments had not been sorry, for he had cheated his friends too often, and the wide charity of the sagebrush does not cover that sin. Beneath his pretty looks and daring skill with horses they had found vanity and a cold, false heart; but his sister could not. Here she was, come to find him after lonely years, and to this one soul that loved him in the world how was I to tell the desolation and the disgrace? I was glad to hear her ask me if the stage went soon after supper.

“Now isn’t that a bother?” said she, when I answered that it did not start till morning. She glanced with rueful gayety at the hotel. “Never mind,” she continued, briskly; “I’m used to things. I’ll just sit up somewhere. Maybe the agent will let me stay in the office. You’re sure all that shooting’s only jollification?”

“Certain,” I said. “But I’ll go and see.”

“They always will have their fun,” said she. “But I hate to have a poor boy get hurt—even him deserving it!”

“They use pistols instead of fire-crackers,” said I. “But you must never sleep in that office. I’ll see what we can do.”

“Why, you’re real kind!” she exclaimed, heartily. And I departed, wondering what I ought to do.

Perhaps I should have told you before that Separ was a place once—a sort of place; but you will relish now, I am convinced, the pithy fable of its name.

Midway between two sections of this still unfinished line that, rail after rail and mile upon mile, crawled over the earth’s face visibly during the constructing hours of each new day, lay a camp. To this point these unjoined pieces were heading, and here at length they met. Camp Separation it had been fitly called, but how should the American railway man afford time to say that? Separation was pretty and apt, but needless; and with the sloughing of two syllables came the brief, businesslike result—Separ. Chicago, 1137-1/2 miles. It was labelled on a board large almost as the hut station. A Y-switch, two sidings, the fat water-tank and steam-pump, and a section-house with three trees before it composed the north side. South of the track were no trees. There was one long siding by the corrals and cattle-chute, there were a hovel where plug tobacco and canned goods were for sale, a shed where you might get your horse shod, a wire fence that at shipping times enclosed bales of pressed hay, the hotel, the stage stable, and the little station—some seven shanties all told. Between them were spaces of dust, the immediate plains engulfed them, and through their midst ran the far-vanishing railroad, to which they hung like beads on a great string from horizon to horizon. A great east-and-west string, one end in the rosy sun at morning, and one in the crimson sun at night. Beyond each sky-line lay cities and ports where the world went on out of sight and hearing. This lone steel thread had been stretched across the continent because it was the day of haste and hope, when dollars seemed many and hard times were few; and from the Yellowstone to the Rio Grande similar threads were stretching, and little Separs by dispersed hundreds hung on them, as it were in space eternal. Can you wonder that vigorous young men with pistols should, when they came to such a place, shoot them off to let loose their unbounded joy of living?

And yet it was not this merely that began the custom, but an error of the agent’s. The new station was scarce created when one morning Honey Wiggin with the Virginian had galloped innocently in from the roundup to telegraph for some additional cars.

“I’m dead on to you!” squealed the official, dropping flat at the sight of them; and bang went his gun at them. They, most naturally, thought it was a maniac, and ran for their lives among the supports of the water-tank, while he remained anchored with his weapon, crouched behind the railing that fenced him and his apparatus from the laity; and some fifteen strategic minutes passed before all parties had crawled forth to an understanding, and the message was written and paid for and comfortably despatched. The agent was an honest creature, but of tame habits, sent for the sake of his imperfect lungs to this otherwise inappropriate air. He had lived chiefly in mid-West towns, a serious reader of our comic weeklies; hence the apparition of Wiggin and the Virginian had reminded him sickeningly of bandits. He had express money in the safe, he explained to them, and this was a hard old country, wasn’t it? and did they like good whiskey?

They drank his whiskey, but it was not well to have mentioned that about the bandits. Both were aware that when shaved and washed of their roundup grime they could look very engaging. The two cow-punchers rode out, not angry, but grieved that a man come here to dwell among them should be so tactless.

“If we don’t get him used to us,” observed the Virginian, “he and his pop-gun will be guttin’ some blameless man.”

Forthwith the cattle country proceeded to get the agent used to it. The news went over the sagebrush from Belle Fourche to Sweetwater, and playful, howling horsemen made it their custom to go rioting with pistols round the ticket office, educating the agent. His lungs improved, and he came dimly to smile at this life which he did not understand. But the company discerned no humor whatever in having its water-tank perforated, which happened twice; and sheriffs and deputies and other symptoms of authority began to invest Separ. Now what should authority do upon these free plains, this wilderness of do-as-you-please, where mere breathing the air was like inebriation? The large, headlong children who swept in from the sagebrush and out again meant nothing that they called harm until they found themselves resisted. Then presently happened that affair of the cow-catcher; and later a too-zealous marshal, come about a mail-car they had side-tracked and held with fiddles, drink, and petticoats, met his death accidentally, at which they were sincerely sorry for about five minutes. They valued their own lives as little, and that lifts them forever from baseness at least. So the company, concluding such things must be endured for a while yet, wrote their letter, and you have seen how wrong the letter went. All it would do would be from now on to fasten upon Separ its code of recklessness; to make shooting the water-tank (for example) part of a gentleman’s deportment when he showed himself in town.

It was not now the season of heavy shipping; to-night their work would be early finished, and then they were likely to play after their manner. To arrive in such a place on her way to her brother, the felon in jail, made the girl’s journey seem doubly forlorn to me as I wandered down to the corrals.

A small, bold voice hailed me. “Hello, you!” it said; and