Lin McLean - Owen Wister (read after TXT) 📗

in it. Tubercle has got it here.” He took it from the less hasty agent and thrust it in Jessamine’s hand. “You needn’t to fear. Please open it; it’s good news this time, you bet!” He watched it in her hand as the boy of eight watches the string of a Christmas parcel he wishes his father would cut instead of so carefully untie. “Open it,” he urged again. “Keeping me waiting this way!”

“What in the world does all this mean?” cried Jessamine, stopping short at the first sentence.

“Read,” said Lin.

“You’ve done this!” she exclaimed.

“Read, read!”

So she read, with big eyes. It was an official letter of the railroad, written by the division superintendent at Edgeford. It hoped Miss Buckner might feel like taking the position of agent at Separ. If she was willing to consider this, would she stop over at Edgeford, on her way east, and talk with the superintendent? In case the duties were more than she had been accustomed to on the Louisville and Nashville, she could continue east with the loss of only a day. The superintendent believed the salary could be arranged satisfactorily. Enclosed please to find an order for a free ride to Edgeford.

Jessamine turned her wondering eyes on Lin. “You did do this,” she repeated, but this time with extraordinary quietness.

“Yes,” said he. “And I am plumb proud of it.”

She gave a rich laugh of pleasure and amusement; a long laugh, and stopped. “Did anybody ever!” she said.

“We can call each other neighbors now, yu’ see,” said the cow-puncher.

“Oh no! oh no!” Jessamine declared. “Though how am I ever to thank you?”

“By not argufying,” Lin answered.

“Oh no, no! I can do no such thing. Don’t you see I can’t? I believe you are crazy.”

“I’ve been waiting to hear yu’ say that,” said the complacent McLean. “I’m not argufying. We’ll eat supper now. The eastbound is due in an hour, and I expect you’ll be wanting to go on it.”

“And I expect I’ll go, too,” said the girl.

“I’ll be plumb proud to have yu’,” the cow-puncher assented.

“I’m going to get my ticket to Chicago right now,” said Jessamine, again laughing, sunny and defiant.

“You bet you are!” said the incorrigible McLean. He let her go into the station serenely. “You can’t get used to new ideas in a minute,” he remarked to me. “I’ve figured on all that, of course. But that’s why,” he broke out, impetuously, “I quit you on Bear Creek so sudden. ‘When she goes back away home,’ I’d been saying to myself every day, ‘what’ll you do then, Lin McLean?’ Well, I knew I’d go to Kentucky too. Just knew I’d have to, yu’ see, and it was inconvenient, turruble inconvenient—Billy here and my ranch, and the beef roundup comin’—but how could I let her go and forget me? Take up, maybe, with some Blue-grass son-of-a-gun back there? And I hated the fix I was in till that morning, getting up, I was joshin’ the Virginia man that’s after Miss Wood. I’d been sayin’ no educated lady would think of a man who talked with an African accent. ‘It’s repotted you have a Southern rival yourself,’ says he, joshin’ back. So I said I guessed the rival would find life uneasy. ‘He does,’ says he. ‘Any man with his voice broke in two halves, and one down in his stomach and one up among the angels, is goin’ to feel uneasy. But Texas talks a heap about his lady vigilante in the freight-car.’ ‘Vigilante!’ I said; and I must have jumped, for they all asked where the lightning had struck. And in fifteen minutes after writing you I’d hit the trail for Separ. Oh, I figured things out on that ride!” (Mr. McLean here clapped me on the back.) “Got to Separ. Got the sheriff’s address —the sheriff that saw her that night they held up the locomotive. Got him to meet me at Edgeford and make a big talk to the superintendent. Made a big talk myself. I said, ‘Put that girl in charge of Separ, and the boys’ll quit shooting your water-tank. But Tubercle can’t influence ‘em.’ ‘Tubercle?’ says the superintendent. ‘What’s that?’ And when I told him it was the agent, he flapped his two hands down on the chair arms each side of him and went to rockin’ up and down. I said the agent was just a temptation to the boys to be gay right along, and they’d keep a-shooting. ‘You can choose between Tubercle and your tank,’ I said; ‘but you’ve got to move one of ‘em from Separ if yu’ went peace.’ The sheriff backed me up good, too. He said a man couldn’t do much with Separ the way it was now; but a decent woman would be respected there, and the only question was if she could conduct the business. So I spoke up about Shawhan, and when the whole idea began to soak into that superintendent his eyeballs jingled and he looked as wise as a work-ox. ‘I’ll see her,’ says he. And he’s going to see her.”

“Well,” said I, “you deserve success after thinking of a thing like that! You’re wholly wasted punching cattle. But she’s going to Chicago. By eleven o’clock she will have passed by your superintendent.”

“Why, so she will!” said Lin, affecting surprise.

He baffled me, and he baffled Jessamine. Indeed, his eagerness with her parcels, his assistance in checking her trunk, his cheerful examination of check and ticket to be sure they read over the same route, plainly failed to gratify her.

Her firmness about going was sincere, but she had looked for more dissuasion; and this sprightly abettal of her departure seemed to leave something vacant in the ceremonies She fell singularly taciturn during supper at the Hotel Brunswick, and presently observed, “I hope I shall see Mr. Donohoe.”

“Texas?” said Lin. “I expect they’ll have tucked him in bed by now up at the ranch. The little fellow is growing yet.”

“He can walk round a freight-car all night,” said Miss Buckner, stoutly. “I’ve always wanted to thank him for looking after me.”

Mr. McLean smiled elaborately at his plate

“Well, if he’s not actually thinking he’ll tease me!” cried out Jessamine “Though he claims not to be foolish like Mr. Donohoe. Why, Mr. McLean, you surely must have been young once! See if you can’t remember!”

“Shucks!” began Lin.

But her laughter routed him. “Maybe you didn’t notice you were young,” she said. “But don’t you reckon perhaps the men around did? Why, maybe even the girls kind o’ did!”

“She’s hard to beat, ain’t she?” inquired Lin, admiringly, of me.

In my opinion she was. She had her wish, too about Texas; for we found him waiting on the railroad platform, dressed in his best, to say goodbye. The friendly things she told him left him shuffling and repeating that it was a mistake to go, a big mistake; but when she said the butter was not good enough, his laugh cracked joyously up into the treble. The train’s arrival brought quick sadness to her face, but she made herself bright again with a special farewell for each acquaintance.

“Don’t you ride any more cow-catchers,” she warned Billy Lusk, “or I’ll have to come back and look after you.”

“You said you and me were going for a ride, and we ain’t,” shouted the long-memoried nine-year-old. “You will,” murmured Mr. McLean, oracularly.

As the train’s pace quickened he did not step off, and Miss Buckner cried “Jump!”

“Too late,” said he, placidly. Then he called to me, “I’m hard to beat, too!” So the train took them both away, as I might have guessed was his intention all along.

“Is that marriage again?” said Billy, anxiously. “He wouldn’t tell me nothing.”

“He’s just seeing Miss Buckner as far as Edgeford,” said the agent. “Be back tomorrow.”

“Then I don’t see why he wouldn’t take me along,” Billy complained. And Separ laughed.

But the lover was not back tomorrow. He was capable of anything, gossip remarked, and took up new themes. The sun rose and set, the two trains made their daily slight event and gathering; the water-tank, glaring bulkily in the sun beaconed unmolested; and the agent’s natural sleep was unbroken by pistols, for the cowboys did not happen to be in town. Separ lay a clot of torpor that I was glad to leave behind me for a while. But news is a strange, permeating substance, and it began to be sifted through the air that Tubercle was going to God’s country.

That is how they phrased it in cow-camp, meaning not the next world, but the Eastern States.

“It’s certainly a shame him leaving after we’ve got him so good and used to us,” said the Virginian.

“We can’t tell him goodbye,” said Honey Wiggin. “Separ’ll be slow.”

“We can give his successor a right hearty welcome,” the Virginian suggested.

“That’s you!” said Honey. “Schemin’ mischief away ahead. You’re the leadin’ devil in this country, and just because yu’ wear a faithful-looking face you’re tryin’ to fool a poor school-marm.”

“Yes,” drawled the Southerner, “that’s what I’m aiming to do.”

So now they were curious about the successor, planning their hearty welcome for that official, and were encouraged in this by Mr. McLean. He reappeared in the neighborhood with a manner and conversation highly casual.

“Bring your new wife?” they inquired.

“No; she preferred Kentucky,” Lin said.

“Bring the old one?”

“No; she preferred Laramie.”

“Kentucky’s a right smart way to chase after a girl,” said the Virginian.

“Sure!” said Mr. McLean. “I quit at Edgeford.”

He met their few remarks so smoothly that they got no joy from him; and being asked had he seen the new agent, he answered yes, that Tubercle had gone Wednesday, and his successor did not seem to be much of a man.

But to me Lin had nothing to say until noon camp was scattering from its lunch to work, when he passed close, and whispered, “You’ll see her tomorrow if you go in with the outfit.” Then, looking round to make sure we were alone in the sagebrush, he drew from his pocket, cherishingly, a little shining pistol. “Hers,” said he, simply.

I looked at him.

“We’ve exchanged,” he said.

He turned the token in his hand, caressing it as on that first night when Jessamine had taken his heart captive.

“My idea,” he added, unable to lift his eyes from the treasure. “See this, too.”

I looked, and there was the word “Neighbor” engraved on it.

“Her idea,” said he.

“A good one!” I murmured.

“It’s on both, yu’ know. We had it put on the day she settled to accept the superintendent’s proposition.” Here Lin fired his small exchanged weapon at a cottonwood, striking low. “She can beat that with mine!” he exclaimed, proud and tender. “She took four days deciding at Edgeford, and I learned her to hit the ace of clubs.” He showed me the cards they had practiced upon during those four days of indecision; he had them in a book as if they were pressed flowers. “They won’t get crumpled that way,” said he; and he further showed me a tintype. “She’s got the other at Separ,” he finished.

I shook his hand with all my might. Yes, he was worthy of her! Yes, he deserved this smooth course his love was running! And I shook his hand again. To tonic her grief Jessamine had longed for some activity, some work, and he had shown her Wyoming might hold this for her as well as Kentucky. “But how in the world,” I asked him, “did you persuade her to stop over at Edgeford at all?”

“Yu’ mustn’t forget,” said the lover (and he blushed), “that I had her four hours alone on the train.”

But his