The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories by Owen Wister (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

“He was buildin' one. When I left Galena Creek and come away from that country to meet you, the house was finished enough for the couple to move in. I hefted her brass-nailed trunk up the hill from their tent myself, and I watched her take out her crucifix. But she would not let me help her with that. She'd not let me touch it. She'd fixed it up agaynst the wall her own self her own way. But she accepted some flowers I picked, and set them in a can front of the crucifix. Then Hank he come in, and seein', says to me, 'Are you one of the kind that squats before them silly dolls?' 'I would tell yu', I answered him; 'but it would not inter-est yu'.' And I cleared out, and left him and Willomene to begin their housekeepin'.

“Already they had quit havin' much to say to each other down in their tent. The only steady talkin' done in that house was done by the parrot. I've never saw any go ahaid of that bird. I have told yu' about Hank, and how when he'd come home and see her prayin' to that crucifix he'd always get riled up. He would mention it freely to the boys. Not that she neglected him, yu' know. She done her part, workin' mighty hard, for she was a willin' woman. But he could not make her quit her religion; and Willomene she had got to bein' very silent before I come away. She used to talk to me some at first, but she dropped it. I don't know why. I expect maybe it was hard for her to have us that close in camp, witnessin' her troubles every day, and she a foreigner. I reckon if she got any comfort, it would be when we was off prospectin' or huntin', and she could shut the cabin door and be alone.”

The Virginian stopped for a moment.

“It will soon be a month since I left Galena Creek,” he resumed. “But I cannot get the business out o' my haid. I keep a studyin' over it.”

His talk was done. He had unburdened his mind. Night lay deep and quiet around us, with no sound far or near, save Buffalo Fork plashing over its riffle.

II

We left Snake River. We went up Pacific Creek, and through Two Ocean Pass, and down among the watery willow-bottoms and beaverdams of the Upper Yellowstone. We fished; we enjoyed existence along the lake. Then we went over Pelican Creek trail and came steeply down into the giant country of grasstopped mountains. At dawn and dusk the elk had begun to call across the stillness. And one morning in the Hoodoo country, where we were looking for sheep, we came round a jut of the strange, organ-pipe formation upon a longlegged boy of about nineteen, also hunting.

“Still hyeh?” said the Virginian, without emotion.

“I guess so,” returned the boy, equally matter-of-fact. “Yu' seem to be around yourself,” he added.

They might have been next-door neighbors, meeting in a town street for the second time in the same day.

The Virginian made me known to Mr. Lin McLean, who gave me a brief nod.

“Any luck?” he inquired, but not of me.

“Oh,” drawled the Virginian, “luck enough.”

Knowing the ways of the country, I said no word. It was bootless to interrupt their own methods of getting at what was really in both their minds.

The boy fixed his wide-open hazel eyes upon me. “Fine weather,” he mentioned.

“Very fine,” said I.

“I seen your horses a while ago,” he said. “Camp far from here?” he asked the Virginian.

“Not specially. Stay and eat with us. We've got elk meat.”

“That's what I'm after for camp,” said McLean. “All of us is out on a hunt to-day—except him.”

“How many are yu' now?”

“The whole six.”

“Makin' money?”

“Oh, some days the gold washes out good in the pan, and others it's that fine it'll float off without settlin'.”

“So Hank ain't huntin' to-day?”

“Huntin'! We left him layin' out in that clump o'brush below their cabin. Been drinkin' all night.”

The Virginian broke off a piece of the Hoodoo mud-rock from the weird eroded pillar that we stood beside. He threw it into a bank of last year's snow. We all watched it as if it were important. Up through the mountain silence pierced the long quivering whistle of a bull-elk. It was like an unearthly singer practising an unearthly scale.

“First time she heard that,” said McLean, “she was scared.”

“Nothin' maybe to resemble it in Austria,” said the Virginian.

“That's so,” said McLean. “That's so, you bet! Nothin' just like Hank over there, neither.”

“Well, flesh is mostly flesh in all lands, I reckon,” said the Virginian. “I expect yu' can be drunk and disorderly in every language. But an Austrian Hank would be liable to respect her crucifix.”

“That's so!”

“He ain't made her quit it yet?”

“Not him. But he's got meaner.”

“Drunk this mawnin', yu' say?”

“That's his most harmless condition now.”

“Nobody's in camp but them two? Her and him alone?”

“Oh, he dassent touch her.”

“Who did he tell that to?”

“Oh, the camp is backin' her. The camp has explained that to him several times, you bet! And what's more, she has got the upper hand of him herself. She has him beat.”

“How beat?”

“She has downed him with her eye. Just by endurin' him peacefully; and with her eye. I've saw it. Things changed some after yu' pulled out. We had a good crowd still, and it was pleasant, and not too lively nor yet too slow. And Willomene, she come more among us. She'd not stay shut in-doors, like she done at first. I'd have like to've showed her how to punish Hank.”

“Afteh she had downed yu' with her eye?” inquired the Virginian.

Young McLean reddened, and threw a furtive look upon me, the stranger, the outsider. “Oh, well,” he said, “I done nothing onusual. But that's all different now. All of us likes her and respects her, and makes allowances for her bein' Dutch. Yu' can't help but respect her. And she shows she knows.”

“I reckon maybe she knows how to deal with Hank,” said the Virginian.

“Shucks!” said McLean, scornfully. “And her so big and him so puny! She'd ought to lift him off the earth with one arm and lam him with a baste or