Lin McLean - Owen Wister (read after TXT) 📗

outside for a better look, and I came to the door myself. “That’s what it is,” said he. “It’s the girl. Oh yes. That’s Taylor’s buckskin pair he traded Balaam for. She come by the stage all right yesterday, yu’ see, but she has been too tired to travel, yu’ see, or else, maybe, Taylor wanted to rest his buckskins—they’re four-year-olds. Or else—anyway, they laid over last night at Powder River, and Tommy he has just laid over too, yu’ see, holdin’ the mail back on us twenty-four hours—and that’s your postmaster!”

It was our postmaster, and this he had done, quite as the virtuously indignant McLean surmised. Had I taken the same interest in the new girl, I suppose that I too should have felt virtuously indignant.

Lin and I stood outside to receive the travellers. As their cavalcade drew near, Mr. McLean grew silent and watchful, his whole attention focused upon the Taylors’ vehicle. Its approach was joyous. Its gear made a cheerful clanking, Taylor cracked his whip and encouragingly chirruped to his buckskins, and Tommy’s apparatus jingled musically. For Tommy wore upon himself and his saddle all the things you can wear in the Wild West. Except that his hair was not long, our postmaster might have conducted a show and minted gold by exhibiting his romantic person before the eyes of princes. He began with a black-and-yellow rattlesnake skin for a hat-band, he continued with a fringed and beaded shirt of buckskin, and concluded with large, tinkling spurs. Of course, there were things between his shirt and his heels, but all leather and deadly weapons. He had also a riata, a cuerta, and tapaderos, and frequently employed these Spanish names for the objects. I wish that I had not lost Tommy’s photograph in Rocky Mountain costume. You must understand that he was really pretty, with blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and a graceful figure; and, besides, he had twenty-four hours’ start of poor dusty Lin, whose best clothes were elsewhere.

You might have supposed that it would be Mrs. Taylor who should present us to her friend from Sidney, Nebraska; but Tommy on his horse undertook the office before the wagon had well come to a standstill. “Good friends of mine, and gentlemen, both,” said he to Miss Peck; and to us, “A lady whose acquaintance will prove a treat to our section.”

We all bowed at each other beneath the florid expanse of these recommendations, and I was proceeding to murmur something about its being a long journey and a fine day when Miss Peck cut me short, gaily:

“Well,” she exclaimed to Tommy, “I guess I’m pretty near ready for them eggs you’ve spoke so much about.”

I have not often seen Mr. McLean lose his presence of mind. He needed merely to exclaim, “Why, Tommy, you told me your hens had not been laying since Christmas!” and we could have sat quiet and let Tommy try to find all the eggs that he could. But the new girl was a sore embarrassment to the cow-puncher’s wits. Poor Lin stood by the wheels of the wagon. He looked up at Miss Peck, he looked over at Tommy, his features assumed a rueful expression, and he wretchedly blurted,

“Why, Tommy, I’ve been and eat ‘em.”

“Well, if that ain’t!” cried Miss Peck. She stared with interest at Lin as he now assisted her to descend.

“All?” faltered Tommy. “Not the four nests?”

“I’ve had three meals, yu’ know,” Lin reminded him, deprecatingly.

“I helped him,” said I. “Ten innocent, fresh eggs. But we have left some ham. Forgive us, please.”

“I declare!” said Miss Peck, abruptly, and rolled her sluggish, inviting eyes upon me. “You’re a case, too, I expect.”

But she took only brief note of me, although it was from head to foot. In her stare the dull shine of familiarity grew vacant, and she turned back to Lin McLean. “You carry that,” said she, and gave the pleased cow-puncher a hand valise.

“I’ll look after your things, Miss Peck,” called Tommy, now springing down from his horse. The egg tragedy had momentarily stunned him.

“You’ll attend to the mail first, Mr. Postmaster!” said the lady, but favoring him with a look from her large eyes. “There’s plenty of gentlemen here.” With that her glance favored Lin. She went into the cabin, he following her close, with the Taylors and myself in the rear. “Well, I guess I’m about collapsed!” said she, vigorously, and sank upon one of Tommy’s chairs.

The fragile article fell into sticks beneath her, and Lin leaped to her assistance. He placed her upon a firmer foundation. Mrs. Taylor brought a basin and towel to bathe the dust from her face, Mr. Taylor produced whiskey, and I found sugar and hot water. Tommy would doubtless have done something in the way of assistance or restoratives, but he was gone to the stable with the horses.

“Shall I get your medicine from the valise, deary?” inquired Mrs. Taylor.

“Not now,” her visitor answered; and I wondered why she should take such a quick look at me.

“We’ll soon have yu’ independent of medicine,” said Lin, gallantly. “Our climate and scenery here has frequently raised the dead.”

“You’re a case, anyway!” exclaimed the sick lady with rich conviction.

The cow-puncher now sat himself on the edge of Tommy’s bed, and, throwing one leg across the other, began to raise her spirits with cheerful talk. She steadily watched him—his face sometimes, sometimes his lounging, masculine figure. While he thus devoted his attentions to her, Taylor departed to help Tommy at the stable, and good Mrs. Taylor, busy with supper for all of us in the kitchen, expressed her joy at having her old friend of childhood for a visit after so many years.

“Sickness has changed poor Katie some,” said she. “But I’m hoping she’ll get back her looks on Bear Creek.”

“She seems less feeble than I had understood,” I remarked.

“Yes, indeed! I do believe she’s feeling stronger. She was that tired and down yesterday with the long stage-ride, and it is so lonesome! But Taylor and I heartened her up, and Tommy came with the mail, and to-day she’s real spruced-up like, feeling she’s among friends.”

“How long will she stay?” I inquired.

“Just as long as ever she wants! Me and Katie hasn’t met since we was young girls in Dubuque, for I left home when I married Taylor, and he brought me to this country right soon; and it ain’t been like Dubuque much, though if I had it to do over again I’d do just the same, as Taylor knows. Katie and me hasn’t wrote even, not till this February, for you always mean to and you don’t. Well, it’ll be like old times. Katie’ll be most thirty-four, I expect. Yes. I was seventeen and she was sixteen the very month I was married. Poor thing! She ought to have got some good man for a husband, but I expect she didn’t have any chance, for there was a big fam’ly o’ them girls, and old Peck used to act real scandalous, getting drunk so folks didn’t visit there evenings scarcely at all. And so she quit home, it seems, and got a position in the railroad eating-house at Sidney, and now she has poor health with feeding them big trains day and night.”

“A biscuit-shooter!” said I.

Loyal Mrs. Taylor stirred some batter in silence. “Well,” said she then, “I’m told that’s what the yard-hands of the railroad call them poor waiter-girls. You might hear it around the switches at them division stations.”

I had heard it in higher places also, but meekly accepted the reproof.

If you have made your trans-Missouri journeys only since the new era of dining-cars, there is a quantity of things you have come too late for, and will never know. Three times a day in the brave days of old you sprang from your scarce-halted car at the summons of a gong. You discerned by instinct the right direction, and, passing steadily through doorways, had taken, before you knew it, one of some sixty chairs in a room of tables and catsup bottles. Behind the chairs, standing attention, a platoon of Amazons, thick-wristed, pink-and-blue, began immediately a swift chant. It hymned the total bill-of-fare at a blow. In this inexpressible ceremony the name of every dish went hurtling into the next, telescoped to shapelessness. Moreover, if you stopped your Amazon in the middle, it dislocated her, and she merely went back and took a fresh start. The chant was always the same, but you never learned it. As soon as it began, your mind snapped shut like the upper berth in a Pullman. You must have uttered appropriate words—even a parrot will—for next you were eating things—pie, ham, hot cakes—as fast as you could. Twenty minutes of swallowing, and all aboard for Ogden, with your pile-driven stomach dumb with amazement. The Strasburg goose is not dieted with greater velocity, and “biscuit-shooter” is a grand word. Very likely some Homer of the railroad yards first said it—for what men upon the present earth so speak with imagination’s tongue as we Americans?

If Miss Peck had been a biscuit-shooter, I could account readily for her conversation, her equipped deportment, the maturity in her round, blue, marble eye. Her abrupt laugh, something beyond gay, was now sounding in response to Mr. McLean’s lively sallies, and I found him fanning her into convalescence with his hat. She herself made but few remarks, but allowed the cow-puncher to entertain her, merely exclaiming briefly now and then, “I declare!” and “If you ain’t!” Lin was most certainly engaging, if that was the lady’s meaning. His wide-open eyes sparkled upon her, and he half closed them now and then to look at her more effectively. I suppose she was worth it to him. I have forgotten to say that she was handsome in a large California-fruit style. They made a good-looking pair of animals. But it was in the presence of Tommy that Master Lin shone more energetically than ever, and under such shining Tommy was transparently restless. He tried, and failed, to bring the conversation his way, and took to rearranging the mail and the furniture.

“Supper’s ready,” he said, at length. “Come right in, Miss Peck; right in here. This is your seat—this one, please. Now you can see my fields out of the window.”

“You sit here,” said the biscuit-shooter to Lin; and thus she was between them. “Them’s elegant!” she presently exclaimed to Tommy. “Did you cook ‘em?”

I explained that the apricots were of my preparation.

“Indeed!” said she, and returned to Tommy, who had been telling her of his ranch, his potatoes, his horses. “And do you punch cattle, too?” she inquired of him.

“Me?” said Tommy, slightingly; “gave it up years ago; too empty a life for me. I leave that to such as like it. When a man owns his own property”—Tommy swept his hand at the whole landscape—” he takes to more intellectual work.”

“Lickin’ postage-stamps,” Mr. McLean suggested, sourly.

“You lick them and I cancel them,” answered the postmaster; and it does not seem a powerful rejoinder. But Miss Peck uttered her laugh.

“That’s one on you,” she told Lin. And throughout this meal it was Tommy who had her favor. She partook of his generous supplies; she listened to his romantic inventions, the trails he had discovered, the bears he had slain; and after supper it was with Tommy, and not with Lin, that she went for a little walk.

“Katie was ever a tease,” said Mrs. Taylor of her childhood friend, and Mr. Taylor observed that there was always safety in numbers. “She’ll get used to the ways of this country quicker than our little school-marm,” said he.

Mr. McLean said very little, but read the new-arrived papers. It was only when bedtime dispersed us,