The Cow Puncher - Robert J. C. Stead (best reads .TXT) 📗

don't mind the money," said Dave, cheerfully. "I don't want it back. In fact, I figure it was pretty well spent."

"Lots more where it came from, eh?" laughed the other. "You're from the ranches, I see, and I suppose the price of a steer or two doesn't worry you a hair's worth."

"From is right," Dave replied. "I'm from them, an' I'm not goin' back. As for money—well, I spent my last nickle for breakfast, so I've got to line up a job before noon."

The stranger extended his hand. "Shake," he said. "I like you. You're no squealer, anyway. My name is Conward. Yours?"

Dave told his name, and shook hands. Conward offered his cigarette box, and the two smoked for a few moments in silence.

"What kind of a job do you want?" Conward asked at length.

"Any kind that pays a wage," said Dave. "If I don't like it I'll chuck it as soon as I can afford t' be partic'lar, but just now I've got to get a grub-stake."

"I know the fellow that runs an employment agency down here," Conward answered. "Let's go down. Perhaps I can put you in right."

Conward spoke to the manager of the employment agency and introduced Dave.

"Nothing very choice on tap to-day," said the employment man. "You can handle horses, I suppose?"

"I guess I can," said Dave. "Some."

"I can place you delivering coal. Thirty dollars a month, and you board with the boss."

"I'll take it," said Dave.

The boss proved to be one Thomas Metford. He owned half a dozen teams and was engaged in the cartage business, specializing on coal. He was a man of big frame, big head, and a vocabulary appropriate to the purposes to which he applied it. Among his other possessions were a wife, numerous children, and a house and barn, in which he boarded his beasts of burden, including in the term his horses, his men, and his wife, in the order of their valuation. The children were a by-product, valueless until such time as they also would be able to work.

Dave's duties were simple enough. He had to drive a wagon to a coal yard, where a very superior young man, with a collar, would express surprise that he had been so long gone, and tell him to back in under chute number so-and-so. It appeared to be always a matter of great distress to this young man that Dave did not know which chute to back under until he was told. Having backed into position, a door was opened. There was a fiction that the coal in the bin should then run into the wagon box, but, as Dave at once discovered, this was merely a fiction. Aside from a few accommodating lumps near the door the coal had to be shovelled. When the box was judged to be full the wagon was driven on to the scales. If the load were too heavy some of it had to be thrown off, while the young man with the collar passed remarks appropriate to the occasion. If the load were too light less distress was experienced. Then Dave had to drive to an address that was given him, shovel the coal down a chute located in the most inaccessible position the premises afforded, and return to the coal yard, where the young man with the collar would facetiously inquire whether Mrs. Blank had invited him in to afternoon tea, or if he had been waiting for a change in the weather.

Conditions in the boarding-house had the value of distracting Dave's attention from the unpleasantness of his work. Mrs. Metford, handicapped by her numerous offspring, embittered by the regular recurrence of her contributions to the State, and disheartened by drudgery and overwork, had long ago ceased to place any store on personal appearance or even cleanliness. As Dave watched her slovenly shuffle to and from the kitchen, preceded and pursued by young Metfords in all degrees of childish innocence, his mind flew back to dim recollections of his own mother, and the quiet, noiseless order of their home. Even in the latter days, when he and his father had been anything but model housekeepers, they had never known such squalor as this.

Metford's attitude toward his wife fluctuated from course humour to brutality, but there was left in the woman no spark of spirit to resist. With neither tongue nor eye did she make any response, and her shufflings back and forth were neither hastened nor delayed by the pleasure of her lord. Her bearing was that of one who has suffered until the senses are numb, who has drunk the last dregs of bitterness, for whom no possible change of condition can be worse. Her indifference was tragic.

The sleeping accommodations had the virtue of simplicity. The Metford tribe was housed in a lean-to which supported one wall of the kitchen, and the eight boarders slept upstairs over the main part of the house. The room was not large, but it had four corners, and in each corner stood a cheap iron bed with baggy springs and musty mattress. The ceiling, none too high at any part, sloped at the walls almost to the edges of the beds. One table and wash basin had to serve for the eight lodgers; those who were impatient for their turn might omit their ablutions altogether or perform them in the horse-trough at the barn.

All Metford's employees, with the exception of Dave, were foreigners, more or less inconversant with the English language. Somewhat to his surprise, they maintained an attitude of superiority toward him, carrying on their conversations in a strange tongue, and allowing him little part in their common life. Dave's spirit, which had always been accustomed to receive and be received on a basis of absolute equality, rebelled violently against the intangible wall of exclusion which his fellow workers built about themselves, and as they had shown no desire for his company, he retaliated by showing still less for theirs, with the result that he found himself very much alone and apart from the life of his new surroundings.

His work and supper were over by seven o'clock each evening, and now was the opportunity for him to begin the schooling for which he had left the ranch. But he developed a sudden disinclination to make the start; he was tired in the evening, and he found it much more to his liking to stroll down town, smoke cigarettes on the street corners, or engage in an occasional game of pool. In this way the weeks went by, and when his month with Metford was up he had neglected to find another position, so he continued where he was. He was being gradually and unconsciously submerged in an inertia which, however much it might hate its present surroundings, had not the spirit to seek a more favourable environment.

So the fall and winter drifted along; Dave had made few acquaintances and no friends, if we except Conward, whom he frequently met in the pool rooms, and for whom he had developed a sort of attachment. His first underlying sense of distrust had been lulled by closer acquaintanceship; Conward's mild manner and quiet, seductive voice invited friendship, and it became a customary thing for the two to play for small stakes, which Dave won as often as he lost.

One Saturday evening as Dave was on the way to their accustomed resort he fell in with Conward on the street. "Hello, old man," said Conward, cheerily, "I was just looking for you. Got two tickets for the show to-night. Some swell dames in the chorus. Come along. There'll be doings."

There were two theatres in the town, one of which played to the better class residents. In it anything of a risque nature had to be presented with certain trimmings which allowed it to be classified as "art," but in the other house no such restrictions existed. It was to the latter that Conward led. Dave had been there before, in the cheap upper gallery, but Conward's tickets admitted to the best seats in the house. Dave had adopted town ways to the point where he changed his clothes and put on a white collar Saturday evenings, and he found himself amid the gay rustle and perfumes of the orchestra floor with a very pleasant sense of being somebody among other somebodies. The orchestra played a swinging air, to which his foot kept tap, and presently the curtain went up and the show was on with a rush of girls and colour.

It was an entirely new experience. From the upper gallery the actors and actresses always seemed more or less impersonal and abstract, but here they were living, palpitating human beings, almost within hand reach, certainly within eye reach, as Dave presently discovered. There was a trooping of girls about the stage, with singing and rippling laughter and sweet, clear voices; then a sudden change of formation flung a line of girls right across behind the footlights, where they tripped merrily through motions of mingled grace and acrobatics. Dave found himself regarding the young woman immediately before him; all in white she was, with some scintillating material that sparkled in the glare of the spot-light; then suddenly she was in orange, and pink, and purple, and mauve, and back again in white. And although she performed the various steps with smiling abandon, there was in her dress and manner a modesty which fascinated the boy with a subtlety which a more reckless appearance would have at once defeated.

And then Dave looked in her face. It was a pretty face, notwithstanding its grease-paint, and it smiled right into his eyes. His heart thumped between his shoulders as though it would drive all the air from his lungs. She smiled at him—for him! Now they were away again; there were gyrations about the stage, he almost lost her in the maze; a young man in fine clothes rushed in, and was apparently being mobbed by the girls, and said some lines in a rapid voice which Dave's ear had not been trained to catch; and then he danced about with one of them—with the very one—with his one! My, how nimble she was! He wondered if she knew the young man very well. They seemed very friendly. But he supposed she had to do that anyway; it was part of her job; it was all in the play. Certainly the young man was very clever, but he didn't like his looks. Certainly he could dance very well. "I could make him dance different to the tune of a six-shooter," Dave said to himself, and then flushed a little. That was silly. The young man was paid to do this, too. Still it looked like a very good job. It looked like a very much better job than shovelling coal for Metford.

Then there was a sudden break-away in the dance, and the girl disappeared behind a forest, and the mobbing of the young man recommenced. Dave supposed she had gone to rest; dancing like that must be hard on the wind. He found little to interest him now in what was going on on the stage. It seemed rather foolish. They were just capering around and being foolish. They were a lot of second-raters. And the young man—it was plain he didn't care a whit for them; he was just doing it because he had to. There was a vacant seat in front. He wished the girl behind the forest would come down and rest there. Then she could see the show herself. Then she could see—

But there was a whirr from the forest, and the girl re-appeared, this time all in red, but not nearly so much in red as she had previously been in white. My, what a quick change she had made! And how her skirt stood out like a rim when she whirled herself! And the young man left all the rest and went to dance with her