Kitabı oku: «Bill Nye and Boomerang. Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems», sayfa 13
THE CLUB-FOOTED LOVER OF PIUTE PASS
A TALE OF LOVE AND COLD PIZEN
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Many years ago, when Wyoming was new and infested with the bear, the bunko-steerer, the buffalo and the bold, bad man, a little circumstance occurred there which is worthy of notice; and as it has never appeared in the newspapers, I give it as near as my memory will serve me in the narrative.
When Wyoming was a wilderness, and before the civilizing influence of the legislature and Pattee's lottery had toned down the rough outlines of the young commonwealth, there lived over on Horse Creek a ranchman whom we will call Henry Ward Beecher, as a kind of nom de corral as it were.
Henry Ward Beecher was a bachelor, and lived by himself. He did not know the loving influences and gentle yearnfulness of woman's society. His life was a howling wilderness, a wide waste of loneliness and wretchedness, because he was unmated.
Henry Ward Beecher did not know the pleasure of rising in the night and tangling his feet up in a corset lying on the floor, or of brushing his bald head in the morning with a hair brush so full of long, silky hairs that they would wind around his nose and tickle his bald head till he would wish he was dead. He was alone amid the solitude of the mountains, with no companion but a low grade, refractory mule and a flea-bitten, ecru-colored, mongrel dog, with one eye knocked out.
Henry thought, as year succeeded year, that he would make a change, and throw more joy into his humble life m some way or another, but he was making money, and kept busy all the time, so that he neglected it.
Finally one day in spring there came to the Ranche de Henry Ward Beecher a man from Ohio, named Obejoyful Jenkins. He had come west hoping to get a situation as president of a bank on the strength of being an Ohio man; but most all the banks seemed to have all the presidents they needed, so that Obejoyful concluded to compromise the matter, and herd sheep at twenty-five dollars per month and board. He struck Henry Ward Beecher and made a trade with him.
CHAPTER THE TWICE
The two men soon became quite friendly, owing to their isolated condition, and told each other all their family secrets. Henry told Obejoyful how his grandfather was hung; and Obejoyful told Henry how he loved a girl in Ohio, named Oleander McTodd, and how he was going to send for her, and marry her as soon as he could raise the scads to bring her west.
Time flew on, and at last Obejoyful had saved up the collateral necessary to send for his soul's idol. He wrote to her, enclosing a post office money order for the amount necessary to pay emigrant fare to the railroad terminus, and also to buy lignum vito cookies, and fire-proof pie, at the lunch counters along the road.
About the day on which Oleander McTodd would naturally arrive at the ranche, Obejoyful was sent up on Stinking Water to round up a bunch of sheep that had escaped, and bring them back to the fold.
Then Henry Ward Beecher shaved' himself, put warm tallow on his boots, swept out the cabin for the first time in nineteen years, and waited for events to shape themselves.
CHAPTER THREE TIMES
The orb of day rode slowly adown the crimson west. The snow-clad mountains stood leaning against the purple sky. They had done so on several occasions before. A woman, on an ambling palfrey of the cayuse denomination, rode down the mountain path to the cabin, and alighted. Henry Ward Beecher came to the door with some hesitation and no suspenders.
"Is't Obejoyful, me truant love, an inmate of this rural retreat, said a young, sweet voice, that sounded like the melody of a shingle mill.
"Nay, by my halidome he is't not. Gentle lady, on yester morn I did give him the grand bounce, and now he hath joined a hold-up outfit on the overland stage route. It pains me to tell to you this sad, sad news, for I wot ye art the damsel who erst was mashed on Obejoyful; but I cannot tell a lie; he is unworthy of you, and a cross-eyed, spavined snipe of the desert, and don't you forget it."
Then Oleander lifted up her voice to an elevation of about 14,000 feet above the level of the sea, and she wape with an exceeding great weep.
CHAPTER FOUR TIMES
Henry Ward Beeeher let her weep till her surcharged orbs had ceased to give down, and then he brought out some valley tan that he had in the house for medicinal purposes and comforted her.
Then they got acquainted.
They sat in the gloaming, and Henry Ward Beecher turned the gas partly off, and held the hand of Oleander, and told her that Obejoyful had been a humorist on an Ohio paper, and otherwise destroyed the prospects of the absent lover in the eyes of Miss McTodd.
They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they were solid pards from that moment. Shortly afterward they rode away to the nearest justice of the peace, about 223 miles off, and were married.
Then they went home.
Obejoyful was there. He was also heeled; but H. W. B. got the drop on him. Then Obejoyful seemed filled with disgust, and he seemed oppressed and filled with nameless forebodings. He seemed to lose faith in mankind, also to some extent in womankind. He seemed to think that love wasn't exactly what it was represented to him by the agent. It didn't seem to be full weight, and there wasn't a prize in each and every package, as he had been led to suppose.
He then presented a bill to Henry Ward Beecher for $49.53, freight charges on Oleander McTodd; but H. W. B. swore with a great, blood-curdling, three-cornered oath that he would not pay it.
That night Obejoyful Jenkins procured some poison, and stole away to a quiet place, and wrote a note to tell his friends, when they found his body, why he had taken his own life. Then he commended his soul to Providence, poured out a glass of whisky, thought he would try it without the poison first. The draught revived him. He changed his mind and put the poison in Henry Ward Beecher's whisky, stole H. W. B.'s narrow-gauge mule Boomerang, and lit out for the North Park.
This is a true story. If the gentle reader has doubts about it I will produce the mule Boomerang, which is now in my possession and in a good state of preservation.
Hereafter, in order to save time and annoyance to my readers, true stories over my signature will be marked with a star, thus, *.
THE AUTOMATIC LIAR
Laramie City, August 23. – He came in gently but firmly, and felt in his pocket for something.
Finally he found what looked a little like an egg-beater and some like a new kind of speed indicator.
"I want to show you," he said kindly, "an office-dial to hang on your door, so that when you are away your clients will know where you are, and when you will return. For instance, by turning the thumb-screw, the dial will show:
"At court,
"At dinner,
"At supper,
"At bank,
"At post-office, etc., etc., etc., with the time you will return. There are sixty-four combinations which cover all cases of this kind necessary for the man of business, and it is no doubt the greatest achievement of mechanical ingenuity. Price, $ 1.50."
"No," said Mr. Biteoffmorethanhecouldchaw, "there are twenty-seven reasons why it would not be advisable for me to purchase your automatic bulletin. Firstly, I have but one client, and he can not read. He would only come and look at the indicator and kick it all to pieces and swear and go away. Secondly, your machine is incomplete, anyway. The inventor has signally failed to meet the popular want. It would only be an aggravation to the average attorney.
"I can think of a hundred things that ought to be added to a truthful indicator. Supposing that I have gone to the circus, or to a meeting of the vestry, or suppose I am drunk, or at a reunion of the Y. M. C. A., or out to eat a clove with a member of the bar, or at a camp meeting, or putting up the clothes-line at home? Or, going still further, suppose I am wringing out the clothes, or setting bread, or taking a bath, or wrestling with the delirium tremens, or toning down a rebellious corn, or putting Paris green on my squash bugs, or inspecting microscopically the homoeopathic fragment of ice that the kind-hearted ice man has prescribed for me?
"Or, going still further into detail, supposing that I am dead and cannot state with any degree of accuracy where I am or when I shall return, do you suppose that I would herald a glittering $1.50 lie to the world by saying that I was at the barber shop and would be back at 10:30?
"Do you think I would pay $1.50 for a machine to vicariously proclaim to the broad universe that I was at the bank, when I have no business with the bank?
"Do you suppose that I would advertise that I was at the post office when I was at the beer garden, or assert that I was at the court house, when, as a matter of fact, I was at that moment having a preparation of lemon-peel and other chemicals arranged for myself and another invalid in a cool retreat down town?
"No, sir! I spurn you and your cast-iron prevaricator, I promised my dying mother, who afterwards recovered, that I would never lie by machinery.
"If I cannot lie enough to keep up with the growing demand, I will resign like a man, and not call to my aid a cheap Jim Crow, hand-me-down-liar, costing $1.50 only.
"Always do right, and then you will never be put to shame.
"If you wish, you can leave the hall door ajar as you go out the main entrance."
Exeunt advance agent at upper left hand entrance, orchestra playing something soft and yielding.
SOME POSTOFFICE FIENDS
The official count shows that only two and one-half per cent, of those who go to the postoffice transact their business and then go away. The other ninety-seven and one-half per cent, do various things to cheer up the postmaster and make him earn his money and wish that he had died when he was teething. They also make it exceedingly interesting for the other two and one-half per cent. When I go to the postoffice there is always one man who meets me at the door and pours out a large rippling laugh into my face, flavored with old beer and the fragrances of a royal Havana cabbage-leaf cigar that he is sucking. If he cannot be present himself he is vicariously on deck.
He asks me if my circus was a financial success, and how my custard pie plants are doing, and then fills the sultry air with another gurgling laugh preserved in alcohol.
I like to smell a hearty laugh laden with second-hand whisky. It revives me and intoxicates me. Still I am trying not to become a helpless slave to the appetite for strong drink in this form. There are other forms of intemperance that are more seductive than this one.
There is also a boy who never had any mail, and whose relatives never had any mail, and they couldn't read it if they did, and if some one read it to them they couldn't answer it. He is always there, too.
When he sees me he hails me with a glad smile of recognition, and comes up to me and stands on my toes and is just as sociable and artless and trusting and alive with childish glee and incurable cussedness as he can be. He stirs me up with his elbows, and crawls through between my legs until the mail is open, and then he wedges himself in front of my box so that I can't get the key into it.
Some day when the janitor sweeps out the postoffice he will find a short suspender and a lock of brindle hair and a handful of large freckles, and he will wonder what it means.
It will be what I am going to leave of that boy for the coroner to operate on.
Then there are two boys who come to the box delivery to settle the difficulties that arise during the day. They fight long and hard, but a permanent peace is never declared. It is only temporary, and the next day the old feud is ripe again, and they fight it all over once more.
There is also an amusing party who cheerfully stands up against the boxes and reads his letters, and laughs when he finds something facetious, or swears when the letter don't suit him. He also announces to the bystanders who each letter is from, and seems to think the great throbbing world is standing with bated breath quivering with anxiety to know whether his sister in Arkansas has successfully acquired triplets this year or only twins.
This, however, is an error, for the great, throbbing world, with characteristic selfishness, don't care a brass-mounted continental one way or the other. One day this man got a letter with a mourning envelope, and I heaved a sigh of relief, for, thought I, he will now go away and be alone with his great grief. But he did not. He stood up manfully and controlled his emotions through it all; and when he got through he broke into the old silvery laugh.
It seems that his brother in Oregon had run out of yellow envelopes, and had filled the one with the black border unusually full of convulsive mirth.
What a world of bitter disappointment this is anyhow!
Then there is the woman who playfully stands at the general delivery window, and gleefully sticks her fangs out into the subsequent week, and skittishly chides the clerk because he doesn't get her a letter, and he good naturedly tells her as he has done daily for seven years, that he will write her one to-morrow.
Then she reluctantly goes home to get rested so that she can come again and stand there the next day.
Then comes the literary cuss, who takes a weekly paper from Vermont with a patent inside to it. He reads it with the purest unselfishness to me, and points out the fresh, new-laid jokes that one always finds in the enterprising paper with the patent digestion.
He also explains the jokes to me, so that I need not grope along through life in hopeless ignorance of what is going on all about me.
There is a woman, too, who comes to the window and lavishly buys a three-cent stamp, and runs out her tongue, and hangs it over the stamp clerk's shoulder, and lays the stamp back against the glottis and moistens it, and has to run her skinny finger down her turkey gobbler neck to rescue it, and then she pastes it on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, and asks the clerk to be sure and see that it goes. She then thoughtfully tells him who it is to go to, and gives a short biography of the sendee.
There can be no doubt that some women are more capable of doing certain kinds of business than men are. All classes of business requiring careful and minute explanations and concise and exhaustive directions can be better attended to by this class of women.
They enter joyfully upon the task of shedding collateral information in a way that would appall a man, and when they confide in you, you know that they are not keeping anything back. You almost wish sometimes that they would keep back a little of it and not rob themselvss.
Still, perhaps it is better that this class of women is not trusted with any great amount of business, for life is so brief, so evanescent, and so transitory.
It is but a step from the cradle to the grave anyway, and if a man stands on one leg an hour, and then on the other an hour, listening to extensive information every time he sells a stamp, he will die with his ambitions unfruitioned.
AGRICULTURE AT AN ALTITUDE OF 7500 FEET
I herewith acknowledge the receipt of two bags of cane-seed from the Agricultural Department.
Mr. Le Duc is always thinking of me and evidently knew that I was yearning for some cane-seed. It will grow luxuriantly here on the spinal column of the American continent where winter lingers in the lap of spring till after the Fourth of July.
William says that this breed of sugar-cane "originated in Minnesota, and is claimed to have been the result of accidental hybridization."
I shall not allow anything of this kind myself if I can by the most tireless watchfulness avoid it. Accidental hybridization is what is demoralizing the sugar-cane of the whole country.
I shall plant this seed in drills two feet apart, mulching with rich top-dressing of retired gum boots and dead cats. I will then wait till the plant has germinated and appears above the surface, when I shall remove the boots and dead cats and rub the plants with a Turkish towel to promote a healthy circulation.
Then next fall while others who have sneered at me and called me a horny-handed buckwheater from the rural districts, are running up heavy bills for groceries, I will go out into my molasses orchard and pick a milk pan full of granulated sugar from my trees, or shell out enough maple sugar for breakfast at a slight cost and with the blessed consciousness that I did it all myself.
William is going to send me some more seeds that he thinks will do well in this tropical climate. If he could send me something that would be more hardy, like the early Swedish lemon-squeezer, or the mammoth custard-pie plant, or the Northern Spy cucumber tree, my reports to the department would be more cheerful than they are, but where plants have to wear their heavy California underclothes all through August they get discouraged and prefer to bloom in the sweet fields of Eden.
Last year I tried the hot-bed process, but it was not a signal success. This summer I shall use the hot-bed as an ice cream freezer. It wanted to act in that capacity last summer, but I had a freezer that did very well, so I foolishly used the hot-bed to assist the plants, although I know of several days in midsummer when my cabbage-plants had to get out of that hot-bed and run up and down the garden walk to keep their feet from freezing.
THE GENTLE YOUTH FROM LEADVILLE
In addition to the other attractions about the depot, the old museum of curiosities from the Rocky Mountains has been re-opened. I like to go down and listen to the remarks of the overland passenger relative to these articles. There are two stuffed coyotes chained to the door, one on each side, and it amuses me to see a solicitous parent nearly yank his little son to pieces for going so near these ferocious animals. The coyotes look very life-like, and show their teeth a good deal, but it breaks a man all up when he finds that their digestive apparatus has been replaced with sawdust and plaster of Paris.
After a coyote gets to padding himself out with baled hay and cotton so as to look plump, he loses his elasticity of spirits, and we cease to respect him. Sometimes a tourist asks if these coyotes are prairie dogs.
A few days ago a man from Michigan, who has been here two weeks and wears a large buckskin patch where it will do the most good, and who is very bitter in his remarks about "tenderfeet," was standing at the depot, when a young man, evidently from a theological seminary, came along from the train whistling, "What a friend we have in Jesus." He walked up to the Michigan man, who began to look fierce, and timidly asked if he would tell him all about the coyote.
The Michigan man, who never had seen a live coyote in his life, volunteered to tell him some of the finest decorated lies, with Venetian blinds and other trimmings to them, while the young man stood there in open-mouthed wonder, with daylight visible between his legs as high as the fifth rib. I never saw such a picture of rapt attention in my life. As he became more interested, the Michigan man warmed up to his work and lied to this guileless youth till the perspiration rolled down his face. As the train started out, the delegate to the Young Men's Christian Association asked the Michigan man for his address. "I want the address of some good earnest liar," he said, "one who can lie by the day, or by the job, and endure the strain. I want a man to enter the field for the championship of America. Any communication you may wish to make will reach me at Leadville, Colorado. I have been in the Rocky Mountains ever since I was three years old, and have lived for weeks with no other diet but coyote on toast and raw Michigan man." He waved his hand at the M. man, and said: "If I don't see you again, hello!" and he was gone.
How many such little episodes we experience on our journey to the tomb!
A SNIDE JOURNALIST
Recent occurrences here have seemed to absolutely demand that something be said relative to newspaper-men.
During my residence here I have been brought face to face with more fraud journalists than ever before, and I am forced to lift up my voice against it. I have met the ordinary-tramp who is pleased and happy if he be allowed to eat cold-grub and sleep beneath the twinkling stars, but the newspaper-tramp is meaner, more self assumed and has brighter prospects for perdition than all the rest. He stands out ahead of the rank and file of tramps as a kind of Major-General tramp, fearless and self reliant.
He feels the nobility of the profession of journalism, and indeed it is a calling of which its followers may well be proud, but the snide representative of the press is too proud. He puts on too many frills.
Perhaps I am too easily picked up in this manner, but I cannot help sympathizing with deserving newspaper men who lack many of the comforts of life. I have been there. I know what it is to battle with a cold world and wrestle with hunger. But now in the midst of prosperity, my heart goes out for these vagrants in such a way that just as I begin to get affluent, I find some subject for my charity, and I have to begin over again.
On Monday last a young man with a hopeful light in his eye, alighted from the eastern-bound train, and going into the Thornburg House, registered his name, at least we will play that it was his name, for no one else has since called in to claim it.
We will call him Brown as a matter of convenience. His front name, as I afterward learned, was Ward. I might say that, in putting this report together, another Ward has been heard from, but I leave that for the docile reader to do as he or she may see fit.
Mr. Brown then proceeded to get acquainted with the people of Laramie and be sociable. He was not so reticent as some prominent newspaper men are, but seemed to be the rollicking, jovial kind. He said that he was the travelling correspondent of the Salt Lake Tribune and also represented the Louisville Courier-Journal.
I wondered at the time what in the name of all that was handsome, the Courier-Journal wanted to pay a man and send him to the front for, with Laramie City as his objective point. Bye-and-bye he crossed my path and made himself known. Said he knew me by reputation, and then I began to get alarmed. I was afraid he was a detective. But he wasn't. I drew him out on the subject of Harry Watterson. He knew blank. Knew him well. Had slept with him. He and Hank had been drunk together several times.
Then I felt proud. He was an intimate friend of a great man, and sitting there talking with an unsophisticated youth like me just as naturally as life. It sounds like a book. I asked him up to my office, and made him sit in my best chair – the one with the four good legs – while I took the foundered one. I told him to make himself perfectly free with the luxuriant furniture of the office, and invited him to spit on the floor whenever it came handy. I told him that I knew great men didn't want to feel hampered while chewing tobacco, and that I wanted my guests to feel at ease.
He then took his knife, cut off a piece of tobacco, about the size of a paper weight, threw it back till it struck the gable-end of his mouth with a hollow thud, and proceeded to unroll the most gorgeous panorama of falsehoods that I ever listened to. Casually, while putting the fresco work on my floor, he took out a letter from Watterson, and showed it to me. Watterson writes about the same kind of a copper-plate hand that I do.
I wanted to take the letter and make a plaster cast of it, but Mr. Brown said Hank wouldn't like it. The letter went on in a free and easy way to joke Brown about looking too often on the maddening bowl, and then asked him to be a correspondent for the C. J.
The next day I came down town thinking about how easy it was for any one, by a straightforward, honest course, to rise in the world, and get acquainted with prominent men. Bye and bye I met the Sheriff. He asked me if I didn't want to go up to the jail and take a last look at my journalistic friend. I went up. Brown lay there in an easy position on an old blanket, in one of the cells.
The surroundings seemed to be in perfect harmony with the general appearance of Mr. Brown. He had taken off the large satin arrangement which served partly as a necktie, and partly to throw the public off its guard in relation to his shirt. The shirt was there, slightly disfigured, but still in the ring. It was the same shirt that he had started out in life with. He had outgrown it, and it looked feeble, but it was evidently determined to stay by Mr. Brown.
I looked at him and then broke into tears. Large $2.00 sobs convulsed my frame. I told him that he had basely imposed upon me, and led me to believe that he was a Republican, and now he had removed the mask as it were, and I could see that he was a Democrat. With these stone walls and iron grates, and that soiled shirt, I could no longer doubt.
I left him, resolving that hereafter I would not be betrayed by appearances. He will drift away into the mighty, surging mass of humanity, and we shall forget it. Perhaps, when the Governor of Maine holds a mass meeting and re-union at Augusta, he will be there. But he will drop out of my horizon like the memory of a red-headed girl, and I shall go on my way until some other newspaper man with a letter from Whitelaw Reid, or George Washington, or Noah, or some other prominent man, comes along, and then I shall, no doubt, open up to his view the same untold wealth of confidence and generous trust.
Those who are looking anxiously every mail for a copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal or the Salt Lake Tribune, containing a long letter about their town, will be disappointed. They will never come. Through the long visita of years and down through the mellow softened atmosphere of the Sweet Bye and Bye I hear the low, sad refrain, and it is refraining, "Never More." Instead of the merry prattle of Mr. Brown amid the loud echo of his expectorations as they fall with a startling crash upon the marble floor of my office, I only hear the rattle of the cast iron "come-alongs" and the tearful "Never More."
