IIITHE LEATHER-STORE
Hisfirst night in Los Angeles was like summer, though it was February. In the core of the old town he found the Plaza, and strolled through the Mexican crowd. His heart started a queer beat as the band struck up ‘La Paloma,’ his lips forming the words of the first line or two:
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,Valgame Dios—’
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,Valgame Dios—’
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,Valgame Dios—’
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios—’
A wonder took him as to what Los Angeles used to be like when there were empty hills all around and how ‘La Paloma’ would have sounded in those days. ‘Carved out of starlight,’ he whispered.
The next day in the window of an old leather-store near the Plaza, he saw a cardboard sign reading: ‘Young man wanted.’ Elbert didn’t suppose they would take on one without experience, but the impulse grew upon him to try his luck. The thought of going East so soon hadn’t become any easier, nor did he consider with relish the idea of asking his father for money to stay away with. To his surprise he was given a trial in the leather-shop, and gradually he becamepleased with the arrangement, for the store proved to have quality and background. Real cattlemen used to swear by it, he found out, and occasionally, even now, an old-timer would come in and talk with the proprietor. They would chat of the days when cantinas still welcomed the passer-by around the corner on North Main Street, little games going on upstairs. In those days the Mexicans hanging around the Plaza still had bits of color in their sashes and sombreros.
There was a gray wooden horse in the leather-store, fragile but full height, on which Elbert was accustomed to show bridles, saddles, blankets, and pack-gear, talking to customers a lot wiser than he felt, for he still resented life’s conspiracy which had kept him from sitting a live horse where he belonged.
In the evening he would go out and lounge in the Plaza under the dusty palms and sycamores. It was better than Heaslep’s in a way—the Mexicans had a friendly feel, and sometimes when the band played, he could imagine himself down in the City of Mexico, or in the heart of Sonora at least. One day during the dinner hour, when Elbert was alone, a calm-eyed, oldish man pushed ajar the door of the leather-store, looked slowly around and remarked in mildest tone:
‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do, is to saddle their pony.’
The voice was so gentle and leisurely, Elbert was warmed and interested at once. He was quite sure that nothing he could say about saddles would astonish such a customer, so he approached with a smile merely. The stranger had come to a halt before as fine a bit of workmanship in plain leather as the store contained.
‘It ain’t hem-stitched,’ he began reflectively. ‘Thirty-eight pounds.’
‘Would you like to see it on the model?’ Elbert inquired.
The other didn’t seem to hear. ‘Now, what would you expect me to lay out for a little tan kack like this?’ he asked.
‘Hundred-seventy-five,’ Elbert said throatily. ‘Would you like to look at it on the model?’
‘No, it might confuse me a whole lot to see it on your dappled gray. Anyway, I can see Buddy Pitcairn made her from here. I’m shore partial about him monogram when I fork leather.’
A check was written with the remark: ‘You can ship her to me, care of Mort Cotton’s ranch at San Forenso, Arizona, and take plenty of time to look up this paper, young man. I never feel sure that the bank will like it, when I write out money for myself.’
The easy, rapid writing hinted an intelligence in curious contrast to the quaint speech and big loose hands, blackened and rounded to tool handles.The name on the check was Robert Leadley, and that was but the first of several calls which this customer made at the leather-store, ostensibly for further purchases, but always lingering to talk with Elbert. The latter had never known any one so easy to be with, and one late afternoon at closing time, when Mr. Leadley, with embarrassment, invited him to go out to supper, Elbert had been on the point of asking the same thing. They stopped for a soft drink at an old brown rail in Main Street.
‘I ’member when this was a great sportin’ place,’ Mr. Leadley said. ‘I used to come in here from the mountains with gold in a little chamois sack. Had a California claim in those days. I’m back in Arizona now, not a great ways from where I began. When the time came for me to go out this last trip, I felt like coming over to L.A., just like I used to from these mountains. Why, I was in this very place one night when a man was shot. Just yonder by that plate of hard-boiled eggs, he went down, callin’ on a woman.’
‘I didn’t quite understand what you mean by “going out,”’ said Elbert, not wanting to miss anything.
‘When you’ve got a claim in the mountains and you figure on leaving, you designates it “going out.”’
‘Is it a gold mine?’
‘Well, by stretchin’ a trifle you might call her a gold mine—just a little claim by myself. Southeast a ways and high up. You go to San Forenso first. You can look back into California and down into Sonora from my diggin’s.’
‘Do you have horses up at the mine?’ Elbert asked, thinking of the Pitcairn stock-saddle.
The quaint laugh sounded. ‘Just a little vanity, young man. They do say Bob Leadley would have his saddle-hoss, if he was runnin’ a canal boat. I can’t seem to do proper without a bit of hoss-flesh handy, though Mamie sure costs me no end money and trouble, not bein’ the sort of hoss as can pick her livin’ off the north side o’ trees—’
He paused, as if pleased to recall the mare to mind in minutest detail.
‘Mamie’s father was the stake-hoss, Ganopol—one of the first ten runners, they do say, and bone and blood to go with it, if not a whole lot of hoss-sense essential. Mamie’s mother was just a cow hoss ... just a cow hoss, with a little clock workin’ between her eyes—that was Clara. Thirteen years, I had her, and we got real domesticated together, you might say. Mamie’s a five-year-old now—just about growed up—don’t resemble neither parent none, bein’ a jewel box by herself, full of her own little knick-knacks.... Yep, bred right out of the purple royalty on one hand and the black sage on the other, but approachin’my idea of saddle-hoss, plumb satisfyin’—
‘An’ p’raps it ain’t such a chore, as I’m makin’ out, to get hay and grain up to the mine,’ Mr. Leadley added, ‘because once or twice a year, Mort Cotton sends his mule train up from San Forenso to pack down my ore. Takes just about a week’s work, three times a year, for a dozen or fourteen mules; and ’stead of the train pilin’ back uptrail with empty riggin’s, I stock up the cabin and the corral. Makes it easy, but a whole lot of times, I don’t know where to put all I got—’
‘But what do you do with your mare when you leave the mine?’ Elbert asked.
‘Leave her with Mort Cotton at his ranch in San Forenso. All hands have got to know her at Mort’s.’
After supper they strolled back to the Plaza. The band began playing ‘La Paloma.’ Elbert started to speak, but Mr. Leadley’s hand tightened on his knee for silence.
‘I’ve got reason to remember that piece,’ he said, when it was over. ‘The Mexicans never get tired of it. It’s like the Virgin speaking to them. Do you know what that word means?’
‘Dove,’ said Elbert.
‘Correct. You must have studied the language?’
‘Only the last few weeks. I’d like to knowmore. It would come handy in the leather-store. You know a lot about Mexico, don’t you?’
‘Not so much as I used to believe, young man, but I ain’t averse to these people. I used to think I was, but as I look back now, I ’casionally catch myself wishin’ I’d treated them as well as they have treated me. Just a curious feelin’ at times—’
It didn’t seem to be a deep matter to Mr. Leadley, his eyes were so pleasant.
‘They’re peaceful to be with, like cattle,’ he went on. ‘I lived on a farm back East when I was a boy, and my father and mother used to fight a whole lot—at supper, especially. I ’member often goin’ out in the barnyard, and how peaceful it was, after the supper table. I don’t mean Mexicans are cattle, you understand, only that they loll around and ruminate peaceful, like cattle.’
Elbert waited for more, and what came had a world of feeling in it that he didn’t understand. It seemed the night was chillier, but the gentle tone hadn’t changed.
‘We used to call ’em greasers and shoot ’em up a lot, not thinkin’ much about it. We used to hang ’em for hoss-thieves, when a sheriff wanted to make a showin’. Thought little more of ’em than a Chinee, only diff’rent. Young punchers and miners—we thought we was the people—’
The voice stopped so suddenly Elbert felt queer.
‘You didn’t tell me, why you have reason to remember “La Paloma,”’ he said, looking across at the red lights of ‘Estella Teatro.’
‘I’ve got a boy about your size, I figure, somewhere south in Sonora—’
The words fanned to life the romantic pictures of Elbert’s private world—‘somewhere south in Sonora—’
‘He used to like that song—used to whistle and sing it at all times. A dozen years since I saw him. He was under fifteen then—that would make him about your age now. You’re pretty good size, but I think he’d show up a speck taller by this time.’
‘What’s your son doing down there?’
‘Well, I only hear from him occasionally, through the papers. Must be excitin’ work, having to do with the rurales, mostly. Some calls it politics in Mexico.... Maybe they’ll play that again—if we sit down for a spell.’
And now Elbert was hearing the story of a boy, called Bart—no mother—life in a mining camp on the Rio Brava, Arizona—a sorry sort of helpless attachment in the father.
‘The very night Bart came to town, before even the old Mexican nurse let me in, I knew my job was cut out,’ Mr. Leadley said.
Sentences like these stood out in the midst of detail:
‘I had everything mapped out for him, but he wouldn’t follow the map. That broke me, because I mapped so hard and set so much store.... Bit by bit Bart showed me he’d have his way—taking his whippings easy, looking white, but ready to laugh, and going his own way just the same afterward. I never seemed able to do the right thing by him; couldn’t let him alone; cared too much, I guess—the kind of care that hurts. Why, I’d get lonesome for him when he was right in the room, and flare up over things I’d never dream of getting sore about in any one else. Altogether, what I didn’t know in them days was so much, young man, that I’ve been fillin’ in ever since, and ain’t through yet.’