It is not the purpose of this story to describe the battle of the Little Big Horn in detail. That has been done many times. There is little about it that is remarkable, excepting always the heroism of the men who fought so desperately. The scene itself must have been impressive, as viewed by the non-combatants of the Indians from the bluffs near at hand—the swirl of brown about the melting patch of blue. After Custer fell, the savages turned eagerly down the valley to attack Reno, leaving the dead as they lay. Lafond did not accompany them. The sight had aroused certain reflections in his breast, and he wished to work the thing out.
After sunset, he went alone and on foot over to the battlefield. The troopers lay as they had fallen—first, Calhoun's company in line, with its officers in place; then Keogh's; finally, on the knoll, the remnant, scattered irregularly among the dead of their enemies. In the cold light their faces shone white and still, even yet instinct with the eagerness of battle; an eagerness which death had transmuted from flesh to marble. Near the centre lay Custer, his long yellow hair framing his face, his hands crossed on his breast. He alone was unmutilated, save by the shot that had taken his life.
The half-breed did not hesitate on the outer circle of the combat, but picked his way among the corpses until he stood on the summit of the little knoll. Then he folded his arms and looked steadily down on the white man's inscrutable face.
Whatever might be Lafond's intellectual or moral deficiencies, lack of perspicacity was not among them. Through the red glory of this apparent victory, the most sweeping ever accomplished by the plains Indians, he saw clearly the imminence of final defeat. The dead man before him lay smiling, and Lafond perceived that he smiled because he saw his people arising to avenge him. The beat of the muster drum calling the avengers to the frontier now sounded in prophecy to his hearing, and the echoes of the last battle shot merged into the clang of an iron civilization, which was destined to push these exulting victors dispassionately aside. It was a striking picture of light and of shadow—this dark, savage figure silhouetted against the softened brightness of the sky, this bright-haired warrior lying bathed in the glorification of a Western night; the white man humiliated, defeated, slain, but seeing with closed eyes that at which he smiled with deep content; the savage, proud in success, triumphant, victor, but perceiving somehow, in the very evidences of his achievement, that which made him knit his brows. How little was this great victory against the background of the people whom it had outraged, and yet how mightily it would stir that people when once it became known!
Michaïl Lafond the savage stood before the body of Custer the fallen, for an hour, moving not one muscle all the time. At the end of the hour Michaïl Lafond the civilized turned slowly away, and walked thoughtfully toward the lodges on the other bank of the Little Big Horn River. The sight of a brave man, who had died as he lived, had reformed Lafond, but whether moralists would have approved of the reformation is to be doubted.
The night ran well along toward morning. The squaws, who had been plundering and mutilating the dead, had long since returned to hear the report of the warriors who had gone to attack Reno. The attack had failed, but the fight had been desperate and the losses on both sides heavy. Six of Custer's command, captured alive, were burned to death. At last, the entire camp, with the exception of the women sentinels, had gone to rest. Toward daybreak, even these became drowsy.
Lafond arose quietly. He gathered a few necessaries into a pack, placed them outside the doorway of the lodge, hesitated a moment, and then returned. His two squaws slept, as usual, one each side of the little girl. Lafond lifted the child carefully in order that he might not awaken her guardians or herself, and wrapped her closely in his blanket. At the doorway he again hesitated. Then, chuckling grimly, he deposited the child by the bundle he had already prepared, and returning, took down from the tent pole the string of scalps which went to show how successful and how savage a warrior he had been. By the light of the stars he selected one of these and laid it carefully between the two sleeping women. It was the scalp of the little girl's mother. Then he rehung the string on the tent pole, and went outside immensely pleased with his bit of humor.
It was his good-by to the wild life. From that time on he dwelt in the towns, where in a very few years his name became known as standing for a shrewdness in management, a keenness in seizing opportunities, and an inflexibility of purpose rarely to be met with among his Anglo-Saxon competitors. His present objective point, however, was the Spotted Tail Agency, which was, from the valley of the Little Big Horn, an affair of five days. Michaïl Lafond did it in four; or at least at the end of the fourth he was within a few miles of the agency buildings. By the evening of the third day, he had transformed both himself and the little girl into an appearance of civilization, reclothing her in the garments she had worn at the time of her capture, and himself in a complete outfit which he had collected piece by piece on that last night with the savages. The change was truly astonishing.
His last camp in the open was pitched within sight of the Spotted Tail reservation. The darkness was almost at hand. He had fed himself and the child, had put the latter to rest under one blanket and was just about to wrap himself in the other, when he became aware of a prairie schooner swaying leisurely across the plains in his direction. He at once sat up again. Every man was to him an object of suspicion.
Not until the wagon had halted within a few feet of him could he distinguish the occupant. Then he perceived that the latter was a gentle-faced, silver-haired individual of mild aspect, dressed decently but strangely, and possessed of introspective blue eyes, which he turned dreamily on Lafond.
"May I camp here?" he inquired deprecatingly.
The half-breed considered.
"I s'pose so," he said without enthusiasm.
The old man descended and uncoupled his two animals. After he had picketed them, he returned, and, extracting from the wagon body the materials for a meal, he proceeded to make himself at home over Lafond's fire.
"I never did like to camp alone," he confided to the latter.
Lafond watched him intently. No further words were exchanged until the stranger had finished his supper and had restored his kit to the wagon. Then the younger man offered the hospitality of the plains.
"Yo' smok'?" he inquired, tendering his tobacco.
"Thank you, no," replied the old man with a tone of breeding which Lafond felt but could not define.
The half-breed could not make out the newcomer, and the conversation failed to enlighten him. That was an epoch when all the world turned to the West; but it was a practical world. There one might in time meet all sorts and conditions of men, from the English lord to the turbulent Fenian; from the New York exquisite fallen on hard times to the "bad man" who had never been east of the Mississippi. One never betrayed surprise at anything one might bring ashore from this flotsam and jetsam of the human race. But all these odds and ends were at least made of tough material, strong enough to run wherever a rapid current might dash them, capable of supporting hard knocks against one another or the obstructions in the way; while this placid old man seemed to Lafond like a crystal vessel, of rare quality, perhaps, but none the less fragile. At the last he asked bluntly, "What do you here?"
The old man fell silent for a minute or two and gazed into the coals of the dying fire.
"My name is Durand," he said at last, with an infinitude of sorrow in the tones of his voice. "I am an entomologist. I am here to get specimens—butterflies; but it is not here that I belong. My place is elsewhere, and that I know. But it is not in my country, and——" he broke off. Lafond looked on curiously, for the dreamy haze had faded from the speaker's eyes. "My friend," Durand went on, "there are times when one cares not to see the face of man except in the bosom of the great nature. I do not know that you understand that. It is with the bitterness of a wrong that such knowledge comes, and with it comes the hate of cities and of the things men do. Some men have had their will of me, and I am come to the wilderness. They called it revenge to drive me here."
"Revenge! But you still live!" repeated Lafond in wonder.
"And is it that you think the taking of life is revenge?" cried Durand, with sudden energy. "They who take their revenge in killing are actually the merciful ones, and they cheat no one but themselves."
"Yes?" asked Lafond, his soul in the question.
The other turned in surprise at his companion's vehemence. He saw a stolid; dark-skinned man gazing impassively into the fire.
"They are fools," went on Durand bitterly, after a moment; "just fools. These others were of more ingenuity; they knew what would hurt, what would avenge them better than the killing."
"I do not understand," said the half-breed, feeling his way slowly, for the fear of damming this flow of confidence. He looked away, for his eye glowed, though his voice was steady. "W'at is it? If one kills, if one takes that life, w'at is worse?"
"Worse, worse?" cried Durand, flinging his hands impotently upward. "A thousand things!" He suddenly became calm, and turned to Lafond with impressive forefinger. "Listen, my friend. Life is a little thing. Anyone can take it who has a gun, or a knife, or even a stone. But the true revenge is in finding out what it is that each man prizes the most, and then taking it from him. And that requires power! power! power!
"Few there are who have not something they prize more than life," he added gloomily. The fire died from his eye. He became once again the timid old butterfly hunter, pushing blindly out into the wilderness, wondering at himself for thus exposing an old wound to a chance passer; and yet perhaps feeling in some dim fashion—so inscrutable are the instincts of these half-childish natures—that in so doing he was following for a moment the lines of greater destinies than his own.
And certainly, long after the dipper had swung below the pole star, Lafond sat staring into the ashes of the fire, just as four days since he had stared into the ashes of a brave and chivalrous life. In his history there were the two crucial hours—one after the greatest battle of the plains; the other after a dozen sentences exchanged with a half-crazy old entomologist. From the potent reflections induced by these one hundred and twenty minutes it resulted that Michaïl Lafond became civilized and a seeker for wealth in the development of the young country. In wealth he saw power; in power the ability to give or take away.
The depriving each man of that which he prizes the most!
While things have gone on, we have conducted our business and returned each evening to our armchairs by the fire. There we have sat at ease and reviewed the world. Events have come to pass. Diplomats have quarrelled gravely over the wording of a document. From our evening papers we have gathered a languid interest in the controversy. Six months later we pick up the paper and find that the dispute is still going on. A German and an Englishman play a game of chess over the cable. This too is reported in our journal, and we follow its progress with attention through the weeks of its duration. Somebody agitates the establishment of a new industry in our native town. It will raise the value of our real estate, so we attend meetings for some months and talk about it, after which the industry is assured. Two years later it is in operation and we congratulate ourselves. Friends of our younger days marry; and before we know it their houses are noisy with the shoutings of children. Leisurely we grow older. Our ideas become fixed, often by the most trivial of circumstances. Africa means tangled forest; India, a jungle; Siberia, broad snow plains; all South America, a dripping stillness of tropical verdure; simply because somewhere, some time, a book or paper, the woodcut of a child's lesson, has so generalized them for us. Against these preconceived notions the events we read about are cast.
In very much this way the constant facts of the West have been to us the Indian and the buffalo. Before our eyes the Master Showman has held insistently this picture. Against the background of the occidental hills or the flat reach of the grass-nodding prairies has posed in solemn gravity the naked warrior, leaning from his pony upon his feather-bedecked lance; or, in the choking dust of its own progression, has lumbered heavily the buffalo myriad. These have seemed permanent—the man and the beast.
Then, before our protesting conservatism, the scene has dissolved in a mist of strange shapes and violent deeds, only to steady a moment later into a new picture. The mounted figure has disappeared, and in his place, against the glow of sunset, the sturdy form of the husbandman grasps the shaft of his plough, gazing past the tired horses, and brooding the slow thoughts of his calling. The last rays catch the sheen of grain—a sea of it—and shimmer lightly until they lose themselves in contrast with the square of ruddy light that marks the windows of a farmhouse.
This is the new West. We rub our eyes and wonder. The diplomats still squabble; the chess game dawdles its languid way; the factory is getting ready to pay its first dividend; our friends' children are about to enter the high school. Everything has developed along the usual lines of growth, and yet this greater change has come about in a night. We turn back the files of our paper, and find that it has occupied in the world's history just fifteen years! In that little space of time the institutions of untold ages have been overthrown and new ones substituted for them.
Deadwood was founded in 1876. In 1890 Sitting Bull and his tribe were utterly destroyed in the mid-winter fight at Wounded Knee. Between those dates, the Dakotas have manufactured at home an article of quite adequate civilization.
To be sure, the product is perhaps a little crude. Although enormous grain fields attest indubitably that the farmer has tamed the soil, equally enormous Indian reservations as indubitably dispute too sweeping an assertion of it. Electric railways may be instanced in some towns. The sprightly six-shooter is in others the quickest road to the longest journey. Hot Springs has a modern hotel and an improved bar; a scant thirty miles north is the unsheriffed log-mining camp where the "bad man" terrorizes in all his glory.
These things are true, but they count for little. The great facts remain, and they are these: a cowboy named Tenney tried to lasso the last buffalo some years since and got himself yanked over several irregular miles of country; the Sioux are herded nicely on their reservations and shoot at nickels with bows and arrows for the amusement of passing tourists. The old frontier conditions have gone. If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.
This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. The folders show a map with the usual blood-red artery of mathematical straightness, passing through myriads of small-type towns, clinging desperately by their noses to the blessings of commerce, and sundry dignified, large-type cities, standing more aloof on their own merits. It all looks imposing enough on paper; but in reality the line does little more than keep itself warm in the narrow valley of its route. On closer inspection the myriads of towns disappear. Minnekahta is a station in the midst of a vast plain, Pringles a sawmill, Stony Point just nothing at all. For the Black Hills are great of extent, and one county of the Dakotas could swallow an eastern State.
All this, from border warfare to comparative order—say from Canute to Elizabeth—not in a thousand years, but in the brief age of a man-child growing out from his kindergarten into his college!
To one who has lived with the country, the process has been an education more thorough than that usually vouchsafed men. It has lacked in the graces and accomplishments, perhaps, but it has brought to the highest pitch the two qualities of self-reliance and of power of insight into men's characters. Whatever blunders a frontiersman may commit when visiting his neighbor cities in the East, they are never the bashful blunders of a countryman. Bunco men can clean him out in a gambling joint, but who ever heard of their selling him a gold brick? He has lived through all this hundreds of years ago, when Wild Bill was killed at Deadwood, or perhaps a century or so later, when, the year following, Alfred took the Caldwells to the Hills and was so nearly rushed by the Sioux. His life has been an epitome. He has met most conditions at one time or another, and is no longer afraid of them.
In a tale dealing with this period of the dissolving view—when in changing from one slide of the lantern to the other the Master Showman has permitted us a little glimpse of hurrying, heroic figures and dazzled us with the clouds of great deeds swiftly done—the teller must adopt one of two methods. He must either generalize, or be content to spend his space on single episodes. In that period, every day was a book. Men counted as nothing experiences filled with an excitement or a pathos or a beauty intense enough to render significant the whole life of a quiet New Englander. Acts were many, and trod close on one another's heels, yet to each act there was a sequence of motive, of desire, of logical effect, as well capable of being sought out and described as though they were not entangled and confused in the rush of the moments. The story teller could find his task in the dissection of these, and the task would be interesting. But to one who is concerned, not with a period, but a life, this is impossible.
The fifteen years saw a marked change in the fortunes of the half-breed known as Michaïl Lafond. During all that time he had led an apparently honest and law-abiding life. No man could say that he had been cheated by him or that he had been favored; but one and all with whom the half-breed had come into contact could speak with admiration and fear of the latter's power of seizing the best of the main chance. He had left the child at the Spotted Tail reservation, giving her name as Molly Lafond and making arrangements for her maintenance. He turned some gold claims to advantage, but abandoned that sort of thing as too uncertain. He participated mildly in the prosperity of several of the mushroom towns of the period, but soon drew out of booms as possessing also too much of the element of luck.
He did the hundreds of other things to which men in a new country can always turn their hands, and in each he made his profit; but in each he found something lacking to the elaborate scheme of power he had builded one evening before a prairie camp fire. Finally he hit upon whisky and dance halls and there he stayed. Abandoning all other enterprises, he gave his individual attention to these two, for he found in them not only the surest and largest monetary returns, but the certain popularity which men accord to those who minister to their pleasures. From Deadwood to Edgemont there gradually grew up a string of saloons bearing the name of Lafond. Some of them were paying, some on the point of paying, some merely lying latent for the boom which Lafond thought to see in the near future. For, as of old, he delighted in discounting the future. He liked long shots in his investments.
Over each of these various establishments their owner was in the habit of placing a man chosen according to the needs of the place, and this man fell more or less under Lafond's personal supervision according as the exigencies of the case seemed to demand it. The half-breed's policy was to keep in actual touch with the most prosperous, and to give personal effort to the most promising. The others could take care of themselves until their time came. So at Mulberry Gulch, where the camp consisted only of a number of grub stakers, he owned a little log cabin which he had never seen. At Deadwood, an old and prosperous camp, he was proprietor of a begilded and bemirrored splendor so well established that it needed only a periodical supervising visit to keep it running smoothly. At Copper Creek was also nothing but a log-cabin saloon; but Copper Creek bade fair to amount to something. Perhaps the spirit of the three kinds was best indicated by the signs over their counters. Mulberry Gulch exhibited a rudely lettered device informing the public, "Pies, Whisky and Pistols for Sail Here." Deadwood thirsty ones learned that they should "Ask for Our 1860 Old Crow; the Finest on Earth." Copper Creek sententiously remarked: "To Trust is Bust."
All this symbolized nothing more or less than the commercial history of a successful man in the West. It meant nothing except that Lafond had the instinct and the cleverness, and so was getting rich. More interesting than the change of his fortune was the change of the man himself.
In the old days he had been crafty in a subtle way; but he had been impulsive, eager, excitable, inclined to jump at the bidding of his intuitions. Now his character seemed to have expanded and modified. A powder explosion had slightly bent his straight figure, halted his gait, and seamed his face with powder marks. To hide these last, he wore a beard. The effect was one of quiet responsibility, and a certain geniality, though a keen observer might have hesitated to call this geniality kindly.
His manner was very quiet. He never reproved his subordinates or addressed a hasty word to anyone, unless he became thoroughly convinced of the culprit's incapacity. Then his anger was at white heat. He could forgive deliberate attempts to evade his commands or conscious efforts at rascality, for with them he could cope; but mistakes he never condoned. An occasional slight inversion of the natural order of words or phrases was all that remained to him of his old accent.
Altogether he was a personage whose public position was unexceptionable. In the West no man has a past, unless that past is personified and carries a rebuking six-shooter. He had wealth, popularity, an acquaintance as wide as the Hills themselves. All that meant power, especially when combined with a shrewd ability to read men's characters.
But of the old order one thing remained—his religion. In the storm and stress of a period hot with events, his life work was conceived and laid out. The lines of its plan had been seared into his soul by crime. He no longer felt the smart, but the cicatrix was there, and he daily bowed to its symbolism, often without a thought of what it really meant. His was like the future of a boy who has entered the army; his line of conduct was all prearranged, and his independence of it never occurred to him. There was no glowering hate in this; only a certain sense of inevitability. In other words, it was his religion.
"COME ACROSS, OR I'LL...""COME ACROSS, OR I'LL..."
"COME ACROSS, OR I'LL...""COME ACROSS, OR I'LL..."
Certain things were to be done. First of all he must become wealthy. Very well; wealthy he became. He must become popular. Agreed; he cultivated his fellow men. He must know how to read character and to hit upon weaknesses. Exactly; he bent his cleverness to the task. There was a larger end to which these three were but the means; but that would come later. Just now life meant quiet, earnest compassing of the three things. Until they were quite within his grasp, he could afford to shut into the background what their ultimate signification should be. Lafond lived tranquilly a perfectly moral existence.
But without his volition the great idea crystallized into some sort of shape. It was always in the background, to be sure; but, after all, a background fills the picture.That which men hold to be most dear! The years had taught him what it was, without his actually demanding it of them. Men hold most dear property, reputation, honor among their fellow men, and the love of women. Women hold most dear virtue and a good name.
About fifteen years after he had quitted the Indians, Lafond suddenly realized that he had gained the power and knew how to use it. Quite dispassionately he looked ahead to the next step.
There were Jim Buckley, Billy Knapp, Alfred and the doctor's family. The latter now included only the girl, whom Lafond had himself caused to be raised to young womanhood. Of the others, Jim Buckley and Alfred had long since left the country—Alfred for Arizona, where he had gone into cow punching; Buckley for Montana and Idaho, in whose mountains he was supposed to be prospecting. These two, then, were out of the way for the present. They would never be difficult to find, and in comparison with Billy they had held quite a secondary place at the time of the half-breed's molten state, before he had cooled into the fixed forms of his conduct of life.
The reason for this throws not a little light on Lafond's character. The feminine streak in him hated Billy Knapp personally, simply because that individual was loud in talk, great in size, and blustering in manner. He could restrain his resentment against the bashful Alfred or the imperturbable Jim; but not that against a man who seemed always, to the high strung half-breed, the potential bully. He would have followed Billy Knapp to China, if necessary.
But it so happened that that individual, after a checkered career, had settled down in the village or camp of Copper Creek, not forty miles from Lafond's headquarters at Rapid. Billy's vicissitudes were those of many of his class. Trained in the liberal give and take policy of the early frontier times, he found himself, on their ebb, stranded high and dry without appropriate means of progression. Billy was used to relying on his plainscraft, his courage, his skill with firearms, and his personal strength. Such qualities as economy, accuracy of estimate, frugality, and patience in the overcoming of abstractions would have been, to his early life, practically useless. He came to be a big-hearted, generous fellow, without the slightest idea of the value of money or the burden of debt. He was apt to be seized by many whims, which he was wont to gratify on the spot.
"Know Billy Knapp?" ruminated an old plainsman once. "Billy Knapp? Seems to me I do; he's the feller that would buy the co't house yonder if he could get trusted for it, ain't he?"
It described him. And as in the old days his prestige had depended on individual prowess of a rather spectacular order, it came about that Billy was just a little fond of strutting. He liked to play the patron, he liked to distribute favors, to treat to drinks, to stand as the representative of great unseen forces, whether of military power in the old days, or of extensive capital in these latter.
For a great many years this vanity had remained ungratified. Billy had not the virtues to succeed in the rising commercialism of the new West. After the last great campaign against the Sioux, he found his usual occupations almost wiped from the slate. The plains were as safe as Illinois. He picked up a livelihood still, mainly by reason of his wonderful gift of persuasion, for Billy could talk black white, if only the particular shade and the discussion were situated in the West. He drove stage, broke horses, bossed cattle outfits, and finally drifted into prospecting.
There his chance came. By a lucky stroke of trading he became possessed of some really good quartz claims and a small sum of ready cash. Two weeks later he was in Chicago. It was his first trip east of the Mississippi, but he knew just what he wanted, and he got it. Three days of Billy's golden oratory led to the purchase by an Eastern syndicate of an option on his group of claims, and the understanding that toward the middle of the following summer a committee of owners should visit the property in order to discuss ways and means of developing the various quartz leads.
The delighted Billy returned to Copper Creek. There at last he found himself the important figure he had always dreamed of being. He posed to himself and to everybody else. The camp gradually filled, and the claims round about were snapped up greedily.
Lafond had easily kept himself informed of all this. It was sufficiently notorious. Now when he came to a realization that the next move in his game of life was due and that he should put to its appointed use the power he had so long amassed, he decided to study Billy Knapp in order to see which of the four—property, reputation, honor or love—that volatile individual held most dear. He could make a shrewd guess, but he wanted to be on the ground. And as he thought about it, there came to him a great wave of enthusiasm and eagerness over this game he was about to play; a delight in the magnitude of the stakes and the power of the instruments employed, an intellectual glorying quite different and separated from his personal feelings in the matter, or that religious obligation of it which lay at the back of his soul.
The first thing Michaïl Lafond did in pursuance of his new determination was to visit the Spotted Tail reservation in order to reclaim the girl henceforth to be known as Molly Lafond.
No one knows why he had followed out his first impulse to preserve her life and bring her up. After a time, however, she came to symbolize, in his half-mystical perception of such things, the first cause of all that had happened. Personally he liked her because she was such a free, independent, fiery little creature. He liked to talk to her and be ordered about by her. He liked also to watch the graceful, decisive movements of her lithe young body and the sparkle of her hair. She looked a good deal like her mother.
He even listened with what would appear to be close sympathy to her complaints of the agent's wife and the life to be led at a reservation. She and the agent's wife never did get on well. The latter was a stern, commonplace, fat woman without sympathy. And the life! There were no men, nothing but Indians. All you could do was to read all day and all the evening, or ride straight out in any given direction that led nowhere. Michaïl Lafond, in his semi-annual visits, was inclined to agree with her and even to pity her a little. His personal likings were on the surface, and had nothing whatever to do with the deeps of his nature.
Just as the surest way of satisfying his thirst for revenge upon Billy Knapp was to deprive the man of his reputation and his property, so he had determined to make of Molly a dance-hall girl, like Colorado Jenny. It would deprive her of virtue and good name, the things a woman holds most dear. He also felt keenly, in his instinctive dramatic sense, the fitness of throwing this fine-fibred daughter of a nobler race to the hungry passions, of watching her reversion little by little to the brute type; but a formulation of it never came to the surface of his mind. And yet, I must repeat, there was in one sense nothing personal in this. Lafond felt no aversion to the girl herself. He took no pleasure in the thought of cursing her or beating her, as might a man seeking a hotter revenge. It was just cold, malignant, calculating hate of something in opposition to him, which she symbolized.
This intellectual form of hatred is a peculiar characteristic of half-breeds.
When Lafond suggested to Molly that she should leave the agency and take up her residence with him in Copper Creek, she assented very gladly, for she felt her present life insupportable. The day before, she and Mrs. Sweeney, the agent's wife, had come into violent collision.
"Where was you yesterday afternoon?" Mrs. Sweeney had asked, as Molly came into the kitchen.
It was before breakfast, so Molly shrugged an impatient shoulder.
"Riding," she replied briefly.
"Riding where?" insisted Mrs. Sweeney with heavy persistency.
"Over west."
"See anybody?"
"No."
"Sure?"
"Yes."
The old lady wound her hands in her apron and fixed her charge severely with her eye.
"Strange how blind some folks is," she went on after a moment. "Now, I was indoors washing an' I see that young sergeant over there scoutin' 'round."
The words were simple; the tone was not.
"What do you mean?" cried Molly sharply. "Do you mean to say I was riding with him?"
Mrs. Sweeney wagged her head with aggravating sagacity.
"Nobody needn't put on no shoe that don't fit 'em," she said, and sighed with the air of a martyr who has discovered all and is disappointed.
Molly knew that her question had been justified by the woman's insinuation, that she had put on no shoe, and that if there were a martyr in the room it was not the agent's wife. Thereupon she said things excitedly. The agent's wife assumed an injured placidity, than which there is nothing more aggravating. Finally Molly flounced out of the room.
The agent's wife, being utterly in the wrong, sulked after the manner of women for the rest of the day, and had to be sued for forgiveness.
And yet next day, when Molly and the half-breed drove away, Mrs. Sweeney remembered that the girl had been with them nearly fifteen years, and wept; and the agent booted a trespassing Indian from his office with unwonted energy.
Molly, on the other hand, was as happy as a lark. Every man knows the thrill of anticipation when he stows the gun case under the seat and induces the pointer to curl up in the straw, just as every woman knows the delight of an entrance to a room which her presence brightens more than any other's. Molly experienced the same thrill, the same delight. She had the instincts of the coquette; the confidence of inexperience; the false ideals of a knowledge drawn from books and speculation; and her heart had not yet awakened her conscience. She looked forward to her own power over men, for she was intelligent, and realized the extent both of her charms and of her knowledge. The latter was not inextensive, for in her reading she had enjoyed the overwhelming advantage of heredity. Heredity is a little scheme by which, to a great extent, one recognizes knowledge, instead of acquiring it.
They drove along for some distance without speaking. The girl was too happy and the half-breed too preoccupied to talk.
"Mike," she commanded suddenly after a time, "quit that smoking. I don't like it."
The half-breed hesitated, narrowing his brow, and looking straight ahead. Then he silently knocked the ashes from his pipe and slipped it into his pocket. Molly's eyes flashed with triumphant amusement. The game had begun. After a time the sun sank into the dark hills, and the great shadow of Harney crept out of them.
The wagon rattled down a short incline to the broad, shallow bed of the Cheyenne. Molly turned it aside into a little grass plat.
"We'll camp here to-night," she announced.
"There is better water two mile further, on the trail, on Fall River," said Lafond, without moving.
"I said we'd camp here!" repeated the girl sharply.
The half-breed descended and began to unharness the horses.
The camp which was to be the scene of Lafond's operations and of the girl's anticipated triumphs, lay between Ragged Top and Tom Custer. It consisted of a double row of log cabins situated in the V of the deep ravine. The men generally ate in the long dining-room of the hotel, worked at prospecting in the hills, and spent their evenings in the centrally situated Little Nugget saloon, the property of Michaïl Lafond.
The night of the half-breed's arrival the usual crowd was carrying on the usual discussions on the usual subjects.
One fresh from the East entering the building would have been struck first with the strangeness of the room. It was long and low, and on three sides dark. Against the fourth wall was stretched tightly a white cotton sheet, imitating plaster, in front of which stood the bar. The bar was polished, narrow, with a foot rest in front and two towels hanging from metal clasps just under the projecting eaves of it. It had been brought in sections, by wagon, at considerable expense. Some three feet behind the bar, stretched a shelf of the same height, towel covered, on which stood four bottles in front of a little mirror. The shelf was piled symmetrically with glasses of all shapes—tumblers, ponies, fine-stemmed wineglasses—arranged in pyramids and squares. They glittered in the glare of the lamps, and the indirect light from the white sheet. A dim pink reflection was given back by the mirror—dim and pink because the glass was draped with pink mosquito bar. Overhead hung the sign which read, "To Trust is Bust."
Beneath the reflector of the largest lamp lounged the barkeeper reading a paper. He had spread the paper on the bar, and, having crooked his elbows out at wide angles around its margin, was bending his head of straw-colored hair close over the print. He was dressed in white as to the upper part of his body. Occasionally he read aloud in a monotone from the paper. At other times his lips moved slowly, shaping the invisible words as they took form in his sluggish brain.
"The latest creations in ties," he read, "are described by our buyer as being natty effects in the narrow plaids."
Outside this glare of light from the white-dressed man, and the glittering pyramids and squares and glasses, and the dim pink reflections, and the white sheet imitating plaster, the rest of the room seemed dark by contrast. Near the door and the small front window, glowed a red-hot stove. Along the walls were ranged chairs. In the chairs sat many men smoking. Above the men a few cheap pictures were tacked against the rough walls. One of them represented an abnormally slim and smooth race horse against a background of vivid green. Another showed an equally green landscape, throwing into relief a group of red-coated men on spider-legged horses, pursuing a huddle of posing white hounds. One of the spider-legged horses had fallen, and the rider, being projected horizontally forward, was suspended rigidly in mid air, like Mohammed's coffin, and with as much apparent prospect of coming to earth. Still another presented the sight of an exceedingly naked woman descending from an exceedingly flat and marble couch. One foot was on the floor, and the other knee rested still on the flat and marble couch. It was labelled "Surprised."
Three large lamps with reflectors illuminated this part of the room. Then came a strip of comparative dusk; then another hanging-lamp disclosed a smooth-topped table, on which was a faro lay-out.
The men in the chairs smoked industriously and spoke seldom. The air was thick with the smoke of strong tobacco, such as "Hand Made" and "Lucky Strike." Very near the stove sprawled old Mizzou, low-foreheaded, white-bearded, talking always of women and the merits of grass-widows and school-ma'ams.
"They is nothin' like 'em!" he asserted with ever-fresh emphasis of tone. "Back in Chillicothe, whar th' hogs an' gals is co'n-fed, they is shore bustin'! When one of them critters comes 'round, I feels jest like raisin' hell and puttin' a chunk under it!"
"Th'hellyou do!" snorted Cheyenne Harry, scowling his handsome brows, "th'hellyou do! Give us a rest with yore everlasting females." He pulled his hat over his eyes, and drew savagely on his pipe, his right hand over the bowl, his left clasped tight under his armpit.
Billy Knapp was telling about his mine.
"On that thar Buffalo lode," he said impressively, "I got a lead twenty foot wide.Twenty foot, I say! And it holds out; it holds out a lot. It's great. I says to them Chicago sharps, I says, 'You won't find sech a lead as thet thar nowhere else in the Hills,' and by gravy I believe that's right! I do for shore! An' I says to them, I says, 'It only takes a little sinkin', an' a little five stamp mill, t' put her on a paying basis to wunst. Ain't no manner ofdoubtof it! I tell you it's a chance! that's what it is!'"
He breathed hard with the enthusiasm into which his words lifted him. He vociferated, telling over and over about his twenty foot lead. He held his great hand suspended in the air through whole sentences, bringing it down with a mighty slap as he came to his conclusions. The men about him listened unmoved. They believed what he said, but they had got over being excited at it. Jack Graham, his hat on his knees, twisted his little moustache and smiled amusedly. As the scout appealed to him from time to time, he nodded silent assent. Over beyond the bar of dusk, two men were staking small sums at faro. The keen-eyed dealer was monotonously calling the cards. "All ready; all down; hands up; jack win; queen lose!" he drawled.
In the corner nearest the door, a youth of eighteen huddled on the floor asleep. Here and there wandered an active wire-haired dog, bigger than a fox terrier and of different color, but with the terrier's bright eyes and alert movements. It was a strange beast, brown and black on the head, black on the body, badger gray on the legs, with sharp white teeth, over which bristled gray whiskers of the stiffness of a hair brush. As it passed the various men, it eyed them closely, ready to wag its stump of a tail in friendship, or to circle warily in avoidance of a kick. It was a self-reliant dog, a dog used to taking care of itself. Men called it Peter, without abbreviation.
Peter was possessed of the spirit of restlessness. He smelled everything, first with dainty sniffs, then with long, deep inhalations. Thus he came to know the inner nature of table legs and chairs, of men's boots and of dark corners. Between investigations he would stand in front of the bar and stretch, sticking first one hind leg, then the other, at stiff angles behind him, and then, fore feet far in front, pressing the chest of his long body nearly to the floor.
These things irritated Cheyenne Harry. He attempted to command Peter harshly, but Peter paid no attention.
"Off his feed," observed Dave Williams to young Barker in an undertone.
"Yeah," agreed the latter.
About eight o'clock Blair and the stage drew in and drew out again, after warming at the red-hot stove a little cross man who cursed the whole West—climate, scenery, and all—with a depth and heartiness that left these loyal Westerners gasping. Billy Knapp had attempted to reply, but had not held his own in the interchange.
After the stranger had gone out, the pristine calm broke into a froth of recrimination. The room shouted. It blamed Billy. It cursed the stranger. It thought of a dozen things that might have been said or done, as is the fashion of rooms. Billy vociferated against the tourist.
"Little two by four prospec' hole!" he cried. "He may be all right whar he comes from, which don't rank high anyhow, but when he comes out yar makin' any sech fool breaks as that, he don't assay a cent a ton fo' sense!"
"Oh, hell," growled Cheyenne Harry. "You-all make me tired!"
"Shake yore grouch, Harry," they advised good-humoredly. Cheyenne Harry was popular, fearless and a good shot. He had a little the reputation, in some quarters, of being a "bad man."
Billy went on with his tirade. The men shook their heads. "You wasn't ace high, Billy," said they. Billy insisted, getting more and more excited. They looked down from the calm of superior wisdom. Their anger vanished in Billy's. He was angry for the whole crowd.
"Moroney ought to have been here," they observed regretfully. "He's th' boy! He'd have trimmed th' little cuss good. Can't get ahead of Moroney nohow."
Billy denied that Moroney could have done better than he, Billy, did. The men championed Moroney's cause with warmth. A new discussion arose out of the old. With a prodigious clatter every man drew up his chair until a circle was formed. Archibald Mudge, alias Frosty, the barkeeper, leaned his head on his fists across the bar, trying to hear. The two men at the faro game cashed in and quit. The faro dealer, imperturbable, indifferent, cat-like, shuffled his cards. Around the outside of the word-hurling circle Peter wandered, sniffing at chairs and the boots of men.
Then on a sudden Molly and the half-breed arrived, to the vast astonishment of Copper Creek, which had no women and expected none.
The newcomers appeared in the doorway, apparently from nowhere, pausing a moment before entering the saloon. Molly leaned a hand on each jamb, and calmly surveyed the room. Lafond blinked his eyes at the light, imperturbably awaiting the girl's good pleasure. After a moment she stepped inside, and again looked the apartment over, slowly, searchingly. She saw in that long sweeping glance everything there was to be seen—the men and their various attitudes, the bar, the glasses, the mirror draped with mosquito bar, the white cotton sheet, the lamps, the faro table, even the three sporting pictures on the wall.
In that moment she made up her mind what to do. Her heart was beating fast and her color was high. She experienced all the sensations of a man going into battle, but not a timid man, or one not sure. Rather, she felt a new access of force, a new confidence, a new imperious power that would bend conditions to suit itself. She knew in a flash just how to tame these untamed men.
Then she stepped swiftly forward and marched up to the bar, against which she leaned the broad of her back, running her arms along the rail on either side and resting one heel against the foot rest. She tossed her curls back, and again looked coolly at the silent men.
An observer might have found it interesting to note how the different inmates of the room took this unexpected appearance of the First Woman. Billy Knapp stared with round, gloating eyes, in which a hundred possibilities awoke. Cheyenne Harry, aroused from his slouching attitude, thrust his pipe into his pocket and furtively smoothed his moustache. Graham looked the newcomer over with cool inquiring scrutiny. Frosty began to polish a glass, finding relief from his embarrassment in accustomed and commonplace occupation. The faro dealer shuffled his cards, imperturbable, indifferent, cat-like. Peter sat upright on his haunches, sniffing daintily, first in the girl's direction, then in the man's, watching, bright-eyed and alert. Peter was the only being in the place who noticed the girl's companion. The latter, in turn, inspected the room deliberately, with a crafty calculation.
"Well," said Molly Lafond, with slow scorn, "how long are you going to sit there before you take care of a lady's horses?"
Then they suddenly became aware of the half-breed and of the white-covered schooner, dimly visible through the door. They began to regain control of their wits. The arrested currents of life moved once more. Who was this girl? Why should she command? Above all, why did not this little black hairy man take care of his own horses? Men helped themselves in the West.
They stirred uneasily, but no one responded. The girl's eyes flashed.
"Move!" she commanded, stretching her arm with a sudden and regal gesture toward the door.
The three men nearest jumped up and hurried out. The girl stood for an instant, her arm still outstretched; then she dropped it to her side with a rippling laugh.
"You boys need someone to make you stand 'round, that's all," she said. "Next time I speak, yourustle!"
She placed her hands behind her on the bar, and jumped lightly upward, perching on one corner and swinging her little feet to and fro. She sat in the focus of one of the larger lamps, seeming to radiate with a strange hard brilliancy. Her eyes sparkled and her curly golden hair escaped from under her old peaked cap in a bewildering tangle of twisted and glittering fire. She went on easily, without embarrassment, chattering in so assured a manner that the men were silenced by the very shyness that should have been hers.
"We got here a little late, boys," she said, conversationally, "on account of a hot box, but here we are—me and Mike. You don't know us though, do you? Well, this is Mike Lafond." She looked toward the half-breed, and a sudden inspiration lit her eye. "Black Mike!" she cried, clapping her hands. "That's it; Black Mike." She paused in happy contemplation of the appropriateness of this nickname. It seemed to fit; and it stuck forever after. "He owns this joint here, he says, and I reckon he says right," she went on after a pause. "He ain't pretty, but I'll tend to that for the family." She perked her head sideways, proving the point beyond contest.
Peter, who had been watching her, his own head in the same attentive pose, took this as a signal. He barked sharply. "Shut up, dog!" commanded Molly. She seized a pretzel from a tin pan at her side and threw it at Peter. Peter considered the pretzel as a contribution, so subsided.
"Well, boys, I'm glad to be here. I'm going to stay. You might look more pleased." She cast her eye along the group of men, each in a tense attitude of uneasiness. Graham's nonchalant and lounging self-poise struck her. "Aren't you glad?" she asked, pointing her finger at him. His quizzical smile only deepened. Failing to confuse him, as she intended, Molly hastily abandoned him. "You ought to be," she asserted, skilfully turning the remark in the direction of Cheyenne Harry. "Come here and let's look at you. I want to know your name. You ain't bashful, are you?"
Harry put on an appearance of ease and sauntered over to the bar. He would show the boys that he was used to society. He grinned at her pleasantly.
"Can't no one look purty nex' to you!" he said boldly.
"Well, well!" cried Molly, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. "That's the first pleasant word I've had, and after I've told you I was coming here to live, too!"
Billy Knapp bounced up, eager to retrieve his reputation.
"Th' camp bids you welcome, ma'am, an' is proud and pleased that such a beauteous member of her lovely sect is come amongst us!" he orated.
The men moved their chairs slightly. One or two cleared their throats. The constraint was beginning to break.
"Thank you," replied Molly prettily. "This is an occasion. Mike here asks you all to have a drink. Don't you, Mike?"
The half-breed nodded. He was watching the progress of affairs keenly.
Frosty set out glasses, into which the men poured whiskey from small black bottles. Harry gave his own to the girl, and then procured another for himself. Mike sat by the stove. Peter approached tentatively, but decided to remain at a wary distance. At the other end of the room the faro dealer shuffled his cards, indifferent, imperturbable, cat-like; a strange man, without friends, implacable and just. The men who had gone to stable the horses entered and received their glasses. The girl raised hers high in the air.
"Now," she cried, "here's hoping we'll all be good friends!"
The men drank their whiskey. They were slowly developing a certain enthusiasm over the new girl. Constraint was gone. They lounged easily against the bar. Two stood out near the middle of the floor, where they could see better, their arms across each other's shoulders. Molly touched her lips to her glass, and handed it to Billy, who stood on the other side of her. "Drink it for me," she whispered confidentially in his ear.
"It'll make me drunk," he said in mock objection. She looked incredulous. "You have touched it with yore lips," he explained sentimentally, and drank to cover his confusion. He felt elated. He had made a pretty speech, too.
The girl laughed and put her hand caressingly on his shoulder. At either knee was one of these great men; about were many others, all looking at her with admiration, waiting for her words. This was triumph! This was power! And then she looked up and found Graham's calm gray eyes fixed on her in quizzical amusement. She turned away impatiently and began to talk.
Never was such airy persiflage heard in a mining camp before. The prospectors were dissolved in a continual grin, exploded in a perpetual guffaw. Now they understood the charm of woman's conversation, which Moroney had so often extolled. They spared a thought to wish that Moroney were here to take part in this. "Moroney can do such elegant horsing," they said. What a pair this would be! How she glanced from one member to the other of the group with her witty speeches! She rapped each man's knuckles hard, to the delight of all the rest, and yet the fillip left no pain, but only a pleasant glow. They laughed consumedly.
And then, after a little, she asked them if they could sing; and without waiting for a reply, she struck up a song of her own in a high, sweet voice. With a gripping of the heart and a catching of the breath, they recognized the air. Not one man there had ever heard its words in a woman's voice before. It was "Sandy Land," the universal, the endless, the beloved, the song that brings back to every Westerner visions of other times when he has sung it, and other places—the night herd, the camp fire, the trail. With the chorus there came a roar as every man present sang out the heart that was in him. The girl was surrounded in an instant. This was the moment of which she had dreamed. She half closed her eyes, and laughed with the gurgling over-note of a triumphant child.
Cheyenne Harry straightened from his lounging position at the girl's left, slipped his arm about her waist, and kissed her full upon the lips.
The room suddenly became very still. Peter could be heard scratching his neck with stiffened hind leg behind the stove. Graham half started from his seat, but sank back as he saw the girl's face. Mike never stirred or missed a puff on his short pipe.
The girl paled a little, and, putting her hands behind her, slid carefully off the edge of the bar to the floor. Then she walked with quick firm steps to the offender and slapped him vigorously, first on one side of the head, then on the other. He raised his elbows to defend his ears, whereupon she reached swiftly forward under his arm and slipped his pistol from its open holster; after which she retreated slowly backward, holding both hands behind her. Cheyenne Harry turned red and white, and looked about him helplessly.
"You ain't big enough to have a gun!" she said, with scorn. "When you get man enough to tell me you're sorry, I'll give it back."
She crossed the room toward the street, dangling the pistol on one finger by the trigger guard.
"I reckon I'll go now," she said simply. She passed through the door to the canvas-covered schooner outside.
A breathless but momentary silence was broken by Cheyenne Harry.
"I know it, boys, I know it," he protested. "Don't say a word. Frosty, trot out the nose paint."
Billy was fuming.
"Hellof a way to do!" he muttered. "Nicehospitableway to welkim a lady!Lovelyidee she gets of this camp!"
Harry turned on him slowly. "What's it to yuh?" he asked malevolently. "What's it to yuh, eh? I want to know! Who letyouin this, anyway?"
He thrust his head forward at Billy.
"For the love of Peter the Hermit, shut up, you fellows!" cried Jack Graham. "Don't make ever-lasting fools of yourselves. That girl can take care of herself without any of your help, Billy; and it served you dead right, Harry, and you know it."
"That's right, Billy," said several.
Harry growled sulkily in his glass. "Ain't I knowin' it?" he objected. "Ain't I payin' fer this drink because I know it? But I ain't goin' t' have any ranikahoo ijit like Billy Knapp rubbin' it in."
"Billy didn't mean to rub it in," said Jack Graham, "so shake hands and let up."
The threatened quarrel was averted, and the men drank on Harry. Then Mike set up the drinks to the furtherance of their friendly relations. They talked to Mike at length, inquiring his plans, approving his sense in choosing Copper Creek as a residence, congratulating him on his daughter, commending her style. Mike hoped they would make the Little Nugget their evening headquarters. They replied with enthusiasm that they would. Mike made himself agreeable in a quiet way, without saying much. Everybody was "stuck" on him—everybody but Harry. Harry sulked over Billy's insults. His sullen mood had returned. Finally, late in the evening, he pushed his chair back abruptly and went up to the bar.
"I'm goin'," he announced. "Give me that bottle."
He poured himself a stiff drink, which he absorbed at a toss of the wrist, and turned away.
"Mr. Mortimer," called Frosty, "did you pay for this?"
"Chalk it down to me," called Harry, without looking back.
Frosty caught the snake eye of his proprietor fixed upon him. He twisted his feet in terror beneath the bar. "It's agin the rules," he called at last, weakly, just as Harry reached the door.
The latter turned in heavy surprise. Then he walked deliberately back to the bar, on which he leaned his elbows.
"Look yere," he said truculently, "ain't I good fer that?"
"Why, yes, I reckon so," cried poor Frosty in an agony. "But it's agin the rules."
"Rules, rules!" sneered Harry. "Since when air you runnin' this joint on rules? Ain't you chalked drinks up to me before? Ain't you? Answer me that. Ain't you?"
"But it's different now," objected Mudge.
"Different, is it? Well, you chalk that drink up to me as I tell yuh, or go plumb to th' devil for the pay. And don't you bother me no more, or I'll have to be harsh to yuh!" Harry loved to bully, and he was working off his irritation. The men in the room stood silent. Harry liked an audience. He went on: "I'll shoot up yore old rat joint yere till you ain't got glass enough left to mend your wall eye, you white-headed little varmint."
Lafond had come softly to the end of the bar. "Naw," he interrupted quietly, "you are not shooting up anything."
Harry turned slowly to him and spread his legs apart. "And did you address me, sir?" he begged with mock politeness. "Would you be so p'lite as to repeat yore remarks?"
"You are not shooting up anything," reiterated Mike, "and it is you who will settle for this drink. Behold the sign which you have read!"
Harry turned to the room wide eyed. "Did you hear the nerve of it?" he inquired. "Tellin' me what I'll do! You damn little greaser," he cried in sudden fury, "I'll show you whether I'm shootin' up anythin'!"
He reached for his gun, remembered on the instant that his holster was empty, and sprang for Lafond. The half-breed calmly lifted a whiskey glass, near which he had taken the precaution to stand, and slopped its contents full in the other's eyes. Harry, blinded, struck against the corner of the bar. Mike slipped to one side and produced his revolver.
Several sprang between the two men. The room was in an uproar. Peter barked, clamant, frantic. Everybody tried to talk at once. In the background the faro dealer ceased shuffling his cards, and began imperturbably, indifferently, to pack together his layout. He had made little that night. After a moment he went out, without a glance toward the excited group.
The men were forcing the blinded and raving Harry toward the door. Mike leaned over the bar, watching with bright eyes, his arms folded across his chest and the pistol barrel peeping over the crook of one elbow.
When they had all gone out, most of them shouting good-natured farewells, he turned savagely on the pale-faced Mudge. The native cruelty of the man blazed forth. He scored the barkeeper with a tongue that lashed like a whip, vituperating, crushing with the weight of his sarcasm, frightening with the vividness of his threats. Mudge shrank back into the corner of the space behind the bar, spreading his arms along either side, watching the half-breed with wide-open fascinated eyes, as one would watch a dangerous wild beast.
After a little the storm passed. Lafond asked in surly tones where the bunk was. Frosty showed him his own, behind the saloon, in a little shack of hewn timbers. Without a word Lafond turned in, dressed as he was, and closed his eyes. For a time he ruminated slowly. He had seen his man, and already he could put his finger on one weak point in Billy's personality—love of the spectacular, of bombast. A blow to his vanity would hurt. The half-breed had also taken fair measure of most of the other men in the room. He knew how to ingratiate himself, and his bold move in the case of Cheyenne Harry had had that object directly in view. He did not as yet see clearly just what form his blow to Billy's vanity was to take, but that would come with time. Lafond's calling and his position in the new town gave him unlimited opportunities for observation, and he was in no hurry. After waiting fifteen years, another twelvemonth would not matter.
"Go slow," said Black Mike to himself.
His doze was abruptly broken by Frosty's scared voice asking a question. The barkeeper's thick wits could not take in the situation. He was frightened almost out of his senses, and incapable of consecutive thought.
"And where shall I sleep, sir?" he asked stupidly in a timid little voice.
Mike turned over explosively. "You can sleep in hell for all of me!" he shouted angrily. "Get out!"
Frosty returned to the main room of the saloon. There he spread a horse blanket, redolent of the stables, on the floor behind the stove. After a time Peter lay down beside him. The barkeeper, frightened, stupid, vaguely nervous, in his slow nerveless way, gathered the strange intelligent dog to him, and the two slept.
The men took Harry to the creek, where he washed out his eyes. They had many comments to make, to none of which Harry vouchsafed a reply. But his sulkiness was gone. Suddenly he paused for a moment in his ablutions, and laughed.
"Damned if they ain't a pair!" he asserted. "And that gal——"
"She shore beats grass-widders and school-ma'ams!" said Old Mizzou.