Read Ebook: The Westerners by White Stewart Edward

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Ebook has 1623 lines and 98526 words, and 33 pages

The half-breed, his nervous hands deep in his side-pockets, walked slowly to his horse. Then, in sudden access of rapid motion, he leaped on the animal's back and disappeared.

THE WOMAN

Barely had the dust of the half-breed's sudden departure sifted from the air, when Buckley arose and announced his intention of "taking a little look round." He was gone two hours, and returned looking solemn and earnest. Billy and Alfred were cooking things over a small fire. Buckley spat in a propitiatory manner toward seven small bushes, and conversationally informed the northwest corner of the canvas top on a nearby schooner that he, Jim Buckley, had decided to take along a woman.

Billy and Alfred thereupon spilled the coffee, and could not believe their ears.

"She's goin', if I have to take her by myself," Buckley concluded. And then Alfred and Billy looked up into his face, and saw that he was in earnest.

Alfred turned pink and wriggled the bacon, trying immediately to think how he was going to make the best of this. It did not look easy.

Billy Knapp exploded.

"You go to hell!" was his method of objection.

"She goes," repeated Jim, with even greater quietness of manner. "An' if you-all don' like it, why, jest say so. I quits. You got to have her, if you have me."

"I'd jest like to know why," complained Billy, a little sobered at this threat.

Whereupon Jim found himself utterly at a loss. He had not thought as far as that. He suddenly appreciated the logical weakness of his position; but then, again, intuitively, he realized more subtly its strength. So he said not a word, but arose lightly, and brought unto them the woman herself.

She was a sweet little woman, with deep, trusting blue eyes, and she accompanied Jim without a thought of the opposition she had excited. Jim merely told her she was to meet the other two men. She intended only to show her appreciation of their kindness.

She approached the fire, and assumed her most gracious manner.

"I want to thank you both, as well as Mr. Buckley, for being so good to me," she began, with real feeling. "I know how hard it is for you to take me just now, and I appreciate it more than I can say. I don't know what we would have done. You need not be afraid that we shall be much trouble, for we will all be brave, and not murmur. Your goodness has made me very happy, and I am going to pray to God for you to-night," said the little Puritan with simple reverence. It meant a great deal to her.

Alfred, as usual, was wrigglingly shy. Billy Knapp several times opened his mouth to object, but somehow closed it slowly each time without having objected. The woman saw. She thought it meant that her presence embarrassed them both, so with true tact she wished them a gentle good-night, and went away.

The three looked at one another.

"Well?" asked Jim defiantly.

Billy coughed. He spat in the fire. He exploded. "Damn it! She goes!" he roared with the voice of a bull.

They both looked expectantly toward Alfred. Alfred nodded his head. He was wondering how long it had been since anyone had prayed for him.

"Thar is a man with her," remarked Jim, after a moment's silence. "He's a tenderfoot. And a kid. The kid has blue eyes, too," he added irrelevantly.

"The camp'll be mighty riled," put in Alfred.

"Let's go see the tenderfoot," suggested the practical Billy.

They dropped everything, and went over to the "hotel," where they viewed the woman's husband at a safe distance. He was a slight, bent man, with near-sighted eyes behind thick spectacles, straight, light hair, and a peering, abstracted expression of countenance. He wore a rather shiny frock coat.

"Gee Christmas!" ejaculated Billy, and laughed loudly.

Alfred shook his head.

Jim looked grave.

They returned to camp, and began to discuss the question of ways and means. There would surely be trouble when the affair became known. The inclusion of a tenderfoot from Chicago, on account of his pinto team, had almost resulted in a riot of the rejected. Not one of the three was fatuous enough to imagine for a moment that Jack Snowie, for instance, who had been refused because he wanted to take his wife, would exactly rejoice over the scouts' decision. In fact, Jack had a rather well-developed sense of injustice, and a summary method of showing it. And he was by no means alone.

Jim agreed to transport the three in his schooner, which was one point well settled. Billy suggested at least a dozen absurd methods of keeping the camp in ignorance until the start had actually been made, each one of which was laughed to scorn by the practical Jim.

"She might put on men's clothes," he concluded desperately.

"For the love of God, what for?" inquired Jim. "Stick to sense, Billy. Besides, there's the kid."

Billy tried once more.

"They might meet us 'bout a hundred mile out. He could take Jim's schooner, here, and mosey out nor'-west, and then jest nat'rally pick us up after we gets good and started. That way, the camp thinks he palavers with Jim and us to get a schooner, and maybe they thinks Jim is a damn fool a whole lot, but Jim don't mind that; do you, Jim?"

"No, I don't mind that," said Jim, "but yore scheme's no good."

"Why?"

"He wouldn't get ten mile before somebody'd hold him up and lift his schooner off him. They's a raft of bad men jest layin' fer a chance like that to turn road agent."

Billy turned a slow brick-red, and got up suddenly, overturning the coffee-pot. A dozen strides brought him to the camp of the Tennessee outfit. There he raised his voice to concert pitch.

"We aims to pull out day arter to-morrow," he bellowed. "We also aims to take with us two tenderfeet, a woman, and a kid. Them that has objections can go to the devil."

So saying, he turned abruptly on his heel and returned to his friends. Jim whistled; but Alfred smiled softly, and began to recap the nipples of his old-fashioned Colt's revolvers. Alfred was at that time the best shot with a six-shooter in the middle West.

Seeing this, Billy's frown relaxed into a grin.

"I'm thinkin' that them that does object probably will go to the devil," said he.

In half an hour the news was all over camp. When Micha?l Lafond heard of it, he left his dinner half eaten and went out to talk earnestly to a great variety of people.

THE MAN WHO STOOD "99"

The three scouts would never have been able to explain satisfactorily their reasons for being so easily persuaded, or their obstinacy in adhering to the determination so suddenly made. Prue Welch would have thanked a divine providence for it. The doctor, her husband, took it as quite in the natural course of events.

He was a queer man, the doctor, a pathetic little figure in the world's progress--an outgrowth of it, in a certain way of thinking.

Born of good old New England stock, he spent his studious, hard-working boyhood on a farm. At sixteen he went to the high school, where he was adored by his teachers because he stood ninety-nine in algebra. Inconsequently, but inevitably, this rendered him shy in the presence of girls, and unwarrantably conscious of his hands and feet. So, when he went to college, he spent much time in the library, more in the laboratory, and none at all in the elemental little chaos of a world that can do so much for the wearers of queer clothes and queerer habits of thought. He graduated, a spectacled grind, bowed of shoulder, straight of hair, earnest of thought.

Much reading of abstract speculation had developed in him a reverence for the impractical that amounted almost to obsession. Given a bit of useless information and a chunk of solid wisdom, he would at once bestow his preference on the former, provided, always, it were theoretical enough. He knew the dips of strata from their premonitary surface wiggles to their final plunges into unknown and heated depths. He could deliver to you a cross-section of your pasture lot, streaked like the wind-clouds of early winter; and he could explain it in the most technical language. Nothing rock-ribbed and ancient escaped him in his frequent walks. He saw everything--except, perchance, the beauty that clothes the rock-ribbed and ancient as a delicate aura, invisible to the eye of science--and he labelled what he saw, and ticketed it away in the pigeon-holes of his many-chambered mind, where he could put his finger on it at any given moment in the easiest fashion in the world.

It is very pleasant to know where the Paleozoic has faulted, and how; or why the stratifications of the ice age do not show glacial scorings in certain New England localities. To verify in regard to lamination green volumes of obese proportions, or to recognize the projection into the geological physical world of the thought of a master, this is fine, is noble; this makes to glow the kindly light in spectacled blue eyes.

Adoniram Welch left college with many honors. He returned to his little New England village, and for a space was looked upon as a local celebrity. This is a bad thing for most youths, but Adoniram it affected not at all. It availed only to draw upon him, in sweet contemplation, another pair of blue eyes, womanly, serious blue eyes, under a tangle of curly golden hair.

And so, although Prue Welch was a homely name, and Prue Winterborne a beautiful one, when Adoniram accepted the chair of geology offered him by his alma mater, the owner of the blue eyes went with him, and the new professor's thick spectacles somehow glowed with a kindly warmth, which even fine specimens of the finest fossils had never been able to kindle. He settled down into a little white house, in a little blossomy "yard," under a very big, motherly elm, and gave his days to the earnest mental dissection of the cuticle of the globe. His wife attacked the problem of life on six hundred dollars a year.

Now, from this state of affairs sprang two results. The professor evolved a theory, and Mrs. Professor, although she did not in the least understand what it was all about, came to believe in it, to champion it, to consider it quite the most important affair of the age. The professor thought so, too; and so they were happy and united.

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