The Open Boat and Other Stories
of his former splendour was his pride, or his vanity, which was one
thing which need not have remained. He killed the foreman of the ranch
over an inconsequent matter as to which of them was a liar, and the
midnight train carried him eastward. He became a brakeman on the Union
Pacific, and really gained high honours in the hobo war that for many
years has devastated the beautiful railroads of our country. A creature
of ill-fortune himself, he practised all the ordinary cruelties upon
these other creatures of ill-fortune. He was of so fierce a mien that
tramps usually surrendered at once whatever coin or tobacco they had
in their possession; and if afterward he kicked them from the train,
it was only because this was a recognized treachery of the war upon
the hoboes. In a famous battle fought in Nebraska in 1879, he would
have achieved a lasting distinction if it had not been for a deserter
from the United States army. He was at the head of a heroic and
sweeping charge, which really broke the power of the hoboes in that
country for three months; he had already worsted four tramps with
his own coupling-stick, when a stone thrown by the ex-third baseman
of F Troop's nine laid him flat on the prairie, and later enforced
a stay in the hospital in Omaha. After his recovery he engaged with
other railroads, and shuffled cars in countless yards. An order to
strike came upon him in Michigan, and afterward the vengeance of the
railroad pursued him until he assumed a name. This mask is like the
darkness in which the burglar chooses to move. It destroys many of the
healthy fears. It is a small thing, but it eats that which we call our
conscience. The conductor of No. 419 stood in the caboose within two
feet of Bill's nose, and called him a liar. Bill requested him to use
a milder term. He had not bored the foreman of Tin Can Ranch with any
such request, but had killed him with expedition. The conductor seemed
to insist, and so Bill let the matter drop.
He became the bouncer of a saloon on the Bowery in New York. Here most
of his fights were as successful as had been his brushes with the
hoboes in the West. He gained the complete admiration of the four clean
bar-tenders who stood behind the great and glittering bar. He was an
honoured man. He nearly killed Bad Hennessy, who, as a matter of fact,
had more reputation than ability, and his fame moved up the Bowery and
down the Bowery.
But let a man adopt fighting as his business, and the thought grows
constantly within him that it is his business to fight. These phrases
became mixed in Bill's mind precisely as they are here mixed; and let
a man get this idea in his mind, and defeat begins to move toward him
over the unknown ways of circumstances. One summer night three sailors
from the U.S.S. _Seattle_ sat in the saloon drinking and attending to
other people's affairs in an amiable fashion. Bill was a proud man
since he had thrashed so many citizens, and it suddenly occurred to him
that the loud talk of the sailors was very offensive. So he swaggered
upon their attention, and warned them that the saloon was the flowery
abode of peace and gentle silence. They glanced at him in surprise, and
without a moment's pause consigned him to a worse place than any stoker
of them knew. Whereupon he flung one of them through the side door
before the others could prevent it. On the sidewalk there was a short
struggle, with many hoarse epithets in the air, and then Bill slid
into the saloon again. A frown of false rage was upon his brow, and
he strutted like a savage king. He took a long yellow night-stick from
behind the lunch-counter, and started importantly toward the main doors
to see that the incensed seamen did not again enter.
The ways of sailormen are without speech, and, together in the street,
the three sailors exchanged no word, but they moved at once. Landsmen
would have required two years of discussion to gain such unanimity. In
silence, and immediately, they seized a long piece of scantling that
lay handily. With one forward to guide the battering-ram, and with two
behind him to furnish the power, they made a beautiful curve, and came
down like the Assyrians on the front door of that saloon.
Mystic and still mystic are the laws of fate. Bill, with his kingly
frown and his long night-stick, appeared at precisely that moment
in the doorway. He stood like a statue of victory; his pride was at
its zenith; and in the same second this atrocious piece of scantling
punched him in the bulwarks of his stomach, and he vanished like a
mist. Opinions differed as to where the end of the scantling landed
him, but it was ultimately clear that it landed him in south-western
Texas, where he became a sheep-herder.
The sailors charged three times upon the plate-glass front of the
saloon, and when they had finished, it looked as if it had been the
victim of a rural fire company's success in saving it from the flames.
As the proprietor of the place surveyed the ruins, he remarked that
Bill was a very zealous guardian of property. As the ambulance surgeon
surveyed Bill, he remarked that the wound was really an excavation.
III
As his Mexican friend tripped blithely away, Bill turned with a
thoughtful face to his frying-pan and his fire. After dinner he drew
his revolver from its scarred old holster, and examined every part of
it. It was the revolver that had dealt death to the foreman, and it
had also been in free fights in which it had dealt death to several or
none. Bill loved it because its allegiance was more than that of man,
horse, or dog. It questioned neither social nor moral position; it
obeyed alike the saint and the assassin. It was the claw of the eagle,
the tooth of the lion, the poison of the snake; and when he swept
it from its holster, this minion smote where he listed, even to the
battering of a far penny. Wherefore it was his dearest possession, and
was not to be exchanged in south-western Texas for a handful of rubies,
nor even the shame and homage of the conductor of No. 419.
During the afternoon he moved through his monotony of work and leisure
with the same air of deep meditation. The smoke of his supper-time fire
was curling across the shadowy sea of mesquit when the instinct of the
plainsman warned him that the stillness, the desolation, was again
invaded. He saw a motionless horseman in black outline against the
pallid sky. The silhouette displayed serape and sombrero, and even the
Mexican spurs as large as pies. When this black figure began to move
toward the camp, Bill's hand dropped to his revolver.
The horseman approached until Bill was enabled to see pronounced
American features, and a skin too red to grow on a Mexican face. Bill
released his grip on his revolver.
"Hello!" called the horseman.
"Hello!" answered Bill.
The horseman cantered forward. "Good evening," he said, as he again
drew rein.
"Good evenin'," answered Bill, without committing himself by too much
courtesy.
For a moment the two men scanned each other in a way that is not
ill-mannered on the plains, where one is in danger of meeting
horse-thieves or tourists.
Bill saw a type which did not belong in the mesquit. The young fellow
had invested in some Mexican trappings of an expensive kind. Bill's
eyes searched the outfit for some sign of craft, but there was none.
Even with his local regalia, it was clear that the young man was of a
far, black Northern city. He had discarded the enormous stirrups of
his Mexican saddle; he used the small English stirrup, and his feet
were thrust forward until the steel tightly gripped his ankles. As
Bill's eyes travelled over the stranger, they lighted suddenly upon the
stirrups and the thrust feet, and immediately he smiled in a friendly
way. No dark purpose could dwell in the innocent heart of a man who
rode thus on the plains.
As for the stranger, he saw a tattered individual with a tangle of hair
and beard, and with a complexion turned brick-colour from the sun and
whisky. He saw a pair of eyes that at first looked at him as the wolf
looks at the wolf, and then became childlike, almost timid, in their
glance. Here was evidently a man who had often stormed the iron walls
of the city of success, and who now sometimes valued himself as the
rabbit values his prowess.
The stranger smiled genially, and sprang from his horse. "Well, sir, I
suppose you will let me camp here with you to-night?"
"Eh?" said Bill.
"I suppose you will let me camp here with you to-night?"
Bill for a time seemed too astonished for words. "Well,"--he answered,
scowling in inhospitable annoyance--"well, I don't believe this here is
a good place to camp to-night, mister."
The stranger turned quickly from his saddle-girth.
"What?" he said in surprise. "You don't want me here? You don't want me
to camp here?"
Bill's feet scuffled awkwardly, and he looked steadily at a cactus
plant. "Well, you see, mister," he said, "I'd like your company well
enough, but--you see, some of these here greasers are goin' to chase
me off the range to-night; and while I might like a man's company all
right, I couldn't let him in for no such game when he ain't got nothin'
to do with the trouble."
"Going to chase you off the range?" cried the stranger.
"Well, they said they were goin' to do it," said Bill.
"And--great heavens! will they kill you, do you think?"
"Don't know. Can't tell till afterwards. You see, they take some feller
that's alone like me, and then they rush his camp when he ain't quite
ready for 'em, and ginerally plug 'im with a sawed-off shot-gun load
before he has a chance to git at 'em. They lay around and wait for
their chance, and it comes soon enough. Of course a feller alone like
me has got to let up watching some time. Maybe they ketch 'im asleep.
Maybe the feller gits tired waiting, and goes out in broad day, and
kills two or three just to make the whole crowd pile on him and settle
the thing. I heard of a case like that once. It's awful hard on a man's
mind--to git a gang after him."
"And so they're going to rush your camp to-night?" cried the stranger.
"How do you know? Who told you?"
"Feller come and told me."
"And what are you going to do? Fight?"
"Don't see nothin' else to do," answered Bill gloomily, still staring
at the cactus plant.
There was a silence. Finally the stranger burst out in an amazed cry.
"Well, I never heard of such a thing in my life! How many of them are
there?"
"Eight," answered Bill. "And now look-a-here; you ain't got no manner
of business foolin' around here just now, and you might better lope
off before dark. I don't ask no help in this here row. I know your
happening along here just now don't give me no call on you, and you
better hit the trail."
"Well, why in the name of wonder don't you go get the sheriff?" cried
the stranger.
"Oh, h----!" said Bill.
IV
Long, smoldering clouds spread in the western sky, and to the east
silver mists lay on the purple gloom of the wilderness.
Finally, when the great moon climbed the heavens and cast its ghastly
radiance upon the bushes, it made a new and more brilliant crimson of
the campfire, where the flames capered merrily through its mesquit
branches, filling the silence with the fire chorus, an ancient melody
which surely bears a message of the inconsequence of individual
tragedy--a message that is in the boom of the sea, the sliver of the
wind through the grass-blades, the silken clash of hemlock boughs.
No figures moved in the rosy space of the camp, and the search of the
moonbeams failed to disclose a living thing in the bushes. There was no
owl-faced clock to chant the weariness of the long silence that brooded
upon the plain.
The dew gave the darkness under the mesquit a velvet quality that