The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
where a covey of young willow-grouse were hiding as their horses passed.
And then, without warning, as they sat by the spring, he had spoken
potently of his love.
She did not interrupt him. She waited until he was wholly finished.
“I am not the sort of wife you want,” she said, with an attempt of
airiness.
He answered roughly, “I am the judge of that.” And his roughness was a
pleasure to her, yet it made her afraid of herself. When he was absent
from her, and she could sit in her cabin and look at Grandmother Stark,
and read home letters, then in imagination she found it easy to play
the part which she had arranged to play regarding him--the part of the
guide, and superior, and indulgent companion. But when he was by her
side, that part became a difficult one. Her woman’s fortress was shaken
by a force unknown to her before. Sam Bannett did not have it in him to
look as this man could look, when the cold lustre of his eyes grew hot
with internal fire. What color they were baffled her still. “Can it
possibly change?” she wondered. It seemed to her that sometimes when she
had been looking from a rock straight down into clear sea water, this
same color had lurked in its depths. “Is it green, or is it gray?”
she asked herself, but did not turn just now to see. She kept her face
toward the landscape.
“All men are born equal,” he now remarked slowly.
“Yes,” she quickly answered, with a combative flash. “Well?”
“Maybe that don’t include women?” he suggested.
“I think it does.”
“Do yu’ tell the kids so?”
“Of course I teach them what I believe!”
He pondered. “I used to have to learn about the Declaration of
Independence. I hated books and truck when I was a kid.”
“But you don’t any more.”
“No. I cert’nly don’t. But I used to get kep’ in at recess for bein’ so
dumb. I was most always at the tail end of the class. My brother, he’d
be head sometimes.”
“Little George Taylor is my prize scholar,” said Molly.
“Knows his tasks, does he?”
“Always. And Henry Dow comes next.”
“Who’s last?”
“Poor Bob Carmody. I spend more time on him than on all the rest put
together.”
“My!” said the Virginian. “Ain’t that strange!”
She looked at him, puzzled by his tone. “It’s not strange when you know
Bob,” she said.
“It’s very strange,” drawled the Virginian. “Knowin’ Bob don’t help it
any.”
“I don’t think that I understand you,” said Molly, sticky.
“Well, it is mighty confusin’. George Taylor, he’s your best scholar,
and poor Bob, he’s your worst, and there’s a lot in the middle--and you
tell me we’re all born equal!”
Molly could only sit giggling in this trap he had so ingeniously laid
for her.
“I’ll tell you what,” pursued the cow-puncher, with slow and growing
intensity, “equality is a great big bluff. It’s easy called.”
“I didn’t mean--” began Molly.
“Wait, and let me say what I mean.” He had made an imperious gesture
with his hand. “I know a man that mostly wins at cyards. I know a man
that mostly loses. He says it is his luck. All right. Call it his luck.
I know a man that works hard and he’s gettin’ rich, and I know another
that works hard and is gettin’ poor. He says it is his luck. All right.
Call it his luck. I look around and I see folks movin’ up or movin’
down, winners or losers everywhere. All luck, of course. But since folks
can be born that different in their luck, where’s your equality? No,
seh! call your failure luck, or call it laziness, wander around the
words, prospect all yu’ mind to, and yu’ll come out the same old trail
of inequality.” He paused a moment and looked at her. “Some holds four
aces,” he went on, “and some holds nothin’, and some poor fello’ gets
the aces and no show to play ’em; but a man has got to prove himself my
equal before I’ll believe him.”
Molly sat gazing at him, silent.
“I know what yu’ meant,” he told her now, “by sayin’ you’re not the wife
I’d want. But I am the kind that moves up. I am goin’ to be your best
scholar.” He turned toward her, and that fortress within her began to
shake.
“Don’t,” she murmured. “Don’t, please.”
“Don’t what?”
“Why--spoil this.”
“Spoil it?”
“These rides--I don’t love you--I can’t--but these rides are--”
“What are they?”
“My greatest pleasure. There! And, please, I want them to go on so.”
“Go on so! I don’t reckon yu’ know what you’re sayin’. Yu’ might as well
ask fruit to stay green. If the way we are now can keep bein’ enough
for you, it can’t for me. A pleasure to you, is it? Well, to me it is--I
don’t know what to call it. I come to yu’ and I hate it, and I come
again and I hate it, and I ache and grieve all over when I go. No!
You will have to think of some other way than just invitin’ me to keep
green.”
“If I am to see you--” began the girl.
“You’re not to see me. Not like this. I can stay away easier than what I
am doin’.”
“Will you do me a favor, a great one?” said she, now.
“Make it as impossible as you please!” he cried. He thought it was to be
some action.
“Go on coming. But don’t talk to me about--don’t talk in that way--if
you can help it.”
He laughed out, not permitting himself to swear.
“But,” she continued, “if you can’t help talking that way--sometimes--I
promise I will listen. That is the only promise I make.”
“That is a bargain,” he said.
Then he helped her mount her horse, restraining himself like a Spartan,
and they rode home to her cabin.
“You have made it pretty near impossible,” he said, as he took his
leave. “But you’ve been square to-day, and I’ll show you I can be square
when I come back. I’ll not do more than ask you if your mind’s the same.
And now I’ll not see you for quite a while. I am going a long way. But
I’ll be very busy. And bein’ busy always keeps me from grievin’ too much
about you.”
Strange is woman! She would rather have heard some other last remark
than this.
“Oh, very well!” she said. “I’ll not miss you either.”
He smiled at her. “I doubt if yu’ can help missin’ me,” he remarked. And
he was gone at once, galloping on his Monte horse.
Which of the two won a victory this day?
XIII. THE GAME AND THE NATION--ACT FIRST
There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two
classes,--the quality and the equality.
The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. Both
will be with us until our women bear nothing but kings.
It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans
acknowledged the ETERNAL INEQUALITY of man. For by it we abolished a
cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up
in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and
our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature.
Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal
liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and
gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, “Let the best man win, whoever
he is.” Let the best man win! That is America’s word. That is true
democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same
thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.
The above reflections occurred to me before reaching Billings, Montana,
some three weeks after I had unexpectedly met the Virginian at Omaha,
Nebraska. I had not known of that trust given to him by Judge Henry,
which was taking him East. I was looking to ride with him before long
among the clean hills of Sunk Creek. I supposed he was there. But I came
upon him one morning in Colonel Cyrus Jones’s eating palace.
Did you know the palace? It stood in Omaha, near the trains, and it was
ten years old (which is middle-aged in Omaha) when I first saw it. It
was a shell of wood, painted with golden emblems,--the steamboat, the
eagle, the Yosemite,--and a live bear ate gratuities at its entrance.
Weather permitting, it opened upon the world as a stage upon the
audience. You sat in Omaha’s whole sight and dined, while Omaha’s dust
came and settled upon the refreshments. It is gone the way of the Indian
and the buffalo, for the West is growing old. You should have seen the
palace and sat there. In front of you passed rainbows of men,--Chinese,
Indian chiefs, Africans, General Miles, younger sons, Austrian nobility,
wide females in pink. Our continent drained prismatically through Omaha
once.
So I was passing that way also, walking for the sake of ventilation from
a sleeping-car toward a bath, when the language of Colonel Cyrus Jones
came out to me. The actual colonel I had never seen before. He stood
at the rear of his palace in gray flowery mustaches and a Confederate
uniform, telling the wishes of his guests to the cook through a hole.
You always bought meal tickets at once, else you became unwelcome.
Guests here had foibles at times, and a rapid exit was too easy.
Therefore I bought a ticket. It was spring and summer since I had heard
anything like the colonel. The Missouri had not yet flowed into New York
dialect freely, and his vocabulary met me like the breeze of the plains.
So I went in to be fanned by it, and there sat the Virginian at a table,
alone.
His greeting was up to the code of indifference proper on the plains;
but he presently remarked, “I’m right glad to see somebody,” which was a
good deal to say. “Them that comes hyeh,” he observed next, “don’t eat.
They feed.” And he considered the guests with a sombre attention.
“D’ yu’ reckon they find joyful digestion in this swallo’-an’-get-out
trough?”
“What are you doing here, then?” said I.
“Oh, pshaw! When yu’ can’t have what you choose, yu’ just choose what
you have.” And he took the bill-of-fare. I began to know that he had
something on his mind, so I did not trouble him further.
Meanwhile he sat studying the bill-of-fare.
“Ever heard o’ them?” he inquired, shoving me the spotted document.
Most improbable dishes were there,--salmis, canapes, supremes,--all
perfectly spelt and absolutely transparent. It was the old trick of
copying some metropolitan menu to catch travellers of the third and last
dimension of innocence; and whenever this is done the food is of the
third and last dimension of awfulness, which the cow-puncher knew as
well as anybody.
“So they keep that up here still,” I said.
“But what about them?” he repeated. His finger was at a special item,
FROGS’ LEGS A LA DELMONICO. “Are they true anywheres?” he asked. And I
told him, certainly. I also explained to him about Delmonico of New York
and about Augustin of Philadelphia.
“There’s not a little bit o’ use in lyin’ to me this mawnin’,” he said,
with his engaging smile. “I ain’t goin’ to awdeh anything’s laigs.”
“Well, I’ll see how he gets out of it,” I said, remembering the odd
Texas legend. (The traveller read the bill-of-fare, you know, and called
for a vol-au-vent. And the proprietor looked at the traveller, and
running a pistol into his ear, observed, “You’ll take hash.”) I was
thinking of this and wondering what would happen to me. So I took the
step.
“Wants frogs’ legs, does he?” shouted Colonel Cyrus Jones. He fixed
his eye upon me, and it narrowed to a slit. “Too many brain workers
breakfasting before yu’ came in, professor,” said he. “Missionary ate
the last leg off me just now. Brown the wheat!” he commanded, through
the hole to the cook, for some one had ordered hot cakes.
“I’ll have fried aiggs,” said the Virginian. “Cooked both sides.”
“White wings!” sang the colonel through the hole. “Let ’em fly up and
down.”
“Coffee an’ no milk,” said the Virginian.
“Draw one in the dark!” the colonel roared.
“And beefsteak, rare.”
“One slaughter in the pan, and let the blood drip!”
“I should like a glass of water, please,” said I. The colonel threw me a
look of pity.
“One Missouri and ice for the professor!” he said.