The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
blinked his eyes with renewed anticipation. His tall tormentor continued
with a face of unchanging gravity, and a voice of gentle solicitude:
“How is the health of that unfortunate--”
“That’s right! Pour your insults! Pour ’em on a sick, afflicted woman!”
The eyes blinked with combative relish.
“Insults? Oh, no, Uncle Hughey!”
“That’s all right! Insults goes!”
“Why, I was mighty relieved when she began to recover her mem’ry. Las’
time I heard, they told me she’d got it pretty near all back. Remembered
her father, and her mother, and her sisters and brothers, and her
friends, and her happy childhood, and all her doin’s except only your
face. The boys was bettin’ she’d get that far too, give her time. But
I reckon afteh such a turrable sickness as she had, that would be
expectin’ most too much.”
At this Uncle Hughey jerked out a small parcel. “Shows how much you
know!” he cackled. “There! See that! That’s my ring she sent me back,
being too unstrung for marriage. So she don’t remember me, don’t she?
Ha-ha! Always said you were a false alarm.”
The Southerner put more anxiety into his tone. “And so you’re a-takin’
the ring right on to the next one!” he exclaimed. “Oh, don’t go to get
married again, Uncle Hughey! What’s the use o’ being married?”
“What’s the use?” echoed the bridegroom, with scorn. “Hm! When you grow
up you’ll think different.”
“Course I expect to think different when my age is different. I’m havin’
the thoughts proper to twenty-four, and you’re havin’ the thoughts
proper to sixty.”
“Fifty!” shrieked Uncle Hughey, jumping in the air.
The Southerner took a tone of self-reproach. “Now, how could I forget
you was fifty,” he murmured, “when you have been telling it to the boys
so careful for the last ten years!”
Have you ever seen a cockatoo--the white kind with the top-knot--enraged
by insult? The bird erects every available feather upon its person.
So did Uncle Hughey seem to swell, clothes, mustache, and woolly white
beard; and without further speech he took himself on board the Eastbound
train, which now arrived from its siding in time to deliver him.
Yet this was not why he had not gone away before. At any time he could
have escaped into the baggage-room or withdrawn to a dignified distance
until his train should come up. But the old man had evidently got a sort
of joy from this teasing. He had reached that inevitable age when we are
tickled to be linked with affairs of gallantry, no matter how.
With him now the Eastbound departed slowly into that distance whence
I had come. I stared after it as it went its way to the far shores of
civilization. It grew small in the unending gulf of space, until all
sign of its presence was gone save a faint skein of smoke against the
evening sky. And now my lost trunk came back into my thoughts, and
Medicine Bow seemed a lonely spot. A sort of ship had left me marooned
in a foreign ocean; the Pullman was comfortably steaming home to port,
while I--how was I to find Judge Henry’s ranch? Where in this unfeatured
wilderness was Sunk Creek? No creek or any water at all flowed here that
I could perceive. My host had written he should meet me at the station
and drive me to his ranch. This was all that I knew. He was not here.
The baggage-man had not seen him lately. The ranch was almost certain
to be too far to walk to, to-night. My trunk--I discovered myself still
staring dolefully after the vanished East-bound; and at the same instant
I became aware that the tall man was looking gravely at me,--as
gravely as he had looked at Uncle Hughey throughout their remarkable
conversation.
To see his eye thus fixing me and his thumb still hooked in his
cartridge-belt, certain tales of travellers from these parts forced
themselves disquietingly into my recollection. Now that Uncle Hughey was
gone, was I to take his place and be, for instance, invited to dance on
the platform to the music of shots nicely aimed?
“I reckon I am looking for you, seh,” the tall man now observed.
II. “WHEN YOU CALL ME THAT, SMILE!”
We cannot see ourselves as others see us, or I should know what
appearance I cut at hearing this from the tall man. I said nothing,
feeling uncertain.
“I reckon I am looking for you, seh,” he repeated politely.
“I am looking for Judge Henry,” I now replied.
He walked toward me, and I saw that in inches he was not a giant. He was
not more than six feet. It was Uncle Hughey that had made him seem to
tower. But in his eye, in his face, in his step, in the whole man,
there dominated a something potent to be felt, I should think, by man or
woman.
“The Judge sent me afteh you, seh,” he now explained, in his civil
Southern voice; and he handed me a letter from my host. Had I not
witnessed his facetious performances with Uncle Hughey, I should have
judged him wholly ungifted with such powers. There was nothing external
about him but what seemed the signs of a nature as grave as you could
meet. But I had witnessed; and therefore supposing that I knew him in
spite of his appearance, that I was, so to speak, in his secret and
could give him a sort of wink, I adopted at once a method of easiness.
It was so pleasant to be easy with a large stranger, who instead of
shooting at your heels had very civilly handed you a letter.
“You’re from old Virginia, I take it?” I began.
He answered slowly, “Then you have taken it correct, seh.”
A slight chill passed over my easiness, but I went cheerily on with a
further inquiry. “Find many oddities out here like Uncle Hughey?”
“Yes, seh, there is a right smart of oddities around. They come in on
every train.”
At this point I dropped my method of easiness.
“I wish that trunks came on the train,” said I. And I told him my
predicament.
It was not to be expected that he would be greatly moved at my loss; but
he took it with no comment whatever. “We’ll wait in town for it,” said
he, always perfectly civil.
Now, what I had seen of “town” was, to my newly arrived eyes, altogether
horrible. If I could possibly sleep at the Judge’s ranch, I preferred to
do so.
“Is it too far to drive there to-night?” I inquired.
He looked at me in a puzzled manner.
“For this valise,” I explained, “contains all that I immediately need;
in fact, I could do without my trunk for a day or two, if it is not
convenient to send. So if we could arrive there not too late by starting
at once--” I paused.
“It’s two hundred and sixty-three miles,” said the Virginian.
To my loud ejaculation he made no answer, but surveyed me a moment
longer, and then said, “Supper will be about ready now.” He took my
valise, and I followed his steps toward the eating-house in silence. I
was dazed.
As we went, I read my host’s letter--a brief hospitable message. He was
very sorry not to meet me himself. He had been getting ready to drive
over, when the surveyor appeared and detained him. Therefore in his
stead he was sending a trustworthy man to town, who would look after
me and drive me over. They were looking forward to my visit with much
pleasure. This was all.
Yes, I was dazed. How did they count distance in this country? You spoke
in a neighborly fashion about driving over to town, and it meant--I
did not know yet how many days. And what would be meant by the term
“dropping in,” I wondered. And how many miles would be considered really
far? I abstained from further questioning the “trustworthy man.” My
questions had not fared excessively well. He did not propose making me
dance, to be sure: that would scarcely be trustworthy. But neither did
he propose to have me familiar with him. Why was this? What had I done
to elicit that veiled and skilful sarcasm about oddities coming in on
every train? Having been sent to look after me, he would do so,
would even carry my valise; but I could not be jocular with him. This
handsome, ungrammatical son of the soil had set between us the bar of
his cold and perfect civility. No polished person could have done it
better. What was the matter? I looked at him, and suddenly it came to
me. If he had tried familiarity with me the first two minutes of our
acquaintance, I should have resented it; by what right, then, had I
tried it with him? It smacked of patronizing: on this occasion he had
come off the better gentleman of the two. Here in flesh and blood was
a truth which I had long believed in words, but never met before. The
creature we call a GENTLEMAN lies deep in the hearts of thousands that
are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type.
Between the station and the eating-house I did a deal of straight
thinking. But my thoughts were destined presently to be drowned in
amazement at the rare personage into whose society fate had thrown me.
Town, as they called it, pleased me the less, the longer I saw it. But
until our language stretches itself and takes in a new word of closer
fit, town will have to do for the name of such a place as was Medicine
Bow. I have seen and slept in many like it since. Scattered wide, they
littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the
Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of
treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next,
as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles,
and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More
forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn
there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and
blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet
light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of
creation’s first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights
were immaculate and wonderful.
Medicine Bow was my first, and I took its dimensions, twenty-nine
buildings in all,--one coal shute, one water tank, the station, one
store, two eating-houses, one billiard hall, two tool-houses, one feed
stable, and twelve others that for one reason and another I shall not
name. Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances;
many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories
high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe
of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal
light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come
straight from Genesis. Into that space went wandering a road, over a
hill and down out of sight, and up again smaller in the distance, and
down once more, and up once more, straining the eyes, and so away.
Then I heard a fellow greet my Virginian. He came rollicking out of
a door, and made a pass with his hand at the Virginian’s hat. The
Southerner dodged it, and I saw once more the tiger undulation of body,
and knew my escort was he of the rope and the corral.
“How are yu’ Steve?” he said to the rollicking man. And in his tone I
heard instantly old friendship speaking. With Steve he would take and
give familiarity.
Steve looked at me, and looked away--and that was all. But it was
enough. In no company had I ever felt so much an outsider. Yet I liked
the company, and wished that it would like me.
“Just come to town?” inquired Steve of the Virginian.
“Been here since noon. Been waiting for the train.”
“Going out to-night?”
“I reckon I’ll pull out to-morro’.”
“Beds are all took,” said Steve. This was for my benefit.
“Dear me,” said I.
“But I guess one of them drummers will let yu’ double up with him.”
Steve was enjoying himself, I think. He had his saddle and blankets, and
beds were nothing to him.
“Drummers, are they?” asked the Virginian.
“Two Jews handling cigars, one American with consumption killer, and a
Dutchman with jew’lry.”