The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
train been started?” he demanded.
“This hyeh train?” The Virginian consulted his watch. “Why, it’s been
fanning it a right smart little while,” said he, laying no stress upon
his indolent syllables.
“Huh!” went Trampas. He gave the rest of us a final unlovely scrutiny.
“It seems to have become a passenger train,” he said. And he returned
abruptly inside the caboose.
“Is he the member who don’t sing?” asked Scipio.
“That’s the specimen,” replied the Southerner.
“He don’t seem musical in the face,” said Scipio.
“Pshaw!” returned the Virginian. “Why, you surely ain’t the man to mind
ugly mugs when they’re hollow!”
The noise inside had dropped quickly to stillness. You could scarcely
catch the sound of talk. Our caboose was clicking comfortably westward,
rail after rail, mile upon mile, while night was beginning to rise from
earth into the clouded sky.
“I wonder if they have sent a search party forward to hunt Schoffner?”
said the Virginian. “I think I’ll maybe join their meeting.” He opened
the door upon them. “Kind o’ dark hyeh, ain’t it?” said he. And lighting
the lantern, he shut us out.
“What do yu’ think?” said Scipio to me. “Will he take them to Sunk
Creek?”
“He evidently thinks he will,” said I. “He says he will, and he has the
courage of his convictions.”
“That ain’t near enough courage to have!” Scipio exclaimed.
“There’s times in life when a man has got to have courage WITHOUT
convictions--WITHOUT them--or he is no good. Now your friend is that
deep constitooted that you don’t know and I don’t know what he’s
thinkin’ about all this.”
“If there’s to be any gun-play,” put in the excellent Shorty, “I’ll
stand in with him.”
“Ah, go to bed with your gun-play!” retorted Scipio, entirely
good-humored. “Is the Judge paying for a carload of dead punchers to
gather his beef for him? And this ain’t a proposition worth a man’s
gettin’ hurt for himself, anyway.”
“That’s so,” Shorty assented.
“No,” speculated Scipio, as the night drew deeper round us and the
caboose click-clucked and click-clucked over the rail joints; “he’s
waitin’ for somebody else to open this pot. I’ll bet he don’t know but
one thing now, and that’s that nobody else shall know he don’t know
anything.”
Scipio had delivered himself. He lighted a cigarette, and no more wisdom
came from him. The night was established. The rolling bad-lands sank
away in it. A train-hand had arrived over the roof, and hanging the red
lights out behind, left us again without remark or symptom of curiosity.
The train-hands seemed interested in their own society and lived in
their own caboose. A chill wind with wet in it came blowing from the
invisible draws, and brought the feel of the distant mountains.
“That’s Montana!” said Scipio, snuffing. “I am glad to have it inside my
lungs again.”
“Ain’t yu’ getting cool out there?” said the Virginian’s voice. “Plenty
room inside.”
Perhaps he had expected us to follow him; or perhaps he had meant us
to delay long enough not to seem like a reenforcement. “These gentlemen
missed the express at Medora,” he observed to his men, simply.
What they took us for upon our entrance I cannot say, or what they
believed. The atmosphere of the caboose was charged with voiceless
currents of thought. By way of a friendly beginning to the three hundred
miles of caboose we were now to share so intimately, I recalled myself
to them. I trusted no more of the Christian Endeavor had delayed them.
“I am so lucky to have caught you again,” I finished. “I was afraid my
last chance of reaching the Judge’s had gone.”
Thus I said a number of things designed to be agreeable, but they met my
small talk with the smallest talk you can have. “Yes,” for instance, and
“Pretty well, I guess,” and grave strikings of matches and thoughtful
looks at the floor. I suppose we had made twenty miles to the
imperturbable clicking of the caboose when one at length asked his
neighbor had he ever seen New York.
“No,” said the other. “Flooded with dudes, ain’t it?”
“Swimmin’,” said the first.
“Leakin’, too,” said a third.
“Well, my gracious!” said a fourth, and beat his knee in private
delight. None of them ever looked at me. For some reason I felt
exceedingly ill at ease.
“Good clothes in New York,” said the third.
“Rich food,” said the first.
“Fresh eggs, too,” said the third.
“Well, my gracious!” said the fourth, beating his knee.
“Why, yes,” observed the Virginian, unexpectedly; “they tell me that
aiggs there ain’t liable to be so rotten as yu’ll strike ’em in this
country.”
None of them had a reply for this, and New York was abandoned. For some
reason I felt much better.
It was a new line they adopted next, led off by Trampas.
“Going to the excitement?” he inquired, selecting Shorty.
“Excitement?” said Shorty, looking up.
“Going to Rawhide?” Trampas repeated. And all watched Shorty.
“Why, I’m all adrift missin’ that express,” said Shorty.
“Maybe I can give you employment,” suggested the Virginian. “I am taking
an outfit across the basin.”
“You’ll find most folks going to Rawhide, if you’re looking for
company,” pursued Trampas, fishing for a recruit.
“How about Rawhide, anyway?” said Scipio, skillfully deflecting this
missionary work. “Are they taking much mineral out? Have yu’ seen any of
the rock?”
“Rock?” broke in the enthusiast who had beaten his knee. “There!” And he
brought some from his pocket.
“You’re always showing your rock,” said Trampas, sulkily; for Scipio now
held the conversation, and Shorty returned safely to his dozing.
“H’m!” went Scipio at the rock. He turned it back and forth in his hand,
looking it over; he chucked and caught it slightingly in the air, and
handed it back. “Porphyry, I see.” That was his only word about it. He
said it cheerily. He left no room for discussion. You could not damn
a thing worse. “Ever been in Santa Rita?” pursued Scipio, while the
enthusiast slowly pushed his rock back into his pocket. “That’s down in
New Mexico. Ever been to Globe, Arizona?” And Scipio talked away about
the mines he had known. There was no getting at Shorty any more that
evening. Trampas was foiled of his fish, or of learning how the fish’s
heart lay. And by morning Shorty had been carefully instructed to change
his mind about once an hour. This is apt to discourage all but very
superior missionaries. And I too escaped for the rest of this night. At
Glendive we had a dim supper, and I bought some blankets; and after that
it was late, and sleep occupied the attention of us all.
We lay along the shelves of the caboose, a peaceful sight I should
think, in that smoothly trundling cradle. I slept almost immediately, so
tired that not even our stops or anything else waked me, save once, when
the air I was breathing grew suddenly pure, and I roused. Sitting in
the door was the lonely figure of the Virginian. He leaned in silent
contemplation of the occasional moon, and beneath it the Yellowstone’s
swift ripples. On the caboose shelves the others slept sound and still,
each stretched or coiled as he had first put himself. They were not
untrustworthy to look at, it seemed to me--except Trampas. You would
have said the rest of that young humanity was average rough male blood,
merely needing to be told the proper things at the right time; and one
big bunchy stocking of the enthusiast stuck out of his blanket, solemn
and innocent, and I laughed at it. There was a light sound by the door,
and I found the Virginian’s eye on me. Finding who it was, he nodded
and motioned with his hand to go to sleep. And this I did with him in
my sight, still leaning in the open door, through which came the
interrupted moon and the swimming reaches of the Yellowstone.
XVI. THE GAME AND THE NATION--LAST ACT
It has happened to you, has it not, to wake in the morning and wonder
for a while where on earth you are? Thus I came half to life in the
caboose, hearing voices, but not the actual words at first.
But presently, “Hathaway!” said some one more clearly. “Portland 1291!”
This made no special stir in my intelligence, and I drowsed off again
to the pleasant rhythm of the wheels. The little shock of stopping next
brought me to, somewhat, with the voices still round me; and when we
were again in motion, I heard: “Rosebud! Portland 1279!” These figures
jarred me awake, and I said, “It was 1291 before,” and sat up in my
blankets.
The greeting they vouchsafed and the sight of them clustering
expressionless in the caboose brought last evening’s uncomfortable
memory back to me. Our next stop revealed how things were going to-day.
“Forsythe,” one of them read on the station. “Portland 1266.”
They were counting the lessening distance westward. This was the
undercurrent of war. It broke on me as I procured fresh water at
Forsythe and made some toilet in their stolid presence. We were drawing
nearer the Rawhide station--the point, I mean, where you left the
railway for the new mines. Now Rawhide station lay this side of
Billings. The broad path of desertion would open ready for their feet
when the narrow path to duty and Sunk Creek was still some fifty miles
more to wait. Here was Trampas’s great strength; he need make no move
meanwhile, but lie low for the immediate temptation to front and waylay
them and win his battle over the deputy foreman. But the Virginian
seemed to find nothing save enjoyment in this sunny September morning,
and ate his breakfast at Forsythe serenely.
That meal done and that station gone, our caboose took up again its easy
trundle by the banks of the Yellowstone. The mutineers sat for a while
digesting in idleness.
“What’s your scar?” inquired one at length inspecting casually the neck
of his neighbor.
“Foolishness,” the other answered.
“Yourn?”
“Mine.”
“Well, I don’t know but I prefer to have myself to thank for a thing,”
said the first.
“I was displaying myself,” continued the second. “One day last summer it
was. We come on a big snake by Torrey Creek corral. The boys got betting
pretty lively that I dassent make my word good as to dealing with him,
so I loped my cayuse full tilt by Mr. Snake, and swung down and catched
him up by the tail from the ground, and cracked him same as a whip, and
snapped his head off. You’ve saw it done?” he said to the audience.
The audience nodded wearily.
“But the loose head flew agin me, and the fangs caught. I was pretty
sick for a while.”
“It don’t pay to be clumsy,” said the first man. “If you’d snapped the
snake away from yu’ instead of toward yu’, its head would have whirled
off into the brush, same as they do with me.”
“How like a knife-cut your scar looks!” said I.
“Don’t it?” said the snake-snapper. “There’s many that gets fooled by
it.”
“An antelope knows a snake is his enemy,” said another to me. “Ever seen
a buck circling round and round a rattler?”
“I have always wanted to see that,” said I, heartily. For this I knew to
be a respectable piece of truth.
“It’s worth seeing,” the man went on. “After the buck gets close in, he
gives an almighty jump up in the air, and down comes his four hoofs in
a bunch right on top of Mr. Snake. Cuts him all to hash. Now you tell me
how the buck knows that.”
Of course I could not tell him. And again we sat in silence for a
while--friendlier silence, I thought.
“A skunk’ll kill yu’ worse than a snake bite,” said another, presently.
“No, I don’t mean that way,” he added. For I had smiled. “There is a
brown skunk down in Arkansaw. Kind of prairie-dog brown. Littler than
our variety, he is. And he is mad the whole year round, same as a dog
gets. Only the dog has a spell and dies but this here Arkansaw skunk
is mad right along, and it don’t seem to interfere with his business in