The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
“Got a gold mine up Bear Creek.”
And after comment and prophecy, Medicine Bow returned to its dinner.
This meal was my last here for a long while. The Virginian’s
responsibility now returned; duty drove the Judge’s trustworthy man
to take care of me again. He had not once sought my society of his own
accord; his distaste for what he supposed me to be (I don’t exactly know
what this was) remained unshaken. I have thought that matters of dress
and speech should not carry with them so much mistrust in our democracy;
thieves are presumed innocent until proved guilty, but a starched collar
is condemned at once. Perfect civility and obligingness I certainly did
receive from the Virginian, only not a word of fellowship. He harnessed
the horses, got my trunk, and gave me some advice about taking
provisions for our journey, something more palatable than what food we
should find along the road. It was well thought of, and I bought quite a
parcel of dainties, feeling that he would despise both them and me. And
thus I took my seat beside him, wondering what we should manage to talk
about for two hundred and sixty-three miles.
Farewell in those days was not said in Cattle Land. Acquaintances
watched our departure with a nod or with nothing, and the nearest
approach to “Good-by” was the proprietor’s “So-long.” But I caught sight
of one farewell given without words.
As we drove by the eating-house, the shade of a side window was raised,
and the landlady looked her last upon the Virginian. Her lips were
faintly parted, and no woman’s eyes ever said more plainly, “I am one of
your possessions.” She had forgotten that it might be seen. Her glance
caught mine, and she backed into the dimness of the room. What look
she may have received from him, if he gave her any at this too public
moment, I could not tell. His eyes seemed to be upon the horses, and
he drove with the same mastering ease that had roped the wild pony
yesterday. We passed the ramparts of Medicine Bow,--thick heaps and
fringes of tin cans, and shelving mounds of bottles cast out of the
saloons. The sun struck these at a hundred glittering points. And in a
moment we were in the clean plains, with the prairie-dogs and the pale
herds of antelope. The great, still air bathed us, pure as water and
strong as wine; the sunlight flooded the world; and shining upon the
breast of the Virginian’s flannel shirt lay a long gold thread of hair!
The noisy American drummer had met defeat, but this silent free lance
had been easily victorious.
It must have been five miles that we travelled in silence, losing and
seeing the horizon among the ceaseless waves of the earth. Then I looked
back, and there was Medicine Bow, seemingly a stone’s throw behind
us. It was a full half-hour before I looked back again, and there sure
enough was always Medicine Bow. A size or two smaller, I will admit, but
visible in every feature, like something seen through the wrong end of
a field glass. The East-bound express was approaching the town, and I
noticed the white steam from its whistle; but when the sound reached us,
the train had almost stopped. And in reply to my comment upon this, the
Virginian deigned to remark that it was more so in Arizona.
“A man come to Arizona,” he said, “with one of them telescopes to study
the heavenly bodies. He was a Yankee, seh, and a right smart one, too.
And one night we was watchin’ for some little old fallin’ stars that he
said was due, and I saw some lights movin’ along across the mesa pretty
lively, an’ I sang out. But he told me it was just the train. And I told
him I didn’t know yu’ could see the cyars that plain from his place,
‘Yu’ can see them,’ he said to me, ‘but it is las’ night’s cyars you’re
lookin’ at.’” At this point the Virginian spoke severely to one of the
horses. “Of course,” he then resumed to me, “that Yankee man did not
mean quite all he said.--You, Buck!” he again broke off suddenly to
the horse. “But Arizona, seh,” he continued, “it cert’nly has a mos’
deceivin’ atmospheah. Another man told me he had seen a lady close one
eye at him when he was two minutes hard run from her.” This time the
Virginian gave Buck the whip.
“What effect,” I inquired with a gravity equal to his own, “does this
extraordinary foreshortening have upon a quart of whiskey?”
“When it’s outside yu’, seh, no distance looks too far to go to it.”
He glanced at me with an eye that held more confidence than hitherto he
had been able to feel in me. I had made one step in his approval. But
I had many yet to go. This day he preferred his own thoughts to my
conversation, and so he did all the days of this first journey; while
I should have greatly preferred his conversation to my thoughts. He
dismissed some attempts that I made upon the subject of Uncle Hughey so
that I had not the courage to touch upon Trampas, and that chill brief
collision which might have struck the spark of death. Trampas! I had
forgotten him till this silent drive I was beginning. I wondered if I
should ever see him, or Steve, or any of those people again. And this
wonder I expressed aloud.
“There’s no tellin’ in this country,” said the Virginian. “Folks come
easy, and they go easy. In settled places, like back in the States, even
a poor man mostly has a home. Don’t care if it’s only a barrel on a lot,
the fello’ will keep frequentin’ that lot, and if yu’ want him yu’ can
find him. But out hyeh in the sage-brush, a man’s home is apt to be his
saddle blanket. First thing yu’ know, he has moved it to Texas.”
“You have done some moving yourself,” I suggested.
But this word closed his mouth. “I have had a look at the country,” he
said, and we were silent again. Let me, however, tell you here that he
had set out for a “look at the country” at the age of fourteen; and
that by his present age of twenty-four he had seen Arkansas, Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.
Everywhere he had taken care of himself, and survived; nor had his
strong heart yet waked up to any hunger for a home. Let me also tell you
that he was one of thousands drifting and living thus, but (as you shall
learn) one in a thousand.
Medicine Bow did not forever remain in sight. When next I thought of it
and looked behind, nothing was there but the road we had come; it lay
like a ship’s wake across the huge ground swell of the earth. We were
swallowed in a vast solitude. A little while before sunset, a cabin came
in view; and here we passed our first night. Two young men lived here,
tending their cattle. They were fond of animals. By the stable a chained
coyote rushed nervously in a circle, or sat on its haunches and snapped
at gifts of food ungraciously. A tame young elk walked in and out of
the cabin door, and during supper it tried to push me off my chair. A
half-tame mountain sheep practised jumping from the ground to the roof.
The cabin was papered with posters of a circus, and skins of bear and
silver fox lay upon the floor. Until nine o’clock one man talked to the
Virginian, and one played gayly upon a concertina; and then we all went
to bed. The air was like December, but in my blankets and a buffalo robe
I kept warm, and luxuriated in the Rocky Mountain silence. Going to wash
before breakfast at sunrise, I found needles of ice in a pail. Yet it
was hard to remember that this quiet, open, splendid wilderness (with
not a peak in sight just here) was six thousand feet high. And when
breakfast was over there was no December left; and by the time the
Virginian and I were ten miles upon our way, it was June. But always
every breath that I breathed was pure as water and strong as wine.
We never passed a human being this day. Some wild cattle rushed up to
us and away from us; antelope stared at us from a hundred yards; coyotes
ran skulking through the sage-brush to watch us from a hill; at our noon
meal we killed a rattlesnake and shot some young sage chickens, which
were good at supper, roasted at our camp-fire.
By half-past eight we were asleep beneath the stars, and by half-past
four I was drinking coffee and shivering. The horse, Buck, was hard to
catch this second morning. Whether some hills that we were now in
had excited him, or whether the better water up here had caused an
effervescence in his spirits, I cannot say. But I was as hot as July by
the time we had him safe in harness, or, rather, unsafe in harness. For
Buck, in the mysterious language of horses, now taught wickedness to
his side partner, and about eleven o’clock they laid their evil heads
together and decided to break our necks.
We were passing, I have said, through a range of demi-mountains. It was
a little country where trees grew, water ran, and the plains were shut
out for a while. The road had steep places in it, and places here and
there where you could fall off and go bounding to the bottom among
stones. But Buck, for some reason, did not think these opportunities
good enough for him. He selected a more theatrical moment. We emerged
from a narrow canyon suddenly upon five hundred cattle and some cow-boys
branding calves by a fire in a corral. It was a sight that Buck knew by
heart. He instantly treated it like an appalling phenomenon. I saw
him kick seven ways; I saw Muggins kick five ways; our furious motion
snapped my spine like a whip. I grasped the seat. Something gave a
forlorn jingle. It was the brake.
“Don’t jump!” commanded the trustworthy man.
“No,” I said, as my hat flew off.
Help was too far away to do anything for us. We passed scatheless
through a part of the cattle, I saw their horns and backs go by. Some
earth crumbled, and we plunged downward into water rocking among
stones, and upward again through some more crumbling earth. I heard a
crash, and saw my trunk landing in the stream.
“She’s safer there,” said the trustworthy man.
“True,” I said.
“We’ll go back for her,” said he, with his eye on the horses and his
foot on the crippled brake. A dry gully was coming, and no room to
turn. The farther side of it was terraced with rock. We should simply
fall backward, if we did not fall forward first. He steered the horses
straight over, and just at the bottom swung them, with astonishing
skill, to the right along the hard-baked mud. They took us along the
bed up to the head of the gully, and through a thicket of quaking asps.
The light trees bent beneath our charge and bastinadoed the wagon as it
went over them. But their branches enmeshed the horses’ legs, and we
came to a harmless standstill among a bower of leaves.
I looked at the trustworthy man, and smiled vaguely. He considered me
for a moment.
“I reckon,” said he, “you’re feelin’ about halfway between ‘Oh, Lord!’
and ‘Thank God!’”
“That’s quite it,” said I, as he got down on the ground.
“Nothing’s broke,” said he, after a searching examination. And he
indulged in a true Virginian expletive. “Gentlemen, hush!” he murmured
gently, looking at me with his grave eyes; “one time I got pretty near
scared. You, Buck,” he continued, “some folks would beat you now till
yu’d be uncertain whether yu’ was a hawss or a railroad accident. I’d
do it myself, only it wouldn’t cure yu’.”
I now told him that I supposed he had saved both our lives. But he
detested words of direct praise. He made some grumbling rejoinder, and
led the horses out of the thicket. Buck, he explained to me, was a good
horse, and so was Muggins. Both of them generally meant well, and that
was the Judge’s reason for sending them to meet me. But these broncos
had their off days. Off days might not come very often; but when the
humor seized a bronco, he had to have his spree. Buck would now behave
himself as a horse should for probably two months. “They are just like
humans,” the Virginian concluded.