Somewhere in Red Gap Part 22

"Cousin Egbert got all fussed up in his mind about the name and always called her Postle-nut. He don't seem to have a brain for such things.

But she didn't mind. I give her credit for that. She was fifty if she was a day, but very, very blond; laboratory stuff, of course. You'd of called her a superblonde, I guess. And haggard and wrinkled in the face; but she took good care of that, too--artist's materials.

"You know old Pete--that Indian you see cutting up wood back on the place. Pete took a long look at her and named her the Painted Desert.

You always hear say an Indian hasn't got any sense of humour. I don't know; Pete was sure being either a humourist or a poet. However, this here lady handed me a new one about my business. She thought it was merely an outdoor sport. I never could get that out of her head. Even when she left she says she knows it's ripping good sport, but it's such a terrific drain on one's income, and I must be quite mad about ranching to keep it up. I said, yes; I got quite mad about it sometimes, and let it go at that. What was the use?"

A voiceless interval while we climbed a trail to the timbered bench where fence posts were being cut by half a dozen of the Arrowhead forces. Two of these were swiftly detached and bade to repair the break in the fence by which one Timmins was now profiting, the entire six being first regaled with a brief but pithy character a.n.a.lysis of the offender, portraying him as a loathsome biological freak; headless, I gathered, and with the acquisitive instincts of a trade rat.

Then we rounded back on our way to the Arrow head ranch house. Five miles up the narrowing valley we could see its outposts and its smoke.

Far below us the spick-and-span buildings of deserted Broadmoor glittered newly, demanding that I be told more of them. Yet for the five-mile ride I added, as I thought, no item to my slender stock.

Instead, when we had descended from the bench and were again in fields where the gates might be opened only by galling effort, I learned apparently irrelevant facts concerning Egbert Floud's pet kitten.

"Yes, sir; he's just like any old maid with that cat. 'Kitty!' here and 'Kitty!' there; and 'Poor Kitty, did I forget to warm its milk?' And so on. It was give to him two years ago by Jeff Tuttle's littlest girl, Irene; and he didn't want it at first, but him and Irene is great friends, so he pretended he was crazy about it and took it off in his overcoat pocket, thinking it would die anyway, because it was only skin and bones. Whenever it tried to purr you'd think it was going to shake all its timbers loose. His house is just over on the other side of Arrowhead Pa.s.s there, and I saw the kitten the first day he brought it up, kind of light brown and yellow in colour, with some gray on the left shoulder.

"Well, the minute I see these markings I recognized 'em and remembered something, and I says right off that he's got some cat there; and he says how do I know? And I tell him that there kitten has got at least a quarter wildcat in it. Its grandmother, or mebbe its great-grandmother, was took up to the Tuttle Ranch when there wasn't another cat within forty miles, and it got to running round nights; and quite a long time after that they found it with a mess of kittens in a box out in the harness room. One look at their feet and ears was all you'd want to see that their pa was a bobcat. They all become famous fighting characters, and was marked just like this descendant of theirs that Cousin Egbert has. And, say, I was going on like this, not suspecting anything except that I was giving him some interesting news about the family history of this pet of his, when he grabs the beast up and cuddles it, and says I had ought to be ashamed of myself, talking that way about a poor little innocent kitten that never done me a stroke of harm. Yes, sir; he was right fiery.

"I don't know how he come to take it that cross way, for he hadn't thought highly of the thing up to that moment. But some way it seemed to him I was talking scandal about his pet--kind of clouding up its ancestry, if you know what I mean. He didn't seem to get any broad view of it at all. You'd almost think I'd been reporting an indiscretion in some member of his family. Can you beat it? Heating up that way over a puny kitten, six inches from tip to tip, that he'd been thinking of as a pest and only taken to please Irene Tuttle! So he starts in from that minute to doctor it up and nurture it with canned soup and delicacies; and every time I see him after that he'd look indignant and say what great hands for spreading gossip us women are, and his kitten ain't got no more bobcat in its veins than what I have.

"He's a stubborn old toad. Irene had told him the kitten's name was Kate; so he kept right on calling it that even after it become incongruous, as you might say. Judge Ballard was up here on a fishing trip one time and heard him calling it Kate, and he says to Egbert: Why call it Kate when it ain't? Egbert says that was the name little Irene give it and it's too much trouble to think up another. The Judge says, Oh, no; not so much trouble, being that he could just change the name swiftly from Kate to Cato, thus meeting all conventional requirements with but slight added labour. But Egbert says there's the sentiment to think of--whatever he meant by that; and if you was to go over there to-day and he was home you'd likely hear him say: 'Yes; Kate is certainly some cat! Why, he's at least half bobcat--mebbe three-quarters; and the fightingest devil!' What's that? Yes; he's changed completely round about the wildcat strain. He's proud of it. If I was to say now it was only a quarter bob he'd be as mad as he was at first; he says anybody can see it's at least half bob. What changed him?

Oh, well, we're too near home. Some other time."

So it befell that not until we sat out for a splendid sunset that evening did I learn in an orderly manner of Postlethwaite vicissitudes.

Ma Pettengill built her first cigarette with tender solicitude; and this, in consideration of her day's hard ride, I permitted her to burn in relaxed silence. But when her trained fingers began to combine paper and tobacco for the second I mentioned Broadmoor, Postlethwaite, Posnett, and parties in general that come round the tired business woman, hara.s.sed with the countless vexations of a large cattle ranch, telling her how wise she has been to retire to this sylvan quietude, where she can dream away her life in peace. She started easily:

"That's it; they always intimate that running a ranch is mere cream puffs compared to a regular business, and they'd like to do the same thing to-morrow if only they was ready to retire from active life. Mebbe they get the idea from these here back-to-nature stories about a brokendown bookkeeper, sixty-seven years old, with neuritis and gastric complications and b.u.m eyesight, and a wife that ain't ever seen a well day; so they take every cent of their life savings of eighty-three dollars and settle on an abandoned farm in Connecticut and clear nine thousand dollars the first year raising the Little Giant caper for boiled mutton. There certainly ought to be a law against such romantic trifling. In the first place, think of a Connecticut farmer abandoning anything worth money! Old Timmins comes from Connecticut. Any time that old leech abandons a thing, bookkeepers and all other parties will do well to ride right along with him. I tell you now--"

The second cigarette was under way, and suddenly, without modulation, the performer was again on the theme, Posnett _nee_ Postlethwaite.

"Met her two years ago in Boston, where I was suffering a brief visit with my son-in-law's aunts. She was the sole widow of a large woolen mill. That's about all I could ever make out--couldn't get any line on him to speak of. The first time I called on her--she was in pink silk pyjamas, smoking a perfecto cigar, and unpacking a bale of lion and tiger skins she'd shot in Africa, or some place--she said she believed there would be fewer unhappy marriages in this world if women would only try more earnestly to make a companion of their husbands; she said she'd tried hard to make one of hers, but never could get him interested in her pursuits and pastimes, he preferring to set sullenly at his desk making money. She said to the day of his death he'd never even had a polo mallet in his hand. And wasn't that pitiful!

"And right now she wanted to visit a snappy little volcano she'd heard about in South America--only she had a grown son and daughter she was trying to make companions of, so they would love and trust her; and they'd begged her to do something nearer home that was less fatiguing; and mebbe she would. And how did I find ranching now? Was I awfully keen about it and was it ripping good sport? I said yes, to an extent. She said she thought it must be ripping, what with chasing the wild cattle over hill and dale to la.s.so them, and firing off revolvers in company with lawless cowboys inflamed by drink. She went on to give me some more details of ranch life, and got so worked up about it that we settled things right there, she being a lady of swift decisions. She said it wouldn't be very exciting for her, but it might be fine for son and daughter, and bring them all together in a more sacred companionship.

"So I come back and got that place down the creek for her, and she sent out a professional architect and a landscape gardener, and some other experts that would know how to build a ranch _de luxe_, and the thing was soon done. And she sent son on ahead to get slightly acquainted with the wild life. He was a tall bent thing, about thirty, with a long squinted face and going hair, and soft, innocent, ginger-coloured whiskers, and hips so narrow they'd hardly hold his belt up. That rowdy mother of his, in trying to make a companion of him, had near scared him to death. He was permanently frightened. What he really wanted to do, I found out, was to study insect life and botany and geography and arithmetic, and so on, and raise orchids, instead of being killed off in a sudden manner by his rough-neck parent. He loved to ride a horse the same way a cat loves to ride a going stove.

"I started out with him one morning to show him over the valley. He got into the saddle all right and he meant well, but that don't go any too far with a horse. Pretty soon, down on the level here, I started to canter a bit. He grabbed for the saddle horn and caught a handful of bunch gra.s.s fifteen feet to the left of the trail. He was game enough.

He found his gla.s.ses and wiped 'em off, and said it was too bad the mater couldn't have seen him, because it would have been a bright spot in her life.

"Then he got on again and we took that steep trail up the side of the canon that goes over Arrowhead, me meaning to please him with some beautiful and rugged scenery, where one false step might cause utter ruin. It didn't work, though. After we got pretty well up to the rim of the canon he looks down and says he supposes they could recover one if one fell over there. I says: 'Oh, yes; they could recover one. They'd get you, all right. Of course you wouldn't look like anything!'

"He shudders at that and gets off to lead his horse, begging me to do the same. I said I never tried to do anything a horse could do better, and stayed on. Then he got confidential and told me a lot of interesting crimes this mater of his had committed in her mad efforts to make a companion of him. Once she'd tramped on the gas of a ninety-horsepower racer and socked him against a stone wall at a turn some fool had made in the road; and another time she near drowned him in the Arctic Ocean when she was off there for the polar-bear hunting; and she'd got him well clawed by a spotted leopard in India, that was now almost the best skin in her collection; and once in Switzerland he fell off the side of an Alp she was making him climb, causing her to be very short with him all day because it delayed the trip. Tied to a rope he was and hanging out there over nothing for about fifteen minutes--he must have looked like a sash weight.

"Then he told about learning to run a motor car all by himself, just to please the mater. The first time he made the sharp turns round their country house he took nine shingles off the corner and crumpled a fender like it was tissue paper; but he stuck to it till he got the score down to two or three shingles only. He seemed right proud of that, like it was bogey for the course, as you might say. He wasn't the greatest humourist in the world, being too high-minded, but he appealed to all my better instincts; he was trying so hard to make the grade out of respect for his bedizened and homicidal mother.

"And his poor sister, that come along later, was very much like him, being severe of outline and wearing the same kind of spectacles, and not fussing much about the fripperies of dress that engross so many of our empty-headed s.e.x and get 'em the notice of the male. Her complexion was brutally honest, which was about all her very best-wishers could say for it, but she was kind-hearted and earnest, and thought a good deal about the real or inner meaning of life. What she really yearned for was to stay in Boston and go to concerts, holding the music on her lap and checking off the notes with a gold pencil when the fiddlers played them.

I watched her do it one night. I don't know what her notion was, keeping cases on the orchestra that way; but it seemed to give her a secret satisfaction. She was also interested in bird life and other studies of a high character, and she didn't want to be made a companion of by her rabid parent any more than brother did. They was just a couple of lambkins born to a tiger.

"Pretty soon the ranch buildings was all complete and varnished and polished, like you seen to-day, and the family moved in with all kinds of uniformed servants that looked unhappy and desperate. They had a pained butler in a dress suit that never once set foot outside the house the whole five months they was here. He'd of been thought too gloomy for good taste, even at a funeral. He had me nervous every time I went there, thinking any minute he was going to break down and sob.

"And this lady loses no time making companions of her children that didn't want to be. First she tried to make 'em chase steers on horseback. A fact! That was one of her ideas of ranch life. When I asked her what she was going to stock her ranch with she said didn't I have some good heads of stock I could sell her? And I said yes, I had some good heads, and showed her a bunch of my thoroughbreds, thinking none but the best would satisfy her. She looked 'em over with a glittering eye and said they was too fat to run well. I didn't get her. I said it was true; I hadn't raised 'em for speed. I said I didn't have an animal on the place that could hit better than three miles an hour, and not that for long. I cheerfully admitted I didn't have a thoroughbred on the place that wouldn't be a joke on any track in the country; but I wanted to know what of it.

"'How do you get any sport out of them,' demands the lady, 'if they can't give you a jolly good chase?'

"That's what she asked me in so many words. I says, does she aim to breed racing cattle? And she says, where will the sport be with creatures all out of condition with fat, like mine are? It took me about ten minutes to get her idea, it was that heinous or criminal. When I did get it I sent her to old Safety First; and what does she do but buy a herd of twenty yearling steers from the old crook! Scrubby little runts that had been raised out in the hills and was all bone and muscle, and any one of 'em able to do a mile in four minutes flat, I guess.

"Old Safety was tickled to death at first when he put off this refuse on her at a price not much more than double what they would have brought in a tanyard, which was all they'd ever be good for except bone fertilizer, mebbe; but he was sick unto death when he found they was just what she wanted, the skinnier the better and he could have got anything he asked for 'em. He says to me afterward why don't I train some of mine and trim her good? But I told him I'm cinched for h.e.l.l, anyway, and don't have to make it tighter by torturing poor dumb brutes.

"That's what it amounted to. Having got Angora chaps and cowboy hats for herself and offsprings, what do they do but get on ponies and chase this herd all over creation, whirling their ropes, yelling, shooting in the air--just like you see on any well-conducted ranch. Once in a while the old lady herself, being a demon rider, would rope an animal and fetch it down; but brother and sister was very careful not to tangle their own ropes on anything. They didn't shoot their guns with any proper spirit, either; and when they tried to yip like cowboys they sounded like rabbits. And brother having to smoke brown-paper cigarettes, which he hated like poison and had trouble in rolling!

"Mother could roll 'em, all right--do it with one hand. And she urged sister to; but sister rebelled for once. The old lady admitted this was due to a fault in her early training. It seems her grandmother had been one of the old-fashioned sort; and, having studied the modern young woman of society in Boston and New York, she'd promised sister a string of pearls if she didn't either smoke or drink till her twenty-first birthday. Sister had not only won the pearls but had come on to twenty-eight without being like other young girls of the day, and wasn't going to begin now. So ma and brother had to do all the smoking.

"After a fine morning's run following the steers they'd like as not have a little branding in the afternoon, the old-fashioned kind that ain't done in the higher ranch circles any more, where a couple of silly punchers rope an animal fore and aft and throw it, thereby setting it back at least four months in its growth. The old lady was puzzled again by me having my branding done in a chute, where the poor things ain't worried more than is necessary. I bet she thought I was a short sport, not doing a thing on my place that would look well in a moving picture.

She got a lot of ripping sport out of this branding. Made no difference if they was already branded, they got it again; she'd brand 'em over and over. Two or three of that herd got it so often that they looked like these leather suitcases parties bring back from Europe stuck all over with hotel labels.

"Well, this branch of sport lasted quite a while, with them steers developing speed every day till they got too fast for any one but the old lady. Brother and sister would be left far behind, or mebbe get stacked up and discouraged or sprained for the day. The old dame said it was disheartening, indeed, trying to make companions of one's children when they showed such a low order of intelligence for it. Still, she was fair-minded; so she had a golf links made, and put 'em at that. She wouldn't play herself, saying it was an effeminate game, good for fat old men or schoolboys, but mebbe her chits would benefit by it and get a taste for proper sports, where you can break a bone now and then by not using care.

"But golf wasn't much better. Sister would carry a book of poetry with her and read it as she loafed from one hit to another. The old lady near shed tears at the sight. And brother was about as bad, getting hypnotized by pa.s.sing insect life and forgetting his score while prodding some new kind of bug.

"The old lady said I'd never believe what a care and responsibility children was. She had wanted 'em to go in for ranching and be awfully keen about it, and look how they acted! Still, she wouldn't give up. She suggested polo next; but sister said it wasn't a lady's game, making no demand upon the higher attributes of womanhood, and brother said he might go in for it if she'd let him play his on a bicycle, as being more reliable or stauncher than a pony.

"So she throws up her hands in despair, but thinks hard again; and at last she says she has the right sport for 'em and why didn't she think of it before! This new idea is to bring up her pack of prize-winning beagles, the sport being full of excitement, and yet safe enough for all concerned if they'll look where they walk and not stop to read slushy poems or collect insect life. Sister and brother said beagles, by all means, like drowning sailors clutching at a straw or something; and the old lady sent off a telegram.

"I admit I didn't know what kind of a game beagles was, but I didn't betray the fact when she told me about it. I was over to Egbert Floud's place next day and I asked him. But he didn't know and he couldn't even get the name right. He says: 'You mean beetles.' I says, 'Not at all'; that it's beagles. Then he says I must of got the name twisted, and probably it's one of these curly horns. That's as close as he ever did come to the name; and until he actually saw the things he insisted they was either something to blow on or something that crawled. 'Mark my words,' he says,'they're either a horn or a bug; and I wonder what this here blond guy will be doing next.' So I saw nothing sensible was to be had out of him, and I left him there, doddering.

"Then in about ten days, which was days of peace for brother and sister, because they didn't have to go in keenly for any new way of killing themselves off, what comes up but several crates of beagles, in charge of their valet or tutor! I'd looked forward to something of a thrilling or unknown character, and they turned out to be mere dogs; just little brown-and-white dogs that you wouldn't notice if you hadn't been excited by their names; kind of yapping mutts that some parties would poison off if they lived in the same neighbourhood with 'em. They all had names like Rex II and Lady Blessington, and so on; and each one had cost more than any three steers I had on the place. What do you think of that?

They was yapping in their kennels when I first seen 'em, with the old lady as excited as they was, and brother and sister trying to look excited in order to please mother, and at least looking relieved because no fatalities was in immediate prospect.

"I listened to the noise a while and acted nice by saying they was undoubtedly the very finest beagles I'd ever laid eyes on--which was the simple G.o.d's truth; and then I says won't she take one out of the cage and let him beagle some, me not having any idea what it would be like?

But the old lady says not yet, because the costumes ain't come. I thought at first it was the pups that had to be dressed up, but it seems it was costumes for her and brother and sister to wear; so I asked a few more silly questions and found out the mystery. It seemed the secret of a beagle's existence was rabbits. Yes, sir; they was mad about rabbits and went in keenly for 'em. Only they wouldn't notice one, I gathered, if the parties that followed 'em wasn't dressed proper for it.

"Then we went in where we could hear each other without screaming, and the lady tells me more about it, and how beagles is her last hope of her chits ever amounting to anything in the great world of sport. If they don't go in keenly for beagles she'll just have to give up and let Nature take its course with the poor things. And she said these was A-Number-One beagles, being sure to get a rabbit if one was in the country. She'd just had 'em at a big fashionable country resort down South, some place where the sport attracted much notice from the simple-minded peasantry, and it hadn't been a good country for rabbits; so the beagles had trooped into a backyard and destroyed a Belgian hare that had belonged to a little boy, whose father come out and swore at the costumed hunters in a very common manner, and offered to lick any three of 'em at once.

"And in hurrying acrost a field to get away from this rowdy, that seemed liable to forget himself and do something they'd all regret later, they was put up a tree by a bull that was sensitive about costumes, and had to stay there two hours, with the bull trying to grub up the tree, and would of done so if his owner hadn't come along and rescued 'em.

"She made it sound like an exciting sport, all right, yet nothing I thought I'd ever go in keenly for. It didn't seem like anything I'd get up in the night to indulge myself in. And I agreed with her that if her chits found beagling too adventurous, then all hope was gone and she might as well let 'em die peacefully in their beds.

"Two days later the costumes come along and I was kindly sent word to show up the next morning if I wanted to see some ripping sport that I'd be quite mad about and go in for keenly, and all that sort of thing, by Jove! Of course I go over, on account of this dame's atrocities never yet having failed to interest me, and I didn't think she'd fall down now. I felt strangely out of it, though, when I seen the costumes. Ma and sister had, from the top down, black velvet jockey caps; green velvet coats with gold b.u.t.tons; white pique skirts, coming to the knee; black silk stockings; and neat black shoes with white spats. Brother had been abused the same, barring the white skirt, which left him looking like something out of a collection called The Dolls of All Nations.

"I saw right off that all these clothes must be necessary--they looked so careful and expensive. Yes, Sir; that lady would no more of went out beagling without being draped for it than she'd of gone steer hunting without a vanity-box lashed to her saddle horn.

"I sort of hung back with the awe-stricken help when the start was made.

They was all out in front except the butler, who lurked in the entry looking like he'd pa.s.sed a night of grief at the new-made grave of his mother.

"The beagles surged all over the place the minute they was let loose, and then made for down in the willows below the house. And, sure enough, they started a cottontail down there and went in for him keenly, followed by ma and brother and sister. Brother started to yell 'Yoicks!

Yoicks!' But ma shut him off with a good deal of severity that caused him to blush at his words. It seems Yoicks is a cry you give at some other critical juncture in life. When beagles start you must yell 'Gone away!' in a clear, ringing voice. Brother meant well, but didn't know.

"Anyhow, they followed those pups, and I trailed along at a decent distance on my horse; and pretty soon they got the rabbit which had been fool enough to come round in a wide circle back to where it started from. Say! It was mere child's play for that plucky little band of nine dogs to clean up that rabbit. They never had a minute's fear of it and the rabbit didn't have the least chance of winning the fight, not at any stage. Yes, sir! any time you see nine beagles setting on a tuckered rabbit--I don't care how wild he is--you'll know how to put your money down.

"I never did see a rabbit put up a worse fight than that one did. I rode up to its fragments, and the old lady was saying how ripping it was and calling sister a mollycoddle, because here was sister crying like a baby over the rabbit's fate--a rabbit she'd never set eyes on before in her life. Brother didn't look like he had gone in keenly for the sport, either. He was kind of green and yellow, like one of these parties on shipboard about the time he's saying he don't feel the boat's motion the least bit; and, anyway, he's got a sure-fire remedy for it if anything does happen. I just kind of stood around, neutral and revolted.