Somewhere in Red Gap Part 7

"Show him how I can shoot," said he.

The amazing Boogies waddled--yet with dignity--to a point ten paces distant, drew a coin from the pocket of his dingy overalls, and spun it to the blue of heaven. Ere it fell the deadly weapon bore swiftly on it and snapped.

"Crack!" said the marksman grimly.

His a.s.sistant recovered the coin, scrutinized it closely, rubbed a fat thumb over its supposedly dented surface, and again spun it. The desperado had turned his back. He drew as he wheeled, and again I was given to understand that his aim had been faultless.

"Good Little Sure Shot!" declaimed Boogies fulsomely.

"Hold it in your hand oncet," directed Little Sure Shot. The intrepid a.s.sistant gallantly extended the half dollar at arm's length between thumb and finger and averted his statesman's face with practiced apprehension. "Crack!" said Little Sure Shot, and the coin seemed to be struck from the unscathed hand. "Only nicked the aidge of it," said he, genially deprecating. "I don't like to take no chancet with the lad's mitt."

It had indeed been a pretty display of sharpshooting--and noiseless.

"Had me nervous, you bet, first time he tried that," called Boogles.

"Didn't know his work then. Thought sure he'd wing me."

Jimmie Time loftily ejected imaginary sh.e.l.ls from his trusty firearm and seemed to expel smoke from its delicate interior. Boogies waddled his approach.

"Any time they back Little Sure Shot up against the wall they want to duck," said he warmly. "He has 'em hard to find in about a minute. Tell him about that fresh depity marshal, Jimmie."

"I already did," said Jimmie.

"Ain't he the h.e.l.l-cat?" demanded Boogles, mopping a brow that Daniel Webster would have observed with instant and perhaps envious respect.

"I been a holy terror in my time, all right, all right!" admitted the hero. "Never think it to look at me though. One o' the deceivin' kind till I'm put upon; then--good-night!"

"Jest like that!" murmured Boogles.

"Buryin' ground--that's all." The lips of the bad man shut grimly on this.

"Say," demanded Boogles, "on the level, ain't he the real Peruvian doughnuts? Don't he jest make 'em all hunt their--" The tribute was unfinished.

"You ol' Jim! You ol' Jim Time!" Shrilly this came from Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the Arrowhead framed in the kitchen doorway of the ranch house.

He brandished a scornful and commanding dish towel at the bad man, who instantly and almost cravenly cowered under the distant a.s.sault. The garment of his old bad past fell from him, leaving him as one exposed in the market-place to the scornful towels of Chinamen. "You run, ol' Jim Time! How you think catch 'um din' not have wood?"

"Now I was jest goin' to," mumbled Jimmie Time; and he amazingly slunk from the scene of his late triumphs toward the open front of a woodhouse.

His insulter turned back to the kitchen with a final affronting flourish of the towel. The whisper of Boogles came hoa.r.s.ely to me: "Some of these days Little Sure Shot'll put a dose o' cold lead through that c.h.i.n.k's heart."

"Is he really dangerous?" I demanded.

"Dangerous!" Boogles choked warmly on this. "Let me tell you, that old boy is the real Peruvian doughnuts, and no mistake! Some day there won't be so many c.h.i.n.ks round this dump. No, sir-ee! That little cutthroat'll have another notch in his gun."

The situation did indeed seem to brim with the cheerfullest promise; yet something told me that Little Sure Shot was too good, too perfect.

Something warned me that he suffered delusions of grandeur--that he fell, in fact, somewhat short of being the real doughnuts, either of a Peruvian or any other valued sort.

Nor had many hours pa.s.sed ere it befell emphatically even so. There had been the evening meal, followed by an hour or so of the always pleasing and often instructive talk of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, who has largely known life for sixty years and found it entertaining and good. And we had parted at an early nine, both tired from the work and the play that had respectively engaged us the day long.

My candle had just been extinguished when three closely fired shots cracked the vast stillness of the night. Ensued vocal explosions of a curdling shrillness from the back of the house. One instantly knew them to be indignant and Chinese. Caucasian ears gathered this much. I looked from an open window as the impa.s.sioned cries came nearer. The lucent moon of the mountains flooded that side of the house, and starkly into its light from round the nearest corner struggled Lew Wee, the Chinaman.

He shone refulgent, being yet in the white or full-dress uniform of his calling.

In one hand he held the best gun of Jimmie Time; in the other--there seemed to be a well-gripped connection with the slack of a buckskin shirt--writhed the alleged real doughnuts of a possibly Peruvian character. The captor looked aloft and remained vocal, waving the gun, waving Jimmie Time, playing them together as cymbals, never loosening them. It was fine. It filled the eye and appeased the deepest longings of the ear.

Then from a neighbouring window projected the heroic head and shoulders of my hostess, and there boomed into the already vivacious libretto a pa.s.sionate barytone, or thereabout, of sterling timbre.

"What in the name of--"

I leave it there. To do so is not only kind but necessary. The most indulgent censor that ever guarded the columns of a print intended for young and old about the evening lamp would swiftly delete from this invocation, if not the name of Deity itself, at least the greater number of the attributes with which she endowed it. A few were conventional enough, but they served only to accentuate others that were too hastily selected in the heat of this crisis. Enough to say that the lady overbore by sheer ma.s.s of tone production the strident soprano of Lew Wee, controlling it at length to a lucid disclosure of his grievance.

From the doorway of his kitchen, inoffensively proffering a final cigarette to the radiant night, he had been the target of three shots with intent to kill. He submitted the weapon. He submitted the writhing a.s.sa.s.sin.

"I catch 'um!" he said effectively, and rested his case.

"Now--I aimed over his head." It was Jimmie Time alias Little Sure Shot, and he whimpered the words. "I jest went to play a sell on him."

The voice of the judge boomed wrathfully on this:

"You darned pestering mischief, you! Ain't I forbid you time and again ever to load them guns? Where'd you get the ca'tridges?"

"Now--I found 'em," pleaded the bad man. "I did so; I found 'em."

"c.o.o.ned 'em, you mean!" thundered the judge. "You c.o.o.ned 'em from Buck or Sandy. Don't tell me, you young reprobate!"

"He all like bad man," submitted the prosecution. "I tell 'um catch stlovewood; he tell 'um me: 'You go to haitch!' I tell 'um: 'You ownself go to haitch! He say: 'I flan you my gun plitty soon!' He do."

"I aimed over the coward's head," protested the defendant.

"Can happen!" sanely objected the prosecution.

"Ain't I told you what I'd do if you loaded them guns?" roared the judge. "Gentle, limping, baldheaded--" [Deleted by censor.] "How many more times I got to tell you? Now you know what you'll get. You'll get your needings--that's what you'll get! All day to-morrow! You hear me?

You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow! Put 'em on first thing in the morning and wear 'em till sundown. No hiding out, neither! Wear 'em where folks can see what a bad boy you are. And swearing, too! I got to be 'shamed of you! Yes, sir! Everybody'll know how 'shamed I am to have a tough kid like you on the place. I won't be able to hold my head up. You wear 'em!"

"I--I--I aimed above--" Jimmie Time broke down. He was weeping bitterly.

His captor released him with a final shake, and he brought a forearm to his streaming eyes.

"You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow!" again thundered the judge as the culprit sobbed a stumbling way into obscurity.

"You'self go to haitch!" the unrelenting complainant called after him.

The judge effected a rumbling withdrawal. The night was again calm. Then I slept on the problem of the Arrowhead's two-gun bad man. It seemed now pretty certain that the fatuous Boogles had grossly overpraised him. I must question his being the real doughnuts of any sort--even the mildest--much less the real Peruvian. But what was "'em" that in degrading punishment and to the public shame of the Arrowhead he must wear on the morrow? What, indeed, could "'em" be?

I woke, still pondering the mystery. Nor could I be enlightened during my breakfast, for this was solitary, my hostess being long abroad to far places of the Arrowhead, and the stolid mask of Lew Wee inviting no questions.

Breakfast over, I stationed myself in the bracing sunlight that warmed the east porch and aimlessly overhauled a book of flies. To three that had proved most popular in the neighbouring stream I did small bits of mending, ever with a questing eye on adjacent outbuildings, where Little Sure Shot--_nee_ Time--might be expected to show himself, wearing "'em."

A blank hour elapsed. I no longer affected occupation with the flies.

Jimmie Time was irritating me. Had he not been specifically warned to "wear 'em" full shamefully in the public eye? Was not the public eye present, avid? Boogles I saw intermittently among beanpoles in the garden. He appeared to putter, to have no care or system in his labour.

And at moments I noticed he was dropping all pretense of this to stand motionless, staring intently at the shut door of the stable.