Lin McLean, Owen Wister [the false prince .TXT] 📗

At this Mr. McLean’s face grew more alert. “Say Doc,” said he, “what do yu’ want for Christmas that nobody’s likely to give yu’?”

“A big practice—big enough to interfere with my politics.”

“What else? Things and truck, I mean.”

“Oh—nothing I’ll get. People don’t give things much to fellows like me.”

“Don’t they? Don’t they?”

“Why, you and Santa Claus weren’t putting up any scheme on my stocking?”

“Well—”

“I believe you’re in earnest!” cried his Excellency. “That’s simply rich!” Here was a thing to relish! The Frontier comes to town “heeled for a big time,” finds that presents are all the rage, and must immediately give somebody something. Oh, childlike, miscellaneous Frontier! So thought the good-hearted Governor; and it seems a venial misconception. “My dear fellow,” he added, meaning as well as possible, “I don’t want you to spend your money on me.”

“I’ve got plenty all right,” said Lin, shortly.

“Plenty’s not the point. I’ll take as many drinks as you please with you. You didn’t expect anything from me?”

“That ain’t—that don’t—”

“There! Of course you didn’t. Then, what are you getting proud about? Here’s our shop.” They stepped in from the street to new crowds and counters. “Now,” pursued the Governor, “this is for a very particular friend of mine. Here they are. Now, which of those do you like best?”

They were sets of Tennyson in cases holding little volumes equal in number, but the binding various, and Mr. McLean reached his decision after one look. “That,” said he, and laid a large muscular hand upon the Laureate. The young lady behind the counter spoke out acidly, and Lin pulled the abject hand away. His taste, however, happened to be sound, or, at least, it was at one with the Governor’s; but now they learned that there was a distressing variance in the matter of price.

The Governor stared at the delicate article of his choice. “I know that Tennyson is what she—is what’s wanted,” he muttered; and, feeling himself nudged, looked around and saw Lin’s extended fist. This gesture he took for a facetious sympathy, and, dolorously grasping the hand, found himself holding a lump of bills. Sheer amazement relaxed him, and the cow-puncher’s matted wealth tumbled on the floor in sight of all people. Barker picked it up and gave it back. “No, no, no!” he said, mirthful over his own inclination to be annoyed; “you can’t do that. I’m just as much obliged, Lin,” he added.

“Just as a loan, Doc—some of it. I’m grass-bellied with spot-cash.”

A giggle behind the counter disturbed them both, but the sharp young lady was only dusting. The Governor at once paid haughtily for Tennyson’s expensive works, and the cow-puncher pushed his discountenanced savings back into his clothes. Making haste to leave the book department of this shop, they regained a mutual ease, and the Governor became waggish over Lin’s concern at being too rich. He suggested to him the list of delinquent taxpayers and the latest census from which to select indigent persons. He had patients, too, whose inveterate pennilessness he could swear cheerfully to—“since you want to bolt from your own money,” he remarked.

“Yes, I’m a green horse,” assented Mr. McLean, gallantly; “ain’t used to the looks of a twenty-dollar bill, and I shy at ‘em.”

From his face—that jocular mask—one might have counted him the most serene and careless of vagrants, and in his words only the ordinary voice of banter spoke to the Governor. A good woman, it may well be, would have guessed before this the sensitive soul in the blundering body, but Barker saw just the familiar, whimsical, happy-go-lucky McLean of old days, and so he went gayly and innocently on, treading upon holy ground. “I’ve got it!” he exclaimed; “give your wife something.”

The ruddy cow-puncher grinned. He had passed through the world of woman with but few delays, rejoicing in informal and transient entanglements, and he welcomed the turn which the conversation seemed now to be taking. “If you’ll give me her name and address,” said he, with the future entirely in his mind.

“Why, Laramie!” and the Governor feigned surprise.

“Say, Doc,” said Lin, uneasily, “none of ‘em ain’t married me since I saw yu’ last.”

“Then she hasn’t written from Laramie,” said the hilarious Governor, and Mr. McLean understood and winced in his spirit deep down. “Gee whiz!” went on Barker, “I’ll never forget you and Lusk that day!”

But the mask fell now. “You’re talking of his wife, not mine,” said the cow-puncher very quietly, and smiling no more; “and, Doc, I’m going to say a word to yu’, for I know yu’ve always been my good friend. I’ll never forget that day myself—but I don’t want to be reminded of it.”

“I’m a fool, Lin,” said the Governor, generous instantly. “I never supposed—”

“I know yu’ didn’t, Doc. It ain’t you that’s the fool. And in a way—in a way—” Lin’s speech ended among his crowding memories, and Barker, seeing how wistful his face had turned, waited. “But I ain’t quite the same fool I was before that happened to me,” the cow-puncher resumed, “though maybe my actions don’t show to be wiser. I know that there was better luck than a man like me had any call to look for.”

The sobered Barker said, simply, “Yes, Lin.” He was put to thinking by these words from the unsuspected inner man.

Out in the Bow Leg country Lin McLean had met a woman with thick, red cheeks, calling herself by a maiden name; and this was his whole knowledge of her when he put her one morning astride a Mexican saddle and took her fifty miles to a magistrate and made her his lawful wife to the best of his ability and belief. His sagebrush intimates were confident he would never have done it but for a rival. Racing the rival and beating him had swept Mr. McLean past his own intentions, and the marriage was an inadvertence. “He jest bumped into it before he could pull up,” they explained; and this casualty, resulting from Mr. McLean’s sporting blood, had entertained several hundred square miles of alkali. For the new-made husband the joke soon died. In the immediate weeks that came upon him he tasted a bitterness worse than in all his life before, and learned also how deep the woman, when once she begins, can sink beneath the man in baseness. That was a knowledge of which he had lived innocent until this time. But he carried his outward self serenely, so that citizens in Cheyenne who saw the cow-puncher with his bride argued shrewdly that men of that sort liked women of that sort; and before the strain had broken his endurance an unexpected first husband, named Lusk, had appeared one Sunday in the street, prosperous, forgiving, and exceedingly drunk. To the arms of Lusk she went back in the public street, deserting McLean in the presence of Cheyenne; and when Cheyenne saw this, and learned how she had been Mrs. Lusk for eight long, if intermittent, years, Cheyenne laughed loudly. Lin McLean laughed, too, and went about his business, ready to swagger at the necessary moment, and with the necessary kind of joke always ready to shield his hurt spirit. And soon, of course, the matter grew stale, seldom raked up in the Bow Leg country where Lin had been at work; so lately he had begun to remember other things beside the smouldering humiliation.

“Is she with him?” he asked Barker, and musingly listened while Barker told him. The Governor had thought to make it a racy story, with the moral that the joke was now on Lusk; but that inner man had spoken and revealed the cow-puncher to him in a new and complicated light; hence he quieted the proposed lively cadence and vocabulary of his anecdote about the house of Lusk, but instead of narrating how Mrs. beat Mr. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Mr. took his turn the odd days, thus getting one ahead of his lady, while the kid Lusk had outlined his opinion of the family by recently skipping to parts unknown, Barker detailed these incidents more gravely, adding that Laramie believed Mrs. Lusk addicted to opium.

“I don’t guess I’ll leave my card on ‘em,” said McLean, grimly, “if I strike Laramie.”

“You don’t mind my saying I think you’re well out of that scrape?” Barker ventured.

“Shucks, no! That’s all right, Doc. Only—yu’ see now. A man gets tired pretending—onced in a while.”

Time had gone while they were in talk, and it was now half after one and Mr. McLean late for that long-plotted first square meal. So the friends shook hands, wishing each other Merry Christmas, and the cow-puncher hastened toward his chosen companions through the stirring cheerfulness of the season. His play-hour had made a dull beginning among the toys. He had come upon people engaged in a pleasant game, and waited, shy and well disposed, for some bidding to join, but they had gone on playing with each other and left him out. And now he went along in a sort of hurry to escape from that loneliness where his human promptings had been lodged with him useless. Here was Cheyenne, full of holiday for sale, and he with his pockets full of money to buy; and when he thought of Shorty, and Chalkeye, and Dollar Bill, those dandies to hit a town with, he stepped out with a brisk, false hope. It was with a mental hurrah and a foretaste of a good time coming that he put on his town clothes, after shaving and admiring himself, and sat down to the square meal. He ate away and drank with a robust imitation of enjoyment that took in even himself at first. But the sorrowful process of his spirit went on, for all he could do. As he groped for the contentment which he saw around him he began to receive the jokes with counterfeit mirth. Memories took the place of anticipation, and through their moody shiftings he began to feel a distaste for the company of his friends and a shrinking from their lively voices. He blamed them for this at once. He was surprised to think he had never recognized before how light a weight was Shorty; and here was Chalkeye, who knew better, talking religion after two glasses. Presently this attack of noticing his friends’ shortcomings mastered him, and his mind, according to its wont, changed at a stroke. “I’m celebrating no Christmas with this crowd,” said the inner man; and when they had next remembered Lin McLean in their hilarity he was gone.

Governor Barker, finishing his purchases at half-past three, went to meet a friend come from Evanston. Mr. McLean was at the railway station, buying a ticket for Denver.

“Denver!” exclaimed the amazed Governor.

“That’s what I said,” stated Mr. McLean, doggedly.

“Gee whiz!” went his Excellency. “What are you going to do there?”

“Get good and drunk.”

“Can’t you find enough whiskey in Cheyenne?”

“I’m drinking champagne this trip.”

The cow-puncher went out on the platform and got aboard, and the train moved off. Barker had walked out too in his surprise, and as he stared after the last car, Mr. McLean waved his wide hat defiantly and went inside the door.

“And he says he’s got maturity,” Barker muttered. “I’ve known him since seventy-nine, and he’s kept about eight years old right along.” The Governor was cross, and sorry, and presently crosser. His jokes about Lin’s marriage came back to him and put him in a rage with the departed fool. “Yes, about eight. Or six,” said his Excellency, justifying himself by the past. For he had first known Lin, the boy of nineteen, supreme in length of limb and recklessness, breaking horses and feeling for an early mustache. Next, when the mustache was nearly accomplished,