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

“Now you gentlemen needn’t bother about me.”

“We’ll have to, m’m. You ain’t used to Separ.”

“Oh, I am no—tenderfoot, don’t you call them?” She whipped out her pistol, and held it at the cow-puncher, laughing.

This would have given no pleasure to me; but over Lin’s features went a glow of delight, and he stood gazing at the pointed weapon and the girl behind it. “My!” he said, at length, almost in a whisper, “she’s got the drop on me!”

“I reckon I’d be afraid to shoot that one of yours,” said Miss Buckner. “But this hits a target real good and straight at fifteen yards.” And she handed it to him for inspection.

He received it, hugely grinning, and turned it over and over. “My!” he murmured again. “Why, shucks!” He looked at Miss Buckner with stark rapture, caressing the polished revolver at the same time with a fond, unconscious thumb. “You hold it just as steady as I could,” he said with pride, and added, insinuatingly, “I could learn yu’ the professional drop in a morning. This here is a little dandy gun.”

“You’d not trade, though,” said she, “for all your flattery.”

“Will yu’ trade?” pounced Lin. “Won’t yu’?”

“Now, Mr. McLean, I am afraid you’re thoughtless. How could a girl like me ever hold that awful .45 Colt steady?”

“She knows the brands, too!” cried Lin, in ecstasy. “See here,” he remarked to me with a manner that smacked of command, “we’re losing time right now. You go and tell the agent to hustle and fix his room up for a lady, and I’ll bring her along.”

I found the agent willing, of course, to sleep on the floor of the office. The toy station was also his home. The front compartment held the ticket and telegraph and mail and express chattels, and the railing, and room for the public to stand; through a door you then passed to the sitting, dining, and sleeping box; and through another to a cooking-stove in a pigeon-hole. Here flourished the agent and his lungs, and here the company’s strict orders bade him sleep in charge; so I helped him put his room to rights. But we need not have hurried ourselves. Mr. McLean was so long in bringing the lady that I went out and found him walking and talking with her, while fifty yards away skulked poor Texas, alone. This boy’s name was, like himself, of the somewhat unexpected order, being Manassas Donohoe.

As I came towards the new friends they did not appear to be joking, and on seeing me Miss Buckner said to Lin, “Did he know?”

Lin hesitated.

“You did know!” she exclaimed, but lost her resentment at once, and continued, very quietly and with a friendly tone, “I reckon you don’t like to have to tell folks bad news.”

It was I that now hesitated.

“Not to a strange girl, anyway!” said she. “Well, now I have good news to tell you. You would not have given me any shock if you had said you knew about poor Nate, for that’s the reason—Of course those things can’t be secrets! Why, he’s only twenty, sir! How should he know about this world? He hadn’t learned the first little thing when he left home five years ago. And I am twenty-three—old enough to be Nate’s grandmother, he’s that young and thoughtless. He couldn’t ever realize bad companions when they came around. See that!” She showed me a paper, taking it out like a precious thing, as indeed it was; for it was a pardon signed by Governor Barker. “And the Governor has let me carry it to Nate myself. He won’t know a thing about it till I tell him. The Governor was real kind, and we will never forget him. I reckon Nate must have a mustache by now?” said she to Lin.

“Yes,” Lin answered, gruffly, looking away from her, “he has got a mustache all right.”

“He’ll be glad to see you,” said I, for something to say.

“Of course he will! How many hours did you say we will be?” she asked Lin, turning from me again, for Mr. McLean had not been losing time. It was plain that between these two had arisen a freemasonry from which I was already shut out. Her woman’s heart had answered his right impulse to tell her about her brother, and I had been found wanting!

So now she listened over again to the hours of stage jolting that “we” had before us, and that lay between her and Nate. “We would be four— herself, Lin, myself, and the boy Billy. Was Billy the one at supper? Oh no; just Billy Lusk, of Laramie. “He’s a kid I’m taking up the country,” Lin explained. “Ain’t you most tuckered out?”

“Oh, me!” she confessed, with a laugh and a sigh.

There again! She had put aside my solicitude lightly, but was willing Lin should know her fatigue. Yet, fatigue and all, she would not sleep in the agent’s room. At sight of it and the close quarters she drew back into the outer office, so prompted by that inner, unsuspected strictness she had shown me before.

“Come out!” she cried, laughing. “Indeed, I thank you. But I can’t have you sleep on this hard floor out here. No politeness, now! Thank you ever so much. I’m used to roughing it pretty near as well as if I was—a cowboy!” And she glanced at Lin. “They’re calling forty-seven,” she added to the agent.

“That’s me,” he said, coming out to the telegraph instrument. “So you’re one of us?”

“I didn’t know forty-seven meant Separ,” said I. “How in the world do you know that?”

“I didn’t. I heard forty-seven, forty-seven, forty-seven, start and go right along, so I guessed they wanted him, and he couldn’t hear them from his room.”

“Can yu’ do astronomy and Spanish too?” inquired the proud and smiling McLean.

“Why, it’s nothing! I’ve been day operator back home. Why is a deputy coming through on a special engine?”

“Please don’t say it out loud!” quavered the agent, as the machine clicked its news.

“Yu’ needn’t be scared of a girl,” said Lin. “Another sheriff! So they’re not quit bothering us yet.”

However, this meddling was not the company’s, but the county’s; a sheriff sent to arrest, on a charge of murder, a man named Trampas, said to be at the Sand Hill Ranch. That was near Rawhide, two stations beyond, and the engine might not stop at Separ, even to water. So here was no molesting of Separ’s liberties.

“All the same,” Lin said, for pistols now and then still sounded at the corrals, “the boys’ll not understand that till it’s explained, and they may act wayward first. I’d feel easier if you slept here,” he urged to the girl. But she would not. “Well, then, we must rustle some other private place for you. How’s the section-house?”

“Rank,” said the agent, “since those Italians used it. The pump engineer has been scouring, but he’s scared to bunk there yet himself.”

“Too bad you couldn’t try my plan of a freight-car!” said I.

“An empty?” she cried. “Is there a clean one?”

“You’ve sure never done that?” Lin burst out.

“So you’re scandalized,” said she, punishing him instantly. “I reckon it does take a decent girl to shock you.” And while she stood laughing at him with robust irony, poor Lin began to stammer that he meant no offence. “Why, to be sure you didn’t!” said she. “But I do enjoy you real thoroughly.”

“Well, m’m,” protested the wincing cow-puncher, driven back to addressing her as “ma’am,” “we ain’t used—”

“Don’t tangle yourself up worse, Mr. McLean. No more am I ‘used.’ I have never slept in an empty in my life. And why is that? Just because I’ve never had to. And there’s the difference between you boys and us. You do lots of things you don’t like, and tell us. And we put up with lots of things we don’t like, but we never let you find out. I know you meant no offense,” she continued, heartily, softening towards her crushed protector, “because you’re a gentleman. And lands! I’m not complaining about an empty. That will be rich—if I can have the door shut.”

Upon this she went out to view the cars, Mr. McLean hovering behind her with a devoted, uneasy countenance, and frequently muttering “Shucks!” while the agent and I followed with a lamp, for the dark was come. With our help she mounted into the first car, and then into the next, taking the lamp. And while she scanned the floor and corners, and slid the door back and forth, Lin whispered in my ear: “Her name’s Jessamine. She told me. Don’t yu’ like that name?” So I answered him, “Yes, very much,” thinking that some larger flower—but still a flower—might have been more apt.

“Nobody seems to have slept in these,” said she, stepping down; and on learning that even the tramp avoided Separ when he could, she exclaimed, “What lodging could be handier than this! Only it would be so cute if you had a Louavull an’ Nashvull car,” said she. “Twould seem like my old Kentucky home!” And laughing rather sweetly at her joke, she held the lamp up to read the car’s lettering. “‘D. and R. G.’ Oh, that’s a way-off stranger! I reckon they’re all strange.” She went along the train with her lamp. “Yes, ‘B. and M.’ and ‘S. C. and P.’ Oh, this is rich! Nate will laugh when he hears. I’ll choose ‘C., B. and Q.’ That’s a little nearer my country. What time does the stage start? Porter, please wake ‘C., B. and Q.’ at six, sharp,” said she to Lin.

From this point of the evening on, I think of our doings—their doings— with a sort of unchanging homesickness. Nothing like them can ever happen again, I know; for it’s all gone—settled, sobered, and gone. And whatever wholesomer prose of good fortune waits in our cup, how I thank my luck for this swallow of frontier poetry which I came in time for!

To arrange some sort of bed for her was the next thing, and we made a good shake-down—clean straw and blankets and a pillow, and the agent would have brought sheets; but though she would not have these, she did not resist—what do you suppose?—a looking-glass for next morning! And we got a bucket of water and her valise. It was all one to her, she said, in what car Lin and I put up; and let it be next door, by all means, if it pleased him to think he could watch over her safety better so; and she shut herself in, bidding us good-night. We began spreading straw and blankets for ourselves, when a whistle sounded far and long, and its tone rose in pitch as it came.

“I’ll get him to run right to the corrals,” said the agent, “so the sheriff can tell the boys he’s not after them.”

“That’ll convince ‘em he is,” said Lin. “Stop him here, or let him go through.”

But we were not to steer the course that events took now. The rails of the main line beside us brightened in wavering parallels as the headlight grew down upon us, and in this same moment the shootings at the corrals chorused in a wild, hilarious threat. The burden of the coming engine heavily throbbed in the air and along the steel, and met and mixed with the hard, light beating of hoofs. The sounds approached together like a sort of charge, and I stepped between the freight-cars, where I heard Lin ordering the girl inside to lie down flat, and could see the agent running about in the dust, flapping his arms to signal with as much coherence as a chicken with its