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

head off. I had very short space for wonder or alarm. The edge of one of my freight-cars glowed suddenly with the imminent headlight, and galloping shots invaded the place. The horsemen flew by, overreaching, and leaning back and lugging against their impetus. They passed in a tangled swirl, and their dust coiled up thick from the dark ground and luminously unfolded across the glare of the sharp-halted locomotive. Then they wheeled, and clustered around it where it stood by our cars, its air-brake pumping deep breaths, and the internal steam humming through its bowels; and I came out in time to see Billy Lusk climb its front with callow, enterprising shouts. That was child’s play; and the universal yell now raised by the horsemen was their child’s play too; but the whole thing could so precipitately reel into the fatal that my thoughts stopped. I could only look when I saw that they had somehow recognized the man on the engine for a sheriff. Two had sprung from their horses and were making boisterously toward the cab, while Lin McLean, neither boisterous nor joking, was going to the cab from my side, with his pistol drawn, to keep the peace. The engineer sat with a neutral hand on the lever, the fireman had run along the top of the coal in the tender and descended and crouched somewhere, and the sheriff, cool, and with a good-natured eye upon all parties, was just beginning to explain his errand, when some rider from the crowd cut him short with an invitation to get down and have a drink. At the word of ribald endearment by which he named the sheriff, a passing fierceness hardened the officer’s face, and the new yell they gave was less playful. Waiting no more explanations, they swarmed against the locomotive, and McLean pulled himself up on the step. The loud talking fell at a stroke to let business go on, and in this silence came the noise of a sliding-door. At that I looked, and they all looked, and stood harmless, like children surprised. For there on the threshold of the freight-car, with the interior darkness behind her, and touched by the headlight’s diverging rays, stood Jessamine Buckner.

“Will you gentlemen do me a favor?” said she. “Strangers, maybe, have no right to ask favors, but I reckon you’ll let that pass this time. For I’m real sleepy!” She smiled as she brought this out. “I’ve been four days and nights on the cars, and tomorrow I’ve got to stage to Buffalo. You see I’ll not be here to spoil your fun tomorrow night, and I want boys to be boys just as much as ever they can. Won’t you put it off till tomorrow night?”

In their amazement they found no spokesman; but I saw Lin busy among them, and that some word was passing through their groups. After the brief interval of standstill they began silently to get on their horses, while the looming engine glowed and pumped its breath, and the sheriff and engineer remained as they were.

“Good-night, lady,” said a voice among the moving horsemen, but the others kept their abashed native silence; and thus they slowly filed away to the corrals. The figures, in their loose shirts and leathern chaps, passed from the dimness for a moment through the cone of light in front of the locomotive, so that the metal about them made here and there a faint, vanishing glint; and here and there in the departing column a bold, half-laughing face turned for a look at the girl in the doorway, and then was gone again into the dimness.

The sheriff in the cab took off his hat to Miss Buckner, remarking that she should belong to the force; and as the bell rang and the engine moved, off popped young Billy Lusk from his cow-catcher. With an exclamation of horror she sprang down, and Mr. McLean appeared, and, with all a parent’s fright and rage, held the boy by the arm grotesquely as the sheriff steamed by.

“I ain’t a-going to chase it,” said young Billy, struggling.

“I’ve a mind to cowhide you,” said Lin.

But Miss Buckner interposed. “Oh, well,” said she, “next time; if he does it next time. It’s so late to-night! You’ll not frighten us that way again if he lets you off?” she asked Billy.

“No,” said Billy, looking at her with interest. “Father ‘d have cowhided me anyway, I guess,” he added, meditatively.

“Do you call him father?”

“Ah, father’s at Laramie,” said Billy, with disgust. “He’d not stop for your asking. Lin don’t bother me much.”

“You quit talking and step up there!” ordered his guardian. “Well, m’m, I guess yu’ can sleep good now in there.”

“If it was only an ‘L. and N.’ I’d not have a thing against it! Good-night, Mr. McLean; good-night, young Mr.—”

“I’m Billy Lusk. I can ride Chalkeye’s pinto that bucked Honey Wiggin.”

“I am sure you can ride finely, Mr. Lusk. Maybe you and I can take a ride together. Pleasant dreams!”

She nodded and smiled to him, and slid her door to; and Billy considered it, remarking: “I like her. What makes her live in a car?”

But he was drowsing while I told him; and I lifted him up to Lin, who took him in his own blankets, where he fell immediately asleep. One distant whistle showed how far the late engine had gone from us. We left our car open, and I lay enjoying the cool air. Thus was I drifting off, when I grew aware of a figure in the door. It was Lin, standing in his stockings and not much else, with his pistol. He listened, and then leaped down, light as a cat. I heard some repressed talking, and lay in expectancy; but back he came, noiseless in his stockings, and as he slid into bed I asked what the matter was. He had found the Texas boy, Manassas Donohoe, by the girl’s car, with no worse intention than keeping a watch on it. “So I gave him to understand,” said Lin, “that I had no objection to him amusing himself playing picket-line, but that I guessed I was enough guard, and he would find sleep healthier for his system.” After this I went to sleep wholly; but, waking once in the night, thought I heard some one outside, and learned in the morning from Lin that the boy had not gone until the time came for him to join his outfit at the corrals. And I was surprised that Lin, the usually good-hearted, should find nothing but mirth in the idea of this unknown, unthanked young sentinel. “Sleeping’s a heap better for them kind till they get their growth,” was his single observation.

But when Separ had dwindled to toys behind us in the journeying stage I told Miss Jessamine, and although she laughed too, it was with a note that young Texas would have liked to hear; and she hoped she might see him upon her return, to thank him.

“Any Jack can walk around all night,” said Mr. McLean, disparagingly.

“Well, then, and I know a Jack who didn’t,” observed the young lady.

This speech caused her admirer to be full of explanations; so that when she saw how readily she could perplex him, and yet how capable and untiring he was about her comfort, helping her out or tucking her in at the stations where we had a meal or changed horses, she enjoyed the hours very much, in spite of their growing awkwardness.

But oh, the sparkling, unbashful Lin! Sometimes he sat himself beside her to be close, and then he would move opposite, the better to behold her.

Never, except once long after (when sorrow manfully borne had still further refined his clay), have I heard Lin’s voice or seen his look so winning. No doubt many a male bird cares nothing what neighbor bird overhears his spring song from the top of the open tree, but I extremely doubt if his lady-love, even if she be a frank, bouncing robin, does not prefer to listen from some thicket, and not upon the public lawn. Jessamine grew silent and almost peevish; and from discourse upon man and woman she hopped, she skipped, she flew. When Lin looked at his watch and counted the diminished hours between her and Buffalo, she smiled to herself; but from mention of her brother she shrank, glancing swiftly at me and my well-assumed slumber.

And it was with indignation and self-pity that I climbed out in the hot sun at last beside the driver and small Billy.

“I know this road,” piped Billy, on the box

“‘I camped here with father when mother was off that time. You can take a left-hand trail by those cottonwoods and strike the mountains.”

So I inquired what game he had then shot.

“Ah, just a sage-hen. Lin’s a-going to let me shoot a bear, you know. What made Lin marry mother when father was around?”

The driver gave me a look over Billy’s head, and I gave him one; and I instructed Billy that people supposed his father was dead. I withheld that his mother gave herself out as Miss Peck in the days when Lin met her on Bear Creek.

The formidable nine-year-old pondered. “The geography says they used to have a lot of wives at Salt Lake City. Is there a place where a woman can have a lot of husbands?”

“It don’t especially depend on the place,” remarked the driver to me.

“Because,” Billy went on, “Bert Taylor told me in recess that mother’d had a lot, and I told him he lied, and the other boys they laughed and I blacked Bert’s eye on him, and I’d have blacked the others too, only Miss Wood came out. I wouldn’t tell her what Bert said, and Bert wouldn’t, and Sophy Armstrong told her. Bert’s father found out, and he come round, and I thought he was a-going to lick me about the eye, and he licked Bert! Say, am I Lin’s, honest?”

“No, Billy, you’re not,” I said.

“Wish I was. They couldn’t get me back to Laramie then; but, oh, bother! I’d not go for ‘em! I’d like to see ‘em try! Lin wouldn’t leave me go. You ain’t married, are you? No more is Lin now, I guess. A good many are, but I wouldn’t want to. I don’t think anything of ‘em. I’ve seen mother take ‘pothecary stuff on the sly. She’s whaled me worse than Lin ever does. I guess he wouldn’t want to be mother’s husband again, and if he does,” said Billy, his voice suddenly vindictive, “I’ll quit him and skip.”

“No danger, Bill,” said I.

“How would the nice lady inside please you?” inquired the driver.

“Ah, pshaw! she ain’t after Lin!” sang out Billy, loud and scornful. “She’s after her brother. She’s all right, though,” he added, approvingly.

At this all talk stopped short inside, reviving in a casual, scanty manner; while unconscious Billy Lusk, tired of the one subject, now spoke cheerfully of birds’ eggs.

Who knows the child-soul, young in days, yet old as Adam and the hills? That school-yard slur about his mother was as dim to his understanding as to the offender’s, yet mysterious nature had bid him go to instant war! How foreseeing in Lin to choke the unfounded jest about his relation to Billy Lusk, in hopes to save the boy’s ever awakening to the facts of his mother’s life! “Though,” said the driver, an easygoing cynic, “folks with lots of fathers will find heaps of brothers in this country!” But presently he let Billy hold the reins, and at the next station carefully lifted him down and up. “I’ve knowed that woman, too,” he whispered to me. “Sidney, Nebraska. Lusk was off half the time. We laughed when she fooled