There was nothing unique to Tom Simpson in filling that very popular rôle of a man without a job. He frequently had played in the great drama of life as one of the supernumeraries in the same capacity before. He carried his part easily as he rode on toward the Ellison ranch to deliver the borrowed horse and gun. There was something new and diverting, however, in the experience of meeting such a supreme ass as Sid Coburn. How such a man could run at large, carrying on even the primitive business of grazing cattle, without somebody backing him up and taking everything away from him, passed all understanding.
Simpson wondered if the fellow would have the gall to come to Eudora Ellison with a demand for the return of the horse. He concluded it was altogether probable. No doubt Coburn had bought the animal from the man who stole it, without troubling over title in the case. Very likely he never had heard of Eudora's loss, or had not heeded it, a thing quite natural in a country where reports of stolen horses must have been as thick as flies.
It would be interesting to see how far he'd get with a demand on the girl for her valuable pet. Probably to the front gate in double-quick, with a flock of bullets cooing around his ears. Simpson stole a little grin from himself, and looked around apprehensively as he committed the indiscretion, as if he feared somebody had caught him at it and would bring it up against him in due time.
While he was not troubled over his own situation to any worrisome extent, he could not forbear speculating on the future, or wonder where he was to take up the lost reins of his somewhat erratic destiny and begin driving a straight course again. If the livery driver had it right, there was trouble waiting for him at Drumwell. Certainly there was nothing else, the business possibilities of the town for a man out of a job being next to nothing at all.
The town marshal would have a grudge against him as well as that crab of a man who carried his head on his shoulder, as if it were another man's head that he had picked up on the road and was bringing home. Drumwell was a good enough place to avoid.
He considered Wellington, where he might resume his original intention of adventuring into the Panhandle, the trunk railroad line running through that place; and of Wichita, famed throughout the southwest as a cattlemen's centre. He had only a few dollars, a very few dollars. And there was no way for a man without a horse to travel except by rail. He might be obliged to return to Drumwell, it appeared as if he would be forced to do so, to resume his indefinite way.
At Drumwell he might get a ride on a stock train as far as Wellington or Wichita. He plotted a definite course, ending satisfactorily at either place. That would be the program: Wellington or Wichita. So much decided, he left it there.
They accepted his return at the Ellison ranch as a matter of course. Tom would have been deeply affronted if they had taken it otherwise, and he would have been greatly surprised. It was only a little past noon when he arrived and, as he had left Coburn's inhospitable house without breakfast, the cordial invitation to dinner was doubly welcome.
Yet it was hardly an invitation, for Mrs. Ellison was calling him Tom as naturally and easily as if she had known him all his life. It was more like the pleasurable bustling around setting out things for one of the family who had arrived a little late. The two women sat at table with him, although they had finished their meal before he arrived, carrying out that comfortable feeling of family reunion after adventures afar upon the road.
They inquired of his reception at Coburn's, neither shocked nor surprised, apparently, to learn that it had been a little cold. Simpson made it a humorous recital, stressing far more the defiant strategy of the son and hope of the Coburn house in removing the bowl of preserves beyond the hungry stranger's reach than Coburn's surprise at finding him there. He passed over entirely the incident which had led up to the gun-pulling, only saying that Coburn was wrathful over the horse. He might be expected to appear with a demand for it, he was so hot over the shame the horse had brought on him in going to the wrong home.
In reply to Mrs. Ellison's inquiry on his future plans, Tom admitted they were not so fixed as to admit no revision, and at present they were laid out only as far as Wichita at the uttermost. He might pick up a job with some outfit down in the Nation if he went to Drumwell and stayed around a while, she said, but going to town would subject him to the danger of running into the surviving members of the gang that had raided them. Which, Tom admitted with no apparent concern, was true.
Mrs. Ellison regretted that misfortune had reduced them to such straits that they could no longer offer anybody work, although there was enough of it needed around the place, in all conscience. Some of the neighbors would be driving to Drumwell in a few days, very likely; as for herself and Eudora, they seldom made the trip. It took two days, and they hadn't much to go for, although Eudora was planning big things in the bone trade, which would keep her on the road all the time if her project developed as she hoped.
Simpson proposed to work around the place, putting things to rights, until somebody came along with a conveyance bound for town. Mrs. Ellison agreed to the proposal eagerly, suggesting a scythe among the undergrowth in the orchard.
So it came around that Tom Simpson found himself hitched to an Irishman's razor among the tall horseweeds in the orchard that afternoon. It was a blue October day; the ground was sown with apples ripe and fragrant, apples fermenting and cidery and squashy under foot, apples enough to have supplied the entire population of that township. There was not even a hog on the Ellison place to profit by a little of the waste.
It was pleasant in the orchard, although mowing thickstemmed weeds which stood higher than his head was a new experience for Tom. There was no sound of human activity in the neighborhood, although Mrs. Ellison said homesteaders were settling around them rapidly and there would be no more range left in a little while. A condition greatly to be desired, Tom thought. The nobler purpose of that land would be served by the plowman rather than the cowman. How much better a man felt swinging a scythe in a quiet, fruit-scented orchard than riding the long watches on the range! How much more a man!
That night as he sat in the comfortable kitchen after supper, feeling very much at home in the company of the two women who had accepted him on his face with such generous and open trust, Tom got to wondering if he didn't owe it to their hospitality to tell them something of himself. They must think it strange of him to go roving around with not so much as a change of clothing when the poorest cowboy on the drift had his roll behind the saddle. A polite consideration, unusual delicacy for people in their position, had restrained their curiosity on the turn of affairs which had led to his leaving his last stoppingplace without so much as an extra shirt.
They did not know whether he was a fugitive from justice or misfortune. He did not want to appear mysterious, but he had the inherent reluctance of his nation in making a public display of private difficulties. And now Mrs. Ellison was regarding him with motherly tenderness as he smoked his pipe, the filling supplied by Eudora from a large tin somebody had left on the kitchen shelf. Rather indifferent filling at that, but his own pouch was empty, and any man will agree that poor tobacco is far ahead of no tobacco in such a distressing contingency.
"Haven't you got any relatives at all in this country, Tom?" Mrs. Ellison asked.
She was darning a large, comfortable sock, he wondered for whom, a little gourd of the kind called cymblin pushed into the broken toe. She scarcely looked up from her careful work when she spoke.
"Not a soul," he replied, so readily and cheerfully as to give the impression that he preferred relatives afar to relatives close at hand any day. "Oh well, I have a distant uncle in Kansas City—one of those chaps who takes charge of your detachable property under certain conditions, you know. His name is Blitz."
"Oh, you get out!"
Mrs. Ellison rebuked his apparent facetiousness, not quite understanding the relationship. But Eudora understood all about that kind of uncle. She grinned, not very mirthfully, for she knew that uncommon hard luck must have pushed Tom to Mr. Blitz's door.
"He means a pawnbroker, mother—a place where you leave your watch for ten dollars till you can rake up the money to redeem it."
"Bless my soul!" said Mrs. Ellison, genuinely startled and shocked. She stopped darning to look at him with astonished severity. "I hope you haven't been gamblin'?"
"Mother!" Eudora chided, but gently, the reflection of an ungrinned grin in her eyes. For she had a notion that it must have been that way, knowing men somewhat better than her mother, a state of sophistication not uncommon in any age.
"Just so," Tom admitted, nodding gravely, his eyes as straight ahead as his pipestem pointed.
"Well, I'm glad you're honest enough to admit it, anyhow," Mrs. Ellison said. "What kind of a game did you lose on? They're all crooked, they tell me."
"A kind of a game of checkers," Tom replied, his eyes still fixed straight ahead on nothing but the kitchen wall that anybody but himself could see. What he saw was another thing.
"One of the biggest fool, triflin' games of all," Mrs. Ellison commented with the decisiveness of authority. "I'm surprised at you, Tom Simpson!"
"The game is played," said Tom, not turning from his concentrated staring for even one wink, "on small oblongs of land called city lots. A fellow puts his money down on them, expecting to make a quick move that will bring him out winner—then he goes to see his uncle, Blitz."
"I heard about that real estate boom in Kansas City," Mrs. Ellison said, nodding, fully enlightened now. "My sister in Lexington wrote to me about it—her husband's been dabblin' around in it expectin' to make a fortune."
"There's a large hole in the bottom of it now," Tom said.
"I suppose that Blitz man's got everything you own—you gambled down to the last dollar you could rake and scrape, I reckon, like a man will do."
"No," said Tom, looking at her with a lively light in his eyes, "my trunk and all my gay, as well as somber, apparel is being retained by a dear humanitarian for certain arrears in room rent. I hope to be able to recover it from her, but"
"Her? Do you mean to tell me there's any woman that onery in the state of Missouri?"
"I think it's a question of security, rather than morals," Tom said.
"And you startin' to go away out to the Panhandle without even a change of shirts to your back!"
"Oh, mother!" said Eudora softly, a bit shocked, or making a good pretense of being, at any rate, by these personal references.
Mrs. Ellison was flushed with resentment against the hard-fisted lady in Kansas City, whose conduct in holding the trunk she took as a reflection on the world-famed hospitality of Missourians. She doubtless felt very matriarchal, although she was not more than half as old as she imagined herself to be, having nothing of the look of grandmother about her as she flicked her quick needle in and out mending the hole in the big yarn sock. Only that her years of isolation had been long, and the world of Missouri and her young days seemed very far away.
"Well, I'll tell you what you'll do, Tom Simpson," she said, laying it down with determination not to be gainsaid, "you'll stay right here on this place till you can send for that trunk. I'm not goin' to have any man wanderin' around over the country without even as much as an extra handkerchief to blow his nose on."
She paused in her work to give him a defiant look, as if daring him to set up his desires and decisions against her own.
"You are very-very kind," Tom Simpson said, his voice gentle and low.
Eudora, busy with the after-supper work around the big, home-feeling room, came to the table where her mother sat across from Tom. She was shrouded in a checked apron, her short, curly black hair—it fell about midway of her rather long slender neck—pushed back from her forehead and held by a curved comb. There was eagerness in her eyes, a color of excitement in her bright handsome face.
"I've been wondering, mother," she said, dividing a Jook between her parent and guest, "if we couldn't get Mr. Simpson to go in with us on the bone business? I could pick them up and haul them here, and T— Mr. Simpson, could do the long hauling to town."
"That's what's he's going to do," Mrs. Ellison replied calmly. "I had it all decided on when I spoke."
"There's no big money in it," Eudora explained, taking it for granted that Tom had been drafted and wouldn't refuse to serve, "but it will beat a cowboy job. All that worries me is that gang of horsethieves. They'll lay for you—either in Drumwell or along the road."
"I'm going to take it up with Sheriff Treadwell," Mrs. Ellison announced in her final way. "He's paid to rid the country of that kind of people, even if we never did call on him when we had men of our own to keep them in their proper places. If he can't do it, or won't do it, I'll know the reason why."
"I rather think they can be managed," Tom said quietly.
"You'll help us, then, will you, Tom? You'll go in with us?" Eudora fairly sparkled with eagerness as she put the double question, which all amounted to the same thing.
"You're too generous in taking up a stray chap this way, Mrs. Ellison, Miss Eudora."
Tom rose formally as he spoke, laying his pipe aside, his face as serious as if millions were hanging on the deal. And in relation to his financial status at that hour, it was a very important piece of business for Tom Simpson, indeed. A dollar looked as big to him that night as the hind wheel of a wagon.
"Then it's yours for bones," Eudora said, reaching her hand across the table to seal the compact as man to man.
"And for the bones," said Tom, squeezing her hand a little more ardently than a plain business transaction justified, beyond a doubt.