McPACKEN was not much of a name for a town, but it was the name of that town. Doubtless it was good enough for what it designated, for there is no question that there was a certain dry-salt substantiality in the sound, suggestive of corned beef and cabbage, with such concomitant comforts as railroaders especially favor, and road-weary men of the range swing down from dusty saddles to enjoy.
The town lay close by the sprawling Arkansas River, colloquially called the Arkansaw, at a point where the Santa Fe trail of earlier days crossed that stream of deceptive shallows and wide-spreading bars of silt-white sand. Now another Santa Fe trail ran past its door, a trail wood-girded and steel-bound, whose roaring caravans made echoes among its planked buildings, trailing scents of alluring opulence out of their precious freight, rushing eastward from the orange groves of distant California.
Other scents, true, streamed from less romantic trains which jolted and thumped through the town with shrieking flange on curve, grinding brake-shoe against laboring wheel; scents of an industry to which men one knew and met on the street laid their hands, home-binding, intimate smells such as only cattle trains leave after them to speak of another sort of opulence, truly occidental. For McPacken was a town that had been established on cattle, and grown on cattle, and filled its stores and banks and homes and barber shops on cattle, from the very time that it welcomed the first dusty herd from Texas to its pens.
McPacken had lived and done well on the distinction of being the last loading-point to which Texas cattle were driven into Kansas for shipment to eastern markets. It had not been permitted to boast long of this peculiar favor of changing conditions. The day of the Texas cattlemen who brought their beef to the northern shipping-points on foot across a thousand miles of dusty trails, foraging them on the country as they passed, had come to an end shortly after the founding of McPacken on the Arkansas. The railroads had gone to Texas after the cattlemen's business, and the business of others along the way. Contrary to the expectations of everybody, the town did not die with the passing of the last driven herd.
Texas cattle had been brought to Kansas to fatten on its peculiarly succulent grass for many years before McPacken, and the railroad upon which it lay, graced that illimitable land. McPacken was a dot in the very center of the richest grazing country; chance had put it down at a place where each succeeding change seemed only to work its profit and contribute to its strength. Where herds formerly came to be loaded into trains, they arrived now on board of trains, to be dispersed among a hardy set of business adventurers known as feeders. These cattle were pastured along the broad river valley and brought to perfection for the butcher's block. On their day they were driven again to McPacken, loaded and shipped, their going and coming, their stay between, all leaving an accretion of profit in the town.
That was the reason for McPacken, and that was the way it grew. All that was not so very long ago as time runs under the bridges along the Arkansas. There are men still stumping around who rode after those long-horned herds of strangers from the Nueces as young chaps, able yet to take care of a man's ration of steak with their own teeth. Some of them have foreheads extending to their crowns by now; many are grizzled and whiskered, and galled by the saddle of time, but most of them are going strong. Measured by events, it was a long time ago, for things move fast along the Arkansas; counted back by leap-years, not far.
At the time this parting in the pages of McPacken's history is made, to show who cares to move up a chair and read the chapter so offered, the town was at its greatest consequence and prosperity as a center of the native and imported cattle industry. It was the hub of a wide sweep of open range, into which only a few daring adventurers had pushed forward with fence and plow. These homesteads were mainly along the river, the occupants of them looked upon with a curious, questioning interest, not wholly unsympathetic, as people who lent themselves to some heroic, but misguided, experimentation, out of which little good to themselves or humanity at large could come.
This was the attitude toward all agricultural adventurers in the valley of the Arkansas at that time, shared by cattlemen and town dwellers alike. There was no hostility, no unfriendliness. Everybody would have been glad to see them succeed, but nobody expected them to do so. Their low sod houses were lonely markers to the cowboys who rode from distant ranges to McPacken; their struggles with oxen and lank teams against the tenacious sod a never-ending source of mild entertainment for those rovers of the prairies, who twisted in their saddles to look back as they galloped on to the town's delights.
Agriculture, it will be seen, then, did not contribute anything of consequence to the prosperity of McPacken in those days. The little which the people who followed that industry bought and sold in the town would not have been missed if it had been withdrawn entirely, for McPacken did not look to the earth for its supplies. It was a place that lived out of tin cans and bottles, and threw them down in the back yard when it had emptied them.
The railroad had established a division point there, with shops for emergency repairs to cars and engines, a roundhouse for stabling and grooming the steeds of the iron trail, and a system of water works to serve these various enterprises. All of this, with the smoke and noise, gave the place a comfortably progressive atmosphere, in addition to adding to its citizenship many artisans, trainmen, engine wipers, and subsidiary attendants upon the aristocracy of railroad life.
There was the river, the railroad along its shore, where cottonwoods laced with wild grapevines made green refreshment for eyes weary of summer heat glimmering over vast prairie lands; beyond the railroad, McPacken. The town seemed to empty upon the railroad, as one river empties into another, its principal street holding the little red depot, like an island, in its mouth. One stood on the station platform and looked upon all the consequence of McPacken, which was, no doubt, much greater than it appeared.
Beer kegs lay heaped in pyramidal pile on this platform at all times, if not empty ones waiting a train, full ones waiting a wagon. This pile of kegs seemed to be a proclamation to all who arrived, or lingered, or passed by, of the town's defiance, its aloofness in its wickedness from application of the commonwealth's laws.
Yet this was a wickedness of sullen defiance rather than one of lurid depravity; a wickedness that bribed county officials with the left hand while it dispensed beer with the right, practice common to Kansas towns of that time. It was a small-bore wickedness, rather despicable than destructive, which endured until the busy long arm could find time to reach out and squelch it, as happened to McPacken in its day, but a day long after this one of which you read, to be sure. Taking McPacken all over, it was not a bad town for its frontier situation. It had all the material, but never made much of its opportunity.
Between the railroad and the beginning of town there was a wide strip of unoccupied land, owned jointly by McPacken, the county and the "company" as that principal institution of the country was called. Here the county highway entered McPacken from the west, a road that ran past the small sod houses and stubborn farms and lost itself finally in the trails which split from the ends of it like ravelled strands of a lariat. It was a dusty, trampled gray stretch of beaten ground with hitching-racks along the sides of the buildings which stood at the beginning of the principal thoroughfare. Prominent on the corner of this trampled common, the Cottonwood Hotel stood, and in front of the hotel the place which concerned itself with beer kegs and defied the sovereign state.
That was the beginning of McPacken as one saw it from the railroad station: the hotel on the left, the saloon on the right. There were two cottonwood trees of considerable girth and spread of limb in front of the hotel, a pump and watering trough for horses between them. Here the sidewalk was double width, part of it being the hotel veranda, covered by a wooden awning to the curb.
Two benches, fixed solidly against the wall, flanked the door of the hotel, offering accommodations for no fewer than twenty loafers. At certain hours of the day these were filled, especially at evening, when the railroaders' day was done, and the withdrawing sun left it cool and pleasant there. Then Angus Valorous Macdougal, night clerk, dish washer, potato parer and waiter in a pinch, appeared with sprinkling can, gave the sidewalk planks a wetting down, leaving behind him a pleasant odor of allayed dust, reminiscent of a shower.
At such hour the railroaders and chance guests from the range planted their chairs in the street and cocked back with feet on the sidewalk edge, where they viewed at pleasure the passing life of McPacken. That was the original motion picture entertainment, very popular in its day, in Kansas towns, and other towns, a great deal bigger than McPacken. There is not an inch of room for legitimate question that the students of anatomy lined up along the sidewalk of that progressive city were of as much consequence in their orbit, their arguments and conclusions; of as much wit, wisdom and importance, as hotel loungers anywhere, before and since their time.
At the hour of this opening scene in McPacken, and on the veranda of the Cottonwood Hotel, there was very little wit and wisdom being discharged anywhere along the length and breadth of Santa Fe Street, as the main avenue was called. It was midafternoon of a withering hot summer day. Heat danced and wavered like clouds of transparent ephemera over the unpaved street, glimmered in distorting vexation above rails and ballast roadbed. There was a smell of jimson weed and fennel, and oil from the railroad, spiced with invigorating nip of cottonwood leaves like bitters in an insipid drink.
The sound of hammering came out of the railroad yards, where Orrin Smith, the section boss, was working his gang of terriers putting in a switch. It was a deep, whirring, musical note, that of sledge on rail as some sweating jerry labored to bend the stubborn metal for the curve of the lead, yet subdued in that summer furnace, that vacuum of heat about which nature did not appear to concern itself at all, not even with a zephyr strong enough to turn a feather in the road.
Two figures enlivened the somnolent front of the Cottonwood Hotel this drowsy hour, side by side upon one of the benches flanking the open door. Even a stranger would have known, by her bearing of authority, that the woman was the boss of that concern, and that no man was boss of her. She was that type of woman, common to small hotels and boarding houses, whose bearing seemed to say that if there was a man around the place who had been an incident of more or less interest in her life at one time, he had been reduced to the lowest possible terms, if not rubbed out altogether.
Julia Cowgill was a quick and eager woman, rather meagre of frame, and tall, with a persistent prettiness in her gaunt face, a saucy challenge in her quick-darting, wide-awake gray eyes. Gray was stealing away her black hair with its Irish wave and crinkle. She took no pains to hide the peculation, as she might have done with a little adroit adjustment and tucking under about the ears. There was a look of alertness and searching in her face, as if she lived a continual quest for something that she expected to spring up in the road ahead of her and elude her in the end. Some said it was money; there were more kindly souls who believed it was only rest.
The man beside her was not much of an example as men go, although he had a personality that generally drew a second look, especially when he spoke. He was a small man wearing a sandy little mustache; with a sharp little nose that seemed to have been pinched while in a plastic state just above the nostrils, making an indenture there which gave the organ a peculiar aspect of eagerness when he breathed. His head was broad, somewhat flat on top, well suited to the long line of parting and the cowlick that he had trained into his abundant black locks. A flowing crepe necktie adorned the low collar of his broad-striped shirt, the glory of which was not shadowed by either coat or vest.
There was a rich note in his voice that suggested a song; laughter seemed to lie so near the surface of him that he had only to open his mouth for it to appear in his eyes, slily, provokingly, like a chipmunk at its hole. For Banjo Gibson was a man who looked at life as a sort of one-sided joke, and humanity as an arrangement of comical figures paraded for his diversion. There was nothing much in him but a laugh.
"I'm glad to see you back again, Banjo," Mrs. Cowgill said. "I said to Goosie last night when I heard you talkin' to Angus: 'That's Banjo Gibson. I'll bet anything that's Banjo Gibson.' If I hadn't been so tired I'd 'a' slipped on something and come down."
"Just as well you didn't, pleased as I'd 'a' been to see you. I know how it is here at the hotel—your day's like a rubber sack; the more you put in it the longer it stretches."
"Yes, it's so long, and such worthless help in the dining-room. I had a girl out from Hutchinson—she flew up and quit me in the middle of supper yesterday because Bill Connor pinched her leg. Well, she said he did. I don't believe it."
"Little old Bill, I remember him well. They tell me he's got a run now?"
"Yes, he's makin' regular money. Him and Goosie they're engaged. Goosie she was so put out over what the little freckled flip-tail said about Bill I looked for her to throw his ring in his soup."
"Some people's born to make trouble," said Banjo, with discreet mental reservation bearing on Bill Connor's behavior toward the new girl.
"I wish I could put a man in, but them railroaders wouldn't stand for a man. They seem to think biscuit-shootin' is stric'ly a lady's job."
"It ain't a man's job," Banjo declared with feeling, "though I had to come down to it while I was gone. It was after that quack shook me up in Cheyenne."
"You mean to tell me you waited table, Banjo?"
"If you'd 'a' happened through Chadron, out in the sandhills of Newbrasky, about a year ago, you'd 'a' seen a feller back of the pie counter in the railroad eatin' house you'd 'a' thought was runnin' me a purty tight race for good looks."
"I always said when you went off to play for that Indian doctor you'd see some hard knocks before you got back to McPacken."
"You said it right, for I sure did."
"I'd like to 'a' seen you workin' at that job," Mrs. Cowgill said, the light of her toil-harried spirit in her eyes, a little smile showing at the corners of her large thin mouth.
"I'm thankful we was both spared the sight," Banjo said, with a deep sigh for a shame lived down if not forgotten. "I worked nights, and that helped some, handin' out slam sangwiches and coffee to the passengers that rushed the counter. After the last train we fed passed through, I didn't have anything to do but stand out pie ready for the freight crews. It wasn't much work, only the blowin' was hard on a man's lungs."
"Blowin'?" she repeated severely, in her way of putting a fresh guy in his place. "What do you mean blowin' to cool the pie?"
"No ma'am. I mean dust. That's what I mean. That's the sandiest land in creation, the wind blows so steady and hard you can lean up again it and go to sleep. They do, right along, up there in that country."
"Oh, you get out! I've heard the same thing said of Kansas, but I never saw anything do it but a horse."
Banjo laughed a little, more out of politeness than humor. Nobody likes to have a spike put in his joke. "I used to parade up and down before them six pieces of pie," he said, "blowin' off the sand. Believe me or not, that ain't no lie. I never found any other way to keep them cuts of pie clean and eatable."
"Sprinklin' tobacker juice over 'em!" said she.
"I used to blow till I was blue in the face," said Banjo, "with that sand siftin' in the screen door and all around. I got on middlin' comfortable till they changed time on a freight and throwed two crews on me at once. I thought I was gittin' the consumption keepin' twelve piece of pie clean, and I jumped the job."
Banjo did not wait for the effect on Mrs. Cowgill. It was so tremendous on himself that he doubled over with laughter. When he looked sidling up at her as the humor began to work out of him, his eyes were glistening with mirthful moisture. Mrs. Cowgill was not so much as smiling. She was looking down the track where Orrin Smith was herding his jerries putting in the switch, that sharp alertness for the thing she sought and never owned, bending her nice eyebrows together in a bunch.
"You're the beatin'est man, Banjo," she said, in concession to his comical reminiscence. There was little praise, less encouragement, in her tone for a man of humor such as Banjo Gibson, troubadour home from his adventures afar. A woman was crossing the railroad beyond Smith's gang. Mrs. Cowgill's interest was there.
"Where did you go from there?" she inquired, the 'woman having passed out of sight, leaving at least a divided portion of Mrs. Cowgill's interest behind.
"I rambled back to Wyoming; I had a lot of good friends in Wyoming. They're the dancin'est crowd of people up there you ever saw, kep' me fiddlin' till I nearly forgot how to pick a banjo at all. But places are so darned far apart in that country it wears a man out travellin' around. I never would 'a' been able to make it around to all of 'em if a feller hadn't made me a gift of a horse, one of them little pinto horses with spots on him, the kind they call a calico horse back in Missouri."
"You must 'a' stood well with them, Banjo."
"Yes, I picked up more money there than I ever made before in my life, and I guess I could 'a' married one of them cowgirls and settled down if I'd 'a' cared enough about any of 'em to take a chance. They're too big and wild for me, I'm here to say. They sling a man's heels off of the floor when they swing, and slap him to sleep if he gives 'em any slack. I like a girl my arm'll reach around, and I like 'em that can take a joke."
Banjo looked rueful; his tone was indignantly resentful. Unpleasant memories appeared to rise beneath his striped shirt of the Wyoming maidens who were dull to the piquant humor of a roving musician.
"It might 'a' been better for you, Banjo, if you'd stayed up in that country and settled down on a ranch."
"Maybe I would if they hadn't got to shootin' the country up the way they're doin'. You've read in the papers about that rustlers' war they're havin' there, I guess? Darn reckless the way they're slingin' lead around."
"I heard some of the boys talkin' about it the other night. They said them Wyoming cowmen had sent out word to all the limber-jims on the range to come up there. I don't know how true it is, but there was a cowhand in here from the Cimarron yesterday on his way to Abilene, headin' for Cheyenne. That's what some of the boys said. I guess it's gettin' too peaceable and quiet in this country for some people."
"I'll take mine where a man can ride along the road at night with his girl without a swarm of bullets clippin' his hair," Banjo said, his deep voice vibrant with the moving memories of past perils. "They'd 'a' put a bullet through my fiddle if I'd 'a' stayed in that country. Feller did slam one through my banjo-head one night when I was seein' a lady home from a dance. He said it was a mistake. Lot of good his 'pologizin''d 'a' done me if that bullet'd 'a' went through my gizzard. I left there after that."
"I don't believe there's been a shootin' here since you went away," Mrs. Cowgill said, reminiscently. "Yes, I guess there was, too; some drunken cowhands killed a man that worked on a travellin' paint gang. But none of 'em didn't amount to anything."
"No man don't amount to much when he's got a hole drilled through his bellus," Banjo sighed, as if in regret for the many good ones he had known who had gone that way.
"There's that woman again!" said Mrs. Cowgill, her voice sharp with resentful suspicion.
"Ma'am?" Banjo inquired, looking at her in startled surprise.
"Up the street, just comin' out of the Racket Store. She's been runnin' all over town today—she came in on Nine this morning. I'd like to know what she's up to, flippin' around that way."
One might have gathered from Mrs. Cowsgill's hostile attitude that other women had come to McPacken in days past, and flipped around to the public detriment and Mrs. Cowsgill's own personal embarrassment; and that she resented virtuously such invasion, mainly, if not entirely, on account of the stranger going about her mysterious business without first coming to the Cottonwood Hotel, which was a piece of unpardonable impertinence.
"I see her," said Banjo. "She's a peach!"
"She may be a punkin for all you know," Mrs. Cowgill rebuked him scornfully. She bore down on him hard, as if Banjo Gibson's erring judgment in the appraisal of ladies was a thing of notorious public cognizance, a mockery and a merry jest.
"Um-m-m-m!" said Banjo, deep in his chest, a safe and noncommittal sound for a man who has no argument to make, and one to which he can give a portentous shake, even an ominous tremolo, thereby saving his valor and his face.
"She's headin' here," Mrs. Cowgill announced, still severe, but a little mollified by the prospect of having her curiosity served at last.
"Makin' a bee-line," Banjo added, not at all hurt by the scornful sitting down on. "What do you suppose—"
"Sh-h-h!" Mrs. Cowgill cautioned.
The stranger's foot was on the porch.