ANGUS VALOROUS always remained alert and A bristling, like a night-prowling spider, ready to seize upon any customer who might come his way, until the last cowboy's horse was gone from the hitching-rack in front of the saloon. Frequently one or two of the late stayers were too limber to be lifted to their saddles, in which case they were supported by their more sober comrades across to the hotel, to be given in charge of Angus Valorous, who received them with proper scorn.
Angus never gave a hand to hoisting these paralyzed specimens of the Creator's noblest work upstairs, although he usually followed along to block the plunging descent if the nerveless animals, which seemed to have no more bones than a sack of wheat, slipped through the hands of their guardians. This happened so often that Angus went along after the wavering figures with his sturdy arms and legs at tension, his keen eyes on every move. He was not so greatly interested in pre venting damage to the patrons as to the property of the hotel, in which he seemed to feel something even more lofty than a proprietary interest.
The cowboys cleared out fairly early this night, the last of them being three who raised considerable disturbance when it came to leaving. This was due to the state of one of them, who gave his companions much labor getting him aboard his horse. It was accomplished in time, with great swearing and grave counselling. The fellow was able to ride, although his head wabbled about like a chicken that had suffered a wrung neck in the carpenterly grip of Myron Cowgill.
Angus watched them go their way, standing a little while on the porch after the soft plash of their horses' feet in the thick dust had passed beyond his hearing. He looked toward the stock yards, his pleasurably excited state of the earlier hours having given place to a feeling of sullen ill humor against Cal Withers for delaying his attack until the taste for a fight was crowded out of a man's mouth by the gaping desire for sleep.
Angus was arranging his folding cot in its usual place, having put out all lights except a small lamp, with curved tin reflector through which the top of the chimney extended, a convenient handle on the back of—it for picking it up and turning it upon the faces of late, arriving guests. This lamp Angus stood on the cigar I case, its beam bearing on the window, leaving the rest of the office in reposeful shadow. He spread his canvas cot across the passage leading to the stairs, in such a way that none could enter or depart without stepping over him, a feat that he believed the most cautious prowler that ever slinked through the night could not accomplish without rousing him from the deepest slumber.
Windy Moore came in as Angus was taking off his shoes, having eased himself of his official collar already, and placed it bottomside up on the end of the counter, where he could reach it as a man doubtful of his security might reach his gun. Windy stepped over the cot with some difficulty, for there was no great compass to his short legs, swearing a little as he passed on. A few treads up the stairs he switched his bulldog from one hip pocket to the other, thus giving Angus Valorous a glimpse of the kind of a man he was, as well as a hint of the serious business that had kept him abroad to this unseasonable hour.
Angus Valorous was not much impressed. He had seen too much bluffing in his crowded young day to have any counterfeit valor passed on him by the shifting of a stocky, big-bore gun from one pocket to another. Disdain rose in him; scorn lifted his expressive lip. He grunted in his most contemptuous stress, a deep grunt, and a manly one.
Relieved of his contempt for Windy Moore, Angus Valorous stood his shoes down with the circumspection of a father setting the feet of his son on the highway of life, their toes pointing exactly toward the door, and stretched himself on his back to take his repose. Myron, husband of the house, was under standing orders to appear at 5 o'clock in the morning, at which time Angus would take up his shoes and his collar and go upstairs to continue his refreshment until noon.
Windy Moore had a little room in the back of the house, the cheapest one that he could get. This was not so much due to penury or thrift as the necessity that Windy, like many other railroaders, was under of maintaining quarters at both ends of his run. A man could not afford to put all he made into the rent of rooms, neither of which he could call home, being here today and away tomorrow, with no knowing what greasy stiff sleeping in his bed, to the landlady's double profit, while he was out on his run. The sun hit hard on the one window of that room all afternoon, turning it into an oven fit to render down any little brakeman who might venture into it for hours after the last ardent beam had been withdrawn.
Windy found it very hot there, even at 2 o'clock in the morning, on this night that was comfortable out of doors. It was about that hour when he came in from his vigil with Tom Laylander, yielding to Tom's urgent solicitation to spare himself fatigue, and on no account lose any more sleep over his insignificant and unworthy affairs. Windy took off his shoes and his nellygee shirt, pulled the spindle-backed rocking chair up to the window and sat down to wait an abatement of the temperature, leaving the door open to create a draft.
He regretted that he had made himself so prominent as Tom's champion, so outspoken in his cause. Withers had measured him up—he had seen the old guy running his eye over him—and got wise. That was the answer to the delay in his coming back with a gang of cowhands. Withers was not going to come. If he had not been certain in his own mind of that, Windy never would have left that boy alone down at the stock yards.
That was the way the whole situation sized up, said Windy. Withers was too wise a guy to run against him. He had seen that this poor simple cow jerry was standing in the shadow of a friend who would pitch a little hot lead around if anybody tried to take them cows away from him. And that wasn't no dream. Withers had seen enough to know the business was blocked for him, and he had thrown down his hand. Might as well go to sleep, all McPacken might as well go to sleep and put up its guns. Cal Withers was buffaloed; he never would come back.
It was a noisomely repellant shame, said Windy, in his usual elegant diction, that he hadn't been given a chance to use that old bulldog, which he believed to be a most faithful and efficient weapon, although neither its loyalty nor its efficiency ever had been tested, except in shooting at a telegraph pole. He took the gun out of his pocket, for it was not comfortable there when a man was sitting in a chair, and fondled it, holding it at half-cock, turning the cylinder caressingly with his thumb.
It was a double-action weapon, short, like a water moccasin, its parts oiled and limber, needing only a little pressure on the trigger with the finger to make it lift its head like the uncomely reptile after which it seemed patterned, and blow out its venom with a roar. Windy was sorry, indeed, that he had looked so determined and menacing while Withers was stalling around at the depot with the sheriff that evening. He had queered the whole show by uncovering his hand.
Windy rocked gently, leaning back at ease, refreshed by the cool wind that was coming by little starts through his window. He had the large and comfortable feeling of a man who has made the pleasurable discovery that his fame is wider than he had known. With these pleasant fancies over him, the ease of virtue in his valiant limbs, Windy went to sleep, the pistol in his hand, and drifted into a disturbing and tumultuous dream.
Baldy Evans, the shops watchman, was a sleek, tightskinned large man, dark, unctuous, slow. He looked as if he had come out of black oil, and was on the point of going back into it, uncomfortable as a lobster every minute that he was constrained by duty from laving in its refreshing balm. Baldy was standing in the door of the engine room, consulting his oily watch, a little impatient of the slow-coming dawn, which was beginning to melt away the ground-darkness and show the switch-stands in the yards. Somebody was up, already, frying ham; the smell of it was pleasantly provoking to a hungry man, who had more than two hours yet to wait for his relief.
Baldy stood caressing his fat, sleek watch, running his thumb with circular motion over the glass, leaving an oily dimness. He was trying to correlate that pan of frying ham on somebody's early fire with the habits of various railroaders, running them over lazily in his mind with slow, easy effort in keeping with the movement of his thumb on the crystal of his watch. It was an elusive question; he could not conjoin anybody in railroad circles with that aromatic dish.
Was there any ham on the pantry shelf at home? Baldy wondered, swallowing the anticipatory juices which gushed from his digestive springs with the desire for a plate of that pink delicacy. If there was not, and his wife hadn't already hammered a steak for his breakfast, one of the children could run down to Schauffler's market and get a layer or two of ham.
From that point Baldy began to reflect, according to the philosophical habit that had grown on him during 'his many years of solitary nights, that nothing among all the appetizing delights a woman could stand on a stove reached out and took hold of a man with such a pull as ham. Coffee and cabbage had their sensuous beguilements; onions and liver quickened a man's feet as he drew near home on a frosty autumn morning. Yet all these were only mild stimulants compared to the irresistible desire that laid hold of a hungry man with the first sniff of ham.
Baldy thought he should like to have a farm, where he would raise nothing but hams, although he had little notion whether each ham was a corporeal entity, or merely an adjunct of some creature that must be provided with corn and hay. He did not trouble over any question of biology or anatomy when he thought of ham; only that he had an insatiable appetite for it, and that a state of ease and affluence would be one in which he could freely indulge it without having to think of the price.
It was curious, he thought, how long it took daylight to get up a head of steam when a man was hungry. He had stood in that door other mornings and watched it grow from a little gray mingling with the night, enlarging before his eyes until things shaped out of it, sometimes as suddenly as if they came toward him. But he never had seen the beginning of it, he never had caught it at the trick, so to speak. That was curious, also, Baldy reflected. He wondered if anybody ever had seen the start of day, the very beginning, when its invasion struck over the edge of the world and pried like a lever under the rim of night. Or was the process too gradual for the human eye, too subtle for the human sense?
Baldy could not answer; he did not try. He switched off from that track to the junction of his main line of thought concerning the slowness of this particular day. He had been standing there seven minutes, conscious of breaking day, yet unconscious of any increase in the slow-spreading light. It would be a funny situation for a night watchman, Baldy thought, 1f things should go this far some morning, and no farther; if night and day should balance, neither able to get the bulge and flop the other over. That would be a funny situation for a night watchman, as sure as nails, not knowing whether to leave or stick, the day men—.
It was at that minute, that very second, that Windy Moore was floundering in the distracting durance of a sanguinary dream; it was at that very second that he, in his vision, rose to his elbow, shot through in forty places by Cal Withers and his men, to lift his faithful bulldog and send a bullet into the cowman's mocking face. The roar of his big-bore gun snapped Baldy Evans's fantastic speculations as the sudden lunge of an engine breaks a coupling-link on a frosty morning.
Baldy had forgotten his arrangement with the shops and roundhouse men for blowing the whistle when the shooting began. This sudden roar of a gun in the gray of early morning reminded him of it with a sharpness so much like an accusation of neglect of duty that it was almoset tragic. Baldy jumped for the whistle, and pulled it wide open, jarring the windows of McPacken with the sound.