ONE day of sun turned the mud of Santa Fe street into dust again, not so deep and comfortable under a horse's hoof as before, yet plenti ful enough to give the two cottonwood trees in front of the hotel a gray and familiar look. Angus Valorous came to the door at four o'clock, neckband open, sleeves rolled above his elbows and held there by pink elastic bands with crinkled edges, which looked as if they had been designed for feminine purposes not quite so public.
This was beefsteak and onions day at the Cottonwood Hotel; Angus Valorous was still inflamed and lacrimose from paring and slicing half a peck of Irish figs. His attitude toward the public was resentfully 'indignant, as a man who had been put under a slight. He looked up and down the sidewalk, turned his head like a chicken and took a one-eyed quick calculation of the sun, sniffing inaudibly, but visibly, as he glanced at Banjo Gibson, who was sitting on one of the green benches beside the door.
Angus went for his watering pot after making these observations, and dampened down the sidewalk planks. There was no question, after that proceeding, that dry weather had come back to McPacken again. Angus sprinkled very close to Banjo Gibson's feet, suspended his stream suddenly, looked up with an expression of forbearing injury, as if he had met with another public affront.
"Can't you move?" he demanded, his voice rumbling in manly threat.
"I guess I can," Banjo replied, equally injured and insulted.
"I got to sprinkle here," Angus insisted.
Banjo kept his place on the end of the bench. The watering pot was dribbling a little stream near the toe of his polished shoe.
"If your head swells any bigger," said Banjo, unimpressed by the imperative necessity of water on that particular spot, "it'll bust like a fall cabbage after a rain, When that happens to you, young feller, all that'll be left of you will be a little mist."
Banjo moved along the bench a few feet after handing out this, leaving the dry spot open to the operations of Angus.
"Ya-a-a! what's it to you!" snarled Angus, sprinkling away.
"If you ever do get to be a brakey you'll be one of the kind that thinks the train's a runnin' for your sport and pleasure, and you're doin' the passengers a favor to let 'em ride."
"Ya-a-a! what's it to you!"
"You'll never see the day you'll climb a boxcar with a badge on your hat. Even a brakey's got to have brains enough to turn around."
"Aw-w-w! go ahn an' bite yourself!"
Angus emptied his can and stood swinging it to drain out the last drops, belligerent, bristling. He was not taken down by Banjo's sarcasm; he was not to be taken down by any reproof that human tongue could frame. Banjo ignored him. He crossed his legs comfortably, and went on in pursuit of his own thoughts and ambitions, which perhaps were neither very deep nor high.
Angus went in to let his sleeves down and put on his collar, signal that his menial tasks were over for that day, and that he was not going to help the girls bear off and on in the dining-room that evening. When Angus put his collar on he felt that he had put up the flags of an extra. He was then official in the front office; he had the right of way over everything. Mrs. Cowgill respected that signal. She would have turned in and helped the girls herself before she would have asked Angus to carry on beefsteak and onions with his standup collar on.
Banjo Gibson remained on the green bench beside the door, building the sort of castles a shallow little inconsequential grig of a man may lift in the romantic distances of his vision. Tinsel castles, doubtless, with painted ladies in them, and no board to pay. He remained there until the whistle at the shops announced the close of the railroad day, and the men began to arrive for supper. As they passed him, Banjo had a hearty word for everyone, and they were no less cordial, although somewhat patronizing and indulgent, as toward an inferior who had the special license of a peculiar gift or genius which lifted him almost up to their plane.
Bill Connor came in from his run, the first time Banjo had seen him since his return. Banjo had left him a wiper in the roundhouse when he went away from McPacken two years before to follow the fortunes of the medicine man. Now Bill had grown in bulk and consequence, but Banjo knew him the moment his foot struck the sidewalk under the awning.
It was a delightful reunion, at least for Banjo. He exclaimed in the wondering pleasure that an accomplished flatterer can make so pleasing to the object of it, as he looked Bill over from his little black cap with green visor to the soles of his oily big shoes. They were talking that way, Banjo all laughter, Bill grinning tolerantly, his broad face sooted and black, when Tom Laylander came in from his first day's work as a section hand, or jerry, as the men who made the road safe for the wheels were called in derision.
"Hello, Mr. Gibson," Tom hailed, warmly and ingenuously, pausing a moment, a smile lighting up his face.
Banjo cut short his animated talk, turning slowly, as if an unwelcome, impertinent hand had been laid on his shoulder. He looked blankly, coldly, into Tom Laylander's face, seeming to say: "Now, who is this rascally vagabond?" Only he did not say anything. Just stood that way, haughtily, coldly; displeasure, contempt, in his sneering little face. He turned to Bill Connor again, having cut the impudent jerry to the bone.
Tom Laylander's face burned with the insult; his heart seemed to drop so low in his mortification that it hit the ground. He went on, lame of foot from his high-heeled boots, which were made for the saddle, and not the ballast bed of a railroad. His hands were blistered by the tamping-bar that he had swung with the killing vigor of a greenhorn for the longest ten hours he ever had lived.
Laylander's pistol was buckled around him, as he had worn it all day, much to the entertainment of the jerries, the leather of his belt sweat-soaked and sagging, his body galled from the drag of it. He wondered what he had done to forfeit the friendship of Banjo Gibson, quite innocent yet of the barrier that he had raised between himself and other railroad men when he went to work for Orrin Smith on the section.
The jerry, to the better paid, more pleasantly employed railroad men, was a sort of clown, a comical low fellow to be laughed at and treated with jest, and regarded with complacent self-felicitation on one's natural and social superiority over him. These more fortunate servants of the same master drew a rigid social line. This was as pronounced between conductor, engineer, brakeman, fireman, shop mechanic and the like on one hand; the jerry on the other, as between white men and black.
Mrs. Cowgill was fully cognizant of this social division. She knew she was going squarely in the face of public prejudice when she took Tom Laylander to board as a section hand. It did not need Pap's objections, nor Banjo Gibson's scorn, to tell her this. But she liked the boy. She did not have the heart to hurt him by pointing out an inferiority that was not his, that he did not and could not feel.
But she would draw the line with Tom. No other jerry could sit at her table or sleep in her beds. Railroad men washed up and put on clean collars and clean clothes before coming to supper. They went out in the morning to the shops looking like gentlemen, their greasy garments in neat rolls under their arms. She knew how the jerries at Ryan's came and went in the same clothes day after day, sneaking a bar of soap from Mrs. Ryan on Sunday to wash their shirts and overalls in the river. Nobody could blame a railroad man for refusing to sit with such a crowd at the table. Goosie would not wait on men like that.
It was a big concession, therefore, to lodge Tom Laylander after he had fallen to the low estate of section hand. It was not mercenary; she had plenty of boarders without him. It was nothing in the world but that assertion of tenderness and humanity that dies so hard in people's breasts, living in most of us long after we believe we have smothered it in the interest of our business and social success.
Tom came to supper as fresh as a pink, tidy in a clean shirt and neck-tie, his cougar-skin vest hiding his suspenders from the ladies' eyes. Mrs. Cowgill believed he even had gone to the trouble to shave. Orrin Smith, the section boss, had finished his supper and gone; Goosie had put a pair of cowhands at his table. She was sitting at the foot of the long common table, taking her supper with Bill Connor. Everybody else had cleaned up their pie and gone.
Mrs. Cowgill led Tom to a little table in a secluded corner, even farther away from the center of activities than she had intended. It was a pleasant situation beside a window. The evening wind was blowing the draggled lace curtains, bringing in with it a scent of curing prairie hay.
"After you wait on Tom, take your own supper," Mrs. Cowgill directed Louise. "Goosie she's about through; she'll catch anybody that happens in."
Tom hung his gun on the back of his chair, and stood a moment hesitantly deferential, as if he could not bring himself to sit down first in the presence of a lady. His face was red from the heat and sweat of the day, which something that he had put on it out of a little bottle with a ribbon around its neck had stimulated. This was a lotion thought to be very balmy and refreshing to the freshly shaved railroad face. It was in strong demand at Earl Gray's drug store.
"You're late, Mr. Laylander. There isn't much left," Louise said.
"Anything the cook can throw on a dish will do," Tom replied, growing redder, as if the lotion struck deeper every moment.
"Liver or steak?" Louise inquired, trying to look and feel detached and indifferent, as became her profession, but fighting a great deal harder to keep from smiling in the ingenuous young man's face. "I could get you some French fried, if you like them."
"I love 'em!" Tom declared, with such ardent simplicity that the smile could be restrained no longer.
Louise looked up; Tom, still standing beside the chair, tall and bashful and red, looked down. Each smiled into the other's eyes, and both felt more comfortable, the constraint removed, the way to something friendly, even steak and liver, made clear.
"I recommend the steak," said Louise, in advisory tone.
"It'll hit me fine, ma'am," said Tom, hand on the back of the chair as respectfully as if he waited for the roadmaster, or the section boss, or the governor, or somebody equally high and important, to depart. "But I'm not in any kind of a hurry," Tom protested. "You go ahead and get your own supper first."
"Certainly not," Louise returned, so decisively it made the young man start as if Cal Withers had taken a shot at him through the window. "But I'll take it along with you—if you don't mind," Louise proposed, smiling away the confusion her apparently snappish refusal had brought upon him.
"I'll be honored and delighted," said Tom. "I've been wantin' to have a little talk with you ever since you stepped out there in the road—"
"Wait till I bring on the supper," she suggested.
Tom found himself up against a ledge when it came to going into the subject of his obligation to Louise for stepping between him and Cal Withers when the odds stood so heavily against him that day. It was past, and it deserved nothing but to be forgotten, she said.
"That's easy to say, Miss Gardner, ma'am, but not so easy done. I owe you nothing short of my life. They'd 'a' got me that time; I didn't know he was goin' to bring out a bunch of them."
"They say it's his way. But forget about it, Mr. Laylander." She put her hand on his with a quick hovering touch, like the lighting of a bird, looking her appeal for no more thanks into his eyes.
"I'll have to let it pass, then, with this said, till you're better paid," he yielded. "Please just call me Tom. I'm nothing at all but a common jerry now."
"And I'm nothing but a common biscuit-shooter; call me Louise. But why do you say you're nothing but a jerry? A jerry is the same as any other railroader to me."
"Not to everybody," said Tom, shaking his head sadly. "It didn't strike me that it was such a poor and low-down job till that little Banjo Gibson man refused to speak to me this evenin'. He acted like I'd given him a mortal insult."
"Oh, that little loafer!"
"He was standin' talkin' to that man over at the table with Miss Goosie. He was plumb mortified and ashamed."
"How do you know it was because you're a jerry?"
"I asked that Angus boy. He was insulted, too. He said a jerry didn't have any business hornin' in amongst railroad men."
"It appears that we're both social outcasts, then, Tom. They kid me because I fell from book-agent to biscuit-shooter, and it seems like a comical sort of one, at that. They guy me till I feel like breaking dishes on them sometimes, especially Ford Langley. He seems to have a diabolical sort of pleasure in turning the laugh against a poor workin' girl."
Louise laughed, but it was only a pretense, as Tom Laylander must have been very stupid, indeed, if he had not seen.
"I'll speak to the scoundrel," he said, the fire of indignation in his eyes.
Louise touched his hand again, in that correcting, restraining, and yet assuring manner that was almost a caress.
"Please don't—he isn't worth it. Let them laugh, there's nothing else in life for them; they can't think. Who knows but you and I may have our own private little laugh one of these days? Maybe we'll not always be biscuit-shooters and jerries."
"Yes, you'll rise up and pass on," Tom said in his quaint, soft way of speaking; "I can see it in the cards you will. But for me I can't see anything more than a trampled trail, crisscrossed till it makes my eyes ache to try to read it."
Louise looked across the little table into his face, startled, alert, a question, or rather an appeal, in her concentrated attention. Another man had appeared for a moment from behind the ingenuous simplicity of this Texas cowboy. He had spoken and stepped back again, leaving the curtain that masked him scarcely agitated to show that he had passed. Tom was looking out of the window, his thin whitish eyebrows drawn, making little wrinkles run across his narrow, combative forehead from the bridge of his nose.
"Trampled trails," she repeated thoughtfully. "But they're broader when they're trampled, Tom, and easier to follow along."
"I mean when a lot of people have got the start over you and gone ahead," he explained. "They trample out the tracks of the thing you're tryin' to overtake and throw your rope on, mixin' it up so you can't tell whether you're on the right road or a blind one that spreads out to open range and nowhere in the end. That's what bothers a man, ma'am—Miss Louise."
"What have you been following, Tom, that you've lost in this crisscrossed road?"
Tom turned from the window, put down the knife that he had been holding, blade pointing upward, in his big freckled hand. He met her inquiring, perplexed eyes with a look of leaping eagerness in his own.
"I started out to make a man of myself, Miss Louise. I wanted to get an education in my head and turn out something better than a cowman down among the postoaks on the Brazos. Circumstances, Miss Louise, jetked the rope out of my hand. The animal I thought I was about to throw and brand loped off and left me gappin' after it like a fool. I don't guess I'll ever overtake it any more."
"How long were you in the university, Tom?"
"I left in the middle of my junior year, Miss Louise. But how did you know? The brand must be so dim on me by now it'd take a spyglass to see it."
"Not so dim," she said. "Do you plan to go back?"
"No, I'll turn my face elsewhere, Miss Louise. I'll go on tryin' to pick up something on the start I've got while I'm waitin' for the road to run a little plainer under my feet."
"But you could go back, Tom."
"Ma'am?" said Tom, the cowboy in complete possession again, staring into her animated face with bewildered eyes.
"When you sell you cattle, I mean."
"When I sell 'em, ma'am? I ain't even got 'em to sell."
"You will have them; you're bound to beat that old thief."
"My lawyer says we'll beat him. He says the note Withers holds over me was outlawed in this state five years ago, if it never was paid. But I tell you, Miss Louise, if my father ever owed that man ten thousand dollars that long ago, it was paid."
"He ought to have been careful to get his note back," she said.
"They were awful careless about such little things in those days, Miss Louise."
"Little things! It seems to me a lot of money to loan on nothing but an unsecured note, as Withers says this one was."
"No, not so very much. In the old days when cattlemen were makin' money that wasn't any more to my father than ten dollars would be to one of these self-admirin' railroad men. They just handed such little sums around among themselves without a line of writin' most of the time. That was only small change in the days range cattle paid."
"It was a careless way to handle small change, anyhow."
"Yes, it does seem so," Tom admitted gloomily. "Withers says my father borrowed it when he had a herd up here on Kansas grass a long time ago. I never heard about it if he did. I've wrote to mother to search the old books. It'll be down there if father ever borrowed money from Withers and made his note, for he was a careful man about writin' down his records. I didn't tell mother I'd been attached; I just said Colonel Withers had put in a claim."
"That was better than the whole truth, I think. Have you seen Withers since that—since he put the attachment on your herd?"
"I haven't had the pleasure of meetin' him," said Tom, with peculiar stress.
"I saw him here in town swelling around with two guns on today. He had a gang with him, four or five limber-jims, as Mrs. Cowgill calls them. They trailed after him wherever he went, like a lot of dogs."
"I'm not astonished to hear of it," said Tom.
"Tom," her hand on his again in that impulsive, open and ingenuous way of arresting attention and holding it, "I can't ask you to keep out of his way, I'm not going to ask you to dodge him. But don't hunt him up, Tom, please don't hunt him up. If you see him here in town some evening spreading it around that way, just let him strut—don't rush out and begin to shoot."
"I'd like to do most anything to please you, Miss Louise," said Tom, his face very red, as if what she had asked of him made him ashamed.
"Withers will try to provoke you to make the first break, the way you did before. Don't you see his scheme? They say it's his old trick, to have the slim excuse of defending his life. It puts the law on his side, technically, as the lawyers say. What I mean is, let him start it next time. Let him come to you, don't you go to him."
"Circumstances, I expect, would have to control my actions, Miss Louise. I see the point of your argument, and I'll try to keep it in my mind. I'd rather not have any ruction with him till after the law disposes of my case."
"It would be much better, it would be so much more in your favor. And remember, if you do meet him, let him make the first break. You'd just as well have the law on your side as his."
"That's mighty good advice, and I'll do my best to follow after it, Miss Louise."
So they sat over their supper and talked, those two inferiors among the railroad aristocracy, jokes, both of them, to the hogheads and shacks and clinker-pullers, mainly because they were people who had been up and had come down. Their sympathies enveloped them like a fog, drawing them together in an unworded compact such as grows between the hearts of youth sometimes, to endure longer than solemn treaties of nations engrossed on parchment and set with imposing seals.
Bill Connor, sitting beside Goosie, easy in that proprietary feeling of a man who knows his situation is secure, lit a cigar and flipped the match contemptuously toward the table where the jerry and the biscuit-shooter sat.
"Looks like she's took a kid to raise," he said.