CHAPTER III.
"RED" STANTON.
NO man ever performed in six months a journey as long as the journey which Pete Burnside completed. Men had girdled the globe many times in such a space of months, but Pete Burnside passed from courageous manhood to cowardly and slinking meanness of spirit. He was completely gone. There was nothing left to him.
If it had been a shot fired at a longer range, or if he had shot with a trifle less surety, it might have been well enough for him. But he had seen the bullet drive home, he could have sworn. And having seen that, and, also, how Daly failed to fall, it was all over with Pete.
He himself had been the first to realize it. He had heard other beaten men tell with pitiful eagerness and certainty how they had really won—how their bullets had landed—and how only a miracle had saved the other fellow and enabled him, instead of falling, to strike down the other man instead.
The bullet had struck Daly in the middle of the breast, or a little to the left. And Daly should have died. Instead he had staggered and dropped his man, the bullet grazing Pete's head. Indeed, he was even wrong about the staggering. For it appeared afterward that Daly had been absolutely uninjured, and he had walked away from the spot, whistling, a moment later!
It haunted Pete and pursued him like a living thing, the horror of that moment; And his spirit began to crumble and decay, just as he had known it would do in such a case. Finally, when he was healed of the wound which he had received, there came the show-down which he had dreaded.
A big cow-puncher went wild with moonshine whisky one evening, and Pete was summoned to quell the disturbance. He went with dragging feet to perform the task. He faced the big man and ordered him out of the room. And, instead of going, the puncher had reached for a gun. After that, Pete tried not to remember. For when he thought of it, perspiration rushed out on his forehead, and a wave of sickness poured through him.
But Pete knew that, when the big cow-puncher, Stanton, came at him, and he had tried to get out his own gun, his fingers had been paralyzed, and he had heard the weapon of Stanton explode. The bullet flew wild. The puncher was too drunk to hit the side of a barn at ten paces. But all the strength had run out of Pete's body, and his knees sagged. He cowered in a corner and begged Stanton to let him live!
That had been the nightmare as it actually happened. One thought of it was enough to turn the former deputy to a ghastly gray-green. And most of all he remembered the sick faces of the men who had come to him and raised him and, with voices full of scorn and disgust and pity, bade him go back to his bed, because he still must be sicker than the doctor knew.
And that night he had sneaked out of the town and never went back. He carried with him what possessions he could take conveniently, but he dared not stay to sell what else belonged to him. He dared not meet other men and face their scorn.
First of all he fled straight south. He went as far as San Antonio. Here he lived for a month and established a new circle of friends. Just as he began to make a name for himself, a man came in one day from the north, saw him, recognized him, and told the story. Pete Burnside fled from San Antonio by night, with horror of himself choking him. Then he dipped into Mexico, but it made no difference. Wherever he went, there were men who had seen him in his old home town, men who had watched that awful scene of degradation.
There were two paths open to him. Either he must put an end to his respectable life with a bullet, or else he must put an end to that life by sinking out of sight of all his fellows.
He made the latter choice and became a vagrant. In four months he drifted to the four corners of the country. He saw Vancouver one week and Los Angeles the next. He wandered to New Orleans and thence to New York and from New York to Quebec. But eventually the pull of home will draw men back, as surely as the old instinct guides the carrier pigeon.
Pete dropped off a train in the mountain desert, a scant two hundred miles from his home town. He had left the train just outside a small village, and near the place where he had left it he found a gulley covered with low scrub and brush and with a small stream trickling through it. It was an ideal place for a "jungle," and he began searching through for the assemblage place.
He had not been wrong. He came upon a clearing on the flattened shoulder of a hill. In the midst were half a dozen men in various stages of raggedness and now busily at work on the preparation of a great stew. The huge washboiler, which some hobo of another generation had stolen from the village and presented to the jungle—black with a hundred coats of soot on the outside—was a perfectly satisfactory dish to contain enough stew to supply the appetites of twenty voracious eaters. And there is not in the world a set of gourmands equal to the great American hobo. He has a hump like the camel. He has to live a week on nothing, and he makes up for seven days of starvation in one heaven-astounding attack on victuals.
Pete, being broke, sniffed the preparations from afar. Then, as he drew closer, he was asked if he had money to "pony up" for his share. He admitted that he was broke, but he offered to buy his share with some newly purloined cigars. The cigars made the mouth of more than one tramp water, but they were, obdurate. If he had not money, the rule was that he must procure his share of the edibles.
So he turned back toward the town, a mile and a half away. It was dusk when he reached it, and in the dusk he slipped quietly into a hen roost, removed a fat hen from her perch, and with that prize stole back to the charmed circle around the fire.
He was greeted with acclamation. For the meat end of that mulligan was not altogether satisfactory. They had gathered enough potatoes and some cans of corn and tomatoes. They had secured greens. Some one was frying bread over a little adjacent fire. And at another blaze a great can was half filled with seething coffee. There were some bits of pork and a few pounds of beef in the stew, but the chicken was a blessing sent straight from heaven.
There was a breathlessly short interval spent in cleaning and plucking that fat hen. Then it was tossed in to join the rest of the stew. And the hoboes sat back to regard the steaming result of their united thefts. They contemplated one another, too, not with direct and insolent stares—for there is no courtesy so consummate in some respects as the courtesy of derelicts—but with secret and furtive glances. They estimated one another with the greatest cunning.
Pete Burnside, as usual, was wretched so long as he was forced to be in the company of his fellow men. For one among them, even among these tramps, was liable to know what he had been, and how he had fallen. Nay, worse than that, of late he had sunk so low that men had begun to get at the craven truth about him by simply using their observation.
However it seemed that the half dozen worthies whom he had joined on this occasion, were a great deal less formidable than the majority of those whom he had met on his unending pilgrimage. They were all rather old. That is to say, they were past fifty. And when a man on the road reaches the age of fifty, his joints are stiff, his eye is failing, his back begins to stoop. He had crammed too many years into a short space, and he begins to pay up his penalties.
Among such as these, Pete felt himself to be certainly secure. He began to stir around with a slight air of authority, such as might be forgiven in one who had brought in the choicest portion of the evening meal. He fetched some more wood and stood over the fire and fed it with fresh pieces. He looked into the dark and simmering mass of the stew and sniffed its contents—the dozen blending odors which made it so pleasantly attractive. Altogether he bustled about as one who has a little authority and who is anxious to make it appear more.
Not one of them needed to be told when the moment had arrived to serve the stew. They had risen as of one accord and grouped themselves about the caldron. In a moment more the first huge, helpings had been ladled forth. And now they sat around in a loose circle and devoured their rations in utter silence. There was only the whispering of the wind and the loud snapping of the fire.
So intent were they on their feast that they suffered themselves to be surprised by the advent of a new arrival.
"Hello-o-oo!" thundered the newcomer. "What sort of gents are you to leave me here starving?"
They looked up in amazement, each crowding an extra bite down his throat for fear that he might not taste the remainder of his meal. What they saw was a towering giant, large enough in fact, but made still larger by the manner in which the shadow and firelight shook in turn across him. A great sombrero, half of whose brim had been torn away, was pushed back to expose a densely curling crop of red hair, hair so flamingly red that it might have seemed on fire. He wore a ragged coat so much too small for him that it was apparent one serious exertion would tear it to bits. Around his hips sagged the cowpuncher's cartridge belt, with a Colt in a battered old holster, and he wore on his feet the cow-puncher's riding boots, though there is no known gear so inconvenient for walking. His huge hands, doubled into fists, were now planted on his hips, and he looked down upon the circle of veteran hoboes very much as a man of ordinary stature might have looked down with surprise and amusement and some mischief upon a circle of fairies dancing in a ring.
Pete Burnside looked up to the intruder with a speechless horror, for he saw in the hairy-handed giant no other than that final instrument of his downfall, "Red" Stanton himself!