Chapter IV

Janet started East the next week, with Midge in a box car and the Old Man himself going as far as Chicago. And—blow after blow—Slim was going along, to sleep with Midge and tend him on the train, and later on in chaps and spurs and full regalia to assist Janet during the performance. Slim!

Janet’s farewell to the ranch was rather emotional, but the Kid watched in vain for any indication that he was more than merely included in the general _tout ensemble_. The boys rode to the station and cheered her wildly as the train pulled out, the Old Man waved his hat, and something seemed to fall through the Kid’s diaphragm and settle like a cold flatiron below his breast bone, to remain there for a long, long time.

Years and years passed, and after a week’s time in Chicago the Old Man came home. There was nothing on the surface of things to indicate any radical changes at the ranch. The dogs greeted him uproariously. The lawn looked pleasantly empty and dudeless. The men were hearty and cheerful and ambidextrous at the table as usual. Nothing, in short, to indicate that only the outside of the Kid was among those present, and that, save of course for the cold flatiron, the rest of the Kid was unaccountably missing and might have been located in Chicago.

“How’d it go?” asked Dice Barnett, when the Old Man ambled over to the corral after supper.

“Pretty good,” said the Old Man. “Pretty good. That gold-toothed smile of Slim’s is going to be worth money to him now.”

He glanced at the Kid, but the Kid was sharpening his knife on the edge of a boot and seemed completely absorbed.

“As for Janet, she’s a hit,” said the Old Man, who hadn’t been talking to managers without picking up a phrase or two. “The act’s a knock-out. They’ve had the same sort of thing, of course; but with Janet’s youth and beauty—well, I wish you boys had been there. She sent her love to you all.”

The Kid tested the blade on a finger nail.

“She’s a right good-looking girl, Janet.” Thus, Joe, not without malice. “Somebody will try to pick her off the branch all right. I knew a girl once went on the stage, and she got a bushel of mash notes every week.”

The Kid put away his knife, rose and yawned ostentatiously.

“Reckon I’ll turn in,” he said, and disappeared from a circle which waited to grin until he had gone.

He slept very poorly that night, and spent most of his time reflecting bitterly on the trust in human nature which had turned Janet loose on the world without somebody near her to punch the face of any guy who tried to get fresh with her. A bushel of mash notes every week, eh? He lay there and saw Janet on a brilliantly lighted stage, while the theatre was entirely filled with gilded youths who—the Kid’s experience of theatres was small—almost buried her in flowers. He groaned and turned over on his face. Oh, well, what was it to him, anyhow? Let it ride, that’s all.

The winter came. Part of the outfit went down to the Old Man’s herd of steers in New Mexico, and Al and Joe were following cows in Arizona. The bunk house beds were empty, except for Dice and the Kid, and instead of blackjack and poker Dice read by the bunk-house lamp in the evenings, and the Kid played solitaire morosely. At mealtimes, for they were all together now, the Old Man read Janet’s letters aloud, and her clippings. Her advance man had got hold of her family history by that time, and played pretty heavily on it. The result was that she was being invited to good houses.

For instance:

“‘Everything on the table was gold,’” the Old Man read aloud one day. “‘Can you imagine it? But do you know something? I wouldn’t trade the whole service for the tin cup by the Big Spring.’”

“Rats!” said the savage fear inside the Kid. “Piffle! Tut! And as for that hundred and sixty acres and a log house, tut again. She’s gone. She’s lost. She’ll never come back.”

In November Dice Barnett and the Kid drove the horses along the old cattle trail by the creek to the winter range, and camped for a few days there. The Old Man had been hunting elk, and he blew into camp one day to find the Kid alone, sitting on his heel while he disconsolately fried potatoes in bacon fat, and whistling an extremely dolorous hymn. The Old Man sat back on a log and eyed him.

“Well,” he inquired, “got your sense of values yet?”

“What d’you mean?”

The Old Man looked around.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Take this creek, now. There’s gold in it—real gold. I don’t know from where, but it’s there. Fellows have frozen and starved to death looking for it. But there’s fool’s gold too. Every now and then somebody brings in some iron pyrites and thinks he’s made his everlasting fortune.”

“I get you,” said the Kid. “Well, I know the difference all right now, sir.”

That was all the Old Man said then. But later on, cleaning his rifle with a corner torn off the Kid’s dish towel, he said: “I got a Chicago paper a day or two ago. The Carter girl’s engaged to be married.”

The Kid said nothing for a moment. He was scraping the frying pan. Then he looked up and caught the Old Man’s eye.

“She was a right nice girl,” he said, and grinned.

Winter came on, and the ranch was isolated from the world. Once a week or so the postman in his flivver would work his way up through the roads, thaw out his radiator with boiling water and himself with hot coffee, and leave the mail. Bears came down from the mountains and left tracks around the storehouse and the kitchen. Deer came fearlessly to the feeding racks by the corral, and a mountain sheep was reported on Bishop’s Rock. On the day before Christmas came a great wooden box from Janet, with a fur coat for her mother and a set of Kipling for the Old Man, and on Christmas Day came a telegram:

Dearest Love and a Merry Christmas to all of you.

JANET.

No message to the Kid at all.

The Old Man was rather worried. The Kid had come to his senses, but there was still something wrong with Janet. And the Kid was on his mind. The boy was not eating and—the Old Man strongly suspected—not sleeping either.

“Maybe I’d better write her how things are,” he said one day to Dice Barnett.

“It’s no place for a third party, in my opinion,” Dice objected. “They’ll make the grade or they won’t, but they can’t be pushed.”

So in the long idle days of heavy snow the Old Man pasted Janet’s clippings in a scrapbook, and Mrs. Allenby mended and stacked linen, and the Kid slowly ate his heart out, having abundance of time for this sort of gastronomical misery.

The snow had come early and lay late, and in the open range along the foothills a dozen or so horses dead from cold and starvation had been eaten by coyotes, so that only their bones marked their tragedy. Out in the far meadows the cattle had exhausted the hay, and herculean efforts on the part of the men failed to open a road by which to send the hay carts through. In March they got out at last, and the Old Man breathed again. But the cold continued, and the feed grass was almost exhausted. On a dismal day in March the Kid rode out to the pasture with his revolver strapped on his hip, and cut out some twenty lean and sickly cows to die that the rest of the herd might live.

They looked at him with soft, appealing eyes; and the Kid’s hand shook as he drew the gun. When it was all over he went back and sat for a long time in the steaming barn, where the work horses munched their hay and no one was likely to find him. He would have sold himself for a ten-cent piece that day, and considered the price high.

But with the opening of the spring he found a bit of hope rising, like the sap in the cottonwood trees. Janet would come back that summer, and he would make up for all he had done. He worked solely to that end. He put a new roof on the saddle shed—for her. He dredged stone and repaired roads—for her. With the aid of six cow horns which he rubbed to a high polish and a piece of wood which he varnished, he made a hatrack, slightly odorous but very sightly in his eyes—for her. And in the evenings when his work was done he sat by the stove in the bunk house and played melancholy airs on his mouth organ, to the unprintable expostulations of the now augmented outfit.

The ranch was preparing for the summer influx. Painters and carpenters swarmed over the place; the boys came back from New Mexico and Arizona, jerked off their store clothes, pulled on their chaps, stamped into their boots and were off to report to the Old Man. An early dude or two came, and bunches of wild flowers began to appear in the dining room, while the cook began his summer-long complaint of having to clean the trout the men brought in.

And then at the end of June came Janet.