Chapter VIII: Mr. Rams

"Women, and wine, and war.
War, and wine, and love!
With a sword to wear and a horse to ride
And a wench to love--give me nought beside,
But a bottle or so at the even-tide!
Women, and wine, and war!

Women, and wine, and war,
War, and wine, and love!
Oh, war's my trade, but wine's my play,
Wine crowns my night, and war my day
With a kiss or so in a casual way!
Women, and wine, and war!

Women, and wine, and war,
War, and wine, and love!
Here's a broken head for a drunken spree
When a blue-eyed wench deserted me!
Go, lecture the hussy, and let me be!
Women, and wine, and war!"

I

If Bandy Jones had not been singing _Old King Cole_--our version--at the time, my song would have been quite the success of the evening. All the fellows were gathered at Mother Darkie's buckboard a mile from camp. We put up the drinks by turn so far as our money went, and the liquor seemed to be a sort of delicate blend of sulphuric acid, fusel-oil and petrol flavored with rattlesnake poison, "Specially imported, Massa Blackguard." I tended bar with an arm round the wicked little negress, proposing to her at intervals. As to the entertainment, Bandy beat a bread pan and howled Indian war-songs while Tubby McImerish talked about an English tenderfoot--name o' Rams--found bushed at Horsethief Creek. "Calls me, 'me good man haw,' 'Yes, me deah fellah,' and 'How-d'ye-du-don't-y-know.' Just like old McBugjuice--more side than a jumped-up viceroy--and the crawler wearing putties and a helmet--bet you a dollar he did, then shut yer mouth--and don't yawp as if I was measles and you'd caught 'em. I'm tellin' yous about thish-yer little gawd-forbid, which I brung him into camp to play with the officers. He's improvin' their minds at the officers' mess. If you don't believe me you can see his wet balloon-sleeved pants hung by the cook fire, and Rich Mixed eating of 'em."

Calamity Smith was spouting anarchism, while Tribulation le Grandeur told us about his mare, shot at Fort Walsh in 1876. The pair made a sort of duet: "Abart the pore workin' man _'e call 'im ze abcess_ gettin' a fair show _vot you call strangles, hein?_ I say fair show! So I say _to ze major Walsh_ Down with the Queen! _I say_ and let her take in washing _says I she's got ze strangles_ all she's fit for! Down with the Government! _no! no! no! I no shoot my mare!_ and lynch thim millionaires! _Sacré nom de_--pore workin' man--long live anarchy! _She no keek any_--Down with everybody! _So I mak shoot my fusil and--and vot that you say about Queen Victoria, hein?_ Pore workin' man--_I pull your nose, so_. Yow! _You traitor!_ Ur-r-r. _How you lak me keel you, hein?_ Help! Help!"

"Time, boys! Time!" yelled Mutiny, jammed in between these soloists, and getting killed from both sides.

Enter Rich Mixed with the English tenderfoot's riding breeches, which he reverently laid at my feet. The trio between Mutiny, Tribulation and Calamity had become a triangular duel, while Bandy Jones led off the general salute with hoo-hoo band accompaniment on Mother Darkie's kitchen utensils.

"Now here comesh the Ge-ne-ran all ve-num and spleen,
And he ridesh like a sack, with a string round the middle-oh.
'S head's full of feathers, an' his heart's all woe,
So 'preshent' while the band plays (hic)-shave the Queen."

Are we condemned? We were all getting beastly drunk and yet I would not have you denounce my comrades. Calamity was one of the thirty men who arrested Sitting Bull's victorious army after the Custer massacre, and handed them as prisoners to the American cavalry. Tribulation arrested a cannibal lunatic, and single-handed brought him seven hundred miles through the northern forest in winter. Spud broke a world record in horsemanship, riding a hundred and thirty-two miles by sunlight of one summer day, on a horse who bucked him off at the finish. Mutiny was the very greatest of all our teamsters. McBugjuice was seven days lost after a blizzard, but won through alive. All had shared in heroic work for the state, and all alike were drunk. All lived a monastic life, denied the society of women, barred from every reasonable amusement, inured to privation and to self-denial. They belonged to a phase of history not to be measured by rule of thumb moralities, or judged by the cheap standards of cities, where men live for money, are plentiful and small.

For where men do the work of giants, the overstrain has always its reaction, and if they can not get drunk they will go mad. So I could name a dozen of our best men, the heroes of the force who went mad and shot themselves. The drunken times of the vikings, the conquistadors, the Elizabethans, the British conquerors, the American pioneers and those of Western Canada, are ages of energy and power, of genius and glory, while the sober epochs may well be those of weakness, fatigue, decay.

It is a comfort that we shall not be judged by Christians, but by Christ, with the Saviour's large, merciful understanding, His humorous toleration and sweet charity.

II

Soldier! Soldier! where are your breeches, pray?
Soldier! Soldier! Git up an' dust!
Where the deuce have yer hidden yer brains away?
Soldier! Soldier! Hustle or bust!
Busted the Bugler? Send him to Hawspital
Can't ye shut up that confounded row?
Show a leg, and no damned profanity--
Get up an' sweat for a shillin' a day.

Strident brazen reveillé, insulting the holy calm of dawn, lifted me broad awake. The moon-shadows were running to cover under scented firs, the air was a thin white ecstasy of perfume, the sky a rhapsody of tremulous, quickening splendor. The blue devils of the evening had run to cover. Who had such friends as mine, such great-hearted comrades? What other trooper in the world was secretly a marquis, knight of the noblest of all chivalric orders? As for the Burrows woman, let the wench go hang!

The bugler, crouched by the guard fire, was boiling his morning coffee. The picket, riding drowsily homeward, were driving the herd to the horse lines. From all the tents came sleepy execrations, "Show a leg there! Get a move on! Rise and shine, you cripples! Who told you to tread on my face, eh? Oh, give us a rest, you chaps--who said reveillé?"

"Dress!" cried the bugle, and the day's procedure took on its ordered course through stables, breakfast, fatigues, guard mounting--all that ritual of the service which has for soldiers the flavor of a religion. The bugle calls are sacred as one thinks of the "Reveille" in captured Delhi where Nicholson sahib, God of the Sikhs lay dead, of "Parade" on the listing deck of the _Birkenhead_, of the "General Salute" as Nelson hoisted his flag on board the _Victory_, or the "Roll-call" which followed, Balaklava, or "Lights Out!" throbbing through stricken silence on the field of Waterloo. The ritual, familiar to us as mass to monks, gives dignity to all our humble duties, preparing us to face death that the state may live.

That morning Buckie put me under arrest, and, the call for "Defaulters" found me howling for my solicitor. When any unusual outrage had occurred, I was always arrested on general principles. This time, when I appeared before the officer commanding, I learned that the tent occupied by a certain Mr. Rams, a civilian guest, had been invaded during the night by an alleged buffalo bull. _Item_, the said animal bit the aforesaid Rams who was now under surgical treatment. _Item_, said buffalo was really a sheep. _Item_, the teeth of the above-mentioned sheep, being examined, showed no traces either of blood or trousers. _Item_, the alleged trousers were missing.

Prisoner being charged with divers crimes worthy of capital punishment.

I briefly outlined an alibi with regard to the trousers. Hearing that one Rams was detained in custody, I had borrowed the cook's lamb and introduced it. The pair appeared to have fallen out, which was no affair of mine, although it ought to interest naturalists. I hoped that Mr. Rams would not occur again because he was too tempting.

I could only appeal to the gravity of the court.

Severely reprimanded.

So I went back to my tent, and when Orderly-Corporal Buckie followed he found me packing. I told him I should resign, but even then he kept his official countenance. Jolly good luck for me, he said, that Sam was pleased with my ax work--averring it looked like the gnawings of remorse. As to the monstrous cheek of my defense--Sam nearly had an apoplectic fit. If he had been able to keep his countenance he would have ordered me off to instant death. As it was, he had asked the sergeant-major if I could be spared for three days' absence. Sergeant-major said he could spare me permanently, but even three days' rest for the troop would be a blessing. So I was to saddle Gentle Annie, and my horse, get grub for two from the cook tent, and four feeds of grain in gunny sacks; then to report.

What for?

"You're to escort Mr. Rams to the Throne Mine before the men get at him."

The match never knows how great a fire it kindles.

"Them pants," added Buckie, as he turned away, "is found."

III

In English-speaking books and plays the Spaniard is a villain, and comes to a bad end. Same here.

But, villain as I am, I do assure you that none of your saints could have been with Mr. Rams for a minute without the loss of his halo.

When I had warned him that Gentle Annie's name was Satan, I held her head while he tried to mount on the off side facing her tail. She meekly held the seat of his riding breeches between her clenched teeth, and waited to see what would happen. With inexpressible joy the troop looked on.

"I say, bloomers!" said Mutiny, "they're pontoons."

"Bet you a dollar," Bandy growled, "that he's a Roosian spy."

"Them pants is a checker-board for checker tournaminks," said the troop cook.

"_In pantibus infidelium_," quoth an unfrocked priest, one of our teamsters, "_requiescat in pantis. E pantibus cockalorum, gorlia in pantissimus Piccadilliensis._"

For a half a mile out from camp, Mr. Rams was thoughtful, then in the most sportsmanlike manner called, "I say, Blackguard--"

"If you want to call me," said I, "just whistle--_so_."

At the whistle, my dog came bounding after us. But as troop dog commanding the bobbery pack in camp he had to take the dinner parade, and keep proper discipline. Alas, regardless of duty, reckless of consequences, he romped ahead, leading my procession, for once forgetting his rank and dignity. The most exciting smells bobbed up all round him. "Rabbits!" he barked. "Badger!" he shrieked. "Oh, snakes!"

"My good man," said Rams with a jolt, determined to put me in my proper place as a common soldier. "Two days ago I'd never been on a horse."

"So I see."

"If this was the city, you'd be the tenderfoot, scared at our traffic. What the hell do you know about me? Whatever you think, I'm no coward, facing this beastly expedition."

"All alone, too," said I. "Sure sign of the thoroughbred. No nurse. Now if you picked up my dog by the tail, he wouldn't even whimper."

Rich Mixed had no tail, not even a bud. That member had lately been lost in mortal combat.

"Ought to be in a dog's home," said Rams, surveying the patch of sealing-wax which marked the site of the departed tail.

I said I should be incapable of any such outrage as a dog's home. "Hybrids are never sent to dogs' homes."

"Hybrid, eh? He does look a rum'un."

"They're frightfully infectious," I told him. "Rich Mixed is a hybrid between an old Billy-goat and a she-bear."

"Impossible!"

"We thought so. Billy-goat was such a very respectable dog."

"Oh, I see, a dog."

"Troop dog at Battleford."

"But, if a she-bear--"

"She was the bear in the hymn, and her name was Gladly. You must remember Gladly the cross-eyed bear in the hymn. That's why my dog has such an appalling squint. Of course, though, that's only when he's cross. Besides, he eats bats, and so contracts bad habits."

"Fine day," said Rams, in his most freezing manner.

"You see," I spoke with utter sincerity, "he catches nocturnal habits from eating bats, and mixes up the nocturnal habits with the hibernating bear habits of his mother, and also with the climbing instincts of old Billy-goat who used to mountaineer on the barrack roofs. Now you must realize that you can't be a nocturnal hibernating climbing dog especially in winter. He's dismembered by his passions. It isn't natural."

"Should think not, indeed."

"Makes him so delicate. Inflammation of the squeam, you know. Hence the sealing-wax. It stays on better than sticking-plaster. He eats off the plaster."

Trotting on three legs, ears cocked, smirking with affection, Rich Mixed enjoyed being praised. But now he heard the bugle far away astern, crying out "Officer's wives," and with a pang of remorse, knew he'd be late when the call came, "Love o' God." He bolted to his duties.

As to Rams, at the risk of a dangerous fall, he lighted a cigar. I dismounted to stamp out the flame from his dropped match in the grass, then mounting again set off at a racking trot, which smashed the cigar in his hand and left the remains smoldering on the trail. Without breaking pace, I swung down, trampled the sparks and vaulted back to watch Rams having his vital organs torn adrift and pounded to a haggis during an hour of vengeance. Never again would he smoke selfishly, or while he lived would drop a lighted match. But would he live?

I was angry at losing my dinner, and being sent to Mrs. Sarde's--into temptation. Worse than that, the presence of Rams profaned a landscape ineffably pure and sacred in its wild beauty. The hot air quivered with perfume under the fir trees of that open forest, the birds rang out ecstatic little songs, canaries flaunted their topaz from tree to tree, and humming-birds, each like an emerald in a mist, hovered among the flowers.

We Spaniards make an art of living, quick in every fiber to live, to love, to worship, to sin, to suffer; but, alas, so many are religious, monks and nuns mewed up in convents instead of breeding children. These Anglo-Saxons have no time to live, let life itself drop lost out of their grasping hands because they are sires and mothers fending for their homes, begetters of nations, piling wealth on wealth, ruling the sea, taming the wilderness, filling the continents with their endless, meaningless clamor for more and more. This brutal creature I rode with could see timber by the thousand feet per acre, real estate by sections and town sites, minerals by the ton, the horse-power of cataracts, but not the delicious valley, the aged hills bowed with their weight of years. My people came to worship, his to destroy.

It must have been ninety-five degrees in the shade as we dropped down the white bluffs, and splashed across the Columbia just by the outlet of Lake Windermere. I took the sandwiches from my wallets, and we had lunch in the saddle, walked our horses through enchanted woodlands where trotting would seem profane. With a wry smile, my tenderfoot avowed that he must have a squeam after all. It ached, he said mournfully. "And yet," he asked, "what's the usual name for it?"

"Oh, it's only the thing you get squeamish with," said I. "Among my mother's people they cut the _Squaminosa Invertibitis_ in infancy, just like your doctors cut out the vermiform appendix, and as they do the killing they ought to know."

He gulped the bait. "Your mother's people?" he asked, and offered a cigar, which I declined with thanks. Havana wrappers covered a multitude of wrong 'uns.

"My mother's people? Oh, yes," I remembered. "She's from the New Hebrides. Married my father when he was a Methodist missionary. But then he took to preaching against the black-birders, slavers, you know--so the traders ran him out. He was fed up with the missions, anyway."

Rams was hooked good and hard, so I played him.

"If only," I sighed, "he had caught the mission schooner!"

"What happened?"

"You see, it's never safe in canoes along the New Guinea coast. Poor father was caught, and--well, I can just remember the smell--cooking, you know."

"Horrible! But you escaped?"

I couldn't really convince him unless I owned to that. "Yes, mother and I escaped--swam Torres Straits, got to the pearling station on Thursday Island."

He swallowed that thirty-mile swim, not to mention sharks, and said he had heard a lot about Thursday Island.

I thought best to skip the island.

"After we got home," said I, "we were dreadfully poor. Mother had a perfectly awful time in London, starving. Then she met Madame Tussaud."

"But she was in the French Revolution. It says so in the guide-book."

"Yes, the waxwork business went to her son, you remember, and this was the grandson's second wife, I think--a perfect angel, anyway. Mother got a job as charwoman at the waxworks. How I remember sitting in a corner all alone behind those weird dead figures! They frightened me horribly at first--in the dark, you know, after closing time--and mother scrubbing the floor down in the Chamber of Horrors."

"Awful place that. Scared me."

"In short frocks," I added by way of local color. "I was only five. And then came the trouble--fingers missing from the statues, and ears and things from the sit-down figures. The management found out that mother was a Kanaka, from the New Hebrides. They shoved her in jail."

"But, why?"

"And mother a Methodist!" I wiped my eyes with my shirt-sleeve, deeply moved, then gulped, and went on bravely. "She'd given up eating such things, but there it was, the suspicion, the doubt--fingers missing, and ears--and the nose of Marie Antionette--the highest I ever reached. You see, it wasn't mother. It was me. It was hereditary." I choked back a sob. "That's why my name's Lemuncher."

Rams became very uneasy. He was broke dead gentle to ride or drive, but shied at cannibals.

From the Columbia crossing up Toby Creek to Paradise Flat we climbed about fourteen miles and, scared as I was of night catching us on that dim trail in the mountains, our horses needed rest. We found a Mexican packer camped with his bunch of burros, keen for a gossip in Spanish, insisting that we share his venison stew. I slacked cinches and introduced Mr. Rams to "a Kanaka friend from the New Hebrides."

"But fancy Kanakas here! What next!"

"Yes," I confessed, "a lot of my mother's people settled here to get away from the missionaries. You see, they eat salt, and it spoils their flavor. We'll stop for dinner and try Kanaka cooking."

Mr. Rams was at his second helping when a sudden thought drove all the blood from his clerkly visage. "What food is this?" he gasped.

"An Indian girl," I told him, "dear little papoose our friend shot yesterday."

Rams broke for the woods.

The Mexican warned me to make the Throne Mine by daylight, but when I led the mare to my poor tenderfoot he seemed in a state of collapse. And yet I tapped the manhood which underlies the English character, for ill as he was, and believing me to be a thrice confessed cannibal, insane and armed, he faced me like a hero. "Clear out!" he shouted, pointing me down the trail. "I'll walk to the Throne. Clear out!"

"I'm to deliver you," said I, "in good repair, and take a receipt for you."

His sparring attitude was in quite excellent form, but I told him to lower the right fist just an inch, and wade right in for blood.

The blow on my solar plexus made me reel, but of course I stood to attention. He had to be delivered in good repair, not damaged, at the Throne. His second made my nose bleed.

"Defend yourself," he howled, and poured in all he had until his breath was gone.

"When you're done being peevish," said I, "we'll hit the trail."

"I don't understand," answered my tenderfoot.

"That's the trouble," said I, while I stanched my nose. "You don't understand. You mount on the off-side, drop matches to set the country all ablaze, foul the stream where my horse drinks, believe all that you're told, and don't know venison from human flesh. So you have tantrums like a teething baby."

"Then you're not--a--"

"Cannibal? No. But you're a silly ass."

"Perhaps you're right," said Rams, as I hoisted him into the saddle.

Dense forest filled Paradise Cañon and from its head a switch-back trail climbed up the flank of a gigantic ridge. Along its spine we climbed for many a weary mile until even the midsummer length Of the day began to fail us and twilight was closing in.

Rams talked with a slight twitching of his large, seductively ugly ears--the kind one longs to stroke--and a faint snuffle of the nose, pinched red by wearing glasses, which looked quite convivial. He talked down to me, using nice simple words for me to understand about the London where he had been warped. This London of his was not my glittering City of Joy, and it was quite unlike Red Saunders' bleak manufacturing seaport. It was the London of the white Babu which had given him his uneducated body, his trained unquiet mind, and his opinions to which he attached no end of importance, giving them plenty of air and exercise. He was but one of millions of clerks and students who lived in suburbs, worked in offices. They improved their minds--poor things--of an evening at enormous universities called the Polytechnics where they make prigs. They spent their Saturday afternoons like sportsmen watching the games they could not afford to play. On their direful Sundays, they had their souls exorcised at Bigotarian chapels contemplating hell, and they cycled or walked in the parks to give the girls a treat.

Rams senior was a shiny Baptist millionaire who had bought a knighthood, and sat in the Commons on the Liberal side, a vegetarian, anti- most things, and pro- everything else, with no nonsense about him or any Christian mercy. His daughters were frumps on all sorts of committees, his sons were slaves, and this one was a mining engineer. To-day he rode over his first real rock, so different from the cabinet specimens, to see his first real mine, not like the show-case model. The swampy slopes of Alpine flowers told him nothing about the jagged schists underneath. The granite spires ahead sent him no message about God's ice-mills out of their purple bloom against the orange sky.

When I told him I had lots of relations in town, the weary man flickered up to this last expiring effort as he asked for their names, and where they lived.

"All over the place," I told him. "You know them by their coat-of-arms, the Medici Arms--three golden globes and a side door. They are my uncles."

Poor Rams!

"Look!" I shouted as some small animals leaped across the trail. "A chiffon!"

"A what?" He would not even look.

"A chiffon. It's a sort of four-legged burrowing bird which inhabits mines. We must be near the Throne."

Black clumps of torch-like pines scattered down, far down a slope of Alpine flowers on which we groped. Ahead was a spire peak of pansy bloom on a field of lilac snow against the gloaming. Astern and a little above our trail a small log cabin nestled among the rocks, and a candle glowed in its doorway. Then ahead, quite near, a nook of the hillside revealed more cabins in the frosty murk. A lamp gleamed in a window, to guide us up the rock steps and fields of dusty snow. Here was the Throne.