Those Times and These - Irvin Cobb 4 стр.

Presently one of the boys pulled out of line and spurred up alongside of our chief.

Scuse me, commander, he says, but it begins to look to me like we were back trackin on our own trail.

Billy looks at him, grinnin a little through his whiskers. We all had whiskers on our faces, or the startins of em.

Bless my soul, I believe youre right! says Billy. Why, youve got the makins of a scout in you.

But look here, says the other feller, still sort of puzzled-like, that means were headin due North, dont it?

It means Im headin North, says Billy, and at that he quit grinnin. But you, nor no one else in this troop dont have to fol-ler along onlessen youre minded so to do. Every man here is a free agent and his own boss. And ef anybody is dissatisfied with the route Im takin and favours some other, Id like fur him to come out now and say so. It wont take me moren thirty seconds to resign my leadership.

Oh, thats all right, says the other feller, I was merely astin the question, thats all. I aint dissatisfied. I voted fur you ez commander fur the entire campaign not fur jest part of it. I was fur you when we elected you, and Im fur you yit.

And with that he wheeled and racked along back to his place. Purty soon Billy looked over his shoulder along the column and an idea struck him. Not fur behind him Tom Moss was joggin along with his old battered banjo swung acrost his back. Havin toted that there banjo of hisn all through the war hed likewise brought it along with him into Mexico. He had a mighty pleasin voice, too, and the way he could sing and play that song about him bein a good old rebel and not carin a dam made you feel that he didnt care a dam, neither. Billy beckoned to him and Tom rid up alongside and Billy whispered something in his ear. Toms face all lit up then and he on-slung his banjo frum over his shoulder and throwed one laig over his saddle-bow and hit the strings a couple of licks and reared his head back and in another second he was singin at the top of his voice. But this time he wasnt singin the song about bein a good old rebel. He was singin the one that begins:

In another minute everybody else was singin, too singin and gallopin. Son, you never in your whole life seen so many hairy, ragged, rusty fellers on hoss-back a-tear in along through the dust of a strange land, actin like they were all in a powerful hurry to git somewheres and skeered the gates would be shut before they arrived. Boy, listen: the homesickness jest popped out through my pores like perspiration.

It taken us all of seven days to git frum the border acrost that long stretch of waste to within a days ride of the city of Monterey. It only taken us four and a half to git back agin to the border, the natives standin by to watch us as we tore on past em. The sun was still several hours high on the evenin of the fifth day when we come in sight of the Rio Grande River; and I dont ever seem to recall a stretch of muddy yaller water that looked so grateful to my eyes ez that one looked.

We come canterin down to the waters edge, all of us bein plum jaded and mighty travel-worn. And there, right over yond on the fur bank we could see the peaky tops of some army tents standin in rows and we heared the notes of a bugle, soundin mighty sweet and clear in that still air. And it dawned on us that by a strange coincidence whut wouldnt be liable to happen oncet in a dozen years had happened in our purticular case that the United States Government, ez represented by a detachment of its military forces, had moved down to the line at a point almost opposite to the place where we aimed to cross back over.

I aint sure yit whut it was it mout a-been the first sight of the foeman hed fit aginst so long that riled him or it mout a-been merely a sort of sneakin desire to make out like he purposed to hold off to the very last and then be won over by sweet blandishments but jest ez we reached the river, a big feller hailin frum down in Bland County rid up in front of Billy Priest and he says he wants to ast him a question.

Fire away, says Billy.

Bill Priest, says the Bland County feller, I take it to be your intention to go back into the oncet free but now conquered state of Texas?

Well, pardner, says Billy in that whiny way of hisn, you certainly are a slow one when it comes to pickin up current gossip ez it flits to and fro about the neighbourhood. Why do you spose weve all been ridin hell-fur-leather in this direction endurin of the past few days onlessen it was with that identical notion in mind?

Never mind that now, says the other feller. Circumstances alter cases. Dont you see that there camp over yonder is a camp of Yankee soldiers?

Ef my suspicions are correct thats jest whut it is, says Billy very politely. Whut of it?

Well, says the other feller, did it ever occur to you that ef we cross here them Yankees will call on us to lay down the arms which weve toted so long? Did it ever occur to you that mebbe theyd even expect us to take their dam oath of allegiance?

Yes, says Billy Priest, sence you bring up the subject, it had occurred to me that they mout do jest that. And likewise it has also occurred to me that when them formalities are concluded they mout extend the hospitalities of the occasion by invitin us to set down with them to a meal of real human vittles. Why, he says, I aint tasted a cup of genuwyne coffee in so long that !

The other feller breaks in on him before Billy can git done with whut hes sayin.

And you, he says, sort of sneerful and insinuatin, you, here only some three or four months back was a ring-leader and a head-devil in formin this here expedition. You was goin round makin your brags that youd be the last one to surrender you! And weve been callin you Fightin Billy! Fightin Billy? Hells fire!

Billy rammed his heels in his hosss flanks and shoved over, only reinin up when he was touchin laigs with the Bland County feller. A shiny little blue light come into his eyes and the veins in his neck all swelled out.

My esteemed friend and feller-country-man, says Billy, speakin plenty slow and plenty polite, ef any gentleman present is inclined to make a pussonal matter of it, Ill undertake to endeavour to prove up my right to that there title right here and now. But ef not, I wish to state fur the benefit of all concerned that frum this minute I aint figgerin on wearin the nickname any longer. Frum where I set it looks to me like this is a mighty fitten and appropriate time to go out of the fightin business and resume the placid and pleasant ways of peace. Frum now on, to friends ez well ez to strangers, Im goin to be jest plain William Pitman Priest, Esquire, attorney and counsellor-at-law. I ast you all to kindly bear it in mind. And furthermore speakin solely and exclusively fur the said William Pitman Priest, I will state it is my intention of gittin acrost this here river in time to eat my supper on the soil of my own country. Ef anybody here feels like goin along with me Ill be glad of his company. Ef not, Ill bid all you good comrades an affectionate farewell and jest jog along over all by my lonesome self.

But, of course, when he said that last he was jest funnin talkin to hear hisself talk. He knowed good and well we would all go with him. And we did. And ez fur ez I know none of us ever had cause to regret takin the step.

By hurryin, we did git back home before hog-killin time. And then after a spell, when wed had our disabilities removed, some of us like Billy Priest started runnin fur office and bein elected with reasonable regularity and some of us, like me, went into business. We lived through bayonet rule and reconstruction and carpet-baggery, and we lived to see all them evils die out and a better feelin and a better understandin come in. Weve been livin ever since, sech of us ez are still survivin. Ive done considerble livin myself. Ive lived to see North and South united. Ive even lived to see my own daughter married to the son of a Northern soldier, with the full consent of the families on both sides. And so thats how it happens Ive got a grandson thats part Yankee and part Confederate in his breedin. I reckin there aint nobody thats ez plum foolish ez I am about that there little, curly-headed sassy tike, without its his grandfather on the other side, old Major Ashcroft. We differ radically on politics, the Major bein a besotted and hopeless black Republikin; and try ez I will I aint never been able to cure him of a delusion of hisn that the Ninth Michigan could a-helt its own aginst Kings Hell Hounds ef ever theyd met up on the field of battle; but in other respects hes a fairly intelligent man; and he certainly does coincide with me that betwixt us weve got the smartest four-year-old youngster fur a grandchild that ever was born. Theres hope fur a nation that kin produce sech children ez that one, ef I do say it myself.

He stood up and shook himself.

In fact, son, concluded Sergeant Bagby, you mout safely say that, takin one thing with another, this country is turnin out to be quite a success.

CHAPTER II. AND THERE WAS LIGHT

SO many things that at first seem amazingly complex turn out amazingly simple. The purely elemental has a trick of ambushing itself behind a screen of mystery; but when by deduction and elimination in short, by the simple processes of subtraction and division we have stripped away the mask, the fact stands so plainly revealed we marvel that we did not behold it from the beginning. Elemental, you will remember, was a favourite word with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and one much employed by him in the elucidation of problems in criminology for the better enlightenment of his sincere but somewhat obvious-minded friend, the worthy Doctor Watson.

On the other hand, traits and tricks that appear to betray the characters, the inclinations and, most of all, the vocations of their owners may prove misleading clues, and very often do. You see a black man with a rolling gait, who spraddles his legs when he stands and sways his body on his hips when he walks; and, following the formula of the deductionist cult of amateur detectives, you say to yourself that here, beyond peradventure, is a deep-water sailor, used to decks that heave and scuppers that flood. Inquiry but serves to prove to you how wrong you are. The person in question is a veteran dining-car waiter.

Then along comes another one with a hearty red face, who rears well back and steps out with martial precision. Evidently a retired officer of the regular army, you say to yourself. Not at all; merely the former bass drummer of a military brass band. The bass drummer, as will readily be recalled, leans away from his instrument instead of toward it.

For a typical example of this sort of thing, let us take the man I have in mind for the central figure of this tale. He was a square-built man, round-faced, with a rather small, deep-set grey eye, and a pair of big hands, clumsy-looking but deft. He wore his hair short and his upper lip long. Appraising him upon the occasion of a chance meeting in the street, you would say offhand that this, very probably, was a man who had been reasonably successful in some trade calling for initiative and expertness rather than for technic. He wouldnt be a theatrical manager his attire was too formal; or a stockbroker his attire was not formal enough.

I imagine you in the act of telling yourself that he might be a clever life-insurance solicitor, or a purchasing agent for a trunk line, or a canny judge of real-estate values a man whose taste in dress would run rather to golf stockings than to spats, rather to soft hats than to hard ones, and whose pet hobby would likely be trout flies and not first editions. In a part of your hypothesis you would have been absolutely correct. This man could do things with a casting rod and with a mid-iron too.

Seeing him now, as we do see him, wearing a loose tweed suit and sitting bareheaded behind a desk in the innermost room of a smart suite of offices on a fashionable side street, surrounded by shelves full of medical books and by wall cases containing medical appliances, you, knowing nothing of him except what your eye told you, would probably hazard a guess that this individual was a friend of the doctor, who, having dropped in for social purposes and having found the doctor out, had removed his hat and taken a seat in the doctors chair to await the doctors return.

Therein you would have been altogether in error. This man was not the doctors friend, but the doctor himself a practitioner of high repute in his own particular line. He was known as a specialist in neurotic disorders; privately he called himself a specialist in human nature. He was of an orthodox school of medicine, but he had cast overboard most of the ethics of the school and he gave as little as possible of the medicine. Drugs he used sparingly, preferring to prescribe other things for most of his patients such things, for instance, as fresh air, fresh, vegetables and fresh thoughts. His cures were numerous and his fees were large.

On the other side of a cross wall a woman sat waiting to see him. She was alone, being the first of his callers to arrive this day. A heavy, deep-cushioned town car, with a crest on its doors and a man in fine livery to drive it, had brought her to the doctors address five minutes earlier; car and driver were at the curb outside.

The woman was exquisitely groomed and exquisitely overdressed. She radiated luxury, wealth and the possession of an assured and enviable position. She radiated something else, too unhappiness.

Here assuredly the lay mind might make no mistake in its summarising. There are too many like her for any one of us to err in our diagnosis when a typical example is presented. The city is especially prolific of such women. It breeds them. It coddles them and it pampers them, but in payment therefore it besets them with many devils. It gives them everything in reason and out of reason, and then it makes them long for something else anything else, so long as it be unattainable. Possessed of the nagging demons of unrest and discontent and satiation, they feed on their nerves until their nerves in retaliation begin to feed on them. The result generally is smash. Sanitariums get them, and divorce courts and asylums and frequently cemeteries.

The woman who waited in the reception room did not have to wait very long, yet she was hard put to it to control herself while she sat there. She bit her under lip until the red marks of her teeth showed in the flesh, and she gripped the arms of her chair so tightly and with such useless expenditure of nervous force that through her gloves the knuckles of her hands exposed themselves in sharp high ridges.

Presently a manservant entered and, bowing, indicated mutely that his master would see her now. She fairly ran past him through the communicating door which he held open for her passage. As she entered the inner room it was as though her coming into it set all its orderliness awry. Only the ruddy-faced specialist, intrenched behind the big table in the middle of the floor, seemed unchanged. She halted on the other side of the table and bent across it toward him, her finger tips drumming a little tattoo upon its smooth surface. He did not speak even the briefest of greetings; perhaps he was minded not to speak. He waited for her to begin.