Into what mood was it that the Virginian now fell? Being less busy, did he begin to “grieve” about the girl on Bear Creek? I only know that after talking so lengthily he fell into a nine days’ silence. The talking part of him deeply and unbrokenly slept.
Official words of course came from him as we rode southward from the railroad, gathering the Judge’s stray cattle. During the many weeks since the spring round-up, some of these animals had as usual got very far off their range, and getting them on again became the present business of our party.
Directions and commands--whatever communications to his subordinates were needful to the forwarding of this--he duly gave. But routine has never at any time of the world passed for conversation. His utterances, such as, “We’ll work Willo’ Creek to-morro’ mawnin’,” or, “I want the wagon to be at the fawks o’ Stinkin’ Water by Thursday,” though on some occasions numerous enough to sound like discourse, never once broke the man’s true silence. Seeming to keep easy company with the camp, he yet kept altogether to himself. That talking part of him--the mood which brings out for you your friend’s spirit and mind as a free gift or as an exchange--was down in some dark cave of his nature, hidden away. Perhaps it had been dreaming; perhaps completely reposing. The Virginian was one of those rare ones who are able to refresh themselves in sections. To have a thing on his mind did not keep his body from resting. During our recent journey--it felt years ago now!--while our caboose on the freight train had trundled endlessly westward, and the men were on the ragged edge, the very jumping-off place, of mutiny and possible murder, I had seen him sleep like a child. He snatched the moments not necessary for vigil. I had also seen him sit all night watching his responsibility, ready to spring on it and fasten his teeth in it. And now that he had confounded them with their own attempted weapon of ridicule, his powers seemed to be profoundly dormant. That final pitched battle of wits had made the men his captives and admirers--all save Trampas. And of him the Virginian did not seem to be aware.
But Scipio le Moyne would say to me now and then, “If I was Trampas, I’d pull my freight.” And once he added, “Pull it kind of casual, yu’ know, like I wasn’t noticing myself do it.”
“Yes,” our friend Shorty murmured pregnantly, with his eye upon the quiet Virginian, “he’s sure studying his revenge.”
“Studying your pussy-cat,” said Scipio. “He knows what he’ll do. The time ain’t arrived.” This was the way they felt about it; and not unnaturally this was the way they made me, the inexperienced Easterner, feel about it. That Trampas also felt something about it was easy to know. Like the leaven which leavens the whole lump, one spot of sulkiness in camp will spread its dull flavor through any company that sits near it; and we had to sit near Trampas at meals for nine days.
His sullenness was not wonderful. To feel himself forsaken by his recent adherents, to see them gone over to his enemy, could not have made his reflections pleasant. Why he did not take himself off to other climes--“pull his freight casual,” as Scipio said--I can explain only thus: pay was due him--“time,” as it was called in cow-land; if he would have this money, he must stay under the Virginian’s command until the Judge’s ranch on Sunk Creek should be reached; meanwhile, each day’s work added to the wages in store for him; and finally, once at Sunk Creek, it would be no more the Virginian who commanded him; it would be the real ranch foreman. At the ranch he would be the Virginian’s equal again, both of them taking orders from their officially recognized superior, this foreman. Shorty’s word about “revenge” seemed to me like putting the thing backwards. Revenge, as I told Scipio, was what I should be thinking about if I were Trampas.
“He dassent,” was Scipio’s immediate view. “Not till he’s got strong again. He got laughed plumb sick by the bystanders, and whatever spirit he had was broke in the presence of us all. He’ll have to recuperate.” Scipio then spoke of the Virginian’s attitude. “Maybe revenge ain’t just the right word for where this affair has got to now with him. When yu’ beat another man at his own game like he done to Trampas, why, yu’ve had all the revenge yu’ can want, unless you’re a hog. And he’s no hog. But he has got it in for Trampas. They’ve not reckoned to a finish. Would you let a man try such spite-work on you and quit thinkin’ about him just because yu’d headed him off?” To this I offered his own notion about hogs and being satisfied. “Hogs!” went on Scipio, in a way that dashed my suggestion to pieces; “hogs ain’t in the case. He’s got to deal with Trampas somehow--man to man. Trampas and him can’t stay this way when they get back and go workin’ same as they worked before. No, sir; I’ve seen his eye twice, and I know he’s goin’ to reckon to a finish.”
I still must, in Scipio’s opinion, have been slow to understand, when on the afternoon following this talk I invited him to tell me what sort of “finish” he wanted, after such a finishing as had been dealt Trampas already. Getting “laughed plumb sick by the bystanders” (I borrowed his own not overstated expression) seemed to me a highly final finishing. While I was running my notions off to him, Scipio rose, and, with the frying-pan he had been washing, walked slowly at me.
“I do believe you’d oughtn’t to be let travel alone the way you do.” He put his face close to mine. His long nose grew eloquent in its shrewdness, while the fire in his bleached blue eye burned with amiable satire. “What has come and gone between them two has only settled the one point he was aimin’ to make. He was appointed boss of this outfit in the absence of the regular foreman. Since then all he has been playin’ for is to hand back his men to the ranch in as good shape as they’d been handed to him, and without losing any on the road through desertion or shooting or what not. He had to kick his cook off the train that day, and the loss made him sorrowful, I could see. But I’d happened to come along, and he jumped me into the vacancy, and I expect he is pretty near consoled. And as boss of the outfit he beat Trampas, who was settin’ up for opposition boss. And the outfit is better than satisfied it come out that way, and they’re stayin’ with him; and he’ll hand them all back in good condition, barrin’ that lost cook. So for the present his point is made, yu’ see. But look ahead a little. It may not be so very far ahead yu’ll have to look. We get back to the ranch. He’s not boss there any more. His responsibility is over. He is just one of us again, taking orders from a foreman they tell me has showed partiality to Trampas more’n a few times. Partiality! That’s what Trampas is plainly trusting to. Trusting it will fix him all right and fix his enemy all wrong. He’d not otherwise dare to keep sour like he’s doing. Partiality! D’ yu’ think it’ll scare off the enemy?” Scipio looked across a little creek to where the Virginian was helping throw the gathered cattle on the bedground. “What odds”--he pointed the frying-pan at the Southerner--“d’ yu’ figure Trampas’s being under any foreman’s wing will make to a man like him? He’s going to remember Mr. Trampas and his spite-work if he’s got to tear him out from under the wing, and maybe tear off the wing in the operation. And I am goin’ to advise your folks,” ended the complete Scipio, “not to leave you travel so much alone--not till you’ve learned more life.”
He had made me feel my inexperience, convinced me of innocence, undoubtedly; and during the final days of our journey I no longer invoked his aid to my reflections upon this especial topic: What would the Virginian do to Trampas? Would it be another intellectual crushing of him, like the frog story, or would there be something this time more material--say muscle, or possibly gunpowder--in it? And was Scipio, after all, infallible? I didn’t pretend to understand the Virginian; after several years’ knowledge of him he remained utterly beyond me. Scipio’s experience was not yet three weeks long. So I let him alone as to all this, discussing with him most other things good and evil in the world, and being convinced of much further innocence; for Scipio’s twenty odd years were indeed a library of life. I have never met a better heart, a shrewder wit, and looser morals, with yet a native sense of decency and duty somewhere hard and fast enshrined.
But all the while I was wondering about the Virginian: eating with him, sleeping with him (only not so sound as he did), and riding beside him often for many hours.
Experiments in conversation I did make--and failed. One day particularly while, after a sudden storm of hail had chilled the earth numb and white like winter in fifteen minutes, we sat drying and warming ourselves by a fire that we built, I touched upon that theme of equality on which I knew him to hold opinions as strong as mine. “Oh,” he would reply, and “Cert’nly”; and when I asked him what it was in a man that made him a leader of men, he shook his head and puffed his pipe. So then, noticing how the sun had brought the earth in half an hour back from winter to summer again, I spoke of our American climate.
It was a potent drug, I said, for millions to be swallowing every day.
“Yes,” said he, wiping the damp from his Winchester rifle.
Our American climate, I said, had worked remarkable changes, at least.
“Yes,” he said; and did not ask what they were.
So I had to tell him. “It has made successful politicians of the Irish. That’s one. And it has given our whole race the habit of poker.”
Bang went his Winchester. The bullet struck close to my left. I sat up angrily.
“That’s the first foolish thing I ever saw you do!” I said.
“Yes,” he drawled slowly, “I’d ought to have done it sooner. He was pretty near lively again.” And then he picked up a rattlesnake six feet behind me. It had been numbed by the hail, part revived by the sun, and he had shot its head off.
XVIII. “WOULD YOU BE A PARSON?”
After this I gave up my experiments in conversation. So that by the final afternoon of our journey, with Sunk Creek actually in sight, and the great grasshoppers slatting their dry song over the sage-brush, and the time at hand when the Virginian and Trampas would be “man to man,” my thoughts rose to a considerable pitch of speculation.
And now that talking part of the Virginian, which had been nine days asleep, gave its first yawn and stretch of waking. Without preface, he suddenly asked me, “Would you be a parson?”
I was mentally so far away that I couldn’t get back in time to comprehend or answer before he had repeated: “What would yu’ take to be a parson?”
He drawled it out in his gentle way, precisely as if no nine days stood between it and our last real intercourse.
“Take?” I was still vaguely moving in my distance. “How?”
His next question brought me home.
“I expect the Pope’s is the biggest of them parson jobs?”
It was with an “Oh!” that I now entirely took his idea. “Well, yes; decidedly the biggest.”
“Beats the English one? Archbishop--ain’t it?--of Canterbury? The Pope comes ahead of him?”
“His Holiness would say so if his Grace did not.”
The Virginian turned half in his saddle to see my face--I was, at the moment, riding not quite abreast of him--and I saw the gleam of his teeth beneath his mustache. It was seldom I could make him smile, even to this slight extent. But his eyes grew, with his next words, remote again in their speculation.
“His Holiness and his Grace. Now if I was to hear ’em namin’ me that-a-way every mawnin’, I’d sca’cely get down to business.”
“Oh, you’d get used to the pride of it.”
“’Tisn’t the pride. The laugh is what would ruin me. ’Twould take ’most all my attention keeping a straight face. The Archbishop”--here he took one of his wide mental turns--“is apt to be a big man in them Shakespeare plays. Kings take talk from him they’d not stand from anybody else; and he talks fine, frequently. About the bees, for instance, when Henry is going to fight France. He tells him a beehive is similar to a kingdom. I learned that piece.” The Virginian could not have expected to blush at uttering these last words. He knew that his sudden color must tell me in whose book it was he had learned the piece. Was not her copy of Kenilworth even now in his cherishing pocket? So he now, to cover his blush, very deliberately recited to me the Archbishop’s discourse upon bees and their kingdom:
“‘Where some, like magistrates, correct at home...
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make loot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor:
He, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold.’
“Ain’t that a fine description of bees a-workin’? ‘The singing masons building roofs of gold!’ Puts ’em right before yu’, and is poetry without bein’ foolish. His Holiness and his Grace. Well, they could not hire me for either o’ those positions. How many religions are there?”
“All over the earth?”
“Yu’ can begin with ourselves. Right hyeh at home I know there’s Romanists, and Episcopals--”
“Two kinds!” I put in. “At least two of Episcopals.”
“That’s three. Then Methodists and Baptists, and--”
“Three Methodists!”
“Well, you do the countin’.”
I accordingly did it, feeling my revolving memory slip cogs all the way round. “Anyhow, there are safely fifteen.”
“Fifteen.” He held this fact a moment. “And they don’t worship a whole heap o’ different gods like the ancients did?”
“Oh, no!”
“It’s just the same one?”
“The same one.”
The Virginian folded his hands over the horn of his saddle, and leaned forward upon them in contemplation of the wide, beautiful landscape.
“One God and fifteen religions,” was his reflection. “That’s a right smart of religions for just one God.”
This way of reducing it was, if obvious to him, so novel to me that my laugh evidently struck him as a louder and livelier comment than was required. He turned on me as if I had somehow perverted the spirit of his words.
“I ain’t religious. I know that. But I ain’t unreligious. And I know that too.”
“So do I know it, my friend.”
“Do you think there ought to be fifteen varieties of good people?” His voice, while it now had an edge that could cut anything it came against, was still not raised. “There ain’t fifteen. There ain’t two. There’s one kind. And when I meet it, I respect it. It is not praying nor preaching that has ever caught me and made me ashamed of myself, but one or two people I have knowed that never said a superior word to me. They thought more o’ me than I deserved, and that made me behave better than I naturally wanted to. Made me quit a girl onced in time for her not to lose her good name. And so that’s one thing I have never done. And if ever I was to have a son or somebody I set store by, I would wish their lot to be to know one or two good folks mighty well--men or women--women preferred.”
He had looked away again to the hills behind Sunk Creek ranch, to which our walking horses had now almost brought us.
“As for parsons “--the gesture of his arm was a disclaiming one--“I reckon some parsons have a right to tell yu’ to be good. The bishop of this hyeh Territory has a right. But I’ll tell yu’ this: a middlin’ doctor is a pore thing, and a middlin’ lawyer is a pore thing; but keep me from a middlin’ man of God.”
Once again he had reduced it, but I did not laugh this time. I thought there should in truth be heavy damages for malpractice on human souls. But the hot glow of his words, and the vision of his deepest inner man it revealed, faded away abruptly.
“What do yu’ make of the proposition yondeh?” As he pointed to the cause of this question he had become again his daily, engaging, saturnine self.
Then I saw over in a fenced meadow, to which we were now close, what he was pleased to call “the proposition.” Proposition in the West does, in fact, mean whatever you at the moment please,--an offer to sell you a mine, a cloud-burst, a glass of whiskey, a steamboat. This time it meant a stranger clad in black, and of a clerical deportment which would in that atmosphere and to a watchful eye be visible for a mile or two.
“I reckoned yu’ hadn’t noticed him,” was the Virginian’s reply to my ejaculation. “Yes. He set me goin’ on the subject a while back. I expect he is another missionary to us pore cow-boys.”
I seemed from a hundred yards to feel the stranger’s forceful personality. It was in his walk--I should better say stalk--as he promenaded along the creek. His hands were behind his back, and there was an air of waiting, of displeased waiting, in his movement.
“Yes, he’ll be a missionary,” said the Virginian, conclusively; and he took to singing, or rather to whining, with his head tilted at an absurd angle upward at the sky:
“‘Dar is a big Car’lina nigger,
About de size of dis chile or p’raps a little bigger,
By de name of Jim Crow.
Dat what de white folks call him.
If ever I sees him I ’tends for to maul him,
Just to let de white folks see
Such an animos as he
Can’t walk around the streets and scandalize me.’”
The lane which was conducting us to the group of ranch buildings now turned a corner of the meadow, and the Virginian went on with his second verse:
“‘Great big fool, he hasn’t any knowledge.
Gosh! how could he, when he’s never been to scollege?
Neither has I.
But I’se come mighty nigh;
I peaked through de door as I went by.’”
He was beginning a third stanza, but stopped short; a horse had neighed close behind us.
“Trampas,” said he, without turning his head, “we are home.”
“It looks that way.” Some ten yards were between ourselves and Trampas, where he followed.
“And I’ll trouble yu’ for my rope yu’ took this mawnin’ instead o’ your own.”
“I don’t know as it’s your rope I’ve got.” Trampas skilfully spoke this so that a precisely opposite meaning flowed from his words.
If it was discussion he tried for, he failed. The Virginian’s hand moved, and for one thick, flashing moment my thoughts were evidently also the thoughts of Trampas. But the Virginian only held out to Trampas the rope which he had detached from his saddle.
“Take your hand off your gun, Trampas. If I had wanted to kill yu’ you’d be lying nine days back on the road now. Here’s your rope. Did yu’ expect I’d not know it? It’s the only one in camp the stiffness ain’t all drug out of yet. Or maybe yu’ expected me to notice and--not take notice?”
“I don’t spend my time in expectations about you. If--”
The Virginian wheeled his horse across the road. “Yu’re talkin’ too soon after reachin’ safety, Trampas. I didn’t tell yu’ to hand me that rope this mawnin’, because I was busy. I ain’t foreman now; and I want that rope.”
Trampas produced a smile as skilful as his voice. “Well, I guess your having mine proves this one is yours.” He rode up and received the coil which the Virginian held out, unloosing the disputed one on his saddle. If he had meant to devise a slippery, evasive insult, no small trick in cow-land could be more offensive than this taking another man’s rope. And it is the small tricks which lead to the big bullets. Trampas put a smooth coating of plausibility over the whole transaction. “After the rope corral we had to make this morning”--his tone was mock explanatory--“the ropes was all strewed round camp, and in the hustle I--”
“Pardon me,” said a sonorous voice behind us, “do you happen to have seen Judge Henry?” It was the reverend gentleman in his meadow, come to the fence. As we turned round to him he spoke on, with much rotund authority in his eye. “From his answer to my letter, Judge Henry undoubtedly expects me here. I have arrived from Fetterman according to my plan which I announced to him, to find that he has been absent all day--absent the whole day.”
The Virginian sat sidewise to talk, one long, straight leg supporting him on one stirrup, the other bent at ease, the boot half lifted from its dangling stirrup. He made himself the perfection of courtesy. “The Judge is frequently absent all night, seh.”
“Scarcely to-night, I think. I thought you might know something about him.”
“I have been absent myself, seh.”
“Ah! On a vacation, perhaps?” The divine had a ruddy facet. His strong glance was straight and frank and fearless; but his smile too much reminded me of days bygone, when we used to return to school from the Christmas holidays, and the masters would shake our hands and welcome us with: “Robert, John, Edward, glad to see you all looking so well! Rested, and ready for hard work, I’m sure!”
That smile does not really please even good, tame little boys; and the Virginian was nearing thirty.
“It has not been vacation this trip, seh,” said he, settling straight in his saddle. “There’s the Judge driving in now, in time for all questions yu’ have to ask him.”
His horse took a step, but was stopped short. There lay the Virginian’s rope on the ground. I had been aware of Trampas’s quite proper departure during the talk; and as he was leaving, I seemed also to be aware of his placing the coil across the cantle of its owner’s saddle. Had he intended it to fall and have to be picked up? It was another evasive little business, and quite successful, if designed to nag the owner of the rope. A few hundred yards ahead of us Trampas was now shouting loud cow-boy shouts. Were they to announce his return to those at home, or did they mean derision? The Virginian leaned, keeping his seat, and, swinging down his arm, caught up the rope, and hung it on his saddle somewhat carefully. But the hue of rage spread over his face.
From his fence the divine now spoke, in approbation, but with another strong, cheerless smile. “You pick up that rope as if you were well trained to it.”
“It’s part of our business, seh, and we try to mind it like the rest.” But this, stated in a gentle drawl, did not pierce the missionary’s armor; his superiority was very thick.
We now rode on, and I was impressed by the reverend gentleman’s robust, dictatorial back as he proceeded by a short cut through the meadow to the ranch. You could take him for nothing but a vigorous, sincere, dominating man, full of the highest purpose. But whatever his creed, I already doubted if he were the right one to sow it and make it grow in these new, wild fields. He seemed more the sort of gardener to keep old walks and vines pruned in their antique rigidity. I admired him for coming all this way with his clean, short, gray whiskers and his black, well-brushed suit. And he made me think of a powerful locomotive stuck puffing on a grade.
Meanwhile, the Virginian rode beside me, so silent in his volcanic wrath that I did not perceive it. The missionary coming on top of Trampas had been more than he could stand. But I did not know, and I spoke with innocent cheeriness.
“Is the parson going to save us?” I asked; and I fairly jumped at his voice: “Don’t talk so much!” he burst out. I had got the whole accumulation!
“Who’s been talking?” I in equal anger screeched back. “I’m not trying to save you. I didn’t take your rope.” And having poured this out, I whipped up my pony.
But he spurred his own alongside of me; and glancing at him, I saw that he was now convulsed with internal mirth. I therefore drew down to a walk, and he straightened into gravity.
“I’m right obliged to yu’,” he laid his hand in its buckskin gauntlet upon my horse’s mane as he spoke, “for bringing me back out o’ my nonsense. I’ll be as serene as a bird now--whatever they do. A man,” he stated reflectively, “any full-sized man, ought to own a big lot of temper. And like all his valuable possessions, he’d ought to keep it and not lose any.” This was his full apology. “As for salvation, I have got this far: somebody,” he swept an arm at the sunset and the mountains, “must have made all that, I know. But I know one more thing I would tell Him to His face: if I can’t do nothing long enough and good enough to earn eternal happiness, I can’t do nothing long enough and bad enough to be damned. I reckon He plays a square game with us if He plays at all, and I ain’t bothering my haid about other worlds.”
As we reached the stables, he had become the serene bird he promised, and was sentimentally continuing:
“‘De sun is made of mud from de bottom of de river;
De moon is made o’ fox-fire, as you might disciver;
De stars like de ladies’ eyes,
All round de world dey flies,
To give a little light when de moon don’t rise.’”
If words were meant to conceal our thoughts, melody is perhaps a still thicker veil for them. Whatever temper he had lost, he had certainly found again; but this all the more fitted him to deal with Trampas, when the dealing should begin. I had half a mind to speak to the Judge, only it seemed beyond a mere visitor’s business. Our missionary was at this moment himself speaking to Judge Henry at the door of the home ranch.
“I reckon he’s explaining he has been a-waiting.” The Virginian was throwing his saddle off as I loosened the cinches of mine. “And the Judge don’t look like he was hopelessly distressed.”
I now surveyed the distant parley, and the Judge, from the wagonful of guests whom he had evidently been driving upon a day’s excursion, waved me a welcome, which I waved back. “He’s got Miss Molly Wood there!” I exclaimed.
“Yes.” The Virginian was brief about this fact. “I’ll look afteh your saddle. You go and get acquainted with the company.”
This favor I accepted; it was the means he chose for saying he hoped, after our recent boiling over, that all was now more than right between us. So for the while I left him to his horses, and his corrals, and his Trampas, and his foreman, and his imminent problem.
