The Popular Magazine/Volume 30/Number 4/'The Rosary' and Little John

by B. M. Bower

 

“The Rosary” and Little John

By B. M. Bower

Author of “The Uphill Climb,” “The Flying U Stories,” Etc.

It is all very well to say that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, but when you are alone in a cabin with a man who plays the violin “by ear”? and whose favorite air is ‘‘The Rosary,” you are apt to feel not soothed but as peeved as Little John, the cow-puncher, whose grim experience is set down here.

Little John, whose legal signature was John Little, heaved a long sigh which a sensitive person would have read for endurance strained to the breaking point, and glanced across the cabin at Carl. But Carl not being a sensitive person, the sigh held for him no meaning whatever. Little John scuffed his boot soles nervously upon the board floor like a boy who is studying grammar during recess, while baseball is being played uproariously outside the open window. He pushed his hat so far back on his head that it slid off and narrowly escaped the hot stove behind him, and he ran his fingers distractedly through his hair.

He slid three cards off the diminished pack in his left palm, and unthinkingly laid a red five down across the middle of a black seven—which is no way to play solitaire—and went on without observing the blunder. He picked up his cigarette from the corner of the table, sucked, and found it cold and flabby, and cast it into a far corner. He sat perfectly still for a minute, glaring at the wall; then, so suddenly that Carl jumped, he flung the cards after the cigarette, brought both fists down hard upon the table, and called aloud upon the God who made him.

“Old sol beat yuh again?” Carl inquired sympathetically after a minute, and felt for the lump of unrefined resin in the pocket that had no hole.

Little John dropped his hands inertly to his thighs and shook his head slowly from side to side, acknowledging defeat or helplessness. He did not say a word. And Carl, giving him a long glance of mild puzzlement, tightened the hair one more twist in his bow, tucked the fiddle under his unshaven double chin, and began to play.

Carl was playing “The Rosary,” and it never once occurred to him that there was any connection, however remote, between his playing and Little John's emotional outbreak. Carl was Dutch, and his soul was full of music, and daily went through the pangs of disembodiment trying to get the music out. He drew the bow firmly down across the D string, slid the tone uncertainly up to an approximate E, and began all over again. Carl loved music. But he had paid four dollars and sixty-seven cents for his violin, and the D string was a shade flat, and he played by ear, and his ear was not keen for nice distinctions of tone; it couldn't have been, since he did not notice the flatness of a string. And he was playing “The Rosary.” Figure the result out for yourself.

Carl drew out the last note of the second bar as long as the hair was in his bow. And the face of Little John puckered as if he had inadvertently bitten into a sour pickle. Little John made no claim to having a musical soul, but he had a sharp ear for flatted notes and discords. When Carl slid over to the A string and fumbled half tones there of nerve-wracking inaccuracy, Little John's palms flew protectingly to his ears.

“Oh, for the love of Mike!” he implored. “Cut it out!”

Carl, from sheer astonishment, brought “The Rosary” to an abrupt halt. “What's eatin' on you?” he demanded. “There ain't nothing the matter with that piece, is there?”

Little John snorted, as if his vocabulary fell far short of his need.

“That's the swellest piece that was ever made!”

“Not the way you butcher it, it ain't,” Little John retorted unkindly.

“Some folks can't tell good music when they do hear it.” Carl, conscious of having music in his soul, spoke in a superior tone. “I s'pose,' he added, with much sarcasm, “'you'd ruther listen to 'Turkey in the Straw'!”

“I would not. I'd ruther listen to that old wolf up on the pinnacle howl a while, if it's all the same to you. I ain't heard a yeep out of him for four days. Ill bet you scared him plumb outa the country with that caterwauling.”

“A feller's got to practice,” Carl pointed out aggrievedly.. “The. swellest player in the world had to learn how first, didn't he? I've been trying to git that piece down pat ever since I come home. I don't see why you make a roar now. I've got it.”

“You've got it bad,” amended Little John acrimoniously.

“Aw, what do you know about music? That's a swell piece. It was played by a swell orchestra, lemme tell yuh, I went and listened to it three times, when I was up to the Falls. And when yuh consider I had to carry it in my head three days before~I got a chancet to try it----”

“That's what ails it, maybe. It got spoiled on the way down. It's plumb rotten, now. Take it outside.” Though coarse and inelegant, that thrust was effective.

Carl was very much offended. He laid the instrument down on the calico-covered pillow of his bunk, grabbed his cap and mittens, and went out, sulking. Little John, he considered, could be pretty blamed insulting when he got started. Kicking because a feller tried to play something that had real music into it! Some folks he knew couldn't tell good music when they did hear it. Long as he sawed out dance tunes, Little John would set all day and never say a word against it; but just let him start something swell—something classical---- You will see that there was nothing to be done with Carl, since he had acquired a taste for “classical” music.

Left alone and in blessed silence, Little John gave a grunt or two of disgust and relief combined. He picked up his hat and the cards he had flung across the room, wiped the trey of diamonds on his sleeve to remove the print of Carl's departing boot toe, and went back to playing solitaire.

Before he had the cards spread, the ill effect of those excruciating, flatted half tones lessened, and he began to feel ashamed of his outbreak. Carl, he admitted to himself, was a good-hearted cuss, even if he didn't know when he was fiddling off the key. It wasn't every day you found a fellow that would build fires on cold mornings without beefing around a lot about it; or chop most of the wood without kicking. And he sure did seem to get a lot of comfort out of that fiddle.

Little John, after five minutes of uni-form good luck, found himself with empty palms, and “old sol” beaten before him on the mottled-brown oilcloth. He forgave Carl those agonizing, flat notes, and was pleasant almost to the point of placation when Carl returned, half frozen and filled with gloom.

But on the next night, and the next, and the night after that, when he was forced to sit shuddering over Carl's interpretation of a “classical piece” that deserved a better fate, no amount of appreciation of Carl's good qualities could atone for the outrage upon Little John's nerves. He did not become accustomed to it; he grew so supersensitive that even the fairly true notes set his teeth on edge, and he grew hot within him whenever Carl tucked the cheap fiddle under his chin and turned his round, blue eyes upon vacancy.

Have you ever observed how cumulative is resentment; until it breeds bitter antagonism and worse? Within ten days Little John's resentment grew to the point where he hated Carl and all that Carl said or did. He hated the way he leaned over his plate, and he hated the way he sat in the saddle, and his manner of beginning every argument with, “Aw, what's eatin' on yuh?” Never in his life had he felt such a disgust for a comrade—and for so slight a cause.

And they two were living alone in a little cabin twelve miles from any other habitation, and their duties were monotonous and their diversions few. Even so there had been harmony between the two until Carl acquired a swollen jaw and a grinding pain in his wisdom tooth, and made that trip to Great Falls which resulted in his bringing “The Rosary” home in his head.

They might better have disagreed on politics or religion; better even if they had loved the same girl, for then they would have had something worth fighting over. As it was, Little John was handicapped with a fair working sense of justice. He knew in the heart of him that Carl had just as much right to play the fiddle as he himself had to spend whole evenings playing solitaire. He even recognized the justice of Carl's assertion that a feller had to practice. But no sense of justice could prevent a nervous wincing when Carl tightened the hair in his bow, wriggled his coat sleeve loose upon his arm, and began to play—with the D string nearly always flat.

There was a day when Little John's emotions warred with and nearly overthrew his sense of justice. He seized the violin—or better call it a fiddle—after Carl had laid it down and gone sulking outside, and he meditated violence. The cast-iron cookstove came near having four dollars and sixty-seven cents' worth of fuel added to its fire in one lump. But Little John had a swift mental picture, just as he lifted the stove lid, which made the deed impossible. He put the fiddle back on Carl's bunk, and made shift to ease his emotions by swearing at Carl when he returned.

Carl had bought that fiddle with money earned hardly and saved under difficulty. He nearly wore out a Sears-Roebuck catalogue choosing, and longing, and hesitating over the purchase. Carl sent half his wages every month to his folks in the old country, and four dollars and sixty-seven cents looked pretty big to him—with the express rate on a violin from Chicago to Montana added. It was Little John himself who had persuaded him at last to send for it, because he only had one life to live, anyway, and it would be all the same a hundred years from now. You know the argument.

Little John remembered, and he could not burn the fiddle. He, therefore, vented his animosity with renewed vigor upon Carl. And Carl was Dutch; and not without reason was born the saying about getting one's Dutch up.

Carl's Dutch got up to the extent that he would play “The Rosary” or die trying. He played it in the morning while he was waiting for the teakettle to boil, so that Little John woke with a start to its dismal wailing. He practiced on stormy days until Little John would stay out in almost any weather rather than sit in the cabin and listen. He played it evenings until Little John could not play a straight game of solitaire to save his life, nor speak without an oath-and a growl. And there was just one course left open to Little John if he felt he could not endure it any longer. He could quit—and in midwinter he could whistle for another job. Little John had endured other unpleasant companions before now, for the sake of keeping his name on a pay roll.

One morning he awoke with a bad taste in his mouth and a headache. Carl was sitting humped before the stove, with his coat buttoned up and his cap pulled over his ears, waiting for the fire to burn, and he was playing “The Rosary.” Little John opened bloodshot eyes and stared at him with hatred in his heart. There was no good in swearing at Carl; he had proved that beyond all doubt in the last week. And because he stood a good five inches taller than the player, and weighed forty pounds more, he could not assault him, and retain any shred of self-respect. And Little John was not a “gun fighter.” He heaved a sigh and covered his head with the blankets.

He did not get up to breakfast, for when one is fully occupied with a sick headache one does not crave bacon, and sour-dough biscuits, and black coffee, and stewed prunes. Nor to his dinner, for the very smell of the bacon frying nauseated him. Carl ate sulkily because his inquiry as to how Little John was “stacking up” had elicited a lot of bad language and no information. He went out and threw a little hay to the horses, came in and stacked the dirty dishes in one neat pile, and, while he waited for the dishwater to heat, he got his fiddle and began to practice. You know what he played.

Little John endured the thing to one soul-disturbing finale, and he endured it in silence. But when Carl, without pause, began at the beginning again, he rose up among his blankets and commanded the player to stop that infernal yowling, or—he mentioned several unpleasant penalties.

“Aw, yuh will, ay? Well, I'd like to see yuh start in and try!” Carl wriggled his sleeve loose upon his right arm and began again, for pure cussedness.

Little John got hastily into his pants and his boots, and went for Carl as if he did not give a hang for his self-respect. He grabbed the offending fiddle, and, in trying to wrench it from Carl's dogged grasp, he twisted the neck loose. Carl's fingers relaxed in sheer dismay, and once more the stove came near receiving higher-priced fuel than had ever been its portion.

But again something inside of Little John forbade that act of vengeance. He looked at the mutilated instrument in his hands, and then at Carl's round, horrified gaze upon it. The thing could torment him no more, but he still hated Carl beyond all reason. He threw the fiddle on Carl's bunk, put on the rest of his clothes, and left the cabin; and the closing of the door behind him loosened a quantity of mud chinking between the logs.

The exertion of doing what he had done sent agonizing pains through his head, and he staggered a little when he walked down the path through the deep snow to the stable. There he was compelled to wait, half sitting on the manger rail, until the throbbing eased a little, before he could saddle his horse.

And when he finally rode past the cabin he went slowly, because every jolt was like a hammer on his brain. But his determination held firm. He was going to “call for his time,” and he didn't care whether he got another job before spring or not. He wouldn't stay overnight with that pop-eyed Dutchman again for all the jobs in the country. He hated Carl; he felt that he could watch him die slowly and painfully, and feel no pity.

The day was cold with slow-drifting, gray clouds, and a nipping wind out of the north. The horse he rode was restive under the restraint of the bit, and much inclined toward shying at perfectly well-known objects beside the trail; whenever he jumped sidewise Little John would shut his eyes and groan. He was sick enough to be in bed with darkened windows, and a wet cloth over his eyes, and with some woman to change the cloth frequently, and kiss him softly on the lips when she had finished her ministrations; but, being a cow-puncher, and having no woman who cared enough to fuss over him, he considered himself perfectly competent to ride the twelve miles to the home ranch—because a cow-puncher will never own himself unable to ride if he can get his leg over the saddle.

He was riding with his eyes closed, because a sunbeam had fallen through a hole in the clouds, and was dancing briefly on the snow, and he could not bear the dazzle. While he was riding loosely and unguardedly, with his hand pressed over his eyes, his horse scared a jack rabbit out of a bush within five feet of him, whirled suddenly from the trail, and took off across the open as if he were in fear of his life.

Little John yanked instinctively upon the reins almost before he opened his eyes, and without noticing what sort of place they had rushed into. His horse swerved on the brink of a cut bank, broke through an overhanging crust of loose earth and snow, reared once desperately—and the two went down together.

Presently Little John took off a glove and dug the snow out of his ears and from inside his collar where it was melting unpleasantly, lifted his head, and looked to see what kind of a mess he had made of things. His horse was heaving great breaths, and making occasional, half-hearted attempts to get up; and when he settled back, the weight of him came on Little John's right leg, which hurt abominably.

Little John's senses cleared rapidly. He laid a hand against the horse's shoulder, and when next the animal made an attempt to rise he pushed as hard as he could, and managed to pull himself back a little. He did that twice, holding his breath and pinching his lips tight together; and because the snow was deep and yielding, he managed to pull himself from under his horse. Then he sat for a while with his face dropped forward upon his hands, and almost forgot just where he was.

The air was growing colder when he finally lifted his head, and the bright spot in the clouds was so low down in the west that he knew he must have lost track of half an hour or so. Little John was a healthy, perfectly normal, young man, and the instinct of self-preservation was strong within him. He straightened up, felt of his leg carefully, and decided that it was not broken, but that his knee was twisted badly. He dragged himself forward a few feet, got hold of the bridle reins, and called to the horse to get up.

It struggled futilely, and sank back. With its hip “knocked down”—dislocated, that is—it was more helpless than its master, and if he had had his gun, Little John would have shot the brute in mercy. As it was, he could not even remove the heavy saddle; he had to save his energy for himself.

Little John, glancing anxiously at the bright spot in the clouds, set himself to the problem of getting back to the cabin he had left so eagerly. He managed to get back up the bank, and into the trail by dusk; it was not far, but his face was clammy with sweat when he had accomplished the feat, and his hands shook like an old man's when he groped for his handkerchief. He waited a minute and rested, and looked up and down the lonesome stretch of faintly marked snow which was the trail, and knew that if the thing were done he must do it alone. It might be days before any man rode over that trail. Carl might, to-morrow, or the day after that; but to-morrow----

Little John stuffed his handkerchief back into his coat pocket, swung painfully about in the trail until he faced the bleak, gray sunset, and began to hop in that direction. Hop, hop—and then stop a minute to get his balance and let out the breath he had been unconsciously holding. Did you ever try to hop four miles upon one leg?

Little John tried it doggedly for a quarter of a mile or so. But his other foot, that he was trying so hard to keep off the ground, would persist in attempting to do its work in spite of him; whereupon he would swear vehemently and stand until the pain in his knee settled to the grinding, burning ache which he could feel in the ends of his fingers. But he hopped for more than a quarter of a mile, nevertheless.

Then he tried crawling on his hands and one knee. He had tried it before, getting up into the trail—but time dulls the memory, and he tried it again. Two rods of that was a-plenty. It had been a succession of bumps for the twisted knee, and he lay in the snow and gritted his teeth at the agony, and wondered how a trail that seemed smooth enough when one is riding, could conceal so many hummocks under the snow; and wished he had a broken leg to drag, instead of that knee. He believed it would have been less painful. He spent a few minutes digging the snow out of his sleeves, and then he pulled himself upright beside a half-buried rock, and once more he began to hop slowly toward home.

It was dark long ago. Little John, careful as he was, hopped out of the trail into loose snow, and fell headlong. That gave his knee a frightful jolt. He was too sick to move, until the fear of freezing to death drove him again to the fight for existence. He groped with his hands until he felt the inequalities of the trail, and by sheer, dogged nerve he managed to get up and go on. He was not the sort of man, you perceive, who dies easily.

He was resting, balanced precariously upon his well leg, when he heard the wolves begin to howl, a half mile or so behind him, He shivered, though he knew they were not after him; and he wished, while he stood and listened to their wild, hunting call in the bleak dark, that he could have sent a bullet into the brain of his horse before he left him. He knew just how the poor beast was struggling futilely in the snow back there in the hollow, and when he went hopping slowly down the trail again, his pity was not all for his own plight.

He came finally to a place where the trail wound downhill, and the first dip of it was rather steep. He stumbled, wabbled drunkenly in a desperate attempt to keep his balance—for life within him knew that it was not strong enough to pull him out of the snow many more times—and then he went down. As he fell he had a queer vision of a twinkling, yellow light bobbing along ih the distance below him.

After a space—minutes he could not measure—he drew himself wearily up on his elbows and opened his eyes apathetically upon the night. Life was fighting feebly now; Little John did not care so much about hopping that four miles. But he opened his eyes, and he was faintly surprised to see again the queer, bobbing, yellow light. “Looks like a star had pulled its picket pin,” he muttered, watching it dully for a minute. He heard the wolves, too, and he said sadly, “Poor devil,” and did not mean himself. But wolves and stray stars could not hold his interest for long.

He lay down again, with his face on his folded arms to keep it from the snow. He was watching how the pain gripped his knee, and then sent out thin little ribbons of fire up his side to his armpit, and from there down to his finger tips; and how another ribbon of fire slid down his leg to his toes. And he wondered how it was that the pain which traveled upward reached his finger tips at the same instant when the downward pain reach his toes; he thought it was queer, seeing one had so much farther to go than the other. He tried to remember what he had learned in school about the nerves, and the circulation of the blood, and he wondered whether it was his nerves or his blood that carried those pains. He studied them in a curious, detached way, and tried to time them by the beating of the blood in his temples. If they rode in his blood, they could not travel any faster than it; that seemed per- fectly reasonable—irrefutable, even. He would know, as soon as he got the rhythm of that beating in his temples straightened out. Of course, if it was his nerves----

He was interrupted just as he felt himself near the final answer. He opened his eyes and found himself blinking against that yellow light, which was not a star strayed from the sky, but a lantern that smelled vilely of coal oil. The lantern was sitting in the snow close by his face, and it was tilted sidewise so that his first impulse was to reach out and set it straight; which is exactly what he did with his first conscious movement.

“Look out, damn it!” he growled next. “I got a game knee. Think you're tailing up a cow?” He should not be blamed—he was just coming back from the world of nightmares.

“Ketch a-hold of my neck, then,” Carl advised. “Maybe I can git yuh up better that way.” And he bowed his thick, Dutch neck so that Little John might clasp his arms about it; and after that he straightened slowly and steadily, and Little John gritted his teeth and helped himself all he could. So that presently he was standing once more on his good foot, leaning heavily against Carl and panting, too sick to swear.

“Can yuh stand up whilst I get my horse?” Carl asked, after a minute. Little John managed it, just as he had managed before—from sheer, dogged nerve. Carl sometimes did the right thing instinctively. He did not lead his horse up to Little John, but to the lower side of a three-foot bank that he somehow discovered near. Then he helped Little John hop to the bank, and boosted him into the saddle without too much torture. The horse was gentle—Carl never rode any other kind—and did not move until he was commanded to do so, They set off briskly, Carl leading the horse and carrying the lantern that set shadows dancing grotesquely around them as if they were being followed by a company of gnomes.

The cabin was like heaven to Little John when Carl helped him in and eased him down upon his bunk. Little John lay for a time with his eyes closed, not caring for anything except the miracle of his being there. When he opened them, Carl was busily tearing a flour sack into strips, and sewing the strips together with long, awkward stitches and No. 8 black thread.

“Say, how did you happen to run across me, out there?” Little John asked curiously.

Carl bit off the thread at the end of the seam, and picked up another strip of dingy, unbleached cloth with raveled, puckery edges.

“Why, I seen yuh ride off down the trail,” he said simply. “I knowed you wouldn't go off to stay, without saying something about it, so when yuh didn't come back to supper I had a hunch something musta happened. This snow on the ground makes bad ridin'.” He stopped to bite the thread again, and to consider whether the bandage were not long enough.

“You was out hunting for me?” A queer look came into the eyes of Little John.

“Why, sure, I was huntin'. When it come dark and you didn't show up I knowed something musta happened. You'd missed two meals t'-day,” he added, as if that clinched the argument. “I thought mebby your horse had stepped into a hole or something. Kin yuh stand it if I rub the Three H onto your knee? Or had I better just pour it onto the cloth and let it soak through? It's liable to blister, either way.”

“Uh-hunh,” assented Little John, somewhat ambiguously, still regarding Carl with that queer look in his eyes. To himself he was calling Carl a darned fool, but it was with a glow of gratitude and shame strangely mixed. Carl had “knowed” Little John would not leave without saying something about it—and had suspected an accident when Little John failed to return for his supper! Little John felt so mean that he mentally called Carl a darned-fool Dutchman, and he was on the point of repeating the epithet aloud when Carl began to bandage the knee. Then Little John fainted and forgot to say it.

Carl finished the bandaging to his complete satisfaction before he brought Little John to with water that had particles of ice in it. Then he gave him a cup of strong coffee, freshly boiled, and some very decent toast. Little John presently dropped into a pain-troubled sleep, during which jhe moaned frequently and muttered disconnected sentences.

Carl, sentenced to wakefulness, sat by the fire and wondered at the grit of Little John, to walk a mile or more with a knee the size of your head. He thought a doctor ought to have a look at that knee; it was more than sprained, if Carl was any judge; he believed it was knocked plumb out of joint—though he had beet careful not to mention that belief to Little John. And to hop a mile or more on one foot! Little John seemed to be sleeping more soundly than at first; Carl wondered if the fiddle would wake him up. He thought not, if he was careful and played real easy. Carl had spent the whole afternoon with the broken fiddle and:a spool of wire he had found on a shelf, and he had managed somehow to wire the neck into its place. His fingers itched now for the feel of the strings; he didn't believe Little John would wake up, if he played real easy.

Little John dreamed that he was watching a cage of mice fighting They squeaked continually while they fought. He listened a long time to the week, week, week of them, and then he opened his eyes, and the cage of mice vanished instantly. Carl was sitting before the red-hot cookstove, with his fiddle tucked under his chin, and the bow squeaking in a queer, whispery way upon the strings.

Little John lay and watched him, his own face hidden in the shadows. Whenever Carl forgot—as he did occasionally—and brought the bow down strongly across a string, he would stop guiltily and glance anxiously toward Little John. Little John, at such moments, lay very still, with his eyes closed, until Carl, reassured, returned to his playing. But he did not play “The Rosary,” and for a short time Little John wondered why; and then, all at once, he knew.

“The darned chump!” he thought resentfully. “Does he think I'm swine enough----” He scowled, and swallowed a lump that came unexpectedly into his throat, and bit his lips, and watched Carl with a shine in his eyes.

“What you think you're doing?” he inquired grimly, after a while. “Playing mouse-in-the-corner? Sounds like it.”

Carl jumped. “I didn't mean to go and wake you up,” he apologized, taking the fiddle from under his chin. Carl must have had a most forgiving nature, with something sweet and splendid in him in spite of his musical soul and his inaccurate ear for half tones. He could not feel anything“but admiration for a man who had grit enough to walk a mile-with a knee onto him like that; certainly he seemed unable to hold a grudge against Little John.

“Why don't you cut loose and play, if you want to?” Little John demanded harshly. “I can't sleep, anyway, with this knee hurting like it does. Go on and play something.”

So Carl took up his fiddle again, scraped his bow across the lump of resin, twisted a key tentatively, sawed a preparatory flourish, and began to play his level best. Secretly he felt hugely flattered because Little John had actually asked him to play. Flattered, and grateful, if you please! I suppose that was because he had music in his soul—certainly not because he was overburdened with good sense. He played two waltzes and a two-step, and then a “regular breakdown”—and Little John, lying there in the shadows, gritted his teeth at more than the pain his knee gave him, and repented him of his deed that afternoon. For twisting the neck off a four-dollar-and-sixty-seven-cent fiddle, and then wiring it into place does not improve its tone. The D string was not the only one off key, and a wire somewhere about the thing occasionally touched a string and made it buzz abominably.

Little John was only a plain, ordinary cow-puncher, with nerves and a temper none too sweet. But he had some of the qualities that go to the building of heroes.

“Say,” he snarled at last from his shadowy corner, “why 'n hell don't yuh play that thing yuh brought home in your head?”

Carl ought to have been kicked for the look of abject gratitude he gave Little John. He blushed, tightened the hair in his bow one more twist, and played “The Rosary” three times through without stopping. And Little John set his teeth and tried to think of his knee or something pleasant.

“You want to look out, or you'll get so you can play that piece!” he bantered deceitfully when Carl mercifully desisted. And who shall say that his debt to Carl was not with that one misleading sentence paid in full?