Cherokee Trails/Chapter 21
Mrs. Ellison had given Tom a list of groceries and the money to buy them; Waco Johnson had commissioned him to bring out a supply of tobacco. Tom's hasty exit from Drumwell was responsible for his return to the gate empty-handed, and he was a man with a peck of trouble ahead of him to devise an explanation that would satisfy them without divulging the true reason for his apparent remission.
Waco, evidently on the watch, heard the wagon before it came in sight. He hobbled to the gate, opened it, and stationed himself there like a toll-taker, his mouth dry for a smoke. The old cowpuncher spread a big red-gummed grin all over his face as Tom rounded to and struck the gate with the double team as nicely as Waco himself could have done it. He reached up a broad rough hand as Tom came to a stop exactly beside him.
"Hi, Tom?" he hailed heartily. "How you likes to be a w'ale?"
Tom understood this peculiar pleasantry somewhat better than Mrs. Ellison. While he had no more notion than anybody else what felicity there was in the life of a whale that would urge anybody on the Kansas prairie with a desire to exchange places with one, he knew that Waco meant to express the utmost feeling of friendship, good-fellowship and admiration when he made the speculative proposal. Indeed, his manner of speech might lead one not schooled in such crude diction to take it that Waco intimated he already was a whale, for he invariably put it that way:
"How you likes to be a w'ale?"
Tom assured him, as always, that he'd like it fine, and then jumped right in to take the blame for coming home without tobacco. Waco's face elongated till there was not a horse in the team that could have bested him much on measurement.
"Hell's woodpeckers! I'm out!" he said.
"So am I," Tom admitted glumly. "I left there in a devil of a hurry—tell you about it later—here comes Eudora."
Waco knew something was urging a man along when he left town in such a hurry as to forget not only his friend's tobacco but his own, and he suspected it was a business that Tom wanted to keep from the women, above all.
"You made a flyin' trip, Tom," Eudora said, running up, the brightness of welcome in her face.
"He's a flyin' gopher," said Waco, pulling his long, lugubrious face down to wet-leather length. "He come off and forgot my t'backer."
"Oh, you Tom!" she laughed. And then she tiptoed and took a peep into the wagon. "And you forgot the groceries!" she said, looking up at him in reproving amazement.
"I'm altogether untrustworthy and unfit to run around without a nurse," Tom said contritely. "I didn't think of them, Eudora, till I was fifteen or twenty miles along. Then I didn't want to turn back."
"Of course not," she agreed, but with evident disappointment. "You can get them next trip—but I don't know what we're going to do without sugar and coffee."
Tom brightened a little.
"I think Waco and I've got enough of both to hold you till I can bring your supplies."
"We sure have, Eudora. If that's all that's eatin' you, take it easy."
Waco was quick to come to his partner's side in the difficulty, leaving explanations to their proper time and place.
"You'll have to lend us a cup or two, then. But what on earth were you thinkin' of Tom, to forget them that way?"
"I was figuring on prospective profits, I expect—building air castles, you know."
"Bone mansions," said Waco, stretching his big red grin all over his face.
Mrs. Ellison came out before Tom could drive on to unhitch. She inquired about the trip, of which Tom gave a glowing account, although brief.
"But he forgot the groceries!" Eudora said with tragic accusation.
Mrs. Ellison looked at him in speechless vexation, Tom's face growing so hot and red it hurt to have it around.
"Well, Tom Simpson! You sure are a bright one!" she said.
"Ain't I?" said he, miserably abject.
"Comin' off and forgettin' them groceries, when I told you we was nearly out of soda, and sugar, and coffee, and canned tomatoes, and beans, and—and nearly everything you didn't get. Think of a grown man—why, Tom Simpson! you must be in love!"
"He ort to be in jail forgittin' my t'backer," said Waco.
Waco thought to throw a little comedy relief into the situation, but his break had the opposite effect on Mrs. Ellison, who looked sharply at Tom. She reached up suddenly and touched his arm, her face white, fright in her eyes.
"What happened down there, Tom?" she asked, her voice as gentle as if she consoled him for a loss.
"Oh, now," said Tom, depreciating her concern. "I'm just a stupid, absent-minded ass!"
"Well, you haven't had your dinner, have you?" She withdrew her hand from his arm slowly, watching him for a betraying flicker of the eye.
"No; I started early and drove slowly, without a stop."
"Come in when you unharness," she said, and would hear no protest against the hospitable order.
Tom drove to the corral, Waco starting after him.
"If t'backer was all I needed in this world to make me happy," he said, "I'd be throwin' my leg over the moon."
He stopped, turned back and closed the gate, putting up his hand in a mock threat of immediate violence when Eudora would have done it. Mrs. Ellison was looking after Tom, trouble knitting her black brows in a frown. Waco started off again to help unhitch, swinging his game leg, singing his song:
If it wasn't for my dhur what'd I do?
"A man may forget sugar and coffee when he's flighty over a woman or something, but when he forgets t'backer!" Mrs. Ellison said.
"Mother—" Eudora's voice wavered, her heart felt smothered and slow—"Mother, do you think"
"I guess if it's for us to know, he'll tell us," Mrs. Ellison replied gently
She turned in at the kitchen gate, Eudora following, her light feet suddenly heavy, the ache of dread, the oppression of fear, in her breast.
It seemed it was not for them to know. Waco and Tom came to the kitchen, where Tom's lunch was spread, talking lightly, with the animation and banter that passes between a man who has a joke on his friend, and the friend who attempts a jocose defense. Tom praised the team, the wagon, the roads, as he made havoc in the hot meal. He said it was a lark to haul bones forty miles, and he was going to load up immediately to be ready for an early start in the morning.
Waco suggested trying out the other four horses which he had broken. Mrs. Ellison interposed an objection, which Waco overruled. They were as gentle as dogs, he declared, but if you let 'em stand around and forget what they'd learnt they'd be as mean as buzzards by the time he wanted to use them. Fine, said Tom; he'd put them through their paces, and he wanted Mrs. Ellison to tie different colors of yarn in his button-holes, each representing some article in the grocery line. He wasn't coming home without those supplies this trip.
"Yes, and I'll tie a gunny sack around your neck to make you think of that t'backer," Waco said.
Then Waco began to talk about the horses which were left over from the number Tom had brought up from the Nation after the neighbors had taken their animals. There were seven of them, five good, the other two fair. He thought it was a shame for the sheriff to take them and fool around three or four months trying to find their owners. Feed bills and fees and expenses of one kind and another would eat their heads off, and there would be nothing left for Tom in the end.
"I couldn't think of laying 'claim to any of them. The idea is preposterous," said Tom, with his high, frozen-faced dignity.
"The one you rode home," said Waco, "he's a dang good horse. There's only one horse on this place better'n that colt, if you'll take it from a simple-minded feller like me. You're entitled to that one as much as you're entitled to the teeth in your head."
"Not at all," said Tom, distantly.
"The sheriff said so, didn't he, Eudory?"
"That's what he said, Tom."
"He's wrong," said Tom, stiffly. "Somebody owns that horse: it's the sheriff's business to find who."
Waco looked at him intently for a moment, incredulity in his leathery old face.
"You're weak," said he.
"You've hit it," Tom said, with the bright satisfaction he might have displayed if Waco had guessed a riddle which he had thought beyond his powers.
Waco and Eudora laughed, and that glimmer of mirth like firelight on a wall came into Tom Simpson's bright, wise eyes. Only Mrs. Ellison was not moved by the humor of the moment. She was sitting a little apart, the crochet work she had been half-heartedly doing lying in her lap, a sunbeam coming through the window bright on her idle needle.
"We'll take him for the one they shot under you," Eudora said, touching an episode of his adventure that had not been mentioned between them before.
Tom flushed as if confusion would drown him. If Eudora had accused him of complicity in the loss of the horse his embarrassment could not have been greater.
"Eudora!" her mother reproved gently, yet with the startled exclamation of a shock.
Eudora reached out impulsively and touched Tom's hand.
"Oh, Tom! I didn't mean"
"Very good—very-very good!" Tom said, his confusion vanishing before her own. "That will be a fair arrangement, fair compensation. Very-very good."
Waco had taken up his quarters in the bunk-house, his wound having growed up, as he expressed it, the recuperative powers of his kind being remarkable. The same qualities which inured these hard riders of the range to withstand its vicissitudes stored up in them phenomenal healing powers. There was no creature alive, with the probable exception of a fishin' worm as Waco had said, that repaired itself of distressing wounds with such celerity as the old-time range man. His mode of life put him down pretty much on a level with the lower animals, and a bullet hole more or less, as long as no bone was broken, no vital part touched, did not inconvenience him long.
All his leg needed now, Waco said, was movement to keep it from stiffening and staying tender too long. He went cobbling around with the harness, saddles and everything about the place that stood in need of repairs, of which there was plenty to keep him engaged, using his crutch only because Mrs. Ellison insisted, threatening him with heavy penalties if she caught him without it. This misfortune had turned out a fruitful diversion in Waco's days. He probably never had enjoyed himself so long and continuously before in his life, singing his unvarying twoline song, greasing and hammering and tinkering around in his cleverly handy way.
Mrs. Ellison and Eudora liked him as much as he liked them, everybody being on a perfect plane of equality, comfortable and unrestricted by hampering conventions. Waco knew it was not precisely the polite thing to sit in the house with his hat on, or remove his boots in the presence of ladies, or cuss overmuch when they were in hearing, although mild ejaculations were permissible when one hit his thumb with the hammer.
Tom was not surprised when Waco, after standing around while he loaded the wagon for tomorrow's trip, throwing in a bone now and then to prove his able-bodied state, proposed that he go along. He said it was beginning to get kind of dull around there, that being the longest vacation he had taken since he was shot up the last time, down in New Mexico eight or nine years ago. He made this pretext and he advanced that, keeping his only reason under cover, where it bulged as big as a fat woman trying to hide in bed.
He could ride along just as comfortable as a bird in a tree, Waco said, and a man needed company on a slow drive like that. It wasn't the same as rackin' out on a feller's horse to go some place, when he could streak right through and line up with his navel agin the bar. Wagon travel was worse than walkin', the way he looked at it; even a slab-sided old centipede like him was better than no company under such conditions. And so on, to a great length of irrelevant argument.
Tom thanked him heartily, told him he'd appreciate his company above the company of any man alive, but that was a one-man business, a purely personal affair at that stage, and he could not permit a friend to become involved. He had started it, and he would finish it. He was appreciative, but firm, so firm that Waco realized further argument would not advance his desires an inch.
"All right, Tom," he yielded. "I fixed up that rifle yisterday so it works fine."
"Thanks, old feller."
"There's a good shotgun here, too. I ain't in favor of a shotgun as a reg'lar thing, but there's exceptions, as the widder woman said when she married the one-eyed man. I could load you up a dozen shells with buckshot—it'd be excusable if they tried to gang a man. Of course, I always like to keep in the law myself, and stick to my old gun, but a shotgun's excusable at times, perfec-ly excusable."
"I don't think anything is going to happen, Waco. That marshal's a crook, with a streak down his back as broad as a skunk's, only his is yellow. The sheriff told me about him, knows him of old. The fellow used to be a sort of outpost for Wade Harrison; he's tipped off the sheriff's hand more than once when Treadwell was about to close in on that outfit. I believe he's due to lie down this trip."
"Yeah, maybe. But I wish you had a castiron wagon bed, pardner. You know, I found my old gun—did I tell you? Yeah. Out in the krel, where they either dropped it or throwed it away. It had a bunch of my silvery locks stuck to it—they had the nerve to hit me with my own gun! Guess that's all they thought it was good for, or maybe that they'd bent it over my old rock so it wasn't no use to nobody. It don't look fancy, but you can depend on it like pension money. You can take it along."
"You might need it, old chap, you never can tell. Keep it stickin' around you pretty close—I'll have plenty, a whole lot more than I'll need."
"Maybe," said Waco, but with little faith. "Anyhow, I'll be plenty able to drive next trip. About to-morrow I'm goin' to hitch up them colts and drag in some more bones."
"Don't get too fresh and overdo it, Waco. Many a good man's been ruined by drink and hard work."
"Nobody has to warn me agin hard work," Waco said, grinning his biggest. "I've been shyin' at it so long I'm wall-eyed."
Eudora came to the porch to hang dish towels on a line strung between the posts. Waco looked at her abstractedly, as if his thoughts were of her but not with her.
"Them two girls suspicion you got something in your hoof down at Drumwell, Tom," he said.
"Um-m-m," Tom grunted, bending over the pile of bones, pretending little concern in their suspicions.
"Missus Ellison's as uneasy as a cow with a calf hid in the brush," Waco went on, resorting to such homely simile not through any want of respect but because he made his comparisons with the most familiar things. "She'll not sleep a wink till she sees you drivin' up that road agin. I don't know, but I think sometimes it's worse to raise up a woman's suspicions by keepin' something from her than to tell her straight out. A woman's funny that way; she can sense things."
"You seem to know them pretty well," Tom remarked, turning on him a quick humorous eye.
"I ort to," Waco sighed.
As he volunteered no additional information on how he came to master the female psychology, Tom was too polite to inquire. But he supposed Waco's education had come through practical channels, perhaps by marrying. He must have gone quite extensively into the adventure, judging by his oracular declaration.
Tom knew that cowboys of Waco's type, the roving, restless, more or less romantic-minded, frequently had a wife on every range, sometimes not confining the number to one. They were as light-minded about it as certain Mexicans whom Tom had known, who boasted of a priest wife and'a judge wife as ingenuously as another man might speak of a second pair of boots.
Eudora stood looking their way a little while as if she considered joining them, hesitated, appearing somewhat wistful and lonely, and returned to the house.
"She's as bright as a lookin' glass," Waco admired her, "and as handy around the place as a man. She's a good tieup for some young feller. You remember the time I thought you was married into the fam'ly?"
"Damn old ass!" said Tom.