The Cow Jerry/Chapter 3
ODESSA COWGILL, commonly called Goosie, was a sentimental young lady who played the parlor organ. When Louise Gardner first met her she was laying out cutlery on the long table where the regulars assembled at so much a week to replenish their fires and keep up a head of steam for the railroading life.
Goosie was singing, as she spread out the implements of severance and conveyance, a song in which the singer bewailed in lugubrious anticipation the day when a lady sung as Ma-ha-goreet not only might, but positively would, forget him. It was a dismal conclusion, sympathetically and tremulously sung by Goosie, who went into the spirit of it with the feeling of one bereft and forsaken. The window shades of the dining-room were drawn to shut out as much of the afternoon heat as possible, giving Goosie a dim and sentimental light. It was a felicitous arrangement for the singer as well as the song, for Goosie was one of those girls who look better in a little light.
There is no doubt that suds, and soup, and steaming dishes of a boarding house where heavy railroad fare is served, do not contribute an atmosphere for æsthetic development. If beauty thrives in such environment it must of necessity be a rugged beauty, such as that of the hollyhock, the zinnia, or the scentless dahlia flaunting beside the fence. That was the order of Goosie; a big, broad-faced, full-breasted dahlia, boisterous and strong to face the wind.
She was a hearty, happy girl, with a big-spreading mouth, to enjoy so deeply the sad songs of separation, broken faith and blighted homes which were current in that day. Her greatest pleasure was to sing them when her duties threw her alone, as now. It was her melancholy enjoyment at such times to put herself in the heroine's part, with Bill Connor, the fireman to whom she was engaged, standing off in a dim and tearful background, holding out appealing hands, watching her drift hopelessly to ruin and desolation.
She knew that Bill would, in plain and unromantic action, take her by the neck and choke it out of her in such case. That's all the sentiment there was in Bill. Yet it gave her a dear diversion, a serene, sad happiness, to figure Bill off in the background holding out his hands, watching her go to the devil in that pale, drawnfaced way.
Just now she was Ma-ha-goreet, and Bill was the one who wailed of his dreary prospect when she should forget him. She saw herself leaving their home in Argentine—Argentine was the heaven of railroad men, where all of them hoped to go—with the chenille table cover and the gasoline stove and the golden oak furniture—all prospective, but just like that, she knew very well—and drifting away from Bill, lured on by the "festive dance, the rich, the gay," so different, indeed, from their home.
The picture brought comfortable tears, which crawled down beside her nose with a tickling, itchy feeling, making her sniff like a rabbit, and wipe them along her bare arm.
There was another song, sadder for the picture of consummate wreckage in the lives of herself and Bill. It was called We Never Speak As We Pass By. That was her favored one, reserved for rainy days.
He dazzled her, alas, she fell!
It was terribly sad and sweet. The tempter came to Nell, and Goosie was Nell, in the little home in Argentine. And Earl Gray, the druggist, was the tempter. Earl Gray was not the druggist of McPacken when Goosie imagined him as the evil tempter of the song, but a grander Earl Gray, dressed in a long black coat and stove-pipe hat, like the man in the New York Weekly who was tempting Constance. The Pretty Sewing Girl. She cast Earl for the part on account of his long, wavy hair.
Goosie knew that a tempter in her home would not last as long as it would take to cook an egg, with Bill coming in from his run. Bill would slam him against the wall so hard he'd knock the stove-pipe down, and that would be the end of that tempter and that temptation.
Yet it was such a sad pleasure to picture that passage where:
Although a tear bedims her eye.
She often thinks of her past life,
When we were loving man and wife.
Goosie always had it raining in this scene. Bill was coming along a deserted street, close against the wall, a prosperous, opulent-looking Bill, with a diamond stud. She came out of the distance like a misty gray garment blowing on a line, cold, thin as a snake, her hair hanging in wet ropes, ragged, stove-blacking on her hands and nose. She turned imploring eyes on Bill; he passed right on, going to the bank. He didn't give her a look, although she knew he saw her as well as anything. That was where it cut; that was the place where a sweet, deep pain wrung her heart and made her shiver in the ecstacy of refined remorse.
Goosie's mother broke upon her song, bringing the strange girl into the shadowy dining-room.
"Goosie, this is Louise Gardner, the new dining-room girl. Louise, this is Odessa, my daughter. Goosie's her pet name; she's been called by it so long she wouldn't hardly answer to any other by now."
Goosie put down the undistributed cutlery, offering her hand with frank equality.
"Hello," she said. "When did you come in?"
"I came on Nine this morning," Louise returned, speaking of the train by its number with the readiness of a regular railroader.
"Take her to the room and let her fix herself up. You'll have to lend her some of your aprons till she can get some made."
Goosie led the way to the stairs, which came down beside the door connecting dining-room and office, vastly relieved to know she was going to have help that hot evening, eager to get the new girl out into a strong light to see if her complexion was really as good as it looked.
Mrs. Cowgill turned to the kitchen, from which a moaning, long-drawn note of lamentation sounded, as if somebody there labored in a bondage that rent the heart to bear. 'A tall spare negro woman was standing at the stove frying chicken. She turned at Mrs. Cowgill's approach, her prolonged note diminishing, falling away, like the whistle of a fast-running train rounding a woodland curve. The cook grinned, her solemn face glistening with sweat.
"I done got all the chicken on, Mis' Cowgill," she said.
"You'd better go out and cool off a while when you take it up, Rachel," Mrs. Cowgill suggested, with a sort of reticent, grudging kindness.
"I ain't none so hot," Rachel replied cheerfully. "Druther have it hot than them cold winter days when the win' snoops under the doo' and gives me the rheumatis' in my legs and the misery in my back. Ain't no misery hatchin' in my jints this kind of weather. I just dreens the drugs of that misery off in sweat."
"Ain't Angus come down and started on them putaters yet?" Mrs. Cowgill inquired sharply.
"Yassum, he's out there on the po'ch josselin' 'em around, playin' train like he's always a doin'."
Mrs. Cowgill set her foot against the screen door, which had fringed paper tacked along the top to make a commotion among the flies waiting a chance to wing into that paradise of alluring scents. It was equal to opening the door against a driving rain; some of it was bound to get in. A few fortunate ones of the impertinent loafers winged past her, in defiance of Mrs. Cowgill's savage batting with open hand. There was very little hope of refreshment for a fly, once he had made his way by trick and evasion into the kitchen. Everything there was so hot that a sip of it meant instant death to the most tropical fly that ever buzzed.
Mrs. Cowgill let the door close gently, to stand beside it with displeasure coming over the strained look of worriment and longing in her tired face. Angus Valorous Macdougal was sitting on the edge of the shady porch twenty feet or so beyond her, a large bucket of potatoes beside him, a pan to receive the pared ones standing a little way along. Between bucket and pan Angus had a string of the humble vegetables stretched out like a line of freight cars, headed by an immense potato with a protuberance that served for the engine's smokestack.
Angus Valorous was chuffing and hissing equal to any switch engine between Argentine and McPacken as he pushed his little train slowly along, leaning as it progressed, stopping between chuffs to straighten the alignment, entirely absorbed in the pastime, so childish and ridiculous for one of his growth and years.
"Is that what I pay you for?" Mrs. Cowgill broke out in wrath, her voice rising sharp and high.
Angus Valorous started guiltily, ashamed of being caught in the indulgence of a pleasure that he should have left behind him with his knee pants, unconscious, no doubt, in his rather thick-headed and totally unimaginative way, that his overwhelming ambition was only illustrating itself in this homely concrete form. Angus Valorous lived for nothing in life but to be a conductor. That ambition was in his round soft head when he was born; it was in his round hard head now that he was nineteen, and big enough to be thirty-nine. He scrambled the potatoes toward him, letting some of them fall, confused and red behind the ears.
"Is that what I pay you for?" Mrs. Cowgill demanded again, coming forward in long strides as if she meant to assault him. "Don't you know we have supper in this hotel at six o'clock? you great big goodfor-nothing lump of mutton!"
"Aw, keep your shirt on!" Angus retorted, twisting his head to scowl at her, growling from the corner of his mouth. "All you're payin' me ain't goin' to break nothing but your heart! If you don't like it you can git another man!"
Angus spoke in explosions, great sarcasm in his tone, great contempt in the slewing of his mouth. He threw down his knife, and stood facing Mrs. Cowgill, jerking at the strings of his coffee-sack apron as if through with the job.
Angus was a short-built young man, heavy in the thighs, his shoulders thick, his arms short and strong. His black hair was brushed to such a polish that a spider would have needed a hand-line to climb it. His face was round and boyish, his little snub nose quite comical in the midst of his present bluster. But for the black whiskers which crowded his fair ruddy skin, so thick and so fast-growing that no amount of shaving could keep them out of sight, Angus would have looked in the face like a hearty, full-blooded boy of twelve. As it was, he looked twelve, with the whiskers of forty-five.
He was the son of Doctor Macdougal, one child of many children. Doctor competition was sharp in McPacken; Angus had been crowded out to shift for himself when he should have been finishing the grade school, yet not before his whiskers had marked him for an early-ripening man. He could not get a job as brakeman—even conductors, in their consequence and grandeur, must begin there—until he became twenty-one. The Cottonwood Hotel was a very good place to fill the intervening years, which Angus had breasted until only two now stood between him and his happy day of matriculation in the college of conductors.
It was the habit of people native to McPacken, as well as those of transplanted stock who remained in its atmosphere a little while, to be outspoken and independent. A superior might be acknowledged on a job, scorned and contemned for the pull that put him there, but in no other connection, social or civil. Angus Valorous was simply living up to the standards of McPacken when he bristled before Mrs. Cowgill and stood on his rights as a man. If he had acted otherwise he would have been despised, not alone by the men of McPacken, but by the women and children, and Mrs. Cowgill first of all.
"Aw, go ahn!" said Angus, jerking at his apron-strings. "Go ahn! If you want somebody else to do your dirty work for you, go and git him. That's ahl I got to say!"
Mrs. Cowgill stood regarding him in towering scorn, knowing very well that Angus had no more notion of quitting than she had of discharging him.
"Whatever sense you had when you was born leaked out of you before they could bring a teacup to catch it in!" she said. "Go to work, and don't give me any more of your slack!"
To relieve Angus of the necessity of carrying his bluff any farther, and to save her own dignity in the bargain, Mrs. Cowgill left him with that humiliating aspersion. She marched through the kitchen and dining-room, heading for the office, from which she heard the faint tinkle of the little desk bell. She was in no great hurry to attend the caller; as she went along she speculated on whether it might be a cowhand wanting a cigar, or a railroader a plug of tobacco, or an agent wanting to sell something, or some fool that didn't know what he wanted. She was by natural bent a little uncharitable in her estimation of mankind.
As she passed the wash-room—fitted with modern plumbing, supplied with water by the railroad water works—she stopped at the sound of a snorting ablution, familiar in her ears.
"Is that you, Myron?" she called.
"Yup," a soapy, cheerful voice replied.
"What're you doin' home this time of day?"
"Run out of shingles," the soapy voice replied, after some blowing as if to clear water out of a dripping mustache.
"Wasn't there any more in the lumber yard?"
"Schudy broke a wheel; couldn't get 'em over till morning, honey."
"Well, when you're through wastin' water in there you go on out and saw up some of them ties."
"Yes, pet."
Mrs. Cowgill went on to the office. Myron Cowgill, under the shadow of whose name the hotel lady lived, came from the wash-room damp and uncombed, with towel lint in his long brown mustache, a cheerful, even a glad, light in his mild blue eyes. He was one of those beings cut to the pattern of a nothing at the beginning. Gangling, loose-jointed, slip-slap and go easy; long black hair with a brown sunburn at the ends, long brown mustache that appeared to draw hard on his cheeks, which were so thin that he seemed to have sucked them in and swallowed all but the rind. His neck was bony and long, slashed across with wrinkles in the tough brown skin, into which more or less dust and grime had collected in his carpentering career in and about McPacken.
Myron produced the bowl of a corncob pipe from a pocket of his bagging overalls, tapped it in his palm to dislodge the shingle nails; brought the stem of it out of the ruler pocket along his leg, connected the parts and fired up. Pipe in mouth, Myron looked a degree less useful than before, yet undoubtedly the little tuckingup of the mustache over the stem added to the humor and good nature of his simple face. He went out through the kitchen to begin operation on the gritty, hard oak ties which the thrift of his wife secured, through a pull with the roadmaster, to supply fuel for her kitchen range.
"You-all hongry, Mist' Cowgill?" the black cook inquired, with a gentle patronage, as she might have spoken to a child.
"I guess I can make out till supper, Rachel." But unwillingly, his tone implied, and with hardship and repression of desire.
Rachel forked the biggest leg she could find, a doublejointed one, the way they cut them in Kansas in those days of generosity and plenty. Myron accepted it with an engaging network of wrinkles growing in his tough brown face around the eyes, and with a little laugh that was soundless, but expressive of the humor that kindled in him with the thought of beating his wife through the bountiful hand of her cook.
Myron sat on his saw-horse under the cottonwood tree in the back yard, while he cleaned the chicken bone and licked his fingers. Then he began sawing ties, to continue sawing ties until the last boarder was fed, the last transient guest served, even Angus Valorous satisfied behind his black smear of beard. Then if there was anything left, Myron got it, and ate it in silent appreciation of a humor, his mild eyes seemed to say, that no other being in all the world could see.
Mrs. Cowgill heard the summons of the little bell again as she paused at the foot of the stairs to call Goosie. She resented the insistent ring; there was something imperative about it that seemed to place her in an inferior position. She went along deliberately, turning her eyes on this and that, making out that she came casually. She wanted the bell-ringer to understand that she was a necessity in McPacken, not a convenience.
The insistent ringer jof the little desk bell was no less important person than' Verney Carr, station agent, in his white shirt and pink sleeve-holders. Mrs. Cowgill put off her resentment, edging around the counter with a smile. Verney was an important railroad peg in McPacken. He was not the man to call her out without sufficient reason.
"There's a big stock extra in five sections coming," the agent announced without preliminary greeting. "They're bringin' three thousand head from Texas, over west of the Brazos where they've got a big drouth."
"I've heard the cowmen talkin' about it," she nodded, leaning her bare arms on the open register, adjusting herself in position of comfortable confidence.
"First of a lot of 'em, they say," the agent said. "I thought you might want to make some preparations for takin' care of the bunch that'll be comin' with them five extras."
"I'll have Myron kill some more chickens. Thanks, Verney."
"They're goin' to flood this country with them Texas cattle. They'll eat these cowmen up here holler."
"This range'll take care of just so many, and no more, I've heard the cowmen say. The Texas men have to lease from them, you know, Verney, or pay so much a head by the month for usin' their grass. I guess it's a good thing for our people, all them cowhands comin' in here too. They'll spend their money here in town."
"And raise hell at all hours." The agent spoke like a man with unpleasant recollections.
"It'll liven things up," Mrs. Cowgill said. "McPacken will be more like it was when I came here and opened the hotel. There's no harm in them Texas boys if you take them right."
"I know I've got one sweet time ahead of me!" the agent said with what seemed unwarranted feeling. "They'll be all night unloadin' them five trains—the first one's due to arrive about seven."
"I'll take care of 'em as long as they come. We've got to go out of our way to serve the cattle trade."
"Everybody in this country has to," the agent said, with anything but pride or ease of dignity in his part of the service.
"It's the business that counts; there wouldn't be anything here without it."
"Oh, I don't know about that," the agent said, loftily. "I'm gittin' darn sick of seein' these spider-leggid cowhands under sombrero hats with guns hung around on 'em. Don't ever shoot anything with 'em, not even themselves."
"A gun's about the same to them as a watch is to a railroad man, Verney."
"A railroad man needs his watch, but no man needs a gun slung on him in this country."
"It's custom, more than anything. The boys wouldn't look the same without their guns. I'd kind of hate to see them go. But some of them are. I saw Cal Withers ride by a little while ago with only one gun onhim. I remember when he used to carry two, anda knife."
"Darned old fool! This bunch of cattle's comin' consigned to him. He's been gettin' messages all afternoon."
"It's a handful for Cal if he's bought 'em. I hope he don't go broke again."
"Lot of his men with their toy pistols swingin' on 'em rode in a while ago to receive the cattle. I'll have to be right there on the spot till the last cgr's empty."
"To bad," Mrs. Cowgill said indifferently. "Much obliged for comin' over to tell me, Verney." She brought a box of her best brand of cigars from the showcase. The agent picked two with critical deliberation. For such services as this to the Cottonwood Hotel, his smokes cost him nothing.
"Wild bunch," said the agent, turning to go back to the red depot and await the arrival of the vexatious Texans.
"Men, or animals?" she laughed.
"Both," the agent answered over his shoulder from the door.