The Line of Least Resistance/Chapter 6
VI
EVENTS of this weltering world are fully accounted for by so many clashing theories advanced by thinkers and others that the discreet story-teller takes refuge in an abandoned fiction, the Firm of the Fates, a myth no more believed: which, therefore, cannot possibly offend the most vehement and tenacious adherent of any, and may be considered a convenient algebraic symbol for what Fact you favor—Providence, Evolution, Destiny, blind Chance or the chemical reaction of atoms, exactly as you choose.
So, still they snip and spin on high Olympus—Young Clotho, diligent Lachesis, sad Atropos; rather busier than of old, the world having proved astonishingly larger than was expected—for the warnings of sage Malthus had passed all unheeded. But, on the whole, they are pretty well content for all that, since to them was assigned no care of abysmal world-dust hordes of crowding suns and satellites that skip and gambol and whisk and whirl in the opener spaces beyond the narrow bound where imagination ends and infinity begins to be—quite unrestrained and unregulated of Grecian Fates or their ingenious Greek designers.
Great fellows, those same old Greek designers! Clothed in mystery and majesty of poetic thought, their guess is impressive still. Yet we daily jostle elbows with the very body of their guess, and find it prosaic enough—unless, indeed, it concerns ourselves. You may know the modern mediators be tween Fates and men by the scrip or pouch they bear for mandates. Many wear a neat gray uniform, black-braided, brass-buttoned. When next you meet such messenger, turn and look and mark him what he is. Think that in every leathern pouch of all those leathern pouches he brings decrees—love and loss, joy and sorrow and ruin and wrong, name and fame, gain and grief and shame and death.
Of the many such missives handled on a certain June day by the Dundee agency of the Fates—Kim Ki was postmaster, but Deputy Rowe did the work—were two bearing upon this chronicle. Both were unsigned; one was outward bound. Adam Sleiter wrote the last. Sleiter, reputed the sometime terror of Cerillos, Golden and Placer, was now about to transfer the Legal Tender mine to Breese, in exchange for much valuable money—in which crowning feat Sleiter took an artistic pride. Why Sleiter wrote this letter, why he discreetly withheld his signature, will now be declared.
Jim Gales saloon was also, as a sideline, a sort of literary clearing-house. To an unused "Senate" table in the poolroom men brought papers from "home": New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco; Atlanta, Nashville, Louisville, St. Louis and New Orleans; London, Quebec, Berlin; taking at will what others caught their eye, or skimming them over there. Here Kennedy, with an errand for Sleiter's ear in fitting time, loitered—reading, listening to chatting idlers.
Sleiter was one of these idlers—rubicond, flame-bearded; teller of broad, short stories; brawler and bully, boisterous, boastful, obstreperous. The traits were natural and not acquired; he was, if anything, more disagreeable half sober than quarter sober—his minimum and maximum of sobriety. Like the man famed for even temper, who was always mad, Sleiter was always objectionable. It was thought that his arrogant and overbearing manner was a great help in the sale of mines. Investors reasoned that such offensive and gratuitous rudeness in the vendor betokened a consciousness of wares of worth, on the principle that a good mine needs no gush.
As it neared noon the crowd melted away to culinary cares. There were but few left when Kennedy laid down his paper and stopped Sleiter as he was passing the table.
"I wanted to speak to you about Breese," he said in an undertone.
"Well, who's hinderin' you? Talk's cheap! You ain't tongue-tied, be ye?" Sleiter's thick, insolent lip rolled up, exposing jagged and discolored fangs.
"Not so loud, Mr. Sleiter," said Don in the same even tones he had used before. "I wanted to see if you wouldn't let up on selling Breese the Legal Tender. On his wife's account, if for nothing else. She's an old lady. Come, Sleiter, you've got plenty of money. I wish"
Sleiter had dropped his jaw, aghast. "You wish!" he thundered. "You wish! You whippersnapper, what the do I care what you wish? Mind your own business!"
"That wasn't exactly what I meant to say," said Don apologetically. "I didn't word it just right. Especially, I didn't intend to say 'I wish'." One bystander—he was a miner newly here from Arizona—snickered at this. But Jim Gale nudged him with a look so meaning that he reconsidered his hilarity.
Leaving blanks for idle words is unsatisfactory in any case. The reader of scant vocabulary is more impressed by the implied word than if it had been spelled out. In reporting Mr. Sleiter's remarks, such a course would recall the celebrated omission of the title rôle from the play. A paraphrase is better, with permission. Smiting the table with his brawny fist, Mr. Sleiter gave, as his candid, raving and roaring opinion, that Kennedy was an officious meddler, sentenced by his Creator to pass the eons of eternity in a region noted for an insalubrious climate; the speaker being rather inclined to hasten Kennedy's departure thither, and, in fact, offering to do so for the smallest copper coin issued by the Federal Government. As to Breese, he recounted his physical, mental and moral infirmities at some length, and, after advancing an improbable genealogical surmise, affirmed, as a final and clinching venture of abuse, that Breese was one of more exceeding unworth than the speaker himself. The last flight may be given verbatim. Why he omitted the profanity is unknown. Perhaps he thought manner could add nothing to the matter of the charge; perhaps he was secretly uneasy that Don betrayed neither alarm nor anger.
"Yah! Don't you talk to me about Freeze! Think o' the money, saved up a dollar or two at a time, that he's wheedled from them folks back yonder—nesters and millhands and shopkeepers and sich. He jiggles and joggles and projects around playin' ducks and drakes with their money with no chance for action on it, just so's some of it can stick to his fingers. What'd I ever do as bad as that? When I go after 'em all they're out is just what I get. He's a dirty thief, a swindler, a thimble-rigger—that's what Freeze is! Anybody's got a right to his money that's smart enough to get it. And darn him, I'll try to get it all!"
"I dare say what you say of Breese and the investors is true enough in the main," said Don mildly. "In fact, I know it is. But we miss the point. What I meant to say, instead of 'wish,' is this: I'm not giving reasons; I'm giving you instructions, to which you will please listen attentively. You call that trade off!"
"Instructions! Call off" Sleiter spluttered in the violence of his wrath.
"Such is my desire. Don't sell Breese that mine or any mine."
"A bad man, ain't you?" snarled Sleiter. Curious eyes were upon him. "A killer, you are? I heard you was. A fire-eater and a fighter?"
"You never heard me say so. As a matter of fact, I share the views of homicide so ably expressed by Mr. Bobby Burns. But for myself, if I really wanted to know whether a man would fight or not, I'd not ask him. … I'd try him!"
So still! … The shadow of death circled by. No other man stirred a finger, but waited motionless, breathless. Eye to eye, these two fronted across the table. Don did not rise from his chair. The bully's cheek, splotched and mottled dirty red and white, faded at last to an ashy gray; a faint qualm gripped, sinking, at his stomach.
"I ain't" Sleiter paused to wet his lips. "You see I ain't got no gun."
"I see you haven't. But I came prepared for that too. I intend to get this matter settled." Kennedy's hand slipped under his coat and threw a revolver on the table; the butt slid almost to Sleiter's hand. "Take that one!"
"Take That One!"
The desperado was poised on the balls of his feet, one leg advanced, one hand thrown back, balanced, crouching, all but clutching at the gun. The split second would be his! … Eye to eye; but Kennedy's eye was mocking, certain, dominant; before its arrogant pride Sleiter's glance flickered, flinched and fell. An icy hand clutched at his very heart; his nerveless knees gave under his weight in actual physical weakness. … He turned and crept away, followed by sneering glances; a man mastered, broken, shamed and outcast.
••••••
"Don," said Gale confidentially, when the shocked and whispering remnant had followed the deposed ruler, "you're a fool. You're nine different and distinct kinds of fool! Have a drink. He mighty nigh took you up on your little sporting proposition."
"I didn't think he'd stand the pressure," said Don carelessly.
"He'd 'a' beat you to it if he hadn't weakened. You couldn't possibly 'a' got at your other gun first." Gale set out bottle and glass.
"My other gun?" echoed Kennedy, puzzled. "I didn't have any other gun."
Gale put a restraining hand on the bottle, took it off, clubbed it, cast a slow, filmy, calculating glance at Kennedy's head, then at the bottle, back to Kennedy and back to the bottle again, apparently engrossed with some abstruse comparative estimate. At last he sighed, shoved the bottle on a shelf. He unlocked a small cabinet from which he took another bottle, smaller and sealed, which he placed on the bar with a corkscrew, offering no explanation.
Now, this is what Sleiter wrote:
"Mr. Jack Leonard,
"Weatherford, Texas.
"Dear Sir and Friend: I seen a man a while back that told me about your brother Willy and Will Jones beeing killed at Abilene. The man who done it is here now leastways the name is the same Don Kennedy and it is like his impidence not to change it I guess he is a hard one.
"Now if you don't want to tackle him yourself I don't blame you. This man sayd he was there and him and Kennedy pulled out afterward they was old aquantence but Kennedy was overbearing he wouldn't go and see if this was the man he was afrade he sayd your brother and Will Jones they begun it first but you can cinch Kennedy all the same he can't prove it by any one else but him. And if this is the same Kennedy this man says the man who killed your brother can be cinched to for robbing the T P at Sweetwater two years ago. Maybe he wasn't in with them but the train robers stayed hiden in his house at Nolan that night and the next day and was seen there by good citizens Joe and Charley Hanson and Lou Fite they seen them and others the train robbers was pusht clost and had to scatter the man says he was scared and hid his share under Kennedy's fireplace he thinks it is there yet Kennedy did not know it was there I think you could get the scared man to confess right if you seen him and had Kennedy behind the bars he is afrade of Kennedy. If you come out here and get him I will see you and let you know so no more now from a friend."
The other letter came the same day, addressed to Miss Lena Mallory, City, in a printed backhand palpably disguised. Within were these unsigned verses in the same laborious back hand:
A Ballade of White Fingers
Her fingers stray along the frets,
Her fingers wander o'er the strings;
A little while my heart forgets
Its griefs and cares and petty stings;
The chorded cadence throbs and sings,
Forgot are folly, wrong and sin,
And earth seems made for happier things—
When Lena plays her mandolin.
Her fingers glide along the frets,
Her fingers dance upon the strings …
Behind the outpost lone vedettes
A stern and stubborn phalanx swings
To mend the day's disasterings:
High over turmoil, dust and din
The clarion call of Honor rings—
She plays upon her mandolin.
Her fingers dream upon the frets;
They mourn along the wailing strings.
From night's far-arching parapets
The dim wraith of my dead youth wings,
Thrills through the trembling dusk and clings,
Sobbing, about my feet. … Come in!
Dear guest and ghost! … Such answer brings
The magic of her mandolin.
Prince, at the Gates of Paradise,
I fear I scarce shall enter in,
If, still without, with luring eyes,
She plays upon her mandolin.
The sigh followed the smile as Lena read; the swift red dyed her cheek. Her liking for Professor Otis was sincere. She gave warm appreciation to his unexaggerated good qualities. He was vigorous, prudent, successful, seated well above the salt, yet with no drop of snobbish blood—honorable, kindly, generous and just. She admired him, she liked him very much indeed, as a friend, but—she mused for a long time at this inconsistent conclusion. At last, after another reading and, perhaps, another sigh, she laid the verses away in an inconsistent little bamboo box—which might have been a casket but was really a retired tea-basket—with the flint arrow head the Professor had found at the ferry, the yucca blossom he had pressed for her, and other little archæological tokens he had brought her. The bamboo box itself had been his gift