Heart of the West Part 12

If this should meet the eye of the Imam of Muskat, may it quicken his whim to visit the land of the free! Otherwise I fear that I shall be longer than a short time separated from my dollars three.

VII

HYGEIA AT THE SOLITO

If you are knowing in the chronicles of the ring you will recall to mind an event in the early 'nineties when, for a minute and sundry odd seconds, a champion and a "would-be" faced each other on the alien side of an international river. So brief a conflict had rarely imposed upon the fair promise of true sport. The reporters made what they could of it, but, divested of padding, the action was sadly fugacious.

The champion merely smote his victim, turned his back upon him, remarking, "I know what I done to dat stiff," and extended an arm like a s.h.i.+p's mast for his glove to be removed.

Which accounts for a trainload of extremely disgusted gentlemen in an uproar of fancy vests and neck-wear being spilled from their pullmans in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which "Cricket" McGuire found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to San Antonian ears [33]. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that way pa.s.sed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman--may his shadow never measure under six foot two.

[FOOTNOTE 33: In the late 1800's and early 1900's western air was thought to be efficacious in healing tuberculosis (no drug therapy was then available), and many patients were sent to San Antonio. This theme appears in other O. Henry stories. There was a history of tuberculosis in O. Henry's family, and while he never had overt signs of the disease, he was allowed to go (or sent) to Texas at age 20 partly for his health.]

The cattleman, out this early to catch the south-bound for his ranch station, stopped at the side of the distressed patron of sport, and spoke in the kindly drawl of his ilk and region, "Got it pretty bad, bud?"

"Cricket" McGuire, ex-feather-weight prizefighter, tout, jockey, follower of the "ponies," all-round sport, and manipulator of the gum b.a.l.l.s and walnut sh.e.l.ls, looked up pugnaciously at the imputation cast by "bud."

"G'wan," he rasped, "telegraph pole. I didn't ring for yer."

Another paroxysm wrung him, and he leaned limply against a convenient baggage truck. Raidler waited patiently, glancing around at the white hats, short overcoats, and big cigars thronging the platform. "You're from the No'th, ain't you, bud?" he asked when the other was partially recovered. "Come down to see the fight?"

"Fight!" snapped McGuire. "Puss-in-the-corner! 'Twas a hypodermic injection. Handed him just one like a squirt of dope, and he's asleep, and no tanbark needed in front of his residence. Fight!" He rattled a bit, coughed, and went on, hardly addressing the cattleman, but rather for the relief of voicing his troubles. "No more dead sure t'ings for me. But Rus Sage [34] himself would have s.n.a.t.c.hed at it. Five to one dat de boy from Cork wouldn't stay t'ree rounds is what I invested in. Put my last cent on, and could already smell the sawdust in dat all-night joint of Jimmy Delaney's on T'irty-seventh Street I was goin' to buy. And den--say, telegraph pole, what a gazaboo a guy is to put his whole roll on one turn of the gaboozlum!"

[FOOTNOTE 34: Russell Sage (1815-1906) was a well-known wealthy New York businessman with financial interests in banking, western railroads, and Western Union.]

"You're plenty right," said the big cattleman; "more 'specially when you lose. Son, you get up and light out for a hotel. You got a mighty bad cough. Had it long?"

"Lungs," said McGuire comprehensively. "I got it. The croaker says I'll come to time for six months longer--maybe a year if I hold my gait. I wanted to settle down and take care of myself. Dat's why I speculated on dat five to one perhaps. I had a t'ousand iron dollars saved up. If I winned I was goin' to buy Delaney's cafe. Who'd a t'ought dat stiff would take a nap in de foist round--say?"

"It's a hard deal," commented Raidler, looking down at the diminutive form of McGuire crumpled against the truck. "But you go to a hotel and rest. There's the Menger and the Maverick, and--"

"And the Fi'th Av'noo, and the Waldorf-Astoria," mimicked McGuire.

"Told you I went broke. I'm on de b.u.m proper. I've got one dime left.

Maybe a trip to Europe or a sail in me private yacht would fix me up--pa-per!"

He flung his dime at a newsboy, got his _Express_, propped his back against the truck, and was at once rapt in the account of his Waterloo, as expanded by the ingenious press.

Curtis Raidler interrogated an enormous gold watch, and laid his hand on McGuire's shoulder.

"Come on, bud," he said. "We got three minutes to catch the train."

Sarcasm seemed to be McGuire's vein.

"You ain't seen me cash in any chips or call a turn since I told you I was broke, a minute ago, have you? Friend, chase yourself away."

"You're going down to my ranch," said the cattleman, "and stay till you get well. Six months'll fix you good as new." He lifted McGuire with one hand, and half-dragged him in the direction of the train.

"What about the money?" said McGuire, struggling weakly to escape.

"Money for what?" asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled cog-wheels--at right angles, and moving upon different axes.

Pa.s.sengers on the south-bound saw them seated together, and wondered at the conflux of two such antipodes. McGuire was five feet one, with a countenance belonging to either Yokohama or Dublin. Bright-beady of eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit, indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil. Six feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he represented the union of the West and South. Few accurate pictures of his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the mutoscope [35] is as yet unknown in Texas. After all, the only possible medium of portrayal of Raidler's kind would be the fresco--something high and simple and cool and unframed.

[FOOTNOTE 35: mutoscope--In 1894 Henry Norton Marvin and Herman Casler patented the mutoscope, a device for showing moving pictures. A sequence of photographs was attached to a rotating drum, so that the images were flipped rapidly from one to the next as the drum rotated, creating the illusion of motion.]

They were rolling southward on the International [36]. The timber was huddling into little, dense green motts at rare distances before the inundation of the downright, vert prairies. This was the land of the ranches; the domain of the kings of the kine.

[FOOTNOTE 36: International--The International and Great Northern Railroad (I. & G. N.) plays a prominent role in many of O. Henry's stories. It was one of the great early railroads of Texas, beginning in the northeast corner of the state and gradually extending southwestward almost 600 miles, reaching Rockdale by 1873, Austin by 1876, then San Antonio, and eventually the Mexican border at Laredo in 1881. Later it became part of the Missouri Pacific system.]

McGuire sat, collapsed into his corner of the seat, receiving with acid suspicion the conversation of the cattleman. What was the "game"

of this big "geezer" who was carrying him off? Altruism would have been McGuire's last guess. "He ain't no farmer," thought the captive, "and he ain't no con man, for sure. W'at's his lay? You trail in, Cricket, and see how many cards he draws. You're up against it, anyhow. You got a nickel and gallopin' consumption, and you better lay low. Lay low and see w'at's his game."

At Rincon, a hundred miles from San Antonio, they left the train for a buckboard which was waiting there for Raidler. In this they travelled the thirty miles between the station and their destination [37].

If anything could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious McGuire to a sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvety wheels across an exhilarant savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a nimble, tireless trot, which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild, untrammelled gallop. The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they absorbed it, with the delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road perished, and the buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the gra.s.s itself, steered by the practised hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny distant mott of trees was a signboard, each convolution of the low hills a voucher of course and distance. But McGuire reclined upon his spine, seeing nothing but a desert, and receiving the cattleman's advances with sullen distrust. "W'at's he up to?" was the burden of his thoughts; "w'at kind of a gold brick has the big guy got to sell?"

McGuire was only applying the measure of the streets he had walked to a range bounded by the horizon and the fourth dimension.

[FOOTNOTE 37: There is a town named Rincon almost 200 miles south of San Antonio, but it is not on the route of the I. & G. N. O. Henry often appropriated names of real places for his stories without worrying about geographical correctness. The description here is undoubtedly from O. Henry's memory of his journey from his home in North Carolina to a ranch in LaSalle County, Texas, when he was twenty. He would have gotten off the I. & G. N. at Cotulla, about 90 miles south of San Antonio, and ridden to the ranch as described in this paragraph. The description of this journey, with its vistas and aromas, is repeated in a number of O. Henry's stories.]

A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped it at the ranch for the boys to attend to. It was impossible for McGuire to know or comprehend that, in the eyes of the cattleman, his case and that of the calf were identical in interest and demand upon his a.s.sistance. A creature was ill and helpless; he had the power to render aid--these were the only postulates required for the cattleman to act. They formed his system of logic and the most of his creed.

McGuire was the seventh invalid whom Raidler had picked up thus casually in San Antonio, where so many thousand go for the ozone that is said to linger about its contracted streets. Five of them had been guests of Solito Ranch until they had been able to leave, cured or better, and exhausting the vocabulary of tearful grat.i.tude. One came too late, but rested very comfortably, at last, under a ratama tree in the garden.

So, then, it was no surprise to the ranchhold when the buckboard spun to the door, and Raidler took up his debile _protege_ like a handful of rags and set him down upon the gallery.

McGuire looked upon things strange to him. The ranch-house was the best in the country. It was built of brick hauled one hundred miles by wagon, but it was of but one story, and its four rooms were completely encircled by a mud floor "gallery." The miscellaneous setting of horses, dogs, saddles, wagons, guns, and cow-punchers' paraphernalia oppressed the metropolitan eyes of the wrecked sportsman.

"Well, here we are at home," said Raidler, cheeringly.

"It's a h----l of a looking place," said McGuire promptly, as he rolled upon the gallery floor in a fit of coughing.

"We'll try to make it comfortable for you, buddy," said the cattleman gently. "It ain't fine inside; but it's the outdoors, anyway, that'll do you the most good. This'll be your room, in here. Anything we got, you ask for it."

He led McGuire into the east room. The floor was bare and clean.

White curtains waved in the gulf breeze through the open windows. A big willow rocker, two straight chairs, a long table covered with newspapers, pipes, tobacco, spurs, and cartridges stood in the centre.

Some well-mounted heads of deer and one of an enormous black javeli [38] projected from the walls. A wide, cool cot-bed stood in a corner.

Nueces County people regarded this guest chamber as fit for a prince.

McGuire showed his eyeteeth at it. He took out his nickel and spun it up to the ceiling.

[FOOTNOTE 38: javeli--native wild pigs of the Sonoran desert, more often called javelinas, prized by hunters because of their ferocity. Their name comes from the Spanish word for javelin, "jabalina," because of their razor-sharp teeth.]

"T'ought I was lyin' about the money, did ye? Well, you can frisk me if you wanter. Dat's the last simoleon in the treasury. Who's goin'

to pay?"

The cattleman's clear grey eyes looked steadily from under his grizzly brows into the huckleberry optics of his guest. After a little he said simply, and not ungraciously, "I'll be much obliged to you, son, if you won't mention money any more. Once was quite a plenty. Folks I ask to my ranch don't have to pay anything, and they very scarcely ever offers it. Supper'll be ready in half an hour. There's water in the pitcher, and some, cooler, to drink, in that red jar hanging on the gallery [39]."

[FOOTNOTE 39: Drinking water was stored in clay containers in the shade. Water seeped through the clay to the surface, where it evaporated, and the evaporation cooled the jar and its contents.]