The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories Part 22

"Hey? Yuh won't feed a man when he's hungry? Yuh darn Dutch--" Weary went into details in a way that was surprising.

The Happy Family rushed up and pulled him off Patsy before he had done any real harm, and held him till the cook had got into the shelter of his tent and armed himself with a frying pan. Weary was certainly outdoing himself today. The Happy Family resolved into a peace committee.

"Aw, dig up some pie for him, Patsy," pleaded Cal. "Yuh don't want to mind anything he says while he's like this; yuh know Weary's a good friend to yuh when he's sober. Get some strong coffee--that'll straighten him out."

"Py cosh, I not feed no drunk fools. I not care if it iss Weary. He hit mine jaw--"

"Aw, gwan! I guess yuh never get that way yourself," put in Happy Jack, ponderously sarcastic. "I guess yuh never tanked up in roundup, one time, and left me cook chuck fer the hull outfit--and I guess Weary never rode all night, and had the d.i.c.kens of a time, tryin' t' get yuh a doctor--yuh old heathen. Yuh sure are an ungrateful cuss."

"Give him some good, hot coffee, Patsy, and anything he wants to eat,"

commanded Chip, more sharply than was his habit. "And don't be all day about it, either."

That settled it, of course; Chip, being foreman, was to be obeyed--unless Patsy would rather roll his blankets and hunt a new job.

He took to muttering weird German sentences the while he brought out two pies and poured black coffee into a cup. The reveler drank the coffee--three cups of it--ate a whole blueberry pie, and was consoled.

He even wanted to embrace Patsy again, but was restrained by the others. After that he went over and laid down in the shade of the bed-wagon, and straightway began to snore with much energy and enthusiasm.

Chip watched him a minute and then went and sat down on the shady side of the bed-tent and began gloomily to roll a cigarette. The rest of the Happy Family silently followed his example; for a long while no one said a word.

It certainly was a shock to see Weary like that. Not because it is unusual for a man of the range to get in that condition--for on the contrary, it is rather commonplace. And the Happy Family had lived the life too long to judge a man harshly because of an occasional indiscreet departure from the path virtuous; they knew that the man might be a good fellow, after all. In the West grows Charity st.u.r.dily, with branches quite broad enough to cover certain defections on the part of such men as Weary Davidson.

For that, the real shock came in the utter unexpectedness of the thing--and from the fact that a man, even though p.r.o.ne to indulge in such riotous conduct, is supposed to forswear such indulgence when he has other and more important things to do. Weary had been sent afar on a matter of business; he had ridden Glory, a horse belonging to the Flying U. His arrival without the strays he had been sent after; without even the horse he had ridden away--that was the real disaster.

He had broken a trust; he had, apparently, appropriated a horse that did not belong to him, which was worse. But the Happy Family were loyal, to a man. They did not condemn him; they were only waiting for him to sleep himself into a condition to explain the mystery.

"Somebody's doped him," said Pink with decision, after three hours of shying around the subject. "You'll see; somebody's doped him and likely took Glory away when they'd got him batty enough not to know the difference. Yuh mind the queer look in his eyes? And he acts queer.

So help me Josephine! I'd sure like to get next to the man that traded horses with him."

The Happy Family breathed deeply; they were all, apparently, thinking the same thing.

"By golly, that's what," spoke Slim, with decision. "He does act like a man that had been doped."

"Whisky straight wouldn't make that much difference in a man," averred Jack Bates. "Yuh can't _get_ Weary on the fight, hardly, when he's sober; and look at the way he was in town--hot to slaughter that Chinaman that wasn't doing a thing to him, and saying how he hated c.h.i.n.ks. Weary don't; he always says, when Patsy don't make enough pie to go round, that if he was running the outfit he'd have a c.h.i.n.k to cook."

"Aw, look at the way he acted t' Rusty--and he thinks a lot uh Rusty, too," put in Happy Jack, who felt the importance of discovery and was in an unusually complacent mood. "And he was going t' hang Pink up by the heels and--"

Pink turned round and looked at him fixedly, and Happy Jack became suddenly interested in his cigarette.

"Say, he'll sure be sore when he comes to himself, though," observed Cal. "I don't know how he's going to square himself with his school-ma'am. Joe Meeker was into Rusty's place while the big setting comes off; I would uh given him a gentle hint about keeping his face closed, only Weary wouldn't let me off my horse. Joe'll sure give a high-colored picture uh the performance."

"Well, if he does, he'll regret it a lot," prophesied Pink. "And anyway, something sure got wrong with Weary; do yuh suppose he'd give up Glory deliberately? Not on your life! Glory comes next to the Schoolma'am in his affections."

"Wonder where he got that dirt-colored cayuse, anyhow," mused Cal.

"I was studying out the brand, a while ago," Pink answered. "It's blotched pretty bad, but I made it out. It's the Rocking R--they range down along Milk River, next to the reservation. I've never had anything to do with the outfit, but I'd gamble on the brand, all right."

"Well, how the deuce would he come by a Rocking R horse? He never got it around here, anywheres. He must uh got it up on the Marias."

"Then that must be a good long jag he's had--which I don't believe,"

interjected Cal.

"Somebody," said Pink meaningly, "ought to have gone along with him; this thing wouldn't uh happened, then."

"Ye-e-s?" Chip felt that the remark applied to him as a foreman, rather than as one of the Family, and he resented it. "If I'd sent somebody else with him, the outfit would probably be out two horses, instead of one--and there'd be two men under the bed-wagon with their hats and coats missing."

Pink's eyes, under their heavy fringe of curled lashes, turned ominously purple. "With all due respect to you, Mr. Bennett, I'd like to have you explain--"

A horseman rode quietly up to them from behind a thicket of choke-cherry bushes. Pink, catching sight of him first, stopped short off and stared.

"h.e.l.lo, boys," greeted the new-comer gaily. "How's everything? Mamma!

it's good to get amongst white folks again."

The Happy Family rose up as one man and stared fixedly; not one of them spoke, or moved. Pink was the first to recover.

"Well--I'll be--d.a.m.ned!"

"Yuh sure will, Cadwolloper, if yuh don't let down them pretty lashes and quit gawping. What the d.i.c.kens ails you fellows, anyhow? Is--is my hat on crooked, or--or anything?"

"Weary, by all that's good!" murmured Chip, dazedly.

Weary swung a long leg over the back of Glory and came to earth.

"Say," he began in the sunny, drawly voice that was good to hear, "what's the joke?"

The Happy Family sat down again and looked queerly at one another.

Happy Jack glanced furtively at a long figure in the gra.s.s near by, and then, unhappily, at Weary.

"It's him, all right," he blurted solemnly. "They're both him!"

The Happy Family snickered hysterically.

Weary took a long step and confronted Happy Jack. "I'm both him, am I?" he repeated mockingly. "Mamma, but you're a lucid cuss!" He turned and regarded the stunned Family judicially.

"If there's any of it left," he hinted sweetly, "I wouldn't mind taking a jolt myself; but from the looks, and the actions, yuh must have got away with at least two gallons!"

"Oh, we can give you a jolt, I guess," Chip retorted dryly. "Just step this way."

Weary, wondering a bit at the tone of him, followed; at his heels came the perturbed Happy Family. Chip stooped and turned the sleeping one over on his back; the sleeper opened his eyes and blinked questioningly up at the huddle of bent faces.

The astonished, blue eyes of Weary met the quizzical blue eyes of his other self. He leaned against the wagon wheel.

"Oh, mamma!" he said, weakly.

His other self sat up and looked around, felt for his hat, saw that it was gone, and reached mechanically for his cigarette material.

"By the Lord! Are punchers so d.a.m.n scarce in this neck uh the woods, that yuh've got to shanghai a man in order to make a full crew?" he demanded of the Happy Family, in the voice of Weary--minus the drawl.

"I've got a string uh cayuses in that darn stockyards, back in town--and a d.a.m.n poor town it is!--and I've also got a date with the Circle roundup for tomorrow night. What yuh going to do about it?

Speak up, for I'm in a hurry to know."

The Happy Family looked at one another and said nothing.