The Complete Short Stories. O. Hooper Henry

I know Heinrich Strauss?” repeated Curly, affectionately. “Why, say, ‘Bo, I wish I had a dollar for every game of pinochle me and Heine has played on Sunday afternoons.”

      More beer and a second plate of steaming food was set before the diplomat. And then Curly, knowing to a fluid-drachm how far a “con” game would go, shuffled out into the unpromising street.

      And now he began to perceive the inconveniences of this stony Southern town. There was none of the outdoor gaiety and brilliancy and music that provided distraction even to the poorest in the cities of the North. Here, even so early, the gloomy, rock-walled houses were closed and barred against the murky dampness of the night. The streets were mere fissures through which flowed grey wreaths of river mist. As he walked he heard laughter and the chink of coin and chips behind darkened windows, and music coming from every chink of wood and stone. But the diversions were selfish; the day of popular pastimes had not yet come to San Antonio.

      But at length Curly, as he strayed, turned the sharp angle of another lost street and came upon a rollicking band of stockmen from the outlying ranches celebrating in the open in front of an ancient wooden hotel. One great roisterer from the sheep country who had just instigated a movement toward the bar, swept Curly in like a stray goat with the rest of his flock. The princes of kine and wool hailed him as a new zoological discovery, and uproariously strove to preserve him in the diluted alcohol of their compliments and regards.

      An hour afterward Curly staggered from the hotel barroom dismissed by his fickle friends, whose interest in him had subsided as quickly as it had risen. Full — stoked with alcoholic fuel and cargoed with food, the only question remaining to disturb him was that of shelter and bed.

      A drizzling, cold Texas rain had begun to fall — an endless, lazy, unintermittent downfall that lowered the spirits of men and raised a reluctant steam from the warm stones of the streets and houses. Thus comes the “norther” dousing gentle spring and amiable autumn with the chilling salutes and adieux of coming and departing winter.

      Curly followed his nose down the first tortuous street into which his irresponsible feet conducted him. At the lower end of it, on the bank of the serpentine stream, he perceived an open gate in a cemented rock wall. Inside he saw camp fires and a row of low wooden sheds built against three sides of the enclosing wall. He entered the enclosure. Under the sheds many horses were champing at their oats and corn. Many wagons and buckboards stood about with their teams’ harness thrown carelessly upon the shafts and doubletrees. Curly recognised the place as a wagon-yard, such as is provided by merchants for their out-of- town friends and customers. No one was in sight. No doubt the drivers of those wagons were scattered about the town “seeing the elephant and hearing the owl.” In their haste to become patrons of the town’s dispensaries of mirth and good cheer the last ones to depart must have left the great wooden gate swinging open.

      Curly had satisfied the hunger of an anaconda and the thirst of a camel, so he was neither in the mood nor the condition of an explorer. He zigzagged his way to the first wagon that his eyesight distinguished in the semi-darkness under the shed. It was a two-horse wagon with a top of white canvas. The wagon was half filled with loose piles of wool sacks, two or three great bundles of grey blankets, and a number of bales, bundles, and boxes. A reasoning eye would have estimated the load at once as ranch supplies, bound on the morrow for some outlying hacienda. But to the drowsy intelligence of Curly they represented only warmth and softness and protection against the cold humidity of the night. After several unlucky efforts, at last he conquered gravity so far as to climb over a wheel and pitch forward upon the best and warmest bed he had fallen upon in many a day. Then he became instinctively a burrowing animal, and dug his way like a prairie-dog down among the sacks and blankets, hiding himself from the cold air as snug and safe as a bear in his den. For three nights sleep had visited Curly only in broken and shivering doses. So now, when Morpheus condescended to pay him a call, Curly got such a strangle hold on the mythological old gentleman that it was a wonder that anyone else in the whole world got a wink of sleep that night.

      *

      Six cowpunchers of the Cibolo Ranch were waiting around the door of the ranch store. Their ponies cropped grass near by, tied in the Texas fashion — which is not tied at all. Their bridle reins had been dropped to the earth, which is a more effectual way of securing them (such is the power of habit and imagination) than you could devise out of a half-inch rope and a live-oak tree.

      These guardians of the cow lounged about, each with a brown cigarette paper in his hand, and gently but unceasingly cursed Sam Revell, the storekeeper. Sam stood in the door, snapping the red elastic bands on his pink madras shirtsleeves and looking down affectionately at the only pair of tan shoes within a forty-mile radius. His offence had been serious, and he was divided between humble apology and admiration for the beauty of his raiment. He had allowed the ranch stock of “smoking” to become exhausted.

      “I thought sure there was another case of it under the counter, boys,” he explained. “But it happened to be catterdges.”

      “You’ve sure got a case of happenedicitis,” said Poky Rodgers, fency rider of the Largo Verde potrero. “Somebody ought to happen to give you a knock on the head with the butt end of a quirt. I’ve rode in nine miles for some tobacco; and it don’t appear natural and seemly that you ought to be allowed to live.”

      “The boys was smokin’ cut plug and dried mesquite leaves mixed when I left,” sighed Mustang Taylor, horse wrangler of the Three Elm camp. “They’ll be lookin’ for me back by nine. They’ll be settin’ up, with their papers ready to roll a whiff of the real thing before bedtime. And I’ve got to tell ’em that this pink-eyed, sheep-headed, sulphur-footed, shirtwaisted son of a calico broncho, Sam Revell, hasn’t got no tobacco on hand.”

      Gregorio Falcon, Mexican vaquero and best thrower of the rope on the Cibolo, pushed his heavy, silver-embroidered straw sombrero back upon his thicket of jet black curls, and scraped the bottoms of his pockets for a few crumbs of the precious weed.

      “Ah, Don Samuel,” he said, reproachfully, but with his touch of Castilian manners, “escuse me. Dthey say dthe jackrabbeet and dthe sheep have dthe most leetle sesos — how you call dthem — brain-es? Ah don’t believe dthat, Don Samuel — escuse me. Ah dthink people w’at don’t keep esmokin’ tobacco, dthey — bot you weel escuse me, Don Samuel.”

      “Now, what’s the use of chewin’ the rag, boys,” said the untroubled Sam, stooping over to rub the toes of his shoes with a red-and-yellow handkerchief. “Ranse took the order for some more smokin’ to San Antone with him Tuesday. Pancho rode Ranse’s hoss back yesterday; and Ranse is goin’ to drive the wagon back himself. There wa’n’t much of a load — just some woolsacks and blankets and nails and canned peaches and a few things we was out of. I look for Ranse to roll in to-day sure. He’s an early starter and a hell-to-split driver, and he ought to be here not far from sundown.”

      “What plugs is he drivin’?” asked Mustang Taylor, with a smack of hope in his tones.

      “The buckboard greys,” said Sam.

      “I’ll wait a spell, then,” said the wrangler. “Them plugs eat up a trail like a roadrunner swallowin’ a whip snake. And you may bust me open a can of greengage plums, Sam, while I’m waitin’ for somethin’ better.”

      “Open me some yellow clings,” ordered Poky Rodgers. “I’ll wait, too.”

      The tobaccoless punchers arranged themselves comfortably on the steps of the store. Inside Sam chopped open with a hatchet the tops of the cans of fruit.

      The store, a big, white wooden building like a barn, stood fifty yards from the ranch-house. Beyond it were the horse corrals; and still farther the wool sheds and the brush-topped shearing pens — for the Rancho Cibolo raised both cattle and sheep. Behind the store, at a little distance, were the grass-thatched jacals of the Mexicans who bestowed their allegiance upon the Cibolo.

      The ranch-house was composed of four large rooms, with plastered adobe walls, and a two-room wooden ell. A twenty-feet-wide “gallery” circumvented