“Oh, well, one day’s as good as another to get drunk on.”
Falcon wondered if Baldy Bent would get drunk. The cowboys said he used to be a “bad actor” when drunk. He had shot four or five men in the old days, in the Southwest. And before he married and “settled down” he had served five years in the penitentiary.
“You said the other day, Mr. Bent, that I had started too late. How early should I have started if I was to become a real horseman?”
“That’s hard to say, Alec. I’ve been in the saddle since I was five years old. That’s over half a century ago now — down in the old Texas Panhandle. I guess you’ve got to be born to it.”
Bent rambled along in his high, thin voice. Told stories of bringing vast herds, forty years ago, up the Long Trail that wound its way from Mexico to Montana and then up north through the rolling plains of Alberta. A six months’ trip. A long, hard voyage in the saddle.
Bent talked and Alexander Falcon dreamed. There had been, thought Falcon, adventures enough in the West in the old days, but there was little left now of romance. Yet there were some colourful characters among these men around him.
Cud Browne would have served for a hero of his boyhood. The blue-eyed, fair-haired Cud stood six feet one, weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, was strong, gentle and courteous. He talked little except when drunk. Probably he had little to say. He knew, indeed, nothing about anything in the world except horses, cattle, whores. He didn’t “break” horses in the old-fashioned way. Horseflesh was too valuable for that now, and Cud was too good a horseman. He “gentled” the colts. He had chances enough to show boldness as well as skill when he rode the mean, older horses — horses notorious for bad habits, whom nobody else could ride. He had only been thrown once in the whole summer. That was when he had ridden Snake-eye in another man’s saddle with stirrup lengths too short. Even then he had lit on his feet standing. He had followed Snake-eye as that crazy buckskin plunged around the corral, caught the bridle reins and then “gentled” him, changed the stirrup lengths, rode him back to camp.
Beside Cud Browne lounged Long Harry, the cook — a good horseman in his day, but he had given up riding the range for the more profitable occupation of tending the stove. Long Harry stood second in the outfit to nobody but the foreman, Bent.
That animated piece of old saddle-leather, as Falcon knew well, stood second to none. Bent would talk as an equal to Colonel Carson, the owner. Always Bent spoke of “our cattle,” “our range.” For if Colonel Carson had supplied the money and the business judgment, hadn’t he, Bent, supplied the skill in handling cattle, horses, men? Hadn’t they built up the Bar Ninety-Nine between them?
Falcon wondered why Colonel Carson hadn’t joined them yet. He was to have driven the thirty miles from Lethbridge that day, bringing the ranch mail and news of the outside world. Something unforeseen must have delayed him.…
Falcon didn’t give more than half an ear to old Bent’s stories of his youth. He had heard them all a dozen times before. Besides, most of them weren’t true.
Bent at last, satiated with the relation of his Odyssey, came back to the point from which he had started.
“No, Alec, you didn’t begin early enough to become a real cow-puncher. You’re tanned and you’re tough, but you don’t look like a cow-puncher. Why, look at your hands! They show you’ve never done any real work — leastways not with your hands.”
Falcon protested. In the spring, when he had come out from college, he had done as much straight spadework, digging for the dipping-vat, as anyone in the crew. When he had been out before, he had done all the axe-work in camp, hauling driftwood from the river or from tumbledown corrals and chopping it up and splitting it for the cook. For the last four winters he had boxed in the University gymnasium. For the last two summers he had pulled an oar in an eight-oared shell. And that was a great deal harder on the hands than cow-punching. He invited Bent to look at the callouses on his palms.
“It’s not only your hands that show you’re no cow puncher,” Bent went on, stubbornly. “It’s your eyes. A cow-puncher’s always looking out to see what he can see. Half the time you’re looking inside your own head.”
“Have another whisky with me, won’t you?” Falcon wanted to change the conversation. He wasn’t annoyed with Bent: he was annoyed with himself. Brought up amongst books, he wished to develop, not in the direction for which his early environment fitted him, but as an adventurer, a man of action.…
He was a fool, he reflected, to wish to live like an Elizabethan in the twentieth century. You couldn’t be an Elizabethan in the twentieth century even if you were far better fitted for the part than it was his fortune to be. The big adventures were all over. Cow-punching had its fascinating moments, but there was little real adventure to it. The imagination, of course, could always weave about it something of the atmosphere of romance.…
“And when the white, sky-sweeping wings of dawn
Had brushed the gloom from silver mountain-spires,
He had caught his horse and thrown the saddle on
And given rein to his youth’s wild desires;
Then, while his heart leaped with the hoof-beats’ run,
His spirit rose like the young ardent sun.”
He wouldn’t be much of a poet either, he feared, judging by that stuff. He could imagine his former college instructor picking holes in it.… Allerdyce, that huge, lumbering scholar with the searching eye for beauty and the generous appetite for smut: “‘Silver mountain-spires,’ indeed! Trite! Mid-Victorian! Side-whiskered! Your silver spires are worthless except as phallic symbols. And as for ‘his youth’s wild desires.’ … Really now!”
Falcon saw himself as one of those who could neither mount Pegasus nor leave that difficult steed alone. It was such a plight as he got himself into once six years ago, when, as a youngster of seventeen, he tried to vault to the back of a much less fiery charger, his own top horse, Nigger Baby. Left hand on Nigger Baby’s neck, right hand on the horn of the saddle, he had leaped clear from the ground, chaps, spurs and all, with never a thought of stirrups. The way he saw one of the cowboys do. But he wasn’t as quick as the cowboy, and Nigger Baby was too quick. That little black streak bolted the moment Falcon’s feet left the ground. He, halfway into the saddle, held on hard. Hands gripping neck and horn, right foot just over the cantle, his body hanging halfway to the ground. He cursed as he heard the cowboys laughing. Then as, desperate, he pulled himself at last into the saddle, got a knee grip, found his stirrups, the laughter turned to cheers — grinning cheers, but none the less laudatory. “Ride him, cowboy!” “Well done, Wild Easterner!”
But Pegasus was a tougher horse to ride than Nigger Baby. He would never make that seat. Better count on mounting a good prose hack. And, even that, not blooded.
Old Bent chuckled, then said:
“Looks as if Murphy had forgotten about closing time.”
Falcon glanced at the clock. It was past eleven, the hour for clearing out the bar-room and locking up the doors. But nobody paid any attention to the clock, not even Constable Brazenose.
Everybody that Falcon could see in that big barroom was drunk. Roaring drunk. Singing drunk. Dancing drunk. The same wheezy old gramophone, to which earlier in the evening the cowboys had chanted “The Harlots of Jerusalem,” was now squeaking out “The Merry Widow.”
Constable Brazenose was waltzing with Vic Fleming. Both were very grave, with a far-away look in their eyes. Gyp Callahan, not knowing how to waltz, was doing an Indian war dance for the approval of Cud Browne. Big Bob from Mexico stood behind the bar serving drinks. Mike Murphy, the red-faced hotel proprietor, was now the soul of geniality, he was so drunk. He wouldn’t take in anymore coin. His thick red paw shoved it back with a lordly sweep.
As