“Come out uh that, you damned Dutch belly-robber!” bawled Big Medicine joyously, and somewhere behind a curtain a feminine shriek was heard at the shocking sentence.
Four pairs of welcoming hands laid hold upon Patsy; four pairs of strong arms dragged him out of the berth and through the narrow aisle to the platform. The conductor, the head brakeman and the porter were chafing there, and they pulled while the others pushed. So Patsy was deposited upon the platform, grumbling and only half sober.
“Anyway, we’ve got him back,” Weary remarked with much satisfaction the next day when they were once more started toward the range land. “When Irish blows in again, we’ll be all right.”
“By cripes, yuh just give me a sight uh that Irish once, and he’ll come, if I have to rope and drag ’im!” Big Medicine took his own way of intimating that he held no grudge. “Did yuh hear what Patsy said, by cripes, when he was loading up the chuck-wagon at the store? He turned in all that oil and them olives and anchovies, yuh know, and he told Tom t’ throw in about six cases uh blueberries. I was standin’ right handy by, and he turns around and scowls at me and says: ‘Py cosh, der vay dese fellers eats pie mit derselves, I have to fill oop der wagon mit pie fruit alreatty!’ And then the old devil turns around with his back to me, but yuh can skin me for a coyote if I didn’t ketch a grin on ’is face!”
They turned and looked back to where Patsy, seated high upon the mess-wagon, was cracking his long whip like pistol shots and swearing in Dutch at his four horses as he came bouncing along behind them.
“Well, there’s worse fellers than old Patsy,” Slim admitted ponderously. “I don’t want no more Jakie in mine, by golly.”
“I betche Jakie cashes in, with all that lemon in him,” prophesied Happy Jack with relish. “Dirty little Dago—it’d serve him right. Patsy wouldn’t uh acted like that in a thousand years.”
They glanced once more behind them, as if they would make sure that the presence of Patsy was a reality. Then, with content in their hearts, they galloped blithely out of the lane and into the grassy hills.
FIRST AID TO CUPID
The floor manager had just called out that it was “ladies’ choice,” and Happy Jack, his eyes glued in rapturous apprehension upon the thin, expressionless face of Annie Pilgreen, backed diffidently into a corner. He hoped and he feared that she would discover him and lead him out to dance; she had done that once, at the Labor Day ball, and he had not slept soundly for several nights after.
Someone laid proprietary hand upon his cinnamon-brown coat sleeve, and he jumped and blushed; it was only the schoolma’am, however, smiling up at him ingratiatingly in a manner wholly bewildering to a simple minded fellow like Happy Jack. She led him into another corner, plumped gracefully and with much decision down upon a bench, drew her skirts aside to make room for him and announced that she was tired and wanted a nice long talk with him. Happy Jack, sending a troubled glance after Annie, who was leading Joe Meeker out to dance, sighed a bit and sat down obediently—and thereby walked straight into the loop which the schoolma’am had spread for his unwary feet.
The schoolma’am was sitting out an astonishing number of dances—for a girl who could dance from dark to dawn and never turn a hair—and the women were wondering why. If she had sat them out with Weary Davidson they would have smiled knowingly and thought no more of it; but she did not. For every dance she had a different companion, and in every case it ended in that particular young man looking rather scared and unhappy. After five minutes of low-toned monologue on the part of the schoolma’am, Happy Jack went the way of his predecessors and also became scared and unhappy.
“Aw, say! Miss Satterly, I can’t act,” he protested in a panic.
“Oh, yes, you could,” declared the schoolma’am, with sweet assurance, “if you only thought so.”
“Aw, I couldn’t get up before a crowd and say a piece, not if—”
“I’m not sure I want you to. There are other things to an entertainment besides reciting things. I only want you to promise that you will help me out. You will, won’t you?” The schoolma’am’s eyes, besides being pretty, were often disconcertingly direct in their gaze.
Happy Jack wriggled and looked toward the door, which suddenly seemed a very long way off. “I—I’ve got to go up to the Falls, along about Christmas,” he stuttered feebly, avoiding her eyes. “I—I can’t get off any other time, and I’ve—I’ve got a tooth—”
“You’re the fifth Flying-U man who has ‘a tooth,’” the schoolma’am interrupted impatiently. “A dentist ought to locate in Dry Lake; from what I have heard confidentially tonight, there’s a fortune to be made off the teeth of the Happy Family alone.”
Every drop of blood in Happy’s body seemed to stand then in his face. “I—I’ll pull the curtain for yuh,” he volunteered, meekly.
“You’re the seventh applicant for that place.” The schoolma’am was crushingly calm. “Every fellow I’ve spoken to has evinced a morbid craving for curtain-pulling.”
Happy Jack crumpled under her sarcasm and perspired, and tried to think of something, with his brain quite paralyzed and useless.
The schoolma’am continued inexorably; plainly, her brain was not paralyzed. “I’ve promised the neighborhood that I would give a Christmas tree and entertainment—and when a school-teacher promises anything to a neighborhood, nothing short of death or smallpox will be accepted as an excuse for failing to keep the promise; and I’ve seven tongue-tied kids to work with!” (The schoolma’am was only spasmodically given to irreproachable English.) “Of course, I relied upon my friends to help me out. But when I come to calling the roll, I—I don’t seem to have any friends.” The schoolma’am was twirling the Montana sapphire ring which Weary had given her last spring, and her voice was trembly and made Happy Jack feel vaguely that he was a low-down cur and ought to be killed.
He swallowed twice. “Aw, yuh don’t want to go and feel bad about it; I never meant—I’ll do anything yuh ask me to.”
“Thank you. I knew I could count upon you, Jack.”
The schoolma’am recovered her spirits with a promptness that was suspicious; patted his arm and called him an awfully good fellow, which reduced Happy Jack to a state just this side imbecility. Also, she drew a little memorandum book from somewhere, and wrote Happy Jack’s name in clear, convincing characters that made him shiver. He saw other names above his own on the page; quite a lot of them; seven in fact. Miss Satterly, evidently, was not quite as destitute of friends as her voice, awhile back, would lead one to believe. Happy Jack wondered.
“I haven’t quite decided what we will have,” she remarked briskly. “When I do, we’ll all meet some evening in the school-house and talk it over. There’s lots of fun getting up an entertainment; you’ll like it, once you get started.”
Happy did not agree with her, but he did not tell her so; he managed to contort his face into something resembling a grin, and retreated to the hotel, where he swallowed two glasses of whiskey to start his blood moving again, and then sat down and played poker disasterously until daylight made the lamps grow a sickly yellow and the air of the room seem suddenly stale and dead. But Happy never thought of blaming the schoolma’am for the eighteen dollars he lost.
Neither did he blame her for the nightmares which tormented his sleep during the week that followed or the vague uneasiness that filled his waking hour, even when he was not thinking directly of the ghost that dogged him. For wherever he went, or whatever he did, Happy Jack was conscious of the fact that his name was down on the schoolma’am’s list and he was definitely committed to do anything she asked him to do, even to “speaking a piece”—which was in his eyes the acme of mental torture.
When Cal Emmett, probably thinking of Miss Satterly’s little book, pensively warbled in his ear:
Is your name written there,
On