We rode along beside Shamberlain.
“What did you mean just now?” asked my friend. “You spoke of Wade’s being the baronet.”
“I allowed you wouldn’t leave him behind.”
“I don’t understand. I have not seen him since we left you in the summer. I’ve been on to California and back.”
“The Barrownight’s ben stoppin’ round in the Valley ever since. He seems to have a call to stop. Prehaps his heart is tetched, and he is goan to jine the Lord’s people. I left him down to my ranch, ten days ago, playing with a grizzly cub, what he’s trying to make a gentleman of. A pooty average gentleman it’ll make too.”
“Very odd!” says Brent to me. “Biddulph meant to start for home, at once, when we parted. He had some errand in behalf of the lady he had run away from.”
“Probably he found he could not trust his old wounds under her eyes again. Wants another year’s crust over his scarified heart.”
“Quite likely. Well, I wish we had known he was in the Valley. We would have carried him back with us. A fine fellow! Couldn’t be a better!”
“Not raw, as Englishmen generally are?”
“No; well ripened by a year or so in America.”
“Individuals need that cookery, as the race did.”
“Yes; I wish our social cuisine were a thought more scientific.”
“All in good time. We shall separate sauces by and by, and not compel beef, mutton, and turkey to submit to the same gravy.”
“Meanwhile some of my countrymen are so under-done, and some so over-done, that I have lost my taste for them.”
“Such social dyspepsia is soon cured on the plains. You will go back with a healthy appetite. Did your English friend describe the lady of his love?”
“No; it was evidently too stern a grief to talk about. He could keep up his spirits only by resolutely turning his back on the subject.”
“It must needs have been a weak heart or a mighty passion.”
“The latter. A brave fellow like Biddulph does not take to his heels from what he can overcome.”
By this time we had reached camp.
Horses first, self afterwards, is the law of the plains travel. A camp must have, —
1. Water.
2. Fodder.
3. Fuel.
Those are the necessities. Anything else is luxury.
The mail party were a set of jolly roughs. Jake Shamberlain was the type man. To encounter such fellows is good healthy education. As useful in kind, but higher in degree, as going to a bear conversazione or a lion and tiger concert. Civilization mollifies the race. It is not well to have hard knocks and rough usage for mind or body eliminated from our training.
We joined suppers with our new friends. After supper we sat smoking our pipes, and talking horse, Indians, bear-fights, scalping, and other brutal business, such as the world has not outgrown.
Enter, the Brutes
The sun had just gone down. There was a red wrangle of angry vapors over the mounds of mountain westward. A brace of travellers from Salt Lake way rode up and lighted their camp-fire near ours. More society in that lonely world. Two families, with two sets of Lares and Penates.
Not attractive society. They were a sinister-looking couple of hounds. A lean wolfish and a fat bony dog.
One was a rawboned, stringy chap, — as gaunt, unkempt, and cruel a Pike as ever pillaged the cabin, insulted the wife, and squirted tobacco over the dead body of a Free State settler in Kansas. The other was worse, because craftier. A little man, stockish, oily, and red in the face. A jaunty fellow, too, with a certain shabby air of coxcombry even in his travel-stained attire.
They were well mounted, both. The long ruffian rode a sorrel, big and bony as himself, and equally above such accidents as food or no food. The little villain’s mount was a red roan, a Flathead horse, rather naggy, but perfectly hardy and wiry, — an animal that one would choose to do a thousand miles in twenty days, or a hundred between sunrise and sunset. They had also two capital mules, packed very light. One was branded, “A. & A.”
Distrust and disgust are infallible instincts. Men’s hearts and lives are written on their faces, to warn or charm. Never reject that divine or devilish record!
Brent read the strangers, shivered at me, and said, sotto voce, “What a precious pair of cut-throats! We must look sharp for our horses while they are about.”
“Yes,” returned I, in the same tone; “they look to me like Sacramento gamblers, who have murdered somebody, and had to make tracks for their lives.”
“The Cassius of the pair is bad enough,” said Brent; “but that oily little wretch sickens me. I can imagine him when he arrives at St. Louis, blossomed into a purple coat with velvet lappels, a brocaded waistcoat, diamond shirt-studs, or a flamboyant scarf pinned with a pinchbeck dog, and red-legged patent-leather boots, picking his teeth on the steps of the Planters’ House. Faugh! I feel as if a snake were crawling over me, when I look at him.”
“They are not very welcome neighbors to our friends here.”
“No. Roughs abhor brutes as much as you or I do. Roughs are only nature; brutes are sin. I do not like this brutal element coming in. It portends misfortune. You and I will inevitably come into collision with those fellows.”
“You take your hostile attitude at once, and without much reluctance.”
“You know something of my experience. I have had a struggle all my life with sin in one form or other, with brutality in one form or other. I have been lacerated so often from unwillingness to strike the first blow, that I have at last been forced into the offensive.”
“You believe in flooring Apollyon before he floors you.”
“There must be somebody to do the merciless. It’s not my business — the melting mood — in my present era.”
“We are going off into generalities, apropos of those two brutes. What, O volunteer champion of virtue, dost thou propose in regard to them? When will you challenge them to the ordeal, to prove themselves holiest men and good fellows?”
“Aggression always comes from evil. They are losels; we are true knights. They will do some sneaking villany. You and I will thereupon up and at ’em.”
“Odd fellow are you, with your premonitions!”
“They are very vague, of course, but based on a magnetism which I have learnt to trust, after much discipline, because I refused to obey it. Look at that big brute, how he kicks and curses his mule!”
“Perhaps he has stolen it, and is revenging his theft on its object. That brand ‘A. & A.’ may remind him what a thief he is.”
“Here comes the fat brother. He’ll propose to camp with us.”
“It is quite natural he should, saint or sinner, — all the more if he is sinner. It must be terrible for a man who has ugly secrets to wake up at night, alone in bivouac, with a grisly dream, no human being near, and find the stars watching him keenly, or the great white, solemn moon pitying him, yet saying, with her inflexible look, that, moan and curse as he may, no remorse will save him from despair.”
“Yes,” said Brent, knocking the ashes out of his pipe;” night always seems to judge and sentence