steady tearing into “The Cowboy’s Lament” had not improved its tone. As the raucous strains came floating down the wind Lee burst into a bubbling little laugh.
“Mr. Sliver isn’t hardly what you could call a singer. Is he – often taken like that?”
They could have answered quite easily, Sliver’s vocal efforts being ever timed by his potations. Instead, they looked at each other in blank disgust. Nor was answer necessary, for just then Lee dug in her spurs and shot after a wild steer that had taken a sudden notion to go back to the Cañon del Norte.
“Piously drunk!” Jake swore loudly, as soon as she passed beyond earshot. “Wonder where he got it!”
“Search me,” Bull shrugged. “The question is how to stop him. You know what to expect if he’s loose an’ drunk among all them peonas. You ride on an’ head him off. Don’t stan’ any nonsense. Bat him over the can if nec’ssary.”
The admonition was not required, for Jake was always thorough. Neither was it his habit to waste time on argument or persuasion. Having roped Sliver, ten minutes thereafter, from behind a convenient bush, he gagged and cinched him in his saddle, hustled him in by the back gate of the compound, had him lashed to his catre in their adobe before Lee and Bull arrived.
So far, all was well. Their real troubles began when at supper Bull replied to Lee’s inquiry concerning Sliver’s absence that he “wasn’t feeling well.”
She jumped up at once. “Oh, the poor fellow! I must go and see what he can eat!”
A vivid mental picture of the “poor fellow,” gagged and lashed to hiscatre, filled them with consternation. Bull inwardly cursed himself for not having reported Sliver absent. But while he floundered, beating his brains for a second excuse, the crafty Jake supplied it.
“I wouldn’t – really, Miss.”
She stopped, half-way along the portales. He had spoken so earnestly. “Why not? Is it – catching?”
Bull would have replied in the affirmative, regardless of further complications. Jake shook his head. “No, it’s just chills an’ fever, a sorter constitutional ague he’s taken with at this time o’ the year. But – well, Miss, it’s this way, Sliver’s that bashful, though you mightn’t think it to look at him, he’d die of shame if a young lady was to see him in his bunk.”
She hesitated, then came back. “But – he ought to be looked after.”
“He has been.” Jake clinched the victory. “A copa’s the finest thing in the world for chills. He’s had a couple an’ was sleeping like a babe when we came in.”
She gave in with a sigh. “Then we won’t wake him. But you must take him a tray when you go out.”
But if her dominant instinct was thus, for the time, frustrated, it broke out more violently the following morning. When Sliver would fain have carried his aching head and sick stomach out to some secluded portion of the range, to be wretched at his ease, Lee “shooed” him like a sick chicken into a corner of the patio, there to be coddled and doctored with slops and brews compounded by her brown maids, every mother’s daughter of whom had her own infallible “remedio.” His real contrition was made none the lighter by the veiled jestings of his companions at meals.
“Invalid looks a bit better,” Jake would opine.
“A week’s careful nursing orter bring him around,” Bull would add. Then while prodding him with secret gibes, they ate with a zest that turned his poor, burned-out stomach.
That night, moreover, he furnished the text for a rude sermon after they got him alone in the adobe. “I s’pose neither of you saints would ha’ stopped even to smell of it,” he sarcastically inquired, after confessing how and where he obtained the liquor.
“’Tain’t that,” Bull admonished him. “I’m pretty near due for a bust myself. But when it hits, you bet I’ll go somewheres so’s the sight of my hoggishness ain’t a-going to offend our girl. No, ’tain’t that you acquired a bun we’re kicking at, but that you toted it back here.”
“You bet y’u,” Jake added. “Next time you’re took that-a-way, have ’em hide your horse, then lie down with your nose in it an’ don’t budge till you’re through. Have you done, now, or is there anything out there you forgot to drink?”
“Through? Oh, Lordy! Lordy!” Sliver groaned. “My liver’s burned right out!”
“Bueno!” Jake nodded his satisfaction. “Then if you’ve finished I’m free to begin. My fingers has been itching to get into a game for a week. That’s where you fellows have me at a disadvantage. All you’ve gotter do is to find a bottle, but mine’s simply gotter have cards in it. I don’t get off short of El Paso. I reckon some of that important mining business of our’n calls for my presence there day after to-morrow.”
“All right, get it over,” Bull agreed, after a moment’s rumination. “Tell her at breakfast. She’ll fix you up with the fare.”
“‘Tell her at breakfast’?” Jake looked his scorn. “An’ have her running an’ fixing me out with socks an’ shirts an’ things like I was going off on honest business. Not on your life! When she looks at me, so amiable and trustful, like she felt I was straight grain through an’ through, I simply kain’t fix up my mouth for a good lie. No, you fellows can jest give me all you’ve got. With any kind of luck it’ll turn you big interest. You can tell her that I left in the night so’s to catch an early train.”
So real was his feeling, he did rise and leave before daylight. But thereby his moment of shame was merely postponed.
When Jake arrived in El Paso – But the less said about his sojourn there the better. His operations, which included the fleecing of some cattlemen, would not make edifying reading. He may be picked up again at the moment he was, as aforesaid, overtaken by shame, when Lee spied him, a week later, coming through the patio gateway.
“Oh, you poor man!” she exclaimed at the sight of his haggard face. “They must have worked you all night.”
“Which they did work me overtime,” he confessed to Bull, in the adobe that evening. “Five days an’ most of the nights I sat inter one game. Look at this!”
The roll he held up contained two thousand and some odd hundreds of American dollars. “When I seen how the luck was heading my way I pulled a side partner into the game, for I saw what a chance it was to fatten Miss Lee’s hand. He was a —
“What are you crinkling your nose at?” he hotly demanded of Bull. “This ain’t no tainted money. I took it from some sports that had been buying horses from Mexican raiders. Mebbe some of ’em came from this very ranch. Anyway, in default of finding the real owners, who has a better right to their money than the little girl?”
“’Tain’t that.” Bull shook his head. “I was on’y thinking that I’d liefer you tried to give it her than me. She don’t look like she’d take easily to charity.”
“That so?” Jake regarded him cynically. “Now kain’t you jest hear me a-saying, ‘Please, Miss, will you please take this, you need it so bad?’ But is there any reason why she should object to us investing a couple of thousand in horses?”
“No; but she will.”
And Bull was right.
