“Miners and cow-boys.”
“Yes,” said Vogel. “Those poor, deluded fellows, they buy such stuff.” And he laughed at the seedy visionary who had begun frontier life with him on the bottom rung and would end it there. “Do you play that concertina yet, Uncle?” he inquired.
“Yes, yes. I always play. It’s in here with my tooth-brush and socks.” Uncle Pasco held up the bandanna. “Well, he’s getting ready to start. I guess I’ll be climbing inside. Holy Gertrude!”
This shrill comment was at sight of the school-master, patient within the stage. “What business are you in?” demanded Uncle Pasco.
“I am in the spelling business,” replied the teacher, and smiled, faintly.
“Hell!” piped Uncle Pasco. “Take this.”
He handed in his bandanna to the traveller, who received it politely. Max Vogel lifted the box of cheap jewelry; and both he and the boy came behind to boost the old man up on the stage step. But with a nettled look he leaped up to evade them, tottered half-way, and then, light as a husk of grain, got himself to his seat and scowled at the schoolmaster.
After a brief inspection of that pale, spectacled face, “Dutchy,” he called out of the door, “this country is not what it was.”
But old Max Vogel was inattentive. He was speaking to the boy, Dean Drake, and held a flask in his hand. He reached the flask to his new superintendent. “Drink hearty,” said he. “There, son! Don’t be shy. Haf you forgot it is forbidden fruit after now?”
“Kid sworn off?” inquired Uncle Pasco of the school-master.
“I understand,” replied this person, “that Mr. Vogel will not allow his cow-boys at the Malheur Agency to have any whiskey brought there. Personally, I feel gratified.” And Mr. Bolles, the new school-master, gave his faint smile.
“Oh,” muttered Uncle Pasco. “Forbidden to bring whiskey on the ranch? H’m.” His eyes wandered to the jewelry-box. “H’m,” said he again; and becoming thoughtful, he laid back his moth-eaten sly head, and spoke no further with Mr. Bolles.
Dean Drake climbed into the stage and the vehicle started.
“Goot luck, goot luck, my son!” shouted the hearty Max, and opened and waved both his big arms at the departing boy: He stood looking after the stage. “I hope he come back,” said he. “I think he come back. If he come I r-raise him fifty dollars without any beard.”
II
The stage had not trundled so far on its Silver City road but that a whistle from Nampa station reached its three occupants. This was the branch train starting back to Boise with Max Vogel aboard; and the boy looked out at the locomotive with a sigh.
“Only five days of town,” he murmured. “Six months more wilderness now.”
“My life has been too much town,” said the new school-master. “I am looking forward to a little wilderness for a change.”
Old Uncle Pasco, leaning back, said nothing; he kept his eyes shut and his ears open.
“Change is what I don’t get,” sighed Dean Drake. In a few miles, however, before they had come to the ferry over Snake River, the recent leave-taking and his employer’s kind but dominating repression lifted from the boy’s spirit. His gray eye wakened keen again, and he began to whistle light opera tunes, looking about him alertly, like the sparrow-hawk that he was. “Ever see Jeannie Winston in ‘Fatinitza’?” he inquired of Mr. Bolles.
The school-master, with a startled, thankful countenance, stated that he had never.
“Ought to,” said Drake.
“You a man? that can’t be true!
Men have never eyes like you.”
“That’s what the girls in the harem sing in the second act. Golly whiz!” The boy gleamed over the memory of that evening.
“You have a hard job before you,” said the school-master, changing the subject.
“Yep. Hard.” The wary Drake shook his head warningly at Mr. Bolles to keep off that subject, and he glanced in the direction of slumbering Uncle Pasco. Uncle Pasco was quite aware of all this. “I wouldn’t take another lonesome job so soon,” pursued Drake, “but I want the money. I’ve been working eleven months along the Owyhee as a sort of junior boss, and I’d earned my vacation. Just got it started hot in Portland, when biff! old Vogel telegraphs me. Well, I’ll be saving instead of squandering. But it feels so good to squander!”
“I have never had anything to squander,” said Bolles, rather sadly.
“You don’t say! Well, old man, I hope you will. It gives a man a lot he’ll never get out of spelling-books. Are you cold? Here.” And despite the school-master’s protest, Dean Drake tucked his buffalo coat round and over him. “Some day, when I’m old,” he went on, “I mean to live respectable under my own cabin and vine. Wife and everything. But not, anyway, till I’m thirty-five.”
He dropped into his opera tunes for a while; but evidently it was not “Fatinitza” and his vanished holiday over which he was chiefly meditating, for presently he exclaimed: “I’ll give them a shooting-match in the morning. You shoot?”
Bolles hoped he was going to learn in this country, and exhibited a Smith & Wesson revolver.
Drake grieved over it. “Wrap it up warm,” said he. “I’ll lend you a real one when we get to the Malheur Agency. But you can eat, anyhow. Christmas being next week, you see, my programme is, shoot all A.M. and eat all P.M. I wish you could light on a notion what prizes to give my buccaroos.”
“Buccaroos?” said Bolles.
“Yep. Cow-punchers. Vaqueros. Buccaroos in Oregon. Bastard Spanish word, you see, drifted up from Mexico. Vogel would not care to have me give ’em money as prizes.”
At this Uncle Pasco opened an eye.
“How many buccaroos will there be?” Bolles inquired.
“At the Malheur Agency? It’s the headquarters of five of our ranches. There ought to be quite a crowd. A dozen, probably, at this time of year.”
Uncle Pasco opened his other eye. “Here, you!” he said, dragging at his box under the seat. “Pull it, can’t you? There. Just what you’re after. There’s your prizes.” Querulous and watchful, like some aged, rickety ape, the old man drew out his trinkets in shallow shelves.
“Sooner give ’em nothing,” said Dean Drake.
“What’s that? What’s the matter with them?”
“Guess the boys have had all the brass rings and glass diamonds they want.”
“That’s all you know, then. I sold that box clean empty through the Palouse country last week, ’cept the bottom drawer, and an outfit on Meacham’s hill took that. Shows all you know. I’m going clean through your country after I’ve quit Silver City. I’ll start in by Baker City again, and I’ll strike Harney, and maybe I’ll go to Linkville. I know what buccaroos
