Mr. Ranks——”
“Gener’ly called ‘Slum,’ ” interrupted the other.
“Mr. Slum, then——” Tresler smiled.
“Slum!”
The man’s emphasis was marked. There was no cheating him of his due. “Slum” was his sobriquet by the courtesy of prairie custom. “Ranks” was purely a paternal heirloom and of no consequence at all.
“Well, Slum,” Tresler laughed, “suppose we go and sample Carney’s refreshments. I’m tired, and possess a thirst.”
He stepped toward the doorway and looked back. Mr. Ranks had not moved. Only his wondering eyes had followed the other’s movements.
“Won’t you join me?” Tresler asked. Then, noting the fixed stare in the man’s eyes, he went on with some impatience, “What the dickens are you staring at?” And, in self-defense, he was forced into a survey of his own riding-breeches.
Slum looked up. A twinkle of amusement shone beneath his heavy brows, while a broad grin parted the hair on his face.
“Oh, jest nothin’,” he said amiably. “I wer’ kind o’ figgerin’ out what sort of a feller them pants o’ yours wus made for.” He doused the brown earth at his feet with tobacco juice. Then shaking his head thoughtfully, a look of solemn wonder replaced the grin. “Say,” he added, “but he must ’a’ bin a dandy chunk of a man.”
Tresler was about to reply. But a glance at Mr. Ranks, and an audible snigger coming from the doorway, suddenly changed his mind. He swung round to face a howl of laughter; and he understood.
“The drinks are on me,” he said with some chagrin. “Come on, all of you. Yes, I’m a ‘tenderfoot.’ ”
And it was the geniality of his reply that won him a place in the society of Forks Settlement at once. In five minutes his horse was stabled and cared for. In five minutes he was addressing the occupants of the saloon by their familiar nicknames. In five minutes he was paying for whisky at an exorbitant price. In five minutes—well, he sniffed his first breath of prairie habits and prairie ways.
It is not necessary to delve deeply into the characters of these citizens of Forks. It is not good to rake bad soil, the process is always offensive. A mere outline is alone necessary. Ike Carney purveyed liquor. A little man with quick, cunning eyes, and a mouth that shut tight under a close-cut fringe of gray moustache. “Shaky” Pindle, the carpenter, was a sad-eyed man who looked as gentle as a disguised wolf. His big, scarred face never smiled, because, his friends said, it was a physical impossibility for it to do so, and his huge, rough body was as uncouth as his manners, and as unwieldy as his slow-moving tongue. Taylor, otherwise “Twirly,” the butcher, was a man so genial and rubicund that in five minutes you began to wish that he was built like the lower animals that have no means of giving audible expression to their good humor, or, if they have, there is no necessity to notice it except by a well-directed kick. And Slum, quiet, unsophisticated Slum, shadier than the shadiest of them all, but a man who took the keenest delight in the humors of life, and who did wrong from an inordinate delight in besting his neighbors. A man to smile at, but to avoid.
These were the men John Tresler, fresh from Harvard and a generous home, found himself associated with while he rested on his way to Mosquito Bend.
Ike Carney laid himself out to be pleasant.
“Goin’ to Skitter Bend?” he observed, as he handed his new guest the change out of a one hundred dollar bill. “Wal, it’s a tidy layout;—ninety-five dollars, mister; a dollar a drink. You’ll find that c’rect—best ranch around these parts. Say,” he went on, “the ol’ blind hoss has hunched it together pretty neat. I’ll say that.”
“Blind mule,” put in Slum, vaulting to a seat on the bar.
“Mule?” questioned Shaky, with profound scorn. “Guess you ain’t worked around his layout, Slum. Skunk’s my notion of him. I ’lows his kickin’s most like a mule’s, but ther’ ain’t nothin’ more to the likeness. A mule’s a hard-workin’, decent cit’zen, which ain’t off’n said o’ Julian Marbolt.”
Shaky swung a leg over the back of a chair and sat down with his arms folded across it, and his heavy bearded chin resting upon them.
“But you can’t expect a blind man to be the essence of amiability,” said Tresler. “Think of his condition.”
“See here, young feller,” jerked in Shaky, thrusting his chin-beard forward aggressively. “Condition ain’t to be figgered on when a man keeps a great hulkin’, bulldozin’ swine of a foreman like Jake Harnach. Say, them two, the blind skunk an’ Jake, ken raise more hell in five minutes around that ranch than a tribe o’ neches on the war-path. I built a barn on that place last summer, an’ I guess I know.”
“Comforting for me,” observed Tresler, with a laugh.
“Oh, you ain’t like to git his rough edge,” put in Carney, easily.
“Guess you’re payin’ a premium?” asked Shaky.
“I’m going to have three years’ teaching.”
“Three years o’ Skitter Bend?” said Slum, quietly. “Guess you’ll learn a deal in three years o’ Skitter Bend.”
The little man chewed the end of a cigar Tresler had presented him with, while his twinkling eyes exchanged meaning glances with his comrades. Twirly laughed loudly and backed against the bar, stretching out his arms on either side of him, and gripping its moulded edge with his beefy hands.
“An’ you’re payin’ fer that teachin’?” the butcher asked incredulously, when his mirth had subsided.
“It seems the custom in this country to pay for everything you get,” Tresler answered, a little shortly.
He was being laughed at more than he cared about. Still he checked his annoyance. He wanted to know something about the local reputation of the rancher he had apprenticed himself to, so he fired a direct question in amongst his audience.
“Look here,” he said sharply. “What’s the game? What’s the matter with this Julian Marbolt?”
He looked round for an answer, which, for some minutes, did not seem to be forthcoming.
Slum broke the silence at last. “He’s blind,” he said quietly.
“I know that,” retorted Tresler, impatiently. “It’s something else I want to know.”
He looked at the butcher, who only laughed. He turned on the saloon-keeper, who shook his head. Finally he applied to Shaky.
“Wal,” the carpenter began, with a ponderous air of weighing his words. “I ain’t the man to judge a feller offhand like. I ’lows I know suthin’ o’ the blind man o’ Skitter Bend, seein’ I wus workin’ contract fer him all last summer. An’ wot I knows is—nasty. I’ve see’d things on that ranch as made me git a tight grip on my axe, an’ long a’mighty hard to bust a few heads in. I’ve see’d that all-fired Jake Harnach, the foreman, hammer hell out o’ some o’ the hands,
