The Cow Jerry/Chapter 26
GOOSIE had picked up that song from hearing Maud Kelly sing it. The melody, as well as the words, had suffered somewhat in the transposition, Goosie's version beginning like this:
What is my language to thee—
Goosie was unfamiliar with the word anguish, as she was with the emotion. But language was something of which she had no doubt. Bill Connor was proficient in language; he employed it in moments of jealousy, when he sometimes wrung her ear. If Goosie had to offer back a heart, Bill Connor's heart, or anybody's heart, the surrender certainly would be accompanied by language. So the word, according to Goosie's understanding, was entirely appropriate in its place.
Louise wanted to get beyond range of both Goosie's organ and her organs. She pressed her nose against the screen trying to sight along the wall to see if Pap was holding down the end of a bench according to his after-supper habit when off his run. She could not see from the parlor window, yet dreaded to make an exploration from the office door. Pap would be certain to take her appearance as a hint that she wanted to go for a walk. Which she did, but not with Pap.—Pap was not there; the way was clear. Louise hurried out, bareheaded as she was, according to the informal fashion of McPacken ladies when they took the air. This gave them the appearance of having just stepped out of doors, and being on the point of stepping back in again. It was a custom that had the stamp of domesticity about it, and restrained forward young sprigs from getting too fresh.
A certain amount of freshness a lady of McPacken expected and tolerated; but there was a line of safety which both sides usually were careful to respect. Being bareheaded on the streets of McPacken at evening was a woman's safeguard. It was her proclamation that she was one of them, under the guardianship of some hard-knuckled champion who would make times smoky for any fresh guy that might step up and pinch her arm.
Pap was getting to be very troublesome to Louise. He was taking on a proprietary air, just as if things were settled between them, proceeding on the assumption that a man who would cross over to the right-hand side of the engine cab within two years was irresistible to the female desire.
He often came to the court house when he was off his run, to hang around in his leaning, somnolent way of patience, common to people who are not so very brisk of intellect, until her hour for leaving came. Taxpayers had to push in beside his leaning bulk at the window, where Pap smoked Tulip Roses, turning now and then to spit, with the perfection of loftiness, on the splintery floor.
During these watches at the wicket Pap was not voluble. He seldom spoke at all, just stood there leaning on his arms, his watch-chain hooked high up in his black sateen shirt, his watch in the pocket of that favored garment of railroad men of the period. He was like a slow old cat waiting at a hole for a goper to come out, not much concerned whether it ever would appear, but serenely easy in the waiting. It was a sort of public adulation extremely distasteful to the object. It seemed to admit some sort of arrangement, which McPacken was quick to accept and respect.
This progression in Pap's courtship, for it was nothing less romantic, had been made during the two weeks since Tom Laylander went away from McPacken with his cattle. It might go on, Louise thought, smiling whimsically at the absurdity of it, until Pap would take possession of her in due course, unless she began to develop cruelty, and got herself despised by McPacken for her airs, or made a retreat before the slow pressure of Pap's affections, which were about as quick and warm as a glacier.
Seriously, she would leave McPacken. That was all there remained to be done. Tom Laylander never was coming back; the place grew more desolate every day. Her situation at the court house was pleasant, but uncertain. Election would take place in a few weeks; the county treasurer might not be retained in office, in which case the incoming man's friends and relatives would get the subordinate jobs. The tenure of her foothold at the political feed-box in McPacken was extremely insecure. The longer she held on, the more money she would have to begin the world with again, to be sure. But there would be more of Pap, also.
Another week was as long as she could endure Pap, to say nothing of the barren loneliness of that town. One more week, she resolved, in her firm, final way, and then good-by McPacken and the gray-green prairie swells. She would go back to the places where trees circumscribed the view, making the world seem smaller, less formidable to assault. Here the immensity of it was appalling. The heart quailed before it; the courage faltered and shrank away. It was a bleak land to be alone in; a weary land, with no cheer in its vast monotony; a land to break the heart, if it were a heart alone.
There was unusual life in the square tonight, a sound of music, a pressing of people around the center of attraction, which seemed to be a man standing in the town's one hack, which vehicle had its top down, giving it a bold and impertinent, if not a sporty and immoral, air. No less illustrious person than Banjo Gibson was seated in the hack behind the standing man. Banjo was playing them up, the standing man measuring them as they came.
Louise concluded, from Banjo's connection with the stranger, that he was one of those medicine adventurers who commonly appeared in that theatrical manner. In those days it was considered a mark of affluence and high-handed liberality to hire a hack by the hour. McPacken's one vehicle of this sort was anything but a luxurious or costly coach. It had been working gradually westward from Kansas City for twenty years. From its decreasing activity in McPacken's streets it must go to the weed-plot beside the blacksmith shop, among the wrecks of irreparable wagons, old plows, old buggies.
Tonight, with its top turned back, the old hack looked unfamiliar and frivolous, like an elderly country belle who had thrown her sunbonnet off to take part in some unseemly revel. The man who stood in it, with a black coat coming to the joints of his knees, was tall and meagre. He looked like a member of the southern bar, his black hair long and glossy, combed back from a professorial forehead, held down by pomatum which streamed its scents upon the breeze.
This man had a severe and judicial appearance, with his white vest, his black coat held back by a hand thrust in his trousers pocket. From his close, severe scrutiny of the people before him, it seemed as if he had come to try McPacken on some serious charge. Banjo Gibson, in the background of this dignified presence, did not carry out the impression of austere and solemn purpose. Along with Banjo, it was rather a ludicrous combination, indeed, for the mustached little musician lifted up his voice and sang, in far-carrying, deep-throated baritone, this being the burden of his song: The best one in the street,
She said she wasn't hungry
But this is what she eat:
A chickun and a roast,
A plate of stew, some oysters too,
And soft crabs served on toast—
and something else, and something else, all down the menu, which was a long one, and exceedingly humorous in the ears of McPacken.
The climax of this long singing was that this fine blade had but fifty cents in his pocket to meet the bill. That was the point McPacken appreciated. It could understand the exquisite humor of a situation such as that. No matter what was coming—pills, plasters, bitter draughts or sweet—McPacken was content to stand and listen, and perhaps buy a little, only to have more music of that diverting kind.
Banjo finished, his last note carried out on appreciative applause. The man in professional attire began to talk. Not of medicine, although it might lead up to medicine in time; but of consequence and power, and the desire in the breasts of people to enjoy and exercise these blessings. It might be something for the breath, thought Louise, or for the hair; it might be something 'for the liver, or something for the teeth. Whatever he was laying his approach to, he was an easy talking man, sure of his words, sure of himself. It was as if he had come into both consequence and power early in life, and was quite accustomed to them now.
The man talked briskly and refreshingly, getting his words into everybody's ears, putting them just about where he wanted them to go, as it appeared from the silence, the leaning expectancy. Just when he had come to the point where it seemed he was about to uncover his hand, he stopped.
"We'll have some more music," he said.
He continued standing while Banjo sang another song, keeping the thread of expectation in his hands, not relaxing it for a moment. Banjo's song was another one continuing his adventures with his gal, this time in a place that he called "the big cook-quarium," which was devoted to the display of fishes, gentle and monstrous. That done, with greater applause than before, the speaker resumed.
It was not medicine. The key to power was not something to sweeten the breath and enable a common, catarrhal man to marry a fortune; not something for the hair, to furnish a forlorn and plucked bachelor with a brush equal to any fox in a single night. It was nothing in this world of surprises and disappointments but a book.
The man stooped and came up with one of the inestimable volumes in his hand. It was a chunky, thick little book, with a most familiar appearance in the eyes of Louise Gardner; a tight, fat little book in a red cover with large black letters on the back. In truth, surprising, almost comical truth, it was the familiar Thousand Ways.
This man did not follow printed instructions, he did not recite the argument prepared by somebody in the publishing house, and sent out on yellow-tinted paper for the guidance of agents in the field. He was his own authority, and amazingly sufficient unto his day. He transcended all bounds of book agents; he brought imagination into a business that had not known it before his time.
There was nobody in a publishing office anywhere who could advise, direct or instruct that man in ways for bringing his books before the public ear—the public eye would engage them only after purchasing—or add one word that he had not thought of and employed. Before him other book agents were only as dumb beginners; beyond him there was nothing. In the business of being a book agent, he was supreme.
Louise knew she hadn't any claim on the territory this capably voluble man had invaded. Under the terms of her contract with the general agent she was obliged to report every two weeks, a certain number of lapses in this particular amounting to forfeiture of territory exclusively assigned. She never had made any report. This stranger was welcome to the whole world. If he could prosper in it, as he appeared to have done, Kansas was his by the sovereignty of genius. Louise drew a little nearer, to hear more of his methods, and watch the result.
Nobody in that eager crowd of McPacken's best appeared to remember that Louise Gardner had come to town on a certain hot day two months before, offering that same priceless treasure in her appealing, timid, unconvincing way. There was no appeal in this man's business, no uncertainty. He seemed to believe in that book as thoroughly as man ever accepted written word in this world. He seemed even to believe, as he talked on, that the book was a bit too good for McPacken, and to hesitate over allowing them to have it at all.
That was an amazing method, thought Louise. Here he had led them up to what seemed the very approach of his climax, to the point of desire, when hands were already in pockets, and now he was putting the book away. He had only a few copies left, he said; it would seem unfair to place these invaluable formulae for compounding quick and easy fortune into the hands of a small number of people, when there were so many in this world of hardship and poverty who might need them more.
He seemed to be thinking over the situation, with regret for having brought them up to this pitch of desire, as he put the sample volume away in the large valise that stood on the seat before him. It seemed to sadden him to deny them this great secret of the way to wealth, this philosopher's stone bound in red with black letters on the back.
Presently he brightened, looking over the crowd with a little eloquent gesture illustrating his inability to refuse humanity this blessing. But there were only a few, he reminded them; they must not hold it against him if there were not enough to go around. He stood like a philanthropist handing down loaves to the starving. Jake Smolinsky, of the Racket Store, was the first one to step up and buy.
Tom Laylander was a little in advance of her when Louise first saw him. The sight of him gave her a shock, but not an unpleasant one. It was more of an uprising of some hot, flooding emotion between gladness and surprise, with an eagerness to call to him, to crowd through and touch his arm, as one feels when seeing a familiar figure in a strange and lonely place. Tom was wearing the same old white hat, the same old gray shirt. If he had sold his cattle to advantage, he had not yielded to the dominating human vanity to make a show of his prosperity in his dress.
Louise pushed forward, disturbing the calculations of some who were making up sums of money in their palms, to have the price ready if fortune should favor them by allowing them to get up to the hack before the books were gone. She yielded to the impelling, warm feeling of glad friendship, joyful relief, and touched Laylander's shoulder.
"Were you intending to buy a book, Mr. Laylander?" she inquired.
Tom turned as if a bullet had given him a fiery nip in the shoulder. He had a new necktie, of color somewhat too warm; otherwise his appearance was unchanged. He was as fresh and pink as a new potato, and as confused and stammering as if Louise had caught him with his hand in the book agent's pocket.
"Why, Miss Louise!" he said. He seemed amazed, incredulous, but he managed to get his hat off with one hand, and held out the other in greeting.
Tom held her hand with such an ardent clasp, looked at her with so much leaping, sparkling joy in his blue eyes, that Louise felt ashamed to take advantage of his forgiving innocence. She had wronged him doubly, but there was not a shadow of such memories on his ingenuous soul. She drew on his hand to pull him out of the crowd.
"You don't need to buy one of those books," she said.
"Why, Miss Louise!" Tom repeated, in that same amazed, glad way.
There was a bench under the maple trees in the square, close by a cement fountain that never had thrown a jet of water in its day. Not a very secluded place, for seclusion in affairs between people was not encouraged by McPacken, which liked above everything to know what was going on.
A big electric light hung over them, just a little way to one side, around which a cloud of hard-backed, fascinated June-bugs blundered to their doom, to fall in a constant showering, attended by little sounds of sizzling, to the grass. Others had sat on the same bench under like conditions, with similar business before them; others would come after them in their order and sit there, where all McPacken that crossed the square might see.
"Did you do well with your cattle, Tom?" she asked. She was sitting on his lee side, his shadow falling over her like a protecting cloak.
"Yes, Miss Louise, I did right well with them."
"When did you come back?"
"Just this evening, Miss Louise."
"I didn't see you at the hotel."
"No, ma'am. I didn't feel like goin' to the ho-tel, somehow, Miss Louise."
"Oh, please don't 'Miss Louise' and 'ma'am' me, Tom. You know me too well for that."
"Yes, lambie," said Tom.
He got hold of her hand, and held it in the light, openly and boldly, as something that belonged to him.
"Tom, you kept away from the hotel because you didn't want to see me."
She didn't believe it, but it is a woman's way to lay charges, especially a guilty woman when she contrives to make a case against the one in whose censure she soon is to stand. It is a poor subterfuge of filing a cross-bill, of which the best of women are guilty in their shifty little lives.
"I had doubts and fears," said Tom, in his simple, honest way. "But I know they were foolish. I know it as well as anything, now."
"But you don't know what a great wrong I did you, Tom."
She looked up at him with that pleading, large-eyed appeal, as she used to look at hard-hearted citizens who would not buy the Thousand Ways; as she had leaned that first day in McPacken to look at Banjo Gibson, and quicken his sophisticated heart.
"You never wronged a butterfly in your life, you poor little dove," he said.
"But I did—I did something that was simply awful!" She leaned a little, her voice lowered to a whisper. "I turned Cal Withers loose that time!"
"Why," said Tom, in surprise to hear her make such a tragedy of her confession, "I knew that all the time. I was glad you let him go; I was beginnin' to feel kind of sorry for the old feller, tied up there without a drink of water to moisten his tongue."
Louise forgot McPacken; she forgot the bright electric light, fantastic lure of destruction in the June-bug world. She leaned her forehead against Tom Laylander's shoulder, as she had leaned it against the wall on the day of Withers's downfall, and cried. He spoke to her endearingly, stroking her hair with gentle consolation. McPacken had set this stage for such events; let it come and see if it would.
"Well, I declare!" said Tom, after a while, cheerfully, briskly, simulating a great surprise. "That man's closed out his gripful of books—my last chance is gone!"
Louise was feeling much better. She laughed.
"Seriously, Tom, did you want one of them?"
"I wouldn't take one of 'em as a gift," he replied. "That many ways to make money would confuse me so I wouldn't know where to start. I didn't come back to McPacken lookin' for any receipt to make money by; I come back longin' for a receipt that would make me happy."
******
Angus Valorous was returning to the hotel with the baggage wheelbarrow at something after nine o'clock that night. He met Pap Cowgill in his overalls and cap, on his way to take an extra run for which he had been called.
"Who's leavin'?" Pap asked.
"Louise," said Angus, letting down the shafts.
"Louise?" Pap repeated, his heart hitting the bottom of the pit. "Where's she goin' to?"
"Goin' east on Eight," said Angus, enjoying the situation keenly on account of his dislike for Pap, who was too free with his orders, and his full understanding of that young man's intentions with regard to Louise.
"What's she leavin' for?" Pap wondered, dazed by the news.
"It'd pay you to keep posted," said Angus Valorous, with great contempt. "The cow jerry come back to town this evening; him and her was married a little while ago."
"The hu-hu-hu—," said Pap.
If Pap ever was able to complete it, Angus Valorous did not hear the end. He left Pap standing in the road as cruelly winded as if the hardest hitter in McPacken had given him a jolt in that seat of his soul where his pie went home.
Angus Valorous went on toward the hotel with the wheelbarrow, in little starts, little haltings. He was a freight engine, pulling out of the McPacken yards on a wet night, his drivers spinning on the slippery rails. He puffed now in deep, laboring exhaust, going with slow step in measure with it; now in quick, explosive racing, as the drivers spun on the wet rails, his feet chuffing the dust to a cloud as he stood in his tracks, the rails fairly burning under the friction of his wheels.
Over in the Cottonwood Hotel, in the corner of the room where Louise Gardner had made her hasty preparations to depart not half an hour before, there lay a little pile of fat red books with black lettering on their backs, which anybody could have had for the carrying away.
The end