LITMIR.BIZ

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on both sides, by cripes, jingling their big, silver spurs, all wearin’ fancy chaps to ride four or five miles down the road. Honest to grandma, they call that punchin’ cows! Oh, he’s a Native Son, all right. I’ve saw lots of ‘em, only I never saw one so far away from the Promised Land before. That there looks queer to me. Natiff Sons—the real ones, like him—are as scarce outside Calyforny as buffalo are right here in this coulee.”

      “That’s the way they do it, all right,” Irish agreed. “And then they’ll have a ‘rodeo’—”

      “Haw-haw-haw!” Big Medicine interrupted, and took up the tale, which might have been entitled “Some Cowpunching I Have Seen.”

      “They have them rodeos on a Sunday, mostly, and they invite everybody to it, like it was a picnic. And there’ll be two or three fellers to every calf, all lit up, like Mig-u-ell, over there, in chaps and silver fixin’s, fussin’ around on horseback in a corral, and every feller trying to pile his rope on the same calf, by cripes! They stretch ‘em out with two ropes—calves, remember! Little, weenty fellers you could pack under one arm! Yuh can’t blame ‘em much. They never have more’n thirty or forty head to brand at a time, and they never git more’n a taste uh real work. So they make the most uh what they git, and go in heavy on fancy outfits. And this here silver-mounted fellow thinks he’s a real cowpuncher, by cripes!”

      The Happy Family laughed at the idea; laughed so loud that Miguel left his lonely splendor and swung over to them, ostensibly to borrow a match.

      “What’s the joke?” he inquired languidly, his chin thrust out and his eyes upon the match blazing at the end of his cigarette.

      The Happy Family hesitated and glanced at one another. Then Cal spoke truthfully.

      “You’re it,” he said bluntly, with a secret desire to test the temper of this dark-skinned son of the West.

      Miguel darted one of his swift glances at Cal, blew out his match and threw it away.

      “Oh, how funny. Ha-ha.” His voice was soft and absolutely expressionless, his face blank of any emotion whatever. He merely spoke the words as a machine might have done.

      If he had been one of them, the Happy Family would have laughed at the whimsical humor of it. As it was, they repressed the impulse, though Weary warmed toward him slightly.

      “Don’t you believe anything this innocent-eyed gazabo tells you, Mr. Rapponi,” he warned amiably. “He’s known to be a liar.”

      “That’s funny, too. Ha-ha some more.” Miguel permitted a thin ribbon of smoke to slide from between his lips, and gazed off to the crinkled line of hills.

      “Sure, it is—now you mention it,” Weary agreed after a perceptible pause.

      “How fortunate that I brought the humor to your attention,” drawled Miguel, in the same expressionless tone, much as if he were reciting a text.

      “Virtue is its own penalty,” paraphrased Pink, not stopping to see whether the statement applied to the subject.

      “Haw-haw-haw!” roared Big Medicine, quite as irrelevantly.

      “He-he-he,” supplemented the silver-trimmed one.

      Big Medicine stopped laughing suddenly, reined his horse close to the other, and stared at him challengingly, with his pale, protruding eyes, while the Happy Family glanced meaningly at one another. Big Medicine was quite as unsafe as he looked, at that moment, and they wondered if the offender realized his precarious situation.

      Miguel smoked with the infinite leisure which is a fine art when it is not born of genuine abstraction, and none could decide whether he was aware of the unfriendly proximity of Big Medicine. Weary was just on the point of saying something to relieve the tension, when Miguel blew the ash gently from his cigarette and spoke lazily.

      “Parrots are so common, out on the Coast, that they use them in cheap restaurants for stew. I’ve often heard them gabbling together in the kettle.”

      The statement was so ambiguous that the Happy Family glanced at him doubtfully. Big Medicine’s stare became more curious than hostile, and he permitted his horse to lag a length. It is difficult to fight absolute passivity. Then Slim, who ever tramped solidly over the flowers of sarcasm, blurted one of his unexpected retorts.

      “I was just wonderin’, by golly, where yuh learnt to talk!”

      Miguel turned his velvet eyes sleepily toward the speaker. “From the boarders who ate those parrots, amigo,” he smiled serenely.

      At this, Slim—once justly accused by Irish of being a “single-shot” when it came to repartee—turned purple and dumb. The Happy Family, forswearing loyalty in their enjoyment of his discomfiture, grinned and left to Miguel the barren triumph of the last word.

      He did not gain in popularity as the days passed. They tilted noses at his beautiful riding gear, and would have died rather than speak of it in his presence. They never gossiped with him of horses or men or the lands he knew. They were ready to snub him at a moment’s notice—and it did not lessen their dislike of him that he failed to yield them an opportunity. It is to be hoped that he found his thoughts sufficient entertainment, since he was left to them as much as is humanly possible when half a dozen men eat and sleep and work together. It annoyed them exceedingly that Miguel did not seem to know that they held him at a distance; they objected to his manner of smoking cigarettes and staring off at the skyline as if he were alone and content with his dreams. When he did talk they listened with an air of weary tolerance. When he did not talk they ignored his presence, and when he was absent they criticized him mercilessly.

      They let him ride unwarned into an adobe patch one day—at least, Big Medicine, Pink, Cal Emmett and Irish did, for they were with him—and laughed surreptitiously together while he wallowed there and came out afoot, his horse floundering behind him, mud to the ears, both of them.

      “Pretty soft going, along there, ain’t it?” Pink commiserated deceitfully.

      “It is, kinda,” Miguel responded evenly, scraping the adobe off Banjo with a flat rock. And the subject was closed.

      “Well, it’s some relief to the eyes to have the shine taken off him, anyway,” Pink observed a little guiltily afterward.

      “I betche he ain’t goin’ to forget that, though,” Happy Jack warned when he saw the caked mud on Miguel’s Angora chaps and silver spurs, and the condition of his saddle. “Yuh better watch out and not turn your backs on him in the dark, none uh you guys. I betche he packs a knife. Them kind always does.”

      “Haw-haw-haw!” bellowed Big Medicine uproariously. “I’d love to see him git out an’ try to use it, by cripes!”

      “I wish Andy was here,” Pink sighed. “Andy’d take the starch outa him, all right.”

      “Wouldn’t he be pickings for old Andy, though? Gee!” Cal looked around at them, with his wide, baby-blue eyes, and laughed. “Let’s kinda jolly him along, boys, till Andy gets back. It sure would be great to watch ‘em. I’ll bet he can jar the eternal calm outa that Native Son. That’s what grinds me worse than his throwin’ on so much dog; he’s so blamed satisfied with himself! You snub him, and he looks at yuh as if you was his hired man—and then forgets all about yuh. He come outa that ‘doby like he’d been swimmin’ a river on a bet, and had made good and was a hee-ro right before the ladies. Kinda ‘Oh, that’s nothing to what I could do if it was worth while,’ way he had with him.”

      “It wouldn’t matter so much if he wasn’t all front,” Pink complained. “You’ll notice that’s always the way, though. The fellow all fussed up with silver and braided leather can’t get out and do anything. I remember up on Milk river—” Pink trailed off into absorbing reminiscence, which, however, is too lengthy to repeat here.

      “Say, Mig-u-ell’s down at the stable, sweatin from every pore trying to get his saddle clean, by golly!” Slim reported cheerfully, just as Pink was relighting the cigarette which

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