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On The Border With Crook. John Gregory Bourke
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isbn 4064066384104
Автор произведения John Gregory Bourke
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Or, under other aspects of the daily life of the place, there would be such references as, “Th’ night after Duffield drawed his gun on Jedge Titus”—a rather uncertain reference, since Duffield was always “drawin’ his gun” on somebody. “Th’ time of th’ feast (i.e., of Saint Augustine, the patron saint of the town), when Bob Crandall broke th’ ‘Chusas’ game fur six hundred dollars,” and other expressions of similar tenor, which replaced the recollections of “mowing time,” and “harvest,” and “sheep-shearing” of older communities.
Another strain upon the unduly excitable brain lay in the impossibility of learning exactly how many miles it was to a given point. It wasn’t “fifty miles,” or “sixty miles,” or “just a trifle beyond the Cienaga, and that’s twenty-five miles,” but rather, “Jes’ on th’ rise of the mesa as you git to th’ place whar Samaniego’s train stood off th’ Apaches;” or, “A little yan way from whar they took in Colonel Stone’s stage;” or, “Jes’ whar th’ big ‘killin’ ’ tuk place on th’ long mesa,” and much more of the same sort.
There were watches and clocks in the town, and some Americans went through the motions of consulting them at intervals. So far as influence upon the community went, they might just as well have been in the bottom of the Red Sea. The divisions of the day were regulated and determined by the bells which periodically clanged in front of the cathedral church. When they rang out their wild peal for early Mass, the little world by the Santa Cruz rubbed its eyes, threw off the slight covering of the night, and made ready for the labors of the day. The alarm clock of the Gringo might have been sounding for two hours earlier, but not one man, woman, or child would have paid the slightest attention to the cursed invention of Satan. When the Angelus tolled at meridian, all made ready for the noon-day meal and the postprandial siesta; and when the hour of vespers sounded, adobes dropped from the palsied hands of listless workmen, and docile Papagoes, wrapping themselves in their pieces of “manta” or old “rebosos,” turned their faces southward, mindful of the curfew signal learned from the early missionaries.
They were a singular people, the Papagoes; honest, laborious, docile, sober, and pure—not an improper character among them. Only one white man had ever been allowed to marry into the tribe—Buckskin Aleck Stevens, of Cambridge, Mass., and that had to be a marriage with bell, book, and candle and every formality to protect the bride.
I do not know anything about the Papagoes of to-day, and am prepared to hear that they have sadly degenerated. The Americans have had twenty years in which to corrupt them, and the intimacy can hardly have been to the advantage of the red man.
CHAPTER IV.
SOME OF THE FRIENDS MET IN OLD TUCSON—JACK LONG—HIS DIVORCE—MARSHAL DUFFIELD AND “WACO BILL”—“THEM ’ERE’S MEE VISITIN’ KEE-YARD”—JUDGE TITUS AND CHARLES O. BROWN—HOW DUFFIELD WAS KILLED—UNCLE BILLY N—— AND HIS THREE GLASS EYES—AL. GARRETT—DOCTOR SEMIG AND LIEUTENANT SHERWOOD—DON ESTEVAN OCHOA—BISHOP SALPOINTE—PETE KITCHEN AND HIS RANCH.
“SEE yar, muchacho, move roun’ lively now, ’n’ git me a Jinny Lin’ steak.” It was a strong, hearty voice which sounded in my ears from the table just behind me in the “Shoo Fly,” and made me mechanically turn about, almost as much perplexed as was the waiter-boy, Miguel, by the strange request.
“Would you have any objection, sir, to letting me know what you mean by a Jenny Lind steak?”
“A Jinny Lin’ steak, mee son, ’s a steak cut from off a hoss’s upper lip. I makes it a rule allers to git what I orders; ’n’ ez far ’s I kin see, I’ll get a Jinny Lin’ steak anyhow in this yere outfit, so I’m kinder takin’ time by the fetlock, ’n’ orderin’ jes’ what I want. My name’s Jack Long; what mout your’n be?”
It was apparent, at half a glance, that Jack Long was not “in sassiety,” unless it might be a “sassiety” decidedly addicted to tobacco, given to the use of flannel instead of “b’iled” shirts, never without six-shooter on hip, and indulging in profanity by the wholesale.
A better acquaintance with old Jack showed that, like the chestnut, his roughest part was on the outside. Courage, tenderness, truth, and other manly attributes peered out from under roughness of garb and speech. He was one of Gray’s “gems of purest ray serene,” born in “the dark, unfathomed caves” of frontier isolation.
Jack Long had not always been “Jack” Long. Once, way back in the early fifties, he and his “podners” had struck it rich on some “placer” diggings which they had preëmpted on the Yuba, and in less than no time my friend was heralded to the mountain communities as “Jedge” Long. This title had never been sought, and, in justice to the recipient, it should be made known that he discarded it at once, and would none of it. The title “Jedge” on the frontier does not always imply respect, and Jack would tolerate nothing ambiguous.
He was bound to be a gentleman or nothing. Before the week was half over he was arrayed, not exactly like Solomon, but much more conspicuously, in the whitest of “bailed” shirts, in the bosom of which glistened the most brilliant diamond cluster pin that money could procure from Sacramento. On the warty red fingers of his right hand sparkled its mate, and pendent from his waist a liberal handful of the old-fashioned seals and keys of the time attracted attention to the ponderous gold chain encircling his neck, and securing the biggest specimen of a watch known to fact or fiction since the days of Captain Cuttle.
Carelessly strolling up to the bar of the “Quartz Rock,” the “Hanging Wall,” or the “Golden West,” he would say, in the cheeriest way:
“Gents, what’ll yer all hev? It’s mine this time, barkeep.” And, spurning the change obsequiously tendered by the officiating genius of the gilded slaughter-house of morality, Jack would push back the twenty-dollar gold piece with which he usually began his evenings with “the boys,” and ask, in a tone of injured pride: “Is there any use in insultin’ a man when he wants to treat his friends?” And barkeeper and all in the den would voice the sentiment that a “gent” who was as liberal with his double eagles as Colonel Long was a gent indeed, and a man anybody could afford to tie to.
It was the local paper which gave Jack his military title, and alluded to the growing demand that the colonel should accept the nomination for Congress. And to Congress he would have gone, too, had not fickle Fortune turned her back upon her whilom favorite.
Jack had the bad luck to fall in love and to be married—not for the first time, as he had had previous experience in the same direction, his first wife being the youngest daughter of the great Indian chief “Cut-Mouth John,” of the Rogue River tribe, who ran away from Jack and took to the mountains when her people went on the war-path. The then wife was a white woman from Missouri, and, from all I can learn, a very good mate for Jack, excepting that prosperity turned her head and made her very extravagant. So long as Jack’s mine was panning out freely Jack didn’t mind much what she spent, but when it petered, and economy became necessary, dissensions soon arose between them, and it was agreed that they were not compatible.
“If you don’t like me,” said Mrs. Long one day, “give me a divorce and one-half of what you have, and I’ll leave you.”
“’Nuff sed,” was Jack’s reply, “’n’ here goes.”
The sum total in the Long exchequer was not quite $200. Of this, Jack laid to one side a double eagle, for a purpose soon to be explained. The remainder was divided into two even piles, one of which was handed over to his spouse. The doors of the wardrobe stood open, disclosing