Rain had not fallen for some sixty days, and for some sixty more there was no necessity that it should fall.  It is spells of weather like this that set the Western editor writing praise and prophecy of the boundless fertility of the soil ­when irrigated, and of what an Eden it can be made ­with irrigation; but the spells annoy the people who are trying to raise the Eden.  We always told the transient Eastern visitor, when he arrived at Cheyenne and criticised the desert, that anything would grow here ­with irrigation; and sometimes he replied, unsympathetically, that anything could fly ­with wings.  Then we would lead such a man out and show him six, eight, ten square miles of green crops; and he, if he was thoroughly nasty, would mention that Wyoming contained ninety-five thousand square miles, all waiting for irrigation and Eden.  One of these Eastern supercivilized hostiles from New York was breakfasting with the Governor and me at the Cheyenne Club, and we were explaining to him the glorious future, the coming empire, of the Western country.  Now the Governor was about thirty-two, and until twenty-five had never gone West far enough to see over the top of the Alleghany Mountains.  I was not a pioneer myself; and why both of us should have pitied the New-Yorker’s narrowness so hard I cannot see.  But we did.  We spoke to him of the size of the country.  We told him that his State could rattle round inside Wyoming’s stomach without any inconvenience to Wyoming, and he told us that this was because Wyoming’s stomach was empty.  Altogether I began to feel almost sorry that I had asked him to come out for a hunt, and had travelled in haste all the way from Bear Creek to Cheyenne expressly to meet him.

“For purposes of amusement,” he said, “I’ll admit anything you claim for this place.  Ranches, cowboys, elk; it’s all splendid.  Only, as an investment I prefer the East.  Am I to see any cowboys?”

“You shall,” I said; and I distinctly hoped some of them might do something to him “for purposes of amusement.”

“You fellows come up with me to my office,” said the Governor.  “I’ll look at my mail, and show you round.”  So we went with him through the heat and sun.

“What’s that?” inquired the New-Yorker, whom I shall call James Ogden.

“That is our park,” said I.  “Of course it’s merely in embryo.  It’s wonderful how quickly any shade tree will grow here wi ­” I checked myself.

But Ogden said “with irrigation” for me, and I was entirely sorry he had come.

We reached the Governor’s office, and sat down while he looked his letters over.

“Here you are, Ogden,” said he.  “Here’s the way we hump ahead out here.”  And he read us the following: 

“Magaw, Kansas, July 5, 188 ­

“Hon. Amory W. Baker: 

“Sir, ­Understanding that your district is suffering from a prolonged drought, I write to say that for necessary expenses paid I will be glad to furnish you with a reasonably shower.  I have operated successfully in Australia, Mexico, and several States of the Union, and am anxious to exhibit my system.  If your Legislature will appropriate a sum to cover, as I said, merely my necessary expenses ­say $350 (three hundred and fifty dollars) ­for half an inch I will guarantee you that quantity of rain or forfeit the money.  If I fail to give you the smallest fraction of the amount contracted for, there is to be no pay.  Kindly advise me of what date will be most convenient for you to have the shower.  I require twenty-four hours’ preparation.  Hoping a favorable reply,

“I am, respectfully yours,

“Robert Hilbrun”

“Will the Legislature do it?” inquired Ogden in good faith.

The Governor laughed boisterously.  “I guess it wouldn’t be constitutional,” said he.

“Oh, bother!” said Ogden.

“My dear man,” the Governor protested, “I know we’re new, and our women vote, and we’re a good deal of a joke, but we’re not so progressively funny as all that.  The people wouldn’t stand it.  Senator Warren would fly right into my back hair.”  Barker was also new as Governor.

“Do you have Senators here too?” said Ogden, raising his eyebrows.  “What do they look like?  Are they females?” And the Governor grew more boisterous than ever, slapping his knee and declaring that these Eastern men were certainly “out of sight”.  Ogden, however, was thoughtful.

“I’d have been willing to chip in for that rain myself,” he said.

“That’s an idea!” cried the Governor.  “Nothing unconstitutional about that.  Let’s see.  Three hundred and fifty dollars ­”

“I’ll put up a hundred,” said Ogden, promptly.  “I’m out for a Western vacation, and I’ll pay for a good specimen.”

The Governor and I subscribed more modestly, and by noon, with the help of some lively minded gentlemen of Cheyenne, we had the purse raised.  “He won’t care,” said the Governor, “whether it’s a private enterprise or a municipal step, so long as he gets his money.”

“He won’t get it, I’m afraid,” said Ogden.  “But if he succeeds in tempting Providence to that extent, I consider it cheap.  Now what do you call those people there on the horses?”

We were walking along the track of the Cheyenne and Northern, and looking out over the plain toward Fort Russell.  “That is a cow-puncher and his bride,” I answered, recognizing the couple.

“Real cow-puncher?”

“Quite.  The puncher’s name is Lin McLean.”

“Real bride?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“She’s riding straddle!” exclaimed the delighted Ogden, adjusting his glasses.  “Why do you object to their union being holy?”

I explained that my friend Lin had lately married an eating-house lady precipitately and against my advice.

“I suppose he knew his business,” observed Ogden.

“That’s what he said to me at the time.  But you ought to see her ­and know him.”

Ogden was going to.  Husband and wife were coming our way.  Husband nodded to me his familiar offish nod, which concealed his satisfaction at meeting with an old friend.  Wife did not look at me at all.  But I looked at her, and I instantly knew that Lin ­the fool! ­had confided to her my disapproval of their marriage.  The most delicate specialty upon earth is your standing with your old friend’s new wife.

“Good-day, Mr. McLean,” said the Governor to the cow-puncher on his horse.

“How’re are yu’, doctor,” said Lin.  During his early days in Wyoming the Governor, when as yet a private citizen, had set Mr. McLean’s broken leg at Drybone.  “Let me make yu’ known to Mrs. McLean,” pursued the husband.

The lady, at a loss how convention prescribes the greeting of a bride to a Governor, gave a waddle on the pony’s back, then sat up stiff, gazed haughtily at the air, and did not speak or show any more sign than a cow would under like circumstances.  So the Governor marched cheerfully at her, extending his hand, and when she slightly moved out toward him her big, dumb, red fist, he took it and shook it, and made her a series of compliments, she maintaining always the scrupulous reserve of the cow.

“I say,” Ogden whispered to me while Barker was pumping the hand of the flesh image, “I’m glad I came.”  The appearance of the puncher-bridegroom also interested Ogden, and he looked hard at Lin’s leather chaps and cartridge-belt and so forth.  Lin stared at the New-Yorker, and his high white collar and good scarf.  He had seen such things quite often, of course, but they always filled him with the same distrust of the man that wore them.

“Well,” said he, “I guess we’ll be pulling for a hotel.  Any show in town?  Circus come yet?”

“No,” said I.  “Are you going to make a long stay?”

The cow-puncher glanced at the image, his bride of three weeks.  “Till we’re tired of it, I guess,” said he, with hesitation.  It was the first time that I had ever seen my gay friend look timidly at any one, and I felt a rising hate for the ruby-checked, large-eyed eating-house lady, the biscuit-shooter whose influence was dimming this jaunty, irrepressible spirit.  I looked at her.  Her bulky bloom had ensnared him, and now she was going to tame and spoil him.  The Governor was looking at her too, thoughtfully.

“Say, Lin,” I said, “if you stay here long enough you’ll see a big show.”  And his eye livened into something of its native jocularity as I told him of the rain-maker.

“Shucks!” said he, springing from his horse impetuously, and hugely entertained at our venture.  “Three hundred and fifty dollars?  Let me come in”; and before I could tell him that we had all the money raised, he was hauling out a wadded lump of bills.

“Well, I ain’t going to starve here in the road, I guess,” spoke the image, with the suddenness of a miracle.  I think we all jumped, and I know that Lin did.  The image continued:  “Some folks and their money are soon parted” ­she meant me; her searching tones came straight at me; I was sure from the first that she knew all about me and my unfavorable opinion of her ­“but it ain’t going to be you this time, Lin McLean.  Ged ap!” This last was to the horse, I maintain, though the Governor says the husband immediately started off on a run.

At any rate, they were gone to their hotel, and Ogden was seated on some railroad ties, exclaiming:  “Oh, I like Wyoming!  I am certainly glad I came.”

“That’s who she is!” said the Governor, remembering Mrs. McLean all at once.  “I know her.  She used to be at Sidney.  She’s got another husband somewhere.  She’s one of the boys.  Oh, that’s nothing in this country!” he continued to the amazed Ogden, who had ejaculated “Bigamy!” “Lots of them marry, live together awhile, get tired and quit, travel, catch on to a new man, marry him, get tired and quit, travel, catch on ­”

“One moment, I beg,” said Ogden, adjusting his glasses.  “What does the law ­”

“Law?” said the Governor.  “Look at that place!” He swept his hand towards the vast plains and the mountains.  “Ninety-five thousand square miles of that, and sixty thousand people in it.  We haven’t got policemen yet on top of the Rocky Mountains.”

“I see,” said the New-Yorker.  “But ­but ­well let A and B represent first and second husbands, and X represent the woman.  Now, does A know about B? or does B know about A?  And what do they do about it?”

“Can’t say,” the Governor answered, jovially.  “Can’t generalize.  Depends on heaps of things ­love ­money ­Did you go to college?  Well, let A minus X equal B plus X, then if A and B get squared ­”

“Oh, come to lunch,” I said.  “Barker, do you really know the first husband is alive?”

“Wasn’t dead last winter.”  And Barker gave us the particulars.  Miss Katie Peck had not served long in the restaurant before she was wooed and won by a man who had been a ranch cook, a sheep-herder, a bar-tender, a freight hand, and was then hauling poles for the government.  During his necessary absences from home she, too, went out-of-doors.  This he often discovered, and would beat her, and she would then also beat him.  After the beatings one of them would always leave the other forever.  Thus was Sidney kept in small-talk until Mrs. Lusk one day really did not come back.  “Lusk,” said the Governor, finishing his story, “cried around the saloons for a couple of days, and then went on hauling poles for the government, till at last he said he’d heard of a better job south, and next we knew of him he was round Leavenworth.  Lusk was a pretty poor bird.  Owes me ten dollars.”

“Well,” I said, “none of us ever knew about him when she came to stay with Mrs. Taylor on Bear Creek.  She was Miss Peck when Lin made her Mrs. McLean.”

“You’ll notice,” said the Governor, “how she has got him under in three weeks.  Old hand, you see.”

“Poor Lin!” I said.

“Lucky, I call him,” said the Governor.  “He can quit her.”

“Supposing McLean does not want to quit her?”

“She’s educating him to want to right now, and I think he’ll learn pretty quick.  I guess Mr. Lin’s romance wasn’t very ideal this trip.  Hello! here comes Jode.  Jode, won’t you lunch with us?  Mr. Ogden, of New York, Mr. Jode.  Mr. Jode is our signal-service officer, Mr. Ogden.”  The Governor’s eyes were sparkling hilariously, and he winked at me.

“Gentlemen, good-morning.  Mr. Ogden, I am honored to make your acquaintance,” said the signal-service officer.

“Jode, when is it going to rain?” said the Governor, anxiously.

Now Jode is the most extraordinarily solemn man I have ever known.  He has the solemnity of all science, added to the unspeakable weight of representing five of the oldest families in South Carolina.  The Jodes themselves were not old in South Carolina, but immensely so in ­I think he told me it was Long Island.  His name is Poinsett Middleton Manigault Jode.  He used to weigh a hundred and twenty-eight pounds then, but his health has strengthened in that climate.  His clothes were black; his face was white, with black eyes sharp as a pin; he had the shape of a spout ­the same narrow size all the way down ­and his voice was as dry and light as an egg-shell.  In his first days at Cheyenne he had constantly challenged large cowboys for taking familiarities with his dignity, and they, after one moment’s bewilderment, had concocted apologies that entirely met his exactions, and gave them much satisfaction also.  Nobody would have hurt Jode for the world.  In time he came to see that Wyoming was a game invented after his book of rules was published, and he looked on, but could not play the game.  He had fallen, along with other incongruities, into the roaring Western hotch-pot, and he passed his careful, precise days with barometers and weather-charts.

He answered the Governor with official and South Carolina impressiveness.  “There is no indication of diminution of the prevailing pressure,” he said.

“Well, that’s what I thought,” said the joyous Governor, “so I’m going to whoop her up.”

“What do you expect to whoop up, sir?”

“Atmosphere, and all that,” said the Governor.  “Whole business has got to get a move on.  I’ve sent for a rain-maker.”

“Governor, you are certainly a wag, sir,” said Jode, who enjoyed Barker as some people enjoy a symphony, without understanding it.  But after we had reached the club and were lunching, and Jode realized that a letter had actually been written telling Hilbrun to come and bring his showers with him, the punctilious signal-service officer stated his position.  “Have your joke, sir,” he said, waving a thin, clean hand, “but I decline to meet him.”

“Hilbrun?” said the Governor, staring.

“If that’s his name ­yes, sir.  As a member of the Weather Bureau and the Meteorological Society I can have nothing to do with the fellow.”

“Glory!” said the Governor.  “Well, I suppose not.  I see your point, Jode.  I’ll be careful to keep you apart.  As a member of the College of Physicians I’ve felt that way about homeopathy and the faith-cure.  All very well if patients will call ’em in, but can’t meet ’em in consultation.  But three months’ drought annually, Jode!  It’s slow ­too slow.  The Western people feel that this conservative method the Zodiac does its business by is out of date.”

“I am quite serious, sir,” said Jode.  “And let me express my gratification that you do see my point.”  So we changed the subject.

Our weather scheme did not at first greatly move the public.  Beyond those who made up the purse, few of our acquaintances expressed curiosity about Hilbrun, and next afternoon Lin McLean told me in the street that he was disgusted with Cheyenne’s coldness toward the enterprise.  “But the boys would fly right at it and stay with it if the round-up was near town, you bet,” said he.

He was walking alone.  “How’s Mrs. McLean to-day?” I inquired.

“She’s well,” said Lin, turning his eye from mine.  “Who’s your friend all bugged up in English clothes?”

“About as good a man as you,” said I, “and more cautious.”

“Him and his eye-glasses!” said the sceptical puncher, still looking away from me and surveying Ogden, who was approaching with the Governor.  That excellent man, still at long range, broke out smiling till his teeth shone, and he waved a yellow paper at us.

“Telegram from Hilbrun,” he shouted; “be here to-morrow”; and he hastened up.

“Says he wants a cart at the depot, and a small building where he can be private,” added Ogden.  “Great, isn’t it?”

“You bet!” said Lin, brightening.  The New Yorker’s urbane but obvious excitement mollified Mr. McLean.  “Ever seen rain made, Mr. Ogden?” said he.

“Never.  Have you?”

Lin had not.  Ogden offered him a cigar, which the puncher pronounced excellent, and we all agreed to see Hilbrun arrive.

“We’re going to show the telegram to Jode,” said the Governor; and he and Ogden departed on this mission to the signal service.

“Well, I must be getting along myself,” said Lin; but he continued walking slowly with me.  “Where’re yu’ bound?” he said.

“Nowhere in particular,” said I. And we paced the board sidewalks a little more.

“You’re going to meet the train to-morrow?” said he.

“The train?  Oh yes.  Hilbrun’s.  To-morrow.  You’ll be there?”

“Yes, I’ll be there.  It’s sure been a dry spell, ain’t it?”

“Yes.  Just like last year.  In fact, like all the years.”

“Yes.  I’ve never saw it rain any to speak of in summer.  I expect it’s the rule.  Don’t you?”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I don’t guess any man knows enough to break such a rule.  Do you?”

“No.  But it’ll be fun to see him try.”

“Sure fun!  Well, I must be getting along.  See yu’ to-morrow.”

“See you to-morrow, Lin.”

He left me at a corner, and I stood watching his tall, depressed figure.  A hundred yards down the street he turned, and seeing me looking after him, pretended he had not turned; and then I took my steps toward the club, telling myself that I had been something of a skunk; for I had inquired for Mrs. McLean in a certain tone, and I had hinted to Lin that he had lacked caution; and this was nothing but a way of saying “I told you so” to the man that is down.  Down Lin certainly was, although it had not come so home to me until our little walk together just now along the boards.

At the club I found the Governor teaching Ogden a Cheyenne specialty ­a particular drink, the Allston cocktail.  “It’s the bitters that does the trick,” he was saying, but saw me and called out:  “You ought to have been with us and seen Jode.  I showed him the telegram, you know.  He read it through, and just handed it back to me, and went on monkeying with his anemometer.  Ever seen his instruments?  Every fresh jigger they get out he sends for.  Well, he monkeyed away, and wouldn’t say a word, so I said, ‘You understand, Jode, this telegram comes from Hilbrun.’  And Jode, he quit his anemometer and said, ’I make no doubt, sir, that your despatch is genuwine.’  Oh, South Carolina’s indignant at me!” And the Governor slapped his knee.  “Why, he’s so set against Hilbrun,” he continued, “I guess if he knew of something he could explode to stop rain he’d let her fly!”

“No, he wouldn’t,” said I.  “He’d not consider that honorable.”

“That’s so,” the Governor assented.  “Jode’ll play fair.”

It was thus we had come to look at our enterprise ­a game between a well-established, respectable weather bureau and an upstart charlatan.  And it was the charlatan had our sympathy ­as all charlatans, whether religious, military, medical, political, or what not, have with the average American.  We met him at the station.  That is, Ogden, McLean, and I; and the Governor, being engaged, sent (unofficially) his secretary and the requested cart.  Lin was anxious to see what would be put in the cart, and I was curious about how a rain-maker would look.  But he turned out an unassuming, quiet man in blue serge, with a face you could not remember afterwards, and a few civil, ordinary remarks.  He even said it was a hot day, as if he had no relations with the weather; and what he put into the cart were only two packing-boxes of no special significance to the eye.  He desired no lodging at the hotel, but to sleep with his apparatus in the building provided for him; and we set out for it at once.  It was an untenanted barn, and he asked that he and his assistant might cut a hole in the roof, upon which we noticed the assistant for the first time ­a tallish, good-looking young man, but with a weak mouth.  “This is Mr. Lusk,” said the rain-maker; and we shook hands, Ogden and I exchanging a glance.  Ourselves and the cart marched up Hill Street ­or Capitol Avenue, as it has become named since Cheyenne has grown fuller of pomp and emptier of prosperity ­and I thought we made an unusual procession:  the Governor’s secretary, unofficially leading the way to the barn; the cart, and the rain-maker beside it, guarding his packed-up mysteries; McLean and Lusk, walking together in unconscious bigamy; and in the rear, Odgen nudging me in the ribs.  That it was the correct Lusk we had with us I felt sure from his incompetent, healthy, vacant appearance, strong-bodied and shiftless ­the sort of man to weary of one trade and another, and make a failure of wife beating between whiles.  In Twenty-fourth Street ­the town’s uttermost rim ­the Governor met us, and stared at Lusk.  “Christopher!” was his single observation; but he never forgets a face ­cannot afford to, now that he is in politics; and, besides, Lusk remembered him.  You seldom really forget a man to whom you owe ten dollars.

“So you’ve quit hauling poles?” said the Governor.

“Nothing in it, sir,” said Lusk.

“Is there any objection to my having a hole in the roof?” asked the rain-maker; for this the secretary had been unable to tell him.

“What! going to throw your bombs through it?” said the Governor, smiling heartily.

But the rain-maker explained at once that his was not the bomb system, but a method attended by more rain and less disturbance.  “Not that the bomb don’t produce first-class results at times and under circumstances,” he said, “but it’s uncertain and costly.”

The Governor hesitated about the hole in the roof, which Hilbrun told us was for a metal pipe to conduct his generated gases into the air.  The owner of the barn had gone to Laramie.  However, we found a stove-pipe hole, which saved delay.  “And what day would you prefer the shower?” said Hilbrun, after we had gone over our contract with him.

“Any day would do,” the Governor said.

This was Thursday; and Sunday was chosen, as a day when no one had business to detain him from witnessing the shower ­though it seemed to me that on week-days, too, business in Cheyenne was not so inexorable as this.  We gave the strangers some information about the town, and left them.  The sun went away in a cloudless sky, and came so again when the stars had finished their untarnished shining.  Friday was clear and dry and hot, like the dynasty of blazing days that had gone before.

I saw a sorry spectacle in the street ­the bridegroom and the bride shopping together; or, rather, he with his wad of bills was obediently paying for what she bought; and when I met them he was carrying a scarlet parasol and a bonnet-box.  His biscuit-shooter, with the lust of purchase on her, was brilliantly dressed, and pervaded the street with splendor, like an escaped parrot.  Lin walked beside her, but it might as well have been behind, and his bearing was so different from his wonted happy-go-luckiness that I had a mind to take off my hat and say, “Good-morning, Mrs. Lusk.”  But it was “Mrs. McLean” I said, of course.  She gave me a remote, imperious nod, and said, “Come on, Lin,” something like a cross nurse, while he, out of sheer decency, made her a good-humored, jocular answer, and said to me, “It takes a woman to know what to buy for house-keepin,”; which poor piece of hypocrisy endeared him to me more than ever.  The puncher was not of the fibre to succeed in keeping appearances, but he deserved success, which the angels consider to be enough.  I wondered if disenchantment had set in, or if this were only the preliminary stage of surprise and wounding, and I felt that but one test could show, namely, a coming face to face of Mr. and Mrs. Lusk, perhaps not to be desired.  Neither was it likely.  The assistant rain-maker kept himself steadfastly inside or near the barn, at the north corner of Cheyenne, while the bride, when she was in the street at all, haunted the shops clear across town diagonally.

On this Friday noon the appearance of the metal tube above the blind building spread some excitement.  It moved several of the citizens to pay the place a visit and ask to see the machine.  These callers, of course, sustained a polite refusal, and returned among their friends with a contempt for such quackery, and a greatly heightened curiosity; so that pretty soon you could hear discussions at the street corners, and by Saturday morning Cheyenne was talking of little else.  The town prowled about the barn and its oracular metal tube, and heard and saw nothing.  The Governor and I (let it be confessed) went there ourselves, since the twenty-four hours of required preparation were now begun.  We smelled for chemicals, and he thought there was a something, but having been bred a doctor, distrusted his imagination.  I could not be sure myself whether there was anything or not, although I walked three times round the barn, snuffing as dispassionately as I knew how.  It might possibly be chlorine, the Governor said, or some gas for which ammonia was in part responsible; and this was all he could say, and we left the place.  The world was as still and the hard, sharp hills as clear and near as ever; and the sky over Sahara is not more dry and enduring than was ours.  This tenacity in the elements plainly gave Jode a malicious official pleasure.  We could tell it by his talk at lunch; and when the Governor reminded him that no rain was contracted for until the next day, he mentioned that the approach of a storm is something that modern science is able to ascertain long in advance; and he bade us come to his office whenever we pleased, and see for ourselves what science said.  This was, at any rate, something to fill the afternoon with, and we went to him about five.  Lin McLean joined us on the way.  I came upon him lingering alone in the street, and he told me that Mrs. McLean was calling on friends.  I saw that he did not know how to spend the short recess or holiday he was having.  He seemed to cling to the society of others, and with them for the time regain his gayer mind.  He had become converted to Ogden, and the New-Yorker, on his side, found pleasant and refreshing this democracy of Governors and cow-punchers.  Jode received us at the signal-service office, and began to show us his instruments with the careful pride of an orchid-collector.

“A hair hygrometer,” he said to me, waving his wax-like hand over it.  “The indications are obtained from the expansion and contraction of a prepared human hair, transferred to an index needle traversing the divided arc of ­”

“What oil do you put on the human hair Jode?” called out the Governor, who had left our group, and was gamboling about by himself among the tubes and dials.  “What will this one do?” he asked, and poked at a wet paper disc.  But before the courteous Jode could explain that it had to do with evaporation and the dew-point, the Governor’s attention wandered, and he was blowing at a little fan-wheel.  This instantly revolved and set a number of dial hands going different ways.  “Hi!” said the Governor, delighted.  “Seen ’em like that down mines.  Register air velocity in feet.  Put it away, Jode.  You don’t want that to-morrow.  What you’ll need, Hilbrun says, is a big old rain-gauge and rubber shoes.”

“I shall require nothing of the sort, Governor,” Jode retorted at once.  “And you can go to church without your umbrella in safety, sir.  See there.”  He pointed to a storm-glass, which was certainly as clear as crystal.  “An old-fashioned test, you will doubtless say, gentlemen,” Jode continued ­though none of us would have said anything like that ­“but unjustly discredited; and, furthermore, its testimony is well corroborated, as you will find you must admit.”  Jode’s voice was almost threatening, and he fetched one corroborator after another.  I looked passively at wet and dry bulbs, at self-recording, dotted registers; I caught the fleeting sound of words like “meniscus” and “terrestrial minimum thermometer,” and I nodded punctually when Jode went through some calculation.  At last I heard something that I could understand ­a series of telegraphic replies to Jode from brother signal-service officers all over the United States.  He read each one through from date of signature, and they all made any rain to-morrow entirely impossible.  “And I tell you,” Jode concluded, in his high, egg-shell voice, “there’s no chance of precipitation now, sir.  I tell you, sir,” ­he was shrieking jubilantly ­“there’s not a damn’ thing to precipitate!”

We left him in his triumph among his glass and mercury.  “Gee whiz!” said the Governor.  “I guess we’d better go and tell Hilbrun it’s no use.”

We went, and Hilbrun smiled with a certain compassion for the antiquated scientist.  “That’s what they all say,” he said.  “I’ll do my talking to-morrow.”

“If any of you gentlemen, or your friends,” said Assistant Lusk, stepping up, “feel like doing a little business on this, I am ready to accommodate you.”

“What do yu’ want this evenin’?” said Lin McLean, promptly.

“Five to one,” said Lusk.

“Go yu’ in twenties,” said the impetuous puncher; and I now perceived this was to be a sporting event.  Lin had his wad of bills out ­or what of it still survived his bride’s shopping.  “Will you hold stakes, doctor?” he said to the Governor.

But that official looked at the clear sky, and thought he would do five to one in twenties himself.  Lusk accommodated him, and then Ogden, and then me.  None of us could very well be stake-holder, but we registered our bets, and promised to procure an uninterested man by eight next morning.  I have seldom had so much trouble, and I never saw such a universal search for ready money.  Every man we asked to hold stakes instantly whipped out his own pocketbook, went in search of Lusk, and disqualified himself.  It was Jode helped us out.  He would not bet, but was anxious to serve, and thus punish the bragging Lusk.

Sunday was, as usual, chronically fine, with no cloud or breeze anywhere, and by the time the church-bells were ringing, ten to one was freely offered.  The biscuit-shooter went to church with her friends, so she might wear her fine clothes in a worthy place, while her furloughed husband rushed about Cheyenne, entirely his own old self again, his wad of money staked and in Jode’s keeping.  Many citizens bitterly lamented their lack of ready money.  But it was a good thing for these people that it was Sunday, and the banks closed.

The church-bells ceased; the congregations sat inside, but outside the hot town showed no Sunday emptiness or quiet.  The metal tube, the possible smell, Jode’s sustained and haughty indignation, the extraordinary assurance of Lusk, all this had ended by turning every one restless and eccentric.  A citizen came down the street with an umbrella.  In a moment the by-standers had reduced it to a sordid tangle of ribs.  Old Judge Burrage attempted to address us at the corner about the vast progress of science.  The postmaster pinned a card on his back with the well-known legend, “I am somewhat of a liar myself.”  And all the while the sun shone high and hot, while Jode grew quieter and colder under the certainty of victory.  It was after twelve o’clock when the people came from church, and no change or sign was to be seen.  Jode told us, with a chill smile, that he had visited his instruments and found no new indications.  Fifteen minutes after that the sky was brown.  Sudden, padded, dropsical clouds were born in the blue above our heads.  They blackened, and a smart shower, the first in two months, wet us all, and ceased.  The sun blazed out, and the sky came blue again, like those rapid, unconvincing weather changes of the drama.

Amazement at what I saw happening in the heavens took me from things on earth, and I was unaware of the universal fit that now seized upon Cheyenne until I heard the high cry of Jode at my ear.  His usual punctilious bearing had forsaken him, and he shouted alike to stranger and acquaintance:  “It is no half-inch, sir!  Don’t you tell me"’ And the crowd would swallow him, but you could mark his vociferous course as he went proclaiming to the world.  “A failure, sir!  The fellow’s an impostor, as I well knew.  It’s no half-inch!” Which was true.

“What have you got to say to that?” we asked Hilbrun, swarming around him.

“If you’ll just keep cool,” said he ­“it’s only the first instalment.  In about two hours and a half I’ll give you the rest.”

Soon after four the dropsical clouds materialized once again above open-mouthed Cheyenne.  No school let out for an unexpected holiday, no herd of stampeded range cattle, conducts itself more miscellaneously.  Gray, respectable men, with daughters married, leaped over fences and sprang back, prominent legislators hopped howling up and down door-steps, women waved handkerchiefs from windows and porches, the chattering Jode flew from anemometer to rain-gauge, and old Judge Burrage apostrophized Providence in his front yard, with the postmaster’s label still pinned to his back.  Nobody minded the sluicing downpour ­this second instalment was much more of a thing than the first ­and Hilbrun alone kept a calm exterior ­the face of the man who lifts a heavy dumb-bell and throws an impressive glance at the audience.  Assistant Lusk was by no means thus proof against success I saw him put a bottle back in his pocket, his face already disintegrated with a tipsy leer.  Judge Burrage, perceiving the rain-maker, came out of his gate and proceeded toward him, extending the hand of congratulation.  “Mr. Hilbrun,” said he, “I am Judge Burrage ­the Honorable T. Coleman Burrage ­and I will say that I am most favorably impressed with your shower.”

“His shower!” yelped Jode, flourishing measurements.

“Why, yu’ don’t claim it’s yourn, do yu’?” said Lin McLean, grinning.

“I tell you it’s no half-inch yet, gentlemen,” said Jode, ignoring the facetious puncher.

“You’re mistaken,” said Hilbrun, sharply.

“It’s a plumb big show, half-inch or no half-inch,” said Lin.

“If he’s short he don’t get his money,” said some ignoble subscriber

“Yes, he will,” said the Governor, “or I’m a short.  He’s earned it.”

“You bet “’ said Lin.  “Fair and square.  If they’re goin’ back on yu’, doctor, I’ll chip ­Shucks!” Lin’s hand fell from the empty pocket; he remembered his wad in the stake-holder’s hands, and that he now possessed possibly two dollars in silver, all told.  “I can’t chip in, doctor,” he said.  “That hobo over there has won my cash, an’ he’s filling up on the prospect right now.  I don’t care!  It’s the biggest show I’ve ever saw.  You’re a dandy, Mr. Hilbrun!  Whoop!” And Lin clapped the rain-maker on the shoulder, exulting.  He had been too well entertained to care what he had in his pocket, and his wife had not yet occurred to him.

They were disputing about the rainfall, which had been slightly under half an inch in a few spots, but over it in many others; and while we stood talking in the renewed sunlight, more telegrams were brought to Jode, saying that there was no moisture anywhere, and simultaneously with these, riders dashed into town with the news that twelve miles out the rain had flattened the grain crop.  We had more of such reports from as far as thirty miles, and beyond that there had not been a drop or a cloud.  It staggered one’s reason; the brain was numb with surprise.

“Well, gentlemen,” said the rain-maker, “I’m packed up, and my train’ll be along soon ­would have been along by this, only it’s late.  What’s the word as to my three hundred and fifty dollars?”

Even still there were objections expressed.  He had not entirely performed his side of the contract.

“I think different, gentlemen,” said he.  “But I’ll unpack and let that train go.  I can’t have the law on you, I suppose.  But if you don’t pay me” (the rain-maker put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the fence) “I’ll flood your town.”

In earthquakes and eruptions people end by expecting anything; and in the total eclipse that was now over all Cheyenne’s ordinary standards and precedents the bewildered community saw in this threat nothing more unusual than if he had said twice two made four.  The purse was handed over.

“I’m obliged,” said Hilbrun, simply.

“If I had foreseen, gentlemen,” said Jode, too deeply grieved now to feel anger, “that I would even be indirectly associated with your losing your money through this ­this absurd occurrence, I would have declined to help you.  It becomes my duty,” he continued, turning coldly to the inebriated Lusk, “to hand this to you, sir.”  And the assistant lurchingly stuffed his stakes away.

“It’s worth it,” said Lin.  “He’s welcome to my cash.”

“What’s that you say, Lin McLean?” It was the biscuit-shooter, and she surged to the front.

“I’m broke.  He’s got it.  That’s all,” said Lin, briefly.

“Broke!  You!” She glared at her athletic young lord, and she uttered a preliminary howl.

At that long-lost cry Lusk turned his silly face.  “It’s my darling Kate,” he said.  “Why, Kate!”

The next thing that I knew Ogden and I were grappling with Lin McLean; for everything had happened at once.  The bride had swooped upon her first wedded love and burst into tears on the man’s neck, which Lin was trying to break in consequence.  We do not always recognize our benefactors at sight.  They all came to the ground, and we hauled the second husband off.  The lady and Lusk remained in a heap, he foolish, tearful, and affectionate; she turned furiously at bay, his guardian angel, indifferent to the onlooking crowd, and hurling righteous defiance at Lin.  “Don’t yus dare lay yer finger on my husband, you sage-brush bigamist!” is what the marvelous female said.

“Bigamist?” repeated Lin, dazed at this charge.  “I ain’t,” he said to Ogden and me.  “I never did.  I’ve never married any of ’em before her.”

“Little good that’ll do yus, Lin McLean!  Me and him was man and wife before ever I come acrosst yus.”

“You and him?” murmured the puncher.

“Her and me,” whimpered Lusk.  “Sidney.”  He sat up with a limp, confiding stare at everybody.

“Sidney who?” said Lin.

“No, no,” corrected Lusk, crossly ­“Sidney, Nebraska.”

The stakes at this point fell from his pocket which he did not notice.  But the bride had them in safe-keeping at once.

“Who are yu’, anyway ­when yu’ ain’t drunk?” demanded Lin.

“He’s as good a man as you, and better,” snorted the guardian angel.  “Give him a pistol, and he’ll make you hard to find.”

“Well, you listen to me, Sidney Nebraska ­” Lin began.

“No, no,” corrected Lusk once more, as a distant whistle blew ­“Jim.”

“Good-bye, gentlemen,” said the rain-maker.  “That’s the west-bound.  I’m perfectly satisfied with my experiment here, and I’m off to repeat it at Salt Lake City.”

“You are?” shouted Lin McLean.  “Him and Jim’s going to work it again!  For goodness’ sake, somebody lend me twenty-five dollars!”

At this there was an instantaneous rush.  Ten minutes later, in front of the ticket-windows there was a line of citizens buying tickets for Salt Lake as if it had been Madame Bernhardt.  Some rock had been smitten, and ready money had flowed forth.  The Governor saw us off, sad that his duties should detain him.  But Jode went!

“Betting is the fool’s argument, gentlemen,” said he to Ogden, McLean, and me, “and it’s a weary time since I have had the pleasure.”

“Which way are yu’ bettin’?” Lin asked.

“With my principles, sir,” answered the little signal-service officer.

“I expect I ain’t got any,” said the puncher.  “It’s Jim I’m backin’ this time.”

“See here,” said I; “I want to talk to you.”  We went into another car, and I did.

“And so yu’ knowed about Lusk when we was on them board walks?” the puncher said.

“Do you mean I ought to have ­”

“Shucks! no.  Yu’ couldn’t.  Nobody couldn’t.  It’s a queer world, all the same.  Yu’ have good friends, and all that.”  He looked out of the window.  “Laramie already!” he commented, and got out and walked by himself on the platform until we had started again.  “Yu’ have good friends,” he pursued, settling himself so his long legs were stretched and comfortable, “and they tell yu’ things, and you tell them things.  And when it don’t make no particular matter one way or the other, yu’ give ’em your honest opinion and talk straight to ’em, and they’ll come to you the same way.  So that when yu’re ridin’ the range alone sometimes, and thinkin’ a lot o’ things over on top maybe of some dog-goned hill, you’ll say to yourself about some fellow yu’ know mighty well, ‘There’s a man is a good friend of mine.’  And yu’ mean it.  And it’s so.  Yet when matters is serious, as onced in a while they’re bound to get, and yu’re in a plumb hole, where is the man then ­your good friend?  Why, he’s where yu’ want him to be.  Standin’ off, keepin’ his mouth shut, and lettin’ yu’ find your own trail out.  If he tried to show it to yu’, yu’d likely hit him.  But shucks!  Circumstances have showed me the trail this time, you bet!” And the puncher’s face, which had been sombre, grew lively, and he laid a friendly hand on my knee.

“The trail’s pretty simple,” said I.

“You bet!  But it’s sure a queer world.  Tell yu’,” said Lin, with the air of having made a discovery, “when a man gets down to bed-rock affairs in this life he’s got to do his travellin’ alone, same as he does his dyin’.  I expect even married men has thoughts and hopes they don’t tell their wives.”

“Never was married,” said I.

“Well ­no more was I. Let’s go to bed.”  And Lin shook my hand, and gave me a singular, rather melancholy smile.

At Salt Lake City, which Ogden was glad to include in his Western holiday, we found both Mormon and Gentile ready to give us odds against rain ­only I noticed that those of the true faith were less free.  Indeed; the Mormon, the Quaker, and most sects of an isolated doctrine have a nice prudence in money.  During our brief stay we visited the sights:  floating in the lake, listening to pins drop in the gallery of the Tabernacle, seeing frescos of saints in robes speaking from heaven to Joseph Smith in the Sunday clothes of a modern farm-hand, and in the street we heard at a distance a strenuous domestic talk between the new ­or perhaps I should say the original ­husband and wife.

“She’s corralled Sidney’s cash!” said the delighted Lin.  “He can’t bet nothing on this shower.”

And then, after all, this time ­it didn’t rain!

Stripped of money both ways, Cheyenne, having most fortunately purchased a return ticket, sought its home.  The perplexed rain-maker went somewhere else, without his assistant.  Lusk’s exulting wife, having the money, retained him with her.

“Good luck to yu’, Sidney!” said Lin, speaking to him for the first time since Cheyenne.  “I feel a heap better since I’ve saw yu’ married.”  He paid no attention to the biscuit-shooter, or the horrible language that she threw after him.

Jode also felt “a heap better.”  Legitimate science had triumphed.  To-day, most of Cheyenne believes with Jode that it was all a coincidence.  South Carolina had bet on her principles, and won from Lin the few dollars that I had lent the puncher.

“And what will you do now?” I said to Lin.

“Join the beef round-up.  Balaam’s payin’ forty dollars.  I guess that’ll keep a single man.”

A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF CHRISTMAS

The Governor descended the steps of the Capitol slowly and with pauses, lifting a list frequently to his eye.  He had intermittently pencilled it between stages of the forenoon’s public business, and his gait grew absent as he recurred now to his jottings in their accumulation, with a slight pain at their number, and the definite fear that they would be more in seasons to come.  They were the names of his friends’ children to whom his excellent heart moved him to give Christmas presents.  He had put off this regenerating evil until the latest day, as was his custom, and now he was setting forth to do the whole thing at a blow, entirely planless among the guns and rocking-horses that would presently surround him.  As he reached the highway he heard himself familiarly addressed from a distance, and, turning, saw four sons of the alkali jogging into town from the plain.  One who had shouted to him galloped out from the others, rounded the Capitol’s enclosure, and, approaching with radiant countenance leaned to reach the hand of the Governor, and once again greeted him with a hilarious “Hello, Doc!”

Governor Barker, M.D., seeing Mr. McLean unexpectedly after several years, hailed the horseman with frank and lively pleasure, and, inquiring who might be the other riders behind, was told that they were Shorty, Chalkeye, and Dollar Bill, come for Christmas.  “And dandies to hit town with,” Mr. McLean added.  “Red-hot.”

“I am acquainted with them,” assented his Excellency.

“We’ve been ridin’ trail for twelve weeks,” the cow-puncher continued, “makin’ our beds down anywheres, and eatin’ the same old chuck every day.  So we’ve shook fried beef and heifer’s delight, and we’re goin’ to feed high.”

Then Mr. McLean overflowed with talk and pungent confidences, for the holidays already rioted in his spirit, and his tongue was loosed over their coming rites.

“We’ve soured on scenery,” he finished, in his drastic idiom.  “We’re sick of moonlight and cow-dung, and we’re heeled for a big time.”

“Call on me,” remarked the Governor, cheerily, “when you’re ready for bromides and sulphates.”

“I ain’t box-headed no more,” protested Mr. McLean; “I’ve got maturity, Doc, since I seen yu’ at the rain-making, and I’m a heap older than them hospital days when I bust my leg on yu’.  Three or four glasses and quit.  That’s my rule.”

“That your rule, too?” inquired the Governor of Shorty, Chalkeye, and Dollar Bill.  These gentlemen of the saddle were sitting quite expressionless upon their horses.

“We ain’t talkin’, we’re waitin’,” observed Chalkeye; and the three cynics smiled amiably.

“Well, Doc, see yu’ again,” said Mr. McLean.  He turned to accompany his brother cow-punchers, but in that particular moment Fate descended or came up from whatever place she dwells in and entered the body of the unsuspecting Governor.

“What’s your hurry?” said Fate, speaking in the official’s hearty manner.  “Come along with me.”

“Can’t do it.  Where are yu’ goin’?”

“Christmasing,” replied Fate.

“Well, I’ve got to feed my horse.  Christmasing, yu’ say?”

“Yes; I’m buying toys.”

“Toys!  You?  What for?”

“Oh, some kids.”

“Yourn?” screeched Lin, precipitately.

His Excellency the jovial Governor opened his teeth in pleasure at this, for he was a bachelor, and there were fifteen upon his list, which he held up for the edification of the hasty McLean.  “Not mine, I’m happy to say.  My friends keep marrying and settling, and their kids call me uncle, and climb around and bother, and I forget their names, and think it’s a girl, and the mother gets mad.  Why, if I didn’t remember these little folks at Christmas they’d be wondering ­not the kids, they just break your toys and don’t notice; but the mother would wonder ­’What’s the matter with Dr. Barker?  Has Governor Barker gone back on us?’ ­that’s where the strain comes!” he broke off, facing Mr. McLean with another spacious laugh.

But the cow-puncher had ceased to smile, and now, while Barker ran on exuberantly, McLean’s wide-open eyes rested upon him, singular and intent, and in their hazel depths the last gleam of jocularity went out.

“That’s where the strain comes, you see.  Two sets of acquaintances.  Grateful patients and loyal voters, and I’ve got to keep solid with both outfits, especially the wives and mothers.  They’re the people.  So it’s drums, and dolls, and sheep on wheels, and games, and monkeys on a stick, and the saleslady shows you a mechanical bear, and it costs too much, and you forget whether the Judge’s second girl is Nellie or Susie, and ­well, I’m just in for my annual circus this afternoon!  You’re in luck.  Christmas don’t trouble a chap fixed like you.”

Lin McLean prolonged the sentence like a distant echo.

“A chap fixed like you!” The cow-puncher said it slowly to himself.  “No, sure.”  He seemed to be watching Shorty, and Chalkeye, and Dollar Bill going down the road.  “That’s a new idea ­Christmas,” he murmured, for it was one of his oldest, and he was recalling the Christmas when he wore his first long trousers.

“Comes once a year pretty regular,” remarked the prosperous Governor.  “Seems often when you pay the bill.”

“I haven’t made a Christmas gift,” pursued the cow-puncher, dreamily, “not for ­for ­Lord! it’s a hundred years, I guess.  I don’t know anybody that has any right to look for such a thing from me.”  This was indeed a new idea, and it did not stop the chill that was spreading in his heart.

“Gee whiz!” said Barker, briskly, “there goes twelve o’clock.  I’ve got to make a start.  Sorry you can’t come and help me.  Good-bye!”

His Excellency left the rider sitting motionless, and forgot him at once in his own preoccupation.  He hastened upon his journey to the shops with the list, not in his pocket, but held firmly, like a plank in the imminence of shipwreck.  The Nellies and Susies pervaded his mind, and he struggled with the presentiment that in a day or two he would recall some omitted and wretchedly important child.  Quick hoof-beats made him look up, and Mr. McLean passed like a wind.  The Governor absently watched him go, and saw the pony hunch and stiffen in the check of his speed when Lin overtook his companions.  Down there in the distance they took a side street, and Barker rejoicingly remembered one more name and wrote it as he walked.  In a few minutes he had come to the shops, and met face to face with Mr. McLean.

“The boys are seein’ after my horse,” Lin rapidly began, “and I’ve got to meet ’em sharp at one.  We’re twelve weeks shy on a square meal, yu’ see, and this first has been a date from ’way back.  I’d like to ­” Here Mr. McLean cleared his throat, and his speech went less smoothly.  “Doc, I’d like just for a while to watch yu’ gettin’ ­them monkeys, yu’ know.”

The Governor expressed his agreeable surprise at this change of mind, and was glad of McLean’s company and judgment during the impending selections.  A picture of a cow-puncher and himself discussing a couple of dolls rose nimbly in Barker’s mental eye, and it was with an imperfect honesty that he said, “You’ll help me a heap.”

And Lin, quite sincere, replied, “Thank yu’.”

So together these two went Christmasing in the throng.  Wyoming’s Chief Executive knocked elbows with the spurred and jingling waif, one man as good as another in that raw, hopeful, full-blooded cattle era, which now the sobered West remembers as the days of its fond youth.  For one man has been as good as another in three places ­Paradise before the Fall; the Rocky Mountains before the wire fence; and the Declaration of Independence.  And then this Governor, beside being young, almost as young as Lin McLean or the Chief Justice (who lately had celebrated his thirty-second birthday), had in his doctoring days at Drybone known the cow-puncher with that familiarity which lasts a lifetime without breeding contempt; accordingly he now laid a hand on Lin’s tall shoulder and drew him among the petticoats and toys.

Christmas filled the windows and Christmas stirred in mankind.  Cheyenne, not over-zealous in doctrine or litanies, and with the opinion that a world in the hand is worth two in the bush, nevertheless was flocking together, neighbor to think of neighbor, and every one to remember the children; a sacred assembly, after all, gathered to rehearse unwittingly the articles of its belief, the Creed and Doctrine of the Child.  Lin saw them hurry and smile among the paper fairies; they questioned and hesitated, crowded and made decisions, failed utterly to find the right thing, forgot and hastened back, suffered all the various desperations of the eleventh hour, and turned homeward, dropping their parcels with that undimmed good-will that once a year makes gracious the universal human face.  This brotherhood swam and beamed before the cow-puncher’s brooding eyes, and in his ears the greeting of the season sang.  Children escaped from their mothers and ran chirping behind the counters to touch and meddle in places forbidden.  Friends dashed against each other with rabbits and magic lanterns, greeted in haste, and were gone, amid the sound of musical boxes.

Through this tinkle and bleating of little machinery the murmur of the human heart drifted in and out of McLean’s hearing; fragments of home talk, tendernesses, economies, intimate first names, and dinner hours, and whether it was joy or sadness, it was in common; the world seemed knit in a single skein of home ties.  Two or three came by whose purses must have been slender, and whose purchases were humble and chosen after much nice adjustment; and when one plain man dropped a word about both ends meeting, and the woman with him laid a hand on his arm, saying that his children must not feel this year was different, Lin made a step toward them.  There were hours and spots where he could readily have descended upon them at that, played the rôle of clinking affluence, waved thanks aside with competent blasphemy, and tossing off some infamous whiskey, cantered away in the full self-conscious strut of the frontier.  But here was not the moment; the abashed cow-puncher could make no such parade in this place.  The people brushed by him back and forth, busy upon their errands, and aware of him scarcely more than if he had been a spirit looking on from the helpless dead; and so, while these weaving needs and kindnesses of man were within arm’s touch of him, he was locked outside with his impulses.  Barker had, in the natural press of customers, long parted from him, to become immersed in choosing and rejecting; and now, with a fair part of his mission accomplished, he was ready to go on to the next place, and turned to beckon McLean.  He found him obliterated in a corner beside a life-sized image of Santa Claus, standing as still as the frosty saint.

“He looks livelier than you do,” said the hearty Governor. “’Fraid it’s been slow waiting.”

“No,” replied the cow-puncher, thoughtfully.  “No, I guess not.”

This uncertainty was expressed with such gentleness that Barker roared.  “You never did lie to me,” he said, “long as I’ve known you.  Well, never mind.  I’ve got some real advice to ask you now.”

At this Mr. McLean’s face grew more alert.  “Say Doc,” said he, “what do yu’ want for Christmas that nobody’s likely to give yu’?”

“A big practice ­big enough to interfere with my politics.”

“What else?  Things and truck, I mean.”

“Oh ­nothing I’ll get.  People don’t give things much to fellows like me.”

“Don’t they?  Don’t they?”

“Why, you and Santa Claus weren’t putting up any scheme on my stocking?”

“Well ­”

“I believe you’re in earnest!” cried his Excellency.  “That’s simply rich!” Here was a thing to relish!  The Frontier comes to town “heeled for a big time,” finds that presents are all the rage, and must immediately give somebody something.  Oh, childlike, miscellaneous Frontier!  So thought the good-hearted Governor; and it seems a venial misconception.  “My dear fellow,” he added, meaning as well as possible, “I don’t want you to spend your money on me.”

“I’ve got plenty all right,” said Lin, shortly.

“Plenty’s not the point.  I’ll take as many drinks as you please with you.  You didn’t expect anything from me?”

“That ain’t ­that don’t ­”

“There!  Of course you didn’t.  Then, what are you getting proud about?  Here’s our shop.”  They stepped in from the street to new crowds and counters.  “Now,” pursued the Governor, “this is for a very particular friend of mine.  Here they are.  Now, which of those do you like best?”

They were sets of Tennyson in cases holding little volumes equal in number, but the binding various, and Mr. McLean reached his decision after one look.  “That,” said he, and laid a large muscular hand upon the Laureate.  The young lady behind the counter spoke out acidly, and Lin pulled the abject hand away.  His taste, however, happened to be sound, or, at least, it was at one with the Governor’s; but now they learned that there was a distressing variance in the matter of price.

The Governor stared at the delicate article of his choice.  “I know that Tennyson is what she ­is what’s wanted,” he muttered; and, feeling himself nudged, looked around and saw Lin’s extended fist.  This gesture he took for a facetious sympathy, and, dolorously grasping the hand, found himself holding a lump of bills.  Sheer amazement relaxed him, and the cow-puncher’s matted wealth tumbled on the floor in sight of all people.  Barker picked it up and gave it back.  “No, no, no!” he said, mirthful over his own inclination to be annoyed; “you can’t do that.  I’m just as much obliged, Lin,” he added.

“Just as a loan, Doc ­some of it.  I’m grass-bellied with spot-cash.”

A giggle behind the counter disturbed them both, but the sharp young lady was only dusting.  The Governor at once paid haughtily for Tennyson’s expensive works, and the cow-puncher pushed his discountenanced savings back into his clothes.  Making haste to leave the book department of this shop, they regained a mutual ease, and the Governor became waggish over Lin’s concern at being too rich.  He suggested to him the list of delinquent taxpayers and the latest census from which to select indigent persons.  He had patients, too, whose inveterate pennilessness he could swear cheerfully to ­“since you want to bolt from your own money,” he remarked.

“Yes, I’m a green horse,” assented Mr. McLean, gallantly; “ain’t used to the looks of a twenty-dollar bill, and I shy at ’em.”

From his face ­that jocular mask ­one might have counted him the most serene and careless of vagrants, and in his words only the ordinary voice of banter spoke to the Governor.  A good woman, it may well be, would have guessed before this the sensitive soul in the blundering body, but Barker saw just the familiar, whimsical, happy-go-lucky McLean of old days, and so he went gayly and innocently on, treading upon holy ground.  “I’ve got it!” he exclaimed; “give your wife something.”

The ruddy cow-puncher grinned.  He had passed through the world of woman with but few delays, rejoicing in informal and transient entanglements, and he welcomed the turn which the conversation seemed now to be taking.  “If you’ll give me her name and address,” said he, with the future entirely in his mind.

“Why, Laramie!” and the Governor feigned surprise.

“Say, Doc,” said Lin, uneasily, “none of ’em ain’t married me since I saw yu’ last.”

“Then she hasn’t written from Laramie,” said the hilarious Governor, and Mr. McLean understood and winced in his spirit deep down.  “Gee whiz!” went on Barker, “I’ll never forget you and Lusk that day!”

But the mask fell now.  “You’re talking of his wife, not mine,” said the cow-puncher very quietly, and smiling no more; “and, Doc, I’m going to say a word to yu’, for I know yu’ve always been my good friend.  I’ll never forget that day myself ­but I don’t want to be reminded of it.”

“I’m a fool, Lin,” said the Governor, generous instantly.  “I never supposed ­”

“I know yu’ didn’t, Doc.  It ain’t you that’s the fool.  And in a way ­in a way ­” Lin’s speech ended among his crowding memories, and Barker, seeing how wistful his face had turned, waited.  “But I ain’t quite the same fool I was before that happened to me,” the cow-puncher resumed, “though maybe my actions don’t show to be wiser.  I know that there was better luck than a man like me had any call to look for.”

The sobered Barker said, simply, “Yes, Lin.”  He was put to thinking by these words from the unsuspected inner man.

Out in the Bow Leg country Lin McLean had met a woman with thick, red cheeks, calling herself by a maiden name; and this was his whole knowledge of her when he put her one morning astride a Mexican saddle and took her fifty miles to a magistrate and made her his lawful wife to the best of his ability and belief.  His sage-brush intimates were confident he would never have done it but for a rival.  Racing the rival and beating him had swept Mr. McLean past his own intentions, and the marriage was an inadvertence.  “He jest bumped into it before he could pull up,” they explained; and this casualty, resulting from Mr. McLean’s sporting blood, had entertained several hundred square miles of alkali.  For the new-made husband the joke soon died.  In the immediate weeks that came upon him he tasted a bitterness worse than in all his life before, and learned also how deep the woman, when once she begins, can sink beneath the man in baseness.  That was a knowledge of which he had lived innocent until this time.  But he carried his outward self serenely, so that citizens in Cheyenne who saw the cow-puncher with his bride argued shrewdly that men of that sort liked women of that sort; and before the strain had broken his endurance an unexpected first husband, named Lusk, had appeared one Sunday in the street, prosperous, forgiving, and exceedingly drunk.  To the arms of Lusk she went back in the public street, deserting McLean in the presence of Cheyenne; and when Cheyenne saw this, and learned how she had been Mrs. Lusk for eight long, if intermittent, years, Cheyenne laughed loudly.  Lin McLean laughed, too, and went about his business, ready to swagger at the necessary moment, and with the necessary kind of joke always ready to shield his hurt spirit.  And soon, of course, the matter grew stale, seldom raked up in the Bow Leg country where Lin had been at work; so lately he had begun to remember other things beside the smouldering humiliation.

“Is she with him?” he asked Barker, and musingly listened while Barker told him.  The Governor had thought to make it a racy story, with the moral that the joke was now on Lusk; but that inner man had spoken and revealed the cow-puncher to him in a new and complicated light; hence he quieted the proposed lively cadence and vocabulary of his anecdote about the house of Lusk, but instead of narrating how Mrs. beat Mr. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Mr. took his turn the odd days, thus getting one ahead of his lady, while the kid Lusk had outlined his opinion of the family by recently skipping to parts unknown, Barker detailed these incidents more gravely, adding that Laramie believed Mrs. Lusk addicted to opium.

“I don’t guess I’ll leave my card on ’em,” said McLean, grimly, “if I strike Laramie.”

“You don’t mind my saying I think you’re well out of that scrape?” Barker ventured.

“Shucks, no!  That’s all right, Doc.  Only ­yu’ see now.  A man gets tired pretending ­onced in a while.”

Time had gone while they were in talk, and it was now half after one and Mr. McLean late for that long-plotted first square meal.  So the friends shook hands, wishing each other Merry Christmas, and the cow-puncher hastened toward his chosen companions through the stirring cheerfulness of the season.  His play-hour had made a dull beginning among the toys.  He had come upon people engaged in a pleasant game, and waited, shy and well disposed, for some bidding to join, but they had gone on playing with each other and left him out.  And now he went along in a sort of hurry to escape from that loneliness where his human promptings had been lodged with him useless.  Here was Cheyenne, full of holiday for sale, and he with his pockets full of money to buy; and when he thought of Shorty, and Chalkeye, and Dollar Bill, those dandies to hit a town with, he stepped out with a brisk, false hope.  It was with a mental hurrah and a foretaste of a good time coming that he put on his town clothes, after shaving and admiring himself, and sat down to the square meal.  He ate away and drank with a robust imitation of enjoyment that took in even himself at first.  But the sorrowful process of his spirit went on, for all he could do.  As he groped for the contentment which he saw around him he began to receive the jokes with counterfeit mirth.  Memories took the place of anticipation, and through their moody shiftings he began to feel a distaste for the company of his friends and a shrinking from their lively voices.  He blamed them for this at once.  He was surprised to think he had never recognized before how light a weight was Shorty; and here was Chalkeye, who knew better, talking religion after two glasses.  Presently this attack of noticing his friends’ shortcomings mastered him, and his mind, according to its wont, changed at a stroke.  “I’m celebrating no Christmas with this crowd,” said the inner man; and when they had next remembered Lin McLean in their hilarity he was gone.

Governor Barker, finishing his purchases at half-past three, went to meet a friend come from Evanston.  Mr. McLean was at the railway station, buying a ticket for Denver.

“Denver!” exclaimed the amazed Governor.

“That’s what I said,” stated Mr. McLean, doggedly.

“Gee whiz!” went his Excellency.  “What are you going to do there?”

“Get good and drunk.”

“Can’t you find enough whiskey in Cheyenne?”

“I’m drinking champagne this trip.”

The cow-puncher went out on the platform and got aboard, and the train moved off.  Barker had walked out too in his surprise, and as he stared after the last car, Mr. McLean waved his wide hat defiantly and went inside the door.

“And he says he’s got maturity,” Barker muttered.  “I’ve known him since seventy-nine, and he’s kept about eight years old right along.”  The Governor was cross, and sorry, and presently crosser.  His jokes about Lin’s marriage came back to him and put him in a rage with the departed fool.  “Yes, about eight.  Or six,” said his Excellency, justifying himself by the past.  For he had first known Lin, the boy of nineteen, supreme in length of limb and recklessness, breaking horses and feeling for an early mustache.  Next, when the mustache was nearly accomplished, he had mended the boy’s badly broken thigh at Drybone.  His skill (and Lin’s utter health) had wrought so swift a healing that the surgeon overflowed with the pride of science, and over the bandages would explain the human body technically to his wild-eyed and flattered patient.  Thus young Lin heard all about tibia, and comminuted, and other glorious new words, and when sleepless would rehearse them.  Then, with the bone so nearly knit that the patient might leave the ward on crutches to sit each morning in Barker’s room as a privilege, the disobedient child of twenty-one had slipped out of the hospital and hobbled hastily to the hog ranch, where whiskey and variety waited for a languishing convalescent.  Here he grew gay, and was soon carried back with the leg refractured.  Yet Barker’s surgical rage was disarmed, the patient was so forlorn over his doctor’s professional chagrin.

“I suppose it ain’t no better this morning, Doc?” he had said, humbly, after a new week of bed and weights.

“Your right leg’s going to be shorter.  That’s all.”

“Oh, gosh!  I’ve been and spoiled your comminuted fee-mur!  Ain’t I a son-of-a-gun?”

You could not chide such a boy as this; and in time’s due course he had walked jauntily out into the world with legs of equal length after all and in his stride the slightest halt possible.  And Doctor Barker had missed the child’s conversation.  To-day his mustache was a perfected thing, and he in the late end of his twenties.

“He’ll wake up about noon to-morrow in a dive, without a cent,” said Barker.  “Then he’ll come back on a freight and begin over again.”

At the Denver station Lin McLean passed through the shoutings and omnibuses, and came to the beginning of Seventeenth Street, where is the first saloon.  A customer was ordering Hot Scotch; and because he liked the smell and had not thought of the mixture for a number of years, Lin took Hot Scotch.  Coming out upon the pavement, he looked across and saw a saloon opposite with brighter globes and windows more prosperous.  That should have been his choice; lemon peel would undoubtedly be fresher over there; and over he went at once, to begin the whole thing properly.  In such frozen weather no drink could be more timely, and he sat, to enjoy without haste its mellow fitness.  Once again on the pavement, he looked along the street toward up-town beneath the crisp, cold electric lights, and three little bootblacks gathered where he stood and cried “Shine?  Shine?” at him.  Remembering that you took the third turn to the right to get the best dinner in Denver, Lin hit on the skilful plan of stopping at all Hot Scotches between; but the next occurred within a few yards, and it was across the street.  This one being attained and appreciated, he found that he must cross back again or skip number four.  At this rate he would not be dining in time to see much of the theatre, and he stopped to consider.  It was a German place he had just quitted, and a huge light poured out on him from its window, which the proprietor’s father-land sentiment had made into a show.  Lights shone among a well-set pine forest, where beery, jovial gnomes sat on roots and reached upward to Santa Claus; he, grinning, fat, and Teutonic, held in his right hand forever a foaming glass, and forever in his left a string of sausages that dangled down among the gnomes.  With his American back to this, the cow-puncher, wearing the same serious, absent face he had not changed since he ran away from himself at Cheyenne, considered carefully the Hot Scotch question, and which side of the road to take and stick to, while the little bootblacks found him once more and cried, “Shine?  Shine?” monotonous as snow-birds.  He settled to stay over here with the south-side Scotches, and the little one-note song reaching his attention, he suddenly shoved his foot at the nearest boy, who lightly sprang away.

“Dare you to touch him!” piped a snow-bird, dangerously.  They were in short trousers, and the eldest enemy, it may be, was ten.

“Don’t hit me,” said Mr. McLean “I’m innocent.”

“Well, you leave him be,” said one.

“What’s he layin’ to kick you for, Billy?  ’Tain’t yer pop, is it?”

“New!” said Billy, in scorn.  “Father never kicked me.  Don’t know who he is.”

“He’s a special!” shrilled the leading bird, sensationally.  “He’s got a badge, and he’s goin’ to arrest yer.”

Two of them hopped instantly to the safe middle of the street, and scattered with practiced strategy; but Billy stood his ground.  “Dare you to arrest me!” said he.

“What’ll you give me not to?” inquired Lin, and he put his hands in his pockets, arms akimbo.

“Nothing; I’ve done nothing,” announced Billy, firmly.  But even in the last syllable his voice suddenly failed, a terror filled his eyes, and he, too, sped into the middle of the street.

“What’s he claim you lifted?” inquired the leader, with eagerness.  “Tell him you haven’t been inside a store to-day.  We can prove it!” they screamed to the special officer.

“Say,” said the slow-spoken Lin from the pavement, “you’re poor judges of a badge, you fellows.”

His tone pleased them where they stood, wide apart from each other.

Mr. McLean also remained stationary in the bluish illumination of the window.  “Why, if any policeman was caught wearin’ this here,” said he, following his sprightly invention, “he’d get arrested himself.”

This struck them extremely.  They began to draw together, Billy lingering the last.

“If it’s your idea,” pursued Mr. McLean, alluringly, as the three took cautious steps nearer the curb, “that blue, clasped hands in a circle of red stars gives the bearer the right to put folks in the jug ­why, I’ll get somebody else to black my boots for a dollar.”

The three made a swift rush, fell on simultaneous knees, and clattering their boxes down, began to spit in an industrious circle.

“Easy!” wheedled Mr. McLean, and they looked up at him, staring and fascinated.  “Not having three feet,” said the cow-puncher, always grave and slow, “I can only give two this here job.”

“He’s got a big pistol and a belt!” exulted the leader, who had precociously felt beneath Lin’s coat.

“You’re a smart boy,” said Lin, considering him, “and yu’ find a man out right away.  Now you stand off and tell me all about myself while they fix the boots ­and a dollar goes to the quickest through.”

Young Billy and his tow-headed competitor flattened down, each to a boot, with all their might, while the leader ruefully contemplated Mr. McLean.

“That’s a Col you’ve got,” ventured he.

“Right again.  Some day, maybe, you’ll be wearing one of your own, if the angels don’t pull yu’ before you’re ripe.”

“I’m through!” sang out Towhead, rising in haste.

Small Billy was struggling still, but leaped at that, the two heads bobbing to a level together; and Mr. McLean, looking down, saw that the arrangement had not been a good one for the boots.

“Will you kindly referee,” said he, forgivingly, to the leader, “and decide which of them smears is the awfulest?”

But the leader looked the other way and played upon a mouth-organ.

“Well, that saves me money,” said Mr. McLean, jingling his pocket.  “I guess you’ve both won.”  He handed each of them a dollar.  “Now,” he continued, “I just dassent show these boots uptown; so this time it’s a dollar for the best shine.”

The two went palpitating at their brushes again, and the leader played his mouth-organ with brilliant unconcern.  Lin, tall and brooding leaned against the jutting sill of the window, a figure somehow plainly strange in town, while through the bright plate-glass Santa Claus, holding out his beer and sausages, perpetually beamed.

Billy was laboring gallantly, but it was labor, the cow-puncher perceived, and Billy no seasoned expert.  “See here,” said Lin, stooping, “I’ll show yu’ how it’s done.  He’s playin’ that toon cross-eyed enough to steer anybody crooked.  There.  Keep your blacking soft, and work with a dry brush.”

“Lemme,” said Billy.  “I’ve got to learn.”  So he finished the boot his own way with wiry determination, breathing and repolishing; and this event was also adjudged a dead heat, with results gratifying to both parties.  So here was their work done, and more money in their pockets than from all the other boots and shoes of this day; and Towhead and Billy did not wish for further trade, but to spend this handsome fortune as soon as might be.  Yet they delayed in the brightness of the window, drawn by curiosity near this new kind of man whose voice held them and whose remarks dropped them into constant uncertainty.  Even the omitted leader had been unable to go away and nurse his pride alone.

“Is that a secret society?” inquired Towhead, lifting a finger at the badge.

Mr. McLean nodded.  “Turruble,” said he.

“You’re a Wells & Fargo detective,” asserted the leader.

“Play your harp,” said Lin.

“Are you a ­a desperaydo?” whispered Towhead.

“Oh, my!” observed Mr. McLean, sadly; “what has our Jack been readin’?”

“He’s a cattle-man!” cried Billy.  “I seen his heels.”

“That’s you!” said the discovered puncher, with approval.  “You’ll do.  But I bet you can’t tell me what we wearers of this badge have sworn to do this night.”

At this they craned their necks and glared at him.

“We ­are ­sworn ­don’t yu’ jump, now, and give me away ­sworn ­to ­blow off three bootblacks to a dinner.”

“Ah, pshaw!” They backed away, bristling with distrust.

“That’s the oath, fellows.  Yu’ may as well make your minds up ­for I have it to do!”

“Dare you to!  Ah!”

“And after dinner it’s the Opera-house, to see ’The Children of Captain Cant’!”

They screamed shrilly at him, keeping off beyond the curb.

“I can’t waste my time on such smart boys,” said Mr. McLean, rising lazily to his full height from the window-sill.  “I am goin’ somewhere to find boys that ain’t so turruble quick stampeded by a roast turkey.”

He began to lounge slowly away, serious as he had been throughout, and they, stopping their noise short, swiftly picked up their boxes, and followed him.  Some change in the current of electricity that fed the window disturbed its sparkling light, so that Santa Claus, with his arms stretched out behind the departing cow-puncher seemed to be smiling more broadly from the midst of his flickering brilliance.

On their way to turkey, the host and his guests exchanged but few remarks.  He was full of good-will, and threw off a comment or two that would have led to conversation under almost any circumstances save these; but the minds of the guests were too distracted by this whole state of things for them to be capable of more than keeping after Mr. McLean in silence, at a wary interval, and with their mouths, during most of the journey, open.  The badge, the pistol, their patron’s talk, and the unusual dollars, wakened wide their bent for the unexpected, their street affinity for the spur of the moment; they believed slimly in the turkey part of it, but what this man might do next, to be there when he did it, and not to be trapped, kept their wits jumping deliciously; so when they saw him stop, they stopped instantly too, ten feet out of reach.  This was Denver’s most civilized restaurant ­that one which Mr. McLean had remembered, with foreign dishes and private rooms, where he had promised himself, among other things, champagne.  Mr. McLean had never been inside it, but heard a tale from a friend; and now he caught a sudden sight of people among geraniums, with plumes and white shirt-fronts, very elegant.  It must have been several minutes that he stood contemplating the entrance and the luxurious couples who went in.

“Plumb French!” he observed at length; and then, “Shucks!” in a key less confident, while his guests ten feet away watched him narrowly.  “They’re eatin’ patty de parley-voo in there,” he muttered, and the three bootblacks came beside him.  “Say, fellows,” said Lin, confidingly, “I wasn’t raised good enough for them dude dishes.  What do yu’ say!  I’m after a place where yu’ can mention oyster stoo without givin’ anybody a fit.  What do yu’ say, boys?”

That lighted the divine spark of brotherhood!

“Ah, you come along with us ­we’ll take yer!  You don’t want to go in there.  We’ll show yer the boss place in Market Street.  We won’t lose yer.”  So, shouting together in their shrill little city trebles, they clustered about him, and one pulled at his coat to start him.  He started obediently, and walked in their charge, they leading the way.

“Christmas is comin’ now, sure,” said Lin, grinning to himself.  “It ain’t exactly what I figured on.”  It was the first time he had laughed since Cheyenne, and he brushed a hand over his eyes, that were dim with the new warmth in his heart.

Believing at length in him and his turkey, the alert street faces, so suspicious of the unknown, looked at him with ready intimacy as they went along; and soon, in the friendly desire to make him acquainted with Denver, the three were patronizing him.  Only Billy, perhaps, now and then stole at him a doubtful look.

The large Country Mouse listened solemnly to his three Town Mice, who presently introduced him to the place in Market Street.  It was not boss, precisely, and Denver knows better neighborhoods; but the turkey and the oyster stew were there, with catsup and vegetables in season, and several choices of pie.  Here the Country Mouse became again efficient; and to witness his liberal mastery of ordering and imagine his pocket and its wealth, which they had heard and partly seen, renewed in the guests a transient awe.  As they dined, however, and found the host as frankly ravenous as themselves, this reticence evaporated, and they all grew fluent with oaths and opinions.  At one or two words, indeed, Mr. McLean stared and had a slight sense of blushing.

“Have a cigarette?” said the leader, over his pie.

“Thank yu’,” said Lin.  “I won’t smoke, if yu’ll excuse me.”  He had devised a wholesome meal, with water to drink.

“Chewin’s no good at meals,” continued the boy.  “Don’t you use tobaccer?”

“Onced in a while.”

The leader spat brightly.  “He ain’t learned yet,” said he, slanting his elbows at Billy and sliding a match over his rump.  “But beer, now ­I never seen anything in it.”  He and Towhead soon left Billy and his callow profanities behind, and engaged in a town conversation that silenced him, and set him listening with all his admiring young might.  Nor did Mr. McLean join in the talk, but sat embarrassed by this knowledge, which seemed about as much as he knew himself.

“I’ll be goshed,” he thought, “if I’d caught on to half that when I was streakin’ around in short pants!  Maybe they grow up quicker now.”  But now the Country Mouse perceived Billy’s eager and attentive apprenticeship.  “Hello, boys!” he said, “that theatre’s got a big start on us.”

They had all forgotten he had said anything about theatre, and other topics left their impatient minds, while the Country Mouse paid the bill and asked to be guided to the Opera-house.  “This man here will look out for your blackin’ and truck, and let yu’ have it in the morning.”

They were very late.  The spectacle had advanced far into passages of the highest thrill, and Denver’s eyes were riveted upon a ship and some icebergs.  The party found its seats during several beautiful lime-light effects, and that remarkable fly-buzzing of violins which is pronounced so helpful in times of peril and sentiment.  The children of Captain Grant had been tracking their father all over the equator and other scenic spots, and now the north pole was about to impale them.  The Captain’s youngest child, perceiving a hummock rushing at them with a sudden motion, loudly shouted, “Sister, the ice is closing in!” and she replied, chastely, “Then let us pray.”  It was a superb tableau:  the ice split, and the sun rose and joggled at once to the zenith.  The act-drop fell, and male Denver, wrung to its religious deeps, went out to the rum-shop.

Of course Mr. McLean and his party did not do this.  The party had applauded exceedingly the defeat of the elements, and the leader, with Towhead, discussed the probable chances of the ship’s getting farther south in the next act.  Until lately Billy’s doubt of the cow-puncher had lingered; but during this intermission whatever had been holding out in him seemed won, and in his eyes, that he turned stealthily upon his unconscious, quiet neighbor, shone the beginnings of hero-worship.

“Don’t you think this is splendid?” said he.

“Splendid,” Lin replied, a trifle remotely.

“Don’t you like it when they all get balled up and get out that way?”

“Humming,” said Lin.

“Don’t you guess it’s just girls, though, that do that?”

“What, young fellow?”

“Why, all that prayer-saying an’ stuff.”

“I guess it must be.”

“She said to do it when the ice scared her, an’ of course a man had to do what she wanted him.”

“Sure.”

“Well, do you believe they’d ‘a’ done it if she hadn’t been on that boat, and clung around an’ cried an’ everything, an’ made her friends feel bad?”

“I hardly expect they would,” replied the honest Lin, and then, suddenly mindful of Billy, “except there wasn’t nothin’ else they could think of,” he added, wishing to speak favorably of the custom.

“Why, that chunk of ice weren’t so awful big anyhow.  I’d ‘a’ shoved her off with a pole.  Wouldn’t you?”

“Butted her like a ram,” exclaimed Mr. McLean.

“Well, I don’t say my prayers any more.  I told Mr. Perkins I wasn’t a-going to, an’ he ­I think he is a flubdub anyway.”

“I’ll bet he is!” said Lin, sympathetically.  He was scarcely a prudent guardian.

“I told him straight, an’ he looked at me an’ down he flops on his knees.  An’ he made ’em all flop, but I told him I didn’t care for them putting up any camp-meeting over me; an’ he says, ‘I’ll lick you,’ an’ I says, ‘Dare you to!’ I told him mother kep’ a-licking me for nothing, an’ I’d not pray for her, not in Sunday-school or anywheres else.  Do you pray much?”

“No,” replied Lin, uneasily.

“There!  I told him a man didn’t, an’ he said then a man went to hell.  ‘You lie; father ain’t going to hell,’ I says, and you’d ought to heard the first class laugh right out loud, girls an’ boys.  An’ he was that mad!  But I didn’t care.  I came here with fifty cents.”

“Yu’ must have felt like a millionaire.”

“Ah, I felt all right!  I bought papers an’ sold ’em, an’ got more an’ saved, ant got my box an’ blacking outfit.  I weren’t going to be licked by her just because she felt like it, an’ she feeling like it most any time.  Lemme see your pistol.”

“You wait,” said Lin.  “After this show is through I’ll put it on you.”

“Will you, honest?  Belt an’ everything?  Did you ever shoot a bear?”

“Lord! lots.”

“Honest?  Silver-tips?”

“Silver-tips, cinnamon, black; and I roped a cub onced.”

“O-h!  I never shot a bear.”

“You’d ought to try it.”

“I’m a-going to.  I’m a-going to camp out in the mountains.  I’d like to see you when you camp.  I’d like to camp with you.  Mightn’t I some time?” Billy had drawn nearer to Lin, and was looking up at him adoringly.

“You bet!” said Lin; and though he did not, perhaps, entirely mean this, it was with a curiously softened face that he began to look at Billy.  As with dogs and his horse, so always he played with what children he met ­the few in his sage-brush world; but this was ceasing to be quite play for him, and his hand went to the boy’s shoulder.

“Father took me camping with him once, the time mother was off.  Father gets awful drunk, too.  I’ve quit Laramie for good.”

Lin sat up, and his hand gripped the boy.  “Laramie!” said he, almost shouting it.  “Yu’ ­yu’ ­is your name Lusk?”

But the boy had shrunk from him instantly.  “You’re not going to take me home?” he piteously wailed.

“Heaven and heavens!” murmured Lin McLean.  “So you’re her kid!”

He relaxed again, down in his chair, his legs stretched their straight length below the chair in front.  He was waked from his bewilderment by a brushing under him, and there was young Billy diving for escape to the aisle, like the cornered city mouse that he was.  Lin nipped that poor little attempt and had the limp Billy seated inside again before the two in discussion beyond had seen anything.  He had said not a word to the boy, and now watched his unhappy eyes seizing upon the various exits and dispositions of the theatre; nor could he imagine anything to tell him that should restore the perished confidence.  “Why did yu’ lead him off?” he asked himself unexpectedly, and found that he did not seem to know; but as he watched the restless and estranged runaway he grew more and more sorrowful.  “I just hate him to think that of me,” he reflected.  The curtain rose, and he saw Billy make up his mind to wait until they should all be going out in the crowd.  While the children of Captain Grant grew hotter and hotter upon their father’s geographic trail, Lin sat saying to himself a number of contradictions.  “He’s nothing to me; what’s any of them to me?” Driven to bay by his bewilderment, he restated the facts of the past.  “Why, she’d deserted him and Lusk before she’d ever laid eyes on me.  I needn’t to bother myself.  He wasn’t never even my step-kid.”  The past, however, brought no guidance.  “Lord, what’s the thing to do about this?  If I had any home ­This is a stinkin’ world in some respects,” said Mr. McLean, aloud, unknowingly.  The lady in the chair beneath which the cow-puncher had his legs nudged her husband.  They took it for emotion over the sad fortune of Captain Grant, and their backs shook.  Presently each turned, and saw the singular man with untamed, wide-open eyes glowering at the stage, and both backs shook again.

Once more his hand was laid on Billy.  “Say!” The boy glanced at him, and quickly away.

“Look at me, and listen.”

Billy swervingly obeyed.

“I ain’t after yu’, and never was.  This here’s your business, not mine.  Are yu’ listenin’ good?”

The boy made a nod, and Lin proceeded, whispering:  “You’ve got no call to believe what I say to yu’ ­yu’ve been lied to, I guess, pretty often.  So I’ll not stop yu’ runnin’ and hidin’, and I’ll never give it away I saw yu’, but yu’ keep doin’ what yu’ please.  I’ll just go now.  I’ve saw all I want, but you and your friends stay with it till it quits.  If yu’ happen to wish to speak to me about that pistol or bears, yu’ come around to Smith’s Palace ­that’s the boss hotel here, ain’t it? ­and if yu’ don’t come too late I’ll not be gone to bed.  But this time of night I’m liable to get sleepy.  Tell your friends good-bye for me, and be good to yourself.  I’ve appreciated your company.”

Mr. McLean entered Smith’s Palace, and, engaging a room with two beds in it, did a little delicate lying by means of the truth.  “It’s a lost boy ­a runaway,” he told the clerk.  “He’ll not be extra clean, I expect, if he does come.  Maybe he’ll give me the slip, and I’ll have a job cut out to-morrow.  I’ll thank yu’ to put my money in your safe.”

The clerk placed himself at the disposal of the secret service, and Lin walked up and down, looking at the railroad photographs for some ten minutes, when Master Billy peered in from the street.

“Hello!” said Mr. McLean, casually, and returned to a fine picture of Pike’s Peak.

Billy observed him for a space, and, receiving no further attention, came stepping along.  “I’m not a-going back to Laramie,” he stated, warningly.

“I wouldn’t,” said Lin.  “It ain’t half the town Denver is.  Well, good-night.  Sorry yu’ couldn’t call sooner ­I’m dead sleepy.”

“O-h!” Billy stood blank.  “I wish I’d shook the darned old show.  Say, lemme black your boots in the morning?”

“Not sure my train don’t go too early.”

“I’m up!  I’m up!  I get around to all of ’em.”

“Where do yu’ sleep?”

“Sleeping with the engine-man now.  Why can’t you put that on me to-night?”

“Goin’ up-stairs.  This gentleman wouldn’t let you go up-stairs.”

But the earnestly petitioned clerk consented, and Billy was the first to hasten into the room.  He stood rapturous while Lin buckled the belt round his scanty stomach, and ingeniously buttoned the suspenders outside the accoutrement to retard its immediate descent to earth.

“Did it ever kill a man?” asked Billy, touching the six-shooter.

“No.  It ain’t never had to do that, but I expect maybe it’s stopped some killin’ me.”

“Oh, leave me wear it just a minute!  Do you collect arrow-heads?  I think they’re bully.  There’s the finest one you ever seen.”  He brought out the relic, tightly wrapped in paper, several pieces.  “I foun’ it myself, camping with father.  It was sticking in a crack right on top of a rock, but nobody’d seen it till I came along.  Ain’t it fine?”

Mr. McLean pronounced it a gem.

“Father an’ me found a lot, an’ they made mother mad laying around, an’ she throwed ’em out.  She takes stuff from Kelley’s.”

“Who’s Kelley?”

“He keeps the drug-store at Laramie.  Mother gets awful funny.  That’s how she was when I came home.  For I told Mr. Perkins he lied, an’ I ran then.  An’ I knowed well enough she’d lick me when she got through her spell ­an’ father can’t stop her, an’ I ­ah, I was sick of it!  She’s lamed me up twice beating me ­an’ Perkins wanting me to say ’God bless my mother!’ a-getting up and a-going to bed ­he’s a flubdub!  An’ so I cleared out.  But I’d just as leaves said for God to bless father ­an’ you.  I’ll do it now if you say it’s any sense.”

Mr. McLean sat down in a chair.  “Don’t yu’ do it now,” said he.

“You wouldn’t like mother,” Billy continued.  “You can keep that.”  He came to Lin and placed the arrow-head in his hands, standing beside him.  “Do you like birds’ eggs?  I collect them.  I got twenty-five kinds ­sage-hen, an’ blue grouse, an’ willow-grouse, an’ lots more kinds harder ­but I couldn’t bring all them from Laramie.  I brought the magpie’s, though.  D’ you care to see a magpie egg?  Well, you stay to-morrow an’ I’ll show you that en’ some other things I got the engine-man lets me keep there, for there’s boys that would steal an egg.  An’ I could take you where we could fire that pistol.  Bet you don’t know what that is!”

He brought out a small tin box shaped like a thimble, in which were things that rattled.

Mr. McLean gave it up.

“That’s kinni-kinnic seed.  You can have that, for I got some more with the engine-man.”

Lin received this second token also, and thanked the giver for it.  His first feeling had been to prevent the boy’s parting with his treasures, but something that came not from the polish of manners and experience made him know that he should take them.  Billy talked away, laying bare his little soul; the street boy that was not quite come made place for the child that was not quite gone, and unimportant words and confidences dropped from him disjointed as he climbed to the knee of Mr. McLean, and inadvertently took that cow-puncher for some sort of parent he had not hitherto met.  It lasted but a short while, however, for he went to sleep in the middle of a sentence, with his head upon Lin’s breast.  The man held him perfectly still, because he had not the faintest notion that Billy would be impossible to disturb.  At length he spoke to him, suggesting that bed might prove more comfortable; and, finding how it was, rose and undressed the boy and laid him between the sheets.  The arms and legs seemed aware of the moves required of them, and stirred conveniently; and directly the head was upon the pillow the whole small frame burrowed down, without the opening of an eye or a change in the breathing.  Lin stood some time by the bedside, with his eyes on the long, curling lashes and the curly hair.  Then he glanced craftily at the door of the room, and at himself in the looking-glass.  He stooped and kissed Billy on the forehead, and, rising from that, gave himself a hangdog stare in the mirror, and soon in his own bed was sleeping the sound sleep of health.

He was faintly roused by the church bells, and lay still, lingering with his sleep, his eyes closed, and his thoughts unshaped.  As he became slowly aware of the morning, the ringing and the light reached him, and he waked wholly, and, still lying quiet, considered the strange room filled with the bells and the sun of the winter’s day.  “Where have I struck now?” he inquired; and as last night returned abruptly upon his mind, he raised himself on his arm.

There sat Responsibility in a chair, washed clean and dressed, watching him.

“You’re awful late,” said Responsibility.  “But I weren’t a-going without telling you good-bye.”

“Go?” exclaimed Lin.  “Go where?  Yu’ surely ain’t leavin’ me to eat breakfast alone?” The cow-puncher made his voice very plaintive.  Set Responsibility free after all his trouble to catch him?  This was more than he could do!

“I’ve got to go.  If I’d thought you’d want for me to stay ­why, you said you was a-going by the early train!”

“But the durned thing’s got away on me,” said Lin, smiling sweetly from the bed.

“If I hadn’t a-promised them ­”

“Who?”

“Sidney Ellis and Pete Goode.  Why, you know them; you grubbed with them.”

“Shucks!”

“We’re a-going to have fun to-day.”

“Oh!”

“For it’s Christmas, an’ we’ve bought some good cigars, an’ Pete says he’ll learn me sure.  O’ course I’ve smoked some, you know.  But I’d just as leaves stayed with you if I’d only knowed sooner.  I wish you lived here.  Did you smoke whole big cigars when you was beginning?”

“Do you like flapjacks and maple syrup?” inquired the artful McLean.  “That’s what I’m figuring on inside twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes!  If they’d wait ­”

“See here, Bill.  They’ve quit expecting yu’, don’t yu’ think?  I’d ought to waked, yu’ see, but I slep’ and slep’, and kep’ yu’ from meetin’ your engagements, yu’ see ­for you couldn’t go, of course.  A man couldn’t treat a man that way now, could he?”

“Course he couldn’t,” said Billy, brightening.

“And they wouldn’t wait, yu’ see.  They wouldn’t fool away Christmas, that only comes onced a year, kickin’ their heels and sayin’ ’Where’s Billy?’ They’d say, ’Bill has sure made other arrangements, which he’ll explain to us at his leesyure.’  And they’d skip with the cigars.”

The advocate paused, effectively, and from his bolster regarded Billy with a convincing eye.

“That’s so,” said Billy.

“And where would yu’ be then, Bill?  In the street, out of friends, out of Christmas, and left both ways, no tobaccer and no flapjacks.  Now, Bill, what do yu’ say to us putting up a Christmas deal together?  Just you and me?”

“I’d like that,” said Billy.  “Is it all day?”

“I was thinkin’ of all day,” said Lin.  “I’ll not make yu’ do anything yu’d rather not.”

“Ah, they can smoke without me,” said Billy, with sudden acrimony.  “I’ll see ’em to-morro’.”

“That’s you!” cried Mr. McLean.  “Now, Bill, you hustle down and tell them to keep a table for us.  I’ll get my clothes on and follow yu’.”

The boy went, and Mr. McLean procured hot water and dressed himself, tying his scarf with great care.  “Wished I’d a clean shirt,” said he.  “But I don’t look very bad.  Shavin’ yesterday afternoon was a good move.”  He picked up the arrow-head and the kinni-kinnic, and was particular to store them in his safest pocket.  “I ain’t sure whether you’re crazy or not,” said he to the man in the looking-glass.  “I ain’t never been sure.”  And he slammed the door and went down-stairs.

He found young Bill on guard over a table for four, with all the chairs tilted against it as warning to strangers.  No one sat at any other table or came into the room, for it was late, and the place quite emptied of breakfasters, and the several entertained waiters had gathered behind Billy’s important-looking back.  Lin provided a thorough meal, and Billy pronounced the flannel cakes superior to flapjacks, which were not upon the bill of fare.

“I’d like to see you often,” said he.  “I’ll come and see you if you don’t live too far.”

“That’s the trouble,” said the cow-puncher.  “I do.  Awful far.”  He stared out of the window.

“Well, I might come some time.  I wish you’d write me a letter.  Can you write?” “What’s that?  Can I write?  Oh yes.”

“I can write, an’ I can read too.  I’ve been to school in Sidney, Nebraska, an’ Magaw, Kansas, an’ Salt Lake ­that’s the finest town except Denver.”

Billy fell into that cheerful strain of comment which, unreplied to, yet goes on contented and self-sustaining, while Mr. McLean gave amiable signs of assent, but chiefly looked out of the window; and when the now interested waiter said respectfully that he desired to close the room, they went out to the office, where the money was got out of the safe and the bill paid.

The streets were full of the bright sun, and seemingly at Denver’s gates stood the mountains sparkling; an air crisp and pleasant wafted from their peaks; no smoke hung among the roofs, and the sky spread wide over the city without a stain; it was holiday up among the chimneys and tall buildings, and down among the quiet ground-stories below as well; and presently from their scattered pinnacles through the town the bells broke out against the jocund silence of the morning.

“Don’t you like music?” inquired Billy.

“Yes,” said Lin.

Ladies with their husbands and children were passing and meeting, orderly yet gayer than if it were only Sunday, and the salutations of Christmas came now and again to the cow-puncher’s ears; but to-day, possessor of his own share in this, Lin looked at every one with a sort of friendly challenge, and young Billy talked along beside him.

“Don’t you think we could go in here?” Billy asked.  A church door was open, and the rich organ sounded through to the pavement.  “They’ve good music here, an’ they keep it up without much talking between.  I’ve been in lots of times.”

They went in and sat to hear the music.  Better than the organ, it seemed to them, were the harmonious voices raised from somewhere outside, like unexpected visitants; and the pair sat in their back seat, too deep in listening to the processional hymn to think of rising in decent imitation of those around them.  The crystal melody of the refrain especially reached their understandings, and when for the fourth time “Shout the glad tidings, exultingly sing,” pealed forth and ceased, both the delighted faces fell.

“Don’t you wish there was more?” Billy whispered.

“Wish there was a hundred verses,” answered Lin.

But canticles and responses followed, with so little talking between them they were held spellbound, seldom thinking to rise or kneel.  Lin’s eyes roved over the church, dwelling upon the pillars in their evergreen, the flowers and leafy wreaths, the texts of white and gold. “‘Peace, good-will towards men,’” he read.  “That’s so.  Peace and good-will.  Yes, that’s so.  I expect they got that somewheres in the Bible.  It’s awful good, and you’d never think of it yourself.”

There was a touch on his arm, and a woman handed a book to him.  “This is the hymn we have now,” she whispered, gently; and Lin, blushing scarlet, took it passively without a word.  He and Billy stood up and held the book together, dutifully reading the words: 

   “It came upon the midnight clear,
        That glorious song of old,
    From angels bending near the earth
        To touch their harps of gold;
    Peace on the earth ­”

This tune was more beautiful than all, and Lin lost himself in it, until he found Billy recalling him with a finger upon the words, the concluding ones: 

   “And the whole world sent back the song
    Which now the angels sing.”

The music rose and descended to its lovely and simple end; and, for a second time in Denver, Lin brushed a hand across his eyes.  He turned his face from his neighbor, frowning crossly; and since the heart has reasons which Reason does not know, he seemed to himself a fool; but when the service was over and he came out, he repeated again, “’Peace and good-will.’  When I run on to the Bishop of Wyoming I’ll tell him if he’ll preach on them words I’ll be there.”

“Couldn’t we shoot your pistol now?” asked Billy.

“Sure, boy.  Ain’t yu’ hungry, though?”

“No.  I wish we were away off up there.  Don’t you?”

“The mountains?  They look pretty, so white!  A heap better ’n houses.  Why, we’ll go there!  There’s trains to Golden.  We’ll shoot around among the foothills.”

To Golden they immediately went, and after a meal there, wandered in the open country until the cartridges were gone, the sun was low, and Billy was walked off his young heels ­a truth he learned complete in one horrid moment, and battled to conceal.

“Lame!” he echoed, angrily.  “I ain’t.”

“Shucks!” said Lin, after the next ten steps.  “You are, and both feet.”

“Tell you, there’s stones here, an’ I’m just a-skipping them.”

Lin, briefly, took the boy in his arms and carried him to Golden.  “I’m played out myself,” he said, sitting in the hotel and looking lugubriously at Billy on a bed.  “And I ain’t fit to have charge of a hog.”  He came and put his hand on the boy’s head.

“I’m not sick,” said the cripple.  “I tell you I’m bully.  You wait an’ see me eat dinner.”

But Lin had hot water and cold water and salt, and was an hour upon his knees bathing the hot feet.  And then Billy could not eat dinner!

There was a doctor in Golden; but in spite of his light prescription and most reasonable observations, Mr. McLean passed a foolish night of vigil, while Billy slept, quite well at first, and, as the hours passed, better and better.  In the morning he was entirely brisk, though stiff.

“I couldn’t work quick to-day,” he said.  “But I guess one day won’t lose me my trade.”

“How d’ yu’ mean?” asked Lin.

“Why, I’ve got regulars, you know.  Sidney Ellis an’ Pete Goode has theirs, an’ we don’t cut each other.  I’ve got Mr. Daniels an’ Mr. Fisher an’ lots, an’ if you lived in Denver I’d shine your boots every day for nothing.  I wished you lived in Denver.”

“Shine my boots?  Yu’ll never!  And yu’ don’t black Daniels or Fisher, or any of the outfit.”

“Why, I’m doing first-rate,” said Billy, surprised at the swearing into which Mr. McLean now burst.  “An’ I ain’t big enough to get to make money at any other job.”

“I want to see that engine-man,” muttered Lin.  “I don’t like your smokin’ friend.”

“Pete Goode?  Why, he’s awful smart.  Don’t you think he’s smart?”

“Smart’s nothin’,” observed Mr. McLean.

“Pete has learned me and Sidney a lot,” pursued Billy, engagingly.

“I’ll bet he has!” growled the cow-puncher; and again Billy was taken aback at his language.

It was not so simple, this case.  To the perturbed mind of Mr. McLean it grew less simple during that day at Golden, while Billy recovered, and talked, and ate his innocent meals.  The cow-puncher was far too wise to think for a single moment of restoring the runaway to his debauched and shiftless parents.  Possessed of some imagination, he went through a scene in which he appeared at the Lusk threshold with Billy and forgiveness, and intruded upon a conjugal assault and battery.  “Shucks!” said he.  “The kid would be off again inside a week.  And I don’t want him there, anyway.”

Denver, upon the following day, saw the little bootblack again at his corner, with his trade not lost; but near him stood a tall, singular man, with hazel eyes and a sulky expression.  And citizens during that week noticed, as a new sight in the streets, the tall man and the little boy walking together.  Sometimes they would be in shops.  The boy seemed as happy as possible, talking constantly, while the man seldom said a word, and his face was serious.

Upon New-year’s Eve Governor Barker was overtaken by Mr. McLean riding a horse up Hill Street, Cheyenne.

“Hello!” said Barker, staring humorously through his glasses.  “Have a good drunk?”

“Changed my mind,” said Lin, grinning.  “Proves I’ve got one.  Struck Christmas all right, though.”

“Who’s your friend?” inquired his Excellency.

“This is Mister Billy Lusk.  Him and me have agreed that towns ain’t nice to live in.  If Judge Henry’s foreman and his wife won’t board him at Sunk Creek ­why, I’ll fix it somehow.”

The cow-puncher and his Responsibility rode on together toward the open plain.

“Sufferin Moses!” remarked his Excellency.