Page:The Black Cat v01no02 (1895-11).pdf/4

2 Billy Owen was not analytical. He did not go back any farther than his love for a woman as the representative cause of the present effect. The spirit of his ancestors, trained to conquest and struggle, had suffered a taint in the far gone years, and he had become the son of an uncertain race. There were men of them rude in virtue as well as strength, and men of them branded with a shifting eye and hunted step. Billy had always had his pleasure with a gun in his hand until these wondrous twelve months of his knowledge of Rudy. That that slight person had no acquaintance with the manner of his former life was due to the respect in which Billy held her. For himself, he couldn't get rid of a troublesome pride when he called up the men—the brakemen, and engineers, and inflated conductors—who had backed away from the steel-ringed mouth of his Colt, his Betty. And the brakemen, and engineers, and inflated conductors who hadn't backed away, and whom Betty had spat at, gave him almost more pride than the treasures he had borne off from under their bodies. But a man must be capering to more than one tune if he's to dance in the open all of his life, so Billy had been giving his later days to the panning for gold in secluded spots of the California Sierras; and the first Sunday that he had lent to the village and set apart for the play had been taken by Rudy! He remembered it all very clearly. He had been so careful to shave. Men must remember a moustache of straw color that brought out the steel in his small gray eyes. He had not changed his working dress, for a knife slips down a yawning boot-leg, and a flannel shirt yields best to one's muscles in motion. A hat with a brim was given of the gods, and Billy had drunk of the air and the anticipation, and sauntered with carelessness into the street. Painted beer by the geyserful spouted from pictured mugs at his every footfall, but he delayed that detail of his social duty until he should have been invited, and continued his march. It had seemed to him queer that the street was so empty. Only occasional men swung in and out of saloon doors, and the rival hotel chairs rested wholly idle. But it was not long before he found the cause. A little paint-blistered church sat around the corner, and its open doors had swallowed almost the entire populace. It seemed waiting for more while the thin notes of its rejoicing bell chased each