Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/94

 A ROUGH RIDER.

By F. J. McHENRY.

IDN'T know Jake Hodge, stranger?"

There was an unspeakable contempt in the speaker's voice, evidently caused by my lack of knowledge of Osage country's greatest celebrity. Said lack was 'excused only after I had explained that I was recently from the East. Owing to my rough dress, it is fair to presume that I had been taken for one indigenous to the plains. A consummation I had devoutly wished for, owing to the remembrance of a startling incident on a previous visit four years before, on which occasion I had heard the crack of a pistol and a bullet whizzing past my head, which proved to be an emphatic, if not a very pleasant, way of a coterie of cowboys of reminding me that the denizens of the plains drew the line at silk tiles. So, at least, the fat Jew had explained, who immediately after the shot yanked me bodily into his store hard by, and sold me for six dollars and four bits a slouch hat that would not have sold for the four-bit por- tion of that sum in the effete East.

It was on that first trip that I had met Jake Hodge, ex-cowboy, and at that period the proud handler of the ribbons over four spanking horses that took the tri-weekly stage bowling out of D. City to Cotton- wood, fifty miles south, on the Cimmaron.

Jake was a character in his way, for while, as a matter of course, he was of that rough exterior naturally engendered by his surroundings, nevertheless he was at heart a pretty good fellow, and that, too, notwithstanding that he had been, in the parlance of the plains, "a tin-horn gambler." The most formidable oath he was ever known to use, when angered by one of the male persuasion, was, "You dog- goned dadbusted son of a sea cook." After having delivered himself thus, he acted as if the person addressed had been placed in the lowest category imaginable, and never, even though he stood six feet one in his stockings, with a proportionately Herculean frame, was he ever looked upon as having, in plains parlance, "a big plenty of fight in him." He used to say himself, "I'd ruther eat three square meals a day