The Exile of The Lariat/Chapter 2

HEN, after many weeks, the awful god of the cave had been rendered harmless, the two men packed up the best of the ancient weapons and pottery and sent these up the wall to the camp. The cases containing the triceratops were too heavy to handle thus and were destined to remain in the cave until spring, when the river would be hospitable to the idea of transporting them. They drew on Red Wolf’s help, however, in working out a crude trail down to the river from the cave opening. This took many days of hard toil.

It was late March when the camp was broken and the start was made for Fort Sioux, the freight wagon loaded with the boxes of weapons and pottery.

The snows were disappearing from the plains, though they were still heavy along the canyon edge. Spring was in the air, if not under foot, on the last day of the trip and Hugh found himself unexpectedly eager to reach the warmth and comfort of Fort Sioux, eager for the physical comfort of home, but dreading in a wordless way the reaction of Jessie to his wonderful three months’ work. However, it would be highly appreciated in New York if it was not in Fort Sioux, thought Hugh, his mouth twisting slightly as he thought of Jessie’s inevitable comment:

“Gee whiz! It’s like being married to the keeper of a cemetery!”

It was mid-morning and he wanted to make Fort Sioux that night. Ten miles of sandy road. He settled to this last lap of the journey with dogged determination. All day long the road appeared and disappeared over the rolling yellow plains like quicksilver. Purple peaks appeared at intervals, towered for a time against the horizon, then dropped away. Now and again lone eagles wandered through the violet sky.

They stopped for a very short noon rest at the government wells, then urged the tired horses on. A long sun drenched afternoon, and then toward sundown a startling glimpse again of the canyon in which floated the opalescent clouds of spring. The road seemed to drop into the canyon with utter finality. But Hugh spurred Fossil to the brink without hesitation. This was the old home trail, corkscrewing down and down into the tremendous gash. He waited for the teams to come up to him, eyeing as he did so the black line of the river on the far level floor beneath, and beyond the river, backed solidly against the turreted wall of the canyon, the little town of red-roofed houses, with toy trains on toy tracks weaving in and out among the buildings.

It was Fort Sioux and home. Home! Hugh grunted as he uttered the word Home—Jessie—his mother-in-law. But, at any rate, there was Uncle Bookie. The lead team came up and Hugh took the dropping trail.

Fort Sioux! A frontier town, treeless, wind-swept, lonely as the sky. A single, long, sandy street bordered by dreary frame buildings The dark river rushing harshly behind the street.

The inhabitants, of course, boasted much of the little town,—particularly the male inhabitants. Part of this was sincere. They really considered Fort Sioux the center of the universe and an admirable center, too. But part of their boasting was a protective armor donned to offset the attacks of the Woman’s Club, which, led by Hugh’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Pink Morgan, had been bent on cleaning Fort Sioux, parking it, paving it, lighting it and otherwise making it a comfortable place in which to live. It takes a solid front of complacency to withstand the attacks of a woman's club, but the men of Fort Sioux were solid to the core.

Hugh and his Uncle Bookie, however, could not be accounted as a part of these shock troops, although they were citizens of the little town. Hugh saw Fort Sioux only as a shipping point for dinosaurs, and Bookie saw its true beauty. To Bookie, the lonely town included in its environs not only the ugly streets and the hideous dwellings but the canyon walls that hemmed it in and the wide plains above and the sweeping freedom of the sky.

Bookie knew that, after all, no town, however lovely, could bear comparison with the architecture of that canyon wall. He knew that no people, however fine, could seem as fine as the free ardor of that rushing river. Yet from the window of his book store, Bookie saw the life of the little town as a panorama of exceeding brilliancy and beauty.

Space, color, wide winds and mellow sun, dust of bellowing herds, shouting cowmen, the smell of leather and horse sweat, the clamor of the locomotive shops, the shriek of transcontinental trains, the rush of Indian ponies urged by unsmiling braves, tourists. Fording up to Bookie’s Dude Ranch, fossil hunters, packing prehistoric burdens, and always the unremitting uproar of the river.

Bookie was standing at his window, the window of the Lariat Book Shop, when Hugh led his precious train across the bridge and up the street to the railroad corral. Hugh waved to him in passing The old man’s face, not Jessie’s, would give him his true home-coming. After all, a man must find that look of home somewhere, or be no better than a beast with only a lair, Hugh thought as he turned the freight over to Fred’s careful hands and trotted back to The Lariat.

It was dusk and Bookie had lighted the lamp. He came forward as the young man entered.

“Well, Hughie, welcome back!” he exclaimed.

Hugh grasped the old man’s hands “Uncle Bookie,” he cried, “I’ve had a wonderful trip!”

“You cleaned out the cave, Hughie?”

“Yes, Uncle Bookie! You don’t really mind, do you?”

Bookie looked into Hugh’s eager face with a wistful earnestness, shrugged his shoulders slightly and said finally, “Sit down and let me look at you. There is plenty of time before supper.”

Hugh smiled, perched on the counter and proceeded to light his pipe. Then he returned the old man’s gaze, the little smile of affection continuing to hover around his fine mouth. There was no face in the world that held quite the place in Hugh’s heart that did Bookie’s.

“How’s business here, Uncle Bookie?” Hugh asked after a moment.

“I’ve sold three or four books this winter,” replied Bookie, with a little air of defiance.

“I dare you to name ’em,” grinned Hugh.

“O I sold ’em all right enough,” insisted Bookie, “only I get careless in my sales records, sometimes.”

A ruddy man of sixty strolled in at the open door in time to hear this statement.

“What you need is a wife, Bookie,” he snarled. He spat into the stove. “Some one to keep your accounts. Some one to make you shave every week whether you need it or not. Some one to keep tabs on your tobacco money, some one to hide your old boots on you, some one”

Bookie interrupted. “Must have been trouble at the Indian Massacre, Pink. Aren’t you going to say hello to your son-in-law?”

“Hello, Hughie! Glad you’re back. You can fight your own battles now.”

“The trouble couldn’t have been about me, Pink!” Hugh shrugged derisively.

“Trouble!” snorted the landlord of the Indian Massacre Hotel. “It wasn’t what you’d call trouble. It was the spring inventory of you and me. Kind of a round-up and a thorough overhauling of the stock, including dehorning, delousing, vaccination and a forced sale.”

“How did it end?” asked Bookie, not without a slightly anxious glance at Hugh.

“They sent me over to bring you two to supper. It all started when they see Hughie come along the street with another one of those damned loads of dead junk. The missis is all worked into a lather again.”

“What did Jessie say?” asked Hugh.

“Mighty little, as far as that goes,” replied Jessie’s father. “I don’t understand Jessie. Never did. Sometimes I think she’s entirely under her mother’s thumb.Sometimes seems like she never was under anybody’s thumb. One thing is certain. She and her mother agree that Hughie and I ain’t any good.”

“Do they clump you and Hughie together, as carelessly as that?” asked Bookie, sardonically.

“Well, I don’t see why not,” returned Pink, belligerently. “I don’t see that Hughie is making much more of a fist of things than me. For all the boasting you used to do about him.”

“This is what I call a warm welcome home.” Hugh’s smile was sadder than it was resentful.

“O I ain’t criticizing you!” exclaimed Pink, quickly.“I’m just showing a fellow feeling for you. Which I call being broad-minded.”

“Broad-minded?” queried Hugh.

“Sure. You ain’t exactly making a success of it with Jessie, are you, Hughie?”

“If Jessie would try to understand my point of view, things would go better,” replied his son-in-law.

“Listen, Hughie, don’t you look down on Jessie,” said Pink. “Don’t you think of yourself as brainier than she is. Because I’m telling you, you’re wrong. She gets brain from both sides of the house.”

Bookie gave a sudden shout of laughter. “Poor Jessie!” he exclaimed.

He dropped a chunk of soft coal in at the top of the heater, put the lid on carefully, then looking from Hugh to Pink Morgan he said in a tone of indescribable derision:

“Marriage!”

“I’d rather be an Is than a Never Has Been,” returned Pink. “At least Hugh and I had the nerve to undertake what you’ve always run from.”

“Come on” Hugh slipped from the counter “Let’s go to supper and be done with it.”

Pink, with a groan, followed the two tall figures out of the store. The Indian Massacre, a ramshackle two-story frame building, was directly across the sandy street. The three stamped over the porch and in at the open door. The dining room, containing a single long table, was to the left of the office. Mrs. Morgan was sitting behind the coffee pot, but Hugh led his cohort firmly into the room.

“Good evening, Mrs. Morgan,” he said.

“Good evening, Hughie. Jessie and I had given you up.”

“I was making up for lost time with Uncle Bookie,” returned Hugh, slipping into the seat farthest from his mother-in-law and helping himself to cold beef and fried potatoes. Mrs. Morgan looked him over with a mingling of irritation and affection in her eyes—the irritation finally dominating. She was slender, with a small face that was pretty, despite the thin firmness of her lips. Her hair was light brown and her eyes were light brown and her skin was lightly tanned as the skin of even the most careful Fort Sioux woman had to be. She had an eager, darting way of looking about her. There were fine, nervous lines about her thin lips, and her chin came to a sharp little point.

“Jessie hasn’t seen you yet, has she?” asked Mrs. Morgan.

“I’ve only been home an hour,” protested Hugh.

Bookie chuckled. “Huh! First apology. You’re gone up, Hughie I’ve noticed that as long as you refuse to apologize to Mrs. Pink she can’t get a hand hold. But you’ve made an awful break, boy!”

“Right! She’ll have you hog-tied in ten minutes, Hughie,” grunted Pink.

Mrs Morgan turned on her husband abruptly. “There you go as usual! No sense of the fitness of things. Poor Jessie!”

“Poor Jessie, why?” asked Jessie, suddenly, from the door.

She was what one likes the western type of woman to be. Tall and strong, with fine shoulders and slim thighs. Strength in the splendid neck and strength rather than beauty in the cleanly chiseled face. Perhaps in her perfect strength there was beauty. Who can say? At least her eyes were beautiful—eyes, blue, violet, gray, black; eyes with shadows in the corners, with humor in the lifting lids, with courage and daring in the direct and heart-searching force of her listening gaze. Her hair was lovely, too, blond masses of it wrapped about her head. Yet it was the strength of Jessie that remained with you rather than her points of beauty.

Hugh went over to the door and kissed her cheek. “How are you, Jessie?” he asked

“Very well, Hughie,” she replied casually. “Why were you saying, ‘Poor Jessie,’ Mother?”

“She’s sorry you can’t chew and swaller, same as old Bookie does,” grunted Pink.

“There you go again, Pink Morgan!” cried his wife. “No sense of refinement nor fitness!”

“Refinement!” ejaculated Pink. “No! I ain’t got a refined hair in my head, and I’m proud of it. It’s bad enough to be running the Indian Massacre. On the day some one accuses me of being refined too, I’ll get me a job on the old ranch, roping steers.”

Mrs Morgan tossed her head. “What I’m sorry for Jessie for, is that she’s got a husband without any ambition. Hugh is the smartest young man in Fort Sioux country and the nicest and best liked. And he’s wasting his life being coroner on a lot of beasts that died the Lord knows when.”

“Mrs Morgan, I wish you wouldn’t go into that again,” exclaimed Hugh. “I tell you frankly that I’m sick of your nagging at me.”

His mother-in-law, her cheeks flaming, leaned over the coffee pot. “There’s a chance right now for you to break into the Democratic party that will never come again. I want you to go to the legislature I can have all the women’s clubs of Wyoming back of you. I’m going to be next president of the state federation, see if I’m not!”

Pink groaned, took a huge bite of pie and winked at Bookie. Jessie leaned indolently against the doorpost, her eyes on Hugh.

Bookie smiled grimly. “Hughie,” he said, “you might as well give in. The women in this state run the schools, run the politics and have got all the married men roped and hobbled. But I warn you now, Pink, that the day your wife becomes the governor of Wyoming, I’m going to move to Boston.”

“She won’t run for governor,” declared Pink.

“What’s to prevent her?” Bookie glanced derisively at Mrs. Morgan, who was darting quick glances from himself to her husband and to Hugh.

“In the first place, she’d have to have some men back of her, and she don’t know how to handle men. In the second place, I’d shoot her and myself before I’d be the husband of a woman in office.”

“It’s a pity you quit riding herd, Pink. You were a man then,” said Bookie.

Pink snorted indignantly. “You don’t call a fellow that herds books for a living a regular man, do you?”

Hugh and Bookie burst into laughter. Jessie smiled slowly, her eyes still on Hugh.

“Well!” ejaculated Mrs. Pink, “if you men have finished insulting me, I’ll go on to say that I think Jessie is justified in taking any step—any, if Hugh keeps on refusing to do any of the things she wants him to do.”

Hugh jumped to his feet. “Jessie, once and for all, I demand of you that you keep your mother out of our affairs.”

“Well,” returned Jessie slowly, “it’s good some one takes an interest in our affairs. It’s sure that you don’t.”

“I take an interest in my work. It was my work when you married me. A wife marries a man’s work as well as she marries him. You’ve known me all my life. I’ve never had any interest in any line of work but paleontology. I never will have. Unless you can be contented with my profession, you haven’t a chance in the world to be contented with me. My work is me.”

“You don’t need to be so frightfully irritable about it, do you?” asked Jessie.

Hugh paused, obviously gathering himself together with an effort. The others watched him with concentrated interest. His long jaw was set. He took a turn up and down the dining room and then said, sadly:

“You all heckle me so! Jessie, if you won’t understand, at least you might have faith in my knowing what I’m doing. I thought that was part of being a wife. To have faith in a man.”

Jessie’s face softened a little. She shook her head ruefully “The same old story!” she said. “Hughie always talking us out of our critical attitude without in the least convincing us that we are wrong and he’s right.”

“I’m not going to let him soft-soap me, this time!” declared his mother-in-law.

Hugh’s expression was half indignant, half bewildered “I certainly wouldn’t take the trouble to soft-soap you!” he retorted

“I’ve a question to ask that I hope won’t offend any body,” said Bookie. “I’ve often wondered why Jessie, since she hasn’t any family, doesn’t do something with her time besides ride horses and read novels?”

“What would you expect me to do, Uncle Bookie?” asked Jessie, lazily.

“Me? O I’m too old to have any expectations about human nature,” replied the old man. “I just wondered if real work on your part might not give Hugh a different impression of your criticisms.”

Jessie stared at Bookie. Then she turned to Hugh. “Is that so, Hughie?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied indifferently. And he picked up his hat and went out.

Fred gave him his breakfast the next morning and shortly after eight o’clock Hugh strolled thoughtfully into the book store.

Fort Sioux, of course, was no place for a book store. Everybody knows that a small town does not support a book store comfortably even in the east, and that the hopelessness of a book store in a small town increases as we move westward. Sometimes even a westerner will admit that frontier states are not book-absorbing states.

Bookie Smith had always had one consuming ambition. He had wanted to keep a book store in Boston. His mother had been a New England woman who, after thirty years on the plains, wept when she saw a post-card of Boston Common; which might account for a part of Bookie’s obsession. But whatever the impelling motive, at fifty, Bookie leased his outfit to an eastern hotel man for a dude ranch and bought Pink Morgan’s poolroom in Fort Sioux. Pink became landlord of the Indian Massacre Hotel.

There was a large window at either end of the poolroom. The roof was ceiled with metal, stamped in a design of cupids. Bookie made tall stack bookcases with which to line the walls. There were miles of shelves in the store. When he brought down from the ranch his thousand volumes of what not, the shelves swallowed them at a mouthful.

He placed a huge, airtight heater in the rear of the room with a very large brass cuspidor in front of it. The cuspidor was distinctly an æsthetic touch, for the cowman uses the stove when he uses anything. Near the front door he placed a small counter with a large cash register near the window end. He put three or four comfortable wooden chairs around the stove and painted a sign on the front window—The Lariat Book Store. J. H. Smith, Prop. He then sent to eastern publishers for their catalogs and opened the door for business.

He had done all this the year he had sent Hugh to the University at Laramie. He had made an excellent cowboy of Hugh. He wanted him ultimately to be president of the United States. If there had been the office of president of the world, Bookie would have destined Hugh for that, with a complete conviction of his foster child’s fitness for the job.

Bookie was scowling over a dog-eared account book when Hugh came in.

“I just can’t find where I set down those sales,” he said. “The dude trade’ll be opening up now and I’ve got to know where I stand.”

Hugh chuckled and perched on the counter, looking about the store with an air of humorous content. This was home.

“Uncle Bookie,” he said, “I want to ask you as one old timer to another, did any one ever get up courage to use the brass cuspidor?”

Bookie gave the question careful consideration. “I think once Johnny Parnell tried it when he thought I wasn’t looking. I’m not sure, and I wouldn’t want to accuse him wrongly.”

Both men grinned and turned to look as the door opened, and a gust of fine sand blew in, followed by old Red Wolf.

“What are you trading today, Red Wolf?” asked Bookie.

The Indian pulled a pair of moccasins from his pocket. Bookie gave the beaded footgear a cursory glance and shook his head.

“I’ve told you forty times, Red Wolf, I want the kind of bead work the squaws learned from their grandmothers and not the kind the missionaries teach them.”

“That’s good. My girl made ’em!” protested Red Wolf.

“I don’t care who made it. She got chamois skin and beads at the Ten Cent Store in Cheyenne and a design off a Pullman carpet. I want buckskin and real Indian designs, like the bucks wore when you and I were young. Rabbit tracks in the snow, eagles flying. You know, Red Wolf.”

“They won’t make ’em,” said the Indian dejectedly.

“O go on and swap with him, Uncle Bookie!” exclaimed Hugh. “You’re being artistic in restraint of trade!”

His uncle smiled, took a fresh bit of plug and went over to a row of shop-worn books. He handed a copy of Keats’ poems, bound in bright red, to the Indian. Red Wolf glanced eagerly through the pages, then shook his head.

“No good. No pictures,” he said.

“There, you see, Hugh! He wants the same thing in books that I want in bead work. Here, choose for yourself, Red Wolf.”

The Indian moved to the shelf with alacrity. The door swung open again and a broad, ruddy young man clanked in. He wore a sombrero, short leather coat and angora chaps Silver spurs rang as he clanked down the room.

“Hello, Hughie Stewart!” he roared.

“Hello, Johnny Parnell!” returned Hughie.

“Say, Bookie, have you got a new western story?” asked Johnny, in a voice that could be heard to the top of the canyon.

“Yes. Roping ’Em. On the shelf by the window. How’s everything up at the ranch?”

“Much as usual. First bunch of dudes for the season coming today,” Johnny groaned.

“Why don’t you go to work at a regular job?” asked Bookie. “Why should a real cowman like you want to make a living riding herd on a lot of dudes?”

Johnny groaned again. “I often wonder that very thing myself, Bookie. Guess what I need to make a man of me is a wife. Couldn’t locate one for me, could you Bookie?”

“I might,” admitted Bookie.

“Be sure you pick one that can earn her own living,” grinned Johnny. “I can support myself but only a little over. I’ve got to have one of these here new women. Not one of these lazy beauties like Jess. I’ll bet you pay a luxury tax on her, eh, Hughie?”

“Jess is all right,” said Hugh.

Johnny tossed him a quick look. “You don’t have to tell me that, Hughie. I knew it before you did. You’re sure that’s a western story, Bookie? I don’t read any other kind.”

“Why not?” asked Bookie

“Well, being foreman on a dude ranch like I am, I get homesick for real western life. So as soon as the dudes begin to come in, I begin to load up on western novels. And every once in a while, I find a writer that don’t mount his horse from the right side!”

His listeners laughed with him. Bookie wrapped the volume, the cash register rang and Johnny clanked out. A moment later he flashed by the window on a rearing horse. Bookie watched a squaw herd a bunch of scraggly Indian ponies toward the railroad corral, then he sauntered back to the stove.

“Have you found anything you want, Red Wolf?” he asked.

The Indian, who was gazing delightedly into a large book which he had opened to a full-page illustration, grunted assent. It was a cheap and worn edition of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Doré.

“Those pictures will make you squirm, all right,” smiled Bookie.

The Indian nodded soberly. “Show ’em to the squaws. Scare ’em to death.” He buttoned the book under his mackinaw and went out softly.

“I’ll be off again tomorrow or next day, Uncle Bookie. I had a request from England this morning for a brontosaur”

“Are you going to leave things up in the air with Jessie?” asked the older man.

“How can I do otherwise? She’s too brainless to argue with.”

Bookie shook his head. “Jessie has a brain She’s lazy-minded, that’s all. I didn’t want you to marry her, I’ll admit, but it wasn’t that I had anything in particular against Jessie, as I’ve told you fifty times. A boy of twenty-two has no business to marry if he’s a growing man. And you were that. Not that I’m knocking Jessie, either. She’s got a lot to her, but you don’t seem able to bring it out.”

“Well, where does it all lead to?” sighed Hugh.

The older man did not answer. He turned from watching Hugh, to the window where beyond the locomotive shops rose the mighty red wall of the canyon, weathered and buttressed into shapes of exceeding strength and beauty. After his gaze had swept from base to summit, he turned, and diving under the shelf, he brought up a slab of rock which he slid carefully onto the counter. Hugh stared at it, then examined it minutely, scarcely seeming to breathe as he did so.

“By Jove, it might be the skin of a trachodon! Where did you get it, Uncle Bookie?”

“A young Sioux brought it in this winter. I swapped him an illustrated copy of Gulliver's Travels for it. He wouldn’t tell me where he found it. You’ll have to get that information through old Red Wolf. All I hope is that it’s near enough to Fort Sioux so you won’t have to be gone long to dig it up.”

Hugh, suddenly roused from his absorption in the fossil by a certain drop in the old man’s voice, turned and repeated thoughtfully, “You hope I won’t have to be gone long to dig it up? Why do you say that, Uncle Bookie?”

Bookie smiled but did not reply.

Hugh took a turn or two up and down the room. Then he paused and put a long, sinewy brown hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Uncle Bookie, you’re lonely.”

“Well, supposing I am! Most people are, as I’ve said before. You are lonely yourself.”

“No man is entirely lonely who loves his work as I do mine.” Hugh still scrutinized the older man’s brown eyes.

“I doubt if you love your dinosaurs any more than I do my books.”

“Oh, books!” exclaimed Hugh in his gently modulated voice. “Books! Just paper and print, all of them! Me, I live with the giants. While you are conning old fairy tales, I’m actually resurrecting the past. I’m making dead ages live again. I’m a magician whose magic you can put your hand on and feel.”

“Perhaps!” Bookie smiled “But I’m consorting with the great thinkers of all ages.”

Hugh dropped his hand from his foster uncle’s shoulder and walked back to look at the river from the rear window. It was brimming its banks, but its overflow was done for the year. An airplane dropped to the canyon floor west of the river.

“The mail is early today,” said Bookie.

Hugh did not hear him. “I have the feeling,” he said without turning from the window, “that I’m making a mighty poor return to you for all you’ve done for me. You supported me from the time I was ten until I finished college. I married against your wishes. You’re dissatisfied with my profession. And it hurts me.”

“A man has a right to choose his own work and his own wife,” replied Bookie. “You’ll have to put up with my growling. I’m like any other old hen with one chicken.”

Hugh glanced at the cot back of the stove where Bookie slept. “I think I’ll move another cot in here, Uncle Bookie, and stay with you between trips.”

The older man shook his head. “It will just cause talk, and anyhow, I’m not lonely that way. Mine’s just the loneliness of one kind of old age. The loneliness of looking back at wasted years and forward to—nothing. You stay with Jessie.” He paused and shook his head. “You young fellows of this generation are ruining your women. My generation of women was worth twenty of yours. We were all pioneers and we expected the women to work as hard as we did. And they rose to the scratch. They were wonders! Why, even Mrs. Morgan in her younger days up on the old Bar X did the work of three people. And even now, in spite of all her faults, she’s a dray horse for work. But this new generation of town women that you fellows keep in idleness—Huh! You get about what you deserve for your softness!”

“You’d better let me move in with you,” repeated Hugh. “I have a feeling that you don’t look well.”

“Any man unlucky enough to survive the grub at the Indian Massacre for ten years has a right not to look well,” retorted Bookie. “You stay with your wife. A generation ago you wouldn’t have thought of leaving her. You’d have needed her work too much. Go on up and take a look at the new bone ranch. I know you’re honing for it.”

Hugh, curiously enough Bookie thought, went out reluctantly.