WESTERN CLASSICS - Ultimate Collection: Historical Novels, Wild West Adventures & Action Romance Novels. Owen Wister

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СКАЧАТЬ upon the bluffs, and, descending, merge in the dust their horses had raised. Yet all this was nothing in the vastness of the growing day.

      Beyond their voices the rim of the sun moved above the violet hills, and Drybone, amid the quiet, long, new fields of radiance, stood august and strange.

      Down along the tall, bare slant from the graveyard the two horsemen were riding back. They could be seen across the river, and the horse-racers grew curious. As more and more watched, the crowd began to speak. It was a calf the two were bringing. It was too small for a calf. It was dead. It was a coyote they had roped. See it swing! See it fall on the road!

      "It's a coffin, boys!" said one, shrewd at guessing.

      At that the event of last night drifted across their memories, and they wheeled and spurred their ponies. Their crowding hoofs on the bridge brought the swimmers from the waters below and, dressing, they climbed quickly to the plain and followed the gathering. By the door already were Jerky Bill and Limber Jim and the Doughie and always more, dashing up with their ponies; halting with a sharp scatter of gravel to hear and comment. Barker was gone, but the important coroner told his news. And it amazed each comer, and set him speaking and remembering past things with the others. "Dead!" each one began. "Her, does he say?"

      "Why, pshaw!"

      "Why, Frenchy said Doc had her cured!"

      Jack Saunders claimed she had rode to Box Elder with Lin McLean. "Dead? Why, pshaw!"

      "Seems Doc couldn't swim her out."

      "Couldn't swim her out?"

      "That's it. Doc couldn't swim her out."

      "Well—there's one less of us."

      "Sure! She was one of the boys."

      "She grub-staked me when I went broke in '84."

      "She gave me fifty dollars onced at Lander, to buy a saddle."

      "I run agin her when she was a biscuit-shooter."

      "Sidney, Nebraska. I run again her there, too."

      "I knowed her at Laramie."

      "Where's Lin? He knowed her all the way from Bear Creek to Cheyenne."

      They laughed loudly at this.

      "That's a lonesome coffin," said the Doughie. "That the best you could do?"

      "You'd say so!" said Toothpick Kid.

      "Choices are getting scarce up there," said Chalkeye. "We looked the lot over."

      They were arriving from their search among the old dug-up graves on the hill. Now they descended from their ponies, with the box roped and rattling between them. "Where's your hearse, Jerky?" asked Chalkeye.

      "Have her round in a minute," said the cowboy, and galloped away with three or four others.

      "Turruble lonesome coffin, all the same," repeated the Doughie. And they surveyed the box that had once held some soldier.

      "She did like fixin's," said Limber Jim.

      "Fixin's!" said Toothpick Kid. "That's easy."

      While some six of them, with Chalkeye, bore the light, half-rotted coffin into the room, many followed Toothpick Kid to the post-trader's store. Breaking in here, they found men sleeping on the counters. These had been able to find no other beds in Drybone, and lay as they had stretched themselves on entering. They sprawled in heavy slumber, some with not even their hats taken off and some with their boots against the rough hair of the next one. They were quickly pushed together, few waking, and so there was space for spreading cloth and chintz. Stuffs were unrolled and flung aside till many folds and colors draped the motionless sleepers, and at length a choice was made. Unmeasured yards of this drab chintz were ripped off, money treble its worth was thumped upon the counter, and they returned, bearing it like a streamer to the coffin. While the noise of their hammers filled the room, the hearse came tottering to the door, pulled and pushed by twenty men. It was an ambulance left behind by the soldiers, and of the old-fashioned shape, concave in body, its top blown away in winds of long ago; and as they revolved, its wheels dished in and out like hoops about to fall. While some made a harness from ropes, and throwing the saddles off two ponies backed them to the vehicle, the body was put in the coffin, now covered by the chintz. But the laudanum upon the front of her dress revolted those who remembered their holidays with her, and turning the woman upon her face, they looked their last upon her flashing, colored ribbons, and nailed the lid down. So they carried her out, but the concave body of the hearse was too short for the coffin; the end reached out, and it might have fallen. But Limber Jim, taking the reins, sat upon the other end, waiting and smoking. For all Drybone was making ready to follow in some way. They had sought the husband, the chief mourner. He, however, still lay in the grass of the quadrangle, and despising him as she had done, they left him to wake when he should choose. Those men who could sit in their saddles rode escort, the old friends nearest, and four held the heads of the frightened cow-ponies who were to draw the hearse. They had never known harness before, and they plunged with the men who held them. Behind the hearse the women followed in a large ranch-wagon, this moment arrived in town. Two mares drew this, and their foals gambolled around them. The great flat-topped dray for hauling poles came last, with its four government mules. The cow-boys had caught sight of it and captured it. Rushing to the post-trader's, they carried the sleeping men from the counter and laid them on the dray. Then, searching Drybone outside and in for any more incapable of following, they brought them, and the dray was piled.

      Limber Jim called for another drink and, with his cigar between his teeth, cracked his long bull-whacker whip. The ponies, terrified, sprang away, scattering the men that held them, and the swaying hearse leaped past the husband, over the stones and the many playing-cards in the grass. Masterfully steered, it came safe to an open level, while the throng cheered the unmoved driver on his coffin, his cigar between his teeth.

      "Stay with it, Jim!" they shouted. "You're a king!"

      A steep ditch lay across the flat where he was veering, abrupt and nearly hidden; but his eye caught the danger in time, and swinging from it leftward so that two wheels of the leaning coach were in the air, he faced the open again, safe, as the rescue swooped down upon him. The horsemen came at the ditch, a body of daring, a sultry blast of youth. Wheeling at the brink, they turned, whirling their long ropes. The skilful nooses flew, and the ponies, caught by the neck and foot, were dragged back to the quadrangle and held in line. So the pageant started the wild ponies quivering but subdued by the tightened ropes, and the coffin steady in the ambulance beneath the driver. The escort, in their fringed leather and broad hats, moved slowly beside and behind it, many of them swaying, their faces full of health, and the sun and the strong drink. The women followed, whispering a little; and behind them the slow dray jolted, with its heaps of men waking from the depths of their whiskey and asking what this was. So they went up the hill. When the riders reached the tilted gate of the graveyard, they sprang off and scattered among the hillocks, stumbling and eager. They nodded to Barker and McLean, quietly waiting there, and began choosing among the open, weather-drifted graves from which the soldiers had been taken. Their figures went up and down the uneven ridges, calling and comparing.

      "Here," said the Doughie, "here's a good hole."

      "Here's a deep one," said another.

      "We've struck a well here," said some more. "Put her in here."

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