WESTERN CLASSICS - Ultimate Collection: Historical Novels, Wild West Adventures & Action Romance Novels. Owen Wister
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McLean spoke to Barker. "I'd like to stop this," said he, "but a man might as well—"
"Might as well stop a cloud-burst," said Barker.
"Yes, Doc. But it feels—it feels like I was looking at ten dozen Lin McLeans." And seeing them still helpless with Chalkeye, he joined them and lifted the cow-boy out.
"I think," said Slaghammer, stepping forward, "this should proceed no further without some—perhaps some friend would recite 'Now I lay me?"'
"They don't use that on funerals," said the Doughie.
"Will some gentleman give the Lord's Prayer?" inquired the coroner.
Foreheads were knotted; triad mutterings ran among them; but some one remembered a prayer book in one of the rooms in Drybone, and the notion was hailed. Four mounted, and raced to bring it. They went down the hill in a flowing knot, shirts ballooning and elbows flapping, and so returned. But the book was beyond them. "Take it, you; you take it," each one said. False beginnings were made, big thumbs pushed the pages back and forth, until impatience conquered them. They left the book and lowered the coffin, helped again by McLean. The weight sank slowly, decently, steadily, down between the banks. The sound that it struck the bottom with was a slight sound, the grating of the load upon the solid sand; and a little sand strewed from the edge and fell on the box at the same moment. The rattle came up from below, compact and brief, a single jar, quietly smiting through the crowd, smiting it to silence. One removed his hat, and then another, and then all. They stood eying each his neighbor, and shifting their eyes, looked away at the great valley. Then they filled in the grave, brought a head-board from a grave near by, and wrote the name and date upon it by scratching with a stone.
"She was sure one of us," said Chalkeye. "Let's give her the Lament."
And they followed his lead:
"Once in the saddle, I used to go dashing,
Once in the saddle, I used to go gay;
First took to drinking, and then to card-playing;
Got shot in the body, and now here I lay.
"Beat the drum slowly, Play the fife lowly,
Sound the dead march as you bear me along.
Take me to Boot-hill, and throw the sod over me—
I'm but a poor cow-boy, I know I done wrong."
When the song was ended, they left the graveyard quietly and went down the hill. The morning was growing warm. Their work waited them across many sunny miles of range and plain. Soon their voices and themselves had emptied away into the splendid vastness and silence, and they were gone—ready with all their might to live or to die, to be animals or heroes, as the hours might bring them opportunity. In Drybone's deserted quadrangle the sun shone down upon Lusk still sleeping, and the wind shook the aces and kings in the grass.
PART IV
Over at Separ, Jessamine Buckner had no more stockings of Billy's to mend, and much time for thinking and a change of mind. The day after that strange visit, when she had been told that she had hurt a good man's heart without reason, she took up her work; and while her hands despatched it her thoughts already accused her. Could she have seen that visitor now, she would have thanked her. She looked at the photograph on her table. "Why did he go away so quickly?" she sighed. But when young Billy returned to his questions she was buoyant again, and more than a match for him. He reached the forbidden twelfth time of asking why Lin McLean did not come back and marry her. Nor did she punish him as she had threatened. She looked at him confidentially, and he drew near, full of hope.
"Billy, I'll tell you just why it is," said she. "Lin thinks I'm not a real girl."
"A—ah," drawled Billy, backing from her with suspicion.
"Indeed that's what it is, Billy. If he knew I was a real girl—"
"A—ah," went the boy, entirely angry. "Anybody can tell you're a girl." And he marched out, mystified, and nursing a sense of wrong. Nor did his dignity allow him to reopen the subject.
To-day, two miles out in the sage-brush by himself, he was shooting jack-rabbits, but began suddenly to run in toward Separ. A horseman had passed him, and he had loudly called; but the rider rode on, intent upon the little distant station. Man and horse were soon far ahead of the boy, and the man came into town galloping.
No need to fire the little pistol by her window, as he had once thought to do! She was outside before he could leap to the ground. And as he held her, she could only laugh, and cry, and say "Forgive me! Oh, why have you been so long?" She took him back to the room where his picture was, and made him sit, and sat herself close. "What is it?" she asked him. For through the love she read something else in his serious face. So then he told her how nothing was wrong; and as she listened to all that he had to tell, she, too, grew serious, and held very close to him. "Dear, dear neighbor!" she said.
As they sat so, happy with deepening happiness, but not gay yet, young Billy burst open the door. "There!" he cried. "I knowed Lin knowed you were a girl!"
Thus did Billy also have his wish. For had he not told Jessamine that he liked her, and urged her to come and live with him and Lin? That cabin on Box Elder became a home in truth, with a woman inside taking the only care of Mr. McLean that he had known since his childhood: though singularly enough he has an impression that it is he who takes care of Jessamine!
IN THE AFTER-DAYS
The black pines stand high up the hills,
The white snow sifts their columns deep,
While through the canyon's riven cleft
From there, beyond, the rose clouds sweep.
Serene above their paling shapes
One star hath wakened in the sky.
And here in the gray world below
Over the sage the wind blows by;
Rides through the cotton-woods' ghost-ranks,
And hums aloft a sturdy tune
Among the river's tawny bluffs,
Untenanted as is the moon.
Far 'neath the huge invading dusk
Comes Silence awful through the plain;
But yonder horseman's heart is gay,
And he goes singing might and main.