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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69929 ***

-

-

-

-

-THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA

-

-A Story of a Fish out of Water

-

-By Irvin S. Cobb

-

-Illustrations by James E. Allen

-

-

-[Illustration: The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding

-ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card

-racks of the world.]

-

-

-From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road

-above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train

-boss, addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of

-the steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six

-’cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many

-somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath

-them, to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind

-back. It became evident that Dad thought the breathing space

-sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words

-dropped down through the spicy dry air.

-

-“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and you

-could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of

-firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up, you

-scenery-lovin’ _so-and-soes_!”

-

-There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and then

-fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation.

-“How prodigal nature is out in these Western wilds!” she said.

-

-“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter, Miss

-Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother’s

-were.

-

-“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that

-the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked

-in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such picturesque types

-everywhere!”

-

-“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said Mr.

-Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured

-indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average

-height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at all, so

-long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”

-

-“_Mong père_, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss

-Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native

-haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”

-

-Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one

-in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a

-foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his

-glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead

-drew into wrinkles.

-

-Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and

-her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn snugly

-down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle

-of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large sombrero on her bobbed hair

-and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down

-toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through

-the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the

-heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver

-bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two

-squared boulders that might have been the lichened tombs for a

-couple of Babylon’s kings.

-

-“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls,

-if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re putting plenty

-of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you’ll remember,

-we darn’ near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the

-wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices--chow and lots

-of it!”

-

-Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his

-cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on

-his brow.

-

-“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from

-her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her

-attention--that _mmphing_ sound was. Lacking vowels though it did,

-its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.

-

-“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that dreadful

-horseback riding?”

-

-“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the one

-I’m worried about.”

-

-“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with Shirley?”

-

-“Look at her. That’s all I ask--just look at her.”

-

-Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one,

-squinted at the withdrawing figure.

-

-“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,” she

-protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday--or was it Tuesday;

-no, Monday--I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was

-the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming through Swift Current

-Pass--only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy

-she was looking.”

-

-“I don’t mean that--she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look

-where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s doing!”

-

-“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to know?”

-demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her

-young.

-

-“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these last

-four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting an

-attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with

-their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject

-rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these roundabout tactics

-to obtain confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced

-them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you? All right then, use ’em.”

-

-“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions in

-your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the child

-a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides

-packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make that pearl

-knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible

-harm can there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?”

-

-“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not

-pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try to

-remember it, too--diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing

-that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to observe

-her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides she’s so

-interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And it’s getting

-serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my drift, or must I

-make plans and specifications?”

-

-“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but

-with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her feathers in

-alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a

-Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. “Oh,

-Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t mean it! A child who’s traveled

-and seen the world! A child who’s had every advantage that wealth

-and social position and all could give her! A child who’s a member

-of the Junior League! A child who’s--who Hector, you’re crazy.

-Hector, you know it’s utterly impossible--utterly! It’s

-preposterous!” Womanlike, she debated against a growing private

-dread. Then, still being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side

-for proof to destroy her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen

-something--you’ve overheard something. Tell me this minute what it

-was you overheard!”

-

-“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around

-eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that on

-her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve seen

-a-plenty.”

-

-“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen it

-myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!”

-But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.

-

-“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,”

-continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand on

-it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild

-Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she’d get over

-it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all

-that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to

-do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the

-rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more

-flip and slangy than usual. That’s the worst symptom yet--that slang

-is.

-

-“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had,

-she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around

-sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything.

-All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have

-mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did--you

-mushed-up.” His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt

-with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might

-condone. “But now it’s different with them. They get slangier and

-flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And

-that’s what Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or

-else I’m the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”

-

-“Maybe--maybe----” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. “Of

-course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector--the mere

-suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible--but on the bare

-chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her head

-maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she is

-that----”

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted.

-“You’re so much older than she is; that’s your trouble. And I’m

-suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who’ve

-got children growing up go around bleating that young people are

-different from the way young people were when we were young. They’re

-not. They’re just the same as we were--same impulses, same emotions,

-same damphoolishness, same everything--but they’ve got a new way of

-expressing ’em. And then we say we can’t understand them. Knock

-thirty years off of our lives and we’d understand all right because

-then we’d be just the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to

-that youngster of ours--not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.”

-Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr.

-Gatling, that masterful, self-educated man.

-

-“But if I pointed out a few things to her--if I warned her----”

-

-“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so terribly

-happy over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I’d come

-courting and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the

-old man could do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my

-tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his

-mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose he’d tried to influence

-you against me, tried to break off the match--what would have

-happened? You’d have thought you were oppressed and persecuted and

-you’d have grabbed for me even quicker than you did.”

-

-“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed----”

-

-“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much

-gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and

-took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the

-consequence was we got married in the First Methodist church with

-bridesmaids and old shoes and kinsfolks and all the other painful

-details instead of me sneaking you out of a back window some dark

-night and us running off together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma’am, if

-you’ll take a tip from an old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna,

-forty-seven years, man and boy, with one road, you’ll----”

-

-“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”

-

-“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re to

-keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our

-reserved seats up in the grand stand and see how the game comes out.

-A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting--that’s our line and

-we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for future

-developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little campaign. With

-your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the

-disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of

-a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed

-by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no

-one who closely studied the lady’s bearing and demeanor. But then,

-none in the party closely studied these.

-

-The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs

-of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and

-passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the

-highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the

-Garden Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and

-aboveboard reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present

-deplorable traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock.

-Soon they swung away from the rutted wagon track and took the

-steeper horseback trail and for hours threaded it like so many

-plodding ants against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at

-midday on a little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a

-picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted

-buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and two

-jeweled glaciers.

-

-They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate and

-remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along the

-farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed among

-the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw a solitary

-bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia springing out of his

-skull and likewise they saw a pair of indifferent mule-deer and

-enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the

-world; for complete particulars consult the official guide-book of

-Our National Playgrounds.

-

-Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within sight

-of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain. So they

-pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove there in a

-sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and watched the sun go

-down in his glory. When the moon rose it was too good to believe.

-You almost could reach up and jingle the tambourines of little

-circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought you could. It was a magic

-hour, an ideal place for lovemaking among the young of the species.

-Realizing the which, Mrs. Gating had a severe sinking and

-apprehensive sensation directly behind the harness buckle on the

-ample belt which girthed her weary form amidships. She’d been

-apprehensive all day but now the sinking was more pronounced.

-

-She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper was

-over and it was near hushabye-time for the tired forms of the

-middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she spoke then

-to her husband, touching on the topic so steadfastly uppermost in

-her brain.

-

-“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid

-you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither one

-of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he helped her

-on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried for her! And

-the way she let him do it! And they’re--they’re together outside

-now. Oh, Hector!”

-

-“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in that

-infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtledoves. Why

-in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight--good and hard? Romola, I

-don’t want to harry you up any more than’s necessary but you take,

-say, about two or three more nights like this and they’re liable to

-do considerable damage to tender hearts.”

-

-“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”

-

-“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you

-tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can

-give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was quite

-plain that he did.

-

-He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted

-sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and

-peeped through the opening.

-

-The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and

-their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the

-shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black

-space, it revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The

-youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat;

-his blue flannel blouse; his Angora chaps with wings that almost

-were voluminous enough for an eagle’s wings; his red silk

-neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat which

-Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy

-mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed,

-high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy--they all matched

-and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the

-sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.

-

-His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally

-called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No

-Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up and hoped

-this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary.

-

-[Illustration: Hayes had ridden the man-killer at the Pendleton

-Round-up. And three moonlight nights hand-running had their

-effect on Shirley’s impressionable youth.]

-

-Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and

-given to deporting himself accordingly.

-

-At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his

-own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura

-all about him.

-

-The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his

-daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the

-sense of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes

-swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft

-in a parting salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering

-off toward the spot where his mates of the outfit already were

-making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some

-very sincere snoring. But before she betook herself to quarters, the

-girl bided for a long minute on the verge of the cliff and looked

-off and away into the studded void beyond her.

-

-Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and

-_mmphed_ several times.

-

-“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked

-absently.

-

-“Who?”

-

-“Him.”

-

-“You actually mean that cowboy?”

-

-“None other than which.”

-

-“Oh, Hector! That--that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that

-clodhopper!”

-

-“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are

-prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em in

-your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no farm-hand;

-he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists

-around through these mountains--and that’s a very different thing, I

-take it. And what he knows he knows blame’ well. I wish I could

-mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle

-he’s riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket.

-And I’d give about five years off my life to be able to handle a

-trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly

-high-grade proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much

-blame him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself, who

-else is going to?”

-

-“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really--but no, you couldn’t

-be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their

-different environments! Look at their different viewpoints!”

-

-“I’m looking--just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m

-driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any

-more than you would--although at that I’m not saying I couldn’t

-maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn’t

-mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I

-didn’t have any station in life to start from myself--it was a

-whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to stagger along fairly well.

-I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent,

-ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have

-her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep

-hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used

-to be guitar-pickers--and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly

-pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of ’em

-carry any weight is on the hip.

-

-“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for

-this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female when

-the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been raised to

-talk the same language--that’s the trouble. I don’t want her to make

-a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s fairly started. I

-don’t want her to have a husband that she’s liable later on to be

-ashamed to show him off before the majority of her friends, or

-anyhow one that she’d maybe have to go around making excuses for the

-way he handled his knife and fork in company; or something. Right

-now, the fix she’s in, she’s probably saying to herself that she

-could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out

-here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next thirty, forty or

-fifty years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After

-a while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach and Paris.”

-

-“But if she’s set her mind--and you know how stubborn she is when

-she gets her mind set--thank heavens she didn’t get that from my

-side of the family!--I say, if she’s set her mind on him, heavens

-above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s

-hypnotized; it’s this free and easy Western life that’s fascinated

-her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”

-

-“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a half-gallon hat and

-a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then

-again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with her, or a

-close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we can.”

-

-“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured, she’s----”

-

-“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”

-

-“But how?”

-

-“Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her

-little dream. By not letting either one of ’em see how anxious we

-are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected as we

-can.”

-

-“And in the meanwhile?”

-

-“Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few

-winks. I hurt all over and there’s quite a lot of me measured that

-way--all over.”

-

-“You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over

-us?”

-

-“I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you’ll hear

-me doing it.” He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the

-blankets over him.

-

-Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating

-persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can.

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon

-the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had

-listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones

-hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous

-category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive

-sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny

-perfumes out of the cedars and the unseen heart-broken little bird

-that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in

-the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep

-defiles where ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance; nor yet the

-fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the

-part of a thoughtful young man to steady a young equestrian of the

-opposite sex while her horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned

-boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies in his

-symposium of contributory dangers.

-

-Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant

-adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day

-when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids,

-Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot

-somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous,

-she having told him a little earlier that presently she desired to

-have speech with him. Only, her way of putting it had been

-different.

-

-“Harken, O most revered Drawing Account,” she said, dropping back on

-a broad place in the trail to be near him. “If you can spare the

-time from being saddle-sore I want to give you an earful as soon as

-this procession, as of even date, breaks up. You pick a quiet

-retreat away from the flock and wait there until I find you, savvy?”

-

-So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him stepping

-lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of impudent

-freedom of movement; and to his father’s eyes she never had seemed

-more graceful or more delectable or more independent looking.

-

-“Dad,” she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye, “in

-me you behold a Sabine woman. I’m bespoken.”

-

-“Mmph,” he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a

-person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.

-

-“Such is the case,” she went on, quite unafraid. “That caveman over

-there in the blue shirt”--she pointed--“he’s the nominee. We’re

-engaged.”

-

-“I can’t plead surprise, kid,” he stated, taking on for the moment

-her bantering tone. “The report that you two had come to a sort of

-understanding has been in active circulation on this reservation for

-the past forty-eight hours or so--maybe longer.”

-

-Her eyebrows went up. “I don’t get you,” she said. “Who circulated

-it?”

-

-“You did, for one,” he told her. “And he did, for another. I may be

-failing, what with increasing age and all, but I’m not more than

-half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this piece of

-news?”

-

-“I came to you first. I--I”--for the first time she faltered an

-instant--“I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a

-little quicker then she would. This is only the curtain-raiser. I’m

-saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her. I have a

-feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I picked on

-something easy to begin with.”

-

-“I see,” he said. “Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?” He held her

-off at arm’s length from him, studying her face hungrily. “But

-what’s the reason your young man didn’t come along with you or ahead

-of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young man that

-brought the message to Garcia.”

-

-“He wanted to come--he wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t let him. I told him

-I’d been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle the job

-better by myself. Well, that’s your cue. What’s it going to be,

-daddy--the glad hand of approval and the parental bless you my

-children, bless you, or a little line of that

-go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again stuff?

-Only, we’re a trifle shy on doors around here.”

-

-He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped

-head, she snuggling her face against his wool-clad breast.

-

-“Baby,” he said, “when all’s said and done, the whole thing’s up to

-you, way I look at it. I don’t suppose there ever was a man who

-really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking one thing

-with another, she was too good for any man on earth. I’m not saying

-now what sort of a husband I’d try to pick out for you if the choice

-had been left to me. I’d probably want to keep you an old maid so’s

-I could have you around and then I’d secretly despise myself for

-doing it, too. What I’m saying is this: If you’re certain you know

-your own mind and if you’ve decided that this boy is the boy you

-want, why what more is there for me to do except maybe to ask you

-just one or two small questions?”

-

-“Shoot!” she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a

-little tighter. “Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in the

-world,” she added, confidentially addressing the top buttonhole of

-his sweater.

-

-“Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this early

-stage of the game, how you are going to live--you two? Or where? Or,

-if I may be so bold, what on?”

-

-“That’s easy,” she said, and now she was peering up at him through a

-tousled short forelock. “You’re going to set us up on a place out

-here somewhere--a ranch. We’re going to raise beef. He knows about

-beef. And I’m going to learn. I aim to be the leading lady beefer of

-the Imperial Northwest.”

-

-“Whose notion was that?” His voice had sharpened the least bit.

-

-“Mine, of course. He doesn’t know anything about it. His idea is

-that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we start

-in on a few of the simoleons that have already been earned--by you.

-And that’s the idea that’s going to prevail.”

-

-“Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along,” he said.

-“Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies. Still, I

-take it there’s no great rush. Now, I tell you what: You run along

-and locate your mother and get _that_ over with. She knows how I

-stand--we’ve been discussing this little affair our own selves.”

-

-“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you have?” She seemed disappointed

-somehow--disappointed and slightly puzzled.

-

-“Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the young

-man that I’m lurking right here behind these rocks ready to have a

-few words with him.”

-

-“Righto!” She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away, and

-for just a moment Mr. Gatling’s conscience smote him.

-

-“I’ve got to do it,” he said to himself, excusing himself. “I’ve

-just got to find out--for her sake and ours--yes, and for his, too.

-It looks like an impossible bet and I’ve got to make sure.”

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-With young Tripier he had more than the few words he had specified.

-They had quite an interview and as they had it the youth’s

-embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialog had made him

-wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at inoffensive pebbles,

-gradually wore off until it vanished altogether and his native

-assurance reasserted itself. A proposition was advanced. It needed

-little pressing; promptly he fell in with it. It appealed to him.

-

-“So we’re agreed there,” concluded his prospective father-in-law,

-clinching the final rivets. “We’ll all go right ahead and finish out

-this tour--it’s only a couple of days more anyhow. Then I’ll take

-Shirley and her mother and run on out to Spokane. We’ll hustle one

-of the other boys back tomorrow to the entrance to tell my chauffeur

-to load some bags in the car and run around to this side and meet us

-where we come out. We’ll leave you there and you can dust back to

-the starting point through that short cut over the Garden Wall you

-were just speaking of. The business that I’ve got in Spokane will

-keep me maybe two or three days. That’ll give you time to get those

-new clothes of yours and then we’ll all meet over at Many

-Glacier--I’ll wire you in advance--and in a day or two we’ll all go

-on East together so’s you can get acquainted with Shirley’s friends

-and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that’s our

-secret--all that part of it is. You’ve never been East, I believe?”

-

-“Well, I’ve been as far as Minot, North Dakota.”

-

-“You’ll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side of

-there. You’ll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe you

-need out in this country?” His manner was solicitous.

-

-“Oh yes, sir, there’s those two swell fellows named Steinfelt and

-Immergluck I was telling you about that they’ve got the leading

-gents’ furnishing goods store down in Cree City.”

-

-“Good enough! I’d suggest that when picking out a suit you get

-something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live colors.”

-Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had been dwelt upon:

-“You understand of course that she’s not to know a single thing

-about all this--it’s strictly between us two?”

-

-“Yes, sir.”

-

-“You see, that’ll make the surprise all the greater when she sees

-you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young college

-fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems like to me I

-was reading in an advertisement only here the other day where

-they’re going in for coats with belts on ’em this season. Oh yes,

-and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.

-

-“One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and

-shaggy, don’t you think? That’s fine for out here but back East a

-young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed up sort

-of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about as old as you

-are just the other day. Let me see--where was it? Oh yes, it was the

-barber at that town of Cree City--I dropped in there for a shave

-when we motored down last week. He seemed to have pretty good ideas

-about trimming up a fellow’s bean, that barber.”

-

-“I know the one you mean--Silk Sullivan. I’ve patronized him

-before.”

-

-“That’s the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us. He

-knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does.... Now,

-mind you, mum’s the word. All this part of it is absolutely between

-us.”

-

-“Oh yes, sir.”

-

-“O. k. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they’re coming along

-with supper.”

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-Mr. Gatling’s strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to

-Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious prolongation

-of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his privy intent

-being to give opportunity for Cree City’s ready-made clothing

-princes to work their will. Since a hellish deed must be done he

-craved that they do it properly. Then on the homeward journey when

-they had reached the Western Gate, he suddenly remembered he had

-failed to complete his purchases of an assortment of game heads at

-Lewis’s on Lake McDonald. He professed that he couldn’t round out

-the order by telephone; unless he personally checked his collection

-some grievous error might be made.

-

-“You go on across on this train, Shirley,” he said. “I telegraphed

-your young man that we’d be there this morning and he’ll be on the

-lookout. Your mother and I’ll dust up to the head of the lake on the

-bus and I’ll finish up what I’ve got to do there and we’ll be along

-on the Limited this evening. After being separated for a whole week

-you two’ll enjoy a day together without any old folks snooping

-around. Meet us at the hotel tonight.”

-

-So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley’s nerves

-had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of a devoted

-mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken eyes fixed on

-her only child--a mother who at frequent intervals sniffed

-mournfully. Quite willingly Shirley went.

-

-“I--I feel as though I were giving her up forever,” faltered Mrs.

-Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter’s departing form.

-

-“Romola,” commanded Mr. Gatling, “don’t be foolish in the head.

-You’re going to be separated from her exactly nine hours.”

-

-“But she tripped away so gaily--so gladly. It was exactly as though

-she wanted to leave us. And yet, heavens knows I’ve tried and tried

-ever since that--that terrible night to show her what she means to

-me----”

-

-“You’ve done more than try, Romola--you’ve succeeded, if that’s any

-consolation to you. You’ve succeeded darned well.” He stared almost

-regretfully down the line at the rear of an observation-car swiftly

-diminishing into a small square dot where the rails came together.

-“Since you mention it, she did look powerfully chipper and cheerful

-a minute ago, hustling to climb aboard that Pullman--cheerfuller

-than she’s looked since we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how

-I wish I could guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute’s

-unhappiness the rest of her life!” Something remotely akin to

-remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling’s heart cockles.

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward the

-close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no Shirley

-was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of Shirley’s

-affianced, either. Up the slope from the tracks at the hotel a clerk

-wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of newly-arrived

-tourists for long enough to tell them Miss Gatling had left word she

-would be awaiting them in their rooms and wished them to come up

-immediately.

-

-So they went up under escort of two college students serving as

-bell-hops. A bedroom door opened and out came Shirley--a crumpled,

-wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face.

-

-“It’s all right, mater,” she said with a flickering trace of her

-usual jauntiness. “The alliance between the house of Gatling and the

-house of Tripier is off. So you can liven up. I’ll be your

-substitute for such crying as is done in this family during the next

-day or two. I’ve--I’ve been practising all afternoon.”

-

-She eluded the lady’s outstretched arms and clung temporarily at her

-father’s breast.

-

-“Dad,” she confessed brokenly, “I think I must have been a little

-bit loony these last two weeks. But, dad, I’ve taken the cure. It’s

-not nice medicine and it makes you feel miserable at first but I

-guess it’s good for what ails me.... Dad, have you seen--him?”

-

-“Not yet.” Compassion for her was mixed in with his own secret

-exultation, as though he tasted a sweet cake that was iced with a

-most bitter icing.

-

-“Well, when you do, you’ll understand. Even if he doesn’t!”

-

-“Have you told him?”

-

-“Of course I have. Did you think I’d try to wish that little job off

-on you? I didn’t tell him the real reason--I couldn’t wound him that

-much. I told him I’d changed. But he--he’s really the one that’s

-changed. That’s what makes it harder for me now. That’s what makes

-it hurt so.”

-

-“Here, Romola,” he said, kissing the girl and relinquishing her into

-her mother’s grasp. “You swap tears awhile--you’ll enjoy that

-anyhow, Romola. I’ve got business downstairs--got to make some

-sleeper reservations for getting out of here in the morning. And as

-soon as we hit Pittsburgh I figure you two had better be booking up

-for a little swing around Europe.”

-

-                  *       *       *       *       *

-

-The lobby below was seething--seething is the word commonly used in

-this connection so we might as well do so, too--was seething with

-Easterners who mainly had dressed as they imagined Westerners would

-dress, and with Westerners who mainly had dressed as they imagined

-Easterners would dress, the resultant effect being that nobody was

-fooled but everybody was pleased. Working his way through the jam on

-the search for a certain one, Mr. Gatling’s eye almost immediately

-was caught by a startling color combination or rather a series of

-startling color combinations appertaining to an individual who stood

-half hidden by a column, leaning against it, head down, with his

-back to Mr. Gatling.

-

-To begin at the top, there was, surmounting all, a smug undersized

-object of head-gear--at least, it would pass for head-gear--of a

-poisonous mustard shade. It perched high and, as it were, aloof upon

-the crest of its wearer’s skull. Below it, where the neck had been

-shaved, and a good portion of the close-clipped scalp as well,

-showed a sort of crescent of pink skin blazing forth in strong

-contrast to the abnormally long expanse of sunburnt surface rising

-above the cross-line of an exceedingly low, exceedingly shiny pink

-linen collar.

-

-Straying on downward, Mr. Gatling’s wondering eye was aware of a

-high-waisted Norfolk jacket belted well up beneath the armpits, a

-garment of a tone which might not be called mauve nor yet lavender

-nor yet magenta but which partook subtly of all three shades--with a

-plaid overlay in chocolate superimposed thereon. Yet nearer the

-floor was revealed a pair of trousers extensively bell-bottomed and

-apparently designed with the intent to bring out and impress upon

-the casual observer the fact that their present owner had two of the

-most widely bowed legs on the North American continent; and finally,

-a brace of cloth-top shoes. Tan shoes, these were, with buttoned

-uppers of a pale fawn cloth, and bulldog toes. They were very new

-shoes, that was plain, and of an exceedingly bright and pristine

-glossiness.

-

-This striking person now moved out of his shelter, his shoulders

-being set at a despondent hunch, and as he turned about, bringing

-his profile into view, Mr. Gatling recognized that the stranger was

-no stranger and he gasped.

-

-“Perfect!” he muttered to himself; “absolutely perfect! Couldn’t be

-better if I’d done it myself. And, oh Lordy, that necktie--that’s

-the finishing stroke! Still, at that, it’s a rotten shame--the poor

-kid!”

-

-He hurried across, overtaking the slumped figure, and as his hand

-fell in a friendly slap upon one drooped shoulder the transformed

-cowboy looked about him with two sad eyes.

-

-“Howdy-do, sir,” he said wanly. Then he braced himself and squared

-his back, and Mr. Gatling perceived--and was glad to note--that the

-youngster strove to take his heartache in a manly fashion.

-

-“Son,” said Mr. Gatling, “from what I’m able to gather I’m not going

-to have you for a son-in-law after all. But that’s no reason why we

-shouldn’t hook up along another line. I’ve been watching you off and

-on ever since we got acquainted and more closely since--well, since

-about a week ago, and it strikes me you’ve got some pretty good

-stuff in you. I’ve been thinking of trying a little flier in the

-cattle game out here. If you think you’d like a chance to start in

-as foreman or boss or superintendent or whatever you call it and

-maybe work up into a partnership if you showed me you had the goods,

-why, we’ll talk it over together at dinner. The womenfolks won’t be

-down and we can sit and powwow.”

-

-“I’d like that fine, sir,” said young Tripier.

-

-“Good boy! I’ll keep you so busy you won’t have time to brood on any

-little disappointment that you may be suffering from now.... Say,

-son, don’t mind my suggesting something, do you? If I was you I’d

-climb out of these duds you’ve got on and climb back into your

-regular working clothes--you don’t seem to match the picture the way

-you are now.”

-

-“Why, you advised me to get ’em your own self, sir!” exclaimed the

-youth.

-

-“That’s right, I did, didn’t I? Well, maybe you had better keep on

-wearing ’em.” A shrewd and crafty gleam flickered under his eyelids.

-“You see--yes--on second thoughts, I think I want a chance to get

-used to you in your stylish new outfit. Promise me you’ll wear ’em

-until noon tomorrow anyhow?”

-

-“Yes, sir,” said his victim obediently.

-

-Mr. Gatling winked a concealed, deadly wink.

-

-

-                                THE END

-

-

-Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September, 1926 issue

-of “Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan” magazine.

-

-*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69929 ***

-

+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69929 ***
+
+
+
+
+THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA
+
+A Story of a Fish out of Water
+
+By Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Illustrations by James E. Allen
+
+
+[Illustration: The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding
+ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card
+racks of the world.]
+
+
+From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road
+above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train
+boss, addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of
+the steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six
+’cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many
+somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath
+them, to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind
+back. It became evident that Dad thought the breathing space
+sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words
+dropped down through the spicy dry air.
+
+“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and you
+could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of
+firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up, you
+scenery-lovin’ _so-and-soes_!”
+
+There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and then
+fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation.
+“How prodigal nature is out in these Western wilds!” she said.
+
+“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter, Miss
+Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother’s
+were.
+
+“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that
+the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked
+in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such picturesque types
+everywhere!”
+
+“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said Mr.
+Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured
+indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average
+height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at all, so
+long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”
+
+“_Mong père_, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss
+Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native
+haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”
+
+Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one
+in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a
+foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his
+glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead
+drew into wrinkles.
+
+Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and
+her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn snugly
+down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle
+of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large sombrero on her bobbed hair
+and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down
+toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through
+the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the
+heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver
+bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two
+squared boulders that might have been the lichened tombs for a
+couple of Babylon’s kings.
+
+“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls,
+if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re putting plenty
+of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you’ll remember,
+we darn’ near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the
+wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices--chow and lots
+of it!”
+
+Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his
+cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on
+his brow.
+
+“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from
+her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her
+attention--that _mmphing_ sound was. Lacking vowels though it did,
+its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.
+
+“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that dreadful
+horseback riding?”
+
+“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the one
+I’m worried about.”
+
+“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with Shirley?”
+
+“Look at her. That’s all I ask--just look at her.”
+
+Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one,
+squinted at the withdrawing figure.
+
+“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,” she
+protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday--or was it Tuesday;
+no, Monday--I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was
+the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming through Swift Current
+Pass--only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy
+she was looking.”
+
+“I don’t mean that--she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look
+where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s doing!”
+
+“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to know?”
+demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her
+young.
+
+“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these last
+four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting an
+attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with
+their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject
+rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these roundabout tactics
+to obtain confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced
+them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you? All right then, use ’em.”
+
+“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions in
+your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the child
+a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides
+packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make that pearl
+knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible
+harm can there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?”
+
+“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not
+pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try to
+remember it, too--diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing
+that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to observe
+her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides she’s so
+interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And it’s getting
+serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my drift, or must I
+make plans and specifications?”
+
+“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but
+with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her feathers in
+alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a
+Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. “Oh,
+Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t mean it! A child who’s traveled
+and seen the world! A child who’s had every advantage that wealth
+and social position and all could give her! A child who’s a member
+of the Junior League! A child who’s--who Hector, you’re crazy.
+Hector, you know it’s utterly impossible--utterly! It’s
+preposterous!” Womanlike, she debated against a growing private
+dread. Then, still being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side
+for proof to destroy her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen
+something--you’ve overheard something. Tell me this minute what it
+was you overheard!”
+
+“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around
+eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that on
+her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve seen
+a-plenty.”
+
+“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen it
+myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!”
+But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.
+
+“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,”
+continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand on
+it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild
+Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she’d get over
+it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all
+that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to
+do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the
+rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more
+flip and slangy than usual. That’s the worst symptom yet--that slang
+is.
+
+“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had,
+she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around
+sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything.
+All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have
+mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did--you
+mushed-up.” His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt
+with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might
+condone. “But now it’s different with them. They get slangier and
+flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And
+that’s what Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or
+else I’m the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”
+
+“Maybe--maybe----” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. “Of
+course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector--the mere
+suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible--but on the bare
+chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her head
+maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she is
+that----”
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted.
+“You’re so much older than she is; that’s your trouble. And I’m
+suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who’ve
+got children growing up go around bleating that young people are
+different from the way young people were when we were young. They’re
+not. They’re just the same as we were--same impulses, same emotions,
+same damphoolishness, same everything--but they’ve got a new way of
+expressing ’em. And then we say we can’t understand them. Knock
+thirty years off of our lives and we’d understand all right because
+then we’d be just the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to
+that youngster of ours--not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.”
+Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr.
+Gatling, that masterful, self-educated man.
+
+“But if I pointed out a few things to her--if I warned her----”
+
+“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so terribly
+happy over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I’d come
+courting and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the
+old man could do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my
+tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his
+mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose he’d tried to influence
+you against me, tried to break off the match--what would have
+happened? You’d have thought you were oppressed and persecuted and
+you’d have grabbed for me even quicker than you did.”
+
+“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed----”
+
+“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much
+gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and
+took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the
+consequence was we got married in the First Methodist church with
+bridesmaids and old shoes and kinsfolks and all the other painful
+details instead of me sneaking you out of a back window some dark
+night and us running off together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma’am, if
+you’ll take a tip from an old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna,
+forty-seven years, man and boy, with one road, you’ll----”
+
+“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”
+
+“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re to
+keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our
+reserved seats up in the grand stand and see how the game comes out.
+A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting--that’s our line and
+we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for future
+developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little campaign. With
+your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the
+disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of
+a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed
+by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no
+one who closely studied the lady’s bearing and demeanor. But then,
+none in the party closely studied these.
+
+The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs
+of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and
+passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the
+highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the
+Garden Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and
+aboveboard reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present
+deplorable traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock.
+Soon they swung away from the rutted wagon track and took the
+steeper horseback trail and for hours threaded it like so many
+plodding ants against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at
+midday on a little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a
+picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted
+buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and two
+jeweled glaciers.
+
+They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate and
+remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along the
+farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed among
+the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw a solitary
+bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia springing out of his
+skull and likewise they saw a pair of indifferent mule-deer and
+enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the
+world; for complete particulars consult the official guide-book of
+Our National Playgrounds.
+
+Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within sight
+of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain. So they
+pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove there in a
+sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and watched the sun go
+down in his glory. When the moon rose it was too good to believe.
+You almost could reach up and jingle the tambourines of little
+circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought you could. It was a magic
+hour, an ideal place for lovemaking among the young of the species.
+Realizing the which, Mrs. Gating had a severe sinking and
+apprehensive sensation directly behind the harness buckle on the
+ample belt which girthed her weary form amidships. She’d been
+apprehensive all day but now the sinking was more pronounced.
+
+She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper was
+over and it was near hushabye-time for the tired forms of the
+middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she spoke then
+to her husband, touching on the topic so steadfastly uppermost in
+her brain.
+
+“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid
+you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither one
+of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he helped her
+on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried for her! And
+the way she let him do it! And they’re--they’re together outside
+now. Oh, Hector!”
+
+“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in that
+infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtledoves. Why
+in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight--good and hard? Romola, I
+don’t want to harry you up any more than’s necessary but you take,
+say, about two or three more nights like this and they’re liable to
+do considerable damage to tender hearts.”
+
+“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”
+
+“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you
+tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can
+give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was quite
+plain that he did.
+
+He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted
+sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and
+peeped through the opening.
+
+The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and
+their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the
+shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black
+space, it revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The
+youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat;
+his blue flannel blouse; his Angora chaps with wings that almost
+were voluminous enough for an eagle’s wings; his red silk
+neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat which
+Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy
+mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed,
+high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy--they all matched
+and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the
+sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.
+
+His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally
+called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No
+Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up and hoped
+this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary.
+
+[Illustration: Hayes had ridden the man-killer at the Pendleton
+Round-up. And three moonlight nights hand-running had their
+effect on Shirley’s impressionable youth.]
+
+Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and
+given to deporting himself accordingly.
+
+At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his
+own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura
+all about him.
+
+The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his
+daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the
+sense of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes
+swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft
+in a parting salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering
+off toward the spot where his mates of the outfit already were
+making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some
+very sincere snoring. But before she betook herself to quarters, the
+girl bided for a long minute on the verge of the cliff and looked
+off and away into the studded void beyond her.
+
+Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and
+_mmphed_ several times.
+
+“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked
+absently.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Him.”
+
+“You actually mean that cowboy?”
+
+“None other than which.”
+
+“Oh, Hector! That--that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that
+clodhopper!”
+
+“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are
+prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em in
+your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no farm-hand;
+he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists
+around through these mountains--and that’s a very different thing, I
+take it. And what he knows he knows blame’ well. I wish I could
+mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle
+he’s riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket.
+And I’d give about five years off my life to be able to handle a
+trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly
+high-grade proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much
+blame him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself, who
+else is going to?”
+
+“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really--but no, you couldn’t
+be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their
+different environments! Look at their different viewpoints!”
+
+“I’m looking--just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m
+driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any
+more than you would--although at that I’m not saying I couldn’t
+maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn’t
+mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I
+didn’t have any station in life to start from myself--it was a
+whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to stagger along fairly well.
+I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent,
+ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have
+her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep
+hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used
+to be guitar-pickers--and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly
+pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of ’em
+carry any weight is on the hip.
+
+“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for
+this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female when
+the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been raised to
+talk the same language--that’s the trouble. I don’t want her to make
+a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s fairly started. I
+don’t want her to have a husband that she’s liable later on to be
+ashamed to show him off before the majority of her friends, or
+anyhow one that she’d maybe have to go around making excuses for the
+way he handled his knife and fork in company; or something. Right
+now, the fix she’s in, she’s probably saying to herself that she
+could be perfectly satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out
+here and wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next thirty, forty or
+fifty years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After
+a while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach and Paris.”
+
+“But if she’s set her mind--and you know how stubborn she is when
+she gets her mind set--thank heavens she didn’t get that from my
+side of the family!--I say, if she’s set her mind on him, heavens
+above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s
+hypnotized; it’s this free and easy Western life that’s fascinated
+her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”
+
+“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a half-gallon hat and
+a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides, or then
+again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with her, or a
+close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we can.”
+
+“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured, she’s----”
+
+“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”
+
+“But how?”
+
+“Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her
+little dream. By not letting either one of ’em see how anxious we
+are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected as we
+can.”
+
+“And in the meanwhile?”
+
+“Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few
+winks. I hurt all over and there’s quite a lot of me measured that
+way--all over.”
+
+“You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over
+us?”
+
+“I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you’ll hear
+me doing it.” He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the
+blankets over him.
+
+Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating
+persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon
+the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had
+listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones
+hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous
+category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive
+sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny
+perfumes out of the cedars and the unseen heart-broken little bird
+that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in
+the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep
+defiles where ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance; nor yet the
+fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the
+part of a thoughtful young man to steady a young equestrian of the
+opposite sex while her horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned
+boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies in his
+symposium of contributory dangers.
+
+Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant
+adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day
+when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids,
+Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot
+somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous,
+she having told him a little earlier that presently she desired to
+have speech with him. Only, her way of putting it had been
+different.
+
+“Harken, O most revered Drawing Account,” she said, dropping back on
+a broad place in the trail to be near him. “If you can spare the
+time from being saddle-sore I want to give you an earful as soon as
+this procession, as of even date, breaks up. You pick a quiet
+retreat away from the flock and wait there until I find you, savvy?”
+
+So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him stepping
+lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of impudent
+freedom of movement; and to his father’s eyes she never had seemed
+more graceful or more delectable or more independent looking.
+
+“Dad,” she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye, “in
+me you behold a Sabine woman. I’m bespoken.”
+
+“Mmph,” he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a
+person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.
+
+“Such is the case,” she went on, quite unafraid. “That caveman over
+there in the blue shirt”--she pointed--“he’s the nominee. We’re
+engaged.”
+
+“I can’t plead surprise, kid,” he stated, taking on for the moment
+her bantering tone. “The report that you two had come to a sort of
+understanding has been in active circulation on this reservation for
+the past forty-eight hours or so--maybe longer.”
+
+Her eyebrows went up. “I don’t get you,” she said. “Who circulated
+it?”
+
+“You did, for one,” he told her. “And he did, for another. I may be
+failing, what with increasing age and all, but I’m not more than
+half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this piece of
+news?”
+
+“I came to you first. I--I”--for the first time she faltered an
+instant--“I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a
+little quicker then she would. This is only the curtain-raiser. I’m
+saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her. I have a
+feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I picked on
+something easy to begin with.”
+
+“I see,” he said. “Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?” He held her
+off at arm’s length from him, studying her face hungrily. “But
+what’s the reason your young man didn’t come along with you or ahead
+of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young man that
+brought the message to Garcia.”
+
+“He wanted to come--he wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t let him. I told him
+I’d been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle the job
+better by myself. Well, that’s your cue. What’s it going to be,
+daddy--the glad hand of approval and the parental bless you my
+children, bless you, or a little line of that
+go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again stuff?
+Only, we’re a trifle shy on doors around here.”
+
+He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped
+head, she snuggling her face against his wool-clad breast.
+
+“Baby,” he said, “when all’s said and done, the whole thing’s up to
+you, way I look at it. I don’t suppose there ever was a man who
+really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking one thing
+with another, she was too good for any man on earth. I’m not saying
+now what sort of a husband I’d try to pick out for you if the choice
+had been left to me. I’d probably want to keep you an old maid so’s
+I could have you around and then I’d secretly despise myself for
+doing it, too. What I’m saying is this: If you’re certain you know
+your own mind and if you’ve decided that this boy is the boy you
+want, why what more is there for me to do except maybe to ask you
+just one or two small questions?”
+
+“Shoot!” she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a
+little tighter. “Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in the
+world,” she added, confidentially addressing the top buttonhole of
+his sweater.
+
+“Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this early
+stage of the game, how you are going to live--you two? Or where? Or,
+if I may be so bold, what on?”
+
+“That’s easy,” she said, and now she was peering up at him through a
+tousled short forelock. “You’re going to set us up on a place out
+here somewhere--a ranch. We’re going to raise beef. He knows about
+beef. And I’m going to learn. I aim to be the leading lady beefer of
+the Imperial Northwest.”
+
+“Whose notion was that?” His voice had sharpened the least bit.
+
+“Mine, of course. He doesn’t know anything about it. His idea is
+that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we start
+in on a few of the simoleons that have already been earned--by you.
+And that’s the idea that’s going to prevail.”
+
+“Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along,” he said.
+“Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies. Still, I
+take it there’s no great rush. Now, I tell you what: You run along
+and locate your mother and get _that_ over with. She knows how I
+stand--we’ve been discussing this little affair our own selves.”
+
+“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you have?” She seemed disappointed
+somehow--disappointed and slightly puzzled.
+
+“Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the young
+man that I’m lurking right here behind these rocks ready to have a
+few words with him.”
+
+“Righto!” She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away, and
+for just a moment Mr. Gatling’s conscience smote him.
+
+“I’ve got to do it,” he said to himself, excusing himself. “I’ve
+just got to find out--for her sake and ours--yes, and for his, too.
+It looks like an impossible bet and I’ve got to make sure.”
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+With young Tripier he had more than the few words he had specified.
+They had quite an interview and as they had it the youth’s
+embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialog had made him
+wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at inoffensive pebbles,
+gradually wore off until it vanished altogether and his native
+assurance reasserted itself. A proposition was advanced. It needed
+little pressing; promptly he fell in with it. It appealed to him.
+
+“So we’re agreed there,” concluded his prospective father-in-law,
+clinching the final rivets. “We’ll all go right ahead and finish out
+this tour--it’s only a couple of days more anyhow. Then I’ll take
+Shirley and her mother and run on out to Spokane. We’ll hustle one
+of the other boys back tomorrow to the entrance to tell my chauffeur
+to load some bags in the car and run around to this side and meet us
+where we come out. We’ll leave you there and you can dust back to
+the starting point through that short cut over the Garden Wall you
+were just speaking of. The business that I’ve got in Spokane will
+keep me maybe two or three days. That’ll give you time to get those
+new clothes of yours and then we’ll all meet over at Many
+Glacier--I’ll wire you in advance--and in a day or two we’ll all go
+on East together so’s you can get acquainted with Shirley’s friends
+and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that’s our
+secret--all that part of it is. You’ve never been East, I believe?”
+
+“Well, I’ve been as far as Minot, North Dakota.”
+
+“You’ll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side of
+there. You’ll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe you
+need out in this country?” His manner was solicitous.
+
+“Oh yes, sir, there’s those two swell fellows named Steinfelt and
+Immergluck I was telling you about that they’ve got the leading
+gents’ furnishing goods store down in Cree City.”
+
+“Good enough! I’d suggest that when picking out a suit you get
+something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live colors.”
+Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had been dwelt upon:
+“You understand of course that she’s not to know a single thing
+about all this--it’s strictly between us two?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“You see, that’ll make the surprise all the greater when she sees
+you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young college
+fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems like to me I
+was reading in an advertisement only here the other day where
+they’re going in for coats with belts on ’em this season. Oh yes,
+and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.
+
+“One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and
+shaggy, don’t you think? That’s fine for out here but back East a
+young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed up sort
+of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about as old as you
+are just the other day. Let me see--where was it? Oh yes, it was the
+barber at that town of Cree City--I dropped in there for a shave
+when we motored down last week. He seemed to have pretty good ideas
+about trimming up a fellow’s bean, that barber.”
+
+“I know the one you mean--Silk Sullivan. I’ve patronized him
+before.”
+
+“That’s the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us. He
+knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does.... Now,
+mind you, mum’s the word. All this part of it is absolutely between
+us.”
+
+“Oh yes, sir.”
+
+“O. k. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they’re coming along
+with supper.”
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Gatling’s strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to
+Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious prolongation
+of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his privy intent
+being to give opportunity for Cree City’s ready-made clothing
+princes to work their will. Since a hellish deed must be done he
+craved that they do it properly. Then on the homeward journey when
+they had reached the Western Gate, he suddenly remembered he had
+failed to complete his purchases of an assortment of game heads at
+Lewis’s on Lake McDonald. He professed that he couldn’t round out
+the order by telephone; unless he personally checked his collection
+some grievous error might be made.
+
+“You go on across on this train, Shirley,” he said. “I telegraphed
+your young man that we’d be there this morning and he’ll be on the
+lookout. Your mother and I’ll dust up to the head of the lake on the
+bus and I’ll finish up what I’ve got to do there and we’ll be along
+on the Limited this evening. After being separated for a whole week
+you two’ll enjoy a day together without any old folks snooping
+around. Meet us at the hotel tonight.”
+
+So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley’s nerves
+had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of a devoted
+mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken eyes fixed on
+her only child--a mother who at frequent intervals sniffed
+mournfully. Quite willingly Shirley went.
+
+“I--I feel as though I were giving her up forever,” faltered Mrs.
+Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter’s departing form.
+
+“Romola,” commanded Mr. Gatling, “don’t be foolish in the head.
+You’re going to be separated from her exactly nine hours.”
+
+“But she tripped away so gaily--so gladly. It was exactly as though
+she wanted to leave us. And yet, heavens knows I’ve tried and tried
+ever since that--that terrible night to show her what she means to
+me----”
+
+“You’ve done more than try, Romola--you’ve succeeded, if that’s any
+consolation to you. You’ve succeeded darned well.” He stared almost
+regretfully down the line at the rear of an observation-car swiftly
+diminishing into a small square dot where the rails came together.
+“Since you mention it, she did look powerfully chipper and cheerful
+a minute ago, hustling to climb aboard that Pullman--cheerfuller
+than she’s looked since we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how
+I wish I could guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute’s
+unhappiness the rest of her life!” Something remotely akin to
+remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling’s heart cockles.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward the
+close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no Shirley
+was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of Shirley’s
+affianced, either. Up the slope from the tracks at the hotel a clerk
+wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of newly-arrived
+tourists for long enough to tell them Miss Gatling had left word she
+would be awaiting them in their rooms and wished them to come up
+immediately.
+
+So they went up under escort of two college students serving as
+bell-hops. A bedroom door opened and out came Shirley--a crumpled,
+wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face.
+
+“It’s all right, mater,” she said with a flickering trace of her
+usual jauntiness. “The alliance between the house of Gatling and the
+house of Tripier is off. So you can liven up. I’ll be your
+substitute for such crying as is done in this family during the next
+day or two. I’ve--I’ve been practising all afternoon.”
+
+She eluded the lady’s outstretched arms and clung temporarily at her
+father’s breast.
+
+“Dad,” she confessed brokenly, “I think I must have been a little
+bit loony these last two weeks. But, dad, I’ve taken the cure. It’s
+not nice medicine and it makes you feel miserable at first but I
+guess it’s good for what ails me.... Dad, have you seen--him?”
+
+“Not yet.” Compassion for her was mixed in with his own secret
+exultation, as though he tasted a sweet cake that was iced with a
+most bitter icing.
+
+“Well, when you do, you’ll understand. Even if he doesn’t!”
+
+“Have you told him?”
+
+“Of course I have. Did you think I’d try to wish that little job off
+on you? I didn’t tell him the real reason--I couldn’t wound him that
+much. I told him I’d changed. But he--he’s really the one that’s
+changed. That’s what makes it harder for me now. That’s what makes
+it hurt so.”
+
+“Here, Romola,” he said, kissing the girl and relinquishing her into
+her mother’s grasp. “You swap tears awhile--you’ll enjoy that
+anyhow, Romola. I’ve got business downstairs--got to make some
+sleeper reservations for getting out of here in the morning. And as
+soon as we hit Pittsburgh I figure you two had better be booking up
+for a little swing around Europe.”
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lobby below was seething--seething is the word commonly used in
+this connection so we might as well do so, too--was seething with
+Easterners who mainly had dressed as they imagined Westerners would
+dress, and with Westerners who mainly had dressed as they imagined
+Easterners would dress, the resultant effect being that nobody was
+fooled but everybody was pleased. Working his way through the jam on
+the search for a certain one, Mr. Gatling’s eye almost immediately
+was caught by a startling color combination or rather a series of
+startling color combinations appertaining to an individual who stood
+half hidden by a column, leaning against it, head down, with his
+back to Mr. Gatling.
+
+To begin at the top, there was, surmounting all, a smug undersized
+object of head-gear--at least, it would pass for head-gear--of a
+poisonous mustard shade. It perched high and, as it were, aloof upon
+the crest of its wearer’s skull. Below it, where the neck had been
+shaved, and a good portion of the close-clipped scalp as well,
+showed a sort of crescent of pink skin blazing forth in strong
+contrast to the abnormally long expanse of sunburnt surface rising
+above the cross-line of an exceedingly low, exceedingly shiny pink
+linen collar.
+
+Straying on downward, Mr. Gatling’s wondering eye was aware of a
+high-waisted Norfolk jacket belted well up beneath the armpits, a
+garment of a tone which might not be called mauve nor yet lavender
+nor yet magenta but which partook subtly of all three shades--with a
+plaid overlay in chocolate superimposed thereon. Yet nearer the
+floor was revealed a pair of trousers extensively bell-bottomed and
+apparently designed with the intent to bring out and impress upon
+the casual observer the fact that their present owner had two of the
+most widely bowed legs on the North American continent; and finally,
+a brace of cloth-top shoes. Tan shoes, these were, with buttoned
+uppers of a pale fawn cloth, and bulldog toes. They were very new
+shoes, that was plain, and of an exceedingly bright and pristine
+glossiness.
+
+This striking person now moved out of his shelter, his shoulders
+being set at a despondent hunch, and as he turned about, bringing
+his profile into view, Mr. Gatling recognized that the stranger was
+no stranger and he gasped.
+
+“Perfect!” he muttered to himself; “absolutely perfect! Couldn’t be
+better if I’d done it myself. And, oh Lordy, that necktie--that’s
+the finishing stroke! Still, at that, it’s a rotten shame--the poor
+kid!”
+
+He hurried across, overtaking the slumped figure, and as his hand
+fell in a friendly slap upon one drooped shoulder the transformed
+cowboy looked about him with two sad eyes.
+
+“Howdy-do, sir,” he said wanly. Then he braced himself and squared
+his back, and Mr. Gatling perceived--and was glad to note--that the
+youngster strove to take his heartache in a manly fashion.
+
+“Son,” said Mr. Gatling, “from what I’m able to gather I’m not going
+to have you for a son-in-law after all. But that’s no reason why we
+shouldn’t hook up along another line. I’ve been watching you off and
+on ever since we got acquainted and more closely since--well, since
+about a week ago, and it strikes me you’ve got some pretty good
+stuff in you. I’ve been thinking of trying a little flier in the
+cattle game out here. If you think you’d like a chance to start in
+as foreman or boss or superintendent or whatever you call it and
+maybe work up into a partnership if you showed me you had the goods,
+why, we’ll talk it over together at dinner. The womenfolks won’t be
+down and we can sit and powwow.”
+
+“I’d like that fine, sir,” said young Tripier.
+
+“Good boy! I’ll keep you so busy you won’t have time to brood on any
+little disappointment that you may be suffering from now.... Say,
+son, don’t mind my suggesting something, do you? If I was you I’d
+climb out of these duds you’ve got on and climb back into your
+regular working clothes--you don’t seem to match the picture the way
+you are now.”
+
+“Why, you advised me to get ’em your own self, sir!” exclaimed the
+youth.
+
+“That’s right, I did, didn’t I? Well, maybe you had better keep on
+wearing ’em.” A shrewd and crafty gleam flickered under his eyelids.
+“You see--yes--on second thoughts, I think I want a chance to get
+used to you in your stylish new outfit. Promise me you’ll wear ’em
+until noon tomorrow anyhow?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said his victim obediently.
+
+Mr. Gatling winked a concealed, deadly wink.
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September, 1926 issue
+of “Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan” magazine.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69929 ***
+
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-<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA ***</div>

-

-<section>

-<h1>The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa</h1>

-<div id='ifpc' class='mt01 mb01 wfpc'>

-  <img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%'>

-  <p class='caption'>

-The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding

-ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card

-racks of the world.

-  </p>

-</div>

-<div class='title'>The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa</div>

-<div class='subtitle'>A Story of a Fish out of Water</div>

-<div style='text-align:center;'>By Irvin S. Cobb</div>

-<div style='text-align:center; font-size:smaller; margin-bottom:2em;'>

-  Illustrations by James E. Allen

-</div>

-</section>

-

-<p>From up on the first level of the first shelf of the

-wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad

-Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span.

-The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist

-about in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched

-over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss

-swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its

-outspread glories while they got their wind back. It became

-evident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had

-been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down

-through the spicy dry air.</p>

-

-<p>“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and

-you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of

-firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up,

-you scenery-lovin’ <i>so-and-soes</i>!”</p>

-

-<p>There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and

-then fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound

-appreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Western

-wilds!” she said.</p>

-

-<p>“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter,

-Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her

-mother’s were.</p>

-

-<p>“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly

-that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation

-should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such

-picturesque types everywhere!”</p>

-

-<p>“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said

-Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his

-gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an

-average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at

-all, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”</p>

-

-<p>“<i>Mong père</i>, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss

-Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his

-native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”</p>

-

-<p>Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the

-one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that

-a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked

-through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter

-looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.</p>

-

-<p>Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots

-and her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn

-snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad

-brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large

-sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the

-pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning

-sunlight came

-slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made

-shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels

-and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right

-wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have

-been the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.</p>

-

-<p>“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your

-souls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re

-putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday

-noon, you’ll remember, we darn’ near starved. For you, the

-beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish

-gastric juices&mdash;chow and lots of it!”</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off

-his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows

-forming on his brow.</p>

-

-<p>“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly

-from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her

-attention&mdash;that <i>mmphing</i> sound was. Lacking vowels though it did,

-its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled

-ears.</p>

-

-<p>“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that

-dreadful horseback riding?”</p>

-

-<p>“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the

-one I’m worried about.”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with

-Shirley?”</p>

-

-<p>“Look at her. That’s all I ask&mdash;just look at her.”</p>

-

-<p>Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than

-one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.</p>

-

-<p>“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,”

-she protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday&mdash;or was it

-Tuesday; no, Monday&mdash;I remember distinctly now it was Monday

-because that was the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming

-through Swift Current Pass&mdash;only last Monday you were saying

-yourself how well and rosy she was looking.”</p>

-

-<p>“I don’t mean that&mdash;she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones.

-Look where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s

-doing!”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to

-know?” demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive

-for her young.</p>

-

-<p>“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these

-last four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting

-an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing

-with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the

-subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these

-roundabout tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions

-before he ever voiced them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you?

-All right then, use ’em.”</p>

-

-<p>“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions

-in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the

-child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three

-guides packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make

-that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call

-it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a

-pearl knot?”</p>

-

-<p>“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not

-pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try

-to remember it, too&mdash;diamonds and hitches usually figure in the

-thing that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to

-observe her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides

-she’s so interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And

-it’s getting serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my

-drift, or must I make plans and specifications?”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow

-but with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her

-feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed

-knickerbockers and a Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any

-feathers to flutter. “Oh, Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t

-mean it! A child who’s traveled and seen the world! A child

-who’s had every advantage that wealth and social position and

-all could give her! A child who’s a member of the Junior League!

-A child who’s&mdash;who Hector, you’re crazy. Hector, you know it’s

-utterly impossible&mdash;utterly! It’s preposterous!” Womanlike, she

-debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being

-womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy

-her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen something&mdash;you’ve

-overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you

-overheard!”</p>

-

-<p>“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around

-eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that

-on her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve

-seen a-plenty.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen

-it myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh,

-pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked

-conviction.</p>

-

-<p>“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,”

-continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand

-on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was

-this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and

-she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First

-loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as

-though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay

-out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all

-of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual.

-That’s the worst symptom yet&mdash;that slang is.</p>

-

-<p>“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she

-had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went

-mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and

-romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded

-ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the

-sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did&mdash;you mushed-up.” His tone was

-accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses

-which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now

-it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and

-they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what

-Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or else I’m

-the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”</p>

-

-<p>“Maybe&mdash;maybe&mdash;&mdash;” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted.

-“Of course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector&mdash;the mere

-suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible&mdash;but on the bare

-chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her

-head maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she

-is that&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling

-interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your

-trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint.

-People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating

-that young people are different from the way young people were

-when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we

-were&mdash;same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same

-everything&mdash;but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then

-we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our

-lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just

-the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster

-of ours&mdash;not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar,

-considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling,

-that masterful, self-educated man.</p>

-

-<p>“But if I pointed out a few things to her&mdash;if I warned her&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so

-terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you.

-After I’d come courting and had gone on home again I guess it

-was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel

-and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense

-enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose

-he’d tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the

-match&mdash;what would have happened? You’d have thought you were

-oppressed and persecuted and you’d have grabbed for me even

-quicker than you did.”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much

-gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw

-and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course,

-and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist

-church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kinsfolks and all the

-other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back

-window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar

-buggy. No, ma’am, if you’ll take a tip from an old retired

-yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy,

-with one road, you’ll&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”</p>

-

-<p>“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re

-to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in

-our reserved seats up in the grand stand and see how the game

-comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting&mdash;that’s

-our line and we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for

-future developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little

-campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned,

-the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner

-rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she

-continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It

-would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady’s

-bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely

-studied these.</p>

-

-<p>The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient

-backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They

-overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with

-provender for the highway contractors on up under the

-cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wall, and behind them heard

-for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the

-immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the

-darkened future prospects of his work stock. Soon they swung

-away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback

-trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants

-against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a

-little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a

-picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted

-buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and

-two jeweled glaciers.</p>

-

-<p>They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate

-and remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along

-the farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed

-among the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw

-a solitary bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia

-springing out of his skull and likewise they saw a pair of

-indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes to fill all the

-souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete particulars

-consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.</p>

-

-<p>Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within

-sight of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain.

-So they pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove

-there in a sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and

-watched the sun go down in his glory. When the moon rose it was

-too good to believe. You almost could reach up and jingle the

-tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought

-you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for lovemaking

-among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs. Gating

-had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind

-the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary

-form amidships. She’d been apprehensive all day but now the

-sinking was more pronounced.</p>

-

-<p>She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper

-was over and it was near hushabye-time for the tired forms of

-the middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she

-spoke then to her husband, touching on the topic so steadfastly

-uppermost in her brain.</p>

-

-<p>“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid

-you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither

-one of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he

-helped her on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried

-for her! And the way she let him do it! And they’re&mdash;they’re

-together outside now. Oh, Hector!”</p>

-

-<p>“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in

-that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded

-turtledoves. Why in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight&mdash;good

-and hard? Romola, I don’t want to harry you up any more than’s

-necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like

-this and they’re liable to do considerable damage to tender

-hearts.”</p>

-

-<p>“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you

-tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can

-give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was

-quite plain that he did.</p>

-

-<p>He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted

-sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and

-peeped through the opening.</p>

-

-<p>The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill

-and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the

-shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous

-blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong,

-sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His

-wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse; his Angora

-chaps with wings that almost were voluminous enough for an

-eagle’s wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved

-bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be

-sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his

-beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled,

-silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy&mdash;they all matched and

-modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the

-sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.</p>

-

-<p>His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally

-called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden

-No Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up

-and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line

-at Calgary.</p>

-

-<div id='i001' class='mt01 mb01 w001'>

-  <img src='images/illus-001.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%'>

-  <p class='caption'>

-Hayes had ridden the man-killer at the Pendleton Round-up.

-And three moonlight nights hand-running had their effect

-on Shirley’s impressionable youth.

-  </p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person

-and given to deporting himself accordingly.</p>

-

-<p>At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with

-his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud

-proprietary aura all about him.</p>

-

-<p>The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about

-his daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make

-out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two

-silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and

-flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch

-as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the

-outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof

-above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she

-betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on

-the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded

-void beyond her.</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and

-<i>mmphed</i> several times.</p>

-

-<p>“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked

-absently.</p>

-

-<p>“Who?”</p>

-

-<p>“Him.”</p>

-

-<p>“You actually mean that cowboy?”</p>

-

-<p>“None other than which.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh, Hector! That&mdash;that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that

-clodhopper!”</p>

-

-<p>“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are

-prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em

-in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no

-farm-hand; he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of

-steering tourists around through these mountains&mdash;and that’s a

-very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows

-blame’ well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he

-does. When he gets in a saddle he’s riveted there but I only

-come loose and work out of the socket. And I’d give about five

-years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can.

-I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly high-grade

-proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much blame

-him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself, who

-else is going to?”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really&mdash;but no, you

-couldn’t be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at

-their different environments! Look at their different

-viewpoints!”</p>

-

-<p>“I’m looking&mdash;just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m

-driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law

-any more than you would&mdash;although at that I’m not saying I

-couldn’t maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still,

-you needn’t mind worrying so much about their respective

-stations in life. I didn’t have any station in life to start

-from myself&mdash;it was a whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to

-stagger along fairly well. I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up

-to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss

-that came along than to have her fall for one of those

-plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back

-home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be

-guitar-pickers&mdash;and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly

-pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of

-’em carry any weight is on the hip.</p>

-

-<p>“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for

-this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female

-when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been

-raised to talk the same language&mdash;that’s the trouble. I don’t

-want her to make a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s

-fairly started. I don’t want her to have a husband that she’s

-liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the

-majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she’d maybe have to

-go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and

-fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she’s in,

-she’s probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly

-satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and

-wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next thirty, forty or fifty

-years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After a

-while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach and Paris.”</p>

-

-<p>“But if she’s set her mind&mdash;and you know how stubborn she is when

-she gets her mind set&mdash;thank heavens she didn’t get that from my

-side of the family!&mdash;I say, if she’s set her mind on him, heavens

-above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s

-hypnotized; it’s this free and easy Western life that’s

-fascinated her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a half-gallon hat

-and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides,

-or then again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with

-her, or a close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we

-can.”</p>

-

-<p>“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured,

-she’s&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”</p>

-

-<p>“But how?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her

-little dream. By not letting either one of ’em see how anxious

-we are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected

-as we can.”</p>

-

-<p>“And in the meanwhile?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few

-winks. I hurt all over and there’s quite a lot of me measured

-that way&mdash;all over.”</p>

-

-<p>“You can go to sleep with that&mdash;that dreadful thought hanging

-over us?”</p>

-

-<p>“I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you’ll

-hear me doing it.” He settled himself on his air mattress and

-drew the blankets over him.</p>

-

-<p>Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most

-aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband

-can.</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights

-upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr.

-Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit

-ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his

-perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those

-explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun

-baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars and the unseen

-heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome

-bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned

-slow journeys through deep defiles where ferns grew with a

-tropical luxuriance; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams

-when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young

-man to steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her

-horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But

-vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies in his symposium

-of contributory dangers.</p>

-

-<p>Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of

-pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of

-the third day when camp was being made beside a river which

-mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in

-a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the

-nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier

-that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her

-way of putting it had been different.</p>

-

-<p>“Harken, O most revered Drawing Account,” she said, dropping

-back on a broad place in the trail to be near him. “If you can

-spare the time from being saddle-sore I want to give you an

-earful as soon as this procession, as of even date, breaks up.

-You pick a quiet retreat away from the flock and wait there

-until I find you, savvy?”</p>

-

-<p>So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him

-stepping lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of

-impudent freedom of movement; and to his father’s eyes she never

-had seemed more graceful or more delectable or more independent

-looking.</p>

-

-<p>“Dad,” she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye,

-“in me you behold a Sabine woman. I’m bespoken.”</p>

-

-<p>“Mmph,” he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a

-person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.</p>

-

-<p>“Such is the case,” she went on, quite unafraid. “That caveman

-over there in the blue shirt”&mdash;she pointed&mdash;“he’s the nominee.

-We’re engaged.”</p>

-

-<p>“I can’t plead surprise, kid,” he stated, taking on for the

-moment her bantering tone. “The report that you two had come to

-a sort of understanding has been in active circulation on this

-reservation for the past forty-eight hours or so&mdash;maybe longer.”</p>

-

-<p>Her eyebrows went up. “I don’t get you,” she said. “Who

-circulated it?”</p>

-

-<p>“You did, for one,” he told her. “And he did, for another. I may

-be failing, what with increasing age and all, but I’m not more

-than half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this

-piece of news?”</p>

-

-<p>“I came to you first. I&mdash;I”&mdash;for the first time she faltered an

-instant&mdash;“I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a

-little quicker then she would. This is only the curtain-raiser.

-I’m saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her.

-I have a feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I

-picked on something easy to begin with.”</p>

-

-<p>“I see,” he said. “Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?” He held

-her off at arm’s length from him, studying her face hungrily.

-“But what’s the reason your young man didn’t come along with you

-or ahead of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young

-man that brought the message to Garcia.”</p>

-

-<p>“He wanted to come&mdash;he wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t let him. I told

-him I’d been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle

-the job better by myself. Well, that’s your cue. What’s it going

-to be, daddy&mdash;the glad hand of approval and the parental bless

-you my children, bless you, or a little line of that

-go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again

-stuff? Only, we’re a trifle shy on doors around here.”</p>

-

-<p>He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped

-head, she snuggling her face against his wool-clad breast.</p>

-

-<p>“Baby,” he said, “when all’s said and done, the whole thing’s up

-to you, way I look at it. I don’t suppose there ever was a man

-who really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking

-one thing with another, she was too good for any man on earth.

-I’m not saying now what sort of a husband I’d try to pick out

-for you if the choice had been left to me. I’d probably want to

-keep you an old maid so’s I could have you around and then I’d

-secretly despise myself for doing it, too. What I’m saying is

-this: If you’re certain you know your own mind and if you’ve

-decided that this boy is the boy you want, why what more is

-there for me to do except maybe to ask you just one or two small

-questions?”</p>

-

-<p>“Shoot!” she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a

-little tighter. “Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in

-the world,” she added, confidentially addressing the top

-buttonhole of his sweater.</p>

-

-<p>“Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this

-early stage of the game, how you are going to live&mdash;you two? Or

-where? Or, if I may be so bold, what on?”</p>

-

-<p>“That’s easy,” she said, and now she was peering up at him

-through a tousled short forelock. “You’re going to set us up on

-a place out here somewhere&mdash;a ranch. We’re going to raise beef.

-He knows about beef. And I’m going to learn. I aim to be the

-leading lady beefer of the Imperial Northwest.”</p>

-

-<p>“Whose notion was that?” His voice had sharpened the least bit.</p>

-

-<p>“Mine, of course. He doesn’t know anything about it. His idea is

-that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we

-start in on a few of the simoleons that have already been

-earned&mdash;by you. And that’s the idea that’s going to prevail.”</p>

-

-<p>“Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along,” he

-said. “Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies.

-Still, I take it there’s no great rush. Now, I tell you what:

-You run along and locate your mother and get <i>that</i> over with.

-She knows how I stand&mdash;we’ve been discussing this little affair

-our own selves.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you have?” She seemed disappointed

-somehow&mdash;disappointed and slightly puzzled.</p>

-

-<p>“Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the

-young man that I’m lurking right here behind these rocks ready

-to have a few words with him.”</p>

-

-<p>“Righto!” She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away,

-and for just a moment Mr. Gatling’s conscience smote him.</p>

-

-<p>“I’ve got to do it,” he said to himself, excusing himself. “I’ve

-just got to find out&mdash;for her sake and ours&mdash;yes, and for his,

-too. It looks like an impossible bet and I’ve got to make sure.”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>With young Tripier he had more than the few words he had

-specified. They had quite an interview and as they had it the

-youth’s embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialog had

-made him wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at

-inoffensive pebbles, gradually wore off until it vanished

-altogether and his native assurance reasserted itself. A

-proposition was advanced. It needed little pressing; promptly he

-fell in with it. It appealed to him.</p>

-

-<p>“So we’re agreed there,” concluded his prospective

-father-in-law, clinching the final rivets. “We’ll all go right

-ahead and finish out this tour&mdash;it’s only a couple of days more

-anyhow. Then I’ll take Shirley and her mother and run on out to

-Spokane. We’ll hustle one of the other boys back tomorrow to the

-entrance to tell my chauffeur to load some bags in the car and

-run around to this side and meet us where we come out. We’ll

-leave you there and you can dust back to the starting point

-through that short cut over the Garden Wall you were just

-speaking of. The business that I’ve got in Spokane will keep me

-maybe two or three days. That’ll give you time to get those new

-clothes of yours and then we’ll all meet over at Many

-Glacier&mdash;I’ll wire you in advance&mdash;and in a day or two we’ll all

-go on East together so’s you can get acquainted with Shirley’s

-friends and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that’s

-our secret&mdash;all that part of it is. You’ve never been East, I

-believe?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, I’ve been as far as Minot, North Dakota.”</p>

-

-<p>“You’ll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side

-of there. You’ll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe

-you need out in this country?” His manner was solicitous.</p>

-

-<p>“Oh yes, sir, there’s those two swell fellows named Steinfelt

-and Immergluck I was telling you about that they’ve got the

-leading gents’ furnishing goods store down in Cree City.”</p>

-

-<p>“Good enough! I’d suggest that when picking out a suit you get

-something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live

-colors.” Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had

-been dwelt upon: “You understand of course that she’s not to

-know a single thing about all this&mdash;it’s strictly between us

-two?”</p>

-

-<p>“Yes, sir.”</p>

-

-<p>“You see, that’ll make the surprise all the greater when she

-sees you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young

-college fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems

-like to me I was reading in an advertisement only here the other

-day where they’re going in for coats with belts on ’em this

-season. Oh yes, and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.</p>

-

-<p>“One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and

-shaggy, don’t you think? That’s fine for out here but back East

-a young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed

-up sort of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about

-as old as you are just the other day. Let me see&mdash;where was it?

-Oh yes, it was the barber at that town of Cree City&mdash;I dropped in

-there for a shave when we motored down last week. He seemed to

-have pretty good ideas about trimming up a fellow’s bean, that

-barber.”</p>

-

-<p>“I know the one you mean&mdash;Silk Sullivan. I’ve patronized him

-before.”</p>

-

-<p>“That’s the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us.

-He knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does....

-Now, mind you, mum’s the word. All this part of it is absolutely

-between us.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh yes, sir.”</p>

-

-<p>“O. k. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they’re coming

-along with supper.”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling’s strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to

-Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious

-prolongation of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his

-privy intent being to give opportunity for Cree City’s

-ready-made clothing princes to work their will. Since a hellish

-deed must be done he craved that they do it properly. Then on

-the homeward journey when they had reached the Western Gate, he

-suddenly remembered he had failed to complete his purchases of

-an assortment of game heads at Lewis’s on Lake McDonald. He

-professed that he couldn’t round out the order by telephone;

-unless he personally checked his collection some grievous error

-might be made.</p>

-

-<p>“You go on across on this train, Shirley,” he said. “I

-telegraphed your young man that we’d be there this morning and

-he’ll be on the lookout. Your mother and I’ll dust up to the

-head of the lake on the bus and I’ll finish up what I’ve got to

-do there and we’ll be along on the Limited this evening. After

-being separated for a whole week you two’ll enjoy a day together

-without any old folks snooping around. Meet us at the hotel

-tonight.”</p>

-

-<p>So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley’s

-nerves had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of

-a devoted mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken

-eyes fixed on her only child&mdash;a mother who at frequent intervals

-sniffed mournfully. Quite willingly Shirley went.</p>

-

-<p>“I&mdash;I feel as though I were giving her up forever,” faltered Mrs.

-Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter’s departing

-form.</p>

-

-<p>“Romola,” commanded Mr. Gatling, “don’t be foolish in the head.

-You’re going to be separated from her exactly nine hours.”</p>

-

-<p>“But she tripped away so gaily&mdash;so gladly. It was exactly as

-though she wanted to leave us. And yet, heavens knows I’ve tried

-and tried ever since that&mdash;that terrible night to show her what

-she means to me&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“You’ve done more than try, Romola&mdash;you’ve succeeded, if that’s

-any consolation to you. You’ve succeeded darned well.” He stared

-almost regretfully down the line at the rear of an

-observation-car swiftly diminishing into a small square dot

-where the rails came together. “Since you mention it, she did

-look powerfully chipper and cheerful a minute ago, hustling to

-climb aboard that Pullman&mdash;cheerfuller than she’s looked since

-we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how I wish I could

-guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute’s

-unhappiness the rest of her life!” Something remotely akin to

-remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling’s heart cockles.</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward

-the close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no

-Shirley was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of

-Shirley’s affianced, either. Up the slope from the tracks at the

-hotel a clerk wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of

-newly-arrived tourists for long enough to tell them Miss Gatling

-had left word she would be awaiting them in their rooms and

-wished them to come up immediately.</p>

-

-<p>So they went up under escort of two college students serving as

-bell-hops. A bedroom door opened and out came Shirley&mdash;a

-crumpled, wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face.</p>

-

-<p>“It’s all right, mater,” she said with a flickering trace of her

-usual jauntiness. “The alliance between the house of Gatling and

-the house of Tripier is off. So you can liven up. I’ll be your

-substitute for such crying as is done in this family during the

-next day or two. I’ve&mdash;I’ve been practising all afternoon.”</p>

-

-<p>She eluded the lady’s outstretched arms and clung temporarily at

-her father’s breast.</p>

-

-<p>“Dad,” she confessed brokenly, “I think I must have been a

-little bit loony these last two weeks. But, dad, I’ve taken the

-cure. It’s not nice medicine and it makes you feel miserable

-at first but I guess it’s good for what ails me.... Dad, have

-you seen&mdash;him?”</p>

-

-<p>“Not yet.” Compassion for her was mixed in with his own secret

-exultation, as though he tasted a sweet cake that was iced with

-a most bitter icing.</p>

-

-<p>“Well, when you do, you’ll understand. Even if he doesn’t!”</p>

-

-<p>“Have you told him?”</p>

-

-<p>“Of course I have. Did you think I’d try to wish that little job

-off on you? I didn’t tell him the real reason&mdash;I couldn’t wound

-him that much. I told him I’d changed. But he&mdash;he’s really the

-one that’s changed. That’s what makes it harder for me now.

-That’s what makes it hurt so.”</p>

-

-<p>“Here, Romola,” he said, kissing the girl and relinquishing her

-into her mother’s grasp. “You swap tears awhile&mdash;you’ll enjoy

-that anyhow, Romola. I’ve got business downstairs&mdash;got to make

-some sleeper reservations for getting out of here in the

-morning. And as soon as we hit Pittsburgh I figure you two had

-better be booking up for a little swing around Europe.”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>The lobby below was seething&mdash;seething is the word commonly used

-in this connection so we might as well do so, too&mdash;was seething

-with Easterners who mainly had dressed as they imagined

-Westerners would dress, and with Westerners who mainly had

-dressed as they imagined Easterners would dress, the resultant

-effect being that nobody was fooled but everybody was pleased.

-Working his way through the jam on the search for a certain one,

-Mr. Gatling’s eye almost immediately was caught by a startling

-color combination or rather a series of startling color

-combinations appertaining to an individual who stood half hidden

-by a column, leaning against it, head down, with his back to Mr.

-Gatling.</p>

-

-<p>To begin at the top, there was, surmounting all, a smug

-undersized object of head-gear&mdash;at least, it would pass for

-head-gear&mdash;of a poisonous mustard shade. It perched high and, as

-it were, aloof upon the crest of its wearer’s skull. Below it,

-where the neck had been shaved, and a good portion of the

-close-clipped scalp as well, showed a sort of crescent of pink

-skin blazing forth in strong contrast to the abnormally long

-expanse of sunburnt surface rising above the cross-line of an

-exceedingly low, exceedingly shiny pink linen collar.</p>

-

-<p>Straying on downward, Mr. Gatling’s wondering eye was aware of a

-high-waisted Norfolk jacket belted well up beneath the armpits,

-a garment of a tone which might not be called mauve nor yet

-lavender nor yet magenta but which partook subtly of all three

-shades&mdash;with a plaid overlay in chocolate superimposed thereon.

-Yet nearer the floor was revealed a pair of trousers extensively

-bell-bottomed and apparently designed with the intent to bring

-out and impress upon the casual observer the fact that their

-present owner had two of the most widely bowed legs on the North

-American continent; and finally, a brace of cloth-top shoes. Tan

-shoes, these were, with buttoned uppers of a pale fawn cloth,

-and bulldog toes. They were very new shoes, that was plain, and

-of an exceedingly bright and pristine glossiness.</p>

-

-<p>This striking person now moved out of his shelter, his shoulders

-being set at a despondent hunch, and as he turned about,

-bringing his profile into view, Mr. Gatling recognized that the

-stranger was no stranger and he gasped.</p>

-

-<p>“Perfect!” he muttered to himself; “absolutely perfect! Couldn’t

-be better if I’d done it myself. And, oh Lordy, that

-necktie&mdash;that’s the finishing stroke! Still, at that, it’s a

-rotten shame&mdash;the poor kid!”</p>

-

-<p>He hurried across, overtaking the slumped figure, and as his

-hand fell in a friendly slap upon one drooped shoulder the

-transformed cowboy looked about him with two sad eyes.</p>

-

-<p>“Howdy-do, sir,” he said wanly. Then he braced himself and

-squared his back, and Mr. Gatling perceived&mdash;and was glad to

-note&mdash;that the youngster strove to take his heartache in a manly

-fashion.</p>

-

-<p>“Son,” said Mr. Gatling, “from what I’m able to gather I’m not

-going to have you for a son-in-law after all. But that’s no

-reason why we shouldn’t hook up along another line. I’ve been

-watching you off and on ever since we got acquainted and more

-closely since&mdash;well, since about a week ago, and it strikes me

-you’ve got some pretty good stuff in you. I’ve been thinking of

-trying a little flier in the cattle game out here. If you think

-you’d like a chance to start in as foreman or boss or

-superintendent or whatever you call it and maybe work up into a

-partnership if you showed me you had the goods, why, we’ll talk

-it over together at dinner. The womenfolks won’t be down and we

-can sit and powwow.”</p>

-

-<p>“I’d like that fine, sir,” said young Tripier.</p>

-

-<p>“Good boy! I’ll keep you so busy you won’t have time to brood on

-any little disappointment that you may be suffering from

-now.... Say, son, don’t mind my suggesting something, do you? If I was

-you I’d climb out of these duds you’ve got on and climb back

-into your regular working clothes&mdash;you don’t seem to match the

-picture the way you are now.”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, you advised me to get ’em your own self, sir!” exclaimed

-the youth.</p>

-

-<p>“That’s right, I did, didn’t I? Well, maybe you had better keep

-on wearing ’em.” A shrewd and crafty gleam flickered under his

-eyelids. “You see&mdash;yes&mdash;on second thoughts, I think I want a

-chance to get used to you in your stylish new outfit. Promise me

-you’ll wear ’em until noon tomorrow anyhow?”</p>

-

-<p>“Yes, sir,” said his victim obediently.</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling winked a concealed, deadly wink.</p>

-

-<p style='margin-top:1em; text-indent:0; text-align:center; font-size:0.8em;'>THE END</p>

-<div class='tn'>

-  <div style='text-align:center;padding-top:0.4em;'>Transcriber’s Notes</div>

-  <ol>

-  <li>This story appeared in the September, 1926 issue

-  of <i>Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan</i> magazine.</li>

-  <li>New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.</li>

-  </ol>

-</div>

-

-<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA ***</div>

-

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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA ***</div>
+
+<section>
+<h1>The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa</h1>
+<div id='ifpc' class='mt01 mb01 wfpc'>
+  <img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%'>
+  <p class='caption'>
+The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding
+ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card
+racks of the world.
+  </p>
+</div>
+<div class='title'>The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa</div>
+<div class='subtitle'>A Story of a Fish out of Water</div>
+<div style='text-align:center;'>By Irvin S. Cobb</div>
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:smaller; margin-bottom:2em;'>
+  Illustrations by James E. Allen
+</div>
+</section>
+
+<p>From up on the first level of the first shelf of the
+wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad
+Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span.
+The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist
+about in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched
+over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss
+swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its
+outspread glories while they got their wind back. It became
+evident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had
+been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down
+through the spicy dry air.</p>
+
+<p>“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and
+you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of
+firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up,
+you scenery-lovin’ <i>so-and-soes</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and
+then fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound
+appreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Western
+wilds!” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter,
+Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her
+mother’s were.</p>
+
+<p>“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly
+that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation
+should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such
+picturesque types everywhere!”</p>
+
+<p>“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said
+Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his
+gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an
+average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at
+all, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Mong père</i>, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss
+Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his
+native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”</p>
+
+<p>Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the
+one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that
+a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked
+through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter
+looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots
+and her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn
+snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad
+brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large
+sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the
+pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning
+sunlight came
+slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made
+shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels
+and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right
+wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have
+been the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.</p>
+
+<p>“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your
+souls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re
+putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday
+noon, you’ll remember, we darn’ near starved. For you, the
+beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish
+gastric juices&mdash;chow and lots of it!”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off
+his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows
+forming on his brow.</p>
+
+<p>“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly
+from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her
+attention&mdash;that <i>mmphing</i> sound was. Lacking vowels though it did,
+its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled
+ears.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that
+dreadful horseback riding?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the
+one I’m worried about.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with
+Shirley?”</p>
+
+<p>“Look at her. That’s all I ask&mdash;just look at her.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than
+one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,”
+she protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday&mdash;or was it
+Tuesday; no, Monday&mdash;I remember distinctly now it was Monday
+because that was the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming
+through Swift Current Pass&mdash;only last Monday you were saying
+yourself how well and rosy she was looking.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t mean that&mdash;she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones.
+Look where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s
+doing!”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to
+know?” demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive
+for her young.</p>
+
+<p>“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these
+last four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting
+an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing
+with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the
+subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these
+roundabout tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions
+before he ever voiced them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you?
+All right then, use ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions
+in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the
+child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three
+guides packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make
+that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call
+it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a
+pearl knot?”</p>
+
+<p>“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not
+pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try
+to remember it, too&mdash;diamonds and hitches usually figure in the
+thing that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to
+observe her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides
+she’s so interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And
+it’s getting serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my
+drift, or must I make plans and specifications?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow
+but with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her
+feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed
+knickerbockers and a Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any
+feathers to flutter. “Oh, Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t
+mean it! A child who’s traveled and seen the world! A child
+who’s had every advantage that wealth and social position and
+all could give her! A child who’s a member of the Junior League!
+A child who’s&mdash;who Hector, you’re crazy. Hector, you know it’s
+utterly impossible&mdash;utterly! It’s preposterous!” Womanlike, she
+debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being
+womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy
+her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen something&mdash;you’ve
+overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you
+overheard!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around
+eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that
+on her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve
+seen a-plenty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen
+it myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh,
+pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked
+conviction.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,”
+continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand
+on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was
+this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and
+she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First
+loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as
+though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay
+out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all
+of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual.
+That’s the worst symptom yet&mdash;that slang is.</p>
+
+<p>“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she
+had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went
+mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and
+romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded
+ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the
+sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did&mdash;you mushed-up.” His tone was
+accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses
+which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now
+it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and
+they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what
+Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or else I’m
+the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe&mdash;maybe&mdash;&mdash;” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted.
+“Of course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector&mdash;the mere
+suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible&mdash;but on the bare
+chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her
+head maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she
+is that&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling
+interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your
+trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint.
+People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating
+that young people are different from the way young people were
+when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we
+were&mdash;same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same
+everything&mdash;but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then
+we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our
+lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just
+the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster
+of ours&mdash;not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar,
+considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling,
+that masterful, self-educated man.</p>
+
+<p>“But if I pointed out a few things to her&mdash;if I warned her&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so
+terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you.
+After I’d come courting and had gone on home again I guess it
+was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel
+and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense
+enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose
+he’d tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the
+match&mdash;what would have happened? You’d have thought you were
+oppressed and persecuted and you’d have grabbed for me even
+quicker than you did.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much
+gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw
+and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course,
+and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist
+church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kinsfolks and all the
+other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back
+window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar
+buggy. No, ma’am, if you’ll take a tip from an old retired
+yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy,
+with one road, you’ll&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re
+to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in
+our reserved seats up in the grand stand and see how the game
+comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting&mdash;that’s
+our line and we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for
+future developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little
+campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned,
+the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner
+rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she
+continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It
+would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady’s
+bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely
+studied these.</p>
+
+<p>The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient
+backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They
+overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with
+provender for the highway contractors on up under the
+cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wall, and behind them heard
+for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the
+immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the
+darkened future prospects of his work stock. Soon they swung
+away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback
+trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants
+against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a
+little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a
+picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted
+buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and
+two jeweled glaciers.</p>
+
+<p>They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate
+and remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along
+the farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed
+among the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw
+a solitary bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia
+springing out of his skull and likewise they saw a pair of
+indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes to fill all the
+souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete particulars
+consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.</p>
+
+<p>Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within
+sight of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain.
+So they pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove
+there in a sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and
+watched the sun go down in his glory. When the moon rose it was
+too good to believe. You almost could reach up and jingle the
+tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought
+you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for lovemaking
+among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs. Gating
+had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind
+the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary
+form amidships. She’d been apprehensive all day but now the
+sinking was more pronounced.</p>
+
+<p>She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper
+was over and it was near hushabye-time for the tired forms of
+the middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she
+spoke then to her husband, touching on the topic so steadfastly
+uppermost in her brain.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid
+you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither
+one of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he
+helped her on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried
+for her! And the way she let him do it! And they’re&mdash;they’re
+together outside now. Oh, Hector!”</p>
+
+<p>“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in
+that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded
+turtledoves. Why in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight&mdash;good
+and hard? Romola, I don’t want to harry you up any more than’s
+necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like
+this and they’re liable to do considerable damage to tender
+hearts.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you
+tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can
+give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was
+quite plain that he did.</p>
+
+<p>He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted
+sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and
+peeped through the opening.</p>
+
+<p>The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill
+and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the
+shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous
+blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong,
+sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His
+wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse; his Angora
+chaps with wings that almost were voluminous enough for an
+eagle’s wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved
+bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be
+sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his
+beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled,
+silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy&mdash;they all matched and
+modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the
+sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.</p>
+
+<p>His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally
+called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden
+No Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up
+and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line
+at Calgary.</p>
+
+<div id='i001' class='mt01 mb01 w001'>
+  <img src='images/illus-001.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%'>
+  <p class='caption'>
+Hayes had ridden the man-killer at the Pendleton Round-up.
+And three moonlight nights hand-running had their effect
+on Shirley’s impressionable youth.
+  </p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person
+and given to deporting himself accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with
+his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud
+proprietary aura all about him.</p>
+
+<p>The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about
+his daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make
+out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two
+silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and
+flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch
+as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the
+outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof
+above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she
+betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on
+the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded
+void beyond her.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and
+<i>mmphed</i> several times.</p>
+
+<p>“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked
+absently.</p>
+
+<p>“Who?”</p>
+
+<p>“Him.”</p>
+
+<p>“You actually mean that cowboy?”</p>
+
+<p>“None other than which.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Hector! That&mdash;that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that
+clodhopper!”</p>
+
+<p>“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are
+prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em
+in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no
+farm-hand; he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of
+steering tourists around through these mountains&mdash;and that’s a
+very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows
+blame’ well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he
+does. When he gets in a saddle he’s riveted there but I only
+come loose and work out of the socket. And I’d give about five
+years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can.
+I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly high-grade
+proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much blame
+him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself, who
+else is going to?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really&mdash;but no, you
+couldn’t be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at
+their different environments! Look at their different
+viewpoints!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m looking&mdash;just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m
+driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law
+any more than you would&mdash;although at that I’m not saying I
+couldn’t maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still,
+you needn’t mind worrying so much about their respective
+stations in life. I didn’t have any station in life to start
+from myself&mdash;it was a whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to
+stagger along fairly well. I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up
+to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss
+that came along than to have her fall for one of those
+plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back
+home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be
+guitar-pickers&mdash;and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly
+pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of
+’em carry any weight is on the hip.</p>
+
+<p>“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for
+this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female
+when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been
+raised to talk the same language&mdash;that’s the trouble. I don’t
+want her to make a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s
+fairly started. I don’t want her to have a husband that she’s
+liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the
+majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she’d maybe have to
+go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and
+fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she’s in,
+she’s probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly
+satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and
+wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next thirty, forty or fifty
+years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After a
+while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach and Paris.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if she’s set her mind&mdash;and you know how stubborn she is when
+she gets her mind set&mdash;thank heavens she didn’t get that from my
+side of the family!&mdash;I say, if she’s set her mind on him, heavens
+above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s
+hypnotized; it’s this free and easy Western life that’s
+fascinated her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a half-gallon hat
+and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides,
+or then again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with
+her, or a close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we
+can.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured,
+she’s&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”</p>
+
+<p>“But how?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her
+little dream. By not letting either one of ’em see how anxious
+we are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected
+as we can.”</p>
+
+<p>“And in the meanwhile?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few
+winks. I hurt all over and there’s quite a lot of me measured
+that way&mdash;all over.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can go to sleep with that&mdash;that dreadful thought hanging
+over us?”</p>
+
+<p>“I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you’ll
+hear me doing it.” He settled himself on his air mattress and
+drew the blankets over him.</p>
+
+<p>Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most
+aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband
+can.</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights
+upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr.
+Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit
+ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his
+perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those
+explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun
+baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars and the unseen
+heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome
+bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned
+slow journeys through deep defiles where ferns grew with a
+tropical luxuriance; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams
+when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young
+man to steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her
+horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But
+vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies in his symposium
+of contributory dangers.</p>
+
+<p>Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of
+pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of
+the third day when camp was being made beside a river which
+mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in
+a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the
+nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier
+that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her
+way of putting it had been different.</p>
+
+<p>“Harken, O most revered Drawing Account,” she said, dropping
+back on a broad place in the trail to be near him. “If you can
+spare the time from being saddle-sore I want to give you an
+earful as soon as this procession, as of even date, breaks up.
+You pick a quiet retreat away from the flock and wait there
+until I find you, savvy?”</p>
+
+<p>So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him
+stepping lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of
+impudent freedom of movement; and to his father’s eyes she never
+had seemed more graceful or more delectable or more independent
+looking.</p>
+
+<p>“Dad,” she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye,
+“in me you behold a Sabine woman. I’m bespoken.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mmph,” he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a
+person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.</p>
+
+<p>“Such is the case,” she went on, quite unafraid. “That caveman
+over there in the blue shirt”&mdash;she pointed&mdash;“he’s the nominee.
+We’re engaged.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t plead surprise, kid,” he stated, taking on for the
+moment her bantering tone. “The report that you two had come to
+a sort of understanding has been in active circulation on this
+reservation for the past forty-eight hours or so&mdash;maybe longer.”</p>
+
+<p>Her eyebrows went up. “I don’t get you,” she said. “Who
+circulated it?”</p>
+
+<p>“You did, for one,” he told her. “And he did, for another. I may
+be failing, what with increasing age and all, but I’m not more
+than half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this
+piece of news?”</p>
+
+<p>“I came to you first. I&mdash;I”&mdash;for the first time she faltered an
+instant&mdash;“I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a
+little quicker then she would. This is only the curtain-raiser.
+I’m saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her.
+I have a feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I
+picked on something easy to begin with.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see,” he said. “Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?” He held
+her off at arm’s length from him, studying her face hungrily.
+“But what’s the reason your young man didn’t come along with you
+or ahead of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young
+man that brought the message to Garcia.”</p>
+
+<p>“He wanted to come&mdash;he wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t let him. I told
+him I’d been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle
+the job better by myself. Well, that’s your cue. What’s it going
+to be, daddy&mdash;the glad hand of approval and the parental bless
+you my children, bless you, or a little line of that
+go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again
+stuff? Only, we’re a trifle shy on doors around here.”</p>
+
+<p>He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped
+head, she snuggling her face against his wool-clad breast.</p>
+
+<p>“Baby,” he said, “when all’s said and done, the whole thing’s up
+to you, way I look at it. I don’t suppose there ever was a man
+who really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking
+one thing with another, she was too good for any man on earth.
+I’m not saying now what sort of a husband I’d try to pick out
+for you if the choice had been left to me. I’d probably want to
+keep you an old maid so’s I could have you around and then I’d
+secretly despise myself for doing it, too. What I’m saying is
+this: If you’re certain you know your own mind and if you’ve
+decided that this boy is the boy you want, why what more is
+there for me to do except maybe to ask you just one or two small
+questions?”</p>
+
+<p>“Shoot!” she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a
+little tighter. “Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in
+the world,” she added, confidentially addressing the top
+buttonhole of his sweater.</p>
+
+<p>“Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this
+early stage of the game, how you are going to live&mdash;you two? Or
+where? Or, if I may be so bold, what on?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s easy,” she said, and now she was peering up at him
+through a tousled short forelock. “You’re going to set us up on
+a place out here somewhere&mdash;a ranch. We’re going to raise beef.
+He knows about beef. And I’m going to learn. I aim to be the
+leading lady beefer of the Imperial Northwest.”</p>
+
+<p>“Whose notion was that?” His voice had sharpened the least bit.</p>
+
+<p>“Mine, of course. He doesn’t know anything about it. His idea is
+that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we
+start in on a few of the simoleons that have already been
+earned&mdash;by you. And that’s the idea that’s going to prevail.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along,” he
+said. “Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies.
+Still, I take it there’s no great rush. Now, I tell you what:
+You run along and locate your mother and get <i>that</i> over with.
+She knows how I stand&mdash;we’ve been discussing this little affair
+our own selves.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you have?” She seemed disappointed
+somehow&mdash;disappointed and slightly puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the
+young man that I’m lurking right here behind these rocks ready
+to have a few words with him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Righto!” She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away,
+and for just a moment Mr. Gatling’s conscience smote him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve got to do it,” he said to himself, excusing himself. “I’ve
+just got to find out&mdash;for her sake and ours&mdash;yes, and for his,
+too. It looks like an impossible bet and I’ve got to make sure.”</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>With young Tripier he had more than the few words he had
+specified. They had quite an interview and as they had it the
+youth’s embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialog had
+made him wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at
+inoffensive pebbles, gradually wore off until it vanished
+altogether and his native assurance reasserted itself. A
+proposition was advanced. It needed little pressing; promptly he
+fell in with it. It appealed to him.</p>
+
+<p>“So we’re agreed there,” concluded his prospective
+father-in-law, clinching the final rivets. “We’ll all go right
+ahead and finish out this tour&mdash;it’s only a couple of days more
+anyhow. Then I’ll take Shirley and her mother and run on out to
+Spokane. We’ll hustle one of the other boys back tomorrow to the
+entrance to tell my chauffeur to load some bags in the car and
+run around to this side and meet us where we come out. We’ll
+leave you there and you can dust back to the starting point
+through that short cut over the Garden Wall you were just
+speaking of. The business that I’ve got in Spokane will keep me
+maybe two or three days. That’ll give you time to get those new
+clothes of yours and then we’ll all meet over at Many
+Glacier&mdash;I’ll wire you in advance&mdash;and in a day or two we’ll all
+go on East together so’s you can get acquainted with Shirley’s
+friends and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that’s
+our secret&mdash;all that part of it is. You’ve never been East, I
+believe?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ve been as far as Minot, North Dakota.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side
+of there. You’ll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe
+you need out in this country?” His manner was solicitous.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes, sir, there’s those two swell fellows named Steinfelt
+and Immergluck I was telling you about that they’ve got the
+leading gents’ furnishing goods store down in Cree City.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good enough! I’d suggest that when picking out a suit you get
+something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live
+colors.” Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had
+been dwelt upon: “You understand of course that she’s not to
+know a single thing about all this&mdash;it’s strictly between us
+two?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“You see, that’ll make the surprise all the greater when she
+sees you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young
+college fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems
+like to me I was reading in an advertisement only here the other
+day where they’re going in for coats with belts on ’em this
+season. Oh yes, and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.</p>
+
+<p>“One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and
+shaggy, don’t you think? That’s fine for out here but back East
+a young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed
+up sort of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about
+as old as you are just the other day. Let me see&mdash;where was it?
+Oh yes, it was the barber at that town of Cree City&mdash;I dropped in
+there for a shave when we motored down last week. He seemed to
+have pretty good ideas about trimming up a fellow’s bean, that
+barber.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know the one you mean&mdash;Silk Sullivan. I’ve patronized him
+before.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us.
+He knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does....
+Now, mind you, mum’s the word. All this part of it is absolutely
+between us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“O. k. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they’re coming
+along with supper.”</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>Mr. Gatling’s strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to
+Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious
+prolongation of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his
+privy intent being to give opportunity for Cree City’s
+ready-made clothing princes to work their will. Since a hellish
+deed must be done he craved that they do it properly. Then on
+the homeward journey when they had reached the Western Gate, he
+suddenly remembered he had failed to complete his purchases of
+an assortment of game heads at Lewis’s on Lake McDonald. He
+professed that he couldn’t round out the order by telephone;
+unless he personally checked his collection some grievous error
+might be made.</p>
+
+<p>“You go on across on this train, Shirley,” he said. “I
+telegraphed your young man that we’d be there this morning and
+he’ll be on the lookout. Your mother and I’ll dust up to the
+head of the lake on the bus and I’ll finish up what I’ve got to
+do there and we’ll be along on the Limited this evening. After
+being separated for a whole week you two’ll enjoy a day together
+without any old folks snooping around. Meet us at the hotel
+tonight.”</p>
+
+<p>So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley’s
+nerves had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of
+a devoted mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken
+eyes fixed on her only child&mdash;a mother who at frequent intervals
+sniffed mournfully. Quite willingly Shirley went.</p>
+
+<p>“I&mdash;I feel as though I were giving her up forever,” faltered Mrs.
+Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter’s departing
+form.</p>
+
+<p>“Romola,” commanded Mr. Gatling, “don’t be foolish in the head.
+You’re going to be separated from her exactly nine hours.”</p>
+
+<p>“But she tripped away so gaily&mdash;so gladly. It was exactly as
+though she wanted to leave us. And yet, heavens knows I’ve tried
+and tried ever since that&mdash;that terrible night to show her what
+she means to me&mdash;&mdash;”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve done more than try, Romola&mdash;you’ve succeeded, if that’s
+any consolation to you. You’ve succeeded darned well.” He stared
+almost regretfully down the line at the rear of an
+observation-car swiftly diminishing into a small square dot
+where the rails came together. “Since you mention it, she did
+look powerfully chipper and cheerful a minute ago, hustling to
+climb aboard that Pullman&mdash;cheerfuller than she’s looked since
+we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how I wish I could
+guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute’s
+unhappiness the rest of her life!” Something remotely akin to
+remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling’s heart cockles.</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward
+the close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no
+Shirley was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of
+Shirley’s affianced, either. Up the slope from the tracks at the
+hotel a clerk wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of
+newly-arrived tourists for long enough to tell them Miss Gatling
+had left word she would be awaiting them in their rooms and
+wished them to come up immediately.</p>
+
+<p>So they went up under escort of two college students serving as
+bell-hops. A bedroom door opened and out came Shirley&mdash;a
+crumpled, wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all right, mater,” she said with a flickering trace of her
+usual jauntiness. “The alliance between the house of Gatling and
+the house of Tripier is off. So you can liven up. I’ll be your
+substitute for such crying as is done in this family during the
+next day or two. I’ve&mdash;I’ve been practising all afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>She eluded the lady’s outstretched arms and clung temporarily at
+her father’s breast.</p>
+
+<p>“Dad,” she confessed brokenly, “I think I must have been a
+little bit loony these last two weeks. But, dad, I’ve taken the
+cure. It’s not nice medicine and it makes you feel miserable
+at first but I guess it’s good for what ails me.... Dad, have
+you seen&mdash;him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet.” Compassion for her was mixed in with his own secret
+exultation, as though he tasted a sweet cake that was iced with
+a most bitter icing.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, when you do, you’ll understand. Even if he doesn’t!”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you told him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I have. Did you think I’d try to wish that little job
+off on you? I didn’t tell him the real reason&mdash;I couldn’t wound
+him that much. I told him I’d changed. But he&mdash;he’s really the
+one that’s changed. That’s what makes it harder for me now.
+That’s what makes it hurt so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Here, Romola,” he said, kissing the girl and relinquishing her
+into her mother’s grasp. “You swap tears awhile&mdash;you’ll enjoy
+that anyhow, Romola. I’ve got business downstairs&mdash;got to make
+some sleeper reservations for getting out of here in the
+morning. And as soon as we hit Pittsburgh I figure you two had
+better be booking up for a little swing around Europe.”</p>
+
+<hr class='tb'>
+
+<p>The lobby below was seething&mdash;seething is the word commonly used
+in this connection so we might as well do so, too&mdash;was seething
+with Easterners who mainly had dressed as they imagined
+Westerners would dress, and with Westerners who mainly had
+dressed as they imagined Easterners would dress, the resultant
+effect being that nobody was fooled but everybody was pleased.
+Working his way through the jam on the search for a certain one,
+Mr. Gatling’s eye almost immediately was caught by a startling
+color combination or rather a series of startling color
+combinations appertaining to an individual who stood half hidden
+by a column, leaning against it, head down, with his back to Mr.
+Gatling.</p>
+
+<p>To begin at the top, there was, surmounting all, a smug
+undersized object of head-gear&mdash;at least, it would pass for
+head-gear&mdash;of a poisonous mustard shade. It perched high and, as
+it were, aloof upon the crest of its wearer’s skull. Below it,
+where the neck had been shaved, and a good portion of the
+close-clipped scalp as well, showed a sort of crescent of pink
+skin blazing forth in strong contrast to the abnormally long
+expanse of sunburnt surface rising above the cross-line of an
+exceedingly low, exceedingly shiny pink linen collar.</p>
+
+<p>Straying on downward, Mr. Gatling’s wondering eye was aware of a
+high-waisted Norfolk jacket belted well up beneath the armpits,
+a garment of a tone which might not be called mauve nor yet
+lavender nor yet magenta but which partook subtly of all three
+shades&mdash;with a plaid overlay in chocolate superimposed thereon.
+Yet nearer the floor was revealed a pair of trousers extensively
+bell-bottomed and apparently designed with the intent to bring
+out and impress upon the casual observer the fact that their
+present owner had two of the most widely bowed legs on the North
+American continent; and finally, a brace of cloth-top shoes. Tan
+shoes, these were, with buttoned uppers of a pale fawn cloth,
+and bulldog toes. They were very new shoes, that was plain, and
+of an exceedingly bright and pristine glossiness.</p>
+
+<p>This striking person now moved out of his shelter, his shoulders
+being set at a despondent hunch, and as he turned about,
+bringing his profile into view, Mr. Gatling recognized that the
+stranger was no stranger and he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>“Perfect!” he muttered to himself; “absolutely perfect! Couldn’t
+be better if I’d done it myself. And, oh Lordy, that
+necktie&mdash;that’s the finishing stroke! Still, at that, it’s a
+rotten shame&mdash;the poor kid!”</p>
+
+<p>He hurried across, overtaking the slumped figure, and as his
+hand fell in a friendly slap upon one drooped shoulder the
+transformed cowboy looked about him with two sad eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Howdy-do, sir,” he said wanly. Then he braced himself and
+squared his back, and Mr. Gatling perceived&mdash;and was glad to
+note&mdash;that the youngster strove to take his heartache in a manly
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>“Son,” said Mr. Gatling, “from what I’m able to gather I’m not
+going to have you for a son-in-law after all. But that’s no
+reason why we shouldn’t hook up along another line. I’ve been
+watching you off and on ever since we got acquainted and more
+closely since&mdash;well, since about a week ago, and it strikes me
+you’ve got some pretty good stuff in you. I’ve been thinking of
+trying a little flier in the cattle game out here. If you think
+you’d like a chance to start in as foreman or boss or
+superintendent or whatever you call it and maybe work up into a
+partnership if you showed me you had the goods, why, we’ll talk
+it over together at dinner. The womenfolks won’t be down and we
+can sit and powwow.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like that fine, sir,” said young Tripier.</p>
+
+<p>“Good boy! I’ll keep you so busy you won’t have time to brood on
+any little disappointment that you may be suffering from
+now.... Say, son, don’t mind my suggesting something, do you? If I was
+you I’d climb out of these duds you’ve got on and climb back
+into your regular working clothes&mdash;you don’t seem to match the
+picture the way you are now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, you advised me to get ’em your own self, sir!” exclaimed
+the youth.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right, I did, didn’t I? Well, maybe you had better keep
+on wearing ’em.” A shrewd and crafty gleam flickered under his
+eyelids. “You see&mdash;yes&mdash;on second thoughts, I think I want a
+chance to get used to you in your stylish new outfit. Promise me
+you’ll wear ’em until noon tomorrow anyhow?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” said his victim obediently.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gatling winked a concealed, deadly wink.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-top:1em; text-indent:0; text-align:center; font-size:0.8em;'>THE END</p>
+<div class='tn'>
+  <div style='text-align:center;padding-top:0.4em;'>Transcriber’s Notes</div>
+  <ol>
+  <li>This story appeared in the September, 1926 issue
+  of <i>Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan</i> magazine.</li>
+  <li>New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.</li>
+  </ol>
+</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA ***</div>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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-<div style='all:initial; display:block; text-align:center; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The cowboy and the lady and her pa</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin:1em 0'>

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and

-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms

-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online

-at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you

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-country where you are located before using this eBook.

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Title: The cowboy and the lady and her pa

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0'>

-A story of a fish out of water

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Author: Irvin S. Cobb

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Illustrator: James E. Allen

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Release Date: February 01, 2023 [eBook #69929]

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Language: English

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Original Publication: International Magazine Corporation, New York, NY, United States (1926)

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>

-Credit: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

-</div>

-<div style='all:initial; display:block; text-align:center; margin-bottom:1em; margin-top:2em;'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWBOY AND THE LADY AND HER PA ***</div>

-

-<section>

-<h1>The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa</h1>

-<div id='ifpc' class='mt01 mb01 wfpc'>

-  <img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%'>

-  <p class='caption'>

-The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding

-ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card

-racks of the world.

-  </p>

-</div>

-<div class='title'>The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa</div>

-<div class='subtitle'>A Story of a Fish out of Water</div>

-<div style='text-align:center;'>By Irvin S. Cobb</div>

-<div style='text-align:center; font-size:smaller; margin-bottom:2em;'>

-  Illustrations by James E. Allen

-</div>

-</section>

-

-<p>From up on the first level of the first shelf of the

-wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad

-Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span.

-The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist

-about in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched

-over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss

-swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its

-outspread glories while they got their wind back. It became

-evident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had

-been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down

-through the spicy dry air.</p>

-

-<p>“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and

-you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of

-firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up,

-you scenery-lovin’ <i>so-and-soes</i>!”</p>

-

-<p>There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and

-then fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound

-appreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Western

-wilds!” she said.</p>

-

-<p>“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter,

-Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her

-mother’s were.</p>

-

-<p>“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly

-that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation

-should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such

-picturesque types everywhere!”</p>

-

-<p>“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said

-Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his

-gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an

-average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at

-all, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”</p>

-

-<p>“<i>Mong père</i>, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss

-Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his

-native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”</p>

-

-<p>Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the

-one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that

-a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked

-through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter

-looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.</p>

-

-<p>Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots

-and her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn

-snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad

-brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large

-sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the

-pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning

-sunlight came

-slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made

-shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels

-and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right

-wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have

-been the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.</p>

-

-<p>“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your

-souls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re

-putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday

-noon, you’ll remember, we darn’ near starved. For you, the

-beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish

-gastric juices&mdash;chow and lots of it!”</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off

-his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows

-forming on his brow.</p>

-

-<p>“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly

-from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her

-attention&mdash;that <i>mmphing</i> sound was. Lacking vowels though it did,

-its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled

-ears.</p>

-

-<p>“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that

-dreadful horseback riding?”</p>

-

-<p>“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the

-one I’m worried about.”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried. “What’s wrong with

-Shirley?”</p>

-

-<p>“Look at her. That’s all I ask&mdash;just look at her.”</p>

-

-<p>Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than

-one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.</p>

-

-<p>“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,”

-she protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday&mdash;or was it

-Tuesday; no, Monday&mdash;I remember distinctly now it was Monday

-because that was the day we got caught in the snowstorm coming

-through Swift Current Pass&mdash;only last Monday you were saying

-yourself how well and rosy she was looking.”</p>

-

-<p>“I don’t mean that&mdash;she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones.

-Look where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s

-doing!”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to

-know?” demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive

-for her young.</p>

-

-<p>“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these

-last four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting

-an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing

-with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the

-subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these

-roundabout tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions

-before he ever voiced them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you?

-All right then, use ’em.”</p>

-

-<p>“Hector Gatling, for a sane man you do get the queerest notions

-in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the

-child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three

-guides packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make

-that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call

-it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a

-pearl knot?”</p>

-

-<p>“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not

-pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try

-to remember it, too&mdash;diamonds and hitches usually figure in the

-thing that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to

-observe her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides

-she’s so interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And

-it’s getting serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my

-drift, or must I make plans and specifications?”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow

-but with incredulity too, and now she was fluttering her

-feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed

-knickerbockers and a Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any

-feathers to flutter. “Oh, Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t

-mean it! A child who’s traveled and seen the world! A child

-who’s had every advantage that wealth and social position and

-all could give her! A child who’s a member of the Junior League!

-A child who’s&mdash;who Hector, you’re crazy. Hector, you know it’s

-utterly impossible&mdash;utterly! It’s preposterous!” Womanlike, she

-debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being

-womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy

-her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen something&mdash;you’ve

-overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you

-overheard!”</p>

-

-<p>“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around

-eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that

-on her yet and I’m too old to begin now and too fat. But I’ve

-seen a-plenty.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen

-it myself first what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh,

-pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked

-conviction.</p>

-

-<p>“I’ve had the feeling for longer than these last few days,”

-continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand

-on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was

-this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and

-she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First

-loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as

-though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay

-out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all

-of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual.

-That’s the worst symptom yet&mdash;that slang is.</p>

-

-<p>“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she

-had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went

-mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and

-romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded

-ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the

-sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did&mdash;you mushed-up.” His tone was

-accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses

-which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now

-it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and

-they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what

-Miss Shirley is doing right now this very minute, or else I’m

-the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”</p>

-

-<p>“Maybe&mdash;maybe&mdash;&mdash;” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted.

-“Of course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector&mdash;the mere

-suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible&mdash;but on the bare

-chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her

-head maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she

-is that&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling

-interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your

-trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint.

-People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating

-that young people are different from the way young people were

-when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we

-were&mdash;same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same

-everything&mdash;but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then

-we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our

-lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just

-the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster

-of ours&mdash;not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar,

-considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling,

-that masterful, self-educated man.</p>

-

-<p>“But if I pointed out a few things to her&mdash;if I warned her&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so

-terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you.

-After I’d come courting and had gone on home again I guess it

-was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel

-and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense

-enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose

-he’d tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the

-match&mdash;what would have happened? You’d have thought you were

-oppressed and persecuted and you’d have grabbed for me even

-quicker than you did.”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much

-gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw

-and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course,

-and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist

-church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kinsfolks and all the

-other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back

-window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar

-buggy. No, ma’am, if you’ll take a tip from an old retired

-yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy,

-with one road, you’ll&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”</p>

-

-<p>“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re

-to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in

-our reserved seats up in the grand stand and see how the game

-comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting&mdash;that’s

-our line and we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for

-future developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little

-campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned,

-the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner

-rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she

-continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It

-would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady’s

-bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely

-studied these.</p>

-

-<p>The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient

-backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They

-overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with

-provender for the highway contractors on up under the

-cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wall, and behind them heard

-for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the

-immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the

-darkened future prospects of his work stock. Soon they swung

-away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback

-trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants

-against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a

-little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a

-picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted

-buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and

-two jeweled glaciers.</p>

-

-<p>They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate

-and remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along

-the farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed

-among the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw

-a solitary bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia

-springing out of his skull and likewise they saw a pair of

-indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes to fill all the

-souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete particulars

-consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.</p>

-

-<p>Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within

-sight of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain.

-So they pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove

-there in a sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and

-watched the sun go down in his glory. When the moon rose it was

-too good to believe. You almost could reach up and jingle the

-tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought

-you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for lovemaking

-among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs. Gating

-had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind

-the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary

-form amidships. She’d been apprehensive all day but now the

-sinking was more pronounced.</p>

-

-<p>She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper

-was over and it was near hushabye-time for the tired forms of

-the middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she

-spoke then to her husband, touching on the topic so steadfastly

-uppermost in her brain.</p>

-

-<p>“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid

-you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither

-one of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he

-helped her on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried

-for her! And the way she let him do it! And they’re&mdash;they’re

-together outside now. Oh, Hector!”</p>

-

-<p>“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in

-that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded

-turtledoves. Why in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight&mdash;good

-and hard? Romola, I don’t want to harry you up any more than’s

-necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like

-this and they’re liable to do considerable damage to tender

-hearts.”</p>

-

-<p>“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you

-tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can

-give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was

-quite plain that he did.</p>

-

-<p>He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted

-sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and

-peeped through the opening.</p>

-

-<p>The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill

-and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the

-shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous

-blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong,

-sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His

-wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse; his Angora

-chaps with wings that almost were voluminous enough for an

-eagle’s wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved

-bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be

-sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his

-beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled,

-silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy&mdash;they all matched and

-modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the

-sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.</p>

-

-<p>His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally

-called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden

-No Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up

-and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line

-at Calgary.</p>

-

-<div id='i001' class='mt01 mb01 w001'>

-  <img src='images/illus-001.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%'>

-  <p class='caption'>

-Hayes had ridden the man-killer at the Pendleton Round-up.

-And three moonlight nights hand-running had their effect

-on Shirley’s impressionable youth.

-  </p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person

-and given to deporting himself accordingly.</p>

-

-<p>At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with

-his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud

-proprietary aura all about him.</p>

-

-<p>The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about

-his daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make

-out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two

-silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and

-flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch

-as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the

-outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof

-above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she

-betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on

-the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded

-void beyond her.</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and

-<i>mmphed</i> several times.</p>

-

-<p>“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked

-absently.</p>

-

-<p>“Who?”</p>

-

-<p>“Him.”</p>

-

-<p>“You actually mean that cowboy?”</p>

-

-<p>“None other than which.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh, Hector! That&mdash;that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that

-clodhopper!”</p>

-

-<p>“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are

-prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em

-in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no

-farm-hand; he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of

-steering tourists around through these mountains&mdash;and that’s a

-very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows

-blame’ well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he

-does. When he gets in a saddle he’s riveted there but I only

-come loose and work out of the socket. And I’d give about five

-years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can.

-I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly high-grade

-proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much blame

-him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself, who

-else is going to?”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really&mdash;but no, you

-couldn’t be! Look at the difference in their stations? Look at

-their different environments! Look at their different

-viewpoints!”</p>

-

-<p>“I’m looking&mdash;just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m

-driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law

-any more than you would&mdash;although at that I’m not saying I

-couldn’t maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still,

-you needn’t mind worrying so much about their respective

-stations in life. I didn’t have any station in life to start

-from myself&mdash;it was a whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to

-stagger along fairly well. I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up

-to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss

-that came along than to have her fall for one of those

-plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back

-home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be

-guitar-pickers&mdash;and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly

-pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of

-’em carry any weight is on the hip.</p>

-

-<p>“But that’s not the point. The point is that if Shirley fell for

-this party she’d probably be a mighty regretful young female

-when the bloom began to rub off the peach. They haven’t been

-raised to talk the same language&mdash;that’s the trouble. I don’t

-want her to make a mistake that’ll gum up her life before it’s

-fairly started. I don’t want her to have a husband that she’s

-liable later on to be ashamed to show him off before the

-majority of her friends, or anyhow one that she’d maybe have to

-go around making excuses for the way he handled his knife and

-fork in company; or something. Right now, the fix she’s in,

-she’s probably saying to herself that she could be perfectly

-satisfied to settle down in a cabin somewhere out here and

-wet-nurse a lot of calves for the next thirty, forty or fifty

-years. But that’s only her heart talking, not her head. After a

-while she’d get to brooding on Palm Beach and Paris.”</p>

-

-<p>“But if she’s set her mind&mdash;and you know how stubborn she is when

-she gets her mind set&mdash;thank heavens she didn’t get that from my

-side of the family!&mdash;I say, if she’s set her mind on him, heavens

-above only knows what’s going to happen. She’s bewitched, she’s

-hypnotized; it’s this free and easy Western life that’s

-fascinated her. I can’t believe she’s in love with him!”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she’s in love with a half-gallon hat

-and a pair of cowboy pants with silver dewdabs down the sides,

-or then again on the other hand maybe it’s the real thing with

-her, or a close imitation of it. That’s for us to find out if we

-can.”</p>

-

-<p>“I won’t believe it. She’s distracted, she’s glamoured,

-she’s&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“All right, then, let’s get her unglammed.”</p>

-

-<p>“But how?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, for one thing, by not rushing in and interfering with her

-little dream. By not letting either one of ’em see how anxious

-we are over this thing. By remaining as calm, cool and collected

-as we can.”</p>

-

-<p>“And in the meanwhile?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, in the meanwhile I, for one, am going to tear off a few

-winks. I hurt all over and there’s quite a lot of me measured

-that way&mdash;all over.”</p>

-

-<p>“You can go to sleep with that&mdash;that dreadful thought hanging

-over us?”</p>

-

-<p>“I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you’ll

-hear me doing it.” He settled himself on his air mattress and

-drew the blankets over him.</p>

-

-<p>Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most

-aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband

-can.</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights

-upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr.

-Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit

-ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his

-perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those

-explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun

-baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars and the unseen

-heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome

-bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned

-slow journeys through deep defiles where ferns grew with a

-tropical luxuriance; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams

-when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young

-man to steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her

-horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But

-vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies in his symposium

-of contributory dangers.</p>

-

-<p>Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of

-pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of

-the third day when camp was being made beside a river which

-mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in

-a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the

-nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier

-that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her

-way of putting it had been different.</p>

-

-<p>“Harken, O most revered Drawing Account,” she said, dropping

-back on a broad place in the trail to be near him. “If you can

-spare the time from being saddle-sore I want to give you an

-earful as soon as this procession, as of even date, breaks up.

-You pick a quiet retreat away from the flock and wait there

-until I find you, savvy?”</p>

-

-<p>So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him

-stepping lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of

-impudent freedom of movement; and to his father’s eyes she never

-had seemed more graceful or more delectable or more independent

-looking.</p>

-

-<p>“Dad,” she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye,

-“in me you behold a Sabine woman. I’m bespoken.”</p>

-

-<p>“Mmph,” he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a

-person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.</p>

-

-<p>“Such is the case,” she went on, quite unafraid. “That caveman

-over there in the blue shirt”&mdash;she pointed&mdash;“he’s the nominee.

-We’re engaged.”</p>

-

-<p>“I can’t plead surprise, kid,” he stated, taking on for the

-moment her bantering tone. “The report that you two had come to

-a sort of understanding has been in active circulation on this

-reservation for the past forty-eight hours or so&mdash;maybe longer.”</p>

-

-<p>Her eyebrows went up. “I don’t get you,” she said. “Who

-circulated it?”</p>

-

-<p>“You did, for one,” he told her. “And he did, for another. I may

-be failing, what with increasing age and all, but I’m not more

-than half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this

-piece of news?”</p>

-

-<p>“I came to you first. I&mdash;I”&mdash;for the first time she faltered an

-instant&mdash;“I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a

-little quicker then she would. This is only the curtain-raiser.

-I’m saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her.

-I have a feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I

-picked on something easy to begin with.”</p>

-

-<p>“I see,” he said. “Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?” He held

-her off at arm’s length from him, studying her face hungrily.

-“But what’s the reason your young man didn’t come along with you

-or ahead of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young

-man that brought the message to Garcia.”</p>

-

-<p>“He wanted to come&mdash;he wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t let him. I told

-him I’d been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle

-the job better by myself. Well, that’s your cue. What’s it going

-to be, daddy&mdash;the glad hand of approval and the parental bless

-you my children, bless you, or a little line of that

-go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again

-stuff? Only, we’re a trifle shy on doors around here.”</p>

-

-<p>He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped

-head, she snuggling her face against his wool-clad breast.</p>

-

-<p>“Baby,” he said, “when all’s said and done, the whole thing’s up

-to you, way I look at it. I don’t suppose there ever was a man

-who really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking

-one thing with another, she was too good for any man on earth.

-I’m not saying now what sort of a husband I’d try to pick out

-for you if the choice had been left to me. I’d probably want to

-keep you an old maid so’s I could have you around and then I’d

-secretly despise myself for doing it, too. What I’m saying is

-this: If you’re certain you know your own mind and if you’ve

-decided that this boy is the boy you want, why what more is

-there for me to do except maybe to ask you just one or two small

-questions?”</p>

-

-<p>“Shoot!” she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a

-little tighter. “Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in

-the world,” she added, confidentially addressing the top

-buttonhole of his sweater.</p>

-

-<p>“Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this

-early stage of the game, how you are going to live&mdash;you two? Or

-where? Or, if I may be so bold, what on?”</p>

-

-<p>“That’s easy,” she said, and now she was peering up at him

-through a tousled short forelock. “You’re going to set us up on

-a place out here somewhere&mdash;a ranch. We’re going to raise beef.

-He knows about beef. And I’m going to learn. I aim to be the

-leading lady beefer of the Imperial Northwest.”</p>

-

-<p>“Whose notion was that?” His voice had sharpened the least bit.</p>

-

-<p>“Mine, of course. He doesn’t know anything about it. His idea is

-that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we

-start in on a few of the simoleons that have already been

-earned&mdash;by you. And that’s the idea that’s going to prevail.”</p>

-

-<p>“Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along,” he

-said. “Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies.

-Still, I take it there’s no great rush. Now, I tell you what:

-You run along and locate your mother and get <i>that</i> over with.

-She knows how I stand&mdash;we’ve been discussing this little affair

-our own selves.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you have?” She seemed disappointed

-somehow&mdash;disappointed and slightly puzzled.</p>

-

-<p>“Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the

-young man that I’m lurking right here behind these rocks ready

-to have a few words with him.”</p>

-

-<p>“Righto!” She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away,

-and for just a moment Mr. Gatling’s conscience smote him.</p>

-

-<p>“I’ve got to do it,” he said to himself, excusing himself. “I’ve

-just got to find out&mdash;for her sake and ours&mdash;yes, and for his,

-too. It looks like an impossible bet and I’ve got to make sure.”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>With young Tripier he had more than the few words he had

-specified. They had quite an interview and as they had it the

-youth’s embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialog had

-made him wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at

-inoffensive pebbles, gradually wore off until it vanished

-altogether and his native assurance reasserted itself. A

-proposition was advanced. It needed little pressing; promptly he

-fell in with it. It appealed to him.</p>

-

-<p>“So we’re agreed there,” concluded his prospective

-father-in-law, clinching the final rivets. “We’ll all go right

-ahead and finish out this tour&mdash;it’s only a couple of days more

-anyhow. Then I’ll take Shirley and her mother and run on out to

-Spokane. We’ll hustle one of the other boys back tomorrow to the

-entrance to tell my chauffeur to load some bags in the car and

-run around to this side and meet us where we come out. We’ll

-leave you there and you can dust back to the starting point

-through that short cut over the Garden Wall you were just

-speaking of. The business that I’ve got in Spokane will keep me

-maybe two or three days. That’ll give you time to get those new

-clothes of yours and then we’ll all meet over at Many

-Glacier&mdash;I’ll wire you in advance&mdash;and in a day or two we’ll all

-go on East together so’s you can get acquainted with Shirley’s

-friends and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that’s

-our secret&mdash;all that part of it is. You’ve never been East, I

-believe?”</p>

-

-<p>“Well, I’ve been as far as Minot, North Dakota.”</p>

-

-<p>“You’ll probably notice a good deal of territory the other side

-of there. You’ll enjoy it. Sure you can pick up all the wardrobe

-you need out in this country?” His manner was solicitous.</p>

-

-<p>“Oh yes, sir, there’s those two swell fellows named Steinfelt

-and Immergluck I was telling you about that they’ve got the

-leading gents’ furnishing goods store down in Cree City.”</p>

-

-<p>“Good enough! I’d suggest that when picking out a suit you get

-something good and brisk as to pattern. Shirley likes live

-colors.” Mr. Gatling next stressed a point which already had

-been dwelt upon: “You understand of course that she’s not to

-know a single thing about all this&mdash;it’s strictly between us

-two?”</p>

-

-<p>“Yes, sir.”</p>

-

-<p>“You see, that’ll make the surprise all the greater when she

-sees you all fixed up in a snappy up-to-date rigging like young

-college fellows your age wear back where she comes from. Seems

-like to me I was reading in an advertisement only here the other

-day where they’re going in for coats with belts on ’em this

-season. Oh yes, and full-bottomed pants; I read that, too.</p>

-

-<p>“One thing more occurs to me: Your hair is a little bit long and

-shaggy, don’t you think? That’s fine for out here but back East

-a young fellow that wants to be in style keeps himself trimmed

-up sort of close. Now I saw a barber working on somebody about

-as old as you are just the other day. Let me see&mdash;where was it?

-Oh yes, it was the barber at that town of Cree City&mdash;I dropped in

-there for a shave when we motored down last week. He seemed to

-have pretty good ideas about trimming up a fellow’s bean, that

-barber.”</p>

-

-<p>“I know the one you mean&mdash;Silk Sullivan. I’ve patronized him

-before.”</p>

-

-<p>“That’s the one. Well, patronize him again before you rejoin us.

-He knows his business all right, your friend Sullivan does....

-Now, mind you, mum’s the word. All this part of it is absolutely

-between us.”</p>

-

-<p>“Oh yes, sir.”</p>

-

-<p>“O. k. Shake on it.... Well, suppose we see how they’re coming

-along with supper.”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling’s strategy ticked like a clock. After they got to

-Spokane he delayed the return by pretending a vexatious

-prolongation of a purely fictitious deal in ore properties, his

-privy intent being to give opportunity for Cree City’s

-ready-made clothing princes to work their will. Since a hellish

-deed must be done he craved that they do it properly. Then on

-the homeward journey when they had reached the Western Gate, he

-suddenly remembered he had failed to complete his purchases of

-an assortment of game heads at Lewis’s on Lake McDonald. He

-professed that he couldn’t round out the order by telephone;

-unless he personally checked his collection some grievous error

-might be made.</p>

-

-<p>“You go on across on this train, Shirley,” he said. “I

-telegraphed your young man that we’d be there this morning and

-he’ll be on the lookout. Your mother and I’ll dust up to the

-head of the lake on the bus and I’ll finish up what I’ve got to

-do there and we’ll be along on the Limited this evening. After

-being separated for a whole week you two’ll enjoy a day together

-without any old folks snooping around. Meet us at the hotel

-tonight.”</p>

-

-<p>So Shirley went on ahead. It perhaps was true that Shirley’s

-nerves had suffered after six days spent in the companionship of

-a devoted mother who trailed along with yearning, grief-stricken

-eyes fixed on her only child&mdash;a mother who at frequent intervals

-sniffed mournfully. Quite willingly Shirley went.</p>

-

-<p>“I&mdash;I feel as though I were giving her up forever,” faltered Mrs.

-Gatling, following with brimming eyes her daughter’s departing

-form.</p>

-

-<p>“Romola,” commanded Mr. Gatling, “don’t be foolish in the head.

-You’re going to be separated from her exactly nine hours.”</p>

-

-<p>“But she tripped away so gaily&mdash;so gladly. It was exactly as

-though she wanted to leave us. And yet, heavens knows I’ve tried

-and tried ever since that&mdash;that terrible night to show her what

-she means to me&mdash;&mdash;”</p>

-

-<p>“You’ve done more than try, Romola&mdash;you’ve succeeded, if that’s

-any consolation to you. You’ve succeeded darned well.” He stared

-almost regretfully down the line at the rear of an

-observation-car swiftly diminishing into a small square dot

-where the rails came together. “Since you mention it, she did

-look powerfully chipper and cheerful a minute ago, hustling to

-climb aboard that Pullman&mdash;cheerfuller than she’s looked since

-we quit the trail last Wednesday. Lord, how I wish I could

-guarantee that kid was never going to have a minute’s

-unhappiness the rest of her life!” Something remotely akin to

-remorse was beginning to gnaw at Mr. Gatling’s heart cockles.</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>Indeed, something strongly resembling remorse beset him toward

-the close of this day. At the station when they detrained, no

-Shirley was on hand to greet them; nor was there sign of

-Shirley’s affianced, either. Up the slope from the tracks at the

-hotel a clerk wrenched himself from an importuning cluster of

-newly-arrived tourists for long enough to tell them Miss Gatling

-had left word she would be awaiting them in their rooms and

-wished them to come up immediately.</p>

-

-<p>So they went up under escort of two college students serving as

-bell-hops. A bedroom door opened and out came Shirley&mdash;a

-crumpled, wobegone Shirley with a streaky swollen face.</p>

-

-<p>“It’s all right, mater,” she said with a flickering trace of her

-usual jauntiness. “The alliance between the house of Gatling and

-the house of Tripier is off. So you can liven up. I’ll be your

-substitute for such crying as is done in this family during the

-next day or two. I’ve&mdash;I’ve been practising all afternoon.”</p>

-

-<p>She eluded the lady’s outstretched arms and clung temporarily at

-her father’s breast.</p>

-

-<p>“Dad,” she confessed brokenly, “I think I must have been a

-little bit loony these last two weeks. But, dad, I’ve taken the

-cure. It’s not nice medicine and it makes you feel miserable

-at first but I guess it’s good for what ails me.... Dad, have

-you seen&mdash;him?”</p>

-

-<p>“Not yet.” Compassion for her was mixed in with his own secret

-exultation, as though he tasted a sweet cake that was iced with

-a most bitter icing.</p>

-

-<p>“Well, when you do, you’ll understand. Even if he doesn’t!”</p>

-

-<p>“Have you told him?”</p>

-

-<p>“Of course I have. Did you think I’d try to wish that little job

-off on you? I didn’t tell him the real reason&mdash;I couldn’t wound

-him that much. I told him I’d changed. But he&mdash;he’s really the

-one that’s changed. That’s what makes it harder for me now.

-That’s what makes it hurt so.”</p>

-

-<p>“Here, Romola,” he said, kissing the girl and relinquishing her

-into her mother’s grasp. “You swap tears awhile&mdash;you’ll enjoy

-that anyhow, Romola. I’ve got business downstairs&mdash;got to make

-some sleeper reservations for getting out of here in the

-morning. And as soon as we hit Pittsburgh I figure you two had

-better be booking up for a little swing around Europe.”</p>

-

-<hr class='tb'>

-

-<p>The lobby below was seething&mdash;seething is the word commonly used

-in this connection so we might as well do so, too&mdash;was seething

-with Easterners who mainly had dressed as they imagined

-Westerners would dress, and with Westerners who mainly had

-dressed as they imagined Easterners would dress, the resultant

-effect being that nobody was fooled but everybody was pleased.

-Working his way through the jam on the search for a certain one,

-Mr. Gatling’s eye almost immediately was caught by a startling

-color combination or rather a series of startling color

-combinations appertaining to an individual who stood half hidden

-by a column, leaning against it, head down, with his back to Mr.

-Gatling.</p>

-

-<p>To begin at the top, there was, surmounting all, a smug

-undersized object of head-gear&mdash;at least, it would pass for

-head-gear&mdash;of a poisonous mustard shade. It perched high and, as

-it were, aloof upon the crest of its wearer’s skull. Below it,

-where the neck had been shaved, and a good portion of the

-close-clipped scalp as well, showed a sort of crescent of pink

-skin blazing forth in strong contrast to the abnormally long

-expanse of sunburnt surface rising above the cross-line of an

-exceedingly low, exceedingly shiny pink linen collar.</p>

-

-<p>Straying on downward, Mr. Gatling’s wondering eye was aware of a

-high-waisted Norfolk jacket belted well up beneath the armpits,

-a garment of a tone which might not be called mauve nor yet

-lavender nor yet magenta but which partook subtly of all three

-shades&mdash;with a plaid overlay in chocolate superimposed thereon.

-Yet nearer the floor was revealed a pair of trousers extensively

-bell-bottomed and apparently designed with the intent to bring

-out and impress upon the casual observer the fact that their

-present owner had two of the most widely bowed legs on the North

-American continent; and finally, a brace of cloth-top shoes. Tan

-shoes, these were, with buttoned uppers of a pale fawn cloth,

-and bulldog toes. They were very new shoes, that was plain, and

-of an exceedingly bright and pristine glossiness.</p>

-

-<p>This striking person now moved out of his shelter, his shoulders

-being set at a despondent hunch, and as he turned about,

-bringing his profile into view, Mr. Gatling recognized that the

-stranger was no stranger and he gasped.</p>

-

-<p>“Perfect!” he muttered to himself; “absolutely perfect! Couldn’t

-be better if I’d done it myself. And, oh Lordy, that

-necktie&mdash;that’s the finishing stroke! Still, at that, it’s a

-rotten shame&mdash;the poor kid!”</p>

-

-<p>He hurried across, overtaking the slumped figure, and as his

-hand fell in a friendly slap upon one drooped shoulder the

-transformed cowboy looked about him with two sad eyes.</p>

-

-<p>“Howdy-do, sir,” he said wanly. Then he braced himself and

-squared his back, and Mr. Gatling perceived&mdash;and was glad to

-note&mdash;that the youngster strove to take his heartache in a manly

-fashion.</p>

-

-<p>“Son,” said Mr. Gatling, “from what I’m able to gather I’m not

-going to have you for a son-in-law after all. But that’s no

-reason why we shouldn’t hook up along another line. I’ve been

-watching you off and on ever since we got acquainted and more

-closely since&mdash;well, since about a week ago, and it strikes me

-you’ve got some pretty good stuff in you. I’ve been thinking of

-trying a little flier in the cattle game out here. If you think

-you’d like a chance to start in as foreman or boss or

-superintendent or whatever you call it and maybe work up into a

-partnership if you showed me you had the goods, why, we’ll talk

-it over together at dinner. The womenfolks won’t be down and we

-can sit and powwow.”</p>

-

-<p>“I’d like that fine, sir,” said young Tripier.</p>

-

-<p>“Good boy! I’ll keep you so busy you won’t have time to brood on

-any little disappointment that you may be suffering from

-now.... Say, son, don’t mind my suggesting something, do you? If I was

-you I’d climb out of these duds you’ve got on and climb back

-into your regular working clothes&mdash;you don’t seem to match the

-picture the way you are now.”</p>

-

-<p>“Why, you advised me to get ’em your own self, sir!” exclaimed

-the youth.</p>

-

-<p>“That’s right, I did, didn’t I? Well, maybe you had better keep

-on wearing ’em.” A shrewd and crafty gleam flickered under his

-eyelids. “You see&mdash;yes&mdash;on second thoughts, I think I want a

-chance to get used to you in your stylish new outfit. Promise me

-you’ll wear ’em until noon tomorrow anyhow?”</p>

-

-<p>“Yes, sir,” said his victim obediently.</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Gatling winked a concealed, deadly wink.</p>

-

-<p style='margin-top:1em; text-indent:0; text-align:center; font-size:0.8em;'>THE END</p>

-<div class='tn'>

-  <div style='text-align:center;padding-top:0.4em;'>Transcriber’s Notes</div>

-  <ol>

-  <li>This story appeared in the September, 1926 issue

-  of <i>Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan</i> magazine.</li>

-  <li>New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.</li>

-  </ol>

-</div>

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