Peak and Prairie Part 18

"Yas, here I be," said Enoch, jauntily, "consortin' with the hosts of Belial. Take a cheer, Simon, take a cheer."

"I guess not," said Simon, slowly; "I don't have no special hankerin'

after Belial, myself. Do you happen to know a man named Conrad Christie?"

"Him's the gentleman," the red-silk Hebe volunteered. "Him in the yeller beard and the red necktie, rakin' in the chips."

Amberley took a critical survey of his adversary. He was a man of forty, or thereabouts, singularly like Simon himself in build and coloring, with enough of the ruffian in his aspect to give the professor an envious sense of inferiority. He was playing cards with a fierce-looking fellow in a black beard, who seemed to be getting the worst of it.

Simon was conscious afterwards of having turned his back on Enoch rather abruptly; of having interrupted, by his departure, an outpouring of confidence in regard to "Mis' Baker's tantrums." At the time, however, he had but one thought and that was to strike while the iron was hot. He felt that the iron was becoming very hot indeed, as he stepped up to the yellow-haired gambler, who was again engaged in the satisfactory ceremony of "rakin' 'em in."

"Mr. Christie," Simon said, and hot as the iron was, he could not control a slight tremor in his voice, not of fear, but of excitement.

"Mr. Christie, I've got something to say to you. Will you step outside with me?"

Christie measured his interlocutor from head to foot, till Simon felt himself insulted in every inch of his person. The peace-loving hermit had time for blood-thirsty thoughts before the answer struck his ear.

"Not much!" came the reply at last, while the speaker gathered up the cards and began dealing. "If this place is good enough for me, I reckon it's good enough for a blasted Sissy of your description!"

No one would do Mr. Christie the injustice to suppose that his remark was unembellished by more forcible expressions than are hereby recorded. Yet, somehow, the worst of them lacked the sting that Simon managed to get into his reply, as he said, in a suppressed voice: "This place ain't good enough, as far's that goes, for the meanest skunk G.o.d ever created! But it'll do for what we've got to settle between us."

"Have a seat, Mister?"

A sick-looking girl, with blazing cheeks, had placed a chair for him.

"Have a----"

The words died on her lips before the solemn, reproachful look the professor turned upon her.

"And Jinny looked smart As a cranberry tart!"

sang the discordant voice from the stage, which n.o.body thought of listening to.

"It's the Lame Gulch Professor," the black-haired man remarked, taking a look at his cards, before turning to his gla.s.s for refreshment.

"d.a.m.n the Lame Gulch Professor!" Christie retorted, by way of acknowledging the introduction.

Then Simon spoke again.

"Mr. Christie, you've got the prettiest and smartest little girl in Lame Gulch," he declared, laying down his proposition in a tone of extreme deliberation; "and you hit her over the head last night, and 't ain't the first time neither."

"Is that the latest news you've got to give us?" asked Christie, pa.s.sing his hand caressingly over his pistol, which lay like a lap-dog on his knees.

"Better let that alone," said the black-haired gambler, persuasively.

"The professor's ben good to my kids."

The threat was so very covert that the sensitive Christie did not feel himself called upon to recognize it as such.

"_He_ ain't no target," Christie declared, with unutterable contempt.

"I'd as soon shoot a door-mat!" whereupon he proceeded, in a disengaged manner, to empty the contents of the black bottle into a gla.s.s, flinging the bottle under the table, with a praiseworthy regard for appearances.

Simon breathed deep and hard, and again there was an exasperating tremor in his low-pitched voice, which drawled more than usual, as he said:

"No; 't ain't the latest news! What I specially come to tell you was, that if you ever lay hands on that child agin, I'll shoot you deader 'n any door-mat you ever wiped your great cowardly boots on!"

Each word of this speech seemed to cleave its separate, individual way with a slow, ponderous significance. Christie pa.s.sed his hand absently down the barrel of the pistol on his knees, till his fingers rested on the trigger. If he had had any murderous intention, however, he seemed to think better of it, for he contented himself with a shrug and an oath, and the supercilious inquiry: "What are you givin' us, anyway?"

The man of the black beard eyed his movements with a furtive interest.

Amberley stood a moment, to give a still more deliberate emphasis to his words, thinking, the while, that in spite of the unvarnished frankness on either side, neither he nor his adversary had quite made each other out. Then he turned and threaded his way among the tables to the door, as quietly and composedly as he had come; while the girl on the stage repeated the a.s.sertion in regard to "Jinny's" smart looks, in which she seemed still unable to awaken the slightest interest in those who should have been her auditors. Before he had pa.s.sed Enoch's chair, which was placed discreetly near the exit, the pair of gamblers were at it again.

Not even the luck had been turned by the interruption. Christie was sweeping in the chips to the same refrain of the "cranberry tarts."

When, to Simon's infinite relief, little Eliza appeared at school the next morning, the teacher scrutinized her jealously in search of b.u.mps and bruises. There was nothing to be seen but the original b.u.mp, and that was reduced in size, though somewhat intensified in color, since the day before.

"I wonder how I should feel when I had shot him!" thought Simon, and his mind reverted to the rattlesnake, and to a sneaking compunction which had seized him when the tail gave its death-quiver. The possibility of missing his mark when once obliged to shoot did not enter his mind. He was fighting on the side of right and justice, and possessing, as he did, but small knowledge of the world and its ways, he had implicit faith in the triumphant outcome of all such encounters.

He took small credit to himself for any temerity he had shown. Somehow it seemed to him that the thing had been made very easy. He felt moderately sure that he owed his safety to the villainous-looking man in the black beard; and, indeed, that was quite in order, for he had been given to understand that Providence was not above making use of the meanest instruments to the accomplishment of a good end. There were times when he was even constrained to hope that, by the same Great Influence, a spark of magnanimity had been awakened in Christie's abandoned soul; and once, when Eliza reported that her "pa" had given her a nickle, he almost believed that those seemingly ineffective words of his had, thanks to that same all-powerful intervention, made an impression. He became positively hopeful that this might be the case, when nearly a month had pa.s.sed, and no further harm had come to his "lamb."

One morning Bella Jones, who ordinarily kept rather fas.h.i.+onable hours, came panting up the hill, the first to arrive. She was a dressy young person, whose father kept a "sample-room." Looking hastily about, to make sure that no one was there to have forestalled her, she cried, still quite out of breath:

"Eliza Christie, she's lost her ma! Died in the night of a hemorag!

Eliza ain't cried a drop, 'n her pa he's just settin' there like he was shot!"

"Like he was shot!" Simon s.h.i.+vered at the words as if a cold wind had pa.s.sed, striking a chill through the intense August day.

The professor kept school that morning as usual, but he did not sit on the settle against the lean-to, and when Patsy Lenders undertook to hoist himself up on it, the boy got his ears boxed. Patsy stated afterwards, in maintenance of the justifiable pride of "ten years goin'

on eleven," that he "wouldn't ha' took it from anybody but the perfessor," and he "wouldn't ha' took it from him, if 't hadn't a ben for that snake!"

It was high noon. The sun was pouring down upon the group of children in the clearing in front of the lop-sided cabin, and upon the empty settle up against it; upon the brooding heights that spanned the horizon beyond the Gulch, upon the fragrant pine-trees close at hand. Simon Jr. had just strayed along with a blossoming yucca protruding from his mouth, and the professor had driven him farther up the slope. Returning from this short excursion, Simon beheld two figures coming up the Gulch; a blond-bearded man, and a little girl in blue. He hurried toward them in real trepidation. He could not bear to see the lamb actually in the company of the wolf. The three met on the edge of the clearing; Christie was the first to speak.

"I've brought you Eliza," he said, in a steady, matter-of-fact voice, something like Eliza's own. "Her ma's dead, 'n you can have her 'f you want her. She thinks you'd like her."

"What do you mean?" asked Simon, his voice clouding over, so that it was hardly audible. "Can I hev her for my own?"

"Yes; that's the proposition! 'N there's a hundred dollars in her pocket which is all the capital I can raise to-day. I can do the funeral on tick. No; I won't try to get her away from you. She ain't my style."

Simon was stooping down with his eyes on a level with Eliza's.

"Say, Eliza," he asked, "would you like to be my little girl?"

"Yes," quoth Eliza.

"And come and live with me all the time?"

"Yes!" and she put out a little hand and touched his face.

"She won't be no great expense to you," said Christie.

Simon stood up and cast a significant glance about him.

"I guess if I let them prospectors in on my land," he said, "there won't be no great call for economizing!"

The two men stood a moment facing each other with the same half-defiant, half-puzzled look they had exchanged at that other meeting, not so long ago. Christie was the first to break the silence.