Good Indian by B. M. Bower (best book club books .TXT) 📕
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- Author: B. M. Bower
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“Maybe he's a detective,” Evadna hazarded.
“Maybe.” Miss Georgie's tone, however, was extremely skeptical. “Only, so far as I can discover, there's never been anything around here to detect. Nobody has been murdered, or robbed, or kidnapped that I ever heard of. Pete Hamilton says not. And—I wonder, now, if Saunders could be watching somebody! Wouldn't it be funny, if old Pete himself turned out to be a Jesse James brand of criminal? Can you imagine Pete doing anything more brutal than lick a postage stamp?”
“He might want to,” Evadna guessed shrewdly, “but it would be too much trouble.”
“Besides,” Miss Georgie went on speculating, “Saunders never does anything that anyone ever heard of. Sweeps out the store, they say—but I'd hate to swear to that. I never could catch it when it looked swept—and brings the mail sack over here twice a day, and gets one to take back. And reads novels. Of course, the man's half dead with consumption; but no one would object to that, if these queer wires hadn't commenced coming to him.”
“Why don't you turn detective yourself and find out?” Plainly, Evadna was secretly laughing at her perturbed interest in the matter.
“Thanks. I'm too many things already, and I haven't any false hair or dark lantern. And, by the way, I'm going to have the day off, Sunday. Charlie Green is coming up to relieve me. And—couldn't we do something?” She glanced wearily around the little office. “Honest, I'd go crazy if I stayed here much longer without a play spell. I want to get clear out, away from the thing—where I can't even hear a train whistle.”
“Then you shall come down to the ranch the minute you can get away, and we'll do something or go somewhere. The boys said they'd take me fishing—but they only propose things so they can play jokes on me, it seems to me. They'd make me fall in the river, or something, I just know. But if you'd like to go along, there'd be two of us—”
“Chicken, we'll go. I ought to be ashamed to fish for an invitation the way I did, but I'm not. I haven't been down to the Hart ranch yet; and I've heard enough about it to drive me crazy with the desire to see it. Your Aunt Phoebe I've met, and fallen in love with—that's a matter of course. She told me to visit her just any time, without waiting to be invited especially. Isn't she the dearest thing? Oh! that's a train order, I suppose—sixteen is about due. Excuse me, chicken.”
She was busy then until the train came screeching down upon the station, paused there while the conductor rushed in, got a thin slip of paper for himself and the engineer, and rushed out again. When the train grumbled away from the platform and went its way, it left man standing there, a fish-basket slung from one shoulder, a trout rod carefully wrapped in its case in his hand, a box which looked suspiciously like a case of some bottled joy at his feet, and a loose-lipped smile upon his face.
“Howdy, Miss Georgie?” he called unctuously through the open door.
Miss Georgie barely glanced at him from under her lashes, and her shoulders indulged themselves in an almost imperceptible twitch.
“How do you do, Mr. Baumberger?” she responded coolly, and very, very gently pushed the door shut just as he had made up his mind to enter.
CHAPTER VIII. THE AMIABLE ANGLER
Baumberger—Johannes was the name he answered to when any of his family called, though to the rest of the world he was simply Baumberger—was what he himself called a true sport. Women, he maintained, were very much like trout; and so, when this particular woman calmly turned her back upon the smile cast at her, he did not linger there angling uselessly, but betook himself to the store, where his worldly position, rather than his charming personality, might be counted upon to bring him his meed of appreciation.
Good Indian and Jack, sitting side by side upon the porch and saying very little, he passed by with a careless nod, as being not worth his attention. Saunders, glancing up from the absorbing last chapter of “The Brokenhearted Bride,” also received a nod, and returned it apathetically. Pete Hamilton, however, got a flabby handshake, a wheezy laugh, and the announcement that he was down from Shoshone for a good, gamy tussle with that four-pounder he had lost last time.
“And I don't go back till I get him—not if I stay here a week,” he declared, with jocular savagery. “Took half my leader and my pet fly—I got him with a peacock-bodied gray hackle that I revised to suit my own notions—and, by the great immortal Jehosaphat, he looked like a whale when he jumped up clear of the riffle, turned over, and—” His flabby, white hand made a soaring movement to indicate the manner in which the four-pounder had vanished.
“Better take a day off and go with me, Pete,” he suggested, getting an unwieldy-looking pipe from the pocket of his canvas fishing-coat, and opening his eyes at a trout-fly snagged in the mouthpiece. “Now, how did that fly come there?” he asked aggrievedly, while he released it daintily for all his fingers looked so fat and awkward. He stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth, and held up the fly with that interest which seems fatuous to one who has no sporting blood in his veins.
“Last time I used that fly was when I was down here three weeks ago—the day I lost the big one. Ain't it a beauty, eh? Tied it myself. And, by the great immortal Jehosaphat, it fetches me the rainbows, too. Good mind to try it on the big one. Don't see how I didn't miss it out of my book—I must be getting absent-minded. Sign of old age, that. Failing powers and the like.” He shook his head reprovingly and grinned, as if he considered the idea something of a joke. “Have to buck up—a lawyer can't afford to grow absent-minded. He's liable to wake up some day and find himself without his practice.”
He got his fly-book from the basket swinging at his left hip, opened it, turned the leaves with the caressing touch one gives to a cherished thing, and very carefully placed the fly upon the page where it belonged; gazed gloatingly down at the tiny, tufted hooks, with their frail-looking five inches of gut leader, and then returned the book fondly to the basket.
“Think I'll go on down to the Harts',” he said, “so as to be that much closer to the stream. Daylight is going to find me whipping the riffles, Peter. You won't come along? You better. Plenty of—ah—snake medicine,” he hinted, chuckling so that the whole, deep chest of him vibrated. “No? Well, you can let me have a horse, I suppose—that cow-backed sorrel will do—he's gentle, I know. I think I'll go out and beg an invitation from that Hart boy—never can remember those kids by name—Gene, is it, or Jack?”
He went out upon the porch, laid a hand upon Jack's shoulder, and beamed down upon him with what would have passed easily for real affection while he announced that he was going to beg supper and a bed at the ranch, and wanted to know, as a solicitous after-thought, if Jack's mother had
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