Lin McLean by Owen Wister (howl and other poems .TXT) 📕

except one. The cook was a more indispensable person. None save the cook was up, so far, this morning. Lin’s brother punchers slept about him on the ground, some motionless, some shifting their prone heads to burrow deeper from the increasing day. The busy work of spring was over, that of the fall, or beef roundup, not yet come. It was mid-July, a lull for these hard-riding bachelors of the saddle, and many unspent dollars stood to Mr. McLean’s credit on the ranch books.

“What’s the matter with some variety?” muttered the boy in his blankets.

The long range of the mountains lifted clear in the air. They slanted from the purple folds and furrows of the pines that richly cloaked them, upward into rock and grassy bareness until they broke remotely into bright peaks, and filmed into the distant lavender of the north and the south. On their western side the streams ran into Snake or into Green River, and so at length met the Pacific. On this side, Wind River flowed forth from them, descending out of the Lake of the Painted Meadows. A mere trout-brook it was up there at the top of the divide, with easy riffles and stepping-stones in many places; but down here, outside the mountains, it was become a streaming avenue, a broadening course, impetuous between its two tall green walls of cottonwood-trees. And so it wound away like a vast green ribbon across the lilac-gray sagebrush and the yellow, vanishing plains.

“Variety, you bet!” young Lin repeated, aloud.

He unrolled himself from his bed, and brought from the garments that made his pillow a few toilet articles. He got on his long boy legs and limped blithely to the margin. In the mornings his slight lameness was always more visible. The camp was at Bull Lake Crossing, where the fork from Bull Lake joins Wind River. Here Lin found some convenient shingle-stones, with dark, deepish water against them, where he plunged his face and energetically washed, and came up with the short curly hair shining upon his round head. After enough looks at himself in the dark water, and having knotted a clean, jaunty handkerchief at his throat, he returned with his slight limp to camp, where they were just sitting at breakfast to the rear of the cook-shelf of the wagon.

“Bugged up to kill!” exclaimed one, perceiving Lin’s careful dress.

“He sure has not shaved again?” another inquired, with concern.

“I ain’t got my opera-glasses on,” answered a third.

“He has spared that pansy-blossom mustache,” said a fourth.

“My spring crop,” remarked young Lin, rounding on this last one, “has juicier prospects than that rat-eaten catastrophe of last year’s hay which wanders out of your face.”

“Why, you’ll soon be talking yourself into a regular man,” said the other.

But the camp laugh remained on the side of young Lin till breakfast was ended, when the ranch foreman rode into camp.

Him Lin McLean at once addressed. “I was wantin’ to speak to you,” said he.

The experienced foreman noticed the boy’s holiday appearance. “I understand you’re tired of work,” he remarked.

“Who told you?” asked the bewildered Lin.

The foreman touched the boy’s pretty handkerchief. “Well, I have a way of taking things in at a glance,” said he. “That’s why I’m foreman, I expect. So you’ve had enough work?”

“My system’s full of it,” replied Lin, grinning. As the foreman stood thinking, he added, “And I’d like my time.”

Time, in the cattle idiom, meant back-pay up to date.

“It’s good we’re not busy,” said the foreman.

“Meanin’ I’d quit all the same?” inquired Lin, rapidly, flushing.

“No—not meaning any offence. Catch up your horse. I want to make the post before it gets hot.”

The foreman had come down the river from the ranch at Meadow Creek, and the post, his goal, was Fort Washakie. All this part of the country formed the Shoshone Indian Reservation, where, by permission, pastured the herds whose owner would pay Lin his time at Washakie. So the young cow-puncher flung on his saddle and mounted.

“So-long!” he remarked to the camp, by way of farewell. He might never be going to see any of them again; but the cow-punchers were not demonstrative by habit.

“Going to stop long at Washakie?” asked one.

“Alma is not waiter-girl at the hotel now,” another mentioned.

“If there’s a new girl,” said a third, “kiss her one for me, and tell her I’m handsomer than you.”

“I ain’t a deceiver of women,” said Lin.

“That’s why you’ll tell her,” replied his friend.

“Say, Lin, why are you quittin’ us so sudden, anyway?” asked the cook, grieved to lose him.

“I’m after some variety,” said the boy.

“If you pick up more than you can use, just can a little of it for me!” shouted the cook at the departing McLean.

This was the last of camp by Bull Lake Crossing, and in the foreman’s company young Lin now took the road for his accumulated dollars.

“So you’re leaving your bedding and stuff with the outfit?” said the foreman.

“Brought my tooth-brush,” said Lin, showing it in the breast-pocket of his flannel shirt.

“Going to Denver?”

“Why, maybe.”

“Take in San Francisco?”

“Sounds slick.”

“Made any plans?”

“Gosh, no!”

“Don’t want anything on your brain?”

“Nothin’ except my hat, I guess,” said Lin, and broke into cheerful song:

“‘Twas a nasty baby anyhow, And it only died to spite us; ‘Twas afflicted with the cerebrow Spinal meningitis!’”

They wound up out of the magic valley of Wind River, through the bastioned gullies and the gnome-like mystery of dry water-courses, upward and up to the level of the huge sagebrush plain above. Behind lay the deep valley they had climbed from, mighty, expanding, its trees like bushes, its cattle like pebbles, its opposite side towering also to the edge of this upper plain. There it lay, another world. One step farther away from its rim, and the two edges of the plain had flowed together over it like a closing sea, covering without a sign or ripple the great country which lay sunk beneath.

“A man might think he’d dreamed he’d saw that place,” said Lin to the foreman, and wheeled his horse to the edge again. “She’s sure there, though,” he added, gazing down. For a moment his boy face grew thoughtful. “Shucks!” said he then, abruptly, “where’s any joy in money that’s comin’ till it arrives? I have most forgot the feel o’ spot-cash.”

He turned his horse away from the far-winding vision of the river, and took a sharp jog after the foreman, who had not been waiting for him. Thus they crossed the eighteen miles of high plain, and came down to Fort Washakie, in the valley of Little Wind, before the day was hot.

His roll of wages once jammed in his pocket like an old handkerchief, young Lin precipitated himself out of the post-trader’s store and away on his horse up the stream among the Shoshone tepees to an unexpected entertainment—a wolf-dance. He had meant to go and see what the new waiter-girl at the hotel looked like, but put this off promptly to attend the dance. This hospitality the Shoshone Indians were extending to some visiting Ute friends, and the neighborhood was assembled to watch the ring of painted naked savages.

The post-trader looked after the galloping Lin. “What’s he quitting his job for?” he asked the foreman.

“Same as most of ‘em quit.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Been satisfactory?”

“Never had a boy more so. Good-hearted, willing, a plumb dare-devil with a horse.”

“And worthless,” suggested the post-trader.

“Well—not yet. He’s headed that way.”

“Been punching cattle long?”

“Came in the country about seventy-eight, I believe, and rode for the Bordeaux Outfit most a year, and quit. Blew in at Cheyenne till he went broke, and worked over on to the Platte. Rode for the C. Y. Outfit most a year, and quit. Blew in at Buffalo. Rode for Balaam awhile on Butte Creek. Broke his leg. Went to the Drybone Hospital, and when the fracture was commencing to knit pretty good he broke it again at the hog-ranch across the bridge. Next time you’re in Cheyenne get Dr. Barker to tell you about that. McLean drifted to Green River last year and went up over on to Snake, and up Snake, and was around with a prospecting outfit on Galena Creek by Pitchstone Canyon. Seems he got interested in some Dutchwoman up there, but she had trouble—died, I think they said—and he came down by Meteetsee to Wind River. He’s liable to go to Mexico or Africa next.”

“If you need him,” said the post-trader, closing his ledger, “you can offer him five more a month.”

“That’ll not hold him.”

“Well, let him go. Have a cigar. The bishop is expected for Sunday, and I’ve got to see his room is fixed up for him.”

“The bishop!” said the foreman. “I’ve heard him highly spoken of.”

“You can hear him preach tomorrow. The bishop is a good man.”

“He’s better than that; he’s a man,” stated the foreman—“at least so they tell me.”

Now, saving an Indian dance, scarce any possible event at the Shoshone agency could assemble in one spot so many sorts of inhabitants as a visit from this bishop. Inhabitants of four colors gathered to view the wolf-dance this afternoon— red men, white men, black men, yellow men. Next day, three sorts came to church at the agency. The Chinese laundry was absent. But because, indeed (as the foreman said), the bishop was not only a good man but a man, Wyoming held him in respect and went to look at him. He stood in the agency church and held the Episcopal service this Sunday morning for some brightly glittering army officers and their families, some white cavalry, and some black infantry; the agency doctor, the post-trader, his foreman, the government scout, three gamblers, the waiter-girl from the hotel, the stage-driver, who was there because she was; old Chief Washakie, white-haired and royal in blankets, with two royal Utes splendid beside him; one benchful of squatting Indian children, silent and marvelling; and, on the back bench, the commanding officer’s new hired-girl, and, beside her, Lin McLean.

Mr. McLean’s hours were already various and successful. Even at the wolf-dance, before he had wearied of its monotonous drumming and pageant, his roving eye had rested upon a girl whose eyes he caught resting upon him. A look, an approach, a word, and each was soon content with the other. Then, when her duties called her to the post from him and the stream’s border, with a promise for next day he sought the hotel and found the three gamblers anxious to make his acquaintance; for when a cow-puncher has his pay many people will take an interest in him. The three gamblers did not know that Mr. McLean could play cards. He left them late in the evening fat with their money, and sought the tepees of the Arapahoes. They lived across the road from the Shoshones, and among their tents the boy remained until morning. He was here in church now, keeping his promise to see the bishop with the girl of yesterday; and while he gravely looked at the bishop, Miss Sabina Stone allowed his arm to encircle her waist. No soldier had achieved this yet, but Lin was the first cow-puncher she had seen, and he had given her the handkerchief from round his neck.

The quiet air blew in through the windows and door, the pure, light breath from the mountains; only, passing over their foothills it had caught and carried the clear aroma of the sagebrush. This it brought into church, and with this seemed also to float the peace and great silence of the plains. The little melodeon in the corner, played by one of the ladies at the post, had finished accompanying