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J. S. Zerbe - "Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra."

Jerome K. Jerome - "Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green"

George Meredith - "Poems by George Meredith Volume 3"

Richard de Bury - "The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury"

Lin McLean

O >> Owen Wister >> Lin McLean




"Judge," spoke a voice at the door, "ain't she ready yet?"

"She is still passing away," observed Slaghammer, piously.

"Because I was thinking," said the man--"I was just--You see, us jury is
dry and dead broke. Doggonedest cards I've held this year, and--Judge,
would there be anything out of the way in me touching my fee in advance,
if it's a sure thing?"

"I see none, my friend," said Slaghammer, benevolently, "since it must
be." He shook his head and nodded it by turns. Then, with full-blown
importance, he sat again, and wrote a paper, his coroner's certificate.
Next door, in Albany County, these vouchers brought their face value of
five dollars to the holder; but on Drybone's neutral soil the saloons
would always pay four for them, and it was rare that any jury-man could
withstand the temptation of four immediate dollars. This one gratefully
received his paper, and, cherishing it like a bird in the hand, he with
his colleagues bore it where they might wait for duty and slake their
thirst.

In the silent room sat Lin McLean, his body coming to life more readily
than his shaken spirit. Barker, seeing that the cow-puncher meant to
watch until the end, brought the whiskey to him. Slaghammer drew
documents from his pocket to fill the time, but was soon in slumber over
them. In all precincts of the quadrangle Drybone was keeping it up late.
The fiddle, the occasional shouts, and the crack of the billiard-balls
travelled clear and far through the vast darkness outside. Presently
steps unsteadily drew near, and round the corner of the door a voice,
plaintive and diffident, said, "Judge, ain't she most pretty near ready?"

"Wake up, Judge!" said Barker. "Your jury has gone dry again."

The man appeared round the door--a handsome, dishevelled fellow--with hat
in hand, balancing himself with respectful anxiety. Thus was a second
voucher made out, and the messenger strayed back happy to his friends.
Barker and McLean sat wakeful, and Slaghammer fell at once to napping.
From time to time he was roused by new messengers, each arriving more
unsteady than the last, until every juryman had got his fee and no more
messengers came. The coroner slept undisturbed in his chair. McLean and
Barker sat. On the bed the mass, with its pink ribbons, breathed and
breathed, while moths flew round the lamp, tapping and falling with light
sounds. So did the heart of the darkness wear itself away, and through
the stone-cold air the dawn began to filter and expand.

Barker rose, bent over the bed, and then stood. Seeing him, McLean stood
also.

"Judge," said Barker, quietly, "you may call them now." And with careful
steps the judge got himself out of the room to summon his jury.

For a short while the cow-puncher stood looking down upon the woman. She
lay lumped in her gaudiness, the ribbons darkly stained by the laudanum;
but into the stolid, bold features death had called up the faint-colored
ghost of youth, and McLean remembered all his Bear Creek days. "Hind
sight is a turruble clear way o' seein' things," said he. "I think I'll
take a walk."

"Go," said Barker. "The jury only need me, and I'll join you."

But the jury needed no witness. Their long waiting and the advance pay
had been too much for these responsible men. Like brothers they had
shared each others' vouchers until responsibility had melted from their
brains and the whiskey was finished. Then, no longer entertained and
growing weary of Drybone, they had remembered nothing but their distant
beds. Each had mounted his pony, holding trustingly to the saddle, and
thus, unguided, the experienced ponies had taken them right. Across the
wide sagebrush and up and down the river they were now asleep or riding,
dispersed irrevocably. But the coroner was here. He duly received
Barker's testimony, brought his verdict in, and signed it, and even while
he was issuing to himself his own proper voucher for ten dollars came
Chalkeye and Toothpick Kid on their ponies, galloping, eager in their
hopes and good wishes for Mrs. Lusk. Life ran strong in them both. The
night had gone well with them. Here was the new day going to be fine. It
must be well with everybody.

"You don't say!" they exclaimed, taken aback. "Too bad."

They sat still in their saddles, and upon their reckless, kindly faces
thought paused for a moment. "Her gone!" they murmured. "Hard to get used
to the idea. What's anybody doing about the coffin?"

"Mr. Lusk," answered Slaghammer, "doubtless--"

"Lusk! He'll not know anything this forenoon. He's out there in the
grass. She didn't think nothing of him. Tell Bill--not Dollar Bill, Jerky
Bill, yu' know; he's over the bridge--to fix up a hearse, and we'll be
back." The two drove their spurs in with vigorous heels, and instantly
were gone rushing up the road to the graveyard.

The fiddle had lately ceased, and no dancers stayed any longer in the
hall. Eastward the rose and gold began to flow down upon the plain over
the tops of the distant hills. Of the revellers, many had never gone to
bed, and many now were already risen from their excesses to revive in the
cool glory of the morning. Some were drinking to stay their hunger until
breakfast; some splashed and sported in the river, calling and joking;
and across the river some were holding horse-races upon the level beyond
the hog-ranch. Drybone air rang with them. Their lusty, wandering shouts
broke out in gusts of hilarity. Their pistols, aimed at cans or prairie
dogs or anything, cracked as they galloped at large. Their speeding,
clear-cut forms would shine upon the bluffs, and, descending, merge in
the dust their horses had raised. Yet all this was nothing in the
vastness of the growing day.

Beyond their voices the rim of the sun moved above the violet hills, and
Drybone, amid the quiet, long, new fields of radiance, stood august and
strange.

Down along the tall, bare slant from the graveyard the two horsemen were
riding back. They could be seen across the river, and the horse-racers
grew curious. As more and more watched, the crowd began to speak. It was
a calf the two were bringing. It was too small for a calf. It was dead.
It was a coyote they had roped. See it swing! See it fall on the road!

"It's a coffin, boys!" said one, shrewd at guessing.

At that the event of last night drifted across their memories, and they
wheeled and spurred their ponies. Their crowding hoofs on the bridge
brought the swimmers from the waters below and, dressing, they climbed
quickly to the plain and followed the gathering. By the door already were
Jerky Bill and Limber Jim and the Doughie and always more, dashing up
with their ponies; halting with a sharp scatter of gravel to hear and
comment. Barker was gone, but the important coroner told his news. And it
amazed each comer, and set him speaking and remembering past things with
the others. "Dead!" each one began. "Her, does he say?"

"Why, pshaw!"

"Why, Frenchy said Doc had her cured!"

Jack Saunders claimed she had rode to Box Elder with Lin McLean.
"Dead? Why, pshaw!"

"Seems Doc couldn't swim her out."

"Couldn't swim her out?"

"That's it. Doc couldn't swim her out."

"Well--there's one less of us."

"Sure! She was one of the boys."

"She grub-staked me when I went broke in '84."

"She gave me fifty dollars onced at Lander, to buy a saddle."

"I run agin her when she was a biscuit-shooter."

"Sidney, Nebraska. I run again her there, too."

"I knowed her at Laramie."

"Where's Lin? He knowed her all the way from Bear Creek to Cheyenne."

They laughed loudly at this.

"That's a lonesome coffin," said the Doughie. "That the best you could
do?"

"You'd say so!" said Toothpick Kid.

"Choices are getting scarce up there," said Chalkeye. "We looked the lot
over."

They were arriving from their search among the old dug-up graves on the
hill. Now they descended from their ponies, with the box roped and
rattling between them. "Where's your hearse, Jerky?" asked Chalkeye.

"Have her round in a minute," said the cowboy, and galloped away with
three or four others.

"Turruble lonesome coffin, all the same," repeated the Doughie. And they
surveyed the box that had once held some soldier.

"She did like fixin's," said Limber Jim.

"Fixin's!" said Toothpick Kid. "That's easy."

While some six of them, with Chalkeye, bore the light, half-rotted coffin
into the room, many followed Toothpick Kid to the post-trader's store.
Breaking in here, they found men sleeping on the counters. These had been
able to find no other beds in Drybone, and lay as they had stretched
themselves on entering. They sprawled in heavy slumber, some with not
even their hats taken off and some with their boots against the rough
hair of the next one. They were quickly pushed together, few waking, and
so there was space for spreading cloth and chintz. Stuffs were unrolled
and flung aside till many folds and colors draped the motionless
sleepers, and at length a choice was made. Unmeasured yards of this drab
chintz were ripped off, money treble its worth was thumped upon the
counter, and they returned, bearing it like a streamer to the coffin.
While the noise of their hammers filled the room, the hearse came
tottering to the door, pulled and pushed by twenty men. It was an
ambulance left behind by the soldiers, and of the old-fashioned shape,
concave in body, its top blown away in winds of long ago; and as they
revolved, its wheels dished in and out like hoops about to fall. While
some made a harness from ropes, and throwing the saddles off two ponies
backed them to the vehicle, the body was put in the coffin, now covered
by the chintz. But the laudanum upon the front of her dress revolted
those who remembered their holidays with her, and turning the woman upon
her face, they looked their last upon her flashing, colored ribbons, and
nailed the lid down. So they carried her out, but the concave body of the
hearse was too short for the coffin; the end reached out, and it might
have fallen. But Limber Jim, taking the reins, sat upon the other end,
waiting and smoking. For all Drybone was making ready to follow in some
way. They had sought the husband, the chief mourner. He, however, still
lay in the grass of the quadrangle, and despising him as she had done,
they left him to wake when he should choose. Those men who could sit in
their saddles rode escort, the old friends nearest, and four held the
heads of the frightened cow-ponies who were to draw the hearse. They had
never known harness before, and they plunged with the men who held them.
Behind the hearse the women followed in a large ranch-wagon, this moment
arrived in town. Two mares drew this, and their foals gambolled around
them. The great flat-topped dray for hauling poles came last, with its
four government mules. The cow-boys had caught sight of it and captured
it. Rushing to the post-trader's, they carried the sleeping men from the
counter and laid them on the dray. Then, searching Drybone outside and in
for any more incapable of following, they brought them, and the dray was
piled.

Limber Jim called for another drink and, with his cigar between his
teeth, cracked his long bull-whacker whip. The ponies, terrified, sprang
away, scattering the men that held them, and the swaying hearse leaped
past the husband, over the stones and the many playing-cards in the
grass. Masterfully steered, it came safe to an open level, while the
throng cheered the unmoved driver on his coffin, his cigar between his
teeth.

"Stay with it, Jim!" they shouted. "You're a king!"

A steep ditch lay across the flat where he was veering, abrupt and nearly
hidden; but his eye caught the danger in time, and swinging from it
leftward so that two wheels of the leaning coach were in the air, he
faced the open again, safe, as the rescue swooped down upon him. The
horsemen came at the ditch, a body of daring, a sultry blast of youth.
Wheeling at the brink, they turned, whirling their long ropes. The
skilful nooses flew, and the ponies, caught by the neck and foot, were
dragged back to the quadrangle and held in line. So the pageant started
the wild ponies quivering but subdued by the tightened ropes, and the
coffin steady in the ambulance beneath the driver. The escort, in their
fringed leather and broad hats, moved slowly beside and behind it, many
of them swaying, their faces full of health, and the sun and the strong
drink. The women followed, whispering a little; and behind them the slow
dray jolted, with its heaps of men waking from the depths of their
whiskey and asking what this was. So they went up the hill. When the
riders reached the tilted gate of the graveyard, they sprang off and
scattered among the hillocks, stumbling and eager. They nodded to Barker
and McLean, quietly waiting there, and began choosing among the open,
weather-drifted graves from which the soldiers had been taken. Their
figures went up and down the uneven ridges, calling and comparing.

"Here," said the Doughie, "here's a good hole."

"Here's a deep one," said another.

"We've struck a well here," said some more. "Put her in here."

The sand-hills became clamorous with voices until they arrived at a
choice, when some one with a spade quickly squared the rain-washed
opening. With lariats looping the coffin round, they brought it and were
about to lower it, when Chalkeye, too near the edge, fell in, and one end
of the box rested upon him. He could not rise by himself, and they pulled
the ropes helplessly above.

McLean spoke to Barker. "I'd like to stop this," said he, "but a man
might as well--"

"Might as well stop a cloud-burst," said Barker.

"Yes, Doc. But it feels--it feels like I was looking at ten dozen Lin
McLeans." And seeing them still helpless with Chalkeye, he joined them
and lifted the cow-boy out.

"I think," said Slaghammer, stepping forward, "this should proceed no
further without some--perhaps some friend would recite 'Now I lay me?"'

"They don't use that on funerals," said the Doughie.

"Will some gentleman give the Lord's Prayer?" inquired the coroner.

Foreheads were knotted; triad mutterings ran among them; but some one
remembered a prayer book in one of the rooms in Drybone, and the notion
was hailed. Four mounted, and raced to bring it. They went down the hill
in a flowing knot, shirts ballooning and elbows flapping, and so
returned. But the book was beyond them. "Take it, you; you take it," each
one said. False beginnings were made, big thumbs pushed the pages back
and forth, until impatience conquered them. They left the book and
lowered the coffin, helped again by McLean. The weight sank slowly,
decently, steadily, down between the banks. The sound that it struck the
bottom with was a slight sound, the grating of the load upon the solid
sand; and a little sand strewed from the edge and fell on the box at the
same moment. The rattle came up from below, compact and brief, a single
jar, quietly smiting through the crowd, smiting it to silence. One
removed his hat, and then another, and then all. They stood eying each
his neighbor, and shifting their eyes, looked away at the great valley.
Then they filled in the grave, brought a head-board from a grave near by,
and wrote the name and date upon it by scratching with a stone.

"She was sure one of us," said Chalkeye. "Let's give her the Lament."

And they followed his lead:


"Once in the saddle, I used to go dashing,
Once in the saddle, I used to go gay;
First took to drinking, and then to card-playing;
Got shot in the body, and now here I lay.

"Beat the drum slowly, Play the fife lowly,
Sound the dead march as you bear me along.
Take me to Boot-hill, and throw the sod over me--
I'm but a poor cow-boy, I know I done wrong."


When the song was ended, they left the graveyard quietly and went down
the hill. The morning was growing warm. Their work waited them across
many sunny miles of range and plain. Soon their voices and themselves had
emptied away into the splendid vastness and silence, and they were gone--
ready with all their might to live or to die, to be animals or heroes, as
the hours might bring them opportunity. In Drybone's deserted quadrangle
the sun shone down upon Lusk still sleeping, and the wind shook the aces
and kings in the grass.



PART IV

Over at Separ, Jessamine Buckner had no more stockings of Billy's to
mend, and much time for thinking and a change of mind. The day after that
strange visit, when she had been told that she had hurt a good man's
heart without reason, she took up her work; and while her hands
despatched it her thoughts already accused her. Could she have seen that
visitor now, she would have thanked her. She looked at the photograph on
her table. "Why did he go away so quickly?" she sighed. But when young
Billy returned to his questions she was buoyant again, and more than a
match for him. He reached the forbidden twelfth time of asking why Lin
McLean did not come back and marry her. Nor did she punish him as she had
threatened. She looked at him confidentially, and he drew near, full of
hope.

"Billy, I'll tell you just why it is," said she. "Lin thinks I'm not a
real girl."

"A--ah," drawled Billy, backing from her with suspicion.

"Indeed that's what it is, Billy. If he knew I was a real girl--"

"A--ah," went the boy, entirely angry. "Anybody can tell you're a girl."
And he marched out, mystified, and nursing a sense of wrong. Nor did his
dignity allow him to reopen the subject.

To-day, two miles out in the sage-brush by himself, he was shooting
jack-rabbits, but began suddenly to run in toward Separ. A horseman had
passed him, and he had loudly called; but the rider rode on, intent upon
the little distant station. Man and horse were soon far ahead of the boy,
and the man came into town galloping.

No need to fire the little pistol by her window, as he had once thought
to do! She was outside before he could leap to the ground. And as he held
her, she could only laugh, and cry, and say "Forgive me! Oh, why have you
been so long?" She took him back to the room where his picture was, and
made him sit, and sat herself close. "What is it?" she asked him. For
through the love she read something else in his serious face. So then he
told her how nothing was wrong; and as she listened to all that he had to
tell, she, too, grew serious, and held very close to him. "Dear, dear
neighbor!" she said.

As they sat so, happy with deepening happiness, but not gay yet, young
Billy burst open the door. "There!" he cried. "I knowed Lin knowed you
were a girl!"

Thus did Billy also have his wish. For had he not told Jessamine that he
liked her, and urged her to come and live with him and Lin? That cabin on
Box Elder became a home in truth, with a woman inside taking the only
care of Mr. McLean that he had known since his childhood: though
singularly enough he has an impression that it is he who takes care
of Jessamine!



IN THE AFTER-DAYS

The black pines stand high up the hills,
The white snow sifts their columns deep,
While through the canyon's riven cleft
From there, beyond, the rose clouds sweep.

Serene above their paling shapes
One star hath wakened in the sky.
And here in the gray world below
Over the sage the wind blows by;

Rides through the cotton-woods' ghost-ranks,
And hums aloft a sturdy tune
Among the river's tawny bluffs,
Untenanted as is the moon.

Far 'neath the huge invading dusk
Comes Silence awful through the plain;
But yonder horseman's heart is gay,
And he goes singing might and main.

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