Blue Kingdom (2 page)

“I was recollectin' of the day,” said Pete Logan, “when we ties the sack of crushed barley onto the back of Excuse Me and turns her loose. Maybe you disremember that day, sir?”

“Bah!” said the colonel.

“I was smilin',” said Pete Logan, “to think that she bucked so hard that she split open the side of that sack and sent the barley squirtin' out like water.”

“I remember,” said the colonel dreamily, “that on that day she then spent a long time smashin' that good barley into the mud of her corral.”

“Yeah,” drawled Pete, “she's a lamb, I reckon.” He raised his hat. “How d'ye, Miss Furneaux?”

The colonel hastily followed the example of his foreman and removed his hat to a woman of middle age who now rode up to them. She had a handsome, sun-browned face, lean and clean-looking, and the most honest gray eyes in the world. She smiled at them both.

“Our boys are not having much luck,” she said.

“I would rather have us represented by the women, Elizabeth,” said the colonel. “I would rather have the girls of this country represent us than the spineless, weak-hearted, chicken-livered rascals who are out there now, lettin' themselves be bucked off like so many sacks of wheat . . . half-filled sacks, at that.” He ended by pointing with a stiff arm. “Look!” he said.

At that moment, aptly to illustrate what the colonel had been saying, one of the Texas contenders was seen to leave the bowed back of his pony and fly upward without wings from his saddle, then drop like a plummet to the ground. The impact was audible.

“I hope he's broken his neck,” said the colonel.

Miss Furneaux looked at Clisson without a smile, but also without malice, for she understood thoroughly the bigness of his heart.

“Why, that's Archie Hunter,” she said.

“Archie Hunter?” repeated the colonel. “Why, then, I must say that he sticks in my mind, in some way connected with your name, Elizabeth. What is it?”

“He was the dearest friend of Rod,” she answered.

“Ah?” said the colonel. He began to add other words, but checked himself, seemed half choking, and turned a violent crimson.

Elizabeth Furneaux looked at him with the same faint smile of understanding. “You meant to ask me what the latest news is about Rod, I suppose?” she said.

“Why, Elizabeth, my dear child,” said the colonel, putting out a hand toward her, “I never want you to speak a word that will hurt you. I never want that.”

“I don't mind telling you,” she said. “I had a letter from him not long ago, but, as usual, he says nothing about what he's really doing. Except that he's found a girl in the mountains. Something too exquisite to be human, I gather. Also . . . you probably know that they've attributed another shooting scrape to Rod?”

“The man near Denver, do you mean?”

“Yes. The man is dead. I've just heard. That's all the recent news. Good-bye, Colonel. I'll see you again before the rodeo breaks up.”

She rode off, and the colonel looked at his foreman with bared teeth, and Pete Logan looked back at him in the same fashion.

“I wish,” said the colonel, after a moment of sustaining this vicious grimace, “I wish that Rodman Furneaux were thrown in the pen with Excuse Me. Confound him, I wish no better than that.”

“They might get on fine,” said Pete Logan. “They'd be birds of a feather, after all.”

The colonel said: “Everything lost . . . everything ruined . . . everything gone to a lot of single-cinch. . . .”

The rest of his language defied reproduction.

“Here's Sam Parker,” said Logan. “I been wonderin' where Sam was. There's a he-man when it comes to ridin' a hoss.”

“Bah!” snorted the colonel. “That Parker is drunk. He can't keep in the saddle hardly. You, Sam Parker, come here, sir.”

Sam Parker came. He was a brown-faced youth with not much forehead and a vast smile over a lantern jaw. He looked at the colonel with the indistinctness of crossed eyes and a clouded brain.

“Sam,” said the colonel, “are you gonna ride?”

“I reckon I am, sir.”

“Are you gonna stick on like a man?”

“I reckon I ain't, sir.”

“Sam, you're drunk.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sam. “I been collectin' and collectin' and collectin' this here bun for three days, and now I
guess I'm pretty well ripe. This here is about the best I ever been . . . I had an ol' master to help to put on the finishin' touches.”

“Some of those center-fire sneaks have got Sam drunk,” suggested the colonel. “Otherwise. . . .”

“Who you been with?” asked Pete Logan.

“I jus' lef' ol' Carrie Dunmore over to Chaffey's crossroads place. We been lettin' the red-eye percolate until it's got into our bones and made 'em jus' so sof' that fallin' off a hoss wouldn't hurt.”

“Hold on!” exclaimed the colonel. “Did you say Carrie Dunmore?
The
Carrie Dunmore?”

“Yes, sir, ol' single-shot Carrie. He's over there. He's jus' warmin' up strong.”

“Why didn't the underbred coyote come on to the rodeo?” asked the colonel savagely.

“Because he said that the sun was shinin' warmer and the sittin' was softer and easier there in Chaffey's place.”

“The lazy scoundrel!” cried the colonel.

“Yes, sir,” answered Sam with a vaster smile than ever. “I've heard of the gent that was so lazy he starved to death because he wouldn't go to the smokehouse to get him a side of bacon. But I reckon that Carrie Dunmore is the most outlazyingest gent in the whole world.”

“That's an honorable distinction,” said the colonel. “Is the fellow as drunk as you are, Sam?”

“Him, sir?” asked Sam Parker. “Is you referrin' by any chance to my frien' Carrie Dunmore? I gotta tell you, sir, that they ain't enough liquor and time in the world to percolate into the insides of Carrie. He jus'
gets the outside a little pickled, but inside . . . he's fine as could be.”

The colonel grew absent of eye and mind. Suddenly he said: “Pete, take Charlie and Joe. Take an extra set of hosses along, too. Ride like fury. It's only two mile' to Chaffey's place, and, if you can't get there in five minutes, you lose your jobs with me. Get that worthless, no-account, set-in-the-sun Carrie Dunmore, and bring him here.”

The foreman looked anxious. “That's only three of us, sir,” he said.

“Suppose there are only three?” roared the colonel. “Is he a grizzly bear or a mountain lion? Besides, ain't he drunk, by the report of that wo'thless Sam Parker? Go get that man. Rope him, tie him up, and bring him here. I'll make him ride, confound him!”

Pete Logan departed at once. Along the fence, he picked up Charlie and Joe—seasoned cowhands—and told them what was wanted. They listened with long faces.

“Why don't you ask me to go on an' pull the teeth of a live buzz saw?” asked Charlie plaintively.

“It ain't a question of wantin' or askin',” said the foreman. “It's a question of gettin' and doin'. The old man is nutty, he's so mad. He wants Carrie Dunmore.”

“For a watch charm, maybe,” Joe said with delicate sarcasm.

But they rounded up an extra horse and started at once on a dead run. In the specified five minutes their puffing, dripping horses halted at the roadside place of Chaffey.

Sounds of mirth issued from within, and the foreman
risked a spy glance through the window before entering. He returned, cursing: “There's four of the best damn' cowpunchers in Texas in there, and they're all hangin' around watchin' Carrie juggle knives. It depends on how lubricated those gents are, what luck we have. Joe, you're a neat hand with a rope. I'll go in and get his attention . . . if I can. When I get in, you daub a rope onto him. Charlie, you stand by to help in any direction you might be needed.”

So, determined, grim-faced, they advanced through the door into the place, and there they found five cowboys stamping on the floor and singing a thundering herd song, while Chaffey himself, behind the bar, smote the varnished surface with the flat of his pudgy white hand in time with the music.

All this accompaniment was for the benefit of a large young man who was dancing a jig with uncertain and fumbling feet, laughing at his own clumsiness, but while he danced his hands were seriously occupied. On the bar were laid nine or ten knives—hunting knives and big Bowie knives. Of these he had taken three and was juggling them into the air as he danced. As the newcomers entered, he greeted them with an Indian yell and added a fourth knife to the three that were in the air. This complicated his performance. What with the stumbling feet and the flight of four knives, it seemed that at any moment he might blunder under the heavy, descending point of one of the weapons. Indeed, he seemed to be drawing his head from side to side to escape their fall.

“We'd better stop this,” said Charlie. “He'll be carving with one of these Bowies, before long.”

“They're gonna stop you, Carrie!” yelled one of the audience.

Carrie answered with wild laughter, and actually turned his handsome head for a fraction of an instant toward the trio. Yet he managed to keep the knives flowing upward without an interruption, yelling: “You there, Pete Logan . . . you line up ag'in' the wall, ol' hoss, line up there with your hands over your head, or I'll split you right in two!”

Pete Logan hesitated, but he did not hesitate long. The wild light in the juggler's eye convinced him that there was a real danger, and back he went to the wall and stretched his arms above his head, only growling as he did so: “I knew that we'd land in the mud, Joe.”

The chorus of five liquor-ridden cowpunchers grew louder, until it thundered, while Carrick Dunmore, still laughing, still reeling, flung a knife that stuck, humming, in the wood half an inch from Logan's right ear.

“Hey!” yelled Logan. “Look out, you'll murder me!”

“If you budge ag'in, old hoss, I will!” shouted Carrick Dunmore, and suddenly the knives flowed brightly from the flat of his hands—the four he had in the air and the others from the edge of the bar behind him. With them, he outlined the head of the foreman, who remained rigid with horror as, with shock after shock, the murderous steel flew home into the wall and hedged his head about in a close circle.

All the time the song of the cowpunchers thundered, and the knives flowed in beat with the song. When the last knife was thrown, however, enormous laughter swallowed all other sound.

Then: “Step out, Pete, and look at your picture drawed on the wall, there,” ordered Dunmore.

Pete stepped out and nodded to Charlie, and that worthy instantly had his rope over the shoulders of Carrick Dunmore. It happened with wonderful speed and unison of effort. While the five inebriated 'punchers were still helpless with excess of mirth, three pairs of hands were applied to the neck of the lariat, and Carrick Dunmore was yanked from his feet, dragged over the floor, and out the door, which was slammed and locked behind them.

“Hey!” shouted Dunmore. “You poor, pudding-headed. . . .” Then laughter seized him again and shook him helpless.

Similar roars still bellowed from the saloon to tell of the hysterically weak men within. The trio, still grim enough and frightened enough, grappled Dunmore. His body was utterly relaxed, but it was not soft. It was loose, with the looseness of supple steel cables as they heaved him into a saddle, and then lashed his feet together beneath the belly of the horse.

Still he laughed as they started down the road. He reeled heavily from side to side. Only the lashings that gripped his feet seemed able to keep him in place, but still with inexhaustible laughter he roared and wept for joy at his own jest, as they thundered along, four men now, and three of them as proud of this exploit as though they had seized a robber chief from the midst of his band and carried him off to the power of the law.

So it was that they galloped onto the field of the rodeo, where the bucking contest still was in progress,
although drawing toward a close, for the sun was sloping far to the west, and the dust that whirled up from the riding field floated, golden in the air. As they came, they could hear the bawling of an angry cow pony, and the whooping of an exultant and equally fierce rider.

“One of them center-fire Californians ag'in,” said the foreman, “but maybe we can do something ag'in' 'em now. Where's something to sober up this here Carrie Dunmore?”

They found a bucket of water and dashed it over him, and, as he emerged from it, spluttering, but still laughing with inextinguishable good nature, they led him to the judges and demanded his right to ride.

The judges regarded the unsteady newcomer with interest. “They's only two horses left to ride,” they said. “One of them is for Tom Bizbee. The other is the colonel's mare. Would you like to try her, Dunmore?”

“I al'ays loved the ladies,” said Carrick Dunmore. “Lemme see this pretty girl?”

They led him eagerly across the field to visit Excuse Me for the first time.

Miss Furneaux went straight to the judges. There she looked them calmly in the eye and said: “That big young man is going to try to ride the colonel's pet roan, and she'll kill him. Do you realize that?”

“He's a mighty good rider, ma'am,” was the first answer.

“Good? He's a drunken rider, just now.”

“Miss Furneaux, a man with too much liquor in him is rarely hurt, except with a bullet! Let him alone. Carrie will come out all right. There goes Bizbee, by the way, and he's caught a hummer!”

Tom Bizbee was a serious young man who would not have been afraid of climbing the side of a thunderbolt and sitting on its back, stirrups or no stirrups. He rode the gray mustang that had fallen to his lot bravely and well to the very center of the bucking grounds, but there the gray rose, as it were, and dissolved like a skyrocket into a tangle of head, tail, legs, and Tom Bizbee.