It was that by now and ever growing. It seemed only an attractive novelty and I still believed a brown hackle would suffice. But then I became aware that this trout, to its stringed accompaniment, ever whistled and sang one song with a desperate intentness. That song was "The Rosary." The fish had presumed too far. "This," I shrewdly told myself, "is almost certainly a dream." The soundless words were magic.
Gorge and stream vanished, the versatile fish faded to blue sky showing through the green needles of a jack pine. It was a sane world again and still, I thought, with the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house going long to the east. I stretched in the hammock, I tingled with a lazy well-being. The world was still; but was it--quite?
On a bench over by the corral gate crouched Buck Devine, doing something needful to a saddle. And as he wrought he whistled. He whistled "The Rosary" shrilly and with much feeling. Nor was the world still but for this. From the bunk house came the mellow throbbing of a stringed instrument, the guitar of Sandy Sawtelle, star rider of the Arrowhead, temporarily withdrawn from a career of sprightly endeavour by a sprained ankle and solacing his retirement with music. He was playing "The Rosary"--very badly indeed, but one knew only too well what he meant.
The two performers were distant enough to be no affront to each other.
The hammock, less happily, was midway between them.
I sat up with groans. I hated to leave the hammock.
"The trout also sang it," I reminded myself. Followed the voice, a voice from the stable, the cracked, whining tenor of a very aged va.s.sal of the Arrowhead, one Jimmie Time. Jimmie, I gathered, was currying a horse as he sang, for each bar of the ballad was measured by the double thud of a currycomb against the side of a stall. Whistle, guitar, and voice now attacked the thing in differing keys and at varying points. Jimmie might be said to prevail. There was a fatuous tenderness in his attack and the thudding currycomb gave it spirit. Nor did he slur any of the affecting words; they clave the air with an unctuous precision:
The ow-wurs I spu-hend with thu-hee, dee-yur heart, (The currycomb: Thud, thud!) Are as a stru-hing of pur-rulls tuh me-e-e, (The currycomb: Thud, thud!)
Came a dramatic and equally soulful interpolation: "Whoa, dang you! You would, would you? Whoa-a-a, now!"
Again the melody:
I count them o-vurr, ev-ry one apar-rut, (Thud, thud!) My ro-sah-ree--my ro-sah-ree!
(Thud, thud!)
Buck Devine still mouthed his woful whistle and Sandy Sawtelle valiantly strove for the true and just accord of his six strings. It was no place for a pa.s.sive soul. I parted swiftly from the hammock and made over the sun-scorched turf for the ranch house. There was shelter and surcease; doors and windows might be closed. The unctuous whine of Jimmie Time pursued me:
Each ow-wur a pur-rull, each pur-rull a prayer, (Thud, thud!) Tuh stu-hill a heart in absence wru-hung, (Thud, thud!)
As I reached the hospitable door of the living-room I observed Lew Wee, Chinese chef of the Arrowhead, engaged in cranking one of those devices with a musical intention which I have somewhere seen advertised. It is an important-looking device in a polished mahogany case, and I recall in the advertis.e.m.e.nt I saw it was surrounded by a numerous enthralled-looking family in a costly drawing-room, while the ghost of Beethoven simpered above it in ineffable benignancy. Something now told me the worst, even as Lew Wee adjusted the needle to the revolving disk.
I waited for no more than the opening orchestral strains. It is a leisurely rhythmed cacophony, and I had time to be almost beyond range ere the voice took up a tale I was hearing too often in one day. Even so I distantly perceived it to be a fruity contralto voice with an expert sob.
A hundred yards in front of the ranch house all was holy peace, peace in the stilled air, peace dreaming along the neighbouring hills and lying like a benediction over the wide river-flat below me, through which the stream wove a shining course. I exulted in it, from the dangers pa.s.sed.
Then appeared Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill from the fringe of cottonwoods, jolting a tired horse toward me over the flat.
"Come have some tea," she cordially boomed as she pa.s.sed. I returned uncertainly. Tea? Yes. But--However, the door would be shut and the Asiatic probably diverted.
As I came again to the rear of the ranch house Mrs. Pettengill, in khaki riding breeches, flannel shirt, and the hat of her trade, towered bulkily as an admirable figure of wrath, one hand on her hip, one poising a quirt viciously aloft. By the corral gate Buck Devine drooped cravenly above his damaged saddle; at the door of the bunk house Sandy Sawtelle tottered precariously on one foot, his guitar under his arm, a look of guilty horror on his set face. By the stable door stood the incredibly withered Jimmie Time, shrinking a vast dismay.
"You hear me!" exploded the infuriated chatelaine, and I knew she was repeating the phrase.
"Ain"t I got to mend this latigo?" protested Buck Devine piteously.
"You"ll go up the gulch and beyond the dry fork and mend it, if you whistle that tune again!"
Sandy Sawtelle rumpled his pink hair to further disorder and found a few weak words for his conscious guilt.
"Now, I wasn"t aiming to harm anybody, what with with my game laig and shet up here like I am--"
"Well, my Lord! Can"t you play a sensible tune then?"
Jimmie Time hereupon behaved craftily. He lifted his head, showing the face of a boy who had somehow got to be seventy years old without ever getting to be more than a boy, and began to whistle softly and innocently--an air of which hardly anything could be definitely said except that it was not "The Rosary." It was very flagrantly not "The Rosary." His craft availed him not.
"Yes, and you, too!" thundered the lady. "You was the worst--you was singing. Didn"t I hear you? How many times I got to tell you? First thing you know, you little reprobate--"
Jimmie Time cowered again. Visibly he took on unbelievable years.
"Yes, ma"am," he whispered.
"Yes, ma"am," meekly echoed the tottering instrumentalist.
"Yes, ma"am," muttered Buck Devine, "not knowing you was anywheres near--"
"Makes no difference where I be--you hear me!"
Although her back was toward me I felt her glare. The wretches winced.
She came a dozen steps toward me, then turned swiftly to glare again.
They shuddered, even though she spoke no word. Then she came on, muttering hotly, and together we approached the ranch house. A dozen feet from the door she bounded ahead of me with a cry of baffled rage. I saw why. Lew Wee, unrecking her approach, was cold-bloodedly committing an encore. She sped through the doorway, and I heard Lew Wee"s frightened squeal as he sped through another. When I stood in the room she was putting violent hands to the throat of the thing.
"The hours I spend with th--" The throttled note expired in a very dreadful squawk of agony. It was as if foul murder had been done, and done swiftly. The maddened woman faced me with the potentially evil disk clutched in her hands. In a voice that is a notable loss to our revivals of Greek tragedy she declaimed:
"Ain"t it the limit?--and the last thing I done was to hide out that record up behind the clock where he couldn"t find it!"
In a sudden new alarm and with three long steps she reached the door of the kitchen and flung it open. Through a window thus exposed we beheld the offender. One so seldom thinks of the Chinese as athletes! Lew Wee was well down the flat toward the cottonwoods and still going strong.
"Ain"t it the limit?" again demanded his employer. "Gosh all--excuse me, but they got me into such a state. Here I am panting like a tuckered hound. And now I got to make the tea myself. He won"t dare come back before suppertime."
It seemed to be not yet an occasion for words from me. I tried for a look of intelligent sympathy. In the kitchen I heard her noisily fill a teakettle with water. She was not herself yet. She still muttered hotly.
I moved to the magazine--littered table and affected to be taken with the portrait of a smug--looking prize Holstein on the first page of the _Stock Breeder"s Gazette_.
The volcano presently seethed through the room and entered its own apartment.
Ten minutes later my hostess emerged with recovered aplomb. She had donned a skirt and a flowered blouse, and dusted powder upon and about her sunburned and rather blobby nose. Her crinkly gray hair had been drawn to a knot at the back of her grenadier"s head. Her widely set eyes gleamed with the smile of her broad and competent mouth.
"Tea in one minute," she promised more than audibly as she bustled into the kitchen. It really came in five, and beside the tray she pleasantly relaxed. The cups were filled and a breach was made upon the cake she had brought. The tea was advertising a sufficient strength, yet she now raised the dynamics of her own portion.
"I"ll just spill a hooker of this here Scotch into mine," she said, and then, as she did even so: "My lands! Ain"t I the cynical old Kate! And silly! Letting them boys upset me that way with that there fool song."
She decanted a saucerful of the re-enforced tea and raised it to her pursed lips. "Looking at you!" she murmured cavernously and drank deep.
She put the saucer back where nice persons leave theirs at all times.
"Say, it was hot over on that bench to-day. I was getting out that bunch of bull calves, and all the time here was old Safety First mumbling round--"
This was rather promising, but I had resolved differently.
"That song," I insinuated. "Of course there are people--"
"You bet there are! I"m one of "em, too! What that song"s done to me--and to other innocent bystanders in the last couple weeks--"
She sighed hugely, drank more of the fortified brew--nicely from the cup this time--and fashioned a cigarette from materials at her hand.
In the flame of a lighted match Mrs. Pettengill"s eyes sparkled with a kind of savage retrospection. She shrugged it off impatiently.
"I guess you thought I spoke a mite short when you asked about Nettie"s wedding yesterday."
It was true. She had turned the friendly inquiry with a rather mystifying abruptness. I murmured politely. She blew twin jets of smoke from the widely separated corners of her generous mouth and then shrewdly narrowed her gaze to some distant point of narration.