Ruggles of Red Gap. Harry Leon Wilson
Seeing that I was puzzled, he added: “This way—you take that notebook and write in it out of this here other book till I think you’ve done enough, then I’ll tell you to stop.” And while I was still bewildered, he drew from an inner pocket a small, well-thumbed volume which I took from him and saw to be entitled “One Hundred Masterpieces of the Louvre.”
“Open her about the middle,” he directed, “and pick out something that begins good, like ‘Here the true art-lover will stand entranced——’ You got to write it, because I guess you can write faster than what I can. I’ll tell her I dictated to you. Get a hustle on now, so’s we can get through. Write down about four pages of that stuff.”
Stunned I was for a moment at his audacity. Too plainly I saw through his deception. Each day, doubtless, he had come to a low place of this sort and copied into the notebook from the printed volume.
“But, sir,” I protested, “why not at least go to the gallery where these art objects are stored? Copy the notes there if that must be done.”
“I don’t know where the darned place is,” he confessed. “I did start for it the first day, but I run into a Punch and Judy show in a little park, and I just couldn’t get away from it, it was so comical, with all the French kids hollering their heads off at it. Anyway, what’s the use? I’d rather set here in front of this saloon, where everything is nice.”
“It’s very extraordinary, sir,” I said, wondering if I oughtn’t to cut off to the hotel and warn Mrs. Effie so that she might do a heated foot to him, as he had once expressed it.
“Well, I guess I’ve got my rights as well as anybody,” he insisted. “I’ll be pushed just so far and no farther, not if I never get any more cultured than a jack-rabbit. And now you better go on and write or I’ll be—dashed—if I’ll ever wear another thing you tell me to.”
He had a most bitter and dangerous expression on his face, so I thought best to humour him once more. Accordingly I set about writing in his notebook from the volume of criticism he had supplied.
“Change a word now and then and skip around here and there,” he suggested as I wrote, “so’s it’ll sound more like me.”
“Quite so, sir,” I said, and continued to transcribe from the printed page. I was beginning the fifth page in the notebook, being in the midst of an enthusiastic description of the bit of statuary entitled “The Winged Victory,” when I was startled by a wild yell in my ear. Cousin Egbert had leaped to his feet and now danced in the middle of the pavement, waving his stick and hat high in the air and shouting incoherently. At once we attracted the most undesirable attention from the loungers about us, the waiters and the passers-by in the street, many of whom stopped at once to survey my charge with the liveliest interest. It was then I saw that he had merely wished to attract the attention of some one passing in a cab. Half a block down the boulevard I saw a man likewise waving excitedly, standing erect in the cab to do so. The cab thereupon turned sharply, came back on the opposite side of the street, crossed over to us, and the occupant alighted.
He was an American, as one might have fancied from his behaviour, a tall, dark-skinned person, wearing a drooping moustache after the former style of Cousin Egbert, supplemented by an imperial. He wore a loose-fitting suit of black which had evidently received no proper attention from the day he purchased it. Under a folded collar he wore a narrow cravat tied in a bowknot, and in the bosom of his white shirt there sparkled a diamond such as might have come from a collection of crown-jewels. This much I had time to notice as he neared us. Cousin Egbert had not ceased to shout, nor had he paid the least attention to my tugs at his coat. When the cab’s occupant descended to the pavement they fell upon each other and did for some moments a wild dance such as I imagine they might have seen the red Indians of western America perform. Most savagely they punched each other, calling out in the meantime: “Well, old horse!” and “Who’d ever expected to see you here, darn your old skin!” (Their actual phrases, be it remembered.)
The crowd, I was glad to note, fell rapidly away, many of them shrugging their shoulders in a way the French have, and even the waiters about us quickly lost interest in the pair, as if they were hardened to the sight of Americans greeting one another. The two were still saying: “Well! well!” rather breathlessly, but had become a bit more coherent.
“Jeff Tuttle, you—dashed—old long-horn!” exclaimed Cousin Egbert.
“Good old Sour-dough!” exploded the other. “Ain’t this just like old home week!”
“I thought mebbe you wouldn’t know me with all my beadwork and my new war-bonnet on,” continued Cousin Egbert.
“Know you, why, you knock-kneed old Siwash, I could pick out your hide in a tanyard!”
“Well, well, well!” replied Cousin Egbert.
“Well, well, well!” said the other, and again they dealt each other smart blows.
“Where’d you turn up from?” demanded Cousin Egbert.
“Europe,” said the other. “We been all over Europe and Italy—just come from some place up over the divide where they talk Dutch, the Madam and the two girls and me, with the Reverend Timmins and his wife riding line on us. Say, he’s an out-and-out devil for cathedrals—it’s just one church after another with him—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, takes ‘em all in—never overlooks a bet. He’s got Addie and the girls out now. My gosh! it’s solemn work! Me? I ducked out this morning.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Told the little woman I had to have a tooth pulled—I was working it up on the train all day yesterday. Say, what you all rigged out like that for, Sour-dough, and what you done to your face?”
Cousin Egbert here turned to me in some embarrassment. “Colonel Ruggles, shake hands with my friend Jeff Tuttle from the State of Washington.”
“Pleased to meet you, Colonel,” said the other before I could explain that I had no military title whatever, never having, in fact, served our King, even in the ranks. He shook my hand warmly.
“Any friend of Sour-dough Floud’s is all right with me,” he assured me. “What’s the matter with having a drink?”
“Say, listen here! I wouldn’t have to be blinded and backed into it,” said Cousin Egbert, enigmatically, I thought, but as they sat down I, too, seated myself. Something within me had sounded a warning. As well as I know it now I knew then in my inmost soul that I should summon Mrs. Effie before matters went farther.
“Beer is all I know how to say,” suggested Cousin Egbert.
“Leave that to me,” said his new friend masterfully. “Where’s the boy? Here, boy! Veesky-soda! That’s French for high-ball,” he explained. “I’ve had to pick up a lot of their lingo.”
Cousin Egbert looked at him admiringly. “Good old Jeff!” he said simply. He glanced aside to me for a second with downright hostility, then turned back to his friend. “Something tells me, Jeff, that this is going to be the first happy day I’ve had since I crossed the state line. I’ve been pestered to death, Jeff—what with Mrs. Effie after me to improve myself so’s I can be a social credit to her back in Red Gap, and learn to wear clothes and go without my breakfast and attend art galleries. If you’d stand by me I’d throw her down good and hard right now, but you know what she is——”
“I sure do,” put in Mr. Tuttle so fervently that I knew he spoke the truth. “That woman can bite through nails. But here’s your drink, Sour-dough. Maybe it will cheer you up.”
Extraordinary! I mean to say, biting through nails.
“Three rousing cheers!” exclaimed Cousin Egbert with more animation than I had ever known him display.
“Here’s looking at you, Colonel,” said his friend to me, whereupon I partook of the drink, not wishing to offend him. Decidedly he was not vogue. His hat was remarkable, being of a black felt with high crown and a wide and flopping