The Wrong Woman (17 page)

"And did you succeed in doing as he wished?" asked Mrs. Norton.

"Well, I managed to get them there somehowconsidering I hadn't had any time
to practice. It made me wonder, though, what a deaf and dumb man would think if
he got a job driving oxen."

"And that is what you mean by his being peculiar?"

"That's sort of it. But maybe that one does n't quite cover the point. What I
mean is that he 's got all sorts of notions of what's right and wrong; and he
tells it to you all of a sudden. He 's quicker 'n pig-tail lightning."

"Do you suppose he might think it wrong for us to meddle with his property?"

"Oh, no. He is n't that way. You know how he is about such things. And
besides he would n't be likely to say anything. I only mentioned that tombstone
business because his mother set so much store by the rockery. He looks at that
as a sort of a monument."

A look of deep seriousness came over Mrs. Norton's countenance. It deepened
as she thought.

"Of course, Mr. Hicks, we intended to tell him about itand thank him for the
use of the stones. But possibly it would be more considerate not to say anything
about it."

"Not tell him at all," repeated Jonas reflectively.

"But I suppose that no matter how we put them back he would notice that it
had been changed."

"Yes. I guess he knows it by heart. He had those blue-flower vines started on
it."

"It was really very thoughtless of us," mused Mrs. Norton.

"Oh, well; it is n't anything serious," remarked Jonas. "If he seems serious
about it you can blame me. Tell him I told you to. I 'm really part owner
anyway; I discovered a lot of those stones and put them there. He 'll understand
how it was. And if he says anything to me I 'll tell him I did n't think. If you
want me to I 'll make it all right when I go out there this afternoon."

"Are you going out there?" she asked, looking up with sudden interest.

"I 've been thinking I would. I want to drop out those three middle yoke and
let them run on grass a while. While I 'm out there, I guess I 'll make Steve a
call and stop overnight. It 'll be late when I get there."

"Oh!"

She saw a very lively and interesting picture of Mr. Hicks's arrival at the
shack. He would not be a very welcome visitor, she thought. Having the
misconceptions she did of affairs at the ranch, she saw all sorts of
possibilities; she said nothing, however, which would keep this interesting
three-cornered meeting from taking place. She turned the conversation at once
into other channels. Having answered his inquiries regarding neighborhood
affairs, and having been finally assured that he would return the rockery and
make everything "all right," she took her leave.

Jonas had had no very definite intention of undertaking the journey at once;
but now that his mind was turned in that direction, he saw that to-day was as
good as to-morrow, or even the day after; he fired up the stove and again took
the batter in hand. This time the pancakes went ahead without interruption. When
he had stacked up the requisite number, and eaten them with honey and bacon, he
hooked the wheelers to the wagon, and then added the rest of the cattle, yoke
after yoke. The plough was to remain where it was. Ensconced upon the more
altitudinous seat of authority he swung his lash out with a report like a
starting-gun and made his way, with the necessary language, across the open and
up Claxton Road.

Jonas's trip to the ranch took longer than it takes to tell it. But there is
not, in truth, anything about the trip itself to telland yet there ought to be
some way of describing time. Under the circumstances, and especially as oxen
cannot be hurried, it might be well to pass the time by talking about Jonas
Hicks's past; it will be better than to take up the scenery again. In those
parts the scenery, if the weather remains settled, is rather uneventful; it is
the same when you arrive as when you started. On a prairie the human mind
carries its own scenery.

Jonas Hicks's past had been somewhat variegated and thus all of a piece. Some
years before the present moment, when the railroad was younger and the "garden
spot of the world" was just beginning to attract attention to its future, Jonas
carelessly acquired a patch of forty acres near the new town of Thornton. At
that time he was still "on the drive," a vocation which took him with the big
herds anywhere from Texas to Fort Benton in Montana. In the calling of cowboy he
had, by a process of natural selection, risen and gradually settled into the
character of cook. Risen, we say, because, in a cattle outfit, there is not a
more important and unquestioned personage; his word is law and they call him pet
names. However, from the day he got down out of the saddle, in an emergency, and
consented to act in the capacity of "Ma,"which was a joke,he was in continual
demand as cook, with increasing popularity. Though he still claimed the ability
to ride and rope and hog-tie with the best of them, he was thenceforth a cook
with all the cook's perquisites and autocratic say-so. There is nowhere, we
might observe, so deep an indication of the true power of Woman as this respect
that is paid to her position, even when it is being occupied by a red-faced
being who wears whiskers and who has no real right, of his own, to be anything
more than an equal of his brother man. But the cook's laws must not be
disobeyed; they allow him to make laws because he is cook; masculine sentiment
is on his side; human welfare demands it. As Jonas was popular in the position,
and did not mind the work when it was appreciated, he continued to fry bacon and
fringy flapjacks and, in general, to furnish "the grease of life," as he called
it, to the outfit. And while he was doing it his fellows conducted the beef, on
ten thousand legs, from the South to the North. They took them North so that
they would put on fat under the stimulus of a Northern winter.

In those days he engineered the peculiar cookstove which we have already
noticed. It was a big, square, sheet-iron stove with an iron axle and wheels
like those of a sulky plow. This piece of machinery was hooked on behind the
chuckwagon, which it followed from clime to clime. Jonas, being a live man and a
"hustler," seldom waited for the outfit to reach the camping-place and come to a
halt before starting to get a meal. As he explained, he had to get about a
two-mile start on their appetites, with pancakes; and so, while the stove was
yet far off from its destination, he would fire up and get things going. Then he
would trot along behind and cook. While "she" (the stove) lurched into buffalo
wallows and rode the swells and unrolled the smoke other stack far out across
the billowy prairie, Jonas would hurry along behind and keep house. Entirely
occupied with his kitchen duties he would move busily here and there or remain
steadily behind or beside the stove while it pursued its onward way, and with
the bucket of batter in his hand and the griddle smoking and sizzling, he would
seldom miss a flap. From the standpoint of a weary cowboy it was a beautiful
sight. It is, indeed, a pleasant thing, when you are tired and hungry, to see
your supper thus coming along as conqueror over space and time.

No one but a man like Jonas, who had the combined talents of a sea-cook and a
cowboy, could have managed it. To make coffee under such circumstances took
considerable ability, of course. And even the flapjacks, which stayed on the
stove better, might seem difficult. Jonas, however, was a man of quick hand and
eye; things seldom got the drop on him, and he handled the pancakes with a
revolver wrist. As the foreman said, he was "a first-class culinary engineer."
In doing this, his longtime experience on bucking bronchos stood him in good
stead; then, too, his practice was confined almost entirely to pancakes and
coffee, for they were but few and simple dishes that he knew by heart. But even
with this special expertness it took a quick man and a philosopher, especially
when the stove cut a caper and the footing was uneven. As Jonas once remarked
when he stepped amiss on his high boot-heel and spilled all the batter into a
buffalo wallow, "This is certainly a corrugated country." He was not always and
necessarily a profane man, whatever one might think who heard him driving oxen.
In times of real trouble he expressed himself coolly and then stuck to the
facts.

For a long time Jonas thought little of the small patch of prairie which
belonged to him; he only began to take it seriously when he sold twenty acresa
deal which was consummated through the agency of Stephen Brown, senior, who paid
the taxes in his absence and thus knew, generally, where Jonas was. Coming back
a year or two later he was surprised to see how that place had built up; and
when, after repeated visits, he had made himself known to all the neighbors and
discovered what nice people they were,it was a new sensation for Jonas to have
neighbors,he got it more and more into his head that they were
his
neighbors, and that he belonged there. He decided to settle down in those parts.
Things in general seemed to be shifting into a new mode of life and impelling
him to go along. In the early eighties, central Texas was becoming tightly
fenced; the barb wire was spreading out generally; railroads were hauling herds
where formerly they went afoot; shorthorn bulls were changing the face of
nature; it was plain to be seen that before a great while the long drives would
be a thing of the past. While there was still use for the cowboy, there was less
call for Jonas's peculiar abilities.

Having land which seemed to call for a house, he built one on it; but at
first he did not occupy it himself. During his absences it was occupied by
"white" families of the sort that move often by wagon and work cotton on shares;
meantime his fancy was playing about the place and taking root. Coming back in
the fall the house was vacant. As Jonas was himself an excellent wife and a kind
husband, he moved in. Having in mind to stop a while, he of course stopped at
his own house.

The problem of living on one spot solved itself in the most natural manner.
Instead of driving cattle in the old way, he conquered a few and drove them from
the seat of a plow. Thus while everything was going forward, he mounted the
wheel of Progress and put his hand to the throttle; and now every time he got
back from one of his occasional absences a new farm had been opened up forever
and ever. But it must not be thought that he had himself become an
agriculturist. He had not even dreamed of it. There is not necessarily any more
relation between a "prairie buster" and the land he "busts" than there is
between a farmer and a locomotive engineer; the spirit of it is different. Jonas
bossed cattle.

If there would seem to be anything of incongruity or humorous contrast
between Jonas and his married neighbors, it must be remembered that, under the
circumstances of a growing country, there was not. In a land where many men live
alone in shacks and do their own work, and where any woman's husband must be
able to go forth with a frying-pan and shift for himself at times, it was no
marvel to see Jonas Hicks doing the same; though, to be sure, he was doing it a
little nearer town than is customary, and this proximity made his
single-blessedness shine out a little plainer. But if there was any humor in
that, or in fact anything else, it was Jonas's prerogative to see it first and
to stretch the joke as far as it would go. Then, too, he lived there only at
intervalswhich were getting to cover the greater part of the timein the style
of a man who camps out. And after a few days' absence in "busting," he would
suddenly reappear and turn loose his oxen and start up housekeeping with all the
new pleasure of a man who is glad to get back among the folks again.

From all of which it will be seen that Jonas's house needed to make no
apology for its presence; he had owned land there among the first; it was the
others who were the innovators and the newcomers; and as to his way of
housekeeping it simply clung a little closer to nature. It was, in fact, the
most natural thing in the neighborhood.

As he continued to live there he liked it more and more. He was glad that
things turned out just as they did. His very location in "the middle of the
puddle," as Steve Brown put it, made it look, to him, as if all these beautiful
women and interesting little children had gathered round to ornament his
position in life; and there is a great deal in looks. He felt also, having owned
some of the land upon which the townspeople were settled, that he was in some
manner responsible for it all; and so he had a corresponding pride in the
community at large and was personally interested in everybody's welfare.

His own property he could have sold or cultivated; but he was well enough
satisfied with things as they were. He could have put up a sign, "keep off the
grass"; he could have built a fence or forbidden any one to use his place as a
short cut to town; he could have done anything that goes with private ownership;
but with him ownership was not necessarily private. To a man with such large
Texas views and lifelong experience of "free grass," such carefulness of a mere
twenty acres would seem rather small, especially small as directed against such
neighbors. He was pleased to be numbered among them, and he acted accordingly.
If the minister's wife needed temporary pasturage for her real shorthorn cow,
just arrived from the North, he invited her to use his place permanently; he
rather liked to see cows around. If an incoming herd of cattle wished to halt
there they were welcome; it reminded him of old times. If the whole surrounding
country went "cross-lots" over his land, there was no objection; what difference
did it make? And besides, it was the farmers and ranchmen who gave him
employment.

He would not sell any land, though. Right here was where he exercised his
private right. He liked things well enough as they were. But when the
proposition came up to purchase a small site for a school-house, he presented
them with a small piece off the corner, only asking that they refrain from
putting a fence around it. As this restriction was no drawback to the community,
they readily acceded to it; consequently the children played ball or did
whatever they pleased all over the place, much to his entertainment. At recess
the youngsters spent much of their time around him, if he were at home, and
though this interfered considerably with his housework he did not mind the
delay.