Louisiana Lou. A Western Story

Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she was accustomed to. Comfort and even luxury surrounded her, and the law stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman. That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had imagined it to be. Only De Launay’s careless gibe as he had left her at the hotel held promise of performance. “To-morrow we’ll start our private butchery,” he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted at a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.

De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared for the change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike him like a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking paved sidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. He had come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitless ranges of his youth and this was what he found.

He had turned and looked back at the frowning cañon through which the train had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forest clad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lava gulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it was changed.

Smoke hung above the cañon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the cañon held a vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down below.

Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the effulgence of limitless electricity.

Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls, stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.

The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in evening clothes.

Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches of farmland, fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the settlers.

But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed and uncivilized.

He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed that his last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the driving restlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remained to offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was.

The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, and that is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in the shiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him with disgust and sought the darker haunts of the town.

With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, he hunted up a “livery and feed barn.” He found one on a side street, near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke of a considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness a cheap automobile standing in front of the place.

But there were horses in the stalls, horses that lolled on a dropped hip, with heads down and eyes closed. There were heavy roping saddles hanging on the pegs, and bridles with ear loops and no throat latches. If the proprietor, one MacGregor, wore a necktie and a cloth cap, he forgave him for the sake of the open waistcoat and the lack of an outer coat.

MacGregor was an incident of little importance. One of more consequence was a good horse that roamed the open feed yard at the side of the barn. De Launay, seedy and disreputable, still had a look about him that spoke of certain long dead days, and MacGregor, when he was asked about the horse, made no mistake in concluding that he had to deal with one who knew what he was about.

The horse was MacGregor’s, taken to satisfy a debt, and he would sell it. The upshot of the affair was that De Launay bought it at a fair price. This took time, and when he finally came out again to the front of the barn it was late afternoon.

Squatted against the wall, their high heels planted under them on the sloping boards of the runway, sat two men. Wide, flapping hats shaded their faces. They wore no coats, although the November evenings were cool and their waistcoats hung open. Overalls of blue denim, turned up at the bottoms in wide cuffs, hid all but feet and wrinkled ankles of their boots which were grooved with shiny semicircles around the heels, where spurs had dented them.

One of them was as tall as De Launay, gaunt and hatchet faced. His hair was yellowish, mottled with patches of grayish green.

The other was sturdy, shorter, with curly, brown hair.

The tall one was humming a tune. De Launay recognized it with a shock of recollection. “Roll on, my little doggy!”

Without a word he sat down also, in a duplicate of their pose. No one spoke for several minutes.

Then, the shorter man said, casually, addressing his remarks to nobody in particular.

“They’s sure a lotta fresh pilgrims done hit this here town.”

The tall one echoed an equally casual chorus.

“They don’t teach no sort of manners to them down-East hobos, neither.”

De Launay stared impassively at the road in front of them.

“You’d think some of them’d sense it that a gent has got a right to be private when he wants to be.”

“It’s a – of a town, nohow.”

“People even run around smellin’ of liquor – which is plumb illegal, Sucatash.”

“Which there are some that are that debased they even thrives on wood alcohol, Dave.”

Silence settled down on them once more. It was broken this time by De Launay, who spoke as impersonally as they.

“They had real cow hands hereaways, once.”

A late and sluggish fly buzzed in the silence.

“I reckon the sheep eat ’em outa range and they done moved down to Arizona.”

The gaunt Sucatash murmured sadly:

“Them pilgrims is sure smart on g’ography an’ history.”

“An’ sheep – especially,” said the one called Dave.

“Ca ne fait rien!” said De Launay, pronouncing it almost like “sinferien” as he had heard the linguists of the A. E. F. do. The two men slowly turned their heads and looked at him apparently aware of his existence for the first time.

Like MacGregor, they evidently saw something beneath his habiliments, though the small mustache puzzled them.

“You-all been to France?” asked Dave. De Launay did not answer direct.

“There was some reputed bronk peelers nursin’ mules overseas,” he mused. “Their daddies would sure have been mortified to see ’em.”

“We didn’t dry nurse no mules, pilgrim,” said Sucatash. “When did you lick Hindenburg?”

De Launay condescended to notice them. “In the battle of vin rouge,” he said. “I reckon you-all musta won a round or two with the vin sisters, yourselves.”

“You’re sure a-sayin’ something, old-timer,” said Dave, with emotion. For the first time he saw the rosette in De Launay’s buttonhole. “You done a little more’n café fightin’ though, to get that?”

De Launay shrugged his shoulders. “They give those for entertainin’ a politician,” he answered. “Any cow hands out of a job around here?”

Both of the men chuckled. “You aimin’ to hire any riders?”

“I could use a couple to wrangle pilgrims in the Esmeraldas. More exactly, there’s a lady, aimin’ to head into the mountains and she’ll need a couple of packers.”

“This lady don’t seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, none whatever,” was the comment.

“Which she hasn’t, bein’ troubled with notions about gold mines and such things. She needs taking care of.”

“Ridin’ the Esmeraldas this time o’ year and doin’ chores for Pop all winter strikes me as bein’ about a toss-up,” said the man called Sucatash. “I reckon it’s a certainty that Pop requires considerable labor, though, and maybe this demented lady won’t. If the wages is liberal – ”

“We ought to see the lady, first,” said Dave. “There’s some lady pilgrims that couldn’t hire me with di’monds.”