An Unpardonable Liar | Page 3

studied the
cities from there; had traveled in different directions merely to get his
bearings. After that he was quite at home. This was singular, too, for
his life had been of recent years much out of the beaten tracks of
civilization. He got the outlines of Herridon in an hour or two, and by
evening he could have drawn a pretty accurate chart of it, both as to
detail and from the point of a birdseye view at the top of the moor.
The moor had delighted him. He looked away to all quarters and saw
hill and valley wrapped in that green. He saw it under an almost
cloudless sky, and he took off his hat and threw his grizzled head back
with a boyish laugh.
"It's good--good enough!" he said. "I've seen so much country all on
edge that this is like getting a peep over the wall on the other side--the
other side of Jordan. And yet that was God's country with the sun on it,
as Gladney used to say--poor devil!"

He dropped his eyes from the prospect before him and pushed the sod
and ling with his foot musingly. "If I had been in Gladney's place,
would I have done as he did, and if he had been in my place would he
have done as I did? One thing is certain, there'd have been bad luck for
both of us, this way or that, with a woman in the equation. He was a
fool--that's the way it looked, and I was a liar--to all appearances, and
there's no heaven on earth for either. I've seen that all along the line.
One thing is sure, Gladney has reached, as in his engineering phrase
he'd say, the line of saturation, and I the line of liver, thanks be to
London and its joys! And now for sulphur water and--damnation!"
This last word was not the real end to the sentence. He had, while
lighting his cigar, suddenly remembered something. He puffed the
cigar fiercely and immediately drew out a letter. He stood looking at it
for a minute and presently let go a long breath.
"So much for London and getting out of my old tracks! Now, it can't go
for another three days, and he needing the dollars. * * * I'll read it over
again anyhow." He took it out and read:
"Cheer up, and get out of the hospital as soon as you can and come over
yourself. And remember in the future that you can't fool about the fire
escapes of a thirteen story flat as you can a straight foothill of the
Rockies or a Lake Superior silver mine. Here goes to you $1,000 (per
draft), and please to recall that what's mine is yours, and what's yours is
your own, and there's a good big sum that'll be yours, concerning which
later. But take care of yourself, Gladney. You can't drown a mountain
with the squirt of a rattlesnake's tooth; you can't flood a memory with
cognac. I've tried it. For God's sake don't drink any more. What's the
use? Smile in the seesaw of the knives. You can only be killed once,
and, believe me, there's twice the fun in taking bad luck naked, as it
were. Do you remember the time you and I and Ned Bassett, the H.B.
company's man, struck the camp of bloods on the Gray Goose river?
How the squaw lied and said he was the trader that dropped their
messenger in a hot spring, and they began to peel Ned before our eyes?
How he said as they drew the first chip from his shoulder, 'Tell the
company, boys, that it's according to the motto on their flag, Pro Pelle
Cutem--Skin For Skin?' How the woman backed down, and he got off
with a strip of his pelt gone? How the medicine man took little bits of
us and the red niggers, too, and put them on the raw place and fixed

him up again? Well, that's the way to do it, and if you come up smiling
every time you get your pound of flesh one way or another. Play the
game with a clear head and a little insolence, Gladney, and you won't
find the world so bad at its worst.
"So much for so much. Now for the commission you gave me. I'd
rather it had been anything else, for I think I'm the last man in the world
for duty where women are concerned. That reads queer, but you know
what I mean. I mean that women puzzle me, and I'm apt to take them
too literally. If I found your wife, and she wasn't as straightforward as
you are, Jack Gladney, I'd as like as not get things in