Sixes and Sevens | Page 4

duck bag; and if you catch the significance of
it, it explains Sam.
Sam Galloway was the Last of the Troubadours. Of course you know
about the troubadours. The encyclopaedia says they flourished between
the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. What they flourished doesn't
seem clear - -- you may be pretty sure it wasn't a sword: maybe it was a
fiddlebow, or a forkful of spaghetti, or a lady's scarf. Anyhow, Sam
Galloway was one of 'em.

Sam put on a martyred expression as he mounted his pony. But the
expression on his face was hilarious compared with the one on his
pony's. You see, a pony gets to know his rider mighty well, and it is not
unlikely that cow ponies in pastures and at hitching racks had often
guyed Sam's pony for being ridden by a guitar player instead of by a
rollicking, cussing, all-wool cowboy. No man is a hero to his
saddle-horse. And even an escalator in a department store might be
excused for tripping up a troubadour.
Oh, I know I'm one; and so are you. You remember the stories you
memorize and the card tricks you study and that little piece on the
piano -- how does it go? -- ti-tum-te-tum-ti-tum -- those little Arabian
Ten Minute Entertainments that you furnish when you go up to call on
your rich Aunt Jane. You should know that omnae personae in tres
partes divisae sunt. Namely: Brons, Troubadours, and Workers. Barons
have no inclination to read such folderol as this; and Workers have no
time: so I know you must be a Troubadour, and that you will
understand Sam Galloway. Whether we sing, act, dance, write, lecture,
or paint, we are only troubadours; so let us make the worst of it.
The pony with the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of
Sam's knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward.
Nature was in her most benignant mood. League after league of
delicate, sweet flowerets made fragrant the 'gently undulating prairie.
The east wind tempered the spring warmth; wool-white clouds flying in
from the Mexican Gull hindered the direct rays of the April sun. Sam
sang songs as he rode. Under his pony's bridle he had tucked some
sprigs of chaparral to keep away the deer flies. Thus crowned, the
long-faced quadruped looked more Dantesque than before, and, judging
by his countenance, seemed to think of Beatrice
Straight as topography permitted, Sam rode to, the sheep ranch of old
man Ellison. A visit to a sheep ranch seemed to him desirable just then.
There had been too many people, too much noise, argument,
competition, confusion, at Rancho Altito. He had never conferred upon
old man Ellison the favour of sojourning at his ranch; but he knew he
would be welcome. The troubadour is his own passport everywhere.

The Workers in the castle let down the drawbridge to him, and the
Baron sets him at his left hand at table in the banquet hall. There ladies
smile upon him and applaud his songs and stories, while the Workers
bring boars' heads and flagons. If the Baron nods once or twice in his
carved oaken chair, he does not do it maliciously.
Old man Ellison welcomed the troubadour flatteringly. He had often
heard praises of Sam Galloway from other ranchmen who had been
complimented by his visits, but had never aspired to such an honour for
his own humble barony. I say barony because old man Ellison was the
Last of the Barons. Of course, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton lived too early to
know him, or he wouldn't have conferred that sobriquet upon Warwick.
In life it is the duty and the function of the Baron to provide work for
the Workers and lodging and shelter for the Troubadours.
Old man Ellison was a shrunken old man, with a short, yellow-white
beard and a face lined and seamed by past-and-gone smiles. His ranch
was a little two-room box house in a grove of hackberry trees in the
lonesomest part of the sheep country. His household consisted of a
Kiowa Indian man cook, four hounds, a pet sheep, and a half-tamed
coyote chained to a fence-post. He owned 3,000 sheep, which he ran on
two sections of leased land and many thousands of acres neither leased
nor owned. Three or four times a year some one who spoke his
language would ride up to his gate and exchange a few bald ideas with
him. Those were red-letter days to old man Ellison. Then in what
illuminated, embossed, and gorgeously decorated capitals must have
been written the day on which a troubadour -- - a troubadour who,
according to the encyclopaedia, should have flourished between the
eleventh and the thirteenth centuries - -- drew rein at the gates of his
baronial castle!