Somewhere in Red Gap | Page 4

with one of the Vanderbilt boys or John D. Rockefeller. They've
walked thirty-eight hundred miles already and got the papers to prove
it--a letter from the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the mayor of
Davenport, Iowa, a picture post card of themselves on the courthouse
steps at Denver, and they've bet forty thousand dollars they could start
out without a cent and come back in twenty-two months with money in
their pocket--and ain't it a good joke?--with everybody along the way
entering into the spirit of it and passing them quarters and such, and
thank you very much for your two bits for the picture post card--and
they got another showing 'em in front of the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt
Lake City, if you'd like that, too--and thank you again--and now they'll
be off once more to the open road and the wild, free life. Not! Yes, two
or three good firm Nots. Having milked the town they'll be right down
to the dee-po with their silver changed to bills, waiting for No. 6 to
come along, and ho! for the open railroad and another town that will

skin pretty. I guess I've seen eight or ten of them boys in the last five
years, with their letters from mayors.
"But this here Wilfred Lennox had a new graft. He was the first I'd give
up to for mere poetry. He didn't have a single letter from a mayor, nor
even a picture card of himself standing with his hat off in front of Pike's
Peak--nothing but poetry. But, as I said, he was there with a talk about
pining for the open road and despising the cramped haunts of men, and
he had appealing eyes and all this flowing hair and necktie. So I says to
myself: 'All right, Wilfred, you win!' and put my purse back in my bag
and thought no more of it.
"Yet not so was it to be. Wilfred, working the best he could to make a
living doing nothing, pretty soon got to the office of Alonzo Price,
Choice Improved Real Estate and Price's Addition. Lon was out for the
moment, but who should be there waiting for him but his wife, Mrs.
Henrietta Templeton Price, recognized leader of our literary and artistic
set. Or I think they call it a 'group' or a 'coterie' or something. Setting at
Lon's desk she was, toying petulantly with horrid old pens and blotters,
and probably bestowing glances of disrelish from time to time round
the grimy office where her scrubby little husband toiled his days away
in unromantic squalor.
"I got to tell you about Henrietta. She's one of them like I just said the
harsh things about, with the secret cry in her heart for romance and
adventure and other forbidden things and with a kindly contempt for
peaceful Alonzo. She admits to being thirty-six, so you can figure it out
for yourself. Of course she gets her husband wrong at that, as women
so often do. Alonzo has probably the last pair of side whiskers outside
of a steel engraving and stands five feet two, weighing a hundred and
twenty-six pounds at the ring side, but he's game as a swordfish, and as
for being romantic in the true sense of the word--well, no one that ever
heard him sell a lot in Price's Addition--three miles and a half up on the
mesa, with only the smoke of the canning factory to tell a body they
was still near the busy haunts of men, that and a mile of concrete
sidewalk leading a life of complete idleness--I say no one that ever
listened to Lon sell a lot up there, pointing out on a blue print the

proposed site of the Carnegie Library, would accuse him of not being
romantic.
"But of course Henrietta never sees Lon's romance and he ain't always
had the greatest patience with hers--like the time she got up the Art
Loan Exhibit to get new books for the M.E. Sabbath-school library and
got Spud Mulkins of the El Adobe to lend 'em the big gold-framed oil
painting that hangs over his bar. Some of the other ladies objected to
this--the picture was a big pink hussy lying down beside the ocean--but
Henrietta says art for art's sake is pure to them that are pure, or
something, and they're doing such things constantly in the East; and I'm
darned if Spud didn't have his oil painting down and the mosquito
netting ripped off it before Alonzo heard about it and put the Not-at-All
on it. He wouldn't reason with Henrietta either. He just said his
objection was that every man that saw it would put one foot up groping
for the brass railing, which would be undignified for a Sabbath-school
scheme,