Somewhere in Red Gap | Page 9

what was the real inner meaning of life after all. Henrietta Templeton
Price hovered near with the glad light of capture in her eyes. Silent but
proud Henrietta was, careless but superior, reminding me of the hunter
that has his picture taken over in Africa with one negligent foot on the
head of a two-horned rhinoceros he's just killed.

"But again the husbands was kind of lurking in the background,
bunched up together. They seemed abashed by this strange frenzy of
their womenfolks. How'd they know, the poor dubs, that a poet wasn't
something a business man had ought to be polite and grovelling to?
They affected an easy manner, but it was poor work. Even Judge
Ballard, who seems nine feet tall in his Prince Albert, and usually looks
quite dignified and hostile with his long dark face and his moustache
and goatee--even the good old judge was rattled after a brief and
unhappy effort to hold a bit of converse with the guest of honour. Him
and Jeff Tuttle went to the grillroom twice in ten minutes. The judge
always takes his with a dash of pepper sauce in it, but now it only
seemed to make him more gloomy.
"Well, I was listening along, feeling elated that I'd put Alonzo and Ben
Sutton out of the way and wondering when the show would
begin--Beryl Mae in her high, innocent voice had just said to the poet:
'But seriously now, are you sincere?' and I was getting some plenty of
that, when up the road in the dusk I seen Bush Jones driving a
dray-load of furniture. I wondered where in time any family could be
moving out that way. I didn't know any houses beyond the club and I
was pondering about this, idly as you might say, when Bush Jones pulls
his team up right in front of the clubhouse, and there on the load is the
two I had tried to lose. In a big armchair beside a varnished centre table
sits Ben Sutton reading something that I recognized as the yellow card
with Wilfred's verses on it. And across the dray from him on a
red-plush sofa is Alonzo Price singing 'My Wild Irish Rose' in a very
noisy tenor.
"Well, sir, I could have basted that fool Bush Jones with one of his own
dray stakes. That man's got an intellect just powerful enough to take
furniture from one house to another if the new address ain't too hard for
him to commit to memory. That's Bush Jones all right! He has the
machinery for thinking, but it all glitters as new as the day it was put in.
So he'd come a mile out of his way with these two riots--and people off
somewhere wondering where that last load of things was!
"The ladies all affected to ignore this disgraceful spectacle, with

Henrietta sinking her nails into her bloodless palms, but the men broke
out and cheered a little in a half-scared manner and some of 'em went
down to help the newcomers climb out. Then Ben had words with Bush
Jones because he wanted him to wait there and take 'em back to town
when the party was over and Bush refused to wait. After suffering
about twenty seconds in the throes of mental effort I reckon he
discovered that he had business to attend to or was hungry or
something. Anyway, Ben paid him some money finally and he drove
off after calling out 'Good-night, all!' just as if nothing had happened.
"Alonzo and Ben Sutton joined the party without further formality.
They didn't look so bad, either, so I saw my crooked work had done
some good. Lon quit singing almost at once and walked good and his
eyes didn't wabble, and he looked kind of desperate and respectable,
and Ben was first-class, except he was slightly oratorical and his collar
had melted the way fat men's do. And it was funny to see how every
husband there bucked up when Ben came forward, as if all they had
wanted was some one to make medicine for 'em before they begun the
war dance. They mooched right up round Ben when he trampled a way
into the flushed group about Wilfred.
"'At last the well-known stranger!' says Ben cordially, seizing one of
Wilfred's pale, beautiful hands. 'I've been hearing so much of you,
wayward child of the open road that you are, and I've just been reading
your wonderful verses as I sat in my library. The woods and the hills
for your spirit untamed and the fire of youth to warm your nights--that's
the talk.' He paused and waved Wilfred's verses in a fat, freckled hand.
Then he looked at him hard and peculiar and says: 'When you going to