The Black Wolf Pack | Page 7

Another man stepped out from the crowd, a very tall, powerful man who would have attracted attention in any garb in any place by his distinguished appearance, who with little ceremony rudely brushed the roughneck to one side, and my instinct told me the handsome stranger could be no other than Big Pete Darlinkel.
My! my! what a man he was! Looked as if he just stepped out of one of Fred Remington's pictures, or Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, or slipped from between the leaves of a volume of Captain Mayne Reid's "Scalp Hunters"--Big Pete was evidently a hold-over from another age. He would have fitted perfectly and with nicety in a picture of Davy Crockett's men down in old Texas. He seemed, however, perfectly at home in this border town, and I noted that the most hard-boiled and toughest men in the crowd treated him with marked respect and deference.
Pete was a wilderness fop and a dandy, and evidently was as careful of his clothes as a West Point cadet. In dress he affected the old-fashioned picturesque garb of the mountains. His appearance filled me with wonder and admiration; he stood six feet two or three inches in his moccasins, straight as an arrow and lithe as a cat.
His costume consisted of a tunic of dressed deer skin, smoked to the softness of the finest flannels. He wore it belted in at the waist, but open at the breast and throat where it fell back like a sailor's collar into a short cape covering the shoulders. Underneath was the undershirt of dressed fawn skin; his leggins and moccasins were of the same material as his hunting shirt, and on his head he wore a fox skin cap; the fox's head adorned with glass eyes ornamented the front and the tail hung like a drooping plume over the left shoulder.
Big Pete Darlinkel was a blonde, and his golden hair hung in sunny curls upon his massive shoulders; a light mustache, soft yellow beard, with a pair of the deepest, clearest, most innocent baby-like blue eyes, all made a face such as an angel might have after years of exposure to sun and wind.
Not only are Big Pete's revolvers gold mounted, but the shaft of his keen-edged knife is rich with figures, rings, and stars filed from gold coins and set in the horn. The very stock of his long, single-barreled rifle is inlaid like an Arab's gun, and, as for his buckskin hunting suit, it is a mass of embroidery and colored quills from his beaded moccasins to the fringed cape of his shirt.
Big Pete was a dandy, fond of color, fond of display; yet in spite of all this he wore absolutely nothing for decoration alone, but every article of use about his person was ornamented to an oriental degree. Gaudy and rich as his costume was when viewed in detail, as a whole it harmonized not only with Pete, his hair, his complexion, his weapons, but with whatever natural objects surrounded him.
Big Pete also seemed to know me instinctively and approached with a graceful and swinging step; holding out his hand he greeted me in a low, soft, well-modulated voice with, "Howdy, kid; yes, I'm Big Pete and allow you are the tenderfoot dude from New York what wants to shoot big game, an' reckon you'd like to meet the wild mountain man? Well, he's a queer one, I tell you. He's got us all buffaloed out this-a-way, most of us don't care to meet him close up and we give him wide range when we cut his trail."
That was Big Pete's greeting. Of course, I had not told him of my real interest in this mysterious man of the mountains, only suggesting that I would like to do some big game shooting and see the spooky hunter.
"Well," I answered, "I would like to get a record elk head to take home to dad. As for the mountain wildman, I wish you'd tell me more about him, he is awfully interesting."
"Tell you more? Well, sho, I reckon I can tell you more than most people round these parts for he makes my game park his stampin' grounds every onct in a while, an' let me tell you he hunts some peculiar, he do, he's half man and half wolf--but shucks, I won't spoil the show, you will see how he hunts for yourself if you stay here long. Glory be, but he's got me some bashful and shy. But mosey along and I'll hist yore stuff on this here cayuse while you let them tha' dogs out of their chicken coop boxes. You can cache your dude duds in the Emporium general store over yonder next to Squinty Quinn's saloon, an' then we're off for the hills. I'll