The Black Wolf Pack | Page 7

prospectors, gamblers, cow
punchers and trappers assembled to meet the incoming stage. When I
scrambled off the top of the old-fashioned coach, and before I had time
to shake the alkali dust from my clothes, or moisten my dry and
cracked lips, a typical western bully approached me roaring the verses
of a song with which he evidently intended to terrify me,

"He blowed into Lanigan swinging a gun A new one, A blue one, A
colt's forty-one, An' swearing Declaring Red Rivers 'ud run Down
Alkali Valley, An' oceans of gore 'ud wash sudden death On the sage
brush shore, An' he shot a big hole--"
He got no further with the song. 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