The Ramblin Kid | Page 2

Old Heck whispered.
"Go on and do it, it won't take but a minute," Charley Saunders
entreated.
"Maybe he's one of these mind-readers and can read it through the
envelope," Bert Lilly volunteered.
"Aw, shut up and give him a chance!"
Trembling, Old Heck tore open the envelope and silently read the
message.
"My Gawd!" he groaned again. "The worst has come to the worst!"
"That ought to make it middlin' bad," Charley remarked soberly.
"Ought to," Bert added sententiously.
Parker crowded forward on sympathy bent.
"Tell us what's in it," he said; "if it's sorrowful we'll be plumb glad to
condole!"
"It's worse than sorrowful--"
"Melancholical?" Skinny inquired.
"My Gawd!" Old Heck said again, his weatherworn features working
convulsively, "it's more than a mortal man can endure and stand!"
"Bet somebody's dead!" Bert whispered to the Ramblin' Kid.

"Probably. Most everybody gets to be sooner or later," was the answer
without emotion.
Sing Pete, Chinese cook for the outfit, dish-rag over his shoulder,
edged out of the kitchen door and shuffled around to the group.
Glimpsing the yellow slip of paper held in the shaking hand of Old
Heck and the awed interest of the cowboys gathered about the boss, he
queried:
"Teleglam?"
No answer.
"Teleglam? Maybe alle samee somebody sickee?" he continued,
cheerfully confident that questions enough would ultimately bring a
reply. He was rewarded:
"What do you know about 'teleglams'? You slant-eyed burner of
beef-steaks!"
"Who's it from?" Charley asked. "Anybody we know--"
"My Gawd," Old Heck mourned once more, "she's comin'!"
"Who's she?" Parker coaxed.
"A female," Old Heck replied, "she's a female!"
"The darned old cuss has had a wife sometime and run off from her and
deserted her and she's pursuing him and trailing him down to earth!"
Chuck Slithers, doubting Thomas of the outfit and student of Sherlock
Holmes, cunningly suggested. "I always imagined he was a varmint
with a past--a' ex-heart breaker of innocent women or a train-robber
or--"
"Aw, hell," the Ramblin' Kid rebuked, "him have a wife? Don't insult
th' female population!"
"_Carramba!_" exclaimed Pedro Valencia, Mexican line-rider for the

Quarter Circle KT, "perhaps she will stick him with the dagger, or
shoot him with the gun when she arrive! The ladies with love kill quick
when the love is--what you call him?--the jilt?"
"And I'd almost forgot I ever had one!" Old Heck continued talking as
if to himself.
"What'd I tell you?" Chuck exulted.
"Shut up! He's confessin'--let him alone an' he'll get it out of his
conscience sooner or later!"
"Had a what?" Parker urged sympathetically. "Maybe you didn't have
one--maybe you only imagined you did!"
"Had a brother--anyhow a half a one--our mothers was the same but
different fathers on account of mine dyin' when I was little and his
marrying our mother again; we was playmates together in our innocent
childhood and infancy until I run away and went to sea and finally
anchored on the Kiowa and got to raisin' cattle--"
"Where does he come in at?" Parker questioned.
"He said it was a female, to start with," Skinny added.
"--and his name is Simeon Dixon on account of his father's being the
same thing, and he went in the street railroad business in a place named
Hartville in Connecticut, and he got married and had a wife--she was
Zithia Forbes, and she's dead, and I knowed that, and he's rich I reckon
and--"
"An' Amrak begat Meshak an' Meshak begat Zimri an' Zimri was th'
founder of th' House of Old Heck," the Ramblin' Kid chanted. "What in
thunder does details amount to, anyhow?"
"But you was mournin' about a she!" Parker insisted.
"Well, I reckon it ain't a wife--at least not the one I was thinking
about," Chuck murmured disappointedly, "but I bet he's had one

somewhere in his vari'gated career and is hiding out from her in fear an'
tremblin'--"
"And there will not be the grand, the beautiful murder?" Pedro sighed,
questioningly.
"Wait a minute," Skinny pleaded, "--give him air!"
"--and he's got a female daughter--and I didn't know that--and he's--oh,
Gawd!--he's sending her out to the Quarter Circle KT!"
"How big is she?" Parker whispered.
"She's--she's twenty-two--"
"Inches around or what?" Charley gasped.
"--and Ophelia is coming with her--Ophelia Cobb--C-o-double-b it
is--is coming with her for a chaperon--"
"Great guns!" Skinny breathed,"--two females!"
"Hold still and I'll read it--no, you do it, Parker--I'm too full of
emotion--my voice'd quiver--"
Parker read:
"Josiah Heck, Eagle Butte, Texas:
"Am sending my daughter, Carolyn June, out to your ranch for a while.
She needs a change. She has broke all the he-human hearts in
Hartville--that is all of them old enough or young enough to be
broke--and is what's called a love-stimulator and won't settle. She is
twenty-two and it's time she was calmed. Hoping