The Ramblin Kid | Page 6

that's the way they are. It's up to Old Heck or Parker to represent
Cupid to the widow--"
"Who the hell's Cupid?" Skinny asked curiously.
"He's a dangerous little outlaw that ain't got no reg'lar range," the
Ramblin' Kid answered for Chuck.
"I'll not do it--" Old Heck and Parker spoke at once.
"Then I won't either," Skinny declared flatly, "I'll quit the dog-goned
Quarter Circle KT first!"
"Let Sing Pete make love to the widow," Bert suggested.
"No, no! Me busy cookee," Sing Pete, who had been listening from the
open doorway, jabbered and darted, frightened, back into the house.
"Anyhow I'd kill him if he did," the Ramblin' Kid said softly; "no
darned Chink can make love to a white woman, old, young or
indifferent, in my presence an' live!"
"Well, Old Heck'll have to do it, then," Skinny said; "hanged if I'm
going to be the only he-love-maker on this ranch!"

"Let Parker and Old Heck divide up on Ophelia," Chuck advised, "one
of them can love her one day and the other the next--"
"That's reasonable," Bert declared, "she'd probably enjoy a change
herself."
"I tell you I ain't got time," Parker protested.
"Neither have I," Old Heck added.
"All right then, I ain't either!" Skinny declared. "If you two ain't willing
to take turn about with the widow and love her off and on between you
I'll be everlastingly hell-tooted if I'm going to stand for a whole one by
myself all of the time! I'll go on strike first and start right now!"
"We'll stay with you, Skinny," the Ramblin' Kid exclaimed with a
laugh, "th' whole bunch will quit till Parker an' Old Heck grants our
demands."
"We'll all quit!" the cowboys chorused.
"Oh, well, Parker," Old Heck grumbled, "I reckon we'll have to do it!"
"It won't be hard work," the Ramblin' Kid said consolingly, "all you got
to do is set still an' leave it to Ophelia. Widows are expert love-makers
themselves an' know how to keep things goin'!"
It was settled. Skinny Rawlins, at an increase of ten dollars a month on
his wage, protestingly, was elected official love-maker to Carolyn June
Dixon, Old Heck's niece, speeding unsuspectingly toward the Quarter
Circle KT, and Old Heck and Parker between them were to divide the
affections of Ophelia Cobb, widow and chaperon.
In the mind of every cowboy on the ranch there was one thought
unexpressed but very insistent that night, "Wonder what She looks
like?" thinking, of course, of Carolyn June.
Old Heck and Parker also were disturbed by a common worry. As each
sank into fitful sleep, thinking of Ophelia Cobb, the widow, and his

own predestinated affinity he murmured:
"What if she insists on getting married?"

CHAPTER III
WHICH ONE'S WHICH
Eagle Butte sprawled hot and thirsty under the melting sunshine of
mid-forenoon. It was not a prepossessing town. All told, no more than
two hundred buildings were within its corporate limits. A giant mound,
capped by a crown of crumbling, weather-tinted rock, rose abruptly at
the northern edge of the village and gave the place its name. Cimarron
River, sluggish and yellow, bounded the town on the south. The
dominant note of Eagle Butte was a pathetic mixture of regret for
glories of other days and clumsy ambition to assume the ways of a city.
Striving hard to be modern it succeeded only in being grotesque.
The western plains are sprinkled with towns like that. Towns that once,
in the time of the long-horn steer and the forty-four and the nerve to
handle both, were frankly unconventional. Touched later by the black
magic of development, bringing brick buildings, prohibition, picture
shows, real-estate boosters, speculation and attendant evils or benefits
as one chooses to classify them, they became neither elemental nor
ethical--mere gawky mimics of both.
When western Texas was cow-country and nothing else Eagle Butte at
least was picturesque. Flickering lights, gay laughter--sometimes curses
and the sounds of revolver shots, of battles fought close and quick and
to a finish--wheezy music, click of ivory chips, the clink of glasses,
from old Bonanza's and similar rendezvous of hilarity lured to the
dance, faro, roulette, the poker table or the hardwood polished bar.
The Mecca it was in those days for cowboys weary with months on the
wide-flung range.

To-day Eagle Butte is modest, mild and super-subdued.
A garage, cement built, squatty and low and painfully new, its
wide-mouthed entrance guarded by a gasoline pump freshly painted
and exceedingly red, stands at the eastern end of the single, broad,
un-paved business street. All of the stores face one way--north--and
look sleepily across at the railroad track, the low-eaved, yellow, Santa
Fe station and the sunburnt sides of the butte beyond. Opposite the
station the old Occidental Hotel with its high porch,