The Taming of Red Butte Western | Page 4

It's
barely possible that you are not the best judge of your own act."
There was something approaching the abandonment of the shameless in
Lidgerwood's manner when he went on.
"It was in the Montana mountains. I was going in to do a bit of expert
engineering for her father. Incidentally, I was escorting her and her
mother from the railroad terminus to the summer camp in the hills,
where they were to join a coaching party of their friends for the
Yellowstone tour. We had to drive forty miles in a stage, and there
were six of us--the two women and four men. On the way the talk
turned upon stage-robbings and hold-ups. With the chance of the real
thing as remote as a visit from Mars, I could be an ass and a braggart.
One of the men, a salesman for a powder company, gave me the rope
wherewith to hang myself. He argued for non-resistance, and I
remember that I grew sarcastic over the spectacle afforded by a grown
man, armed and in possession of his five senses, permitting himself to
be robbed without attempting to resist. You can guess what followed?"
"I'd rather hear you tell it," said the listener at Superintendent

Leckhard's desk. "Go on."
Lidgerwood waited until the switching-engine, with its pop-valve open
and screaming like a liberated devil of the noise pit, had passed.
"Three miles beyond the supper station we had our hold-up; the
cut-and-dried, melodramatic sort of thing you read about, or used to
read about, in the early days, with a couple of Winchesters poking
through the scrub pines to represent the gang in hiding, and one lone,
crippled desperado to come down to the footlights in the speaking part.
You get the picture?"
"Yes; I've seen the original."
"Of course, it struck every soul of us with the shock of the
incredible--the totally unexpected. It was a rank anachronism,
twenty-five years out of date in that particular locality. Before anybody
realized what was happening, the cripple had us lined up in a row
beside the stage, and I was reaching for the stars quite as anxiously as
the little Jew hat salesman, who was swearing by all the patriarchs that
the twenty-dollar bill in his right-hand pocket was his entire fortune."
"Naturally," Ford commented. "You needn't rawhide yourself for that.
You've been West often enough and long enough at a time to know the
rules of the game--not to be frivolous when the other fellow has the
drop on you."
"Wait," said Lidgerwood. "One minute later the cripple had sized us up
for what we were. The other three men were not armed. I was, and Miss
El--the young woman knew it. Also the cripple knew it. He tapped the
gun bulging in my pocket and said, in good-natured contempt, 'Watch
out that thing don't go off and hurt you some time when you ain't
lookin', stranger.' Ford, I think I must have been hypnotized. I stood
there like a frozen image, and let that crippled cow-rustler rob those
two women--take the rings from their fingers!"
"Oh, hold on; there's another side to all that, and you know it," the
vice-president began; but Lidgerwood would not listen.

"No," he protested; "don't try to find excuses for me; there were none.
The fellow gave me every chance; turned his back on me as an
absolutely negligible factor while he was going through the others. I'm
quick enough when the crisis doesn't involve a fighting man's chance;
and I can handle a gun, too, when the thing to be shot at isn't a human
being. But to save my soul from everlasting torments I couldn't go
through the simple motions of pulling the pistol from my pocket and
dropping that fellow in his tracks; couldn't and didn't."
"Why, of course you couldn't, after it had got that far along," asserted
Ford. "I doubt if any one could. That little remark about the gun in your
pocket did you up. When a man gets you pacified to the condition in
which he can safely josh you, he has got you going and he knows
it--and knows you know it. You may be twice as hot and bloodthirsty
as you were before, but you are just that much less able to strike back.
It's not a theory; it is a psychological demonstration."
"But the fact remained," said Lidgerwood, sparing himself not at all. "I
was weighed and found wanting; that is the only point worth
considering."
"Well?" queried Ford, when the self-condemned culprit turned again to
the dusk-darkened window, "what came of it?"
"That which was due to come. I was told many times and in many
different ways what the one woman thought of me. For the few days
during which she and her