The Uphill Climb | Page 5

did I just let it go that way?" Ford, as his brain cleared, stuck close to his groping for the essential facts.
"Well, now--I ain't dead sure as to that. Maybe Rock'll remember. Kinda seems to me now, that she asked you if you was really Frank Ford Cameron, and you said: 'I sure am,' or something like that. The preacher'd know, maybe. He musta been the only sober one in the bunch--except the girl. But you done chased him off, so--"
"Sandy, I wish you'd go hunt Rock up and tell him I want to see him." Ford spoke with more of his natural spirit than he had shown since waking.
"Rock's gone on out to Riley's camp," volunteered Bill. "Left this morning, before the rain started in."
"What was her name--do you know?" Ford went back to the mystery.
"Ida--or was it Jenny? Some darned name--I heard it, when the preacher was marrying you." Bill was floundering hopelessly in mental fog, but he persisted. "And I seen it wrote in the paper I signed my name to. I mind she rolled up the paper afterwards and put it--well, I dunno where, but she took it away with her, and says to you: 'That's safe, now'--or 'You're safe,' or 'I'm safe,'--anyway, some darned thing was safe. And I was goin' to kiss the bride--mebbe I did kiss her--only I'd likely remember it if I had, drunk or sober! And--oh, now I got it!" Bill's voice was full of elation. "You was goin' to kiss the bride--that was it, it was you goin' to kiss her, and she slap--no, by hokey, she didn't slap you, she just--or was it Rock, now?" Doubt filled his eyes distressfully. "Darn my everlastin' hide," he finished lamely, "there was some kissin' somew'ere in the deal, and I mind her cryin' afterwards, but whether it was about that, or--Say, Sandy, what was it Ford was lickin' the preacher for? Wasn't it for kissin' the bride?"
"It was for marrying him to her," Sandy informed him sententiously.
Ford got up and went to the little window and looked out. Presently he came back to the stove and stood staring disgustedly down upon the effusively friendly Bill, leering up at him pacifically.
"If I didn't feel so rotten," he said glumly, "I'd give you another licking right now, Bill--you boozing old devil. I'd like to lick every darned galoot that stood back and let me in for this. You'd ought to have stopped me. You'd oughta pounded the face off me before you let me do such a fool thing. That," he said bitterly, "shows how much a man can bank on his friends!"
"It shows," snorted Bill indignantly, "how much he can bank on himself!"
"On whisky, to let him in for all kinds uh trouble," revised Sandy virtuously. Sandy had a stomach which invariably rebelled at the second glass and therefore, remaining always sober perforce, he took to himself great credit for his morality.
"Married!--and I don't so much as know her name!" gritted Ford, and went over and laid himself down upon the bed, and sulked for the rest of that day of rain and gloom.
CHAPTER II
Wanted: Information
Sulking never yet solved a mystery nor will it accomplish much toward bettering an unpleasant situation. After a day of unmitigated gloom and a night of uneasy dreams, Ford awoke to a white, shifting world of the season's first blizzard, and to something like his normal outlook upon life.
That outlook had ever been cheerful, with the cheerfulness which comes of taking life in twenty-four-hour doses only, and of looking not too far ahead and backward not at all. Plenty of persons live after that fashion and thereby attain middle life with smooth foreheads and cheeks unlined by thought; and Ford was therefore not much different from his fellows. Never before had he found himself with anything worse than bodily bruises to sour life for him after a tumultuous night or two in town, and the sensation of a discomfort which had not sprung from some well-defined physical sense was therefore sufficiently novel to claim all his attention.
It was not the first time he had fought and forgotten it afterwards. Nor was it a new experience for him to seek information from his friends after a night full of incident. Sandy he had always found tolerably reliable, because Sandy, being of that inquisitive nature so common to small persons, made it a point to see everything there was to be seen; and his peculiar digestive organs might be counted upon to keep him sober. It was a real grievance to Ford that Sandy should have chosen the hour he did for indulging in such trivialities as hair-cuts and shampoos, while events of real importance were permitted to transpire unseen and unrecorded. Ford, when the grievance thrust itself keenly upon