The Virginian | Page 6

be
expectin' most too much."
At this Uncle Hughey jerked out a small parcel. "Shows how much you
know!" he cackled. "There! See that! That's my ring she sent me back,
being too unstrung for marriage. So she don't remember me, don't she?
Ha-ha! Always said you were a false alarm."
The Southerner put more anxiety into his tone. "And so you're a-takin'
the ring right on to the next one!" he exclaimed. "Oh, don't go to get
married again, Uncle Hughey! What's the use o' being married?"
"What's the use?" echoed the bridegroom, with scorn. "Hm! When you
grow up you'll think different."
"Course I expect to think different when my age is different. I'm havin'
the thoughts proper to twenty-four, and you're havin' the thoughts
proper to sixty."
"Fifty!" shrieked Uncle Hughey, jumping in the air.
The Southerner took a tone of self-reproach. "Now, how could I forget
you was fifty," he murmured, "when you have been telling it to the
boys so careful for the last ten years!"
Have you ever seen a cockatoo--the white kind with the
top-knot--enraged by insult? The bird erects every available feather
upon its person. So did Uncle Hughey seem to swell, clothes, mustache,
and woolly white beard; and without further speech he took himself on
board the Eastbound train, which now arrived from its siding in time to
deliver him.

Yet this was not why he had not gone away before. At any time he
could have escaped into the baggage-room or withdrawn to a dignified
distance until his train should come up. But the old man had evidently
got a sort of joy from this teasing. He had reached that inevitable age
when we are tickled to be linked with affairs of gallantry, no matter
how.
With him now the Eastbound departed slowly into that distance whence
I had come. I stared after it as it went its way to the far shores of
civilization. It grew small in the unending gulf of space, until all sign of
its presence was gone save a faint skein of smoke against the evening
sky. And now my lost trunk came back into my thoughts, and Medicine
Bow seemed a lonely spot. A sort of ship had left me marooned in a
foreign ocean; the Pullman was comfortably steaming home to port,
while I--how was I to find Judge Henry's ranch? Where in this
unfeatured wilderness was Sunk Creek? No creek or any water at all
flowed here that I could perceive. My host had written he should meet
me at the station and drive me to his ranch. This was all that I knew. He
was not here. The baggage-man had not seen him lately. The ranch was
almost certain to be too far to walk to, to-night. My trunk--I discovered
myself still staring dolefully after the vanished East-bound; and at the
same instant I became aware that the tall man was looking gravely at
me,--as gravely as he had looked at Uncle Hughey throughout their
remarkable conversation.
To see his eye thus fixing me and his thumb still hooked in his
cartridge-belt, certain tales of travellers from these parts forced
themselves disquietingly into my recollection. Now that Uncle Hughey
was gone, was I to take his place and be, for instance, invited to dance
on the platform to the music of shots nicely aimed?
"I reckon I am looking for you, seh," the tall man now observed.
II. "WHEN YOU CALL ME THAT, SMILE!"
We cannot see ourselves as other see us, or I should know what
appearance I cut at hearing this from the tall man. I said nothing,
feeling uncertain.

"I reckon I am looking for you, seh," he repeated politely.
"I am looking for Judge Henry," I now replied.
He walked toward me, and I saw that in inches he was not a giant. He
was not more than six feet. It was Uncle Hughey that had made him
seem to tower. But in his eye, in his face, in his step, in the whole man,
there dominated a something potent to be felt, I should think, by man or
woman.
"The Judge sent me afteh you, seh," he now explained, in his civil
Southern voice; and he handed me a letter from my host. Had I not
witnessed his facetious performances with Uncle Hughey, I should
have judged him wholly ungifted with such powers. There was nothing
external about him but what seemed the signs of a nature as grave as
you could meet. But I had witnessed; and therefore supposing that I
knew him in spite of his appearance, that I was, so to speak, in his
secret and could give him a sort of wink, I adopted at once a method of
easiness. It was so pleasant