You Never Know Your Luck | Page 8

dreamed of a happy land
where flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea. In action, however, as
when Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure
improvisation of nature. He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which
broke out in emotion like an April day, with eyes changing from a
blue-grey to the deepest ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and
made the reputation of an Old Master. Even in the prairie town of
Askatoon, where every man is so busy that he scarcely knows his own
children when he meets them, and almost requires an introduction to
his wife when the door closes on them at bedtime, people took a second
look at him when he passed. Many who came in much direct contact
with him, as Augustus Burlingame the lawyer had done, tried to draw
from him all there was to tell about himself; which is a friendly custom
of the far West. The native-born greatly desire to tell about themselves.
They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are childlike in the frank
recitals of all they were and are and hope to be. This covers up also a
good deal of business acumen, shrewdness, and secretiveness which is
not so childlike and bland.
In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born. These come
from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously

historical. Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer
work and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour
them--the law, society, or a woman.
This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
hide. It was not because of crime that "He buckles up his talk like the
bellyband on a broncho," as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
of him; and Deely was a man of "horse-sense," no doubt because he
was a horse-doctor--"a veterenny surgeon," as his friends called him
when they wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste
remark about the broncho with the observation that, "Same as the
broncho, you buckle him tightest when you know the divil is stirring in
his underbrush." And he added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the
mumplaster on his tongue, Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another
man's wife."
Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out
of his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet;
though there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble.
There was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more
than all else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived his
life for over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer, and
stud- manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the
opinion of the West, "big-bugs" did not come down to this kind of
occupation unless they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.
"Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame," said
Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
farming.
"Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He's an artist, that man is.
Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the
music smells--fairly smells like parfumery," responded Sibley. "I'd like
to get at the bottom of him. There's a real good story under his asbestos

vest--something that'd make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I
do now."
After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
continued the gossip. "Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in
England-- and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can
see; and there he is feelin' the hocks of a filly or openin' the jaws of a
stud horse, age-hunting! Why, you needn't tell me--I've had my mind
made up ever since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan's
Inniskillen chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards. He just
sort of appeared out of the mist of the marnin', there bein' a divil's lot of
excursions and conferences and holy gatherin's in Askatoon that time
back, ostensible for the business which their names denote, like the
Dioceesan Conference and the Pure White Water Society. That was
their bluff; but they'd come herealong for one good pure white
dioceesan thing before