“An' do you know, Doc!” observes Enright, a fortnight later, as they meet for their midday drink, “the boys sorter lays it on you. You know me, Doc! I'll stand up ag'in the iron for you; but as a squar' man, with a fairly balanced mind, I'm bound to admit the boys is right. Now I don't say they feels resentful; it's more like they was mournful over what used to be, an' a day of peace gone by. But you knows what people be whose burdens is more'n they can bear; an' if I was you, this yere lady or I would leave the camp. I'm the last gent to go dictatin' about the details of another gent's game; but you an' me, Doc, has been old friends, an' as a warnin' from a source which means you well, I gives it to you cold the camp is gettin' hostile.”
It is always a spectacle to inspire, to witness a great soul rise to an occasion. Doc Peets never so proves the power of his nature as now, when the tremendous shadow of “Kif's wife” has fallen across Wolfville like a blight. Peets, following Enright's forebodings, holds a long and secret conference with the unhappy Killifer. That night Peets rides to Tucson. The next day Old Monte, with his six horses a-foam, comes crashing into Wolfville two hours ahead of schedule. Before even a mail bag is thrown off, Old Monte unpouches a telegram received at the Tucson office for Mistress Killifer. Its earmark is Illinois; its contents moving. No matter what it tells, its news is cogent enough to decide the lady's mind.
The next morning this dread woman departs, leaving, as she came, with a withering look at all around. That night Killifer gets drunk. Wolfville not only pardons Killifer in his weakness; it joins him.
“But you suppresses the facts, Kif, when you says she's haughty,” observes Dan Boggs. “Haughty, as a deescription, ain't a six-spot!”
“It's with no purpose, Kif,” says Doc Peets, as he fills his glass, “to discourage you—whom I sympathises with as an onfortunate, an' respects as a dead game gent—that I yereby invites the pop'lation to join me in a drink of congratulation on Wolfville's escape from your wife. An' all informal though this assemblage be, I offers a resolootion that this, the 23d of August, the date when the lady in question pulls her freight, be an' remain forevermore a day of yearly thanksgivin' to Wolfville.”
“Which I libates to that myse'f!” says Killifer as he drains his cup to the last lingering drop. “Also I trusts this camp will proceed with caution the next time it turns in to play my domestic hand.”
BEARS
Bears are peaceful folk. They are a mild and lowly citizenry of the woods—I'm talking of the black sort—and shuffle modestly away the moment they hear you coming. We get many of our impressions of the ferocity of animals and the deadly poisons of reptiles from an unworthy sort of hearsay evidence. Much of it comes from Mexicans and Indians rather than from real experience. Now I wouldn't traduce either the Mexicans or the Indians, for their lot is one of hard, sodden ignorance; but it must be conceded that they're by no means careful historians, and run readily to tales of the marvellous and the tragic. I am going back to a bear story I have in mind before I get through; but I want to interject here, while I think of it, that though the centipede, the rattlesnake, the tarantula and the Gila monster, have bitter repute as able to deal death with their poisonous feet or fangs, I was never, in my years on the plains and in the mountains, able to secure proof of even the shallowest sort that a death, whether of man or animal, had ever resulted from the sting of any one of these. On the other hand, I have been with men who were bitten by rattlesnakes, or stung by tarantulas; or who while asleep had suffered as the inadvertent promenade of a centipede, with its hundred hooked, poison-exuding feet; but none of them died. They were sick in an out-of-sort, headache fashion for a day or two; the bitten place inflamed and was sore for a week or a month; that was all. I suppose I've known of fully one hundred horses, cows and sheep which were bitten by rattlesnakes; none died. They were invariably fanged in the nose, too, as they grazed towards my lord of the rattlers. On more than one occasion I kept the animal so bitten in sight to note results. Its head would swell and puff; it would lounge about with a sick listlessness for several days; then the poison would wear away in force, and back to its grass it would go with the wire-edge appetite of a sailor home from sea.