Mr. Masterson was somewhat discouraged, and extricated himself from the interview with what polite speed he might. None the less, about the roots of his soul he felt a self-gratulatory flutter. His remedy had worked; his advice was justified. He had recommended for the haughty coldness of Miss Barndollar a course of what Christian Scientists would describe as “absent treatment” and here was the lady yielding to it like a willow to the wind. Mr. Masterson had cause for exultation, and unbent moderately to that sentiment. Withal he was practical, and lost no time in moving to reunite the lovers. In this, however, Mr. Masterson was guilty of an error. He dispatched Cimarron to bring in Rattlesnake, when he should have sent the sympathetic Jack.
“Go over,” said Mr. Masterson to Cimarron, “and break the news to Rattlesnake. Tell him he wins, and that there’s nothing now to do but consider Calamity’s feelings.”
Cimarron Bill sullenly threw a saddle on a pony, and pointed away into the desolate north. His heart was not for this journey; it was to him as though he were summoning Rattlesnake not for his marriage but for his execution.
“Bat’s takin’ a heap on himse’f!” he muttered. “As for me; I washes my hands of the whole play.”
Mr. Masterson said afterward that Cimarron Bill, in that matter of the love-coil between Miss Barndollar and Rattlesnake, betrayed a side of his character hitherto unknown. Mr. Masterson should have reflected. Never before had he been called upon to consider Cimarron while under what peculiar pressures were here exerted. Deep within the inner recesses of Cimarron’s nature, abode objections to matrimony as rooted as the hills.
“An’ in partic’lar,” Cimarron had observed, when once he mooted the subject with Mr. Short as part of a review they were then and there making of the conjugal experiences of Mr. McBride and Bridget, “an’ in partic’lar I contends that if the world must have sech things as matrimony, then no gent should be pinned down to jest one wife. An’ for this reason,” he continued, waving an impressive paw: “It ain’t good sense. Is it good farobank sense to put your whole bundle on one kyard? No. Then it ain’t good weddin’ sense for to resk your whole heart on one lady. She may fall to lose, an’ then where be you at? It’s my idee that if a party must go ag’inst this weddin’ game, he’ll be safer if he spreads his bets.”
Holding fast to these beliefs, Cimarron Bill rode forth full of an unconscious willingness to play the marplot. He would deliver the message of Mr. Masterson; but he would deliver it in such fashion that, when the worst occurred, as it hereafter—according to his thinking—must most certainly occur, he, Cimarron, could felicitate himself with the reflection that he had in no sort contributed towards bringing that worst about. He would bear the message of Mr. Masterson; he would also proffer warnings all his own. Should the locoed Rattlesnake then persist in riding open-eyed to Dodge and to destruction—why, his blood be on his head!
It was in this frame that Cimarron Bill sat down to flap-jacks with Rattlesnake Sanders that night at the latter’s camp on the White Woman. And this was the conversation that passed between the pair:
“I’ve been sent over to rope you up, Rattlesnake,” quoth Cimarron. “Calamity says you’re to wash off your warpaint an’ report at the agency.”
“Does she still adhere to them demands about bustin’ my laig?” asked Rattlesnake. “Not that it much matters,” he added hastily, for the doughty resolve to see no more of Miss Barndollar, expressed to Mr. Masterson, had long since oozed away, “not that it matters. The round-ups are eight weeks away, an’ I’d easy be able to ride by then.”