“That’s a resk no brave man should refoose to take. You want to remember that she slammed a door in your face; that she set Bat to run you out o’ camp.” These reminders clearly stiffened Rattlesnake Sanders. “For you to surrender, onconditional, would incite her to new crooelties that would lay over them former inhoomanities like a king-full lays over a pa’r of treys. Once,” went on Cimarron, who began to be intoxicated with his own eloquence, “once a party back in St. Looey shows me a picture of a man chained to a rock, an’ a turkey buzzard t’arin’ into him, beak an’ claw. He said it was a sport named Prometheus bein’ fed upon by vultures. In my pore opinion that party was barkin’ at a knot. The picture wasn’t meant for Prometheus an’ the vultures. The painter who daubs it had nothin’ on his mind but jest to show, pictor’ally, exactly what marriage is like. It was nothin’ more nor less than that gifted genius’ notion of a married man done in colours.”
This outburst so moulded the hopes and fears, especially the fears, of Rattlesnake that he gave himself completely to the guidance of Cimarron Bill.
“I’m to stand a pat hand,” said Rattlesnake tentatively, “an’ you’ll go cavortin’ back an’ tell Calamity I’ll let her know.”
“An’ yet,” interposed Cimarron Bill, “I think on that p’int I’d better be the bearer of a note in writin’. Ladies is plenty imaginative, an’ if I takes to packin’ in sech messages, verbal, Calamity may allow I’m lyin’ an’ lay for me.”
There was no material for letter-making about the camp. The ingenious Cimarron suggested an “Injun letter.” Acting on his own happy proposal he tore a small board from the top of a box that had held a dozen cans of corn, and set to work with charcoal. Cimarron Bill drew in one corner what might have passed for the sketch of a woman, while the center was adorned with an excited antelope in full flight, escaping over a ridge.
“I’ll mark the antelope, ‘Bar D’,” said Cimarron, “so’s she’ll know it’s you, Bar D bein’ your brand.”
“But whatever is Calamity to onderstand by them totems?”
“Nothin’ only that you’re goin’ to be a heap hard to ketch,” replied Cimarron. “It’ll teach her your valyoo.”
The antelope looked vastly like a disfigured goat, and the resemblance disturbed Rattlesnake.
“That’ll be all right,” returned Cimarron, confidently; “I’ll explain that it’s an antelope. All pictures has to be explained.”