“Say, this is a shame. Honest to grandma, I’d hate to see Miggie ridin’ bareback the rest uh the summer—with a rope hackamore, by cripes! Don’t go ’n take all his purty-purties away from him like that, boys! Haw-haw-haw!” It is unwise to laugh like that with one’s mouth full of chicken. Big Medicine choked and retired from the conversation and the room.
“Say, you don’t reelize, by golly, what you’re up ag’inst,” Slim observed ponderously. “If you did—”
“Are you dead-game sports, or are you a bunch of old women?” drawled Miguel. “My outfit is up, if any one has nerve enough to take the bets.”
They wrangled more or less amicably over it, as was their habit. But they did finally bet a great deal more on the foolish venture than they should have done. When, finally, they reached the time and the point of departure, Miguel, like the plains Indians during the fever of horse-racing, was pledged to his hat and his high-heeled boots; while the Happy Family, if they lost, would have plenty of reason to repent them of their rashness.
They waited an hour for Pink and Weary to return, and, when they did not appear, they rode off without them. They pitied Miguel, and told him so. They told of haunted cabins, and of murders and dreams come true, and of disasters that were weird.
Andy Green, when half of the ten miles had been covered, roused himself from his disapproving silence and told them a fearsome tale of two miners murdered mysteriously and thrown into their own mine, and of their dog which howled up and down the mountain gulches when the moonlight lay soft upon the land; told it so that they rode close-huddled that they might catch it all, down to the last gruesomely mysterious incident of the murdered master whistling from the pit to the dog, and of the animal’s whimpering obedience—long years after, when the dog’s bones were bleaching through sun and storm above, and the master’s bones were rotting in the darkness below.
Happy Jack more than once glanced uneasily toward the shadowy hollows as they rode slowly across the prairies through the night silence. Slim set his jaw and rode stiffly, staring straight ahead of him as if he feared what he might see, if he looked aside. Miguel was seen to shiver, though the air was soft and warm.
“Now, this Olafson—” Andy began after a silence which no one thought to break. “The boys joshed me a lot about that. But it was queer—the queerest thing I ever saw or heard. To see him sitting there in the firelight, listening—and while he listened, to hear the wind whoo-whoo around the corners and down the chimney—and the snow swish-swishing against the walls like grave clothes when the ghosts walk—”
“Aw—I thought yuh said there wasn’t any ghosts!” croaked Happy Jack uneasily.
“And then Olafson would lift his violin and draw the bow across—”