“Oh, there’s a ghost, all right,” Jack Bates stated meaningly; “all yuh got to do is make one.”
“Say, by golly!” Slim, close behind them, gulped excitedly. “Wouldn’t it—”
“Say, don’t let them faces get to leaking,” Cal advised bluntly. “It’s a whole week till the moon’s good. Shut up!”
Slim goggled at him, caught the hazy beginning of an idea, grinned, and stepped over the rope into the corral. He was grinning when he caught his horse, and he was still grinning widely while he cinched the saddle. He caught Andy Green eying him suspiciously, and snickered outright. But he did not say a word, and, therefore, went his way, believing that he had given no hint of what was in his mind.
Slim and Happy Jack were alike in one respect: Their minds worked slowly and rather ponderously—and, like other ponderous machinery, once in motion they were hard to stop. The others would have left the subject alone, after that hour of hot argument, and in time would have forgotten it except for an occasional jeer, perhaps; but not so Happy Jack and Slim.
The Flying U outfit ate, saddled fresh horses, reloaded the mess wagon, and moved on toward Dry Creek, and that night flung weary bodies upon the growing grass in the shade of the tents, twenty miles and more from One Man Coulee and the little cabin with its grim history of genius blotted out in madness. Nevertheless, Slim searched ostentatiously with plate, knife, and fork in his hand, at supper time, and craned his neck over boxes and cans, until he had the attention of his fellows, who were hungry, and elbowed him out of their way with scant courtesy.
“Say, Mig-u-ell, where’s them stuffed olives?” he called at last. “I thought, by golly, we was goin’ to have some olives for supper?”
“Olives—stuffed olives, are best picked by moonlight, they tell me,” Miguel responded unemotionally, glancing up over his cup. “Have patience, amigo.”
Slim nudged Happy Jack so that he spilled half his coffee and swore because it was hot, caught Big Medicine’s pale-eyed glare upon him, and subsided so suddenly that he choked over his next sentence, which had nothing at all to do with olives, or ghosts, or insane fiddlers.
Men, it would seem, never quite leave their boyhood behind them; at least, those men do not who live naturally and individually, untainted by the poison of the great money marts where human nature is warped and perverted so that nearly all natural instincts are subordinated to the lust for gain of one sort and another. In the Bear Paw country men labor for gain, it is true; but they also live the lives for which nature has created them. There is that in the wide reaches of plain and valley, in the clean arch of blue sky and drifting clouds overhead, which keeps the best of them boyish till their temples are marked with white—yes, and after.