Big Pete.
There was something about that crude letter that stirred me deeply.
Could this strange freak that Big Pete saw from the top of the painted Butte possess that Patrick Mullen rifle? If so did he know anything about the whereabouts of my father? It is not uncommon for people suffering from a mental breakdown to flee to the country or wilderness and there live the life of a recluse, and from my father’s last letter it was evident that he had had a nervous breakdown from anxiety and brooding over the loss of my mother, to whom he evidently was devotedly attached. It might, therefore, be possible that this strange, wild man himself was my father, an unpleasant possibility. At any rate, I felt that I could not rest, at least until I discovered to a certainty the name of the maker of the long rifle said to be carried by the wild hunter and I told dad just how I felt about it.
“I knew you would feel that way, son,” said he. “I have often wanted to go west for the very same purpose and I knew that when I told you everything you would want to go too. I intended to lay all the facts before you when you were twenty-one but now that Blink Broosmore has taken it upon himself to inform you and his truck-driving friends of the mystery surrounding your real parentage, I guess it is best you know all there is to be known about the situation. The rest I’ll leave to you. In fact, it would please me a great deal if you would run down this last vague clue to see if your father really is still alive. Go, Donald, and God bless you, and take that bag of gold with you, unopened, for it may now stand your father in good stead, and if you do find him, bring him here and I promise you he will never want for a thing, nor will you, my son, for you are still my boy whatever your real parentage may be.”
CHAPTER II
The stage pulled up in front of a typical western saloon, post office and general store. There was the usual crowd of prospectors, gamblers, cow punchers and trappers assembled to meet the incoming stage. When I scrambled off the top of the old-fashioned coach, and before I had time to shake the alkali dust from my clothes, or moisten my dry and cracked lips, a typical western bully approached me roaring the verses of a song with which he evidently intended to terrify me,
“He blowed into Lanigan swinging a gun
A new one,
A blue one,
A colt’s forty-one,
An’ swearing
Declaring
Red Rivers ’ud run
Down Alkali Valley,
An’ oceans of gore
’ud wash sudden death
On the sage brush shore,
An’ he shot a big hole—”
He got no further with the song. Another man stepped out from the crowd, a very tall, powerful man who would have attracted attention in any garb in any place by his distinguished appearance, who with little ceremony rudely brushed the roughneck to one side, and my instinct told me the handsome stranger could be no other than Big Pete Darlinkel.
My! my! what a man he was! Looked as if he just stepped out of one of Fred Remington’s pictures, or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, or slipped from between the leaves of a volume of Captain Mayne Reid’s “Scalp Hunters”—Big Pete was evidently a hold-over from another age. He would have fitted perfectly and with nicety in a picture of Davy Crockett’s men down in old Texas. He seemed, however, perfectly at home in this border town, and I noted that the most hard-boiled and toughest men in the crowd treated him with marked respect and deference.
Pete was a wilderness fop and a dandy, and evidently was as careful of his clothes as a West Point cadet. In dress he affected the old-fashioned picturesque garb of the mountains. His appearance filled me with wonder and admiration; he stood six feet two or three inches in his moccasins, straight as an arrow and lithe as a cat.