“She will never know, Marley,” he said huskily.
X—THE MAN! WHO DIDN’T COUNT
He was a little gray-haired hostler, wiper, sweeper, assistant night man in the roundhouse at Big Cloud, anything you like, and this is the story he told me one night, leaning against the blackened jamb of one of the big doors, wiping his hands occasionally upon a hunk of greasy waste.
They were a rough lot out in the mountains in the days when the Hill Division was shaking her steel into something like a permanent right of way—a pretty rough lot. The railroaders because they had to be; the rest because they were just that way naturally. Miners and Indians made up the citizenship mostly, and there’s no worse mixture. They’ve got the redskins corralled on reserves now; but they hadn’t then, and it didn’t take more than one bad word and one drop of bad whisky to set things in lively motion.
There’s a few highfaluting poems, and some other things, about the noble red man that works you up so when you read them that you get to wishing the Almighty had seen fit to let you be a red man, too. Well, that’s all right in its way because, after you’ve rubbed elbows with some of the real thing, you realize that the world owes the poets a living just as much as it does anybody else, and that what they say has to sound good; so you just come to keep the cautionary signals up by instinct, and let it go at that.
But, to give the poets their due, there’s one thing they never trip up on, and that’s the Indian’s compound efficiency for smell. The Indian can smell. When he sticks out his chest, faces southeast, and begins to draw in the God-given mountain air, you’re free to bet that the distilleries down Kentucky way are doing enough business to make regular dividend checks a sure thing. That’s generally good whisky. Bad whisky, in smell and otherwise, carries farther—and it’s only fifteen miles from here to Coyote Bend!
Coyote Bend wasn’t even a pin prick on the engineers’ blue prints when they mapped out the right of way, and there wasn’t any such place when the steel was all spiked down until the day some wandering prospector staked out a bunch of claims—and the news spread.
Gold in the Rockies? No; there’s never been much of it found, but there’s an all-fired big superstition that the mother lode of the whole country is tucked away here somewhere. That’s why, in two days, the wilderness and a gurgling stream that trickled peacefully down through a high-walled canon became Coyote Bend; and that’s why the local freight began to make regular stops to dump off supplies alongside the track. There was no station, of course, no agent, no nothing; the stuff was just dumped, that’s all. The consignees picked out their goods if they could read, or guessed at it if they couldn’t.