The XQX is seventy miles down the river from Striped Rock. Seventy miles ain’t such a distance in Colorado, only I never went back for pretty near two years and a half. Then, one Christmas when we were riding fences—keeping the line up against the snow, and running the cattle back if they broke the wires and got across—I got to thinking of the holiday dances at Striped Rock, and says I: “Here’s for a Christmas as near home as I can get, and a sight of Susie.”
The boss let me off, and I made it in on Christmas Eve. The dance was going on down at Foresters’ Hall. I fixed up and took it in.
And there she was—I didn’t know her for the start she’d got. Her hair—that she used to wear in two molassesy-coloured braids hanging down her back, and shining in the sun the way candy shines when you pull it—was done up all over her head. She was all pinky and whitey in the face the way she used to be when she was a little girl. She had on a sort of pink dress, mighty pretty, with green wassets down the front and a green dingbat around the bottom, and long—not the way it was when I saw her before. She was rushed to the corner with every geezer in the place piled in front of her. I broke into the bunch. Everybody seemed to see me except Susie. She treated me like any other maverick in the herd. She hadn’t even a dance left for me. Once, in “Old Dan Tucker,” she called me out, but she’d called out every other tarantula in the White River country, so there was no hope in that. If ever a man didn’t know where he was at, I was the candidate.
All that winter, riding the fence, I thought and thought. I’d been so dead sure of her that I was letting her go. Here was the principal of the High-school, and young Mullins that worked in the Rancher’s Bank, and Biles that owned stock in the P L, all after her, like broncos after a marked steer, and I was only the “Four-eyed Cow-puncher,” thirty dollars and found. And I got bluer than the light on the snow. And then says I to myself, if she ain’t married when spring melts, by the Lord, I’ll have her.
I’m one of those that ain’t forgetting the sixteenth of February, 1898. Storm over, and me mighty glad of it. Snow all around, except where the line of fence-rails peeked through, and the sun just blinding. I on the bronco breaking through the crust, feeling mighty good both of us. Down in a little arroyo, where a creek ran in summer, was the end of my run. Away off in the snow, I saw Billy Taylor, my side-partner, waving his hand like he was excited. I pounded my mule on the back.
“The Maine’s blown up,” he yells. “The Maine’s blown up!”
“The what?” says I, not understanding.
“The Maine—Havana Harbour—war sure!” he says. I tumbled off in the snow while he chucked me down a bunch of Denver papers. There it was. I went as loco as Billy. Before I got back to camp, I had it all figured out—what I ought to do. I got to the foreman before noon and drew my pay, and left him cussing. Lickety-split, the cayuse—he was mine—got me to the station. I figured that the National Guard would be the first to go, and I figured right. So I telegraphed to old Captain Fletcher of Company N at Range City: “Have you got room for me?” And he answered me, knowing just how I stood on the ranches, “Yes. Can you raise me twenty men to fill my company?” He didn’t need to ask for men; there were plenty of them anxious enough to go, but he did need the sort of men I’d get him. Snow be darned, I rode for four days signing up twenty hellaroos that would leave the Rough Riders standing. Into Range City I hustled them. There we waited on the town, doing nothing but live on our back pay and drill while we waited, nineteen for glory and Spanish blood, and me for glory and the girl.
Congress got a move on at last, though we thought it never would, and the Colorado National Guard was accepted, enlisting as a body. When we were in camp together and the medical inspector went around thumping chests, the captain gave him a little song about my eyes. “He can’t see without his glasses,” says Captain Fletcher, “but he can shoot all right with them on. And he raised my extra men, and he’s a soldier.”
The doctor says, “Well, I’m getting forgetful in my age, and maybe I’ll forget the eye-test.” Which he did as he said.