"Har's das spy'" he yelled "Kill him, fallers, he ban a spy!"
Page [132]
That tour was a great triumph for Bangs. We always did admire his acting, but he outdid himself that night. The rest of us just kept quiet and let him handle the conversation, and I must say it sounded desperate enough to be convincing. Of course he slipped up occasionally and stuck in words that would have choked an ordinary cow-gentleman, but Diggsey was that dazed he wouldn't have suspected if they had been Latin. I thought it would be more or less of a job to explain how we were living in a fifteen-thousand-dollar house instead of dugouts, but Bangs never hesitated a minute. He explained that the house belonged to a millionaire cattle-owner who had built it from reading a society novel, and that he let us live in it because he preferred to live in the barn with the horses. The boys had filled their rooms full of junk and one of them had even tied a pig to his bed—while the way Bangs cleared rubbish out of the bathtub and promised to have some water heated in the morning was convincingly artless. He had just finished explaining that, owing to the boiler-plate in the walls, the house was practically Indian proof, when an awful fusillade of shots broke out from the kitchen. Bangs disappeared for a moment, gun in hand, and I watched our guest trying to make himself six inches narrower and three feet shorter. I don't know when I ever saw a chap so anxious to melt right down into a corner and be mistaken for a carpet tack.
"'S all right," said Bangs, clumping in cheerfully. "Jest the cook having another fit. We've got a cook," he explained, "who gets loaded up 'bout oncet a month so full that he cries pure alcohol, and when he gits that way he insists on trying to shoot cockroaches with his gun. He ain't never killed one, but he's gotten two Chinamen and a mule, and we've got to put a stop to it. He's tied up in the cellar a-swearin' that if he gits loose he'll come upstairs and furnish material for nineteen fancy funerals with silver name-plates. But, don't you worry, Reverend. He can't hurt a fly 'less he gits loose. Here's your room. That hoss blanket on the cot's brand new; towel's in the hall and you'll find a comb somewheres round. Just you turn in if you feel like it, and when you hear Wall-Eye Denton and Pete Pearsall trying to massacre each other in the next room it's time to git up."
Pubby said he would retire at once, and we left him looking scared but relieved. I'll bet he sat up all night taking notes and expecting things to happen. We sat up, too, but for a different reason. You can't imagine how much work it took to get that house running backward. And it was an awful job to do the Wild West stunt, too. We sat and criticised each other's dialect and actions until there were as many as three free fights going on at once. One man favored the Bret Harte style of bad man; another adhered to the Henry Wallace Phillips brand; while still another insisted on following the Remington school. We compromised on a mixture and then spent the rest of the night learning how to forget our table manners.
The result was magnificent. I shall never forget the Reverend Pubby's pained but fascinated expression as he sat at breakfast the next morning and watched thirty hungry savages shoveling plain, unvarnished grub into their faces. The breakfast couldn't have gone better if we had had a dress rehearsal. Our guest couldn't eat. He was afraid to talk. He just held on to his chair, and we could see him stiffen with horror every time some eater would rise up so as to increase his reach and spear a piece of bread six feet away with his fork. The breakfast was a disgusting display of Poland-China manners and was successful in every particular.
We confidently expected Petey Simmons to turn up during the meal and tell us what to do next. He had spent the night with his odoriferous Rep Rho Beta brothers cooking up the rest of the plot and had promised to run up at breakfast. But no Petey appeared. We strung the meal along as far as we could toward dinner and then took up the job of keeping the Reverend Pubby contented and in the house until the life-saving crew arrived. Did you ever try to lie all morning with a slow-speed imagination? That's what we had to do. We explained to Pubby that the students caroused all night and never came to college in the morning; we told him it was against the rules for strangers to go on the campus in the morning; we told him it was dangerous to go out-of-doors because of the Alfalfa Delta, who were suspected of being cannibals; we told him forty thousand things, most of which contradicted each other. If it hadn't been for the boys who kindly started a fight whenever his reverence had tangled Bangs and me up hopelessly on some question we couldn't have survived the inquisition. As it was, I perspired about a barrel and my brain ached for a week.
We went to lunch and put on another exhibition of free-hand feeding, getting more grumpy and disgusted every minute. We were all ready to yell for mercy and put on our civilized clothes when we heard a terrific riot from outside. Then Petey came in.
If there ever was a sure-enough Wild Westerner it was Petey that afternoon. He had on the whole works—two-acre hat, red woolen shirt, spurs, and even chaps—nice hairy ones. I discovered next day that he had swiped my fine bearskin rug and cut it up to make them. In his belt he had a revolver which couldn't have been less than two feet long. Petey was a little fellow, with one of those nineteen-sizes-too-large voices, and when he turned the full organ on you would have thought old Mount Vesuvius had wakened up and rumbled into the room.
"Howdy, Reverend," he thundered. "We jest come along to take you on a little ride over to college. Got a nice gentle cow-pony out here. She bucks as easy as a rockin'-horse. Don't mind about your clothes. Just hop right on. The boys is some anxious to get along, it being most classtime."
We followed the two of them out to the back yard. There were seven Rep Rho Betas on seven moth-eaten ponies which they had dug up from goodness knows where. The rigs they had on represented each fellow's idea of what a cowboy looked like, and would have made a real cowpuncher hang himself for shame. Petey confessed afterward that, of all the Rep Rho Betas, only seven had ever been on a horse, and, of these, three kept him in agony for fear they would fall off and compel him to explain that they were on the verge of delirium tremens. They were a weird-looking bunch, but, gee! they were fierce. Pirates would have been kittens beside them.