“Yes, I got it,” said Jowett, with a chuckle, interpreting the old man’s look. “I got it for good—a wonder from Wonderville. Damned queer-looking critter, but there, I guess we know what I’ve got. Outside like a crinoline, inside like a pair of ankles of the Lady Jane Plantagenet. Yes, I got it, Mr. Druse, got it dead-on!”
“How?” asked the Ry, feeling the clean fetlocks with affectionate approval.
“He’s off East, so he says,” was the joyous reply; “sudden but sure, and I dunno why. Anyway, he’s got the door-handle offered, and he’s off without his camel.” He stroked the neck of the bay lovingly. “How much?”
Jowett held up his fingers. The old man lifted his eyebrows quizzically. “That-h’m! Does he preach as well as that?” he asked.
Jowett chuckled. “He knows the horse-country better than the New Jerusalem, I guess; and I wasn’t off my feed, nor hadn’t lost my head neither. I wanted that dust-hawk, and he knew it; but I got in on him with the harness and the sulky. The bridle he got from a Mexican that come up here a year ago, and went broke and then went dead; and there being no padre, Tripple did the burying, and he took the bridle as his fee, I s’pose. It had twenty dollars’ worth of silver on it—look at these conchs.”
He trifled with the big beautiful buttons on the head-stall. “The sulky’s as good as new, and so’s the harness almost; and there’s the nose-bag and the blankets, and a saddle and a monkey-wrench and two bottles of horse-liniment, and odds and ends. I only paid that”—and he held up his fingers again as though it was a sacred rite—“for the lot. Not bad, I want to say. Isn’t he good for all day, this one?”
The old man nodded, then turned towards the bridge. “The gun-shots—what?” he asked, setting forward at a walk which taxed the rawbone’s stride.
“An invite—come to the wedding; that’s all. Only it’s a funeral this time, and, if something good doesn’t happen, there’ll be more than one funeral on the Sagalac to-morrow. I’ve had my try, but I dunno how it’ll come out. He’s not a man of much dictionary is the Monseenoor.”
“The Monseigneur Lourde? What does he say?”
“He says what we all say, that he is sorry. ‘But why have the Orange funeral while things are as they are?’ he says, and he asks for the red flag not to be shook in the face of the bull.”