“Figgered I might get held up ’fore reaching Santy Fé. If it warn’t that dratted car, it sure would be something else, which same it is. Damned good luck it ain’t worse, as Crump used to say when Providence went agin’ him.”
She observed that the stranger ate ravenously, but drank sparingly. Not thirst had downed him, but starvation.
He seemed startled at her disconcertingly frank manner of speech. She put him down as something better than an ordinary hobo; an out-of-luck Easterner, possibly a lunger. He was fifty or so; with decent clothes, a shave, and a haircut, he might be a striking-looking fellow, she decided. Although he had a hard mouth, what Mehitabel Crump had learned to know as a whiskey mouth, it was steady lipped.
“You sure played in tough luck comin’ this road,” she said, musingly. “So did I. Ain’t nothing between here and Santy Fé ’cept Injuns, greasers, and rattlers, any one of which is worse’n the other two. These rocks is playin’ hell with my tires and the old Henry is coughin’ fit to bust her innards. If I find the feller who sold her to me, I’d sure lay him one over the ear!”
Her simple meal finished, she began to stuff her corncob pipe. The man, still eating wolfishly, watched her with fascinated eyes. She gazed out at the snowy, sun-flooded Sangre de Cristo peaks and continued her soliloquy. When it suited her, Mehitabel Crump could be very garrulous; and when it suited her, she could be as taciturn as the mountains themselves.
“I ain’t surprised at nothing no more, not these days. No, sir! When I first come to this country you knowed just what ye had to reckon agin’. They was Injuns to fight, greasers to work devilment, claim jumpers to rob ye, and such. But now the Injuns is all towerist peddlers, the greasers is called ‘natives’ and runs the courts an’ legislature, and gun toting ain’t popular. A lone woman gets skinned plumb legal, when in the old days it would ha’ been suicide to rob a female. Yes pilgrim, set right in at what’s left, and don’t bother to talk yet a spell.”
She touched a match to her pipe, broke the match, tossed it away.
“If Crump hadn’t blowed up with a dry fuse in a shaft we was sinking over in the Mogollons, where we was prospecting at the time, he’d be plumb astonished at the changes. Yes, and I bet he’d swear to see me driving one of them contraptions yonder! Poor Crump, I never had the heart to dig him up, though it was a right smart prospect we was workin’. But somehow I couldn’t never work that claim, with him still in it that-a-way. I won’t need the money, neither, if I’ve got hold of——”
She paused. Her gaze went to the devouring stranger. Abruptly she changed the subject.
“You don’t look like you was much more’n a poor, innercent pilgrim without any brains to mention. Yet, stranger, I’d gamble that we’d stack up high in morals agin’ such old-timers as Abel Dorales, him what’s half greaser and half Mormon, or old Sandy Mackintavers, what come straight from Scotland to Arizony and made a forchin in thirty years of thieving! Yes, I reckon ye’ve got a streak of real pay dirt in ye, stranger. And if I can’t tell what breed o’ cattle a man is by jest looking at him, it’s a queer thing! I’ve knowed ’em all.”