Then I heard, with perfect irrelevance to Herman Wagner, that she wouldn't have a puncher on the place that owned his own horse. Because why? Because he'd use him gentle all day and steal grain for him at night. Also, that she had some kind of rheumatiz in her left shoulder; but she'd rather be a Christian Scientist and fool herself than pay a doctor to do the same. It may all have been true, but it was not important; not germane to the issue, as we so often say in writing editorials.
It looked so much like a blank for Herman Wagner that I quit asking for a time and let the woman toil at her foolish ruinous tasks.
After half an hour of it she began to rumble a stanza of By Cool Siloam's Shady Rill; so I chanced it again, remarking on the sign I had observed that day. So she left her desk for a seat before the fire and said yes, and they was other signs of Herman's hid off in the mountains where no one but cows, that can't read a line, would see 'em. She also divulged that Herman, himself, wasn't anything you'd want a bronze statue of to put up in Courthouse Square.
Well then, come on, now! What about him? No, sir; not by a darned sight!
With that there desk full of work, she simply could not stop to talk now.
She did.
Is that the only sign of Herman's you saw? He's got others along them trails. You'll see an arrow in white paint, pointing to his sylvan glen, and warnings not to go to other glens till you've tried his. One says: You've tried the rest; now try the best! Another says: Try Wagner's Sylvan Glen for Boating, Bathing, and Fishing. Meals at all hours! And he's got one that shows he studied American advertising as soon as he landed in this country. It says: Wagner's Sylvan Glen—Not How Good, But How Cheap!
I don't know. I ain't made up my mind about Herman, even yet. If it wasn't for why he had to leave Nevada and if I knew there could be more than one kind of German, then I'd almost say Herman was the other kind. But, of course, there can't be but one kind, and he showed the Prussian strain fast enough in why he come up from Reno. Still and all, he's got his engaging points as a pure imbecile or something.
He don't tell me why he left Reno for a long time after he gets here; not till I'd won his confidence by showing I was a German sympathizer. It was when Sandy Sawtelle had a plan for a kind of grand war measure. His grand war measure was to get some secret agents into Germany and kill off all the women under fifty. He said if you done this the stock would die out, because look at the game laws against killing does! He told this to everybody. He told it to Herman; but Herman knew enough to remain noncommittal 'bout it. He told it to me, and I saw right off it probably couldn't be managed right; and, even if it could be, I said to Sandy, it seemed to me somehow like it would be sort of inhuman.
Herman heard me say this and got the idea I was a pacifist and a secret friend of his country; so he confided to me the secret of why he left Reno to keep from having his heart cut out by Manuel Romares. But no matter!
Anyway, last year in the spring this Herman dropped by, looking for work. He hadn't been in America long, having stopped with his uncle in Cincinnati a while, and then coming West on a life of adventure and to take up a career. He said now he'd come up from Nevada, where he'd been working on a sheep ranch, and he acted like he wanted to get into something respectable and lead a decent life again.
Well, it had got so I hired everything that come along; so why not Herman? I grabbed at him. The boys heard he was a German alien and acted, at first, like a bunch of hogs with a bear about; but I'd of hired old Hinderburg himself if he'd offered and put him to doing something worth while.