“The cattle outfit that he done the dirty work for swore an alibi for him. Jim has been in hard luck ever since. He’s been rustlin’ cattle right along; but Lord, who can blame him? He got into some trouble down to Rawlins—shot a man he thought was with Simpson, but who wasn’t—and he’s been in jail ever since. Course now that he’s out Simpson’s bound to get peppered. Glad it didn’t happen here, though. ’Twould be a kind of unpleasant thing to have connected with a eating-house, don’t you think so?” she inquired, with the grim philosophy of the country.
The eating-house patrons had gone their several ways, and the quiet of the dining-room was oppressive by contrast with its late boisterousness. Mrs. Clark, her hands imprisoned in bread-dough, begged Mary to look over the screen door and see if anything was happening. “I’m always suspicious when it’s quiet. I know they’re in deviltry of some sort.”
Mary tiptoed to the door and peeped over, but the room was deserted, save for Simpson, huddled in a corner, biting his finger-nails. “The nasty thing!” exploded Mrs. Clark, when she had received the bulletin. “I’d turn him out if it wasn’t for the notoriety he might bring my place in gettin’ killed in front of it.”
“I dare say I’d better go and see after my trunk; it’s still on the station platform.” Mary wondered what her prim aunts would think of her for sitting in Mrs. Clark’s kitchen, but it had seemed so much more of a refuge than the sordid streets of the hideous little town, with its droves of men and never a glimpse of a woman that she had been only too glad to avail herself of the invitation of the proprietress to “make herself at home till the stage left.”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Mrs. Clark, wiping her hand only partially free from dough and presenting it to Miss Carmichael. She had not inquired where the girl was going, nor even hinted to discover where she came from, but she gave her the godspeed that the West knows how to give, and the girl felt better for it.
At the station, where Mary shortly presented herself, in the interest of that old man of the sea of all travellers, luggage, she learned that the stage did not leave town for some three-quarters of an hour yet. A young man, manipulating many sheets of flimsy, yellow paper covered with large, flourishing handwriting, looked up in answer to her inquiries about Lost Trail. This young man, whose accent, clothes, and manner proclaimed him “from the East,” whither, in all probability, he would shortly return if he did not mend his ways, disclaimed all knowledge of the place as if it were an undesirable acquaintance. But before he could deny it thrice, a man who had heard the cabalistic name was making his way towards the desk, the pride of the traveller radiating from every feature.
The cosmopolite who knew Lost Trail was the type of man who is born to be a Kentucky colonel, and perhaps may have achieved his destiny before coming to this “No Man’s Land,” for reasons into which no one inquired, and which were obviously no one’s business. They knew him here by the name of “Lone Tooth Hank,” and he wore what had been, in the days of his colonelcy—or its equivalent—a frock-coat, restrained by the lower button, and thus establishing a waist-line long after nature had had the last word to say on the subject. With this he wore the sombrero of the country, and the combination carried a rakish effect that was positively sinister.
The scornful clerk introduced Mary as a young lady inquiring about some place in the bad-lands. Off came the sombrero with a sweep, and Lone Tooth smiled in a way that accented the dental solitaire to which he owed his name. Miss Carmichael, concealing her terror of this casual cavalier, inquired if he could tell her the distance to Lost Trail.
“I sho’ly can, and with, consid’able pleasure.” The sombrero completed a semicircular sweep and arrived in the neighborhood of Mr. Hank’s heart in significance of his vassalage to the fair sex. He proceeded:
“Lost Trail sutney is right lonesome. A friend of mine gets a little too playful fo’ the evah-increasin’ meetropolitan spirit of this yere camp, and tries a little tahget practice on the main bullyvard, an’ finds the atmospheah onhealthful in consequence. Hearin’ that the quiet solitude of Lost Trail is what he needs, he lit out with the following circumstance thereof happenin’. One day something in his harness giv’ way—and he recollects seein’ a boot sunnin’ itself back in the road ’bout a quartah of a mile. An’ he figgahs he’ll borry a strip of leather off the boot to mend his harness. Back he goes and finds it has a kind of loaded feelin’. So my friend investigates—and I be blanked if there wasn’t a foot and leg inside of it.”