“I think we’re just sick of helling it.” Peter looked towards the star that last night had been the beacon towards which he and Judith had scaled the heights. “Yes, we get sick of helling it after we’ve turned thirty.”
“Then I can’t be making a mistake. If I thought it was because I was getting on, I’d stampede this here range. It don’t seem fair to a girl to allow that you’re broke, tamed, and know the way to the corral, when it’s just that you’re needin’ to go to an old man’s home.”
“Now this is really love,” said Peter to himself, with interest. “This is humility.” A sympathetic liking for the self-distrustful lover surged hot and generous into Peter’s heart, and he continued to himself: “Now that’s what Judith would appreciate in a man, some directness, some humility!” Poor Judith! Poor burden-bearer! Who was to love her as she deserved to be loved, even as old man Kinson’s girl, of the Basin, was loved? Yet suppose some one did love her in such fashion and she returned it? It was a picture Peter had never conjured up before. Nonsense! he was accustomed to think of Judith a great deal, and that was not the way to think of her. “Dear Judith!” said Peter, half unconsciously to himself, and looked again at the fellow, who had gone back to his dingy letter and continued to reread it in the fire-light as if he hoped to extract some further meaning from the now familiar words. Nature had fitted him out with a rag-bag assortment of features—the nose of a clown, the eyes of a ferret, the mouth that hangs agape like a badly hinged door, the mouth of the incessant talker. And withal, as he lounged in the fire-light, dreamily turning his love-letter, he had a sort of superphysical beauty, reflected of the glow that many waters cannot quench.
Costigan, who had led the merriment against Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house, was playing “mumbly-peg” with Texas Tyler. They had been working like Trojans all day at the round-up, but they pitched their pocket-knives with as keen a zest as school-boys, bickering over points in the game, accusing each other of cheating, calling on the rest of the company to umpire some disputed point.
But presently, from the opposite side of the fire, some one began to sing, in a rich barytone, a dirgelike thing that caught the attention of first one then another of the men, making them stop their yarning and knife-throwing to listen. The tune, in its homely power to evoke the image of the ceremonial of death, was more or less familiar to most of them. There was a conscious funeral pageantry in the ring of its measured phrases that recalled to many burials of the dead that had taken place in their widely scattered homes. Mrs. Barbauld’s hymn, “Flee as a Bird to the Mountain,” are the words usually sung to the air.
Costigan presently cut across the dirgelike refrain with: “Phwat th’ divil is ut about that chune that Oi’m thinkin’ of?”
“This,” said the man with the barytone voice, “is the tune that Nick Steele saved his neck to.”
“Begorra, that’s ut. I wasn’t there mesilf, but Oi’ve heard th’ story told more times than Oi’ve years to me credit.”
“My father was in that necktie party,” spoke up a young cow-puncher, “and I’ve heard him tell the story scores of times, and he always wondered why the devil they let Steele off. Never could understand it after the thing was done. He was talking of it once to a man who was a sharp on things like mesmerism, and the man called it hypnotic suggestion. Said that Steele got control of the whole outfit and mesmerized ’em so they couldn’t do a thing to him.”
Several of the men asked for the story, echoes of which had come down through all the forty years since its happening. And the cow-puncher, lighting a cigarette, began: