Forthwith the cattle country proceeded to get the agent used to it. The news went over the sage-brush from Belle Fourche to Sweetwater, and playful, howling horsemen made it their custom to go rioting with pistols round the ticket office, educating the agent. His lungs improved, and he came dimly to smile at this life which he did not understand. But the company discerned no humor whatever in having its water-tank perforated, which happened twice; and sheriffs and deputies and other symptoms of authority began to invest Separ. Now what should authority do upon these free plains, this wilderness of do-as-you-please, where mere breathing the air was like inebriation? The large, headlong children who swept in from the sage-brush and out again meant nothing that they called harm until they found themselves resisted. Then presently happened that affair of the cow-catcher; and later a too-zealous marshal, come about a mail-car they had side-tracked and held with fiddles, drink, and petticoats, met his death accidentally, at which they were sincerely sorry for about five minutes. They valued their own lives as little, and that lifts them forever from baseness at least. So the company, concluding such things must be endured for a while yet, wrote their letter, and you have seen how wrong the letter went. All it would do would be from now on to fasten upon Separ its code of recklessness; to make shooting the water-tank (for example) part of a gentleman's deportment when he showed himself in town.
It was not now the season of heavy shipping; to-night their work would be early finished, and then they were likely to play after their manner. To arrive in such a place on her way to her brother, the felon in jail, made the girl's journey seem doubly forlorn to me as I wandered down to the corrals.
A small, bold voice hailed me. “Hello, you!” it said; and here was Billy Lusk, aged nine, in boots and overalls, importantly useless with a stick, helping the men prod the steers at the chute.
“Thought you were at school,” said I.
“Ah, school's quit,” returned Billy, and changed the subject. “Say, Lin's hunting you. He's angling to eat at the hotel. I'm grubbing with the outfit.” And Billy resumed his specious activity.
Mr. McLean was in the ticket-office, where the newspaper had transiently reminded him of politics. “Wall Street,” he was explaining to the agent, “has been lunched on by them Ross-childs, and they're moving on. Feeding along to Chicago. We want—” Here he noticed me and, dragging his gauntlet off, shook my hand with his lusty grasp.
“Your eldest son just said you were in haste to find me,” I remarked.
“Lose you, he meant. The kid gets his words twisted.”
“Didn't know you were a father, Mr. McLean,” simpered the agent.
Lin fixed his eye on the man. “And you don't know it now,” said he. Then he removed his eye. “Let's grub,” he added to me. My friend did not walk to the hotel, but slowly round and about, with a face overcast. “Billy is a good kid,” he said at length, and, stopping, began to kick small mounds in the dust. Politics floated lightly over him, but here was a matter dwelling with him, heavy and real. “He's dead stuck on being a cow-puncher,” he presently said.