“Well,” said Scipio bashfully to the Agent, “I’d have sure hated to hand y’u back a ruined business. But he’ll never understand Injuns.”
Out of the door he flew,—squaws and bucks flapped after him like poultry
II
SPIT-CAT CREEK
The cabin on Spit-Cat Creek lies lonely among the high pastures, and looks down to further loneliness across many slanting levels of pine-tops. These descend successively in smooth, odorous, evergreen miles until they reach the open valley. Here runs the stage road, if you can discern it, from the railway to the continuously jubilant cow-town of Likely, Wyoming; and here, when viewed from the cabin through a field-glass, you can readily distinguish an antelope from a stone in the clear atmosphere which commonly prevails. The windows of the cabin are three, and looking in through any of them you can see the stove, the table, and the ingenuous structure which does duty as a bed. During the season of snow, from November until May, the cabin (in the days of which I speak) was dwelt in by no one; while through the open weather some person of honesty and resource would be sent thither from the headquarters ranch on Sunk Creek two or three times, to stay no longer than his duties required, and to come back with his report as soon as they should be performed. Such a man would live here with canned food and the small stove, seldom having other company than his own, and, if he had ears for the music of nature, the singing pines would often companion him, he could hear now and again some unseen bird crying as it passed among them, and always the voice of Spit-Cat. This stream foamed by the cabin to fall and wander deviously away into the great, distant silence of the mountains. Likely was eighteen miles distant, and to this place the man could ride in four hours by a recently discovered trail, which was the shorter one, and followed the smaller tributary stream of Spit-Kitten; and sometimes the man did so ride for his mail, or for more canned food, or for a game of chance and female company, in the continuously jubilant cow-town of Likely, Wyoming.
Upon a midday in June, had you secretly peered through any of the windows in the cabin, you could have seen a seated man, tightly curved over the table and apparently dying in convulsions brought on by poison; for the signs of a newly finished meal were near him. There was a coffee-pot, and a dish of bacon, and three quarters of a pie. But it was merely Scipio Le Moyne endeavoring to write a letter; and no task more excruciating was known to this young man.
“Dear friend,” he had begun, “i got no dictionery, but—”
At this point a heavy blot had intervened as he was changing the personal pronoun into a capital I.