“Who’s McDonough?” inquired the rosy-faced man with the straw hat.
A young fellow from Colorado, they told him, a new settler on Wind River this summer. He had taken up a ranch on North Fork and built him a cabin. Hard luck if he had broken his leg; he had a bunch of horses; was going to raise horses; he had good horses. Hard luck!
We found young McDonough lying in the corral, propped against a neighbor’s kindly knee. The wild horse was snorting and showing us red nostrils and white eyes in a far corner; he had reared and fallen backward while being roped, and the bars had prevented dodging in time. Dirt was ground into McDonough’s flaxen hair, the skin was tight on his cheeks, and his tips were as white as his large, thick nails; but he smiled at us, and his strange blue eyes twinkled with the full spark of undaunted humor.
“Ain’t I a son of a—?” he began, and shook his head over himself and his clumsiness. Further speech was stopped by violent retching, and I was enough of a doctor to fear that this augured a worse hurt than a broken leg. But no blood came up, and he was soon talking to us again, applying to himself sundry jocular epithets which were very well in that rough corral, but must stay there.
He was lifted to the only bed in the cabin, no sound escaping him, though his lips remained white, and when he thought himself unobserved he shut his eyes; but kept them open and twinkling at any one’s approach. They were strange, perplexed eyes, evidently large, but deep-set, their lids screwed together; later that evening I noticed that he held his playing-cards close to them, and slightly to one side, Scipio called him “skew-bald,” but I could see no such defect. He was not injured internally, it proved later, but his right leg was broken above the ankle. We had to cut his boot off, so swollen already was the limb. The heavy man with the straw hat advised getting him to the hospital at the post without delay, and regretted he himself had not come up the river in his wagon; he could have given the patient a lift. With this he departed upon a tall roan horse, with an air about him of business and dispatch uncommon in these parts. Wind River horsemen mostly looked and acted as if there was no such thing as being behind time, there being no such thing as time.
“Who is he?” I asked, looking after the broad back of whipcord and the unseasonable straw hat.
All were surprised. What? Not know Lem Speed? Biggest cattleman in the country. Store and a bank in Lander. House in Salt Lake. Wife in Los Angeles. Son at Yale.
“Up here looking after his interests?” I pursued.
“Up here looking after his interests.” My exact words were repeated in that particular tone which showed I was again left out of something.
“What’s the matter with my questions?” I asked.