Again I said yes, and again he stood silent, smiling and awkward. Then it was uttered; the difficult word which shyness had choked: “If you come, you shall have the best horse on the river.”
Before I could answer he was hobbling back to the hotel. Thus from his heart his untrained lips at last had spoken.
I drove away, triumphing over the doctor, and in my thoughts my holiday passed in review,—my camps, and Scipio, and Still Hunt Spring, and most of all this fellow with his broken leg and perplexed eyes.
At Lander, they said, had I come two days earlier, I should have had the company of Lem Speed. So he and his maroon straw hat came into my thoughts too. He had started for California, I heard from the driver, whose society I sought on the box. He assured me that Lem Speed was rich, but that I carried better whiskey. Trouble was “due” in this country, he said (after more of my whiskey), “pretty near” the sort of trouble they were having on Powder River. For his part he did not wonder that poor men got tired of rich men; not that he objected to riches, but only to hogs. He had nothing against Lem Speed. Temptation to steal stock had never come his way, but he could understand how poor men might get tired of the big cattlemen—some poor men, anyhow. Yes, trouble was “sure due”; what brought Lem Speed up here so long after the beef round-up? Still, he “guessed” he hadn’t told Lem Speed anything that would hurt a poor fellow. Lem Speed had “claimed” he was up here about his bank. If so, why had he gone up Wind River, and all around Big Muddy, and over to the Embar? The bank was not there. No, sir; the big cattlemen were going to “demonstrate” over here as they had on the Dry Cheyenne and Box Elder. I perceived “demonstration” to be the driver’s word for the sudden hanging of somebody without due process of law, and I expressed a doubt as to its being needed here; I had heard nothing of cattle or horses being stolen. This he received in silence, presently repeating that Lem Speed hadn’t got anything from him. We broke off this subject for mines, and after mines we touched on topic after topic, until I confided to him the story of McDonough.
“Of course I would never accept the horse,” I finished.
“Why not?”
“Well—well—it would hardly be suitable.”
“Please yourself,” said the driver, curtly, and looking away. “Such treatment would not please me.”
“You mean, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth,’ as we say?”
“I don’t know as I ever said that.” A steep gulley in the road obliged him to put on the break and release it before he continued: “I’d not consider I had the right to do a man a good turn if I wasn’t willing for him to do me one.”