The furniture, of which there was very little, represented Centerport’s best: there was a “golden-oak” bureau, a “Flemish-oak” easy chair, a “Chippendale” card-table—I am employing the dealer’s language—an iron bedstead, a “mahogany” study table, a sprinkling of brightly upholstered, straight-backed chairs, and a few other pieces, equally highly polished and equally disturbing to the esthetic eye.
The walls were almost, but not quite, bare. Pete didn’t care for pictures, but on nails driven at haphazard hung a silver-mounted bridle, a rawhide lariat, a villainous-looking pair of Mexican wheel-spurs, a leather-banded sombrero, a cartridge-belt and holster, the latter holding a revolver, a leather quirt, and an Indian war-drum, while over the bedstead in the back room the head of a grizzly bear perpetually resented intrusion with snarling lips. The head of a mountain-sheep held a place of honor in the other apartment, and underneath it hung a Navajo Indian blanket, almost worth its weight in gold.
There were only two objects that might have been set down in an inventory as pictures: one was an advertising calendar and the other a photograph of Pete’s mother, who had died soon after Pete’s advent in the world. The photograph shared the top of the dazzling yellow bureau with Pete’s brushes and shaving utensils.
In a corner of the front room was a trunk, covered with a yellow and red saddle-blanket. Against it leaned two guns—a battered Winchester carbine and a handsome two-barreled 12-gauge shot-gun. In another corner, as though thrown there the moment before, lay a brown leather stock saddle, with big hooded stirrups. The card-table held Pete’s smoking things—two corn-cob pipes, a small sack of granulated tobacco, and an ash-tray. The tobacco usually distributed itself over the table and the ashes always blew onto the floor.
In bright weather, the sunlight streamed in through three of the five windows and crossed the rooms in golden shafts, wherein the dust atoms danced and swirled. With the sunlight came the sounds of the neighborhood—the clang of the blacksmith’s sledge against the anvil, the screech of the carpenter’s plane, the steady tap, tap, tap of the harness-maker’s hammer, the stamping of horses’ hoofs, the clamor of passing trains, and the chatter of the loiterers below the windows. Pete called the front room the “corral,” the rear room the “stable,” the whole the “Ranch.”
If I have risked tiring the reader with too long a description of Pete’s dwelling-place, it is because, in spite of their strange furnishings and hideous green walls, the rooms were far more homelike than many a smart suite in Grace Hall, and, to quote Tommy again, were “Pete through and through.” Further, while Allan’s, Hal’s, and Tommy’s rooms sometimes served as meeting-places for the four, the chambers over the harness-shop were their favorite resort. There was an undeniable charm about them; and if you could prevail upon Pete to close a few of the windows in cold weather, and if you didn’t mind sitting upon the tables and the trunk, you could be very comfy at the Ranch.
[CHAPTER VIII]
PETE’S CLUB TABLE
On the Monday night succeeding the Robinson game the quartet was assembled in Pete’s study. Allan had the easy chair, Hal and Tommy shared the big table, and Pete sat on the trunk. The windows were closed, for the night was cold, and the big hanging lamp diffused light, warmth, and a strong odor of kerosene through the apartment. This odor Pete was heroically striving to mitigate with the fumes of a cob pipe. Hal had tried the other pipe, but had soon given it up, avowing discontentedly that Pete ought to keep some real tobacco on hand for guests who weren’t used to chopped hay. The bell in College Hall had just struck nine, and Tommy, for the fourth time, had slid from the table, pleading press of business, and had been pulled back by Hal.