"You see," I spoke with utter sincerity, "he catches nocturnal habits from eating bats, and mixes up the nocturnal habits with the hibernating bear habits of his mother, and also with the climbing instincts of old Billy-goat who used to mountaineer on the barrack roofs. Now you must realize that you can't be a nocturnal hibernating climbing dog especially in winter. He's dismembered by his passions. It isn't natural."
"Should think not, indeed."
"Makes him so delicate. Inflammation of the squeam, you know. Hence the sealing-wax. It stays on better than sticking-plaster. He eats off the plaster."
Trotting on three legs, ears cocked, smirking with affection, Rich Mixed enjoyed being praised. But now he heard the bugle far away astern, crying out "Officer's wives," and with a pang of remorse, knew he'd be late when the call came, "Love o' God." He bolted to his duties.
As to Rams, at the risk of a dangerous fall, he lighted a cigar. I dismounted to stamp out the flame from his dropped match in the grass, then mounting again set off at a racking trot, which smashed the cigar in his hand and left the remains smoldering on the trail. Without breaking pace, I swung down, trampled the sparks and vaulted back to watch Rams having his vital organs torn adrift and pounded to a haggis during an hour of vengeance. Never again would he smoke selfishly, or while he lived would drop a lighted match. But would he live?
I was angry at losing my dinner, and being sent to Mrs. Sarde's—into temptation. Worse than that, the presence of Rams profaned a landscape ineffably pure and sacred in its wild beauty. The hot air quivered with perfume under the fir trees of that open forest, the birds rang out ecstatic little songs, canaries flaunted their topaz from tree to tree, and humming-birds, each like an emerald in a mist, hovered among the flowers.
We Spaniards make an art of living, quick in every fiber to live, to love, to worship, to sin, to suffer; but, alas, so many are religious, monks and nuns mewed up in convents instead of breeding children. These Anglo-Saxons have no time to live, let life itself drop lost out of their grasping hands because they are sires and mothers fending for their homes, begetters of nations, piling wealth on wealth, ruling the sea, taming the wilderness, filling the continents with their endless, meaningless clamor for more and more. This brutal creature I rode with could see timber by the thousand feet per acre, real estate by sections and town sites, minerals by the ton, the horse-power of cataracts, but not the delicious valley, the aged hills bowed with their weight of years. My people came to worship, his to destroy.
It must have been ninety-five degrees in the shade as we dropped down the white bluffs, and splashed across the Columbia just by the outlet of Lake Windermere. I took the sandwiches from my wallets, and we had lunch in the saddle, walked our horses through enchanted woodlands where trotting would seem profane. With a wry smile, my tenderfoot avowed that he must have a squeam after all. It ached, he said mournfully. "And yet," he asked, "what's the usual name for it?"
"Oh, it's only the thing you get squeamish with," said I. "Among my mother's people they cut the Squaminosa Invertibitis in infancy, just like your doctors cut out the vermiform appendix, and as they do the killing they ought to know."
He gulped the bait. "Your mother's people?" he asked, and offered a cigar, which I declined with thanks. Havana wrappers covered a multitude of wrong 'uns.