So at last even Callaghan come to him and told him it wasn’t no use. ‘Very well,’ Blair says. ‘Callaghan says you may be able to sit on the top of a painted horse, so I will buy you a horse out of a dump cart and nail him to the front porch, and you can at least be sitting on top of it when we come up.’
“‘I’ll go back to momma’s,’ she says.
“‘I wish you would,’ Blair says. ‘My old man tried all his life to make a banker out of me, but your old woman done it in two months.’”
“I thought you said they had jack of their own,” the chauffeur said. “Why didn’t she spend some of that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t no exchange for Indian money in New York. Anyways, you would have thought she was a conductor on a Broadway surface car. Sometimes she wouldn’t even wait until I could get Blair under a shower and a jolt into him before breakfast, to make the touch. So the gal goes to the old dame (she lives on Park Avenue) and the gal . . .”
“Was you there too?” the chauffeur said.
“Cried . . . What? Oh. This was a maid, a little Irish kid named Burke; me and her used to go out now and then. She was the one told me about this fellow, this Yale college boy, this Indian sweetheart.”
“Indian sweetheart?”
“They went to the same ward school out at Oklahoma or something. Swapped Masonic rings or something before the gal’s old man found three oil wells in the henhouse and dropped dead and the old dame took the gal off to Europe to go to the school there. So this boy goes to Yale College and last year what does he do but marry a gal out of a tank show that happened to be in town. Well, when she finds that Callaghan has give her up, she goes to her old woman in Park Avenue. She cries. ‘I begin to think that maybe I won’t look funny to his friends, and then he comes there and watches me. He don’t say nothing,’ she says, ‘he just stands there and watches me.’
“‘After all I’ve done for you,’ the old dame says. ‘Got you a husband that any gal in New York would have snapped up. When all he asks is that you learn to sit on top of a horse and not shame him before his swell friends. After all I done for you,’ the old dame says.
“‘I didn’t,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to marry him.’
“‘Who did you want to marry?’ the old dame says.
“‘I didn’t want to marry nobody,’ the gal says.
“So now the old dame digs up about this boy, this Allen boy that the gal . . .”
“I thought you said his name was Yale,” the chauffeur said.
“No. Allen. Yale is where he went to this college.”
“You mean Columbia.”
“No. Yale. It’s another college.”
“I thought the other one was named Cornell or something,” the chauffeur said.
“No. It’s another one. Where these college boys all come from when these hotchachacha deadfalls get raided and they give them all a ride downtown in the wagon. Don’t you read no papers?”
“Not often,” the chauffeur said. “I don’t care nothing about politics.”
“All right. So this Yale boy’s poppa had found a oil well too and he was lousy with it too, and besides the old dame was mad because Blair wouldn’t leave her live in the house with them and wouldn’t take her nowheres when we went.
So the old dame give them all three — her and Blair and this college boy — the devil until the gal jumps up and says she will ride on a horse or bust, and Blair told her to go on and bust if she aimed to ride on this chestnut horse we brought all the way back from Kentucky. ‘I don’t aim for you to ruin this good horse,’ Blair says. ‘You’ll ride on the horse I tell you to ride on.’
“So then she would slip out the back way and go off and try to ride this horse, this good one, this Kentucky plug, to learn how first and then surprise him. The first time didn’t hurt her, but the second time it broke her collar bone, and she was scared how Blair would find it out until she found out how he had knew it all the time that she was riding on it. So when we come down here for the first time that year and Blair started chasing this lyron or whatever it—”
“Fox,” the chauffeur said.
“All right. That’s what I said. So when—”
“You said lyron,” the chauffeur said.
“All right. Leave it be a lyron. Anyways, she would ride on this chestnut horse, trying to keep up, and Blair already outrun the dogs and all, like this time two years ago when he run off from the dogs and got close enough to this lyron to hit it with his riding whip—”
“You mean fox,” the chauffeur said. “A fox, not a lyron. Say . . .” The other man, the valet, secretary, whatever he might have been, was lighting another cigarette, crouched into his upturned collar, the derby slanted down upon his face.
“Say what?” he said.
“I was wondering,” the chauffeur said.
“Wondering what?”
“If it’s as hard for him to ride off and leave her as he thinks it is. To not see her ruining this good Kentucky horse. If he has to ride as fast to do it as he thinks he does.”
“What about that?”
“Maybe he don’t have to ride as fast this year as he did last year, to run off from her. What do you think about it?”
“Think about what?”
“I was wondering.”
“What wondering?”
“If he knowed he don’t have to ride as fast this year or not.”
“Oh. You mean Gawtrey.”
“That his name? Gawtrey?”
“That’s it. Steve Gawtrey.”
“What about him?”
“He’s all right. He’ll eat your grub and drink your liquor and fool your women and let you say when.”
“Well, what about that?”
“Nothing. I said he was all right. He’s fine by me.”
“How by you?”
“Just fine, see? I done him a little favor once, and he done me a little favor, see?”
“Oh,” the chauffeur said. He did not look at the other. “How long has she known him?”
“Six months and maybe a week. We was up in Connecticut and he was there. He hates a horse about as much as she does, but me and Callaghan are all right too; I done Callaghan a little favor once too, so about a week after we come back from Connecticut, I have Callaghan come in and tell Blair about this other swell dog, without telling Blair who owned it. So that night I says to Blair, ‘I hear Mr. Van Dyming wants to buy this horse from Mr. Gawtrey too.’ ‘Buy what horse?’ Blair says.
‘I don’t know,’ I says. ‘One horse looks just like another to me as long as it stays out doors where it belongs,’ I says. ‘So do they to Gawtrey,’ Blair says. ‘What horse are you talking about?’
‘This horse Callaghan was telling you about,’ I says. Then he begun to curse Callaghan. ‘He told me he would get that horse for me,’ he says. ‘It don’t belong to Callaghan,’ I says, ‘it’s Mr. Gawtrey’s horse.’ So here it’s two nights later when he brings Gawtrey home to dinner with him.
That night I says, ‘I guess you bought that horse.’ He had been drinking and he cursed Gawtrey and Callaghan too. ‘He won’t sell it,’ he says. ‘You want to keep after him,’ I says. ‘A man will sell anything.’ ‘How keep after him, when he won’t listen to a price?’ he says. ‘Leave your wife do the talking,’ I says. ‘He’ll listen to her.’ That was when he hit me. . . .”
“I thought you said he just put his hand on you,” the chauffeur said.
“I mean he just kind of flung out his hand when he was talking, and I happened to kind of turn my face toward him at the same time. He never aimed to hit me because he knowed I would have took him. I told him so. I had the rod in my hand, inside my coat, all the while.
“So after that Gawtrey would come back maybe once a week because I told him I had a good job and I didn’t aim to have to shoot myself out of it for no man except myself maybe. He come once a week. The first time she wouldn’t leave him in. Then one day I am reading the paper (you ought to read a paper now and then.
You ought to keep up with the day of the week, at least) and I read where this Yale Allen boy has run off with a show gal and they had fired him off the college for losing his amateur’s standing, I guess. I guess that made him mad, after he had done jumped the college anyways.
So I cut it out, and this Burke kid (me and her was all right, too) she puts it on the breakfast tray that A.M. And that afternoon, when Gawtrey happens to come back, she leaves him in, and this Burke kid happens to walk into the room sudden with something — I don’t know what it was — and here is Gawtrey and her like a fade-out in the pitchers.”
“So Blair
