“What is your private opinion?”
“It’s my private opinion, based on evidence though not hidebound; I was never a opinionated man; that they wasn’t married to one another a-tall.”
“What do you consider evidence?”
“Well, a letter to me from a fellow back east that did claim to be her husband might be considered as evidence. What do you think?”
“Did you kill this sheep with one shot or with two,” I said.
“Sho, now,” the mail rider said.
II
“This fellow got off the west bound train one morning about ten years ago. He didn’t look like a lunger, maybe because he didn’t have but one grip. Usually it’s too late already when they come here. Usually the doctor has told them they haven’t got but a month more, or maybe six months. Yet they’ll get off that west bound train sometimes with everything but the cook stove. I’ve noticed that taking trouble just to get through the world is about the hardest habit of all to break. Owning things.
I know folks right now that would hold up a train bound for heaven while they telephoned back home for the cook to run and bring them something which, not having ever had any use for it at home, they had done forgot. They could live in a house on earth with it for years without even knowing where it was, but just try to get them to start to heaven without taking it along.
“He didn’t look like a lunger. He didn’t look concerned enough. You take them, even while they are sitting on the baggage truck with their eyes shut while the wife is arguing with anybody in sight that her husband’s lungs ain’t worth as much as western folks seem to think, and they look concerned. They are right there, where it is going on. They don’t care who knows that they are the most interested parties present. Like a man on horseback that’s swallowed a dynamite cap and a sharp rock at the same time.
“But him. His name was Darrel, Darrel Howes. Maybe House. She called him Dorry. He just got off the train with his one grip and stood on our platform and sneered at it, the mountains, the space, at the Lord God Himself that watches a man here like a man might watch a bug, a ant.
“ ‘Our station ain’t much,’ I says. ‘You’ll have to give us a little time. We only been working on this country about two hundred years and we ain’t got it finished yet.’
“He looked at me, a tall fellow in clothes that hadn’t never seen as far west as Santone even, before he brought them. What the pitchure magazines would call a dook, maybe. ‘That’s all right with me,’ he says. ‘I don’t intend to look at any of it longer than I can help.’
“ ‘Help yourself,’ I said. ‘They’ll tell you in Washinton it belongs to you too.’
“ ‘They can have my part of it back soon then,’ he says. He looked at me. ‘You’ve got a house here. A camp.’
“I understood what he meant then, what he had come for; I hadn’t never suspected it. I guess I thought he was a drummer, maybe. A perfume drummer, maybe. ‘Oh,’ I says. ‘You mean Sivgut. Sure. You want to use it?’
“That was what he wanted, standing there in his eastern clothes like a Hollywood dook, sneering. And then I knew that he was just about scared to death. After them three or four days on the train with nobody to talk to except his own inhabitants, he had just about got himself scared to death. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It’s a good camp. You’ll like it up there. I’m going up there today. You can go with me, if you want to look at it.
I will get you back here by Thursday night.’ He didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention at all. ‘You’ll have a lot of time to listen to them little things before you die, my friend,’ I says to myself. ‘And without anybody to help you listen, neither.’ I thought that that was what it was. That he was just young (there was something about him that let you know, plain as if he had told you, that he was an only child and that his ma had been a widow since before he begun to remember; anyway, you could see that he had probably spent all his life being took care of by women, women to whom he looked like quite a figger, and here when he really needed to be took care of, he was ashamed to tell them the reason of it, and scared of himself.
I didn’t think he knew what he wanted to do or what he would do next; I thought that all he wanted was for somebody to tell him they would do this or that next, before the time come to need to do something else even. I thought he was running from himself, trying to lose himself in some crowd or in some strange surroundings where he would get lost and couldn’t keep up. I never thought different even when he asked about food. ‘We’ll find some at camp,’ I said. ‘Enough for a week.’
“ ‘You pass there every week do you?’ he said.
“ ‘Sure. Every Tuesday. I get there Tuesday morning. And Thursday night this team will be champing corn in Blizzard again.’
“The team was. I was in Blizzard too, but he was up there at Sivgut. He wasn’t standing in the door, watching me drive away, neither. He was down in the canyon behind the camp, chopping wood, and not making much of an out with the axe, neither. He gave me ten dollars, to buy him a week’s grub. ‘You can’t eat no ten dollars in a week,’ I said. ‘Five will be all you’ll want. I’ll bring it to you and you can pay me then.’ But that wouldn’t do him. When I left there, I had his five dollars.
“I didn’t buy the grub. I borrowed a buffalo robe from Matt Lewis, because the weather had changed that week and I knew it would be a cold ride for him, them two days back to town in the buckboard. He was glad to see the robe. He said the nights was getting pretty chilly, and that he would be glad to have it. So I left the mail with him and I went back to Painter’s and talked Painter out of enough grub to last him until next Tuesday. And I left him there again. He gave me another five dollars. ‘I’m making out a little better with the axe,’ he told me. ‘Don’t forget my grub, this time.’
“And I didn’t forget it. I carried it to him every Tuesday for two years, until he left. I’d see him every Tuesday, especially during that first winter that near about killed him, I’d find him laying on the cot, coughing blood, and I’d cook him up a pot of beans and cut him enough firewood to last until next Tuesday, and finally I took the telegram down to the railroad and sent it for him. It was to a Mrs. So-and-so in New York; I thought that maybe his ma had married again, and it didn’t make sense. It just said ‘I’ve two weeks more the less long than farewell’ and there wasn’t any name to it. So I signed my name to it, Lucas Crump, Mail Rider, and sent it on. I paid for it, too. She got there in five days. It took her five days to get there, and ten years to leave.”
“You said two years a minute ago,” I said.
“That was him. He just stayed two years. I guess that first winter maybe killed his bugs, same as boll weevils back east in Texas. Anyway, he begun to set up and to chop the wood himself, so that when I’d get there about ten o’clock she’d tell me he had done been gone since sunup. And then one day, in the spring after she come there the spring before, I saw him in Blizzard. He had walked in, forty miles, and he had gained about thirty pounds and he looked hard as a range pony. I didn’t see him but for a minute, because he was in a hurry. I didn’t know how much of a hurry until I saw him getting onto the east bound train when it pulled out. I thought then that he was still running from himself.”
“And when you found that the woman was still up there at Sivgut, what did you think then?”
“I knew that he was running from himself then,” the Mail Rider said.
III
“And the woman, you said she stayed ten years.”
“Sure. She just left yesterday.”
“You mean that she stayed on eight years after he left?”
“She was waiting for him to come back. He never told her he wasn’t coming back. And besides, she had the bugs herself then. Maybe it was the same ones, up and moved onto a new pasture.”
“And he didn’t know it? Living right there in the same house with her, he didn’t know she was infected?”
“How know it? You reckon a fellow that’s got a dynamite cap inside him has got time to worry about whether his neighbor swallowed one too or not? And besides, she had done left a husband and two children when she got the telegram. So I reckon she felt for him to come back. I used to talk to her,
