The Enamel Bug in Black Cañon

OLD Brown was late, and he expected trouble. He expressed this conviction to Kit Carson, more out of pride in proving himself a prophet than through any fear of consequences.

“I reckon we’ll ketch it, Kit,” he grunted hoarsely, as he shifted his basket with its ten pounds of gleaming trout.

Kit Carson replied with a sinuous wriggle of his long, rangy body, and a trustful wag of his tail that indicated entire freedom from apprehension. The moment they stepped on the veranda of the hotel Brown’s prediction was fulfilled, but the flush of his satisfaction faded under the violence of the outburst. Hilton, the proprietor, flung out of the dining-room door, the picture of shirt-sleeved, collarless wrath.

“What in the name of Gawd do you mean by coming wdth those fish at this time of day?” he shouted.

Brown gave a twitch of his bushy brows, much as a horse shrugs his mane to drive away a fly.

“They was a leetle slow bitin’ this mornin’.”

“Then I suppose we must delay breakfast till they get ready to bite.”

“It sorter looks that-a-way, — eether that or keep yer boarders frum goin’ up the cañon an’ skeerin’ all the fish in Wolf Crick with their new-fangled contraptions.”

“By heck! ” cried Hilton, invoking one of the minor deities in his pantheon, “you are the most aggravating old beggar I ever saw. I ’ll get. somebody else to supply this hotel with trout.”

“By grab! ” retorted Brown, with equal show of expletive, “you kain’t do it none too quick to suit me. An’ what’s more, I reckons as how you ’ll have to git along without them I ketched this mornin’.”

“Yes, clear out of here with your infernal fish, and don’t ever show your dirty old face around this hotel. Go back to your cave and live like some wild animal.”

“Looky yere, mister!” The mask of senility had fallen from Brown’s ageriven face; his stocky frame vibrated with the hot anger of youth. “Thar ain’t no man kin talk to me that-a-way. I lived in this yere cañon long afore you come, an’ I kin live yere after you go. The Injuns couldn’t drive me out, an’ I don’t reckon you kin. It was all owin’ to yore palaverin’ that I come to ketch fish fer you, an’” —

Whether Brown’s resentment would have reached a merely verbal climax or taken a physical form is not clear. He himself never knew. His remonstrance was interrupted by a volley of deepthroated barks and the patter of flying feet set to the fluting of the sweetest laughter he had ever heard, and around the corner of the veranda raced Kit Carson and a girl. And such a girl! One fleeting glimpse at her flushed, delighted face made Brown forget Hilton altogether.

“O Mr. Hilton!” she cried. “Please tell me who owns this beautiful dog.”

The hotel proprietor tossed a sullen nod at Brown. Ordinarily the old hunter would have viewed this acknowledgment of his ownership with composure, but the instant tribute of a pair of dancing dark eyes implied a distinction so weighty that he shifted uneasily under its burden.

His abashed gaze dropped to a pin in the form of a large beetle that fastened her gown at the neck. No fanciful scarab was this ornament. Fashioned of brighthued enamel, its spraddling legs of gold, it retained the ugliness of the insect it represented. It seemed about to crawl.

“So this is your dog!” exclaimed the girl, as she knelt and clasped her arms around the staghound’s neck. “Don’t you love him ?”

Perhaps it was the leading form of the question; or the pleading tone that seemed to entreat an affirmative. Before he knew it Brown had answered “Yes.”

As he explained it long afterward in relating the incident to Colonel Nelson : “O’ course me an’ Kit had allers ben pards, but I’d never thought o’ lovin’ him. But thar was that gal with her arms around Kit’s neck, an’ ef that did n’t mean she loved him, what does? An’ when she done asked me ef I loved him, whatever else could I say?”

The girl arose, after giving Kit Carson a pat on his shapely head. She saw the basket at Brown’s feet.

“What magnificent trout! Are they yours, too?”

“That’s what they be — mine.”

Hilton winced.

“Oh, I understand. You fish for the hotel. Do you catch many like these?”

“Yes, an’ I used to ketch a heap more afore the lungers got to goin’ up the cañon.”

Panic seized Hilton. He plunged into a fit of coughing that purpled his face, and left it distorted with agony in nowise pulmonary.

“Lungers!” laughed the girl. “I am a lunger, but I shall try to keep from spoiling your fishing.”

Unlucky the celibate that cannot gaze on woman without excess of reverence. Brown’s eyes, still able to single out antelope a mile away, could not discriminate between the telltale hectic pink and the rosy stain of health on that fair young face,

“Y—you” — he floundered.

Hilton picked up the basket.

“Bring them earlier to-morrow morning,” he flung back, as he fled through the doorway.

A slavish dumbness seized Brown, and his muscles grew tense from a rigor of self-consciousness.

“I — did n’t know” —

“ Of course you did n’t.” She took one of his tanned, knotted hands in both of hers. “I don’t look like an invalid, and I’m not, although they all say that. My doctor said a few months in Arizona would cure the weakness of my lungs. But tell me — is consumption a crime ? ”

“Not ef you had it.” Brown blurted out this chivalric impromptu with a warmth not expected of threescore and ten. He wondered whether her trill of laughter was prompted by pleasure or ridicule. Before he reached a conclusion, a waiter came out with his basket, and he seized the opportunity to escape.

“I am going to eat your largest trout for breakfast,” she called after him.

He halted and turned around. For a moment the graven seriousness of his face relaxed into a half-smile. Then the chill of diffidence froze his features into their old, set, stolid lines. When he spoke again he was far up the cañon, — his cañon where he had lived so long in defiant solitude.

Acted like’s if she were shore glad to see us, did n’t she, Kit? An’ her poortier’n a spotted pup!”

His dull fancy was quickened by the memory of a sweet face upturned to his, a pair of frail white arms around Kit Carson’s grizzled neck. To the cry of ease - loving age pleading for creature comforts in return for hateful allegiance to the hotel, he could oppose an unfaltering denial. But ah — have not other men forsaken even deeper antagonisms under the thrall of a picture less compelling? He decided to sjo on catching trout for Hilton.

“You’d orter see the new gal down to the ho-tel,” he said that morning to Colonel Nelson, as he put a cabbage and some potatoes in his basket.

“Ah, more ladies!” exclaimed the Colonel, his pale hand wandering with reminiscent dandyism to his snowy mustache and imperial. “I am delighted to see the sex well represented in our midst. But — did you notice any fresh newspapers at the hotel?”

“What do I keer fer newspapers? Nothin’ in ’em but politics.”

The warm light faded from Brown’s eyes. The first enthusiasm he had allowed himself in years had been snuffed. He could have hated Colonel Nelson if the rebuff had not been so elusive.

Unwittingly Hilton a day or two later became the god in the machine to furnish more tangible grounds for enmity.

“Now you are one of those writer people, Miss Wymore. Why don’t you write up Brown and Colonel Nelson? — only don’t forget to mention the hotel. I can give you all the facts. Just think of it, Brown has lived here for more than thirty years. Queer old devil — old-timer. I once asked him if he was a forty-niner. He swelled up like a turkey gobbler, and says, ‘Naw, forty-eighter.’”

“Before the gold rush!”

“Yes,” went on Hilton, warming up. “Had lots of adventures, too. Then there’s the Colonel, the only great statesman that did n’t die before the Civil War; used to know everybody in Washington. He’s been the means of civilizing Brown. They have a sort of reciprocity treaty; the Colonel trades vegetables for Brown’s game and fish. Brown used to live in a cave, and the Colonel got him to build a cabin. It nearly burned down once because the old savage did n’t know how to manage the stove. I hear he almost chokes to death every time he lights the fire.”

“What strange old men!” she exclaimed. “I am sure they each have a history.”

“Most folks in the territory have,” remarked Hilton cynically. “When we get real intimate with a man in Arizona, we sometimes ask him what his real name was before he came here. Anyway, let me know what you think of that write-up, — and don’t forget about the hotel,”

Colonel Nelson accepted the publicity resultant from the appearance of a special article in one of the San Francisco Sunday papers three weeks later, with the complacence of a man who has been through the experience many times in the past. It awakened a latent desire to figure in the public prints, although he was inclined to question the taste of linking his name with Brown’s. There was a slight basis for this objection, for Brown, in view of his former residence in a cave, was called a troglodyte. The polysyllable conveyed an invidious meaning to the Colonel.

In anticipation of future articles, he saw to it that Miss Wymore did not lack sufficient data. His frequent visits to the hotel gave him an opportunity to provide her with innumerable recollections of Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and especially Matt Carpenter of Wisconsin.

“Yes, if you will permit me to say it, Senator Carpenter was the greatest statesman of his day, although not generally so recognized. He and I were close personal friends. In fact, it was through his solicitation that I first entered the government service.”

This eulogy of the pioneer senator from the Badger State, orotundly declaimed and seasoned with warm Kentucky gesture, constituted the prologue and conclusion of his daily conversation. Occasionally it garnished a simple statement about the improvement in his cough. It was a formula quite familiar to others, like grace before meat, and was listened to with equal resignation.

Glib and inventive were the replies with which Brown stalled off Hilton’s inquiries as to what he thought of Miss Wymore’s story. He delivered his trout at dawn.

“Don’t know what we’d say ef she asked us about it,” he confided to Kit Carson.

But Kit played the traitor. One day as Miss Wymore walked up the cañon he leaped from the sparse shade of a clump of cottonwoods and bounded toward her with a whine of delight. He accepted a petting as a bribe, and led the way to where his master was fishing, lying on a huge boulder like a lizard in the sun. Brown turned his head at the crashing of the bushes.

“Hah!” he exclaimed in surprised guttural.

“I’ve caught you now!” she cried, shaking a finger at him. “Don’t try to run away.”

“I don’t see no ketchin’ about it,” he grunted with the brusquerie of cornered diffidence. “I come yere to ketch trout.”

“Oh, pardon me! I’ll go. I told you I would never spoil your fishing.”

He was on his feet instantly.

“Now don’t take it that-a-way,” he hastened, the growl in his voice dying hard, but dying nevertheless. “I’ve ben wantin’ to see you” —

“Then why have you avoided me?”

“I kain’t read.” He blurted it out with dogged defiance.

“ What difference does that make ? ”

“Hilton told me you written this.” From his pocket he drew a carefully folded page torn from a newspaper. “He said it was somethin’ ’bout me, but — I hain’t never read it.”

Far better would it have been for Brown had he accepted Hilton’s garbled version. Not even Miss Wymore’s soft accents could smooth the harsh edge of rivalry. Long before she finished reading, she saw the shadow on his face.

“I reckon the Kurnel has ben a big gun in his day.”

“But think of your life with all its adventures! You must tell me something of it.”

He demurred with childish stubbornness. She coaxed; she smiled, and caressed Kit Carson. He yielded. It was a story of his life with the Mojaves, nearly half a century before. It was a wonderful story. She forgot the creek racing by with eddied, refreshing turbulence. The sun withdrew unheeded behind its scraggy abattis of piñon, and its rearguard of shadows softened the brilliant tints of the cañon walls to a sober gray. All the while Brown sat cross-legged on his boulder, a figure hoary, ancient; an uncouth, barbaric Homer singing the epic of the pioneer.

Hilton would have won fame as a press agent. With large voice and larger imagination he exploited the “hermits.” They became the fashion after the distracting beauties of the cañon had bred ennui. At least Colonel Nelson did.

“I believe I could love the Colonel if I knew more about American history,” said a pallid young widow with brilliant red hair. “ It would be lovely to appreciate his recollections.” Thus did ignorance thwart Cupid.

At last the day came, the proudest, most dreaded day in Brown’s lonely life. He was at home to callers, and his guests were Miss Wymore and a party from the hotel. From his cabin door he pointed out the cave where he formerly had lived. It had been the lair of a giant grizzly. He killed the bear in a fight at close quarters,— finished him with a knife plunge under the left shoulder. As trophies of the combat, there on the cabin wall was the great spreading pelt, and here on his own shoulder a scar where the monster in his last dying rush had left the mark of a rending paw.

“ How thrilling! ” exclaimed the widow. “It is a great deal more interesting than any of Colonel Nelson’s stories. Don’t you think so, Miss Wymore ?”

This appeal brought forth a twofold answer, — first a sidelong, squelching stare, then: —

“Colonel Nelson’s stories are so different from Mr. Brown’s that it is hard to compare them. Of course Colonel Nelson’s are not so exciting.”

Neither the mute nor spoken rebuff missed Brown. Nor had he failed to note the length of time it took the Colonel to read the newspapers since Miss Wymore had come to the hotel. There was a sullen menace in his eye that warned the Colonel when they met on the trail next day. It suggested silence and aloofness. The proud old Kentuckian stiffened his lank shoulders and accepted the challenge. Then Hilton received his first intimation that the reciprocity treaty no longer existed up the cañon.

“I ’ll take a can o’ tomayters this mornin’.” Brown’s tone implied a threat rather than a request.

“Why don’t you get fresh ones from the Colonel ?”

“I said I wanted a can o’ tomayters. Do I git ’em ?”

“ You sure do,” replied Hilton. And his unsatisfied curiosity sought vent in facile conjecture. He chuckled something about “two dogs in a manger,” and hurried off to find Miss Wymore.

“Do you know,” he said to her in a tone of easy banter, “I believe those two old bucks are getting ready to lock horns over you.”

“Won’t you be kind enough to explain your figure of speech ?” she asked with a snap that made him feel as if he were not clad presentably.

“I guess I’ll let you find out what I mean,” was his discreet reply.

And she did, the very next afternoon. Brown was telling her of the death of Navon, the old war chief of the Navajoes, just after the close of the Mexican War.

“Navon was a great fighter,” he said. “That was afore his tribe had settled down to blanket weavin’. He was a braver warrior than this yere sneakin’ Geronimo, though he wa’n’t so murderous” —

He stopped, and his eyes protruded as if a strangling hand had tightened around his throat. The tall, thin figure of Colonel Nelson was suddenly before them like a ship out of the fog. He lifted his rakish Stetson in salute to Miss Wymore, neatly minced around a bunch of soapweed, and passed on up the cañon with dignity secure and honor intact. A glare of primitive passion shot the blood into Brown’s leathery countenance.

“Tell me some more about Navon, she asked.

“Naw — not now,” he gasped. He stared moodily ahead, and gave a final gulp. “ I don’t reckon my yarns is as good as his’n.”

“Whose ? ” She hoped expediency justified this hollow subterfuge.

He jerked a stubby thumb over his shoulder.

“ Colonel Nelson’s ? Of course they are. How could you think they were not ?”

“Wal — you didn’t seem to think so t’other day when one o’ them gals asked you.” He turned to her with the sensitive appeal of a child.

“Don’t — don’t!” she cried, winking sturdily against a tear. “You must not think of what I said the other day. It was an embarrassing position, for Colonel Nelson, too, has been kind to me. Promise me you will once more be friendly with him. Go to him to-day — for my sake.”

“For my sake!” In that compelling phrase she voiced the essence of her entreaty. Slowly he raised his head as if afraid his face would betray his complete surrender. On his arm rested a small hand in gentle, pleading pressure. It was brown and firmly fleshed. Then his sluggish mind grasped what his eyes had often seen, — the girl who stood before him was no longer an invalid. The fevered flush was gone from her cheeks, buried deep under a coat of rich, glowing tan. His cañon had done this, — his cañon with its dry, rarefied air and unstinted bounty of sunshine.

“Ef you say so — yes.”

“Bless your noble old heart! I knew you would be generous enough to do it. If this was the age of chivalry, you should be my knight.”

“ Yer which ? ” Feminine praise, however sweet, was a strange tongue to Brown.

“My knight, — at least you shall wear some token. What shall it be ? Will the bug do ?”

She unfastened the pin and held it up.

“ Me wear a pinchin’ bug! ” He gave a gruff cackle at the thought. “Ef you put it on, it stays. But me wear a pinchin’ bug.” He cackled again.

“ It is a badge of honor, but you will be worthy of it. He gave it to me, but he won’t object to my giving it to you.”

“Who — the Kurnel?” Brown drew back.

“No,” she laughed with just a hint of shyness. “Some one who doesn’t even live in Arizona. Now are you satisfied ? ”

He was. His assent, half grunt, half growl, showed absolute content with the elimination of the Colonel. The unknown! had a free field.

She pinned the bug full on the fronl of his faded blue shirt.

“You must go now and see Colonel Nelson, and to-night come and tell me all about it.”

“I don’t like to hang around the hotel,” he protested.

“Just this once,” she pleaded. “I’ll save a chair in a corner of the veranda for

you.”

“Ef you say so — yes.” This time the words came more easily, like an oath of fealty grown familiar.

He arrived at Colonel Nelson’s just in time to hear yelps of pain from Kit Carson ; a chorus of frightened squawks gave him circumstantial and audible proof that the Colonel was justified in wielding his stout plum stick so vigorously.

“That’s right! Give it to him, Kurnel! ” shouted Brown with the approval a Spartan father might have shown in the punishment of a thieving son.

Colonel Nelson stopped and raised his brows in patrician inquiry. But Brown not only held aloft the olive branch; he would thrust it into the Colonel’s hand.

“He’d orter be whaled,” he went on, as the staghound slunk past him. “Ain’t got no right chasin’ chickens. Hard enough to raise out yere.”

Such hearty moral support made defense unnecessary. The Colonel smiled in acknowledgment. Blandly he caressed his snowy imperial. The action indicated a receptive mood. Plainly Kit Carson’s escapade had been the opening wedge of peace.

“Kurnel,” said Brown with a directness that made the old Kentuckian stand at attention. “Kit’s my dog, an’ I’m glad you walloped him. But I did n’t stop in to see you ’bout him. I come to tell you I’m good an’ plenty sorry” —

Not if the Colonel had shouted at the top of his voice could the interruption have been more abrupt. Under the spell of that withering gaze, the words shriveled on Brown’s lips, although his bearded chin, as if by momentum, wagged grotesquely on to the end of the unspoken sentence. In that stare the Colonel blazed forth the concentrates of every hostile emotion. His black eyes, snapping and fervid in their incandescent glare, were focused on the front of Brown’s shirt. Involuntarily one of the old hunter’s hands flew to the spot. It touched the enamel bug.

Colonel Nelson lifted his flashing eyes to Brown’s troubled face. His rage was at its height, but it was the well-leashed rage of a fine old gentleman.

“You might have saved yourself the trouble of coming to see me. Your dawg, suh, has given me sufficient annoyance. I hope you will not add to it.” He turned and strode into his cabin.

With jaw dropped in wonder, Brown gazed vacantly at the dosed door, A cold, black nose was thrust into his limp hand, giving and seeking consolation.

“What’s got me buffaloed, Kit, is what we’re goin’ to tell her,” he mumbled at last.

This thought still disturbed him when he went to keep his appointment at the hotel that night. The great pile of halfhewn logs, rustic simplicity to others, was to him the acme of highly flavored civilization. From the veranda came the babble of many voices.

In the semi - darkness of the corner nearest him he saw a woman dressed in white. She dressed in white. Some one was talking to her. He edged closer. Silhouetted against the moonlight was a familiar, broad-brimmed hat, almost as broad as the shoulders of the man that wore it. From the corner came this fragment: —

“Yes, if you will permit me to say it, Senator Carpenter was the greatest statesman of his day, although not generally ”—

He knew the rest — he knew it all — he had heard it a hundred times before. And this was the way she had saved a place for him!

When Kit Carson trotted sniffingly in front of the hotel, Miss Wymore ran out to meet his master. Around the side of the building she saw a squat figure — in the unsatisfying light it was little more than a shadow — moving swiftly up the cañon. She called out. But the shadow sped doggedly on, and soon blended with the gloom of greater shadows.

She looked up at the veranda, and saw Colonel Nelson talking with the redhaired widow.

“I wonder ”—she mused. But she did not interrupt the tête-à-tête.

Vainly did she thread the bouldery thickets along Wolf Creek next day, and for many days thereafter. Once she stopped at Brown’s cabin. The door was open, but with the exception of the sprawling hide of the grizzly on the wall, the interior was primitively bare. Hilton preserved a puzzling silence. His air of meekness was too good to be true. On the morning of her departure from the hotel, he came to her as she sat at breakfast.

“You don’t seem to care much for trout,” he remarked.

“I’m afraid I’m tired of them,” she replied. “Fish never appealed to me as being especially good for breakfast — too much like pie.”

“Yet you used to like them,” he suggested, with just a twinkle of malice.

“Mr. Hilton!” In the bolt uprightness of her attitude he saw the folly of further fencing. “Where is he ?”

“Not so fast, now!”

“ Has he been catching trout for you ? ”

“Every day. This is all I know about it: one morning — I suppose it was at the time you quarreled ” —

“There was no quarrel.”

“Well — whatever it was. He came here, and there was one trout — a beauty — lying on top separated from the rest by willow twigs. ‘That’s fer her,’ he said. He has done the same thing every day. And you have n’t eaten one of them.”

“I must see him before I go.” The imperative was plain in her tone, in spite of a muffled voice and a mist before her eyes.

“Now,” decided Hilton. “ Your stage leaves in half an hour.”

It looked much like one of Hilton’s plots,—this meeting,—but she forgave that. There, leaning against one of the veranda posts, stood Brown, almost hidden under the rebellious folds of the great bearskin from his cabin.

“I’m gittin’ old, an’ blankets ’ll do better for me than a b’arskin,” he growled, in urging her to accept it. “I’d ruther you’d have it than some cow puncher that’d trade it off fer a saddle or make a pair o’ chaps outen it.”

They had no time for explanations. Perhaps they were not needed. But before she took her place in the stage, she turned to him with a smile that would have stirred even colder blood.

“I did like your stories the best,” she said. “And you mistook some one else for me that night.”

In spite of this triumph, Brown felt he had been tricked by the Colonel.

Winter — the winter of the Mogollons — came to the cañon. None felt its bitterness save Brown and Colonel Nelson. It was such a winter as made Hilton say, in explaining the closing of the hotel: —

“You know how hot it gets in Yuma in the summer? Well, it’s just that cold here in the winter.”

An Arctic waste, — a bleak and desolate no-man’s land, shunned by living things. Even the coyotes and timber wolves retreated to the plains below. Snow came in gusts and opaque clouds, whirled in volleys and broadsides by the fury of the wind. One blizzard undid the titanic work of another, and the face of the landscape changed daily. The cañon became a flume through which winter shunted its torrents of rage and tumult.

In all his residence in the Mogollons, Brown had seen nothing to equal it. Both he and Colonel Nelson suffered from cold and hunger before spring came, yet not even their mutual misery bridged the gulf between them. They met but once, Each had an armful of firewood gathered in a lull between blizzards. Enfeebled though they were by hardships, a burst of sullen pride stiffened them for a moment, and they passed on the forsaken trail like strangers in a crowded street.

June again. With the opening of the hotel, Brown resumed his occupation as purveyor of fish and game, but he avoided all new intimacies. One day, after he had delivered his morning’s catch, Hilton called out to him: —

“By the way, Brown, there is some mail here for you.”

Hilton drew from beneath the counter a square envelope. Brown reached for it with nervous fingers, and looked at it with the reverence of the illiterate.

“I’ll have to git somebody to read it. I ain’t got no glasses.”

Hilton took it and opened it. First came an invitation to Miss Wymore’s wedding. But more precious than this was a note to Brown, telling him the bearskin should have the place of honor in her new home.

“Colonel Nelson got one of the invitations, but there was n’t any note,” remarked Hilton. “But say, what’s the meaning of this?”

He held out the sheet to Brown. Below the signature was a lifelike sketch of a beetle with crooked, spraddling legs.

“It takes me to read that! ” exulted Brown with the superiority arising from exclusive knowledge.

The first thing he did when he got home was to go fishing. He had wonderful luck, and soon landed half a dozen magnificent trout. Then he and Kit Carson went to Colonel Nelson’s cabin.

The Colonel evidently was expecting callers, for he came to the door to meet them. Brown was the first to speak when they stepped inside.

“I’ve got a right peart string o’ fish that had orter come in handy.”

“Thank you, Mr. Brown,” said the Colonel, as he took the peace offering. “Now, won’t you permit me to” —

“Not by a dern sight. Me an’ you has gone cahoots on this yere gulch too long fer ary one to talk o’ payin’ fer anything.”

There was a brief silence during which both sat down. Brown caught sight of a square envelope lying on the rough deal table.

“Kurnel,” he said hesitatingly, “I see you — got one — too.”

“Yes,” answered Colonel Nelson softly. “And — you ?”

“Yes.”

The kindly look with which they regarded each other was an open avowal of an offensive and defensive alliance, and Kit Carson ratified the new convention by licking Colonel Nelson’s hand.