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Page 48
"'If you wasn't a Moses-meek little Mary's lamb, you wouldn't have been
took down this way,' says he. 'Haven't you got gumption enough not to
drink swamp water or fall down and scream whenever you have a little
colic or feel a mosquito bite you?' He made me a little mad.
"'You've got the bedside manners of a Piute medicine man,' says I. 'And
I wish you'd go away and let me die a natural death. I'm sorry I sent
for you.'
"'I've a mind to,' says George, 'for nobody cares whether you live or
die. But now I've been tricked into coming, I might as well stay until
this little attack of indigestion or nettle rash or whatever it is,
passes away.'
"Two weeks afterward, when I was beginning to get around again, the
doctor laughed and said he was sure that my friend's keeping me mad all
the time did more than his drugs to cure me.
"So that's the way George and me was friends. There wasn't any sentiment
about it--it was just give and take, and each of us knew that the other
was ready for the call at any time.
"I remember, once, I played a sort of joke on George, just to try him. I
felt a little mean about it afterward, because I never ought to have
doubted he'd do it.
"We was both living in a little town in the San Luis valley, running
some flocks of sheep and a few cattle. We were partners, but, as usual,
we didn't live together. I had an old aunt, out from the East, visiting
for the summer, so I rented a little cottage. She soon had a couple of
cows and some pigs and chickens to make the place look like home. George
lived alone in a little cabin half a mile out of town.
"One day a calf that we had, died. That night I broke its bones, dumped
it into a coarse sack and tied it up with wire. I put on an old shirt,
tore a sleeve 'most out of it, and the collar half off, tangled up my
hair, put some red ink on my hands and spashed some of it over my shirt
and face. I must have looked like I'd been having the fight of my life.
I put the sack in a wagon and drove out to George's cabin. When I
halloed, he came out in a yellow dressing-gown, a Turkish cap and patent
leather shoes. George always was a great dresser.
"I dumped the bundle to the ground.
"Sh-sh!' says I, kind of wild in my way. 'Take that and bury it, George,
out somewhere behind your house--bury it just like it is. And don--'
"'Don't get excited,' says George. 'And for the Lord's sake go and wash
your hands and face and put on a clean shirt.'
"And he lights his pipe, while I drive away at a gallop. The next
morning he drops around to our cottage, where my aunt was fiddling with
her flowers and truck in the front yard. He bends himself and bows and
makes compliments as be could do, when so disposed, and begs a rose bush
from her, saying he had turned up a little land back of his cabin, and
wanted to plant something on it by way of usefulness and ornament. So my
aunt, flattered, pulls up one of her biggest by the roots and gives it
to him. Afterward I see it growing where he planted it, in a place where
the grass had been cleared off and the dirt levelled. But neither George
nor me ever spoke of it to each other again."
The moon rose higher, possibly drawing water from the sea, pixies from
their dells and certainly more confidences from Simms Bell, the friend
of a friend.
"There come a time, not long afterward," he went on, "when I was able to
do a good turn for George Ringo. George had made a little pile of money
in beeves and he was up in Denver, and he showed up when I saw him,
wearing deer-skin vests, yellow shoes, clothes like the awnings in front
of drug stores, and his hair dyed so blue that it looked black in the
dark. He wrote me to come up there, quick--that he needed me, and to
bring the best outfit of clothes I had. I had 'em on when I got the
letter, so I left on the next train. George was--"
Bell stopped for half a minute, listening intently. "I thought I heard a
team coming down the road," he explained. "George was at a summer resort
on a lake near Denver and was putting on as many airs as he knew how. He
had rented a little two-room cottage, and had a Chihauhau dog and a
hammock and eight different kinds of walking sticks.
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