A Girl of the Plains Country

								

that Van Brunt was drinking hard and playing high. He found by
natural instinct the clever, well-bred, profligate young Englishmen
over on the Bar Thirteen, pensioned—or exiled—by their own families;
and after that, between the trips to town, there was drinking and
card playing at the Bar Thirteen. In those days the Three Sorrows
was the finest property under private ownership in the Panhandle,
with pastures all fenced—a rare thing at that time—watered by three
noble creeks whose springs were never dry. It had been well stocked
when Katharine bought it. Now Hank looked helplessly on, thinking of
the two children, saw the money from sales of beef poured into the
bottomless pit of Charley’s dissipations. And he understood that
more than one mortgage had been put on the place, and that a choice
pasture had been sold outright.
And Hank had another small worry, to which he finally applied his
own remedy. The men loved to sit on the long back porch, chairs
tilted against the wall, waiting for supper. They were freshly
washed as to faces and hands, damply slick as to hair; their
innocent enjoyment of company other than their own was so evident
that it would have been a hard heart indeed which would have grudged
them the society of the children; yet Hank listened and was
troubled. Did all cowboys swear so much? Had Snake Thompson’s
language always been what it now appeared? This might be Charley Van
Brunt’s ranch, Charley Van Brunt’s back porch, and these might be
Charley Van Brunt’s children—well, as a matter of fact, the
ownership of all the articles mentioned was so placed—yet Hank felt
himself obliged to speak out and speak distinctly on the subject.
“Boys,” he put it, “you-all have got to ride herd a little closer on
your language. Swearing—leastways more’n reason—around where
children air at—”
“Say, Hank,” broke in Shorty O’Meara, “how much is in reason to
swear when your stirrup leather busts on you, and your left eyebrow
hits the ground?”
“Aw, g’long with you,” Hank admonished, half sheepishly. “You know
how much. If you don’t you’ll soon find out.”
Old Snake Thompson’s sense of humor, liberty and justice was
outraged. Snake used very little language of any sort; when he
talked at all it was apt to be done almost exclusively in more or
less conventional and automatic profanity, and he made husky
protest:
“But, Pearsall—Goddlemighty—I mean—how’s a man to talk? How’s a
feller to express hisself? How’ll we get along without any o’ them
words?”
“Well,” said Hank dryly, “I could give you a pretty fair list of
substitutes.”
“Substitute cuss words?”
“Yes, jest that. You may never have took notice to the fact that I
don’t cuss, nor chew tobacker? Well, I used to do both—fact, I was
something of a star performer in them two lines.”
“What made you quit, Pearsall?” questioned Shorty discontentedly.