George Owen Baxter

The Three Crosses

Warsaw 2017

Contents

I. INTRODUCING BARRY HOME

II. THE PALMIST

III. FATE

IV. JUST RIDING

V. FUNERAL ACTIVITIES

VI. PAWNSHOP PURCHASE

VII. THE PIECE OF GLASS

VIII. FATE'S GAME

IX. SIPPING BEER

X. THE MAN RAN

XI. SHE PROPOSES

XII. ALONE

XIII. THE PAWNBROKER

XIV. THE GREAT RUBY

XV. THE RETURN

XVI. FOOD FOR TALK

I. INTRODUCING BARRY HOME

BEFORE narrating the strange events that befell Barry Home, the best thing is to get pretty close to the man, because he was a good many jumps from any young girl’s ideal of youth and beauty. As for looks, he was about the romantic height of six feet, but his weight was not a pound over a hundred and sixty. He was not small boned, either. There was plenty of substance to his wrists and feet and shoulder bones, but the muscle was laid sparingly on top of this frame. It was tough stuff, very enduring and surprisingly strong. He was not a very powerful man, but, like a desert wolf, though he looked all skin and bones, he could run all day and fight all night. His legs, there is no doubt, curved out more than a shade. That curve helped to lock him in place on any horse, large or small. But it was not beautiful, and neither was the distinct stoop of his shoulders that threw his neck forward at an awkward angle and made his chin jut out.

These curves and angles made a slouchy man out of Barry Home, and his clothes were not worn with any attempt to rectify that impression. At the moment when important events began to happen to him, he was dressed in common or garden overalls that were rubbed white along the seams and that bagged enormously at the knee. He had on a flannel shirt of uncertain color, and a badly knotted bandanna was at his neck. Because it was cold, he was wearing a coat, too. It was the sort of coat that seems never to have been a part of a suit, but, coming singly into the world, it had simply been a coat from the beginning. There was a great oil spot on the right shoulder. The left elbow was patched with a large, triangular section of blue jeans, and this patch had not been sewed on well, therefore, the cloth of the sleeve was pulled quite awry.

Sagging well below the bottom of the coat appeared the gun belt, so loose that it appeared about to drop over the narrow hips of this man. And far down on the right thigh there was the holster with the flap buttoned over the handles of the gun. To look at that arrangement, one would have said that the gun was worn for the purpose of shooting snakes and vermin, rather than to rough it with other men. And that, in fact, was the case. It was a hard-working gun, part of the proper equipment of a hard-working man. When he was in town, he thought a revolver was a burden and a bore. But when he was on the range, he would have felt rather naked and indecent if he had not had the familiar lump and bump hanging down from his right hip.

Another conclusion about the dress of Barry Home would have been that he was absolutely free from vanity. But, when one came to the boots, there the opinion stuck and changed, for they were the finest quality of leather and made to order so that they fitted as gloves should fit, and shoes so seldom do. But more amazing than the boots were the spurs, which were actually plated with heavy gold–gold spurs to stick into the hairy sides of bronchos on the range.

Perhaps that set Barry Home a little apart from the others? Perhaps it was that. It was certainly not his superiority in the matter of personal habits.

Your ordinary cowhand will sweat and get dust down the neck for six days or so. When the seventh comes, he lugubriously begs a small quantity of boiling water from the cook and pours it into a galvanized iron washtub, adding not very much more cool water. Then, he peels off his clothes, takes a scrubbing brush, and gingerly enters the bath with a chunk of laundry soap. He looks, then, like a cross between a starved crow and a restored statue, the original bronze being cut off at the nape of the neck and the wrists, and the torso being restored in shockingly bad taste to the purest white marble.

This bathing is not a pleasant ceremony, and the boys do not like it. Generally they get through it once a week. But sometimes they do not. This is a sad thing, but the truth must out. You who have a steam-heated bathroom at your convenience–how many baths would you take in a bunkhouse refrigerated by hurricanes at twenty below zero?

Well, Barry Home was not one whit better than the average. In addition, he had other unclean habits. For instance, the paper tag of a package of high-grade tobacco was generally hanging out of the breast pocket of his shirt and the soiled yellow strings of the little sack, as well. He was always rolling a smoke, and letting dribblings of the golden dust fall into the wrinkles of his coat and the pockets. He had a way, too, of removing a cigarette from his mouth and sticking the butt of it on the first convenient surface, he hardly cared where.

On winter evenings, Barry Home was fond of smoking a pipe in the bunkhouse. His pipe was black. The forward lip of it had been pounded to a decided bevel in knocking out the ashes. In the back of the pipe there was a deep crack, and Barry Home kept the old pipe from falling to pieces by twisting around it a bit of small-sized baling wire which often grew hot enough to burn through even his thick hide. Every winter Barry Home decided that he would have to give up that battered excuse for a pipe and get a new one. But when he remembered how a new pipe parched the throat and scorched the tongue, he always weakened. Besides, the old pipe was endeared by the many lies he had told around the stem of it, breathing forth clouds of smoke and sulphurous untruths.

For he was a great liar–on winter evenings. In fact, he preferred always the most roundabout way of getting at a thing. The truth was to Barry Home like a glaring, noonday sun, and he preferred the mysterious half-tones, the twilight glories, and profundities of the imagination.

To continue the list of his bad habits, it must be admitted that he chewed tobacco, though this was strictly a summer vice. He had an idea that a quid of tobacco stowed in one cheek keeps the throat moist in the most acrid August weather. He even believed that if one stowed the quid far back in the pouch of the cheek, and took a drink of water from a canteen, the water so flavored had tonic properties.

So, from time to time, he would buy for himself a long plug of good chewing tobacco, each cut of which was ornamented with a tin star stamped into the hard leaf. This tobacco was sweetly flavored with molasses, and it was kept neither in a pouch nor in a metal case, but simply in a hip pocket, so that it was generally much battered against the cantle of the saddle and was compressed on the rims.

To continue the discussion of Barry Home along equally personal lines, his talents were such as one often finds on the range. In no respect were they exceptional. For instance, with guns he had much acquaintance, but he was by no means a great expert. His rifles had killed for him a good many deer and one grizzly bear. He was very fond of talking about that bear, and the story grew more extended and the action of it was more dangerous with the passage of every year.

But he was not a dead shot. He could not bring down the body of a running deer, blurred with speed, as it shot through the brush four or five hundred yards away. He had heard of a good many men who could do that trick every time, but he never had seen the trick done, and he never had met a man who personally claimed that he could do it.

With a revolver he also could hit a mark, if it were not too far away, and if it obligingly stood still. He did not fan the hammer. It is true that he stuck to the old-fashioned, single-action gun, and he was quite skillful in cocking the hammer with his thumb, but the trigger was not a hairtrigger, and neither was it filed away. In common with many other fellows, his peers, he had had plenty of fights, but they had all been with fists. He never had pulled knife or gun on any man. If he had to do such a thing, he would play slow and sure, trying to get close to his mark, and settle the affair with one well-placed slug of lead. But he did not relish the thought of gun fights. The idea of them frightened him.

He was a good rider, as a matter of course. But he was not a flash, fit to win the blue ribbon and the highest prize at a rodeo, where professional horsebreakers exhibited their uncanny skill. He had broken a great many tough, bad mustangs, but he did not do it from choice. When he selected his riding string, he sacrificed a good deal both of beauty and speed for the sake of the large, quiet eye that is apt to bespeak horse sense and good nature. Even so, every year he would be bucked off, three or four times, and he hated that. Whenever he felt a horse arching its back under the saddle, he grew a little cold and sick in the pit of his stomach. He would shout loudly and jerk on the reins to distract the mind of the pony. And he was almost devoutly thankful when such an ordeal ended with his feet still securely in the stirrups.

With a rope he could do the ordinary work, but he had no fancy tricks up his sleeve, and never, never did he uncoil a rope except when the season required work of that sort. Personally, he preferred the light, forty-foot, Texas rope, for he had learned with that kind. Now he was much farther north. He had to swing sixty feet of heavy lariat. That was necessary because the cattle were much bigger–a Texas pony would hardly hold these huge steers, and the bigger, clumsier horses one found on the northern range could not maneuver as close to the target as could the Southern mustangs, quickfooted cats that they are. One needed that sixty-foot length of rope. Sometimes one wished for the strength of arm and the dexterity to throw one of a hundred feet.

In conclusion, one must add, among the talents of Barry Home, that he was a first-rate cowman; that he generally held his jobs for a long stretch at a time; and that he was quite generally liked and respected. He was a veteran and had campaigned in this frontier cattle war for fourteen years. He was referred to as an old-timer–he was called Old Man Barry Home. He was, in fact, of advanced years, having numbered thirty-two of them, all told.

He was a fellow of some education and could talk book English well, but ordinarily he spoke a vile lingo of the range. If he could understand the other fellow and make himself understood at the same time, he was contented.

This Barry Home, here truthfully portrayed, was nevertheless the central figure in the remarkable events which are about to be described. And I dare say that even in daydreams, he never imagined himself accomplishing such things as now fell to his lot. Perhaps a shrewd judge of character might have expected a good deal from him, once the blue, steady fire began to burn in his eyes and the long, lean jaw to set.

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