Frank Harris - My Life and Loves, Book 1

«Please trust me. I shall see to everything. I only wish,» I added, «I could do more for you.» «That's kind,» said the coquette, «very kind,» looking full at me. Emboldened by despair at her approaching departure, I added: «I'm so sorry you're going. I shall never forget you, never.» Taken aback by my directness, the girl laughed saucily, «Never means a week, I suppose.» «You will see,» I went on hurriedly, as if driven, as indeed I was. «If I thought I should not see you again and soon, I should not want to live.» «A declaration,» she laughed merrily, still looking me brightly in the face. «Not of independence,» I cried, «but of-» as I hesitated between «affection» and «love,» the girl put her finger to her lips.

«Hush, hush,» she said gravely, «you are too young to take vows and I must not listen»; but seeing my face fall, she added, «You have been very kind. I shall remember my stay in Chicago with pleasure,» and she stretched out her hand. I took it and held it treasuring every touch. Her look and the warmth of her ringers I garnered up in my heart as purest treasure. As soon as she had gone and the radiance with her, I cudgeled my brains to find some pretext for another talk. «She goes tomorrow,» hammered in my brain and my heartache choked me, almost prevented me from thinking. Suddenly the idea of flowers came to me. I'd buy a lot. No; everyone would notice them and talk. A few would be better. How many? I thought and thought.

When they came into the lounge next day ready to start, I was watching my opportunity, but the girl gave me a better one than I could have picked. She waited till her father and Arriga had left the hall and then came over to the desk. «You have ze checks?» she asked. «Everything will be given you at the train,» I said, «but I have these for you. Please accept them!» and I handed her three splendid red rosebuds, prettily tied up with maiden hair fern.

«How kind,» she exclaimed, coloring, «and how pretty,» she added, look-big at the roses. «Just three?» «One for your hair,» I said, with love's cunning, «one for your eyes and one for your heart-will you remember?» I added in a low voice intensely. She nodded and then looked up sparkling. «As long-as ze flowers last,» she laughed, and was back with her mother. I saw them into the omnibus and got kind words from all the party, even from Senor Arriga, but cherished most her look and word as she went out of the door. Holding it open for her, I murmured as she passed, for the others were within hearing: «I shall come soon.» The girl stopped at once, pretending to look at the tag on a trunk the porter was carrying. «El Paso is far away,» she sighed, «and the hacienda ten leagues further on. When shall we arrive-when?» she added, glancing up at me.

«When?» was the significant word to me for many a month; her eyes had filled it with meaning. I've told of this meeting with Miss Vidal at length because it marked an epoch in my life; it was the first time that love had cast her glamor over me, making beauty superlative, intoxicating. The passion rendered it easier for me to resist ordinary temptation, for it taught me there was a whole gorgeous world in love's kingdom that I had never imagined, much less explored. I had scarcely a lewd thought of Gloria. It was not till I saw her bared shoulders in evening dress that I stripped her in imagination and went almost wild in uncontrollable desire. Would she ever kiss me? What was she like undressed? My imagination was still untutored: I could picture her breasts better than her sex, and I made up my mind to examine the next girl I was lucky enough to see naked much more precisely. At the back of my mind was the fixed resolve to go to Chihuahua somehow or other in the near future and meet my charmer again, and that resolve in due course shaped my life anew.

In early June that year three strangers came to the hotel, all cattlemen I was told, of a new sort: Reece and Dell and Ford, the «Boss,» as he was called. Reece was a tall dark Englishman or rather Welshman, always dressed in brown leather riding boots, Bedford cord breeches and dark tweed cutaway coat: he looked a prosperous gentleman farmer; Dell was almost a copy of him in clothes, about middle height and sturdier-in fact an ordinary Englishman. The Boss was fully six feet tall, taller even than Reece, with a hatchet-thin, bronzed face and eagle profile-evidently a Western cattleman from head to foot. The head-waiter told me about them, and as soon as I saw them I had them transferred to a shady-cool table and saw that they were well waited on. A day or two afterwards we had made friends and a little later Reece got me measured for two pairs of cord breeches and had promised to teach me how to ride. They were cow-punchers, he said, with his strong English accent, and were going down to the Rio Grande to buy cattle and drive 'em back to market in Kansas City. Cattle, it appeared, could be bought in South Texas for a dollar a head or less and fetched from fifteen to twenty dollars each in Chicago. «Of course we don't always get through unscathed,» Reece remarked. «The plains Indians-Cherokees, Blackfeet and Sioux-take care of that; one herd in two gets through and that pays big.» I found they had brought up a thousand head of cattle from their ranch near Eureka, Kansas, and a couple of hundred head of horses. To cut a long story short, Reece fascinated me; he told me that Chihuahua was the Mexican province just across the Rio Grande from Texas, and at once I resolved to go on the trail with these cow-punchers, if they'd take me. In two or three days Reece told me I shaped better at riding than anyone he had ever seen, though he added, «When I saw your thick, short legs I thought you'd never make much of a hand at it.» But I was strong and had grown nearly six inches in my year in the States and I turned in my toes as Reece directed and hung on to the English saddle by the grip of my knees till I was both tired and sore. In a fortnight Reece made me put five-cent pieces between my knees and the saddle and keep them there when galloping or trotting. This practice soon made a rider of me so far as the seat was concerned, and I had already learned that Reece was a pastmaster in the deeper mysteries of the art, for he told me he used to ride colts in the hunting field in England; and «That's how you learn to know horses,» he added significantly. One day I found out that Dell knew some poetry, literature, too, and economics, and that won me completely; when I asked them would they take me with them as a cowboy, they told me I'd have to ask the Boss, but there was no doubt he'd consent; and he consented, after one sharp glance. Then came my hardest task: I had to tell Mr. Kendrick and Mr. Cotton that I must leave. They were more than astonished: at first they took it to be a little trick to extort a raise in salary: when they saw it was sheer boyish adventure-lust, they argued with me but finally gave in. I promised to return to them as soon as I got back to Chicago or got tired of cow-punching. I had nearly eighteen hundred dollars saved, which, by Mr. Cotton's advice, I transferred to a Kansas City bank he knew well.

Life on the Trail On the tenth of June we took a train to Kansas City, the gate at that time of the «wild west.» In Kansas City I became aware of three more men belonging to the outfit: Bent, Charlie, and Bob, the Mexican. Charlie, to begin with the least important, was a handsome American youth, blue eyed and fair haired, over six feet in height, very strong, careless, light hearted: I always thought of him as a big, kind, Newfoundland dog, rather awkward but always well meaning. Bent was ten years older, a war veteran, dark, saturnine, purposeful; five feet nine or ten in height with muscles of whipcord and a mentality that was curiously difficult to fathom. Bob, the most peculiar and original man I had ever met up to that time, was a little dried up Mexican, hardly five feet three in height, half Spaniard, half Indian, I believe, who might be thirty or fifty and who seldom opened his mouth, except to curse all Americans in Spanish. Even Reece admitted that Bob could ride «above a bit» and knew more about cattle than anyone else in this world. Reece's admiration directed my curiosity to the little man and I took every opportunity of talking to him and of giving him cigars, a courtesy so unusual that at first he was half inclined to resent it. It appeared that these three men had been left in Kansas City to dispose of another herd of cattle and to purchase stores needed at the ranch.