Annie Johnston - Travelers Five Along Life's Highway

Jimmy pushed him back. "You're getting too frisky," he admonished. "You'll be took again if you ain't careful. Yes, I know just what you're pining for. You want to see the hills all red with squaw berries or pink in arbutus time; and the mountain brooks – nothing like these muddy old irrigating ditches – so clear you can see the pebbles in the bottom, and the trout flipping back and forth so fast you can hardly see their speckles. But Lord! boy – you don't want to go back there now in mid-winter. The roads are piled up with drifts to the top of the stone fences and the boughs of the sugar-bush are weighed down with snow till you'd think you was walking through a grove of Christmas trees."

"Oh, go on !" pleaded Dane, as he paused. His eyes were closed, but a smile rested on his face as if the scenes Jimmy described were his for the moment. "Jimmy, it's – it's like heaven to hear you talk about it! Don't stop."

To keep the smile on the white face, that rapt, ineffable smile of content, Jimmy talked on. Over forty years lay between him and the scenes he was recalling. He had wandered far afield from his straight-going, path-keeping Puritan family. He had been glad at times that they had lost track of him, and that wherever he went he was known only as "Jimmy." Gradually the reminiscences like the touch of a familiar hand on a troubled brow, soothed Dane into forgetfulness of his surroundings, and he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

Just at dusk that evening, when Batty Carson went around to the kitchen for his usual glass of new milk, he was surprised to see Jimmy down by the wood-pile. He was vigorously at work, helping unload a wagon of mesquite, and quite as vigorously scolding the Indian who had brought it for coming so late.

"Thought he was going to leave," croaked Batty, nodding towards the wood-pile as he took the glass extended towards him.

Hillis chuckled. "Says he's staying on Dane's account; that it would have touched the heart of a coyote the way he begged not to be left to die among strangers. It seems they're both from the same state, so they're almost claiming kin. I rather guess though, that when he'd cooled down he was glad of any old excuse to stay, and when the boy begged him and Mrs. Welsh seconded the motion, he felt he could give in without any let-down to his dignity."

The Indian, gathering up his reins, rattled away in the empty wagon, and Jimmy began to fill his chip-basket, singing in a high, tremulous falsetto as he worked. His voice had been his pride in his youth. It was still sweet, although it cracked at times on the higher notes —

Hillis laughed. "Sings as if he fairly feels his wings sprouting. It's a sure sign he's at peace with the world when he trots out those sentimental old tunes. He doesn't sound now much like the man who was in here this noon, cussin' and slashing around with a butcher knife."

But Jimmy had not forgotten. He cooked his own supper that night, first ostentatiously wiping the skillet and everything else that Matsu had touched, with such an expression of disgust on his face that the little Jap's fine sense of humour was tickled. He shrugged his shoulders, giggled his usual jolly giggle, and afterwards mimicked the whole scene until Mrs. Welsh and Hillis nearly choked with laughter.

Dane was up in a few days, able to go to the dining room and to drive short distances. Young Mrs. Courtland spoke of his improvement to Jimmy one morning as they watched him drive away with Hillis in the ranch surrey. They were going to a neighbouring orange grove to replenish the stock in the storeroom. Jimmy, kneeling in the path, mending Buddy's wooden goat, drove a final tack before he straightened himself to answer.

"No, ma'am!" he said emphatically. "That boy'll never be what is to say really better. When he tears the last leaf off that calendar in his tent he ain't going to need next year's."

Mrs. Courtland looked up, shocked, frightened. "He seems almost as well as my husband, and he is going to get well." She said it defiantly.

"Sure," answered Jimmy. "But he isn't dying of homesickness and worry along with his lung trouble. He's got you and Buddy and the cash. He doesn't have to drive himself nearly crazy thinking that the time is bound to come when those he loves best will be left without a roof over their heads on account of him. It was worse than cruel – it was a downright crime for that doctor to build their hopes up so. If he'd had sense enough to doctor a June-bug he'd have seen that nothing can cure the lad. To send him on such a wild goose chase is bad enough, but to send him alone and as poor as he is – Good Lord – "

Jimmy paused, remembering his audience, just in time to stop the malediction on his tongue.

"But," urged Mrs. Courtland, unconsciously moved to the championship of the unknown doctor by the fact that her father was a physician, "other men have come alone and they seem to be getting on all right."

"Yes, but if you take notice they're all the kind that had bucked up against the world before they got sick, and were used to shifting for themselves. Now there's Batty Carson. He's going to get well. He goes about it as if he was training to get on a foot-ball team. So much deep breathing every so often, hot beef juice at nine, raw eggs at ten, fifty licks at the wood-pile at eleven – What with his sun baths and water baths and rubdowns, looking at his thermometer and weighing himself and feeling his pulse and counting his breaths and watching the clock, he ain't got time to miss his folks. Most of the boarders this year happen to be that sort, or else they've got money to go in for all kinds of amusements that make them forget their troubles. But there was a pitiful lot of cases here last winter. They was too far gone when they come to have any fight in 'em. And that's what I say – it's heartless of the doctors to ship them off here when they've only one chance in a thousand. The West is full of 'em and it ain't right."

Batty Carson, shuffling cards at the little table set in the shade behind the next tent, looked up with a wink when he heard his name mentioned. The others in the game smiled with him as Jimmy went on, and a voice from one of the farther tents called, "Go it, Jimmy! You ought to hire a hall and not waste all that eloquence on a lot of lungers who already vote your ticket. Wish you'd bring me a box of matches when you get around to it."

Taking the tents in order, as was his custom, emptying slops and filling pitchers, Jimmy gradually worked his way along the row until he came to the one outside of which the card-game was going on in silence. As he moved around inside setting things to rights, Batty Carson held up a finger and winked.

"Listen!" he whispered. There was a clinking of bottles on the wash-stand, then a soft plash into the slop-jar, and Jimmy cleared his throat with a muffled "kha-a-a" as if he had just swallowed something good.

"The old buzzard's been at my alcohol bottle again," whispered Batty. "Last time he went against it he didn't leave me enough for one good rub-down, and then he had the face to reel off a long temperance lecture on what a pity it was that so many of us fellows kept spirits in our tents."

A loud laugh followed Jimmy as he walked out innocently clinking his pails. There was a smell of alcohol in his wake. He had spilled some on his clothes. Ignorant of the cause of their mirth he looked back at them over his shoulder with a friendly smile. As he dropped the bucket into the cistern out by the bamboo thicket, his voice floated back in a high cracked falsetto:

Batty laughed again. "What kind of a bet will you fellows put up on Jimmy's prospect of even getting within gun-shot of heaven's gate?" he asked.