"Well, Mrs.Lane," said he, "I suppose by this Christ-mas you've gotten over being afraid of that fellow McRoy, haven't you? Madison and I have talked about it, you know.""Very nearly," said Rosita, smiling, "but I am still nervous sometimes.I shall never forget that awful time when he came so near to killing us.""He's the most cold-hearted villain in the world," said Berkly."The citizens all along the border ought to turn out and hunt him down like a wolf.""He has committed awful crimes," said Rosita, but -- I -- don't -- know.I think there is a spot of good somewhere in everybody.He was not always bad --that I know."
Rosita turned into the hallway between the rooms.
Santa Claus, in muffling whiskers and furs, was just coming through.
"I heard what you said through the window, Mrs.
Lane," he said."I was just going down in my pocket for a Christmas present for your husband.But I've left one for you, instead.It's in the room to your right.""Oh, thank you, kind Santa Claus," said Rosita, brightly.
Rosita went into the room, while Santa Claus stepped into the cooler air of the yard.
She found no one in the room but Madison.
"Where is my present that Santa said he left for me in here?" she asked.
"Haven't seen anything in the way of a present," said her husband, laughing, "unless he could have meant me."The next day Gabriel Radd, the foreman of the X 0Ranch, dropped into the post-office at Loma Alta.
"Well, the Frio Kid's got his dose of lead at last," he remarked to the postmaster.
"That so? How'd it happen?"
"One of old Sanchez's Mexican sheep herders did it!
-- think of it! the Frio Kid killed bv a sheep herder!
The Greaser saw him riding along past his camp about twelve o'clock last night, and was so skeered that he up with a Winchester and let him have it.Funniest part of it was that the Kid was dressed all up with white Angora-skin whiskers and a regular Santy Claus rig-out from head to foot.Think of the Frio Kid playing Santy!"A LITTLE LOCAL COLOUR
I mentioned to Rivington that I was in search of characteristic New York scenes and incidents -- some-thing typical, I told him, without necessarily having to spell the first syllable with an "i.""Oh, for your writing business," said Rivington; "you couldn't have applied to a better shop.What I don't know about little old New York wouldn't make a sonnet to a sunbonnet.I'll put you right in the middle of so much local colour that you won't know whether you are a magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward.When do you want to begin?"Rivington is a young-man-about-town and a New Yorker by birth, preference and incommutability.
I told him that I would be glad to accept his escort and guardianship so that I might take notes of Manhattan's grand, gloomy and peculiar idiosyncrasies, and that the time of so doing would be at his own convenience.
"We'll begin this very evening," said Rivington, him-self interested, like a good fellow."Dine with me at seven, and then I'll steer 'you up against metropolitan phases so thick you'll have to have a kinetoscope to record 'em."So I dined with Rivington pleasantly at his club, in Forty-eleventh street, and then we set forth in pursuit of the elusive tincture of affairs.
As we came out of the club there stood two men on the sidewalk near the steps in earnest conversation.
"And by what process of ratiocination," said one of them, "do you arrive at the conclusion that the division of society into producing and non-possessing classes predicates failure when compared with competitive systems that are monopolizing in tendency and result inimically to industrial evolution?""Oh, come off your perch!" said the other man, who wore glasses."Your premises won't come out in the wash.You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag.
You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it.You quote Marx and Hyndman and Kautsky -what are they? -- shines! Tolstoi? -- his garret is full of rats.I put it to you over the home-plate that the idea of a cooperative commonwealth and an abolishment of competitive systems simply takes the rag off the bush and gives me hyperesthesia of the roopteetoop! The skoo-kum house for yours!
I stopped a few yards away and took out my little notebook.
"Oh, come ahead," said Rivington, somewhat ner-vously; "you don't want to listen to that.""Why man," I whispered, "this is just what I do want to hear.These slang types are among your city's most distinguishing features.Is this the Bowery variety?
I really must hear more of it."
"If I follow you," said the man who had spoken flrst, "you do not believe it possible to reorganize society on the basis of common interest?""Shinny on your own side!" said the man with glasses.
"You never heard any such music from my foghorn.
What I said was that I did not believe it practicable just now.The guys with wads are not in the frame of mind to slack up on the mazuma, and the man with the portable tin banqueting canister isn't exactly ready to join the Bible class.You can bet your variegated socks that the situation is all spifflicated up from the Battery to breakfast! What the country needs is for some bully old bloke like Cobden or some wise guy like old Ben Frank-lin to sashay up to the front and biff the nigger's head with the baseball.Do you catch my smoke? What?"Rivington pulled me by the arm impatiently.
"Please come on," he said."Let's go see something.
This isn't what you want."
"Indeed, it is," I said resisting."This tough talk is the very stuff that counts.There is a picturesqueness about the speech of the lower order of people that is quite unique.Did you say that this is the Bowery variety of slang?""Oh, well," said Rivington, giving it up, "I'll tell you straight.That's one of our college professors talking.
He ran down for a day or two at the club.It's a sort of fad with him lately to use slang in his conversation.
