Nothing is more irritating then than his gratitude.
I traveled once in the Black Hills with such a tenderfoot.We were off from the base of supplies for a ten days' trip with only a saddle-horse apiece.
This was near first principles, as our total provisions consisted of two pounds of oatmeal, some tea, and sugar.Among other things we climbed Mt.Harney.
The trail, after we left the horses, was as plain as a strip of Brussels carpet, but somehow or another that tenderfoot managed to get off it.I hunted him up.We gained the top, watched the sunset, and started down.The tenderfoot, I thought, was fairly at my coat-tails, but when I turned to speak to him he had gone; he must have turned off at one of the numerous little openings in the brush.I sat down to wait.By and by, away down the west slope of the mountain, I heard a shot, and a faint, a very faint, despairing yell.I, also, shot and yelled.After various signals of the sort, it became evident that the tenderfoot was approaching.In a moment he tore by at full speed, his hat off, his eye wild, his six-shooter popping at every jump.He passed within six feet of me, and never saw me.Subsequently I left him on the prairie, with accurate and simple instructions.
"There's the mountain range.You simply keep that to your left and ride eight hours.Then you'll see Rapid City.You simply CAN'T get lost.Those hills stick out like a sore thumb."Two days later he drifted into Rapid City, having wandered off somewhere to the east.How he had done it I can never guess.That is his secret.
The tenderfoot is always in hard luck.Apparently, too, by all tests of analysis it is nothing but luck, pure chance, misfortune.And yet the very persistence of it in his case, where another escapes, perhaps indicates that much of what we call good luck is in reality unconscious skill in the arrangement of those elements which go to make up events.Apersistently unlucky man is perhaps sometimes to be pitied, but more often to be booted.That philosophy will be cryingly unjust about once in ten.
But lucky or unlucky, the tenderfoot is human.
Ordinarily that doesn't occur to you.He is a malevolent engine of destruction--quite as impersonal as heat or cold or lack of water.He is an unfortunate article of personal belonging requiring much looking after to keep in order.He is a credulous and convenient response to practical jokes, huge tales, misinformation.He is a laudable object of attrition for the development of your character.But somehow, in the woods, he is not as other men, and so you do not come to feel yourself in close human relations to him.
But Algernon is real, nevertheless.He has feelings, even if you do not respect them.He has his little enjoyments, even though he does rarely contemplate anything but the horn of his saddle.
"Algernon," you cry, "for heaven's sake stick that saddle of yours in a glass case and glut yourself with the sight of its ravishing beauties next WINTER.
For the present do gaze on the mountains.That's what you came for."No use.
He has, doubtless, a full range of all the appreciative emotions, though from his actions you'd never suspect it.Most human of all, he possesses his little vanities.
Algernon always overdoes the equipment question.
If it is bird-shooting, he accumulates leggings and canvas caps and belts and dog-whistles and things until he looks like a picture from a department-store catalogue.In the cow country he wears Stetson hats, snake bands, red handkerchiefs, six-shooters, chaps, and huge spurs that do not match his face.If it is yachting, he has a chronometer with a gong in the cabin of a five-ton sailboat, possesses a nickle-plated machine to register the heel of his craft, sports a brass-bound yachting-cap and all the regalia.This is merely amusing.But I never could understand his insane desire to get sunburned.A man will get sunburned fast enough; he could not help it if he would.Algernon usually starts out from town without a hat.Then he dares not take off his sweater for a week lest it carry away his entire face.I have seen men with deep sores on their shoulders caused by nothing but excessive burning in the sun.This, too, is merely amusing.It means quite simply that Algernon realizes his inner deficiencies and wants to make up for them by the outward seeming.Be kind to him, for he has been raised a pet.
The tenderfoot is lovable--mysterious in how he does it--and awfully unexpected.
