The Spinster Meets The Unknown
On a Monday noon a small company of horsemen strung out along the trail from Sunk
Creek to gather cattle over their allotted sweep of range. Spring was backward, and they,
as they rode galloping and gathering upon the cold week's work, cursed cheerily and
occasionally sang. The Virginian was grave in bearing and of infrequent speech; but he
kept a song going--a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite
unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be
a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should
weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his
gentle voice and begin:
"If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl,
I'll tell you what I'll do:
I'll cyarve your heart with my razor, AND
I'll shoot you with my pistol, too--"
then they would stridently take up each last line, and keep it going three, four, ten times,
and kick holes in the ground to the swing of it.
By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the promontories of the lonely
hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming
crop. It symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the
wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers, and
they told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this country
would not long be a country for men. They stopped for a meal at an old comrade's. They
looked over his gate, and there he was pattering among garden furrows.
"Pickin' nosegays?" inquired the Virginian and the old comrade asked if they could not
recognize potatoes except in the dish. But he grinned sheepishly at them, too, because
they knew that he had not always lived in a garden. Then he took them into his house,
where they saw an object crawling on the floor with a handful of sulphur matches. He
began to remove the matches, but stopped in alarm at the vociferous result; and his wife
looked in from the kitchen to caution him about humoring little Christopher.
When she beheld the matches she was aghast but when she saw her baby grow quiet in
the arms of the Virginian, she smiled at that cowpuncher and returned to her kitchen.
Then the Virginian slowly spoke again: "How many little strangers have yu' got, James?"
"My! Ain't it most three years since yu' maried? Yu' mustn't let time creep ahaid o' yu',
James."
