“Ran away?” Johnny looked hopeful. “What for?”
“Couldn’t make it go with my old man, and didn’t take to farming. There
were plenty of boys at home. I wasn’t missed.”
Thea wriggled down in the hot sand and rested her chin on her arm. “Tell
Johnny about the melons, Ray, please do!”
Ray’s solid, sunburned cheeks grew a shade redder, and he looked
reproachfully at Thea. “You’re stuck on that story, kid. You like to get
the laugh on me, don’t you? That was the finishing split I had with my
old man, John. He had a claim along the creek, not far from Denver, and
raised a little garden stuff for market. One day he had a load of melons
and he decided to take ‘em to town and sell ‘em along the street, and he
made me go along and drive for him. Denver wasn’t the queen city it is
now, by any means, but it seemed a terrible big place to me; and when we
got there, if he didn’t make me drive right up Capitol Hill! Pap got out
and stopped at folkses houses to ask if they didn’t want to buy any
melons, and I was to drive along slow. The farther I went the madder I
got, but I was trying to look unconscious, when the end-gate came loose
and one of the melons fell out and squashed. Just then a swell girl, all
dressed up, comes out of one of the big houses and calls out, ‘Hello,
boy, you’re losing your melons!’ Some dudes on the other side of the
street took their hats off to her and began to laugh. I couldn’t stand
it any longer. I grabbed the whip and lit into that team, and they tore
up the hill like jack-rabbits, them damned melons bouncing out the back
every jump, the old man cussin’ an’ yellin’ behind and everybody
laughin’. I never looked behind, but the whole of Capitol Hill must have
been a mess with them squashed melons. I didn’t stop the team till I got
out of sight of town. Then I pulled up an’ left ‘em with a rancher I was
acquainted with, and I never went home to get the lickin’ that was
waitin’ for me. I expect it’s waitin’ for me yet.”
Thea rolled over in the sand. “Oh, I wish I could have seen those melons
fly, Ray! I’ll never see anything as funny as that. Now, tell Johnny
about your first job.”
Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and
kindly—perhaps the chief requisites in a good story-teller.
Occasionally he used newspaper phrases, conscientiously learned in his
efforts at self-instruction, but when he talked naturally he was always
worth listening to. Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had,
almost from the time he first ran away, tried to make good his loss. As
a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read
instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary. By the light of
many camp-fires he had pondered upon Prescott’s histories, and the works
of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book-agent.
Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general culture came
hard, and he was determined to get it. Ray was a freethinker, and
inconsistently believed himself damned for being one. When he was
braking, down on the Santa Fe, at the end of his run he used to climb
into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker
about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll’s
speeches and “The Age of Reason.”
Ray was a loyal-hearted fellow, and it had cost him a great deal to give
