But Scipio le Moyne would say to me now and then, “If I was Trampas, I’d pull my freight.” And once he added, “Pull it kind of casual, yu’ know, like I wasn’t noticing myself do it.”
“Yes,” our friend Shorty murmured pregnantly, with his eye upon the quiet Virginian, “he’s sure studying his revenge.”
“Studying your pussycat,” said Scipio. “He knows what he’ll do. The time ain’t arrived.” This was the way they felt about it; and not unnaturally this was the way they made me, the inexperienced Easterner, feel about it. That Trampas also felt something about it was easy to know. Like the leaven which leavens the whole lump, one spot of sulkiness in camp will spread its dull flavor through any company that sits near it; and we had to sit near Trampas at meals for nine days.
His sullenness was not wonderful. To feel himself forsaken by his recent adherents, to see them gone over to his enemy, could not have made his reflections pleasant. Why he did not take himself off to other climes—“pull his freight casual,” as Scipio said—I can explain only thus: pay was due him—“time,” as it was called in cow-land; if he would have this money, he must stay under the Virginian’s command until the Judge’s ranch on Sunk Creek should be reached; meanwhile, each day’s work added to the wages in store for him; and finally, once at Sunk Creek, it would be no more the Virginian who commanded him; it would be the real ranch foreman. At the ranch he would be the Virginian’s equal again, both of them taking orders from their officially recognized superior, this foreman. Shorty’s word about “revenge” seemed to me like putting the thing backwards. Revenge, as I told Scipio, was what I should be thinking about if I were Trampas.
“He dassent,” was Scipio’s immediate view. “Not till he’s got strong again. He got laughed plumb sick by the bystanders, and whatever spirit he had was broke in the presence of us all. He’ll have to recuperate.” Scipio then spoke of the Virginian’s attitude. “Maybe revenge ain’t just the right word for where this affair has got to now with him. When yu’ beat another man at his own game like he done to Trampas, why, yu’ve had all the revenge yu’ can want, unless you’re a hog. And he’s no hog. But he has got it in for Trampas. They’ve not reckoned to a finish. Would you let a man try such spite-work on you and quit thinkin’ about him just because yu’d headed him off?” To this I offered his own notion about hogs and being satisfied. “Hogs!” went on Scipio, in a way that dashed my suggestion to pieces; “hogs ain’t in the case. He’s got to deal with Trampas somehow—man to man. Trampas and him can’t stay this way when they get back and go workin’ same as they worked before. No, sir; I’ve seen his eye twice, and I know he’s goin’ to reckon to a finish.”
I still must, in Scipio’s opinion, have been slow to understand, when on the afternoon following this talk I invited him to tell me what sort of “finish” he wanted, after such a finishing as had been dealt Trampas already. Getting “laughed plumb sick by the bystanders” (I borrowed his own not overstated expression) seemed to me a highly final finishing. While I was running my notions off to him, Scipio rose, and, with the frying-pan he had been washing, walked slowly at me.
“I do believe you’d oughtn’t to be let travel alone the way you do.” He put his face close to mine. His long nose grew eloquent in its shrewdness, while the fire in his bleached blue eye burned with amiable satire. “What has come and gone between them two has only settled the one point he was aimin’ to make. He was appointed boss of this outfit in the absence of the regular foreman. Since then all he has been playin’ for is to hand back his men to the ranch in as good shape as they’d been handed to him, and without losing any on the road through desertion or shooting or whatnot. He had to kick his cook off the train that day, and the loss made him sorrowful, I could see. But I’d happened to come along, and he jumped me into the vacancy, and I expect he is pretty near consoled. And as boss of the outfit he beat Trampas, who was settin’ up for opposition boss. And the outfit is better than satisfied it come out that way, and they’re stayin’ with him; and he’ll hand them all back in good condition, barrin’ that lost cook. So for the present his point is made, yu’ see. But look ahead a little. It may not be so very far ahead yu’ll have to look. We get back to the ranch. He’s not boss there any more. His responsibility is over. He is just one of us again, taking orders from a foreman they tell me has showed partiality to Trampas more’n a few times. Partiality! That’s what Trampas is plainly trusting
