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Updated: June 5, 2025
Cal Emmett yelled at Happy Jack from the bedside, where he was kneeling sympathetically. Happy Jack removed his somber gaze from the licking tongue of flame which showed in the stove-front. "Fire ain't going good, yet," he said in a matter-of-fact tone which contrasted sharply with Cal's excitement. "Teakettle's dry, too. I sent a man to the crick for a bucket uh water; he'll be back in a minute."
"I believe the darned old reprobate was lyin' to us," he remarked, when the horseman disappeared into a coulee. "You sure ought to be qualified to recognize the symptoms," grunted Cal Emmett, kicking his foot out of somebody's carelessly coiled rope on the ground. "That your rope, Happy? No wonder you're always on the bum for one. If you'd try tying it on your saddle " "Aw, g'wan.
You noticed it, because you felt your tongue getting wedged like that between your teeth; but other people would hardly have noticed it at all. When the Principal asked you if you were going to take Holy Orders yourself, I'm sure he only thought you hadn't quite made up your mind yet." "But I'm sure he did notice something," poor Emmett bewailed. "Because he began to hum."
I sat for three hours watching Emmett bring over the rest of his party, which he did without accident, but at the expense of great effort. And all the time in my ears dinned the roar, the boom, the rumble of this singularly rapacious and purposeful river a river of silt, a red river of dark, sinister meaning, a river with terrible work to perform, a river which never gave up its dead.
When the ordeal with the Principal was over and the two guests were strolling back across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally and without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer must have had upon the Principal. Mark did his best to reassure poor Emmett. "Really," he said, "it was scarcely noticeable to anybody else.
At once the stream and wet bars of sand took on a different color. I removed my boots, and waded out to a little bar. The sand seemed quite firm, but water oozed out around my feet; and when I stepped, the whole bar shook like jelly. I pushed my foot through the crust, and the cold, wet sand took hold, and tried to suck me down. "How can you ford this stream with horses?" I asked Emmett.
The Reverend Thomas Tweedle was a benevolent parson of the eighteenth century who by his will had provided the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman for four years. Mark was shy enough under the Principal's courtly inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each time he was asked the simplest question about his tastes or his ambitions.
Across the corral he glimpsed some of the others Pink and Weary, and farther along, Cal Emmett and Jack Bates; but they made no sign if they saw him, and he did not go near them. He did not know when his turn would come to ride, and he had a horse to saddle at the command of the powers that were. Coleman, the man who had collected the horses, almost ran over him.
His tongue appearing like a disturbed mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an agonized endeavour to give utterance to such familiar words as "yes" or "no." Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back at all and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest of his life with it protruding before him or submit it to amputation and become a mute.
Mark and his rival, a raw-boned youth called Emmett who was afflicted with paroxysms of stammering, moved about the precincts upon tiptoe like people trespassing from a high road. On their first evening the two candidates were invited to dine with the Principal, who read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner, only pausing from their perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr.
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