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He could see that the one long street of Fort Canibas was well gridironed with teams horses munching at hitching-posts, wagons thrusting their tails into the roadway. It was quiet at Thornton's end of the village.
"No," he muttered, "you mustn't try to touch them or they vanish." "What's that?" "Just that this is the best thing that ever happened. You're just made for each other, you two." They sped on through the pine forest, talking of village matters, of school matters, and hitching-posts, of politics, of sewers but mostly of love. It was dark when the Poor Boy got back to his own house.
In the moonlight he could see the row of hitching-posts outside the gate. Long ago the horses of the guests should have stood there. They were vacant. A chanted roar of indignation, a just, waxing bellow of affront and dishonoured genius came from André's kitchen, filling the house with rhythmic protest. The beautiful dinner, the pearl of a dinner, the little excellent superb jewel of a dinner!
Not but what the saint has his day every year; but this particular day is a day of days, a fiesta of fiestas: for the Padre has arranged a procession in San Gabriel's honor, and what Mexican would not ride thirty miles to see a procession? So to the hitching-posts all up the long street are tied tired horses that have come that hot morning from San Fernando, and Calabasas, and farther still.
On Saturdays the village presented a somewhat livelier appearance, and the shade trees around the court house square and along Front Street served as hitching-posts for a goodly number of horses and mules and stunted oxen, belonging to the farmer-folk who had come in to trade at the two or three local stores. A murder was a rare event in Branson County.
All the hitching-posts along the streets would have horses tied to them, and inside, the house would be buzzing like a bee-hive with the chatter of that rustic gentry. Don Ramón would give them all a hearing, frowning gravely meanwhile, his chin on his bosom and one hand on the head of the little Rafael at his side a pose copied from a chromo of the Kaiser petting the Crown Prince.
Show us what you got!" It was an uncanny exhibition of skill that followed. These men knew how to handle a sixshooter. They began with tin cans at ten yards, thirty, fifty and hit them. They shot at rolling cans, and hit them; at high-thrown cans, and hit them; at cards nailed to hitching-posts; then at the pips of cards. Neither man could boast of any advantage.
A short ride over a narrow dirt road winding through masses of verdure brought us to the confines of the old church, which, perched upon a hill, reared its turret aloft in the purple air. I fastened our horses to some of the numerous hitching-posts placed along the roadside for the use of worshippers, and we turned to the iron gate leading into the premises.
"Ugh," assented silent Bill, making the first remark of the journey, and as he spoke the syllable he rose and pointed to the courthouse, which stood in the midst of a mud-covered public square, completely surrounded by hitching-posts to which were hitched all the vehicles of locomotion of the last century down to the present in Hicks Center which had not as yet arrived as far as the day of the motor car.
How many thundering spirits have commanded us to march by the tongued and livid lightning of their prophetic souls, but how few of us have done so! Why, to me, this world is a halting hell of hitching-posts and of truculent troughs for belching swineherds.
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