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Raidler took a quart bottle of whisky from his medicine cabinet. "Here, take him this," he said. Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the cow-punchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest importation of Raidler's. He was an absolutely new experience to them.
Raidler took a quart bottle of whisky from his medicine cabinet. "Here, take him this," he said. Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the cow- punchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest importation of Raidler's. He was an absolutely new experience to them.
It was not like the boss to make them. "What's left of 'em don't miss no calls to grub," the cook conceded. "What's left of 'em?" repeated Raidler in a husky voice. Mechanically he began to look around for McGuire's grave. He had in his mind a white slab such as he had seen in the Alabama church-yard. But immediately he knew that was foolish. "Sure," said Pete; "what's left.
The cattleman seemed actually to assume and feel the character assigned to him by McGuire's intemperate accusations the character of tyrant and guilty oppressor. He seemed to have adopted the responsibility of the fellow's condition, and he always met his tirades with a pacific, patient, and even remorseful kindness that never altered. One day Raidler said to him, "Try more air, son.
Bright-beady of eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit, indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil. Six feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he represented the union of the West and South.
Well, I advise you to set him digging post-holes or breaking mustangs. There's our team ready. Good-day, sir." And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off. Raidler reached out and plucked a leaf from a mesquite bush by the railing, and began chewing it thoughtfully.
"You're going down to my ranch," said the cattleman, "and stay till you get well. Six months'll fix you good as new." He lifted McGuire with one hand, and half-dragged him in the direction of the train. "What about the money?" said McGuire, struggling weakly to escape. "Money for what?" asked Raidler, puzzled.
So gentle was his heart that at that moment he would have pleaded guilty to the murder of McGuire. The only being in the camp was the cook, who was just arranging the hunks of barbecued beef, and distributing the tin coffee cups for supper. Raidler evaded a direct question concerning the one subject in his mind. "Everything all right in camp, Pete?" he managed to inquire.
He took it away drenched with bright, arterial blood, and threw it carefully into a clump of prickly pear. Then he slashed with his quirt again, gasped "G'wan" to his astonished pony, and galloped after the gang. That night Raidler received a message from his old home in Alabama. There had been a death in the family; an estate was to divide, and they called for him to come.
Which also partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which "Cricket" McGuire found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to San Antonian ears . At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman may his shadow never measure under six foot two.
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