Part 23

"Then you'll have to make yourself handy, in other ways," I proclaimed as he sat appraising me from his deep-padded car-seat.

"All right," he said, as though the whole thing were settled, on the spot. But it wasn't so simple as it seemed.

"How about this car?" I demanded. His eye met mine; and I made note of the fact that he was compelled to look away.

"I suppose we'll have to hide it somewhere," he finally acknowledged.

"And how'll you hide a car of that size on the open prairie?" I inquired.

"Couldn't we bury it?" he asked with child-like simplicity.

"It's pretty well that way now, isn't it? But I saw it three miles off," I reminded him.

"Couldn't we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?" he suggested next, with the natural cunning of the criminal. "Then they'd never suspect."

"Suspect what?" I asked.

"Suspect where we got it," he explained.

"Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature," I said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was getting restless by this time.

"But you've included yourself in the secret," he tried to argue, with a show of injured feelings. "And surely, after you've wormed that out of me, you're not going to deliver a poor devil over to--"

"You can have perfect confidence in me," I interrupted, trying to be stately but only succeeding, I'm afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded and laughed in a companionable and laisser-faire sort of way as he started his engine and took command of the wheel.

Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the throbbing gray mass moved forward a little, subsided again, and once more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered mass emerged from the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.

The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.

"The wages of sin is mud," he said as I trotted up to him. "And how much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I'd never taken that car!"

The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should try to make allowances for.

"It would have been much better," I agreed, wondering how long it would be before the Mounted Police would be tracking him down and turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.

"Now, if you'll kindly trot ahead," he announced as he relighted his little briar pipe, "and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted windmill, I'll idle along behind you."

I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment quite obvious to him.

"What's your name?" I asked, the same as I'd ask the name of any new help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.

"Peter Ketley," he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.

"All right, Peter," I said, as condescendingly as I was able. "Just follow along, and I'll show you where the bunk-house is."

It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on Paddy and went like the wind. I don't know whether he called it idling or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama Ranch.

"You ride like a ritt-meister," he said, with an approvingly good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would permit.

"Danke-schön!" I rather listlessly retorted, "And if you leave the car here, close beside this hay-stack, it'll probably not be seen until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is clear, you can get it covered up."

I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I'd harped still again on an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine. But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.

Such being the case, I was more excited than I'd have been willing to admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of people, the people who out here are called "good leather," would remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may have been merely ranchers, but I didn't want Peter, whatever his morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire by rubbing sticks together.