Wyandotte High School - Quiverian Yearbook (Kansas City, KS)

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information about them including their domestic troubles, again, two rooms on lower Prospect, 1932, Ethel took sick, long, ghostly, strained nights, deathghospital, fun' eral, broke, back to Montana. You could eat there anyway. ' The time taken for the film of memory to unreel this picture of eight years of his life in detail was only a few seconds. Witli a sigh he stepped into the dusty road. As he neared the group in front of Hannon's, he wished he could escape them but knew he could not. He uttered a strained Hello, boys! and cursed under his breath as he passed them because their replies were also strained and electric. It should not be so, they were his friends, but they were sympathetic and he didn't want sympathy. All he wanted was-God! what did he want anyway?, just a chance-a chance to what?fhe had had two of them and look at him ITOW. The sound of his heavy cowfhide boots on the worn floor of the general store helped to bring back a sense of reality. The smell of freshly shipped coffee and the crisp odor of drygoods was pleasant and real. He won' dercd absently how old Hannon Q Skipper they called himj could stand the continuous noise of crickets back there somewhere in the vicinity of the flour sacks. The skipper didn't look up from a pile of papers by the postoffice cage when Dave entered. He could tell you how everybody that entered his store had voted at the last election, along with a world of other if they were domesticated. They could wait. If they were in a hurry they could wait on themselves. Finally in the middle of a written figure he looked up. His bright little eyes showed that he was surprised to see Dave. Well, doggone, hello! he rasped, dropping his pen' cil and offering a queer little hand that seemed to tell that it had never held a singing rope or gripped the flying heels of a bawling calf. Dave, relieved by the lack of sympathy and the gen' uine ring of comraderie in his cracked voice, gripped the tiny hand and let his pentfup emotions pour loose with gusto concerning the townsfpeople, the weather, and current events. Yes, hosses is gittin' a footholt agin, the skipper squeaked as he made his way to fill Dave's order. Jim Carbine billed two carloads out o' here yestidday at fo'ty dolla's straight paid at loadin'. They was only halter broke and a lot of greys was in the bunch. Don't know where he got them, lessen they's the cut' backs from that cannery bunch that come from upfstate, and they looked too good for thet. Dave considered this morsel of news idly and won' dered if he could profitably trade his Hereford cows for mares. He filled his pipe from the sample can of a new tobacco that lay open on the counter. Then he remembered, the Herefords were no longer his. He reached a long arm over the counter and twirled 12 a three-dayfold Great Falls Tribune around so he could read it. I see they still have hopes o' gittin' them mail robbers, the skipper said. Dave scanned the page with' out interest. The voice drifted on. Two thousand reward by the government for the killer, and 55,000 for the diamond if they- Suddenly a name leaped from the printed page! He read! read it again, read it three, four times. Pap Sanders! Slowly, again that enclosed A tip received agents working on ers.' As the note to the whereabouts methodically he read the words it. today from Chicago to government the case said, 'Look for Pap Sand' was unsigned and gave no clue as of Pap Sanders or of his connection in this case, it was regarded as valuelessf' That was all. The article rambled on retelling the tale of the robbery with all its new developments. Slowly Dave raised his eyes. Slight beads of perspiraf tion appeared on his bronzed forehead. Pap Sanders, he mumbled. What's that! said the voice, Pap Sanders? yeah, ever heer'd o' him? Seven thousand, thought Dave, all mine. No, he answered, never heard of him. Too bad ye didn't, said the voice as its owner ap- peared laden with supplies, might mean a few dolla's for ye. Well, here you are, Dave, you kin check 'em over while I fetch a sack, you're hossfback 0' course? The skipper gazed at Dave's broad shoulders as he passed out the door with the sack of supplies under his arm. Funny what struck 'im all of a sudden, he mused. Guess old Hirshly must be clampin' down on 'im. Too bad, too, bad for that little woman of his'n, mostly just a kid, but sure plumb full of spunk, well- and he returned to his figures. OR many years the dramas, the loves, the tragedies, the hates, the feuds, and the gayeties of the lives of the people of Dobson had made a gay, drab, colorful, sordid, and lovable parade before his eyes as he served the people from behind the worn old counters. Once a man was shot in the stomach on the high board walk in front of the store and in his anguish kicked and floundered from the spot where he fell till he rolled from the walk and died face downward in the powdery dust of the road. A gruesome sight. Another time a man was orderly and precisely hanged by his neck from a tree across the road. On one :old starlit winter nighta The .QUIVERIAN

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that demanded more than a casual glance. Between them was set a remarkable nose, maybe a trifle too wide, but it lent the needed strength that the sensitive mouth lacked. Dave smiled wistfully. After receiving a smile in return, he rose automatically and strode to the corner where coats and hats hung from nails driven in the logs. Placing a battered sombrero on the side of his head, he turned halfway and said to the stove, Guess I'll drop down to Dobson this afternoon and see what's new. Be back for supper? asked the sensitive mouth. He turned and regarded its owner with a slight twinkle in his eyes. Yes He stepped forward, stooped, and, raising a curly lock of brown hair, pressed his thumb hard against her forehead where a perfect complexion and an admirable spirit were making a hard fight against faint lines of worry and discouragement. See, he said, removing his thumb and regarding the print that it left, I've got designs on you so you'll be here when I get back. With that he turned, tilted his head slightly, and went out the door. He was so tall that he had misjudged his own height when he had built that door. Usually tall men are awkward but one needed only to watch Dave mount Nappy who was rangy and ill at ease to know that he was an exception. Want anything? he called as he passed the door, it was just his way of saying goodbye. Nappy liked spring and showed his appreciation by making good time. After crossing the last deadffall and breaking out of the timber into the open trail, he snorted and beat his legs savagely with his ridiculously short tail, trying to break into a stiff lope instead of a trot. Sniffing the fresh breezes laden with the odor of jack-pine and melting snow that drifted down from the peaks, Dave tried to feel happy but couldn't. APPY objected to being tied between a shining new Ford and a bedraggled long haired mare in Dobson and promptly made known his dislike by biting the mare on the back of the neck and kicking her in the flank. Local loungers succeeded in stopping the fray only after it had died a natural death. Then each in his casual way began to narrate how he had stopped it. Never wanta excite a hoss when he's mad, drawled a rangy lad with round shoulders. You mean you never want to make him mad when he's excited, growled a onefeyed, bowlegged, squat character that belonged in Treasure Island. After some discussion on the merits and drawfbacks of each of the subdued animals, the conversation drifted to the only natural course that the occasion presented- Dave Tuttle. Anybody or thing that presented itself in Dobson was the object of local discussion first by the men, who would handle the subject dubiously and quizzically, poke it with sticks and Whittle on it with jackfknives. 19344935 Then the women would take it up, maltreat and tear it apart, and maybe cause a new sensation. The odds were three to one that he wouldnt There was no actual betting, but after all, it's the odds that foretell the outcome of events, not the money involved The loungers knew-as everybody else in Dobson knew by this time-that Dave was in the back of the bank try' ing to get old Hirshly to ex' tend his loan. The frame structure that could not pos' sibly be taken for a bank had it not been so labeled, seemed to radiate by some unknown grapevine telegraph the words spoken by the two inside because the men loungers in front of Hannon's gen' eral store had already taken their conversation apart, formed a verdict, and discarded the immediate subject for the present. The general feeling was that of sym pathy for Dave with the absence of the traditional hard feeling for a forefclosing banker. It was just one of those things-old Hirshly had to have his pound of flesh or his depressionfsappcd banking bus' iness was going to die. He had loaned Dave 31,000.00 on his rocky homestead when the discouraged young engineer who had just returned home from Kane sas City had first staked it out. It had taken some per' suasion on Dave's part to get it in the first place. He was a good stockman and a hard worker and old Hirsh- ly finally let him have it purely on his faith in Dave and his hope that cattle prices would go up-which they decidedly didn't. The conversation lulled as Dave came out of the side door of the bank and the closing of the door left him standing on the narrow board walk. His very pos' ture and every move showed defeat. The undue inf terest in the grocery list he drew from his pocket, the way he nervously put it back, the slightly toofhigh tilt of his chin as he squinted into a sky that contained nothing but blue-all efforts to conceal defeat-screamed of discouragement more than complete supplication would have done. The remains of a tailorfmade cigar- ette that old Hirshly had given him reposed forgotten between his fingers and sent a steady column of blue smoke up the back of his hand till it struck the cuff of his shirt where it broke into curls and waves and drifted off to disappear. One of the curves found its way to the nostrils of his high narrow nose. The queer magic of scents put him back several years. It had been a long time since he had smoked a tailor' made: 1926, a graduate of engineeringg 1927, highway bridge construction in Illinois, 1928, construction in Kansas City-good payi 1929, his first individual conf tract, met Eileen, married, lived at the Plazag busy, joyous days, happy evenings, plans for the future, the savings account they were going to start but never didg 1930, Ethel born, contract finished, hospital bills, no job, left Plazag 1931, nobody wanted engineers, moved ll

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x l I i ,f , ,A ' if f X A ,f ff 2- My f ffllllxv n M jffffl 'fr W X if fs 1. ' g ' Ee -s EQ, young wife had become a mother by the light of his spluttering gas lantern that hung from the store's ceilf ing. So it went, winter and summer. He either saw, heard, or knew it all. Some died, a few left, fewer themselves, but on the whole, life in Dobson remained the same. Dave noticed that his fingers were shaking slightly as he drew the rawhide saddle strings tight around the filled sack. A name kept pounding in his brain. Pap Sanders! g but, as he gripped Nappy's mane with clamped the other one over the managed to throw his head back came, some married, and two had killed his bridle hand and steel saddle horn, he and smile in the face of the loungers, saying, Well, so long, boys, I'm off in a cloud of dust! The late afternoon breezes laden with the brisk tangy odor of sage helped to clear Dave's brain of its mo' mentary, feverish excitement. The thought of Pap Sanders still sent a strange tingling through his blood stream and caused him to grip the bridle reins a little tighter. As he neared the edge of town, he gazed at the sun-bathed tilting spire of the outer-most building, the Catholic Mission, and absently mused that it was cerf tainly representative of the religion of the town. Bat' tered, bent, and weather-beaten it sat alone on the flat prairie, long guyfwires anchoring it against the fierce onslaught of the prevailing or bushes adorned its base from the blast of blizzards winter winds. No shrubs and no trees sheltered it and the relentless blister' inf! heat of the sun. Stark naked it stood against the sky. ugly, vet strangely beautiful. Like a bedraggled ind hafzfrard sentinel it clung, guarding the town from rhe assailments of Satan and Beelzebub. As he passed the cemetery he marveled at the bravf rrv of women who would live and die in such a coun' rrv and be buried in such a place. To be deprived of :he natural life of lights and companionship, to live a hard life in a hard country, and, as a climax, to be laid to rcst in such a forlorn sanctuary, was indeed a heroic gesture. A crude barbed wire fence marked its bounds. The barren graves were marked with native stone, hand-cut and inscribed. No flowers were 19344935 planted on them because everybody knew that they wouldn't grow. Over each was an oblong patch of glaring white gravel because once the hardpan was ripped open the sod and never came back. It left a per- manent scar. He remembered the remark the skipper had made the day after Chet Nelson was buried, I'd rather have the coyotes pick my bones than to be baked under six feet of gravel in that place. By the time the flat, marginal, prairie land began to give way to the jutting rocks and scattered jack-pines of the footfhills the thought of Pap had ceased to cause Dave any excitement. Other thoughts entered his mind that there hadn't been room for before. After all,- Pap Sanders, -there might be a thousand of them in the United States. There might even be two of them in the state of Montana, but that al' lowed him a 5050 chance of success. Slowly, as the gap between two imposing peaks swallowed the sun, and the burning coals of red and amber that it left on the jagged teeth began to melt and fall away, the thought of earning S7000 by capturing a decrepit old man began to turn stale on him. He turned the name over in his brain and at last tried to justify his acf tions by the fact that Pap hadn't told him that his name was Pap Sanders, and that he had immediately become indignant when he had found it out and had called him that. The fact that Pap had been in the locality for only three months and had squatted in that deserted cabin back of his place and that he had always sent him to town for grub could be explained in a multitude of ways. But still, he lived like a dog, associated with no one, and kept asking if any of the YL riders ever came through there to keep track of their yearlin's. Of course there was no one within seven miles of rough country to associate with, but yet, why hadn't he gone to town to stay? The trapping season was over. Nappy laboured up a steep, narrow ravine and Dave felt a thrill that always coursed through him when a good piece of horseflesh was struggling beneath him. When they had reached a landing place and looked up in the face of a longer and steeper climb, Dave reined in to give Nappy his breathe The smell of sweat and leather blending with the slightly pungent odor of deeply matted pine needles was pleasant, and they waited a little longer than was necessary while Dave looked long and thoughtfully at a light across the narrow valley. Nappy faced it too and cocked first one ear and then the other nervously in its direction, waiting for the command to proceed. There was his home, rest, and green grass. He could shake and roll luxuriously in the pine needles and relieve his sweaty itching back, Dave had his own visions-a table set and ready, a pair of deep, blue eyes, waiting. He heard a voice saying, You'll be back for supper? . fContinued on Page 671 13