第49章 NEW YORK BY CAMP FIRE LIGHT(1)
Away out in the Creek Nation we learned things about New York.
We were on a hunting trip, and were camped one night on the bank of a little stream.Bud Kingsbury was our skilled hunter and guide, and it was from his lips that we had explanations of Manhattan and the queer folks that inhabit it.Bud had once spent a month in the metropolis, and a week or two at other times, and he was pleased to discourse to us of what he had seen.
Fifty yards away from our camp was pitched the teepee of a wandering family of Indians that had come up and settled there for the night.An old, old Indian woman was trying to build a fire under an iron pot hung upon three sticks.
Bud went over to her assistance, and soon had her fire going.When he came back we complimented him playfully upon his gallantry.
"Oh," said Bud, "don't mention it.It's a way I have.Whenever I see a lady trying to cook things in a pot and having trouble I always go to the rescue.I done the same thing once in a high-toned house in.New York City.Heap big society teepee on Fifth Avenue.That Injun lady kind of recalled it to my mind.Yes, I endeavours to be polite and help the ladies out."The camp demanded the particulars.
"I was manager of the Triangle B Ranch in the Panhandle," said Bud."It was owned at that time by old man Sterling, of New York.He wanted to sell out, and he wrote for me to come on to New York and explain the ranch to the syndicate that wanted to buy.So I sends to Fort Worth and has a forty dollar suit of clothes made, and hits the trail for the big village.
"Well, when I got there, old man Sterling and his outfit certainly laid themselves out to be agreeable.We had business and pleasure so mixed up that you couldn't tell whether it was a treat or a trade half the time.
We had trolley rides, and cigars, and theatre round-ups, and rubber parties.""Rubber parties?" said a listener, inquiringly.
"Sure," said Bud."Didn't you never attend 'em? You walk around and try to look at the tops of the skyscrapers.Well, we sold the ranch, and old man Sterling asks me 'round to his house to take grub on the night before I started back.It wasn't any high-collared affair -- just me and the old man and his wife and daughter.But they was a fine-haired outfit all right, and the lilies of the field wasn't in it.They made my Fort Worth clothes carpenter look like a dealer in horse blankets and gee strings.
And then the table was all pompous with flowers, and there was a whole kit of tools laid out beside everybody's plate.You'd have thought you was fixed out to burglarize a restaurant before you could get your grub.But I'd been in New York over a week then, and I was getting on to stylish ways.I kind of trailed behind and watched the others use the hardware supplies, and then I tackled the chuck with the same weapons.It ain't much trouble to travel with the high-flyers after you find out their gait.
I got along fine.I was feeling cool and agreeable, and pretty soon Iwas talking away fluent as you please, all about the ranch and the West, and telling 'em how the Indians eat grasshopper stew and snakes, and you never saw people so interested.
"But the real joy of that feast was that Miss Sterling.Just a little trick she was, not bigger than two bits worth of chewing plug; but she had a way about her that seemed to say she was the people, and you believed it.And yet, she never put on any airs, and she smiled at me the same as if I was a millionaire while I was telling about a Creek dog feast and listened like it was news from home.
"By and by, after we had eat oysters and some watery soup and truck that never was in my repertory, a Methodist preacher brings in a kind of camp stove arrangement, all silver, on long legs, with a lamp under it.
"Miss Sterling lights up and begins to do some cooking right on the supper table.I wondered why old man Sterling didn't hire a cook, with all the money he had.Pretty soon she dished out some cheesy tasting truck that she said was rabbit, but I swear there had never been a Molly cotton tail in a mile of it.