I, Jack Swilling by John Myers Myers

Author:John Myers Myers [Myers, John Myers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-6461-1
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

STEP 20 THE KANSAS VENDETTA

NOT WILLING to appear in a town where his visit to a saloon was a source of joy to the drinkers he’d inveighed against, Johnson stopped preaching in Lacygne and soon afterward he sold his farm. Next it was full spring and school was closed so that the boys could help with the planting. My contract wasn’t renewed, because somebody on the school board had observed that my landlady’s girth had increased, even though her husband was in a federal prison; and Gabe wasn’t blamed, because he had openly become the dandelion brightening the premises of a new grass widow. I could have told the board how Arabella Lightfoot and the two little pigeons she called her daughters made their living, but it didn’t seem to me to be anybody’s business but their own, and besides, I was getting restless.

Gabe and I had determined to go hunting, as soon as he could tear himself away from life in the torrid zone. Meanwhile, I had time on my hands and made the acquaintance of newspaperman Peyton Reynolds.

Frontier towns always take it for granted that they are going to be great cities, and the probability of turning into a Boston, Georgia, instead of a Boston, Massachusetts, occurs to few. As Lacygne shared this bustling spirit, nobody but Uncle Doc thought it strange that the place had no less than three newspapers.

“I figure,” he said, “that, counting jackrabbits under the age of consent, there can’t be more than a thousand per capita beings for each palladium of our liberties, and some of the jacks have too much sense to take an interest in news that everybody’s heard before the papers tell about it. How do they get by, not counting Peyton’s printed dagger? Everybody reads that in hopes they’ll find he’s blatherskited some neighbor.”

Peyton Reynolds published and edited The Osage Valley Oracle, a sheet devoted to reeling off insults in well-rounded periods. There’s Peyton now, with the black clothes and white goatee of sixty and the bright eye, on the lookout for trouble, of twenty-one. He made trouble enough for me by following his natural bents, but I liked the old buccaneer and once acted as his second when he shot a rival editor who had objected to being referred to as “the crapulous apple of a feeble-minded early bird’s eye.”

When Gabe decided that the mating season was over, we bought a wagon to carry the hides and the salt for preserving them, using part of the profits from selling his still. Westing, we took turns driving the four mules and trailing the horse of the one so engaged until we were in Arapaho country. There we took skins until late summer, paying our way by giving our hosts the meat we didn’t eat so that they could prepare pemmican and jerky. At the end we took our haul, which was a pretty fair one, down to Bent’s big fortified trading post on the upper Arkansas.

Our plan had been

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