The Ghost of One Man Coulee

By B. M. Bower Author of “The Happy Family Stories,” “Lonesome Land,” Etc.

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 1, 1913 issue of The Popular Magazine.

The reappearance of Olafson, the violinist, who had gone out in the blizzard and was lost seeking the north wind that he might learn the song it sang, and who, according to Happy Jack, returned to earth on moonlight nights to play his violin in the doorway of the deserted shack in One Man Coulee.

Happy Jack, by some freak of misguided ambition, was emulating rather heavily the elfish imagination of Andy Green. He was—to put it baldly and colloquially—throwing a big load into the Native Son who jingled his gorgeous silver spurs close alongside Happy’s more soberly accoutered heel.

“That there,” Happy was saying, with ponderous gravity, “is the shack where the old fiddler went crazy trying to play a tune like the wind—or some blamed fool thing like that—and killed himself because he couldn’t make it stick. It’s haunted, that shack is. The old fellow’s ghost comes around there moonlight nights and plays the fiddle in the door.”

The Native Son, more properly christened Miguel, turned a languidly velvet glance toward the cabin and flicked the ashes from his cigarette daintily. “Have you ever seen the ghost, Happy?” he asked indulgently.

“Ah—yes, sure! I seen it m’self,” Happy lied boldly.

“And were you scared?”

“Me? Scared? Hunh!” Happy gave a fairly good imitation of dumb disgust. “Why, I went and—”

Happy’s imagination floundered in the stagnant pool of a slow-thinking brain.

“I went right in and—”

“Exactly.” Miguel smiled a smile of even, white teeth and ironical lips. “Some moonlight night we will come back here at midnight, you and I. I have heard of that man, and I am fond of music. We will come and listen to him.”

Some of the other boys, ambling up from behind, caught a part of the speech, and looked at one another, grinning.

“The Native Son’s broke out all over with schoolbook grammar ag’in,” Big Medicine remarked. “Wonder what Happy’s done? I’ve noticed, by cripes, that the guilty party better duck, when that there Miguel begins to talk like a schoolma’am huntin’ a job! Hey, there!” he bellowed suddenly, so that one might hear him half a mile away. “What’s this here music talk I hear? Who’s goin’ to play, and where at, and how much is it a head?”

Miguel turned and looked back at the group, smiling still. “Happy was telling me about a ghost in that cabin down there.” He flung out a hand toward the place so suddenly that his horse jumped in fear of the quirt. “I say we’ll come back some night and listen to the ghost. Happy says he frequently rides over to hear it play on moonlight nights, and—”

“Aw, g’wan!” Happy Jack began to look uncomfortable in his mind. “I said—”

“Happy? If he thought there was a ghost in One Man Coulee, you couldn’t tie him down and haul him past in a hayrack at noon,” Andy asserted sharply. “There isn’t any ghost.”

Andy set his lips firmly together, and stared reminiscently down the hill at the lonely little cabin in the coulee. Memory, the original moving-picture machine, which can never be equaled by any man-made contrivance, flashed upon him vividly a picture of the night when he had sat within that cabin, listening to the man who would play the north wind, and who wept because it eluded him always; who played wonderfully—a genius gone mad under the spell of his own music—and at last rushed out into the blizzard and was lost, seeking the north wind that he might learn the song it sang. The scene gripped Andy, even in memory. He wondered fancifully if Olafson was still wandering with his violin, searching for the home of the north wind. They had never found him, not even when the snows had gone and the land lay bare beneath a spring sky. He must have frozen, for the night had been bitter, and a blizzard raged blindingly. Still, they had never found a trace of him.

There had been those who, after searching a while in vain, had accused Andy to his face of building the story to excite his fellows. He had been known to deceive his friends heartlessly, and there had been some argument over the real fate of the vanished Olafson. If Andy had told the truth, asked the doubters, where was Olafson’s body? And who had ever tried to play the wind? Who, save Andy Green, would ever think of such a fantastic tale? Happy Jack, Andy remembered resentfully, had been unusually vociferous in his unbelief, even for him.

“Aw, you stuck to it there was all the makin’s of a ghost,” Happy defended awkwardly, and wished that Andy Green had not overheard the yarn he told Miguel. “Sure, there’s a ghost!” He fell back a step that he might wink at Big Medicine, and so enlist his sledge-hammer assistance. “I leave it to Bud if we didn’t hear it, one night—-”

“And seen it, too, by cripes!” Big Medicine enlarged readily and shamelessly. “Standin’ right in the door, playin’ the fiddle to beat a straight flush.” He glared around the little group with his protruding eyes until his glance met the curious look of Cal Emmett. “You was with us, Cal,” he asserted boldly. “I leave it to you if we didn’t see ’im and hear ’im.”

Cal, thus besought to bear false witness, did so with amiable alacrity. “We sure did,” he declared.

“Funny you never said a word about it before,” snapped Andy, with open disbelief in his tone.

“We thought nobody’d believe us if we did tell it,” Big Medicine explained.

“Pity yuh don’t always think as close to the mark as yuh done then,” Andy retorted.

“How do yuh know there ain’t a ghost?” Big Medicine demanded with some slight rancor, born not of the argument, but of temporary ill feeling between the two. “Is it because yuh know, by cripes, that yuh lied last winter?”

Andy’s lips tightened. “I’ve heard about enough of that,” he said, with a flash of anger. With the cabin in sight, and recalling the tragedy of that night, he was not in the mood to wrangle good-naturedly about it with any one—least of all with Big Medicine. “I didn’t lie. I’m dead willing to back what I said about it with my fists, if—”

Big Medicine twitched the reins to ride close, but Miguel’s horse sidled suddenly and blocked the move. Also, Miguel smiled guilelessly into the angry eyes of Big Medicine.

“Will you fellows come back with me to-night, then, and see the ghost?” he asked lightly. “Or don’t you dare tackle it again?”

Big Medicine snorted and forgot his immediate intentions toward Andy, just as Miguel, perhaps, intended that he should do.

“You wouldn’t dast come along, if we did,” he glowered. “I’d camp there alone for a month, far as I’m concerned, if there was any grub, by cripes!”

“That shows how much you know about the place,” put in Pink, siding with Andy. “Unless somebody’s packed it away lately, there’s all kinds of grub left. Maybe the flour, and bacon, and beans is gone, but there’s enough pickles and stuffed olives to last—”

“Olives!” cried the Native Son, and looked back longingly at the rugged bluff which marked One Man Coulee. “Say, does anybody belong to them olives?”

“Nobody but the ghost,” grinned Pink. “We bought him twelve lovely tall bottles, just to please Jimmie; he told us there wasn’t any sale for stuffed olives in Dry Lake, and he offered ’em to us at cost. We did think uh taking all he had, but we cut it down to twelve bottles afterward. And Olafson never ate a darned olive all the time he was there!”

“And they’re there yet, you say?” It was plain that Miguel was far more interested in the olives than he was in the ghost.

“Sure, they’re there.” Pink was not troubling to warp the truth, as Miguel decided, after a sharp glance. “The stuff all belonged to Olafson, and the shack belongs to the Old Man. And when Olafson went crazy over the wind, and froze to death,” he stipulated distinctly, with a challenging glance at Big Medicine, “we all kept thinking at first he’d come back, maybe. But he never did—”

“Exceptin’ his ghost, by golly!” put in Slim unexpectedly, with a belated snort of amusement at the idea.

“I’d rather,” sighed Miguel, “have a dozen bottles of stuffed olives than a dozen kisses from the prettiest girl in the State.”

“Mamma! they’re easier to get, anyway. If you want ’em that bad—”

“That there ghost may have something to say about them olives,” Happy Jack warned, sticking stubbornly to his story.

Miguel smiled—and there was that in his smile which sent four mendacious cow-punchers hot with resentment.

“Maybe yuh don’t believe in that ghost, by cripes?” Big Medicine challenged indignantly, and gave Miguel a pale, pop-eyed stare meant to be intimidating.

Miguel smiled again as at some secret joke, and made no reply at all.

“Well—don’t yuh b’lieve it?” Big Medicine roared after a minute.

Miguel smiled gently and inspected his cigarette; emotions might surge about this Native Son and beat themselves to a white froth upon the rock of his absolute, inimitable imperturbability, as the Happy Family knew well. Now they rode close-grouped, intensely interested in this struggle between bull-bellowing violence and languid impassivity.

“You don’t believe it yourself, do you?” Miguel inquired evenly at last, rousing himself from his abstraction. “Did you expect me to swallow hook, sinker, and all?”

Big Medicine looked positively murderous. “When I say a thing is so,” he cried, “I expect, by cripes, that folks will take m’ bare word for it. I don’t have to produce no affidavies, nor haul in any witnesses. I ain’t like Andy, here. You’re dealin’ now with a man that can look truth in the face and never bat an eye.”

Miguel smiled again, this time more humanly amused. “I’ve met men before who hadn’t a speaking acquaintance with Dame Truth,” he drawled. “They looked her in the face, too—and she never recognized ’em.”

Big Medicine was at that critical point where make-believe may easily become reality. He had been “joshing” and playing he was mad before; now his glare hardened perceptibly, so that more than one of the boys noticed the difference.

“Aw, if he don’t want to believe it he don’t have to,” Happy Jack intercepted Big Medicine’s belligerent speech. “Chances is them olives’ll stay where they’re at a good long while, though—if Mig-u-ell has to get ’em after dark.”

Miguel smoked while he rode ten rods. “I offered to come and listen to the ghost fiddle his fastest,” he observed at last, “and not one of you fellows took me up on it. To-night I’ll come alone and get those olives. I guess I can carry twelve bottles all right.”

“It’s no use to-night,” Cal Emmett objected. “It’s only on moonlight nights—” He looked a question at Big Medicine.

“Moonlight it’s got to be. There ain’t a moon till—”

“I can find stuffed olives any old kind of a night.” Miguel blew the ashes from his cigarette. “It’s the olives I want, amigo. I don’t give a whoop for your ghost.”

“Aw, I betche yuh dassent come when it’s moonlight, just the same,” cried Happy Jack. “I betche ten dollars yuh dassent.”

It would be tiresome to repeat all that was said upon the subject thereafter. So slight a thing as Happy Jack’s wrongful desire to lie as convincingly as could Andy Green, led the whole Happy Family into a profitless and more or less acrimonious argument. Each man, according to his nature, and the mood he happened to be in at the moment, took up the discussion. And speedily it developed that the faction against Miguel, Andy Green, and Pink included every man of them save Weary, who would stand by Pink regardless of the issue.

It was nearly noon, and they were hungry, and headed toward camp; but despite their haste they argued the foolish question of whether the cabin in One Man Coulee was haunted. Six of them maintained stubbornly that it was—for Irish began to side with Happy Jack just because he did not like the Native Son very well, and that ironical smile of Miguel’s irritated him to a degree; and Jack Bates also espoused the ghost because he scented an opportunity for excitement. The minority, composed of Miguel, Pink, Andy Green, and Weary, confined themselves largely to sarcasm—which is the oil which feeds fastest the flames of dissension.

It was foolish, to be sure; just as foolish as many other things which men drift into doing. But they, nevertheless, reached that point where, as in the case of Big Medicine, make-believe crowded close upon reality. The four rode together into camp ten paces ahead of the six, and they talked in low tones among themselves mostly. When they did deign to look at the six, their glances were unfriendly, and when they spoke their speech was barbed so that it stung the listeners. And the six retaliated vigorously—the more so because they had been silly enough in the first place to declare their belief in the nonexistent, and had been betrayed into making many ridiculous assertions which they were too obstinate to withdraw; so that once again the Happy Family belied the name men had given it, and became for the time being a bunch of as disagreeable cow-punchers as one could find in four days’ ride.

“Aw, say, I sure would like to put it on them fellers good!” Happy Jack growled to Cal and Jack Bates on the way to the corralled saddle bunch after dinner. Happy Jack was purple with wrath, for a caustic sentence or two spoken in Miguel’s most maddening drawl was yet stinging his ears. “That there Native Son makes me tired! I wisht there was a ghost—I’d sure—”

“Oh, there’s a ghost, all right,” Jack Bates stated meaningly; “all yuh got to do is make one.”

“Say, by golly!” Slim, close behind them, gulped excitedly. “Wouldn’t it—”

“Say, don’t let them faces get to leaking,” Cal advised bluntly. “It’s a whole week till the moon’s good. Shut up!”

Slim goggled at him, caught the hazy beginning of an idea, grinned, and stepped over the rope into the corral. He was grinning when he caught his horse, and he was still grinning widely while he cinched the saddle. He caught Andy Green eying him suspiciously, and snickered outright. But he did not say a word, and, therefore, went his way, believing that he had given no hint of what was in his mind.

Slim and Happy Jack were alike in one respect: Their minds worked slowly and rather ponderously—and, like other ponderous machinery, once in motion they were hard to stop. The others would have left the subject alone, after that hour of hot argument, and in time would have forgotten it except for an occasional jeer, perhaps; but not so Happy Jack and Slim.

The Flying U outfit ate, saddled fresh horses, reloaded the mess wagon, and moved on toward Dry Creek, and that night flung weary bodies upon the growing grass in the shade of the tents, twenty miles and more from One Man Coulee and the little cabin with its grim history of genius blotted out in madness. Nevertheless, Slim searched ostentatiously with plate, knife, and fork in his hand, at supper time, and craned his neck over boxes and cans, until he had the attention of his fellows, who were hungry, and elbowed him out of their way with scant courtesy.

“Say, Mig-u-ell, where’s them stuffed olives?” he called at last. “I thought, by golly, we was goin’ to have some olives for supper?”

“Olives—stuffed olives, are best picked by moonlight, they tell me,” Miguel responded unemotionally, glancing up over his cup. “Have patience, amigo.”

Slim nudged Happy Jack so that he spilled half his coffee and swore because it was hot, caught Big Medicine’s pale-eyed glare upon him, and subsided so suddenly that he choked over his next sentence, which had nothing at all to do with olives, or ghosts, or insane fiddlers.

Men, it would seem, never quite leave their boyhood behind them; at least, those men do not who live naturally and individually, untainted by the poison of the great money marts where human nature is warped and perverted so that nearly all natural instincts are subordinated to the lust for gain of one sort and another. In the Bear Paw country men labor for gain, it is true; but they also live the lives for which nature has created them. There is that in the wide reaches of plain and valley, in the clean arch of blue sky and drifting clouds overhead, which keeps the best of them boyish till their temples are marked with white—yes, and after.

It was that tenacious element which started Irish, Cal Emmett, Jack Bates, and Big Medicine to tilting hat brims together when none others were near observe them. It was that which sent them off riding by themselves—to town, they said before they started—early on the first Sunday after the wagons had pulled in to the ranch, there to stand until the beef round-up started.

They returned unobtrusively by mid-afternoon, and they looked very well satisfied with themselves, and inclined to facetiousness.

“What’s the matter?” Weary asked them pointedly when they dismounted at the corral. “Come back after something you forgot?”

“Yeah—sure,” Cal returned, with a flicker of eyelids. “Nothing doing in that darned imitation of a town, anyway.”

“Where’s the mail?” Pink demanded expectantly.

“We—plumb forgot that there mail, by cripes!” Big Medicine looked up quickly. “Irish was goin’ to git it, but he didn’t.”

Pink said nothing, but he studied the four from under the long, curled lashed which he had found very useful in concealing covert glances.

“Sorry, Little One—honest to grandma, I am!” Big Medicine clapped him patronizingly on the shoulder as he passed him.

“I don’t know as it matters,” said Pink sweetly. “Some of us were just about ready to hit the trail. We can get it, I guess. Say! Ain’t you got that cayuse caught up yet, Mig?” he called out to the Native Son, who was reclining luxuriously against a new stack of sweet-smelling bluejoint hay. “Come out of your trance, or we’ll go off and leave you!”

“Oh—yuh going to town?” Cal looked over his shoulder with some uneasiness in his baby-blue eyes.

“Maybe we are and maybe we ain’t. Maybe we’re going to see our best girls. What’s it to you?” Pink turned his back on Cal and looked full at Weary. “Come on—the girls will be plumb wild if we don’t get a move on,” he said carelessly, and picked up his bridle. “Where’s Andy? I thought he said he wanted to go along. Hurry up, Mig, if you’re going.”

Nobody knew what he was driving at, but the three were mounted well within ten minutes, and flinging back remarks to the four who had lately returned. The departing ones were well up on the hogback before any one of them ventured to question Pink, who rode with the air of one whose destination is fixed, and whose desire outstrips his body in the journey.

“Say, Cadwolloper, where are we headed for?” Weary inquired then resignedly. “And what’s the rush?”

Pink glanced down the hill toward the stable and corrals, decided that they were being observed with something very like suspicion, and faced to the front again. “We’re going to head for Rogers’,” he dimpled, “but we ain’t going to get there. Yuh needn’t look down there—but Irish and Cal are saddling up again. They’re afraid we’re going to town. They’re going to trail us up and find out for sure.”

“They sure did act like they’d been holding up a train, when they rode up,” Weary observed. “I’ve been searching my soul with a spyglass trying to find the answer for all that guilt on their faces.”