Navajo Joe was out of luck. Ordinarily his vagaries were not regarded in Cinnabar. His frequent appearance in the single street in a voluntary of nice feats of horsemanship coupled with an exhibition of pistol shooting, in which old tomato cans and passé beer bottles performed as targets, had hitherto excited no more baleful sentiment in the Cinnabar bosom than disgust.
"Shootin' up the town a whole lot," was the name for this engaging pastime as given by Navajo Joe, and up to date the exercise had passed unchallenged.
But to-day it was different. Camps like individuals have moods; now light, now dark, and so it was with Cinnabar. Just at this time Cinnabar was experiencing a wave of virtue. This may have come spontaneously from the germs of order which, after all, dwelt sturdily in the Cinnabar breast It might have been excited by the presence of a pale party of Eastern tourists, just now abiding at the O. K. hotel and who the rather sanguine sentiment of Cinnabar credited with meditating a large investment of treasure in her rocks and rills. But whatever the reason Cinnabar virtue was certainly aroused; a condition of the public mind which made it a bad day for Navajo Joe.
The angry sun smote hotly in the deserted causeway of Cinnabar. The public was within doors. The Gold Mine saloon and its sister hostels, the dance hall and the Full Blown Rose were thriving mightily. Those games known to the world as monte, high-ball and faro and which generally engrossed the public thought were drowsy and dull enough, but the counters whereat the citizens of Cinnabar gathered with his peers in absorption of the incautious drinks of the place, were fairly sloppy from an excess of trade. Notwithstanding the torrid heat, this need not sound strangely. Cinnabar leaning was strongly homeopathic.
Similia similibus curantur—like cures like
Said Cinnabar, and when it was blazing hot drank whisky.
But to-day there was further reason for this consumption. Cinnabar was excited and this provoked a thirst. Navajo Joe, rendering himself prisoner to Jack Moore, rescue or no rescue, had, by order of that sagacious body, been conveyed by his captor before the vigilance committee and was about to be tried for his life.
What was Navajo Joe's immediate crime? Certainly not a grave one. Ten days before it would have hardly earned a comment. But to-day, in its spasm of virtue, and sensitive in its memories of the erratic courses of Navajo Joe aforetime. Cinnabar had gravely and grimly taken possession of that volatile gentleman for punishment. He had killed a Chinaman. It happened thus:
"Yere comes that prairie dog, Navajo Joe, all spraddled out," said Bill Tutt, a short half hour before. He was peering from the window of the Gold Mine saloon at the time, to which he had been drawn by the noise of hoofs, and there was a sense of injury disclosed in the tone, born of the awakened virtue of Cinnabar.
"It looks like this yere camp never can assoome no airs," said Rosewood Jim, in a distempered way, "but this yere miserable Joe comes chargin' up to queer it."
As he spoke, that offending personage unconscious of the great change in Cinnabar morals, swept up the street emitting gladsome and ecstatic whoops and whirling his pistol on his fore finger like a wheel of light. A tourist stood in the door of the hotel smoking a pipe in short, brief puffs of astonishment and reviewed the amazing performance. Navajo Joe at once and abruptly halted, and, gazing for a disgruntled moment on the man from the East, took the pipe from its owner's horrified mouth and placed it in his own.
"Smokin' of pipes," he vouchsafed in condemnatory explanation, "is onelegant and degradin,' an' don't you do it no more in my presence. I'm mighty sensitive that away about pipes an' I don't aim to tolerate 'em; none whatever."
This solution of his motives seemed entirely satisfactory to Navajo Joe. He sat puffing and gazing at the man bereaved, while the latter stood dumbly staring with a morsel of the ravished meerschaum still between his lips. What further might have flowed in the way of oratory or overt acts may not be stated, for the thoughts of the guileless Joe suddenly received a new direction. Just then a Chinaman, voluminously robed, emerged from the New York store whither he had been drawn by dint of soap.
"Whatever is this yere suds-sloppin' Mongol doin' in camp I'd like for to know?" inquired Navajo Joe disdainfully. "I shore leaves orders when I'm yere last for the immejit removal of all sech."