AEGAN had been absent from his home haunts for thirty days. Not for a month. For thirty days. In Raegan's world there is a vast difference of meaning in the two terms.
I was far too tactful to ask where he had been. Intuition—or observation—had told me he would be back in town on the thirtieth day. If not, on the sixtieth or at worst the ninetieth. Magistrates have a fondness for the number thirty and its exact multiples.
Raegan on his return was quite free from reserve or false shame as to his abiding place during the thirty-day hiatus in our acquaintance.
“Been to sea,” he volunteered cheerily. “Surrounded by water, anyhow. And in as comf'table quarters as shipboard; without the risk of being drowned. Stopping a spell at the little riverside ranch claimed by old man Blackwell's heirs. There's worse places—if one doesn't have to be at any of 'em.”
I still felt a certain awkwardness in pursuing the theme. But Raegan had none. He modestly but frankly went on to explain.
“The bulls,” he observed, “have had it in for me for quite a spell. I see that, now it's too late to do me any good. They framed me. Elsewise, why did that mission-upholstered peg poster at Eighth and Fiftieth give me backtalk when I reparteed to his 'move-on' yawp? And then why did he try to shove me when he saw I wasn't feeling as peaceful as I generally do? He must have known I wasn't sober enough to be the reg'lar 'dumb, driven' New Yorker. I handed him one. And in the mix-up I tore both the skirts of his coat. (Always do that, son, when you scrap with a cop. They have to pay, out of their own pockets, for repairs to their harnesses. So a torn coat pains 'em a whole lot worse'n a fractured heart.) I had pull enough to get the coop edict pared down to thirty days; and I squared myself with the sore bull. There's no harm done. But,” he added in soft regret, “if I'd been a militette I'd 'a' got my picture on the front page for messing up a cop—instead of two measly agate lines in the 'Police Court News.'”
I tried to cheer him with the unique reflection that Law, if not Life, deals more gently with women offenders than with men. But Raegan had no wish to be cheered. My well meant words tapped one of the theory veins that lie so close to his mental surface.
And from that punctured vein gushed forth a flood of contradictory argument. To whose depths, like sediment—mud or gold as you may prefer—silted at last the ensuing Raeganesque yarn; told, as usual, by way of illustration.
At least, Raegan seemed to think it illustrated one or more of his argument's various points. Whether or not it did I cannot say. For the points had come too fast and too turbulently for me to tabulate them. But it illustrated something. Of that I can have no doubt at all. Perhaps that honesty is the best policy. Perhaps that birds of a feather should not throw stones.
The good old Law (scoffed Raegan) gives women the best of it, hey? Maybe so, in such silly trifles as property rights and breach of promise and arson and mayhem and murder. But not in the really big things of life. Not once. Sometimes it even drives 'em to matrimony. Or worse. Like Mattie Mercer.
It didn't drive Mattie Mercer to matrimony. For she'd driven there of her own accord. But it drove her out of it and then to worse. And, after that, to still worse. And, at last, to very worst.
Mattie was a friend of mine. At just one spot on the route. Not before or since. She's been miles above me, those earlier and later times. She was a fine woman. I'll hand her that, if it will help her carry her district. I've heard folks hint that her morals were bad. They weren't. Any more than a bald-headed man's hair is bad. She hadn't any. Morals. Not hair. She had a double portion of that. Red. And her eyes were red-brown and her skin was a winter sunset. And her stuck-out jaw was the only thing that saved her from being wrecked by that color combination. As it was, she just couldn't make her temperament behave.
I've read somewhere that a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband. Well, if that's so, Mattie's husband hadn't the ghost of a show of butting into the king row. He got wise, by and by, and he Renoed both Mattie and her temperament.
But she didn't have that south elevation jaw for nothing. She sat on the hilltop and made war medicine, till hubby emeritus loafed across with a big lump sum. He wanted her to drop the use of his last name, too—he having quite a fancy to the name and not relishing the decorations she was likely to plaster on it. Mattie agreed to mislay the name for another spot cash consideration. She grabbed the cash—and hung onto the name. She sure was a business man.