The Remittance Man: A Tale of a Prodigal
9781465598929
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
DEAN RUTHVEN, living in England, had a son, George. This would have been a very ordinary state of affairs in the ordinary course of events; but that George Ruthven was the son of a dean, or of any other great church dignitary, was most certainly a rather unbelievable fact. His life was about as uncanonized an affair as one of the way of Piccadilly civilization, and maintained by parental remittances. Of course, George was consigned to some one—he and his ten thousand pounds that was to start him in cattle ranching; but that didn’t matter—nothing matters in the West, for things must work out their own salvation there. Besides, what mattered it how the money was spent? It would go anyway: remittance men weren’t expected to make money—they were there to spend it; sent by a Providence which answered the prayers of the men in waiting, the Old-timers. So when the son of the Dean landed in Cargelly he was welcomed as a part of the manna shower, made free of the club, and colloquially branded the “Padre.” There was no Board of Trade in Cargelly—just a billiard table at the club. And the Padre’s affairs were arranged as the affairs of the other remittance men had been, by the chiefs, sitting in solemn conclave about this substitute for a council board. “A shoemaker should stick to his last,” was a patent philosophy; the Padre herding cattle was a grotesque conception. What good would it do—the cattle would die of anthrax, or some other infernal thing that was always bothering, and the golden sovereigns he had brought would somehow be lost out on the dismal plain. It was the stupid calculation of a man sitting in London, this idea of Padre’s proper sphere. What he knew all about was horses and racing—there was no doubt about that; he was jolly well full of the thing. Of course, he would have to have a ranch and a shack; but that was easy: so many square miles of air, bottomed by a short-grassed plain. It didn’t even have to be surveyed; it ran from Smythe’s Ranch to Dick’s Coulee—ambiguous, but wholly satisfactory for all requirements. Then a shack was thrown together; the ark, battering-rammed into a square building, would have been an artistic villa by comparison. The selection of the race-horses required more care. Several of the chaps had horses to sell; incidentally every racing man has a horse or two waiting for a buyer more eager than wise. However, in the end the Padre was fairly well stocked with horses. Sport of Kings! but the gods had been kind to the dwellers in the wilderness when Dean Ruthven had been hypnotized into sending George the Wayward to the tents of Shem. And while the direct offerings contributed in London went to the heathen in Africa and divers other places, the indirect, that was the Dean’s by right of arrangement, helped clothe the heathen in Cargelly and educate his tenderfoot son in a knowledge of men’s ways. Of course, ten thousand pounds requires some accounting for if it be expended, and the Padre sent home a fairy tale that would have gained him a prize in any literary competition. The rolling prairie was handled with conventional skill; the invigorating atmosphere was treated artistically; the future of the cattle trade was culled from government blue books. His own ranch, “The Deanery,” was touched upon with diplomatic modesty; it would not do for him to boast of his success at this early stage, he stated, but he had most assuredly stumbled upon a real good thing. He wrote this last statement quite inadvertently, for the good thing so prominent in his mind was Whirlwind, a Montana-bred four-year-old mare; but he allowed the statement to stand.
