Mary

His real name was Quong Wo, but my brother Ajax always called him Mary, because the boy’s round, childish face had a singular smoothness and delicacy. A good and faithful servant he proved during three years. Then he ran away at the time of the anti-Chinese riots, despite our assurance that we wished to keep him and protect him.

“Me no likee Coon Dogs,” said he, with a shiver.

The Coon Dogs were a pack of cowboys engaged in hunting Chinamen out of the peaceful, but sometimes ill-smelling, places which, by thrift, patience, and unremitting labour, they had made peculiarly their own. From the Coon Dogs Ajax and I received a letter commanding us to discharge Mary.

A skull and cross-bones, and a motto, “Beware the bite of the Coon Dogs!” embellished this billet, which was written in red ink. Courtesy constrained us to acknowledge the receipt of it. Next day we put up a sign by the corral gate—

NO HUNTING ALLOWED ON THIS RANCH!

In the afternoon Mary disappeared.

Uncle Jake was of opinion that Mary had divined the meaning of our sign. He had said to Uncle Jake: “I go. Me makee heap trouble for boss.”

Later, upon the same day, we learned from a neighbour that the Coon Dogs had tarred and feathered one poor wretch; another had been stripped and whipped; a third was found half-strangled by his own queue; the market-gardens near San Lorenzo, miracles of industry, had been ravaged and destroyed. Before taking leave our neighbour mentioned the sign.

“Boys,” said he, “take that down—and ship Mary. I’m mighty glad,” he added reflectively, “that my ole woman does the cookin.”

“Mary skedaddled after dinner,” said Ajax, frowning, “but I’m going into town to-morrow to bring him back.”

However, Mary brought himself back that same night. We were smoking our second pipes after supper, when Ajax, pointing an expressive finger at the window, exclaimed sharply: “Great Scot! What’s that?”

Pressed against the pane, glaring in at us, was a face—a face so blanched and twisted by terror and pain that it seemed scarcely human. We hurried out. Mary staggered towards us. In his face were the cruel, venomous spines of the prickly pear. The tough boughs of the manzanita thickets through which he had plunged had scourged him like a cat-o’-nine tails. What clothes he wore were dripping with mud and slime.

“Coon Dogs come,” he gasped. “I tellee you.”

Then he bolted into the shadows of the oaks and sage brush. We pursued, but he ran fast, dodging like a rabbit, till he tumbled over and over—paralysed by fear and fatigue. We carried him back to the ranch-house, propped him up in a chair, and despatched Uncle Jake for a doctor. Before midnight we learned what little there was to know. Mary had been chased by the Coon Dogs. He, of course, was a-foot; the cowboys were mounted. A couple of barbed-wire fences had saved him from capture. We had listened, that afternoon, too coolly, perhaps, to a tale of many outrages, but the horror and infamy of them were not brought home to us till we saw Mary, tattered scarred, bedraggled, lying crumpled up against the gay chintz of the arm-chair. The poor fellow kept muttering: “Coon Dogs come. I know. Killee you, killee me. Heap bad men!”

Next morning Uncle Jake and the doctor rode up.

“I can do nothing,” said the latter, presently. “It’s a case of shock. He may get over it; he may not. Another shock would kill him. I’ll leave some medicine.”

Upon further consultation we put Mary into Ajax’s bed. The Chinaman’s bunk-house was isolated, and the vaqueroes slept near the horse corral, a couple of hundred yards away. Mary feebly protested: “No likee. Coon Dogs—allee same debils—killee you, killee me. Heap bad men!”

We tried to assure him that the Coon Dogs were at heart rank curs. Mary shook his head: “I know. You see.”

The day passed. Night set in. About ten, Mary said, convincingly—

“Coon Dogs coming! Coon Dogs coming!”

“No, no,” said Ajax.

I slipped out of the house. From the marsh beyond the creek came the familiar croaking of the frogs; from the foothills in the cow-pasture came the shrilling of the crickets. A coyote was yapping far down the valley.

“It’s all right, Mary,” said I.

“Boss, Coon Dogs come, velly quick. I know.”

Did he really know? What subtle instinct warned him of the approach of danger? Who can answer such questions? It is a fact that the Coon Dogs were on the road to our ranch, and that they arrived just one hour later. We heard them yelling and shouting at the big gate. Then the popping of pistols told us that the sign, clearly to be seen in the moonlight, was being riddled with bullets.

“We must face the music,” said Ajax grimly. “Come on!”

Mary lay back on the pillow, senseless. Passing through the sitting-room, I reminded Ajax that my duck-gun, an eight-bore, could carry two ounces of buck-shot about one hundred yards.

“We mustn’t fight ’em with their own weapons,” he answered curtly.

The popping ceased suddenly; silence succeeded.

“They’re having their bad time, too,” said Ajax. “They are hitching their plugs to the fence. Hullo!”

Uncle Jake slipped on to the verandah, six-shooter in hand. Before he spoke, he spat contemptuously; then he drawled out: “Our boys say it’s none o’ their doggoned business; they won’t interfere.”

“Good,” said Ajax cheerfully. “Nip back, Uncle; we can play this hand alone.”

“Sure?” The old man’s voice expressed doubt.

“Quite sure. Shush-h-h!”

Uncle Jake slid off the verandah, but he retired—so we discovered later—no farther than the water-butt behind it. Ajax and I went into the sitting-room. From the bed-room beyond came no sound whatever. Through the windows the pack was seen—slowly advancing.

“Come in, gentlemen,” said Ajax loudly.

He stood in the doorway, an unarmed man confronting a dozen desperadoes.

“Wheer’s the Chinaman—Quong?”

I recognised the voice of a cowboy whom we had employed: a man known in the foothills as Cock-a-whoop Charlie.

“He’s here,” Ajax answered quietly.

A tall, gaunt Missourian, also well known to us as a daring bull-puncher, laughed derisively.

“Here—is he? Wal, we want him, but we don’t want no fuss with you, boys. Yer—white, but he’s yaller, and he must go.”

“He is going,” said Ajax. “He’s going fast.”

“How’s that?”

“Come in,” retorted my brother impatiently. “It’s cold out there and dark. You’re not scared of two unarmed men—are you?”

They filed into the house, looking very sheepish.

“I’m glad you’ve come, even at this late hour,” said Ajax, “for I want to have a quiet word with you.”

The psychological characteristics of a crowd are receiving attention at the hands of a French philosopher. M. Gustave Le Bon tells us that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual of average brains.

“You have a nerve,” remarked Cock-a-whoop Charlie.

“You Coon Dogs,” continued my brother, “are making this county too hot for the Chinese—eh?”

“You bet yer life!”

“But won’t you make it too hot for yourselves?”

The pack growled, inarticulate with astonishment and curiosity.

“Some of you,” said Ajax, “have wives and children. What will they do when the Sheriff is hunting—you? You call this the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. So it is. And do you think that the Free and the Brave will suffer you to destroy property and life without calling you to account?”

“We ain’t destroying life.”

“And a heathen Chinee ain’t a man.”

“Quong,” said Ajax, in his deep voice, “is hardly a man yet. We call him Mary, because he looks like a girl. You want him—eh? You are not satisfied with what you did yesterday? You want him? But—do you want him dying?”

The pack cowered.

“He is dying,” said Ajax. “No matter how they live, and a wiser Judge than any of us will pronounce on that, no matter how they live—are your own lives clean?—the meanest of these Chinese knows how to die. One moment, please.”

He entered the room where Mary lay blind and deaf to the terror which had come at last. When Ajax returned, he said quietly: “Come and see the end of what you began. What? You hang back? By God!—you shall come.”

Dominated by his eye and voice, the pack slunk into the bed-room. Upon Mary’s once comely face the purple weals were criss-crossed; and sores had broken out wherever the cactus spines had pierced the flesh.

A groan escaped the men who had wrought this evil, and glancing at each in turn, I caught a glimpse of a quickening remorse, of a horror about to assume colossal dimensions. The Cock-a-whoop cowboy was seized with a palsy; great tears rolled down the cheeks of the gaunt Missourian; one man began to swear incoherently, cursing himself and his fellows; another prayed aloud.

“He’s dead!” shrieked Charlie.

At the grim word, moved by a common impulse, whipped to unreasonable panic as they had been whipped to unreasoning cruelty, the pack broke headlong from the room—and fled!

Long after they had gone, Mary opened his eyes.

“Coon Dogs coming?” he muttered. “Heap bad men!”

“They have come and gone,” said Ajax. “They’ll never come again, Mary. It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

Mary obediently closed his eyes.

“He’ll recover,” Ajax said. And he did.