“How you go on,” I said, holding my aching head. “You mean that they all had something to do with the death of—”
“I mean,” he replied, and his fine features sharpened, “that the non-essential colors vanished. I often wonder,” he murmured, “what Father Brown or old Sherlock would have done with that case. Eh, J.J.?”
1: Work in Progress
A large subterranean chamber strongly acrid with the smell of horseflesh, loud and resonant with the snorting and stamping of horses. In one corner an alcove hewn out of solid concrete, and in the alcove a smithy. Its forge was violently red, and fireflies of sparks darted about. A half-naked pigmy with oily black skin and preposterous biceps hammered like Thor’s little brother on metal which curved sullenly under his rhythmic blows. The low flat ceiling, the naked walls, framed the chamber in stone... This might be Pegasus, this arch-necked stallion champing in his stall, naked and sleek as the day he was foaled. His harem of mares whinnied and nickered about him; and occasionally his scarlet eyes flashed as he pawed the strawed floor with the dainty arrogance of his Arabian ancestors.
Horses, dozens of them, scores of them; tame horses, trick horses, wild horses; saddle horses, raw horses. The sharp effluvium of dung and sweat and breath hung, an opalescent mist, in the strong atmosphere. Gear gleamed before the stalls; brass glittering on oily leather; saddles like brown satin; stirrups like shining platinum; halters like ovals of ebony. And there were coiled lariats on the posts, and Indian blankets...
For this was the stable of a king. His crown was a flaring Stetson, his sceptre a long-barreled Colt pistol, his domain the wide and dusty plains of the American West. His praetorian guard were bow-legged men who rode like centaurs, drawled in a quaint soft speech, rolled cigarets deftly, and whose brown wrinkled eyes held the calm immensities of those who scan the stars under an unadulterated vault of heaven. And his palace was a sprawling rancho — thousands of miles from this place.
For this stable of a king with his odd crown and his strange sceptre and his extraordinary guard was not set in its proper place on the plains of a rolling country. It was not in Texas, or in Arizona, or in New Mexico, or in any of the curious lands where such kings rule. It lay under the feet of a structure endemically American; but not the America of mountains and hills and valleys and trees and sage-brush and plains; rather the America of skyscrapers, subways, rouged chorines, hotels, theatres, breadlines, night-clubs, slums, speakeasies, radio towers, literati, and tabloids. It was as remote from its native habitat as the cots of England or the rice-fields of Japan. A stone’s-throw away that equally curious domain, Broadway, speared through the humorless laughter of New York. Thirty feet above and fifty feet to the south and east roared the metropolis. Past the portals of the architectural Colossus in whose cellars it lay flew a thousand automobiles a minute.
The Colosseum, New York’s new and hugest temple of sport...
Horses, the warp and woof of the outdoors, crated like rabbits over immense distances so that West and East might meet...
It could not happen in England, where institutions take root in their proper soil and, uprooted, die. The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards only in America. Long ago the brawny men of the West occasionally gathered from far places in a holiday mood to show off their prowess with horses and lariats and steers. It was an amusement of the West, for the West. Today it was ripped up from its alkaline soil and transplanted bodily — horses, lariats, steers, cowboys and all — to the stony soil of the East. Its name — rodeo — was retained. Its purpose — ingenuous amusement — was debased. Spectators filed through iron aisles and paid admissions to sagacious promoters. And this was the largest fruit, the horticultural apotheosis, of the West-to-East transplantation — Wild Bill Grant’s Rodeo.
Now in the stable, near the stall of the princely stallion, stood two men. The shorter of the two was an odd creature with a muscular right arm; the left was a stump above the elbow swinging in a gaudy knotted sleeve. His face was lean, his expression was saturnine; whether it had been painted by the black brush of the burning sun or was a splash of something hot in the caldron of his own nature was not easily determined. In his bearing there was something of the stallion’s arrogance; on his thin lips something of the stallion’s sneer. This was that bitter man, One-Arm Woody — odd nomenclature for nobility! who in the lingo of his caste was known as the “top-rider” of the outfit; which is to say, Wild Bill Grant’s featured performer. Woody, whose amber eyes were murderous, possessed the sinewy agelessness of a myth.
The other was quite different, and in his difference equally extraordinary. He was a tall buckaroo, lean as a pine and ever so slightly stooped, as a pine stoops in the high wind. He seemed old and enduring as the Nevada hills; shaggy white on top, dark-brown underneath, and over all the glaze of sharp fresh air and time-buffeted strength. In his face one saw no outstanding feature; it was one with his strong old body, and the whole made an epic figure, like an ancient statue dimly perceived through the mists of ages. His eyelids were strong and brown, and habitually they dropped to cover all but the merest slits, through which frigid colorless chips of eyes stared unblinkingly. This creature of another world was dressed, strangely enough, in the most ordinary of Eastern clothes.
Old Buck Horne! Product of the acrid plains and Hollywood — yes, Hollywood, which like Moloch engulfs all; as dear to the hearts of modern American boys as that legendary buckaroo, Buffalo Bill, had been to the boys of a bygone generation. This was the man who had reanimated the old West. Not the West of Fords and tractors and gasoline-pumps, but the West of the ’70’s, of heavy six-shooters, of the James Boys and Billy the Kid, of horse-thieves and drunken Indians, of cattle-rustlers, saloons, false-fronts and board-walks and fighting sheriffs and range-wars. Buck Horne had accomplished this miracle of resurrection by the instrument of motion pictures; himself an authentic figure out of the past, he had been romantic enough to employ the silver screen to bring the past to life; and there was not a red-blooded young man alive who had not as a boy thrilled to Buck Horne’s dashing exploits with horse and rope and gun in the flickering pictures which raced across a thousand screens the country over.
Two blobs of color. One-Arm Woody, old Buck Horne.
And the wheel stood still.
One-Arm Woody shifted his curved legs, and thrust his hatchety face an inch nearer the brown face of Horne.
“Buck, ya mangy ole breed, y’oughta go back to the flickers with the rest o’ the dudes,” he drawled.
Buck Horne said nothing.
“Pore ole Buck,” said Woody, and his stump of a left arm jerked a little. “Cain’t scarcely drag yore laigs aroun’.”
And Buck said coldly: “Meaning?”
The one-armed man’s eyes flashed, and his right hand forked the brass-studded end of his belt. “Damn you, yo’re hornin’ in!”
A horse nickered, and neither man turned his head. Then from the lips of the tall old fellow came a soft stream of words. Woody’s five fingers twitched, and his mouth twisted wryly. The muscular right arm darted up, and the old man crouched...