The Professor's House

by Willa Cather

trough under the pump. Then he called me to come and pump water on his

  head. After he'd stood the gush of cold water for a few seconds, he

  straightened up with his teeth chattering.

  "That ought to get the whisky out of a fellow's head, oughtn't it? Felt

  good, Tom." Presently he began feeling his side pockets. "Was I dreaming

  something, or did I take a string of jack-pots last night?"

  "The money's in your grip," I told him. "You don't deserve it, for you

  were too drunk to take care of it. I had to come after you and pick it

  up out of the mud."

  "All right. I'll go halvers. Easy come, easy go."

  I told him I didn't want anything off him but breakfast, and I wanted

  that pretty soon.

  "Go easy, son. I've got to change my shirt. This one's wet."

  "It's worse than wet. You oughtn't to go up town without changing.

  You're a stranger here, and it makes a bad impression."

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked superior. He had a square-built,

  honest face and steady eyes that didn't carry a cynical expression very

  well. I knew he was a decent chap, though he'd been drinking and acting

  ugly ever since he'd been on our division.

  After breakfast we went out and sat in the sun at a place where the

  wooden sidewalk ran over a sand gully and made a sort of bridge. I had a

  long talk with him. I was carrying the grip with his winnings in it, and

  I finally persuaded him to go with me to the bank. We put every cent of

  it into a savings account that he couldn't touch for a year.

  From that night Blake and I were fast friends. He was the sort of fellow

  who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself. There

  are lots like that among working-men. They aren't trained by success to

  a sort of systematic selfishness. Rodney had been unlucky in personal

  relations. He'd run away from home when he was a kid because his mother

  married again--a man who had been paying attention to her while his

  father was still alive. He got engaged to a girl down on the Southern

  Pacific, and she double-crossed him, as he said. He went to Old Mexico

  and let his friends put all his savings into an oil well, and they

  skinned him. What he needed was a pal, a straight fellow to give an

  account to. I was ten years younger, and that was an advantage. He liked

  to be an older brother. I suppose the fact that I was a kind of stray

  and had no family, made it easier for him to unbend to me. He surely got

  to think a lot of me, and I did of him. It was that winter I had

  pneumonia. Mrs. O'Brien couldn't do much for me; she was overworked,

  poor woman, with a houseful of children. Blake took me down to his room,

  and he and the old Mexican woman nursed me. He ought to have had boys of

  his own to look after. Nature's full of such substitutions, but they

  always seem to me sad, even in botany.

  I wasn't able to be about until spring, and then the doctor and Father

  Duchene said I must give up night work and live in the open all summer.

  Before I knew anything about it, Blake had thrown up his job on the

  Santa F�, and got a berth for him and me with the Sitwell Cattle

  Company. Jonas Sitwell was one of the biggest cattle men in our part of

  New Mexico. Roddy and I were to ride the range with a bunch of grass

  cattle all summer, then take them down to a winter camp on the Cruzados

  river and keep them on pasture until spring.

  We went out about the first of May, and joined our cattle twenty miles

  south of Pardee, down toward the Blue Mesa. The Blue Mesa was one of the

  landmarks we always saw from Pardee--landmarks mean so much in a flat

  country. To the northwest, over toward Utah, we had the Mormon Buttes,

  three sharp blue peaks that always sat there. The Blue Mesa was south of

  us, and was much stronger in colour, almost purple. People said the rock

  itself had a deep purplish cast. It looked, from our town, like a naked

  blue rock set down alone in the plain, almost square, except that the

  top was higher at one end. The old settlers said nobody had ever climbed

  it, because the sides were so steep and the Cruzados river wound round

  it at one end and under-cut it.

  Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados

  river, directly under the mesa, and all summer long, while we drifted

  about with our cattle from one water-hole to another, we planned how we

  were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After

  supper, when we lit our pipes and watched the sunset, climbing the mesa

  was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual

  work wouldn't have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to

  their hands. John Rapp, the foreman, came along once a month in his

  spring-wagon, to see how the cattle were doing and to bring us supplies

  and bundles of old newspapers.

  Blake was conscientious reader of newspapers. He always wanted to know

  what was going on in the world, though most of it displeased him. He

  brooded on the great injustices of his time; the hanging of the

  Anarchists in Chicago, which he could just remember, and the Dreyfus

  case. We had long arguments about what we read in the papers, but we

  never quarrelled. The only trouble I had with Blake was in getting to do

  my share of the work. He made my health a pretext for taking all the

  heavy chores, long after I was as well as he was. I'd brought my Caesar

  along, and had promised Father Duchene to read a hundred lines a day.

  Blake saw that I did it--made me translate the dull stuff aloud to him.

  He said if I once knew Latin, I wouldn't have to work with my back all

  my life like a burro. He had great respect for education, but he

  believed it was some kind of hocus-pocus that enabled a man to live

  without work. We had Robinson Crusoe with us, and Roddy's favourite

  book, Gulliver's Travels, which he never tired of.

  Late in October, Rapp, the foreman, came along to accompany us down to

  the winter camp. Blake stayed with the cattle about fifteen miles to the

  east, where the grass was still good, and Rapp and I went down to air

  out the cabin and stow away our winter supplies.

  Chapter 2

  The cabin stood in a little grove of pi�ons, about thirty yards back

  from the Cruzados river, facing south and sheltered on the north by a

  low hill. The grama grass grew right up to the doorstep, and the rabbits

  were running about and the grasshoppers hitting the door when we pulled

  up and looked at the place. There was no litter around, it was as clean

  as a prairie-dog's house. No outbuildings, except a shed for our horses.

  The hillside behind was sandy and covered with tall clumps of deer-horn

  cactus, but there was nothing but grass to the south, with streaks of

  bright yellow rabbit-brush. Along the river the cottonwoods and quaking

  asps had already turned gold. Just across from us, overhanging us,

  indeed, stood the mesa, a pile of purple rock, all broken out with red

  sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs. From the

  cabin, night and day, you could hear the river, where it made a bend

  round the foot of the mesa and churned over the rocks. It was t
he sort

  of place a man would like to stay in forever.

  I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put

  clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away bacon and coffee and canned

  stuff on the shelves behind the cook-stove. I confess I looked forward

  to cooking on an iron stove with four holes. Rapp explained to me that

  Blake and I wouldn't be able to enjoy all this luxury together for a

  time. He wanted the herd kept some distance to the north as long as the

  grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one

  camping near the cattle and one sleeping in a bed.

  "There's not pasture enough down here to take them through a long

  winter," he said, "and it's safest to keep them grazing up north while

  you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather's so

  warm, they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. The

  swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that's the last you ever see

  of them. We've lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been

  populated by run-aways from our herd, till now there's a fine bunch of

  wild cattle up there. When the wind's right, our cows over here get the

  scent of them and make a break for the river. You'll have to watch 'em

  close when you bring 'em down."

  I asked him whether nobody had ever gone over to get the lost cattle

  out.

  Rapp glared at me. "Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet.

  The cliffs are like the base of a monument, all the way round. The only

  way in is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level, just

  where the river makes the bend. You can't get in by that, because the

  river's too deep to ford and too swift to swim. Oh, I suppose a horse

  could swim it, if cattle can, but I don't want to be the man to try."

  I remarked that I had had my eye on the mesa all summer and meant to

  climb it.

  "Not while you're working for the Sitwell Company, you don't! If you

  boys try any nonsense of that sort, I'll fire you quick. You'd break

  your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to

  keep them from going over, I tell you. If it wasn't for that mesa, this

  would be the best winter range in all New Mexico."

  After the foreman left us, we settled down to easy living and fine

  weather; blue and gold days, and clear, frosty nights. We kept the

  cattle off to the north and east and alternated in taking charge of

  them. One man was with the herd while the other got his sleep and did

  the cooking at the cabin. The mesa was our only neighbour, and the

  closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a

  blue, featureless lump, as it had been from a distance. Its sky-line was

  like the profile of a big beast lying down; the head to the north,

  higher than the flanks around which the river curved. The north end we

  could easily believe impassable--sheer cliffs that fell from the summit

  to the plain, more than a thousand feet. But the south flank, just

  across the river from us, looked accessible by way of the deep canyon

  that split the bulk in two, from the top rim to the river, then wound

  back into the solid cube so that it was invisible at a distance, like a

  mouse track winding into a big cheese. This canyon didn't break the

  solid outline of the mesa, and you had to be close to see that it was

  there at all. We faced the mesa on its shortest side; it was only about

  three miles long from north to south, but east and west it measured

  nearly twice that distance. Whether the top was wooded we couldn't

  see--it was too high above us; but the cliffs and canyon on the river

  side were fringed with beautiful growth, groves of quaking asps and

  pi�ons and a few dark cedars, perched up in the air like the hanging

  gardens of Babylon. At certain hours of the day, those cedars, growing

  so far up on the rocks, took on the bluish tint of the cliffs

  themselves.

  It was light up there long before it was with us. When I got up at

  daybreak and went down to the river to get water, our camp would be cold

  and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim

  cedars along the rocks would be gold--metallic, like tarnished

  gold-foil. Some mornings it would loom up above the dark river like a

  blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The

  sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in

  its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up

  from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against

  a sky on fire.

  No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us,

  and was always changing. Black thunder-storms used to roll up from

  behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning

  would play round it and jab into it so that we were always expecting it

  would fire the brush. I've never heard thunder so loud as it was there.

  The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though

  it seemed so solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account

  for the prolonged growl and rumble that followed every crash of thunder.

  After the burst in the sky was over, the mesa went on sounding like a

  drum, and seemed itself to be muttering and making noises.

  One afternoon I was out hunting turkeys. Just as the sun was getting

  low, I came through a sea of rabbit-brush, still yellow, and the

  horizontal rays of light, playing into it, brought out the contour of

  the ground with great distinctness. I noticed a number of straight

  mounds, like plough furrows, running from the river inland. It was too

  late to examine them. I cut a scrub willow and stuck a stake into one of

  the ridges, to mark it. The next day I took a spade down to the

  plantation of rabbit-brush and dug around the sandy soil. I came upon an

  old irrigation main, unmistakable, lined with hard smooth cobbles and

  'dobe cement, with sluices where the water had been let out into the

  trenches. Along these ditches I turned up some pieces of pottery, all of

  it broken, and arrowheads, and a very neat, well-finished stone pick-ax.

  That night I didn't go back to the cabin, but took my specimens out to

  Blake, who was still north with the cattle. Of course, we both knew

  there had been Indians all over this country, but we felt sure that

  Indians hadn't used stone tools for a long while back. There must have

  been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient time: fixed residents,

  like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.

  To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about

  finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty

  country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel

  differently about the ground you walk over every day. I liked the winter

  range better than any place I'd ever been in. I never came out of the

  cabin door in the morning to go after water that I didn't feel fresh

  delight in our snug quarters and the river and the old mesa up there,

  with its top burning like a bonfire. I wanted to see what it was like on

 
; the other side, and very soon I took a day off and forded the river

  where it was wide and shallow, north of our camp. I rode clear around

  the mesa, until I met the river again where it flowed under the south

  flank.

  On that ride I got a better idea of its actual structure. All the way

  round were the same precipitous cliffs of hard blue rock, but in places

  it was mixed with a much softer stone. In these soft streaks there were

  deep dry watercourses which could certainly be climbed as far as they

  went, but nowhere did they reach to the top of the mesa. The top seemed

  to be one great slab of very hard rock, lying on the mixed mass of the

  base like the top of an old-fashioned marble table. The channels worn

  out by water ran for hundreds of feet up the cliffs, but always stopped

  under this great rim-rock, which projected out over the erosions like a

  granite shelf. Evidently, it was because of this unbroken top layer that

  the butte was inaccessible. I rode back to camp that night, convinced

  that if we ever climbed it, we must take the route the cattle took,

  through the river and up the one canyon that broke down to water-level.

  Chapter 3

  We brought the bunch of cattle down to the winter range in the latter

  part of November. Early in December the foreman came along with generous

  provisions for Christmas. This time he brought with him a super-cargo,

  a pitiful wreck of an old man he had picked up at Tarpin, the railroad

  town thirty miles northeast of us, where the Sitwells bought their

  supplies. This old man was a castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins by name.

  He had been a valet, and a hospital orderly, and a cook, and for many

  years was a table steward on the Anchor Line. Lately he had been cooking

  for a sheep outfit that were grazing in the cattle country, were they

  weren't wanted. They had done something shady and had to get out in a

  hurry. They dropped old Henry at Tarpin, where he soon drank up all his

  wages. When Rapp picked him up there, he was living on hand-outs.

  "I've told him we can't pay him anything," Rapp explained. "But if he

  wants to stay here and cook for you boys till I make my next trip, he'll

  have plenty to eat and a roof over him. He was sleeping in the livery

  stable in Tarpin. He says he's a good cook, and I thought he might liven

  things up for you at Christmas time. He won't bother you, he's not got

  any of the mean ways of a bum--I know a bum when I see one. Next time I

  come down I'll bring him some old clothes from the ranch, and you can

  fire him if you want to. All his baggage is that newspaper bundle, and

  there's nothing in it but shoes--a pair of patent leathers and a pair of

  sneakers. The important thing is, never, on any account, go off

  skylarking, you two, and leave him with the cattle. Not for an hour,

  mind you. He ain't strong enough, and he's got no head."

  Life was a holiday for Blake and me after we got old Henry. He was a

  wonderful cook and a good housekeeper. He kept that cabin shining like a

  playhouse; used to dress it all out with pi�on boughs, and trimmed the

  kitchen shelves with newspapers cut in fancy patterns. He had learned to

  make up cots when he was a hospital orderly, and he made our bunks feel

  like a Harvey House bed. To this day that's the best I can say for any

  bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a

  child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had

  managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in

  as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no

  grudge against any of the people who had misused him. He loved to tell

  about the celebrated people he'd been steward to, and the liberal tips

  they had given him. There with us, where he couldn't get at whisky, he

  was a model of good behaviour. "Drink is me weakness, you might say," he