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The First Traveler

Time was when Jimmy had been the cook at Welsh's ranch, and had had it all his own way in the greasy adobe kitchen. But that was before Ben Welsh's last round-up. Since then his widow had been obliged to turn part of the cattle-ranch into a boarding camp for invalids; the part that lay in a narrow strip along the desert. Health-seekers paid better than cattle or alfalfa she found.

Many things came in with the new administration. Matsu was one of them, in his white chef's cap and jacket. The spotless linen was a delight to the boarders, but to Jimmy, deposed to the rank of hewer of wood and drawer of water, it was the badge of the usurper. Naturally enough his jealousy took the form of making Matsu live up to his linen, and he watched him like a cat for the slightest lapse from cleanliness.

This constant warfare with Matsu was one of the few diversions the camp afforded, and every man made much of it. Had he been let alone, old Jimmy would have accepted the situation as merely one more ill-turn of Fate, which had left him as usual at the bottom of the wheel. But his futile resentment was too funny a thing for his tormentors to allow to die out.

It was a remark made early that morning which set him to brooding over his wrongs, and finally led to the sup too much which precipitated the fight over the potato-pot. Batty Carson made it, in a hoarse whisper, all the voice left to him since the grippe sent him West in his senior year. (He had been the best tenor in his college glee-club.) Jimmy was moving a table into the shadow of the tents, in order that the daily game of poker might begin. Poker was all there was in that God-forsaken desert to save a man's reason, Batty declared, so they played it from breakfast till bed-time. As the usual group joined him around the table, he opened a new deck of cards and began shuffling it. Automatically he found the joker and flipped it out of the pack. It fell face up on the dry Bermuda grass and old Jimmy stooped to pick it up.

Batty stopped him with a laugh. "A seasoned old poker player like you stooping to pick up the joker!" he teased. "You know well enough only one game goes on this ranch, and the joker's no good in that." Then he winked at the others.

"That's what you'll be after awhile, Jimmy, if you don't stand up for your rights better than you are doing. Matsu will be taking every trick in the game, and you'll count for nothing more than just the joker of the pack."

Jimmy flared up with an indignant oath at the laugh which followed, tore the card in two, and would have gone off muttering vengeance on Batty himself, had not the young fellow stopped him and teased him back into good humour. But the remark rankled afterward because there was such a large element of truth in it. Jimmy was no fool even if he was slow-witted. He knew as well as any one else that he had never counted for much in any game Life had ever given him a hand in. He brooded over the fact until some sort of solace was necessary. After that he burned for an occasion to assert himself. It came when Mrs. Welsh called to him to fill the wood-box. Just as he threw down his first armful of mesquite, the accident befell the potatoes, and he waited to see what Matsu would do.

What could Matsu do with sixteen hungry men listening for the dinner bell, but scoop out a big spoonful from the side of the pot where the ashes had fallen, toss it out of the window and heap the rest of the white fluffy mass into the hot dish awaiting it? Jimmy would have done the same in his day but now he thundered, "Throw out the whole potful, you pig of a heathen! Do you want to drive away every boarder on the ranch with your dirty tricks? Throw it out, I say."

With the good-nature that rarely failed him, Matsu only shrugged his shoulders, giggled his habitual giggle and proceeded, unmoved by threats.

"Go get 'notha drink," he advised, as Jimmy continued to glare at him. "Make you have heap much betta feeling. Not so big mad. Go get full."

Dinner was twenty minutes late that day. The boarders heard the reason from Hillis, who came in in his shirt sleeves to wait on the table, in place of Mrs. Welsh. Hillis was the dish-washer, a tall big-fisted lumberman from Maine, who, stranded at the close of an ill-starred prospecting tour, had taken temporary service in Mrs. Welsh's kitchen. He talked cheerfully of the disturbance as he clumped around the table, thrusting the dishes at each boarder in turn. They forgave his awkwardness in their interest in the fight.

"Jimmy began it," he told them. "Swung on to the pot and tried to pull it away from Jappy and throw out the stuff himself. But Jappy wouldn't have it, and batted him one on the head with the potato masher. Then Jimmy went in for blood, and grabbed the meat-knife, and would have put it into him in a pair of seconds if I hadn't tripped him up and sat on him. There was a hot time in there for a spell, the air was blue. Old Jimmy cussin' for all he was worth in the sand-flapper lingo, and Matsu going him one better every time in his pigeon English!"

"I suppose they'll both throw up their jobs now," remarked a dyspeptic looking man near the foot of the table. "I thought it was too good to last, and this God-forsaken Arizona desert can't hold more than one chef like Matsu. He's the perfection of his kind. I'd feel like hitting the trail myself if he should go."

"That's what Mrs. Welsh is afraid of," replied Hillis. "She's out there now trying to patch up the peace with him and