F oreword
With so many great artists—writers, painters, musicians, flm-makers, actors—the pleasure of an individual work is enriched by our sense of it within the work as a whole. In the paintings of Manet or the flms of Robert Bresson or the theatre productions of Katie Mitchell, there is a movement or fow in each separate work that leads to another, the edges of each text porously letting in the neighbouring texts. The works layer on each other. This is not to suggest that they amount, ultimately, to a single master-work containing all the individuals, because their movement overfows, cascading beyond the maker’s individual mark. Manet’s paintings mark and are marked by the paintings around it, by the culture itself, whose edges are thereby compromised and opened up. Great artworks remind me of the Situationist binding their books in sandpaper so that, as you drag them on and off the bookshelf, they slowly destroy the other books around them. When I see productions by Katie Mitchell, they always spoil other theatre for a while, because her unfinching precision and seriousness and daring makes almost everything else feel cheap, shallow, compromised. Great art breaks down the clear edges and hard borders between things.
One of the joys of this book is the way Verónica Rodríguez is able to capture and conjure such a broad range of David Greig’s plays. Over two and a half decades now, Greig has been writing with prolifc energy a continually evolving and transforming body of work. Each new play adjusts our sense of the previous plays, but also intervenes in the culture in a way that helps us see the world afresh. The boundaries of and
between the plays are porous and permeable. Greig’s plays are invitations for the reader and the audience not to stop at the border but to be welcomed in.
Rodríguez draws particular attention to the gaps, lacunae, breaks and tears (in both senses) of these works. These various “holes” are, she argues persuasively, dramaturgical means by which not only the audience is let in, but gaps through which we can begin to see things differently, where we can imagine a different and better world. Greig’s work is continually in a tensile state, torn between realism and imagination, the way things are and the way things might be. Going beyond physical reality suggests something metaphysical, and indeed, Rodríguez makes a strong case for the spiritual yearnings of Greig’s practice. I was reminded of a show that David and I collaborated on several years ago. The show was Futurology, a Suspect Culture commission by the National Theatre of Scotland. It was both real and not-real; set at an international climate change conference, it both drew on the realities of political timidity and banal compromise and yet, in its fantasized imagination of climate disaster, tried to keep things open, to fnd a utopian space of hope in and beyond the very act of representation. On the frst night, David’s present to me was a copy of Leonard Cohen’s album The Future. On its most famous track, “Anthem”, are the lines “There’s a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”.
There are holes and cracks in all of these plays. In some ways, I suspect this is a product of Greig’s battle with his own considerable intellect. He has spoken before of the way he continually has to change his writing method to evade his conscious mind. He prefers to write in a state of intuitive unknowing, to access those parts of his mind that don’t understand what he’s doing. But as soon as his conscious mind fgures out what’s going on, he has to fnd some new way of getting there without rationality getting in the way, hence his continual evolution as a writer. Hence, too, his deep misgivings about reading critical analysis of his own work: he fears understanding his own writing. (Which is also why I can write what I like about his work here, knowing that he’ll never read it.)
Some of his plays seem to have been written almost like dreams; just as some of our dreams seem to be haphazardly built with the events of the preceding day, so his play Cosmonaut is constructed around all the places Greig had been in the year before writing; San Diego seems to have been fashioned out of anything David had to hand during one
aeroplane journey when fying in to see Cosmonaut at La Jolla Playhouse (a guide to the city, the pilot’s name, an article in the in-fight magazine). It’s why so many of the geographically titled plays—San Diego, Damascus, Kyoto, Being Norwegian—seem unsure whether these places are real or imagined. It’s like the visions of America that appear in Greig’s plays as diverse as The Speculator, The American Pilot and Damascus, a shimmering fantasy: vividly real, and always out of reach.
This should not be exaggerated; Greig’s plays are fercely intelligent, of course, and do seem to construct elaborate and intricate responses to the real world. But their oneiric character should not be ignored either. While many have written about Greig’s serious dramaturgical engagement with Scotland, with politics, with the Middle East, we shouldn’t forget the deep wells of emotion in these plays: the fnal act of Timeless, which is overwhelmed with feeling that tears the play apart; the boundless joyfulness of Midsummer; the end of The Events which, on the night I saw it, reduced its entire audience to magnifcent tears.
What brings the two together—a precise political realism and a wild dreamlike imagination—is the nature of the contemporary world. As Rodríguez reminds us, Greig’s interest in Theodor Adorno dates back to the very beginning of his playwriting. Adorno’s sense in the 1950s and 1960s was that capitalism had extended itself so far into our lives as to form a totality, in which everything was transformed into a commodity, and thus, the dialectic between what is and what might be had ground to a halt. Everything was just its economic value. And if he thought that in the 1960s, what might he have thought now, in an age of turbo-capitalism and globalization?
In Greig’s particular take on Adorno, art has a unique role in breaking open the smooth surfaces of capitalist reality. The diffculty of art, its demandingly complex relation to the every day, the splintered shards of modernist fragmentation, these are the sharp edges that will cut through seamless totality (or the spectacle, or the simulacrum). Art can put holes in the whole. Rodríguez shows brilliantly how Greig’s plays mimic global capitalism’s play of both horizontal and vertical movement, while also creating slippages that undermine the fxity of the globalized world. When I watched The Events, I was watching the Young Vic overlaid on an imagined London church hall, overlaid on Scotland, overlaid on Norway. When we all sobbed at the choir singing “we’re all in here”, what makes that ending so moving (in both senses) is that, at that point, we understand “here” as both here and everywhere.
Greig has, I think, seen in playwriting a particularly radical potential for capturing something beyond the “identity-thinking” (Adorno) of capitalism where things are meant to remain stable so as to have economic value—and only economic value—squarely assigned to them. Greig’s playwriting does not have the fxity of a previous generation who saw plays as needing to be, in Howard Brenton’s phrase, “messages frst”, that is unambiguously expressing a particular textual message. But nor do these plays allow themselves to be exhausted by performance. A play, as Greig knows so well, is both a complete thing in itself and something waiting to be completed in performance. That means that it can never be identical with itself, because its very character is to be non-identical. Plays create characters that are both very particular (Paul in Damascus is a proper character, with a backstory, and lots of personal details) and yet very non-particular (Paul could be played by thousands of actors and seem quite different each time, without departing from the text). Plays long to be completed, but are never completed. Plays often specify space, but leave gaps and holes in the specifcity. Language (in which most plays are presented, of course) works like the human imagination, which can create general entities (“dog”, “ship”, “human”) that you could never never see. You can only ever see a particular human; you can imagine and capture in language humans as such. Greig’s plays are non-identically somewhere between the specifc and the general, the local and the global. And it that gap, in that oscillation, that’s how the light gets in.
David Greig’s plays are full of gaps. Sometimes this is very literal: in his text for Suspect Culture, Lament, there are missing sections in the dialogue that suggest some viral atrophy of language. Often his stage directions are very sparse holding space and the spaceless together. In San Diego, he seems to relinquish authorial control by having the author murdered before the frst act is over and have the characters start to rename each other, the names in the script obediently changing as the wretched of the earth seize control of the text. And through all of these holes, Rodríguez suggests, Greig fnds something holy. Although the holes themselves—the plays’ modesty, their deliberately fraying edges, their incompleteness—prevent them being holier-than-thou.
And through these gaps we see a different vision of ourselves, one where the boundaries of self and of place begin to evaporate. The theatre is a place where we perhaps allow some freedom of movement across the edges of our personal identity. When we go to the theatre, we let the
experience of others penetrate us. Actors inhabit other characters, sometimes multiple other characters: in Mainstream, four performers play two characters, the true nature of the two fgures deferred and displaced, their sharp edges torn as the four actors pass through them. In Fragile, one character is played by a whole audience, perhaps hundreds of people at once. In The Events and The Suppliant Women, particular groups of people are performed by different performers on different nights of the tour—and we know this, giving the particular instantiations of humanity on stage, a perilous, precarious, fragile and provisional quality. This is what Rodríguez calls “transcorporeality”, a theatre that places and displaces the people, the bodies on stage giving us an intense awareness of their here-ness and the possibility of their being other. Some of these characters walk the play like ghosts.
As such, the plays evoke and transcend the complex fows of a globalized world. Global capitalism likes to present itself as the only game in town, but work like this says another world is possible. It is one where the boundaries of the sovereign liberal individual are burst and exceeded by a fow of common responsibility for our cosmopolitan humanity. Towards the end of the book, Rodríguez cites Derrida talking of a state of affairs where “a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere”. At the time, I’m writing—and I hope you, whoever you are, reading this are doing so at a time when this time has defnitively passed—where the political fashion has moved towards building walls and throwing up barriers and strengthening the borders, it seems impossible to imagine a world where such genuinely transnational care and responsibility could be imagined. But even in this textual moment, there is a vision of exchange and slippage and continuity across borders; Derrida is in fact not speaking for himself but quoting Immanuel Kant’s famous cosmopolitan essay “Toward Perpetual Peace”. So as I cite Rodríguez, citing Derrida, citing Kant, we pass from Britain to Spain to France to Germany in a moment of continuity and affrmation of another way we could be.
This book is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on the work of David Greig. It has perhaps taken some critics time to understand the particular force and direction of Greig’s work; as Rodríguez notes here, he was not easily located in the “In Yer Face” generation and so, for a while, remained a slightly shadowy fgure. But let’s also note that many of those “In Yer Face” playwrights seem, now, much closer to Greig’s own direction. Ravenhill’s vision of urban anomie seems closer
now to the glass and chrome worlds of Timeless or Cosmonaut than they once did. (His wonderful play Over There is a riddling exploration of nationhood, difference, desire and separation that struck me as the best play David Greig never wrote.) Sarah Kane’s gradual abstraction from character and her grasping for a beyond seem now more important than the violent eruptions of the early plays. There is a spirit of constant formal disruption in the work of all of these playwrights that has turned out to be much more defnitive of twenty-frst century British playwriting than visceral shock effects. It should encourage us to ask if David Greig has been at the heart of things all along.
The Greig that emerges from these fascinating pages is that of a shamanic seeker after meaning, a fgure immersed in the politics of our world, but in search of not just the real, but the really real, something beyond. Greig’s evasion of his own formidable rational intellect has created—and continues to create—a body of work that offers a secular spirituality that reaches for an absent divine in which we can glimpse the perfectibility of feeling and understanding, mark the edges of the known and let them go. This is theatre that lets the light in.
London, United Kingdom
November 2018
Dan Rebellato
Royal Holloway, University of London
A cknowledgements
This book has been made possible by colleagues, by loved ones and by strangers, only a few of whom I can acknowledge here. Let me start by dedicating this to the holes in our lives, to the absences, to the absent and, indeed, the absentees in these words of thanks.
This book is a rewriting of my Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Globalisation in David Greig’s Theatre: Space, Ethics and the Spectator”, defended at the University of Barcelona in 2016. The frst person I would like to thank is Mireia Aragay, whom I was extremely lucky to have as doctoral supervisor. I owe her very much for all her support and the countless hours she spent on the refnement of my doctoral thesis. I am deeply indebted to the caring guidance of Enric Monforte and Pilar Zozaya during my years in Barcelona and beyond. I extend my gratitude also to fve scholars whose advice enhanced the quality and the international scope of my work while visiting their institutions during my Ph.D.: Martin Middeke (University of Augsburg, 2011), Clare Wallace (Charles University, 2012), Marilena Zaroulia (University of Winchester, 2013), Nicholas Ridout (Queen Mary, University of London, 2014) and Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2015). I feel privileged to have been able to work with all of them.
I am most grateful to David Greig for his work, for the materials he generously provided me with and the many emails he answered. Co-habiting the same world of one’s area of research can prove daunting but David made things so easy along the way that I am immensely thankful for it.
Rebellato’s work on Greig and playwriting in the global era has paved the way for this book to exist. This is why I feel so honoured to have this book opened with a foreword by Dan. Special thanks also to two scholars whom I deeply admire and whose work on Greig has also been crucial to this book, Clare Wallace and Marilena Zaroulia, for endorsing this book.
Many thanks to my readers and editors at Palgrave Macmillan (and beyond), especially Tomas René, Victoria Peters and Vicky Bates and my proofreader Philip Reed.
The initial development of my research was supported by the research project “The Representation of Politics and the Politics of Representation in Post-1990 British Drama and Theatre”, for which I was research assistant, with Aragay as Principal Investigator and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2009-07598), from September 2010 to September 2014. I was also a member of the project “Ethical Issues in Contemporary British Theatre since 1989: Globalisation, Theatricality, Spectatorship” (FFI2012-31842), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, with Aragay as PI, from 2013 to 2016. Since January 2017, I have been a member of the project “British Theatre in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Affect, Community”, a four-year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and by FEDER (European Union) (FFI2016-75443), with Aragay as PI and Cristina DelgadoGarcía, Clara Escoda, Elisabeth Massana, Middeke, Monforte, José Ramón Prado, María Isabel Seguro, Aleks Sierz, Marta Tirado, Wallace and myself as team members. I want to thank these funding bodies for their fnancial support and the projects’ participants for the collaborative and congenial atmosphere that has always characterised our work together.
My gratitude also to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Dienst (DAAD) for funding my research stay in Augsburg (2011) and my participation in “Representations of the Precarious in Contemporary British Drama and Theatre” (DAAD; Projekt-ID 57049392), a one-year (2014) research project, with Aragay and Middeke as PIs. Thanks also to the Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) of the Generalitat de Catalunya for offcially recognising and funding the research team of which I am a member, Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona (CBTBarcelona), for the three-year periods 2014–2016 (2014 SGR 49) and 2017–2019 (2017 SGR 40), with Aragay as PI. For more information, please visit www.ub.edu/cbtbarcelona.
The list that follows (and including the already-mentioned scholars) contains very special people to me and to this book. Some have fed me with materials; some have asked/answered tricky questions; some have endured editing my work; some have shared projects with me; some have been there in pivotal moments; some have greatly inspired me; and some have even done many of those things at the same time and much more. Warm thanks to Siân Adiseshiah, Adam Alston, Awo Mana Asiedu, Vicky Angelaki, Elaine Aston, Christian Attinger, Bettina Auerswald, Jess Banks, Elzbieta Baraniecka, David Barnett, Charlotte Bell, Julia Boll, Jacqueline Bolton, Paola Botham, Ian Brown, John Bull, Maria Elena Capitani, Gautam Chakrabarti, Giovanni Covelli, Melissa Cokely, Emma Cox, Boris Daussà-Pastor, Maria Delgado, Danyela Demir, Graham Eatough, Vicky Featherstone, Marissia Fragkou, Barry Freeman, Cyrielle Garcon, Eva Gil, Lynette Goddard, Philip Hager, Anja Hartl, Jen Harvie, Dilek İnan, Julian Johanpour, Joe Kelleher, David Kerler, Carl Lavery, Nidesh Lawtoo, Mayya Levkina, Patrick Lonergan, Laura López, Eleanor Massie, Chris Megson, Emer O’Toole, David Overend, Louise Owen, Christina Papagiannouli, María José Parra Pérez, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, David Pattie, Patrice Pavis, Ondrej Pilny, Hannah Price, Michael Raab, Alan Read, Duška Radosavljevic, Trish Reid, Janelle Reinelt, Martin Riedelsheimer, Thomas Riccio, George Rodosthenous, Mercè Saumell, Graham Saunders, Marta Segarra, Eleanor Skimin, Adina Sorian, Juan Antonio Suárez, Liz Tomlin, Eckhart Voigts, Laurens de Vos, Fintan Walsh, Nik Wakefeld, David Walton, Margaret Werry and Markus Wessendorf.
Christoph Henke sadly passed away on 26 May 2018. I met Christoph in Augsburg in November 2011. I have fond memories of Christoph talking about his family and Julian Barnes. We will always deeply miss Christoph, the excellent person, friend and colleague he was.
I am also very grateful to friends Tra, Esther, Giannis, Betta, André, Laura, Mar, Violeta, Alex, Luis, Toni, Andrés, Meg and Chris who contributed to this project in their own unique ways. Thanks for crossing borders with me.
I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my families in Murcia, Alicante, Barcelona and London and especially to my partner for keeping me going through some diffcult times and for allowing me all the space and time I needed to complete this work. My wholehearted thanks go to my closest family for their unwavering confdence and their unconditional help and love. Love you all.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Shamanic Semionaut
In the course of my interview with David Greig, now published in Contemporary Theatre Review’s special issue on the playwright,1 Greig’s talk about shamanism and shamans caught my attention. Shamanism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “the beliefs, rituals, techniques, etc., associated with a shaman”.2 A shaman is “a man or a woman who is regarded as having direct access to and infuence in the spirit world which is usually manifested during a trance and empowers them to guide souls, cure illnesses”.3 Greig is interested in shamans “in traditional societies such as the San people of the Kalahari, or the Chuckchee People of Siberia”,4 that is, in shamanic ritual as a traditional practice performed across the globe. My contention is that Greig’s engagement with shamanism reveals fundamental aspects of Greig’s approach to his work and Greig’s theatre. At the time of the interview, Greig was working on The Events (2013), a play that draws on Anders Breivik’s bomb attack and mass shooting in Norway in 2011. When I saw the play at the Young Vic in October 2013, the mention of shamanism and shamans in the interview became clearly connected for me to the reference in the play to a festival of spirituality and the enacting of a shamanic exercise. In addition, Greig’s direct allusion to shamanism, I thought, might help me address the idea of the spiritual—“a structure of experience and possibility [whether god and/or religion are included in the equation or not], rather than a revelation of the one true dogma”5—across Greig’s work.
© The Author(s) 2019
V. Rodríguez, David Greig’s Holed Theatre, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06182-1_1
Although the spiritual is sometimes explicit in Greig’s work, it usually appears in the shape of a search, a yearning, a reaching out. Peter Nesteruk was one of the frst, if not the frst, to connect the notion of “ritual” with Greig’s work, by reference to several plays, including Europe (1994). Nesteruk argues that “[t]he tendency of ritual is […] to bring about the intensifcation of the ‘now’ experience”.6 Chris Megson has noted a recent “turn towards [a] metaphysical or ‘spiritual’ content”7 in contemporary theatre, “grounded in the performative evocation of the moment, and […] constitutive of a reach for new values, new possibilities of living, beyond the grip of capitalism, religion and exhausted ideology”.8 Dan Rebellato claims that “Greig’s work displays a persistent thread of non-rationality, even of religious imagery”.9 In reference to San Diego (2003), Nadine Holdsworth states that “all the characters are yearning for a sense of self-worth […] that they try to fulfl through therapy, their careers or religious faith”.10 This aspect of Greig’s work may indeed be read within “a trend towards […] a yearning for spiritual meaning”.11 Greig himself told Skadi Riemer in relation to The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999) [hereafter Cosmonaut] that “the play is very much about the human relationship with god”,12 and talking about Damascus (2007), Greig claims that Elena, “the piano player, that’s a bit like […] God or something”.13 Other references include the name of the protagonist’s estate in The Architect (1996), Eden Court; the religiosity of most characters in The American Pilot (2005); or Claire’s job as a vicar in The Events. Coming back to shamanism, Greig claims, “I’m interested in an exploration of traditional shamanic practice, by which I mean those circumstances when a community gets together in an enclosed space in order to heal someone”.14 It is relevant to signpost that Greig’s interest in shamanism goes back (at least) to the turn of the millennium. For instance, in his introduction to Oedipus the Visionary (2000), Greig talks about the AIDS-ravaged Lesotho, where “[m]any people seek treatment from the local Mnagka or shaman”.15 An ill person in that context is described as “a victim of bad ‘muti’”, “muti” being “a multilayered word, which means medicine and luck, power and magic. It describes a force in the world which, although invisible and spiritual, is as real and powerful as electricity”.16 To continue with the interview, Greig adds, “I’m thinking of ritual enactions, like telling a story or exploring a theme using music, song, call and response, or rhythm in order to transform someone’s body from sick to healed”.17 Putting this in a way that would
not be at odds with theatre itself, Greig claims that in these ritual enactions “[t]he audience turns up for the experience of healing, or witnessing the healing, or to see the ritual enacted”.18
Greig is also interested in the fact that shamans and shamanic practice can be connected to the ideas of entertainment and performance. “Siberian Shamans [sic]”, Greig claims, “are theatrical people”, and therefore, shamanic practice is not just about healing, “it’s also entertainment, in the way that, for example, music structures the ritual”.19 Indeed, Greig’s understanding of traditional shamanic practice is that “it has connections with theatre, not just theatre in a solemn, spiritual sense but also in the silly, stupid, pure entertainment sense”.20 Besides, as Greig claims, shamans “are very concerned about their performance, whether they’re good or not, whether they are better than the shaman down the road”.21 This performance dimension brings to mind shamanism’s connection with performance studies. Richard Schechner places shamanism within the framework of the wider term performance:
Performance must be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, and on to healing (from shamanism to surgery), the media, and the internet.22
Greig’s interest in shamanism also manifests itself in his very creative process: “I feel as though somewhere in the darkness of these rituals and the shamanic process of creating them is the source of my own work as a playwright”.23 Greig has spoken about “this slightly shamanic thing that you need when you’re writing”,24 a sense of “shamanic power”,25 described as “the ability to negotiate between different worlds”.26 Greig is inspired by the “shamanic worldview” which “has three layers” (the number of layers or worlds depends on shamanic cultures), “the world above, the world below and the world as it is”.27 As Greig explains, “[i]nhabitants of the other worlds [other than the world as it is] can include ancestors, gods, and the animated spirits of animals and plants”.28 What fascinates Greig then is that “[a] shaman is the person who communicates between those worlds”.29 In the case of the playwright, the worlds are the so-called real world and the world of the imagination, where Greig’s characters “live”. The playwright acts as a hinge between
the world and the work—he has for instance spoken of himself as being “the ‘conduit’” for Cosmonaut, a play that was “given”30 to him.
Shamans are holed entities because, through a shaman, the world as it is, and potentially, a person in the world as it is, can establish a connection to the other worlds. He/she is a hole. The playwright communicates between/through worlds and therefore is a holed entity too; he is the porous membrane through which negotiations with the real world and between the real world and the world of characters take place. In the frst instance, Greig claims that he has “a kind of antenna on the world”.31 In this sense, he has equally used the metaphor of the solar panel.32 This means that the playwright works as flter—another perforated structure. At the same time, Greig has noted that he manipulates his conscious mind so as to force it not to intervene if some of the signals picked up by his antenna look irrational and to let the unconscious into the writing process. Yet, “to be unselfconscious you have to trick yourself, it’s a constant effort”.33 As he discloses to Holdsworth, “[b]y taking away the conscious layer, what I’m trying to do is let […] connections happen that want to happen without my conscious internal police system making it nice or okay or safe or unembarrassing”.34
The idea of communication with other worlds indicates a transgression of the membranes which separate those worlds, which also takes me to the idea of holes. A shaman is able to open pathways or “punch” holes in the walls that separate these different worlds—a shaman has the ability to “pierce through” these membranes. Like a shaman, the playwright has the ability to communicate between worlds, which discloses those worlds, the real world and the world where characters live, as holed. As Greig explains, “I am interested in shamanism because I feel that somewhere in the darkness of shamanic ritual might be […] clues that could put me back in touch with the other world where my characters live”.35
The “need” to facilitate communication by the (holed) shaman/playwright between (holed) worlds is not a capricious one. In searching for communication between worlds, the shaman and/or the playwright is/ are bringing to the fore these worlds’ principle of mutuality: “These other worlds and their inhabitants co-exist with us, and their desires and actions can impact on us; similarly, our desires and actions can impact on them”.36 It is worth noting that in shamanism “life is seen to be not only about beliefs and practices, but also about relationships”, “how we are related, and how we relate to each other”.37 The shamanic worldview suggests that “we”—this shamanic “we” includes animals, plants and
spirits—are all implicated in an ecology of ethical responsibility. One can imagine why the shamanic worldview is so appealing to a playwright concerned with ethical questions under globalization and perhaps interested in “trans-mitting” those concerns to the spectator.
But how do shamans (and Greig) get to communicate with other co-existing worlds? As Greig puts it, “[a]ccess to these other worlds is generally understood to come via a spiritual portal. These portals may be in particular places – caves, forest clearings – or they may be created by shamanic action – the dance, or the shamanic trance itself”.38 In the case of the playwright, the creation of symbolic portals might be sought in relation to the creative process as well as during the staging of plays, during the theatrical event. In 2017, due to a writing block, Greig attended a soul-retrieval session with a shamanic healer in Fife (Scotland) in order to recuperate the fuidity between these worlds. With regard to spiritual portals while the (shamanic) theatrical event takes place, for instance, in The Events, Claire attempts to create a symbolic portal through forming a circle and producing a hummed chant with her choir.
Whether these spiritual portals become active or not is less important than the fact that they are attempted. In fact, in this book, I am not concerned with the shamanic “effcacy” of Greig’s work or imposing the label of shamanism (or any label) on Greig’s work but with how shamanism allows this book to look at how Greig addresses his own work and how shamanism assists this book in an initial articulation of Greig’s sense of the spiritual and holed theatre. In sum, the communication of worlds achieved in the creative process through spiritual trance states, soul retrieval or other, is implanted in the communication of worlds desired in the play through spiritual portals, or other. In fact, one could argue that Greig’s plays are shamanic or have a shamanic imprint—reveal worlds as holed—in that they aim at and might trigger interconnectedness.
By virtue of this three senses of “holedness”—holed shaman/playwright, holed worlds, holed work—nothing is conceived in isolation. Creative processes, the playwright shaman and the plays rest on some kind of interpenetration of worlds, which is in tune with a desire which insistently pervades Greig’s work: the desire to convey interconnectedness. This already points out a crucial idea threading through this book: we live in a holed world, in a porous world, this world, this holed here. Through contact with the (shamanic) theatre event, a spectator can ethically enter in “direct” contact with other worlds that are no other
world than this one. Theatre becomes a reminder of who “we” “are”: theatre as shamanic ritual connects “us” to connection (and this does not mean that there is no space for disconnection in such theatre). All of these senses of holed theatre might operate simultaneously in Greig’s work but these levels apply unevenly to different plays. In other words, I am not claiming that all of Greig’s plays are holed in the same ways and at the same levels. This book’s three pieces on theory crucially build upon this Introduction and do cover “holedness” from different angles: globalization, ethics and the spectator, which will offer ways to frame the eight plays analysed in this book.
But whose globalization? What ethics? Which spectators? Scholar and performance artist Thomas Riccio has suggested that “[t]he rest of the world views the role of performance differently, yet the Western form and expression of theatre, along with its incumbent, economically ensconced production machinery and thinking, remains intransigent to a fundamental re-evaluation to make it more vital to a greater cultural, community and spiritual discourse”.39 While Greig is part of the “Western form and expression of theatre”, I believe that his work contributes to “a fundamental re-evaluation to make [theatre] more vital to a greater cultural, community and spiritual discourse”, which displaces the idea of Greig’s theatre being uniquely Western or inadequate to be concerned with areas as encompassing as globalization, ethics and the spectator. At the same time, although shamanic ritual is articulated around the idea of community and healing and triggers a sense of transformation, these characteristics are suggested just as possibilities in Greig’s work. Rather than claiming that by virtue of engaging with shamanism Greig’s work achieves a sense of transformative power (which his work might do), I am suggesting that a spiritual approach to Greig’s work sheds light on the understanding of his practice and on what I call Greig’s holed theatre.
While I hope it is clear by now why I use the word “shamanic” in this Introduction’s title, Greig’s comment as we walked towards a café during our interview break—“I see words everywhere, don’t you see words everywhere?”40—leads me on to the concept of the “semionaut”, which I borrow from art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defnes semionauts (etymologically sign-sailors) as “inventors of pathways within the cultural landscape, nomadic sign gatherers”41 who imagine “the links, the likely relations between disparate sites”.42 The phrase “shamanic semionaut”, then, is meant to designate Greig with regard
to the playwright’s approach to his creative process and the method through which that sign gathering and imagination of links are done, which of course surpasses a sense of uniquely semiotic sign gathering— the “naut” in semionaut is also relevant because it conveys the idea of travelling aptly connecting with shamanism’s worlds’ travelling. Why it might be urgent, paradoxically, to imagine links in a globalised, apparently hyper-connected scenario, and how Greig’s theatre painfully and beautifully articulates interconnectedness are the daunting questions the present book sets out to explore. This book’s central argument is that in order to put forward interconnectedness and to allow the transience that the conveying of interconnectedness is based upon, Greig’s theatre offers myriad senses of “holedness”. In the rest of this Introduction, I offer a brief overview of Greig’s life and work as at the time of writing, discuss one of Greig’s theatre’s most recurrent methods, i.e. the dialectical method, expand on what I mean by holed theatre and present this book’s approach and structure.
dAvid greig
Greig was born in Edinburgh in 1969. Shortly after, his family moved to Northern Nigeria, where his father worked in the construction of “the secretariats and parliament buildings and roads”43 of the country. “Aged 13”,44 and with an American accent which over the years has morphed into a fairly standard RP one, he went back to Scotland where he became involved with acting with the Edinburgh Youth Theatre,45 although he claims that he always knew he would be a writer.46 He studied drama and English at the University of Bristol. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989), Greig, Graham Eatough, Sarah Kane and Simon Pegg, among others, all students at University of Bristol, were in the fnal days of rehearsals for a student production of Howard Barker’s Victory: Choices in Reaction (1983), to be performed at the Glynne Wickham Studio Theatre in the Drama Department at University of Bristol on 16, 17 and 18 November. This is important not only because of the historical turning point, which has decisively shaped Greig’s playwriting (in particular, the work he produces in the 1990s), but also because Barker left a deep imprint on Greig’s theatrical sensibility47—“in the abrupt shifts of register, the emphasis on imagination and possibility, […] the contrapuntal style of clashing dialogue”,48 “the rotundity of language, […] an understanding that what is to be
spoken on stage is to be spoken out loud”,49 the rawness of emotions and the focus on violence.
As soon as Greig completed his degree, he returned to Scotland, where he co-founded the theatre company Suspect Culture with Eatough (actor and artistic director) and Nick Powell (musician), which received funding from the Scottish Arts Council until 2009. When they produced their frst show, based on Greig’s A Savage Reminiscence or How to Snare the Nimble Marmoset (1991), at the University of Bristol, they did not think they were starting a company.50 What led Greig to become a writer was his inability to become a director. Firstly, although “in the early Nineties, the fashionable thing to do was to direct radical versions of the classics”,51 he wanted to do something different. Secondly, he did not have enough money to buy the rights for new plays and soon realized that people wanted to pay him to write.52 At that time, with “a friend”,53 “Greig took over […] the Roman Eagle Lodge, redesignating it ‘Theatre Zoo’”, where “his own play Stalinland, a devised show The Garden, An Audience with Satan […] and the second Suspect Culture show And the Opera House Remained Unbuilt” were performed.54 Since the early 1990s, he has written “performance texts”55 for and occasionally engaged in other kinds of artistic collaboration with Suspect Culture, and produced a vast variety of solo work, including his frst main stage production, Europe, as well as plays for children, young people and adults, radio plays, adaptations, translations and a libretto for a musical. Greig’s oeuvre also includes multifaceted collaborations, multi-author projects, curatorial projects, screenplays, television and visual art projects, and participation in Theatre Uncut,56 among others. To comment on the latter, in Hannah Price’s words, “Theatre Uncut is […] a politically motivated collective”,57 “a movement that began on March 19th [2011] […] made up of hundreds of theatre-makers joining voices” against the cuts to welfare system spending by the Conservative-Liberal coalition government.58
Greig’s promiscuous, cross-pollinating dedication to theatre has also taken him, for instance, to publishing academic essays, editing volumes, speaking at conferences and participating in other public events. He has also workshopped extensively from the early 2000s onwards as part of the Royal Court Theatre’s international programme funded by the British Council, mainly in the Middle East and Northern Africa59 and built artistic ties with a number of theatre-makers in those regions over the years.60 He has directed and acted in some of his own plays, and even
featured as a character in one of them, San Diego, 61 amongst which we might highlight directing: “I love directing. I used to direct at university and I became a writer partly in order to create work to direct”.62 Indeed, in June 2016, Greig became Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.
Although Greig notes that he feels he has not been “generally […] perceived as part of the new writing boom of the early 1990s”,63 he is indeed part of the stimulating effervescence in new writing for the theatre that spanned that decade. Greig clarifes, “[i]n fact, I debuted a couple of years before the ‘in-yer-face’ stuff and inherited my writing more from Martin Crimp or Caryl Churchill”,64 and adds that “[a]t the time I felt sidelined, a little, particularly in Europe where they seemed very eager to stage blood and sperm plays”.65 Although Greig’s plays do not ft the in-yer-face paradigm, his critique of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism is something that he shares with several in-yer-face playwrights, such as Kane, Anthony Neilson, Joe Penhall, Ravenhill, Philip Ridley or Judy Upton, among others. Although moments of in-yer-face sensibility are woven into some of his plays (e.g. San Diego, among others), particularly in the sense of being “drawn to the depiction of psychological and emotional extremes”,66 he does perhaps fall more accurately into the broader category of “new writing”, characterised, among other features, by “the contemporary favour of their language and themes” and “the provocative nature of its content or its experimentation with theatrical form”.67 Experimentation with theatrical form is pervasive throughout Greig’s career. He has challenged “traditional” theatrical form by experimenting, for instance, with the form of the ballad in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), with farce in The Monster in the Hall (2011), with the idea of the road movie in Yellow Moon: The Ballad of Leila and Lee (2006), with the strategy of using PowerPoint to explore protest in Fragile (2011) and with dialogue delivered in tweets in his Twitter comedy The Yes/No Plays (2014), among others.68
At the same time, Greig should also be placed in the context of the contemporary “renaissance in Scottish playwriting”,69 which includes playwrights (despite the age divide) Gregory Burke, John Clifford, Stephen Greenhorn, Chris Hannan, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower, Ian Heggie, Liz Lochhead, Douglas Maxwell, Nicola McCartney, Neilson and Stuart Patterson, among others. Aleks Sierz states that “it was […] Greig who emerged as the country’s most infuential playwright”.70 Scotland is a driving force in Greig’s work, present through Scottish characters,
evocations of the Scottish landscape, Scottish settings or in his fondness for Scottish audiences, among others. This national side, especially in terms of being part of the community of contemporary Scottish culture and politics—for he seems to feel he is one of its public spokespersons— is central to Greig. He was actively involved in the 1997 Scottish referendum, which his play Caledonia Dreaming was a response to, and he “campaign[ed] for a yes vote”71 for the 2014 referendum. As Greig explains, in the context of the 2014 referendum, he wrote a “140-character comedy”,72 which eventually became the above-mentioned Twitter project, The Yes/No Plays, in Rebellato’s words a “cross-over creativepolitical live-digital piece” that is “delivered in miniature bursts on Twitter, mostly featuring two ungendered characters, a couple called Yes and No”.73 In the same context, he also co-curated with David MacLennan, who died without seeing the project come to fruition, the The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know Five Minute: Created by Anyone, for an Audience of Everyone (2014), a 24-hour-long theatre event formed by 180 5-minute pieces staged across Scotland, the UK, the world and the web, and produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, whose premiere took place on 23 June 2014.74 According to Susannah Clapp, “[t]he trenchant chronicler Joyce Macmillan has said that the recent history of the stage in Scotland is in large part the history of Greig, as director and prolifc playwright. He is also at the centre of its future”.75
The fact that Greig is included in Methuen’s Modern British Playwriting 2000–2009 instead of the 1990s counterpart volume indicates that he has been canonised as a post-millennial playwright rather than a 1990s’ one. The present book sees Greig’s 2000s canonisation as being saliently related to his north-of-the-border condition and his early “problematic” relations with the Royal Court Theatre, which turned down some of his plays. Concerning northerliness, as Sierz puts it, “Europe, The Architect, Caledonia Dreaming and The Speculator –[…] [were] clearly innovative and superbly written, yet failed to journey southwards”.76 Sierz adds that “[o]nly occasionally, as with his Cosmonaut […], did metropolitan audiences get to see his plays”.77
As for the Royal Court, in director Philip Howard’s words, the institution “has consistently failed to support or estimate David”.78 The record goes from their rejecting Europe for the Theatre Downstairs79 to deciding not to stage The American Pilot, which eventually found a house with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, Greig has also had productive collaborations with the Royal
Court, such as being “part of an extensive international programme of work pioneered by Elyse Dodgson […] that saw [him] helping to devise a comedy, Mish Alla Ruman (Not About Pomegranates) with the director Rufus Norris and the Al Kasabah Theatre in Ramalla [sic] in 2001”.80 His play Ramallah (2004), which premiered at the Royal Court, is also an offspring of this fruitful connection. Furthermore, under Vicky Featherstone’s artistic direction, the Royal Court staged a highly successful production of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart in 2013, at the London Welsh Centre’s pub. Another crucial collaboration was Greig’s participation as chair of a Syrian playwriting event in 2008.81 2016 saw a workshop presentation of three plays under the rubric Told from the Inside (New Plays from Syria and Lebanon) led by Royal Court International Director Dodgson and playwrights Greig and Sam Holcroft.
Despite those off-border (Scotland and peripheral) and on-theborder (inside and outside Sloane Square) positionings, Greig has had an increasingly successful national and international career. In addition to the Royal Court, his award-winning work has been produced, among others, by the Traverse Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland, 7:84, Paines Plough, the RSC, Donmar Warehouse, the Actors Touring Company (ATC), the Young Vic and the West End’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane with a Warner Bros production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013), for which Greig wrote the libretto. The National Theatre of Scotland was founded in 2006 and Greig was its frst dramaturg in residence in 2007. Currently, Greig’s work has a high profle, and it is proving central to contemporary debates over identity, globalization and culture. He does fgure in courses on contemporary performance and contemporary British theatre. Speaking directly about our contemporary globalised world, Greig’s theatre is deeply concerned with the disenfranchised, from refugees to unemployed youth, Europe and its numerous crises (global) wars particularly in the Middle East, the protest climate against austerity and disenchanted (violent) masculinities across the globe, among many other issues.
The texture of Greig’s plays is intricate, including as it does intertextuality both with other and with his own work and autobiographical detail.82 Greig’s characters are all to a certain extent wounded. Settings that unsettle some scholars and critics due to their apparent unspecifcity or ungraspable specifcity include dispersed locales across the globe, place conglomerates and resonant micro-locations. Topics that run through
his work are the ideas of border, failure, violence, belonging and trauma. Recurrent themes are the pathological, the exposure of power abuse, the impact of the media, a vital engagement with characters on the move, or the pervasiveness of global trade and technology and their impact on everyday life.
His theatre is often described as political, which to Greig means “leftwing theatre” or “theatre with a progressive agenda”,83 a theatre that “poses questions about society to which it does not already know the answer”.84 Greig believes that “political theatre has at its very heart the possibility of change”.85 Greig’s work is also very often described as Brechtian. Greig admires Brecht’s “theatrical boldness”,86 Brecht’s interest in theatre as both serious and entertaining, Brecht’s drive to ask questions rather than answering them and Brecht’s “desire and need to approach a big subject”.87 One might describe the following phenomena as Brechtian in Greig’s work: the use of music; the plain style; the use of scene construction and scene titles; the use of generic designations for some of his characters (the Pilot in The American Pilot, the Boy in The Events, etc.); actors staying on stage throughout shows; the use of characters that are simultaneously inside and outside the play’s reality (David Greig in San Diego, Elena in Damascus, etc.); and de-familiarising uses of language(s), all of which have an interest in recognising the presence of the audience and highlighting the fact that a story is being told. Crucially drawing on Brecht, yet developing a distinctive theatrical register, Greig’s theatre interweaves the concepts of familiarisation and de-familiarisation, judgement and attachment, rationality and irrationality, didacticism and uncertainty, affect and imperviousness, reason and emotion and proximity and distance.
The imprint of geography is deeply ingrained in Greig’s work. Many of his plays’ titles bear the names of cities and towns—San Diego (2003), Damascus (2007), Kyoto (2010), Dalgety (2012)—continents—Europe (1994)—or (ex-)countries—the Soviet Union in Cosmonaut. Others are related to physical geography—Pyrenees (2005)—indicate geographically remote sites—Outlying Islands (2002)—relate to alternative urban geographies—One Way Street (1995)—or make reference to national identity—Being Norwegian (2007), The American Pilot (2005). Geography-related occupations abound, including cosmonauts, a UFO observer and a Middle East negotiator (Cosmonaut). In addition, some characters have the names of countries and cities—Morocco and Berlin (Europe). Greig’s playwriting is obsessed, among other things, with
pilots, astronauts, satellites, planes and birds—in short, any element that allows aerial views.
Place, a highly relevant category in Greig’s work, is usually invested with high doses of transience, including means of transport (airplanes, cars, trucks, helicopters, space modules), everyday spaces (bars, toilets, homes), war-related settings (zones of confict, checkpoints), places marked by consumerism (shopping malls, entertainment-related locations such as pubs) or other gathering places (conference halls, music rooms), edges (beaches, mountains), structures that suggest crossing and interconnecting, both artifcial (bridges, motorways) and natural (rivers, deserts), waiting and threshold areas (train stations, airports, borders, hospitals), places of passage (hotels, motels, car parks) or even semi-surreal spaces (characters’ imaginations, dreams), among others.
Greig’s uneasiness with “being” unequivocally “from” a “place”, possessing a defnite sense of roots and unquestionably feeling at “home” is no secret. “I don’t really have anywhere that I’m from”,88 he has claimed, or “[b]eing/not being Scottish is a matter of profound uncertainty for me”.89 He has also talked about the paradox of “inhabit[ing] both ways of being: a powerful compulsive desire to be rooted and a powerful awareness that I’m not”90 and about the fact that “[t]he obviousness of not being at home makes me feel at home”.91
The trope of lostness is central to Greig’s work. Indeed, he claims, “I fear that all my work concerns lostness in some way or another”,92 and Holdsworth opines that in his plays “characters are often lost”.93 Lostness coupled with an exploration of contemporary masculinities relates to Greig’s claim, “lost men – I guess that’s my neon sign. It’s the story I have to tell”.94 This dimension to lostness is particularly disturbing, because usually lost men are involved in stories that include violence. Indeed, all the plays under discussion feature violence—often entwined with a sense of masculinity in crisis.
the scenes From the world: diAlecticAl engAgement
In Greig’s global outlook, it is not a contradiction to want the independence of Scotland and to have “a sense that the entire world is [his] society: [his] world, [his] country”.95 This idea plausibly derives from Greig’s defning experiences of life having taken place across the globe, including Africa, where he was brought up; New York where he worked for months in hotel rooms; the streets of Cairo and Tunis where he had
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Swede Sam was there, blank-faced over the whole thing, and all that Doc Clevis could get from him was:
“Ay dunno. Ay am de cook.”
Neither Easton nor Blondy Hagen was at the inquest, which was held at the doctor’s home. Sheriff Blue glared silently at the floor during the proceedings, looking at no one.
“Sheriff,” said Doc Clevis, turning away from Swede Sam, “you’ve got a little evidence to show the jury, ain’t you?”
Jake Blue looked straight at Hashknife for a moment and then he answered—
“Nope.”
“Why, I—I thought——”
Doc Clevis seemed surprized.
Blue shook his head.
“We-e-ll, I reckon that’s all—then,” said the doctor slowly, looking at Blue.
He turned to the jury and added—
“You can think this over now, and——”
“It ain’t goin’ to require much thinkin’,” said a raw-boned cattleman. “These two strangers tell a straight story, and Skelton sure never shot Quinn.”
“What about the Swede?” asked the doctor
“I reckon the sheriff ought to apologize to him for puttin’ him in jail at all.”
Blue scowled, but said nothing.
“It’ll be the reg’lar verdict, Doc,” nodded one of the jury. “We finds that Quinin Quinn demises at the hands of a party, or parties, unknown. And,” he added, “that sure as —— ain’t settin’ no new example around here.”
The jury nodded and got to their feet.
“You’re free, Swede,” grunted Blue savagely.
“Das goot,” nodded Swede Sam, getting to his feet. “Now Ay buy drink—for me.”
Blue hurriedly left the room ahead of the rest, and went straight to the War-Bonnet. Spot Easton was near the door evidently waiting for
news, but Blue silently headed straight for the private room, and Easton followed him.
Blue flopped down in a chair and bit savagely into a plug of tobacco. His jaws fairly quivered as he spat out the twisted piece of metal—the trademark on the plug.
“Hook it on to ’em, Jake?” asked Easton, easing himself into a chair.
“Hook ——!” Blue’s vocal cords seemed to unhook with a bang.
“What do you mean, Jake? Didn’t the jury——?”
“To —— with the jury! They turned the Swede loose and said that Quinn was killed by parties unknown; that’s what happened!”
“——!” grunted Easton. “I thought you was so —— clever.”
“Thasso?”
Blue masticated rapidly as if trying to control his temper.
“How about that rifle?” asked Easton.
Blue spat explosively.
“You want to know, do you? So do I! I had that rifle in a rack in my office. I had three more rifles in that same rack. I went to git that rifle this mornin’ and——”
“It wasn’t there, eh?” interrupted Easton.
“You’re —— right it wasn’t! Neither was the other three.”
“You’re clever,” admitted Easton. “Clever as ——! What did you leave——”
“Lemme alone!” snarled Blue. “Don’tcha ride me, Spot! If you thought of that, why didn’t you say so? You’re so danged smart that you always see mistakes after they happen.”
Easton made no reply to this, and a deep gloom seemed to pervade the little room: Blue chewed mechanically, his eyes closed, a picture of abject despair; while Easton considered his bandaged right hand, which ached badly. His knuckles still tingled from contact with that heavy gun.
“Hagen knows that tall jasper,” he volunteered.
“Yeah?”
Blue spat and leaned back.
“Name’s Hashknife. Hagen says he’s a fightin’ hound.”
“My ——!” exploded Blue. “D’ you need to be told?”
After another long period of silence Easton said—
“I’m goin’ to make a trip to Gunsight, Jake.”
“Thasso? Whatfer?”
“Business. Leavin’ pretty soon.”
Jake Blue got to his feet and walked to the door, where he turned and squinted at Easton.
“What in —— do I care where you go? I’m gittin’ sick of havin’ eve’thing goin’ wrong all the time. If we’re goin’ to let that longgeared coyote run this country, let’s both go and give him room. We ain’t a —— bit better off ’n we was.”
“Takes time, Jake.” Easton’s tone was conciliatory.
Blue masticated viciously.
“Where’s Doc goin’ to bury Quinn?”
“I dunno, but I think Doc’s goin’ to start a new graveyard with Quinn. Said he’d picked out a spot back of town. Is that Hashknife person still here?”
“—— him; I suppose so. If I was you I’d sneak out the back way, Spot—if you want to git away safe-like.”
Jake Blue slammed the door behind him and went down the big room, half-grinning to himself. At least it was some satisfaction to goad Spot Easton, who was losing prestige about as fast as possible. Easton’s reputation had been earned, but he seemed to be running into a series of hard-luck and mistakes. Jake Blue also felt that the god of luck had deserted him, but he blamed everybody except himself. He went out of the front door and ran into Doc Clevis.
“I’ve been lookin’ for you,” stated Clevis. “What happened to you, Jake? Was you afraid to produce that rifle?”
Blue cursed solemnly and told the doctor what he had told Spot Easton. Doc Clevis removed his hat and polished his bald head with his palm.
“Somebody,” declared the doctor, “stole them guns.”
“Didja think they walked away?” Blue said sarcastically, and added
“Where’d Skelton and them two longhorns go to?”
Doc Clevis did not know He was dry, and he offered to buy a drink, but Jake Blue refused.
“You better let me look you over,” said the doctor. “Any time you refuses a drink, you’re sick.”
Jake Blue turned wearily away from the doctor and went toward the office. Spot Easton went to the livery-stable and in a few minutes he came out driving a tall, bay horse hitched to a top-buggy. He drove to the sheriff’s doorway, where Blue leaned dejectedly.
“I’m goin’ to Gunsight,” said Easton.
“You’ve got my consent,” grunted Blue, and as Easton drove out of town he added, “I hope t’ —— you run off a grade and never hit bottom.”
Hashknife, Sleepy and Skelton had left town immediately following the inquest. Hashknife was standing in the ranch-house doorway when Easton drove past, headed for Gunsight—the terminus of a branch railroad.
Easton did not look toward the house, but Hashknife recognized him.
“There goes the foreman of the 88, Skelton,” he said.
“Th’ son-of-a-rooster!” grunted Skelton. “He’s done read that letter and he’s goin’ to meet her in Gunsight.”
Easton disappeared around a curve in a cloud of dust, and Hashknife rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“How far’s it to Gunsight?”
“Thirty miles—about.”
“Huh!” Hashknife cogitated deeply. “If she comes in tonight, he’ll likely make the return trip with her.”
“Danged lonesome ride at night,” observed Skelton.
Sleepy came up from the corral and sat down on the steps.
“What’s the matter, long feller?” he asked as he noticed Hashknife’s thoughtful expression.
“That’s what Easton likely wants,” mused Hashknife, ignoring Sleepy’s question. “A feller don’t lie in a letter without havin’ some kind of an ax to grind.”
“Lemme in on it, will you?” asked Sleepy
“Spot Easton just went past in a top-buggy, and he’s headin’ for Gunsight.”
“That’s good. I reckon we can get along without him.”
“But,” said Hashknife slowly, “you gotta figure that the girl’s only eighteen years old. She won’t sabe Spot Easton.”
“I dunno much about human nature,” said Sleepy, “but I do know danged well that I’m hungry. Don’t we ever eat on this new job, Bliz?”
“Y’betcha,” grinned Skelton. “I’m goin’ t’ rustle some bull-beef and bakin’-powder biscuits right now. I was just wonderin’ why that rifle never showed up at the inquest.”
“Did your rifle have any mark on it, Skelton?”
“I dunno. I sure as —— couldn’t identify it.”
“Thassall right then,” grinned Hashknife. “Me and Sleepy examined ’em all before we sunk ’em in the crick—they all looked alike to us.”
Skelton scratched his head violently and squinted at Hashknife.
“You—uh—oh ——, yes! I know what you mean now. Top-hands, y’betcha—yes sir.”
Skelton went into the house and in a few moments he was busy with biscuit-dough, while Sleepy and Hashknife humped up on the steps and manufactured cigarets.
“Thirty miles to Gunsight,” observed Hashknife. “Right pretty little ride.”
“Yeah, it is,” admitted Sleepy.
“She sure is, Sleepy; nice li’l ride. We’ll saddle up as soon as we folds the stummick around a little provender.”
“Saddle up?” queried Sleepy. “You ain’t——”
“We are,” corrected Hashknife.
“Aw-w!” Sleepy protested softly. “You’re the dangdest person t’ hop into——”
“What’d you do, Sleepy?”
“Well, it ain’t our business noways, Hashknife.”
“Supposin’ Spot Easton was goin’ to meet your sister?”
“But she ain’t my sister.”
“’F you was Lonesome Lee’s son, she would be. Suppose you was, Sleepy.”
“I ain’t—not even supposin’, Hashknife.”
“Gosh a’mighty! Thirty miles! I suppose you’d go if it was sixty. Sixty miles ain’t much.”
“I never been able to figure you out, Hashknife.” Sleepy shook his head disconsolately. “You do the dangdest things I ever seen. Some day you’re goin’ to horn into things what don’t concern you, and you’ll meet a hunk of lead—face to face.
“You always kind of go out of your way to bother into other folks’ troubles. Every danged place we go you gets into some dang kind of a mixup, and she’s always because you feel sorry fer somebody. If it was only you I’d say for you to go to it and grab a tombstone but, blast it all, you always drags me into it.”
Sleepy stopped for lack of breath and glared at Hashknife.
“Yes sir,” nodded Hashknife slowly, “just suppose you was a brother to that girl. It’s thirty miles; which is some ride in the dark.”
“Hey!” yelled Skelton from the kitchen. “You jaspers like gravy with your spuds?”
“You spoke my daily prayer,” yelled Hashknife.
Sleepy got to his feet and stretched his arms.
“I hope that train don’t get in so early that we’ll have to hold up Spot Easton on the road. I had a sister, Hashknife, and I know what you mean.”
It was nine o’clock when Hashknife and Sleepy rode into Gunsight, and the night was as dusky as the proverbial black cat. Gunsight was quite a bit larger than Caldwell and a trifle more modern, owing to the railroad which made it a shipping point for the surrounding country.
They dismounted at a hitch-rack and tied their horses.
“Mister Easton will likely put his horse in a stable,” stated Hashknife. “Especially if he aims to drive back tonight. We better kinda examine the livery-stable.”
They jingled their spurs down the sidewalk to where a lantern swung over a wide doorway, from within which came the
unmistakable odor of a stable. Two more lighted lanterns were hung at the sides of the room to light up the rows of stalls.
A stable-man came out of the grain-room carrying another lantern which he placed on a backless chair near the door, and squinted at Hashknife and Sleepy
“Evenin’,” he grunted. Cowboys usually made the stable their headquarters.
“Evenin’,” greeted Hashknife. “How’s business?”
“’S’all right, I reckon. The day man got drunk and I’m doin’ two shifts. Got any Durham?”
Hashknife passed him part of a sack and he rolled a cigaret.
“Ain’t much night business, is there?” asked Hashknife.
“Naw—not much; but just enough to make me miss a date with m’ girl. Figured to close up early, but a feller drove in a while ago, and he’s goin’ out agin’ tonight. Naturally I’ve got to linger around here ’till he starts travelin’ agin’. I ain’t no drinkin’ person, but whisky sure does cause me a lot of misery.”
“Can’t he hitch his own horse?” asked Hashknife.
“Well, I reckon he could; but it ain’t hardly good business to ask a feller to pay fer service and not git it.”
“That’s a fact,” agreed Hashknife solemnly. “We was just wonderin’ if we could bunk in the hay t’night. I don’t admire to pay a hotel fourbits for a chance to read my shirt the next mornin’.”
“Sure, sure. The loft’s got plenty of room, or you can sleep in the grain-room. They’s a bunk in there and some blankets.”
“That’s right kind of you,” said Hashknife. “If we can help you Say, if it ain’t too late to keep that date with your girl——”
“Whatcha mean?”
“Well, is there any reason why I can’t tend to that feller’s horse? Ain’t no trouble to cinch a hull on a bronc. Course I wouldn’t take his money——”
“Thassall right, I got his money in advance. It ain’t no saddlehorse, though. If you don’t mind hitchin’ a horse to a buggy ——”
“Cinch,” grunted Hashknife. “Show me the horse and buggy, pardner.”
It took the man about a minute to point out the horse, harness and buggy. It was the tall, bay horse which Easton had driven from Caldwell. The stable-man was voluble in his thanks, and hurried away to keep his date. Hashknife and Sleepy grinned at each other as they sat down to wait for Easton’s return.
Blondy Hagen, following his run-in with Hashknife and Sleepy, had come to Gunsight. His head was still sore from its crash against the War-Bonnet bar, and he proceeded to embalm his wounded feelings in very bad whisky.
And when Blondy got drunk, he got bad. Like an Indian warrior he sang his own praises—until he saw Spot Easton drive in and stable his horse. Blondy was not afraid of Spot—not in the least, but he knew that Spot would have something to say about what happened in the War-Bonnet.
Blondy was one of those peculiar characters whose gun was always ready for hire, and he could still feel the weight of Spot Easton’s cash. He really wanted to see Spot and, if possible, get more money; but he felt that he really should do something to earn what he had already been paid.
He weaved out of the Ten-Spot saloon and balanced himself against a porch-post. Just to his left was a hitch-rack, partly lighted from the Ten-Spot window. He clung to the post and puzzled over the two horses, which looked familiar. Suddenly he remembered; and the memory caused him to straighten up and grunt softly to himself—
“Tha’s their broncs! Whatcha know?”
Blondy gawped foolishly and grew inspired. It might be worth his while to find Spot Easton and tell him that those two gall-laden punchers were in Gunsight. He lurched away from the post and proceeded to cut himself a wide trail down the sidewalk. He hadn’t the slightest idea where Spot Easton might be found; but Blondy hadn’t the slightest idea where he was going; so it made no difference.
He almost fell into the doorway of a restaurant as a man was coming out—and the man was Easton. He grabbed Blondy by the shoulder to keep him from falling, and shut the door behind him.
Blondy got a glimpse of a very pretty girl sitting at a table; and then Spot Easton shoved him past the restaurant and into the darkness of an alley.
“What are you doin’ here, Hagen?” demanded Easton.
“Me? Leggo that arm! Whatcha think you are?”
“You know who I am,” growled Easton meaningly. “When did you come to Gunsight?”
“Thassall right,” said Blondy drunkenly
“Don’t paw me ’round, Spot. I was looking fer you. Mebbe you’d like to know that them two Tombstone punchers are here.”
“Who?”
“You know; them two that kinda jiggered our play.”
“Oh!” Easton grunted softly. “What are they doin’ here?”
“I never seen ’em,” admitted Blondy, “but their broncs are tied to the rack at the Ten-Spot, y’betcha.”
“Are you sure, Hagen?”
“Betcha I am. I know that tall roan and the blue-gray.”
Spot Easton thought rapidly If Hashknife and Sleepy were in Gunsight, they had a reason for coming—and he might be the reason. He suddenly realized that they had opened and read that letter, and he swore softly for not having thought of that before.
“Are they in the Ten-Spot?” he asked.
“Wasn’t,” Hagen replied. “I come out of there and found the horses.”
“The Ten-Spot is almost straight across the street from the liverystable,” mused Easton aloud. “I wonder if they—Hagen, is there another livery-stable here?”
“Uh-huh. ‘Soapy’ Evans owns kind of a stable.”
“You want to earn your money, Hagen?”
“Tha’s me.”
“Go up to the livery-stable and find out if them two snake-hunters are there. Don’t let ’em see you; do you understand?”
“Prob’ly git killed, if I don’t,” grunted Hagen. “Where’ll I find you?”
“I’ll be right here waitin’ for you.”
It was about two blocks to the stable, and the average was about six saloons to a block. Hagen knew that he had won back the good graces of his employer; so he went in and partook of good cheer. Easton fretted in the dark and waited for a report, while Hagen weaved in and out of the saloons; getting closer to the stable at each entrance and exit, but also getting more cocksure of himself.
The last saloon took away every vestige of cowardice in Blondy Hagen’s make-up. He came out, balanced on the edge of the sidewalk, while he filled his lungs to capacity and then emitted a warwhoop that would have shamed any Indian on earth.
He stumbled off the sidewalk, gripped his six-shooter tightly, took his bearings from the lantern over the doorway of the stable and set sail.
He stumbled up the plank drive-way and into the dim light of the stable, telling himself hoarsely how very great he was and how Spot Easton depended upon him for everything. As he halted to inhale enough breath for another declaration, a rope seemed to descend from nowhere, tightened around his arms and body, and something threw him upside down with a great crash.
Strong hands picked him up and carried him away, and a moment later he felt himself hurled into space. He landed on something fairly soft, while above him came the crash of a closing door and the rasp of a padlock-hasp.
Hagen staggered to his feet and his head came in violent contact with the roof, and he sat down again. After much painful effort he secured a match and inspected his position. He peered all around, felt of his empty holster, and cursed wickedly when the match burnt his finger.
“I’m in the oat-bin,” he told himself, “an’ I ain’t got no gun. Tha’s pe-culiar, but ’s a fac’.”
And Blondy Hagen settled down in the oats and went to sleep, while Spot Easton cursed savagely and wondered if Hagen had run foul of those two unmentionable cowboys.
He had told Jane Lee that he was going to the livery-stable to get the horse and buggy. Peeking into the restaurant window he saw that
she was nervously waiting his return. He prided himself on the fact that he had made an impression on her already and he knew that— well, he owned Lonesome Lee, and the girl did not know any one in Lodge-Pole county.
Hagen had had time to make several trips to the stable by this time. Easton began to worry. Finally he decided to take a chance. He hurried back into the restaurant.
“Just run into a feller who talked business, and it delayed me,” he explained. “I reckon you might as well come along with me as to stay here.”
He picked up her valise and led the way out to the street.
“It’s only a little ways,” he assured her, as he switched the valise to his left hand and slid his gun loose. “She’s a nice night.”
A cowboy came out of a saloon, braced his legs wide apart, whooped loudly and emptied his gun in the air. The girl drew back in affright, but Easton laughed and assured her that the shots meant nothing.
“You’re goin’ to like this country after you get used to it, Jane.”
“I—I suppose so,” she faltered. “It is all so new to me, and the houses seem so small.”
Easton said nothing. They walked up the sloping sidewalk to the door of the stable and stopped. There was not a sound from the interior, except horses munching hay.
Easton looked up and down the street. He could see the hitch-rack in front of the Ten-Spot, but was unable to distinguish the color of the horses.
“Hey!” he called. There was no response. “I suppose I’ll have to harness my own horse,” he said to the girl.
He placed the valise on the floor and walked slowly inside. The door of the grain room was partly open, and he peered in.
Came the dull chuck! of a muffled blow and Easton disappeared inside. The girl was watching him, and wondered how he had managed to get inside by dragging both feet.
From inside the room came a creaking noise and a crash, as if a bin-cover had been slammed down. Then the door opened and Hashknife and Sleepy stepped out.
“Howdy, ma’am,” said Hashknife politely. “Are you Miss Lee?”
“Why, yes. I—I—where is Mr. Easton?”
“Easton? O-o-o-oh, yeah. He’s in the oat-bin, ma’am.”
“I do not understand you.” The girl seemed puzzled.
“Harness the horse, Sleep,” commanded Hashknife. “This lady’s got to find a place to sleep.”
Sleepy gleefully brought out the horse and backed it into the buggy-shafts. Jane Lee stared at the tall cowboy beside her, and wondered at the mystery of it all.
“You drive the rig, Sleep,” ordered Hashknife. “I’ll bring your bronc along with me.”
“But,” objected the girl, “I—I—Mr. Easton is going to take me to my father’s ranch.”
“Was,” corrected Hashknife. “He’s goin’ to sleep with one of his hired men tonight, so we made him let us take you home.”
Hashknife shoved the valise into the rear of the buggy and helped her into the seat. She started to protest, but Sleepy chirped to the tall, bay horse and they rolled hollowly out of the doorway and headed homeward.
As Hashknife crossed to the horses, the stable-man came from down the street and went into the stable. He had seen the top-buggy going up the street, and he surmized that its owner had returned.
As he turned to go toward the rear he heard a muffled voice calling. He listened closely and decided that it came from the grainroom. He sneaked in and lighted a match. Some one was hammering on the inside of the oat-bin. The stable-man was taking no chances. He went outside, got a lantern, which he hung over the top of the bin, took an old shot-gun from behind the door and flipped the fastener loose from the lid of the bin.
A moment later the lid lifted and Spot Easton, very much disheveled, stood up and blinked foolishly.
“Wh-whatcha doin’ in my oats?” grunted the stable-man hoarsely.
“Aw! —— you and your oats!” groaned Spot, as he crawled painfully over the edge and rubbed his sore head.
He looked back inside and motioned to the stable-man to look. Cautiously the man looked down at the sleeping form of Blondy
Hagen.
“This,” said the stable-man seriously, “this here is my-steer-i-us, by ——”
“Where did they go?” asked Easton, rubbing his head, on which appeared to be a bump about the size and shape of an egg. “Did you see the lady?”
“Was there a lady?”
“You — fool!” exploded Easton. “I brought a lady here with me; sabe? I came to get that horse and buggy I left here.”
The stable-man stepped outside and glanced across at the empty stall.
“The horse and buggy is gone,” he announced. “If you know where you left the lady, you might look and see if she’s still there or not.”
But Easton exploded a number of vile epithets and staggered away down the street. The stable-man went back, looked at Blondy Hagen, blew out the lantern and went outside and shoved the sliding-doors together.
“Too —— much hocus-pocus to suit me!” he grunted, and went home.
It was in the small hours of the morning when Mrs. Frosty Snow awoke from a troubled sleep—wherein she had fired Swede Sam in three languages—and sat up in bed. Frosty was on a cattle-buying trip, and Mrs. Snow was all alone in the ranch-house.
Some one was knocking urgently on the front door. She crawled out of bed, picked up a heavy Colt six-shooter, and padded her way to the front door
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“This is Hashknife Hartley, Mrs. Snow.”
“Kinda early, ain’t you?”
“Yes’m,” admitted Hashknife, “it is early. Can I talk to you?”
“If you don’t mind strainin’ your voice through the door.”
“I don’t mind,” Hashknife laughed softly “But this has got to be confidential, Mrs. Snow. It’s about a girl.”
“Thasso?” Mrs. Snow’s voice was a trifle sarcastic. “I ain’t in the habit of bein’ woke up at four o’clock to pass out advice to the lovelorn, Mr. Hartley.”
“Listen, ma’am,” begged Hashknife. “This ain’t nothin’ matrimonial —honest to gosh. You know Spot Easton?”
“By sight and smell,” she replied. Spot Easton’s perfumery was not at all popular with the range folk.
“He lied to a girl,” stated Hashknife softly. “I done stole the girl from him, and I’ve gotta have somebody to take care of her for a while.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” demanded Mrs. Snow, opening the door about four inches. “Where is she? Tell me about her.”
Hashknife swiftly recounted what he knew about the girl, and about the situation at the 88 ranch.
“Bring her in,” ordered Mrs. Snow. “I’ll sure take care of her and nobody’s goin’ to know where she is. Prob’ly end up in a killin’, but that ain’t my affair. Say you’re livin’ at the Tombstone ranch? Yeah, that danged Swede came back.”
Hashknife went back to the dim outlines of a horse and buggy and returned in a moment with Jane Lee and Sleepy. After thirty miles in a top-buggy, with a companion who only talked in monosyllables, Jane Lee was more than willing to stay any place. She did not have the slightest idea of what it was all about. It was not like the reception she had expected. In fact, it was like a nightmare.
“Just edge to one side, while she comes in,” ordered Mrs. Snow. “Frosty Snow’s old woman is kind of in the rough at this time o’ day.”
Jane Lee walked in and Mrs. Snow closed the door to a few inches.
“Come agin, cowboys.”
“Yes’m, y’betcha,” laughed Hashknife, and the two men clumped down the steps and back to their horses and buggy, while Mrs. Snow put her arms around Jane Lee.
“Whatcha cryin’ for?” demanded Mrs. Snow. “My gosh, you’re all right, honey.”
“I—I don’t know what it is all about,” sobbed Jane. “I don’t know what became of Mr. Easton, and——”
“Don’tcha worry about that sidewinder,” Mrs. Snow said soothingly “You brace up and quit worryin’. Mebbe it was danged lucky them two punchers kidnaped you, honey.”
“But why did they?” demanded Jane with some heat.
“Didn’t you ask ’em?”
“Dozens of times. The one who drove the horse wouldn’t tell me anything. He kept singing something about being buried on the lone prairie.”
Mrs. Snow laughed and patted Jane on the shoulder.
“You brace up, honey. You’re danged lucky to ride all the way from Gunsight with a mournful cowpuncher, if you only knowed it. You snap into a nightgown and pile into my bed, and I’ll bet you’ll feel better. We’re common folks here at the Half-Moon, and, outside of havin’ an imported cook, we don’t put on much dog.”
“I suppose,” said Jane softly, “I should be thankful that I am here with you.”
“Yes, and you don’t know half of it, little lady.”
Hashknife and Sleepy took the horse and buggy back to Caldwell, and tied the horse to the rack beside the livery-stable. No one saw them come, and no one saw them leave, except one or two dogs, which barked sleepily.
They rode back to the Tombstone ranch, and stabled their horses just as the first light of dawn showed over the eastern hills.
They stopped in the porch of the ranchhouse as the sound of galloping horses came to their ears, and saw two riders swing around the bend, riding swiftly toward Caldwell. One rider was a little in the rear, and in the dim light he seemed to be a trifle unsteady in his saddle.
“Somebody unlocked the oat-bin,” laughed Hashknife softly, “and the bloodhounds are on the trail of a top-buggy.”
“They’re welcome to it,” yawned Sleepy. “Hope I never have to ride that far in one again. I sung all the time to kinda keep things cheerful.”
“My ——!” gasped Hashknife. “The poor girl!”
Spot
Easton rode all the way from Gunsight with a blind, unreasoning rage in his heart. It had taken him quite a while to arouse the other stable-man in order to hire a saddle-horse, and then he had gone back to the oat-bin and made Blondy Hagen ride with him.
He did not have the slightest idea which way the horse and buggy had gone, until he rode into Caldwell and found it hitched outside the livery-stable. Hagen was still too drunk and sleepy to care how Easton felt, and listened indifferently while Easton polluted the morning air with profanity.
“’F I stole a horsh ’n buggy, I’d git hung,” stated Blondy knowingly.
“And that’s no —— lie, either!” snapped Easton. “Come on.”
Blondy followed him down to Jake Blue’s office. Easton hammered on the door with the toe of his boot. In a few moments Jake’s tousled head appeared and he demanded to know what in the adjective did anybody mean by waking him up in the middle of the night.
Rapidly, and with many oaths, Easton explained that Hashknife and Sleepy had stolen his horse and buggy at Gunsight.
“Thasso?” Blue shivered slightly. “Got any idea where they went with it?”
“Brought it here!” snapped Easton. “It’s tied to the livery-stable hitch-rack.”
“Then it ain’t stole a-tall.” Blue seemed relieved over this statement.
“They stole it from me!” yowled Easton. “I tell you they hit me on the head and threw me into a —— oat-bin!”
“Thasso,” nodded Blondy seriously. “I know, because I was in there, too.”
Blue started to laugh, but managed to choke it back. It was no place to laugh, and yet he howled inwardly at the thought of Easton and Hagen being thrown into an oat-bin.
“I want you to arrest the both of ’em on a charge of horse stealin’,” demanded Easton angrily, “and if you think there’s anything funny about it—go ahead and laugh.”
Blue grew serious. He did not relish the idea of going out to arrest those two men on such a serious charge.
“Are you sure they was the ones?” he asked. “Can you git up in court and swear that they stole your horse and buggy?”
“I’m —— ’f I can,” said Hagen. “All I knows——”
“Of course I can swear to it!” snapped Easton. “Do you think I’d get up there and admit that I didn’t know who done it?”
“If I had a good deputy-sheriff—” Blue expressed his thoughts in words.
“Take Hagen with you, Jake.”
“Like ——!” exploded Hagen. “No sir! I ain’t——”
“Since when did you break away from us?” queried Spot meaningly.
“Oh, awright. I ain’t breakin’ away from nobody, Spot; but when you monkey with them two jaspers there’s a hoo-doo on the job, I tell you. If you lemme try agin’ with the long-range stuff——”
“And miss again,” sneered Easton. “All the good that’s done is to make old Skelton more careful.”
“We ain’t had much luck, tha’s a fact,” said Jake Blue sadly. “Mebbe we went at it all wrong.”
“You can’t expect a fortune to come along and roost in your lap, can you?” asked Easton sneeringly. “We’ll get these two punchers into jail and then we’ll settle with old man Skelton.”
“If we’d only tried to buy the —— place at first,” argued Blue.
“Well, we didn’t!”
“It was your idea to make old Skelton sick of his place, so’s he’d be willin’ to sell cheap.”
“Yeah? How did I know that he was going to hang on in spite of everything? I done the best I could.”
“I reckon so, Spot. Doc Clevis tried to buy it agin’ from Skelton and the old son-of-a-gun made him a price this time.”
“How much, Jake?”
“Hundred thousand dollars.”
“That,” said Hagen seriously, “is more’n it’s worth.”
“Aw, ——!” exploded Easton. “If you’re tryin’ to be funny, Hagen ——”
“Well, ain’t it?” wailed Hagen.
Easton turned back to Blue.
“You slam them two jaspers into jail right away,” he said. “If you need more help I can send in some of the boys from the 88.”
“All right,” Blue said dubiously. “You go and sleep f’r an hour or so, Hagen. This ain’t no blear-eyed job, y’betcha.”
“Make it longer’n that if you feel like it,” agreed Hagen. “Make it a week, and see if I git impatient.”
Easton and Hagen went back up the street toward the WarBonnet. It was too early for Caldwell to be awake, and Easton wondered what old Lonesome Lee was doing out so early in the morning.
The old man was standing in front of the Paris restaurant, and for the first time in months he seemed to be sober.
“What in —— are you doing around so early?” questioned Easton as they came up to the old man.
“Just lookin’ around, thassall,” Lonesome Lee’s voice was very husky, but there was no trace of drunkeness left.
“Lookin’ around, eh? What for?”
“Just for instance.” The old man was a trifle belligerent. This attitude did not please Spot Easton. He much preferred to have the old man whining for liquor.
“What’s biting you?” he snapped.
“Not a danged thing, Spot. I’m sober today, if you take notice, and I’m lookin’ for a letter I lost.”
“Letter?” echoed Easton. “What letter?”
“I was drunk,” continued the old man, “but I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t know about that letter. Somehow I remember you tellin’ me about other letters, Spot— letters that you wrote. I’ve been a —— old drunken bum, but I’m sober right now and I want to know a few things.”
“That must ’a’ been the letter that the long cowboy had,” said Blondy unthinkingly.
Easton shot Blondy a withering glance and turned back to Lonesome.
“I dunno what you’re talking about, Lee.”
“I remember the tall cowboy,” muttered Lonesome. “He was a stranger. But you got the letter, Spot.”
Spot Easton’s hand went mechanically to his ear as he shook his head.
“No, I’m —— if I did! You ask Windy who got that letter. Come on and let’s have a drink, Lonesome.”
Lonesome shook his head slowly, licked his lips and walked away. Easton glared after him and turned to Hagen:
“Will you ever learn to keep your danged tongue out of my affairs? Ain’t you got sense enough to let me do the talkin’? Now, that —— old fool will likely talk to everybody and—aw, ——! I hope you and Jake Blue will get your men today. I don’t want Lonesome Lee to talk to Hashknife. It may take a killin’ to prevent it.”
“You don’t let me in on anythin’,” complained Blondy bitterly. “You talk about letters and cattle-brands and the Tombstone ranch, and you never let me know the why of anythin’. All I’m good fer is to bush-whack, somebody.”
“You get paid for it, don’t you?” demanded Easton.
“Yeah, I get paid for it.”
“Then keep your mouth shut, Hagen. The less you know the safer you are—sabe? It’ll pay you to keep still.”
It was about noon when Hashknife and Sleepy woke up. Bliz Skelton was cooking breakfast for them and, though evidently curious, he asked no questions of what happened the night before.
“I went up to Caldwell last night,” he volunteered. “Ain’t been up there at night for a dog’s age, ’cause it wasn’t noways safe for me to be on the road after dark.”
“Any excitement?” yawned Hashknife, as he tugged at a tight boot.
“No-o-o,” Skelton twisted his face away from the spattering bacon. “Doc Clevis offered to buy this ranch again. A few weeks ago he offered me eight thousand, but last night he made it nine. Got kinda ruffed ’cause I wouldn’t take his offer.”
“You’ve had other offers, ain’t you?” asked Sleepy.
“Yeah. Spot Easton offered me seventy-five hundred.”
“That don’t noways include the stock, does it?” queried Hashknife.
“No. Just the ranch-house and what fenced ground goes with it. When Spot made that offer I reckon I had about seven hundred head of 33 cows on this range, but right now a 33 critter is as scarce as vi’lets in Jan’wary.”
“Well, gee cripes!” exploded Hashknife, stamping his feet on the floor. “You mean to stand there and tell me that you let somebody run off all your stock?”
“Well, I—I didn’t ‘let’ ’em, Hashknife. ’Pears that you don’t have to let folks rustle your cows.”
“Ain’t you complained none?”
“Who’d I complain to?”
“That’s a question,” admitted Hashknife. “I reckon you’ll just about have to sell out, Bliz.”
“—— if I will! No gosh danged bunch of——”
Bliz let loose of his skillet and grabbed his short shot-gun from its rack beside the door Some one had ridden up to the porch, and now was coming up the steps to the door.
Bliz stepped back out of line with the door and motioned to Sleepy to open it. Some one knocked loudly. Sleepy grasped the knob and drew the door open, keeping himself behind it, while Jake Blue and Blondy Hagen stood there and blinked into the muzzle of Skelton’s riot-gun and wished they had postponed their visit.
“Put dud-down that gun,” stuttered Blue, trying to force himself to be brave. “You—you——”
Blondy Hagen’s hands went up above his head, and he squinted dismally. His heart was not in this job at all.
“Whatcha want here, Blue?” asked Skelton.
Jake Blue tore his eyes away from the menacing gun barrels and squinted at Hashknife and Sleepy.
“I want them two,” he replied. “I’ve got warrants for their arrest for horsestealin’.”
He started to reach for his pocket, but changed his mind. Such a move might be suicide. Hashknife walked over to the door and looked at Blue.
“Who swore out that warrant, sheriff?”
“Spot Easton.”
