Hombre

by Elmore Leonard

  I looked around and saw Dean riding back toward us. Braden and Mrs. Favor, two hundred yards off, had come around and reined in as if to wait for him.

  Lamarr Dean had put his rifle in the saddle boot, but now, as he approached us, he drew his Colt.

  3

  Lamarr Dean was close now.

  “I pretty near forgot something,” he said. Then he noticed Russell up on the roof behind me. “What’re you at up there?”

  “Getting my things,” John Russell said. The Spencer was down between his legs as he knelt there, sitting back on his feet, his hands flat on his thighs.

  “Expect you’re going somewhere?”

  “Well,” Russell shrugged, “why sit here, uh?”

  “How far you think you’ll get?”

  “That’s something to find out.”

  Lamarr Dean heeled his horse, moving to the back of the coach. He stood up in the stirrups to reach one of the two waterskins hanging there, unhooked it, and looped the end thong over his saddle horn. Then he came back with the skin hanging round and tight in front of his left leg. He pulled the horse around so he was facing us again.

  “You didn’t say how far you’d get,” Lamarr Dean said.

  Russell’s shoulders went up and down. “We find that out after a while.”

  Lamarr Dean raised the revolver, hesitating, making sure we saw what he was going to do. Mendez yelled something. I’m not sure what, maybe just a sound. But as he yelled it, Lamarr Dean pulled the trigger and the waterskin still hanging from the back of the coach burst open. It gushed and then trickled as the bag sagged, all the water wasting itself on that sandy road, and Lamarr Dean just sat there looking at us. He didn’t smile or laugh, but you could see he enjoyed it.

  He said to Russell, “Now how far?”

  There wasn’t supposed to be an answer to that. Lamarr Dean took up his reins and started around. Russell waited till that moment.

  “Maybe,” he said, “as far as Delgado’s.”

  Lamarr Dean held up, taken off-stride, and now he was sideways to us, his gun hand on the offside and he had to turn his head around over his shoulder to look up at Russell.

  “You said something?”

  “Maybe if we get thirsty,” Russell said, “we’ll go to Delgado’s and have mescal.”

  Lamarr Dean didn’t move, even with his head turned in that awkward position. He stared up at Russell, and I’m certain that right then something was dawning on him.

  He said, “You do that.” For a few more seconds he looked up at Russell, then nudged his horse and started off again with his back to us and holding to a walking pace to show that he wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I kept watching him—thirty, forty, fifty feet away then, about that far when Russell’s voice said, “Get down,” not suddenly, but calmly and in a quiet tone.

  I dropped down on the seat, ducking my head, and Russell said, “All the way down—”

  And that last word wasn’t quiet, still it wasn’t yelled or excited. I saw the Spencer suddenly up to his face and I dropped, looking around to see where I was going and catching a glimpse of Lamarr Dean sixty feet out and wheeling his mount and bringing the Colt gun straight out in front of him, thinking he had time to be sure and bam the Spencer went off in my ear and Lamarr Dean went out of that saddle like he’d been clubbed in the face, his horse swerving, then running.

  Russell must have been sure of his shot, for he was already reloaded and tracking the horse, and, when he fired, the horse stumbled and rolled and tried to get up. And out past the horse you could see Braden coming in. Coming, then swerving as that Spencer went off again, banging hard close to me and cracking thin out in the open. There was the sound of Braden’s revolver twice and I hugged the floor of the boot, looking up to see just the barrel of the Spencer. Russell was full length behind it now, resting the barrel on the front rail, tracking Braden with the sights and not hurrying his fire. Braden swerved again and this time kept going all the way around full circle and back the way he had come toward the small figure way out there that was Mrs. Favor, so you knew Russell had come close. At least Braden didn’t want any part of him right then.

  I raised up. Russell was loading again, now that there was time, taking a loading tube from his blanket and putting seven of the .56-56 slugs in it and shoving the tube up through the stock of the Spencer.

  “They’ll all come back now,” I said. “Won’t they?”

  “As sure as we have what they want,” Russell said.

  There was a space there where nothing happened. I saw Dr. Favor and Mendez and the McLaren girl, all three of them in a row, crouched against the cutbank where they’d gone when the shooting started. It was quiet now, but still nobody moved.

  Russell was buckling on his cartridge belt, over his left shoulder and down across his chest, working it around so that the full cartridge loops were all in front. While he did this, his eyes never left the two specks way out on the meadow.

  We had some time, but I did not think of it then. Braden had to get Early and the Mexican before he came back and they could be a mile off running the stage horses. I kept thinking of how Russell had brought up his Spencer and put it on Lamarr Dean, the way a man might aim at a tin can on a fence, and killed him with one shot. Then he had dropped the horse that was running away with the water bag. He had killed a man, sure of it, and in the same second he had known he must get the horse and he did that too.

  The space where nothing happened lasted maybe a minute altogether. Then it was over for good.

  Russell moved past me, frontwards, stepping on the wheel and then jumping. He was carrying his Spencer of course, and in the other hand his blanket roll and the canteen he and Mendez had used. (Little things you remember: there was no strap on the canteen, only two metal rings a strap had once been fastened to, and Russell hooked a finger through one of the rings to carry it.)

  I don’t think he even looked at the others, but started off down the road we had come up, only stopping to pick up his Colt gun and shove it in his holster. Down just past there he left the road and started up the slope, moving pretty quickly through the greasewood and other brush.

  Dr. Favor woke up first. He yelled at Russell. Then Mendez was out on the road looking up at Russell, and Dr. Favor had run off into the brush on the other side of the coach.

  I started down then, taking the grainsack our provisions were in and my blanket roll. By the time I was on the road, Dr. Favor was coming out of the brush with his little revolver and Mendez’s sawed-off shotgun. Mendez and the McLaren girl were still watching Russell.

  “He’s running,” Dr. Favor said. He was not at all calm and at that moment I thought if the shotgun was loaded he would have fired it at Russell.

  “We need him,” Dr. Favor said then. He knew it right then. He knew it as sure as he thought John Russell was an Apache Indian and we were afoot out in the middle of nowhere.

  That’s when the rest of us came wide awake. The McLaren girl said, “I wouldn’t have any idea where to go. I don’t think I even know where we are.”

  “We’re maybe half way,” I said. “Maybe more. If we were over on the main road I could tell.”

  “Then how far’s the main road?”

  Favor shot a look at her like he was trying to think and she had interrupted him. “Just keep quiet,” he said.

  It stung her, you could see. “Standing out here in the open,” she said, “what good does keeping quiet do?”

  Dr. Favor never answered her. He looked at Mendez and said, “Come on,” handing him his shotgun, and they hurried out to where Lamarr Dean’s horse was, Dr. Favor skirting around Lamarr Dean’s body which lay spread-armed like it had been staked out, but Mendez stopped there to take Lamarr Dean’s Colt. Then they were both at the dead horse, kneeling there a minute, Favor pulling loose the saddlebags while Mendez got the waterskin. They didn’t bother with the Henry rifle, or else it was under the horse and held fast.

  While they were at t
he dead horse, the McLaren girl said, still watching them, “He’s not even thinking of his wife. Do you know that?”

  “Well, sure he is,” I said, not meaning he was actually thinking about her, but at least concerned about her. What did the girl expect him to do? He couldn’t just chase after Braden. That wouldn’t get his wife back.

  “He’s forgotten her,” the McLaren girl said. “All he’s thinking about is the money he stole.”

  “You can’t just say something like that,” I said. I meant you couldn’t know what somebody was thinking, especially in the jackpot we were in right then. A person acted, and thought about it later.

  It was getting the things from Lamarr’s horse that took time, the reason we were not right behind Russell or had him in sight anymore by the time we got down the road past the cutbank and started up the slope.

  Dr. Favor, with the saddlebags over one shoulder, kept ahead of us, following the same direction Russell had taken. The slope was not very difficult at first, a big open sweep that humped up to a bunch of pines along the top; but, as we were hurrying, it wasn’t long before our legs started aching and getting so tight you thought something would knot inside and you’d never get it loosened.

  We were hurrying because of what was behind us, you can bet all your wages on that. But we were also hurrying to catch Russell, feeling like little kids running home in the dark and scared the house was going to be locked and nobody home. Do you see how we felt? We were worried he had left us to go on his own. In other words, knowing we needed Russell if we were going to find our way out of here alive.

  When Dr. Favor reached the trees he hesitated, or seemed to, then he was gone. That’s when we hurried faster, all worn out by then. You could hear Mendez breathing ten feet away.

  But there was no need to hurry. As we reached the top there was Dr. Favor standing just inside the shade of the trees. Russell was just past him. He was sitting down with his blanket open on the ground and his boots off. He was pulling on a pair of curl-toed Apache moccasins, not paying any attention to Dr. Favor who stood there like he had caught Russell and was holding him from getting away, actually pointing his revolver at him. Dr. Favor’s chest was moving up and down with his breathing.

  Mendez moved in a little closer, watching Russell. “Why didn’t you wait for us?” he said. Russell didn’t bother to answer. You weren’t even sure he heard Mendez.

  “He doesn’t care what we do,” Dr. Favor said. “Long as he gets away.”

  “Man,” Mendez said. “What’s the matter with you? We have to think about this and talk it over. What if one of us just ran off? You think that would be a good thing?”

  Russell raised his leg to pull a moccasin on. They were the high Apache kind, like leggings which come up past your knees. He began rolling it down, stuffing the pants leg into it and fastening it about calf-high with a strap of something. He didn’t look up until he had finished this.

  Then he said, “What do you want?”

  “What do we want?” Mendez said, surprised. “We want to get out of here.”

  “What’s stopping you?” Russell said.

  Mendez kept frowning. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Russell had both moccasins on now. He took his boots and rolled them inside the blanket. Doing this, not looking at us, he said, “You want to go with me, uh?”

  “With you? We all go together. This isn’t happening to just one person,” Mendez said. “This is happening to all of us.”

  “But you want me to show you the way,” Russell said.

  “Sure you show the way. We follow. But we’re all together.”

  “I don’t know,” Russell said, very slowly, like he was thinking it over. He looked up at Dr. Favor, directly at him. “I can’t ride with you. Maybe you can’t walk with me…uh?”

  For a minute, maybe even longer, nobody said a word. Russell finished rolling his blanket and tied it up with a piece of line he’d had inside.

  When he stood up, Mendez said—not surprised or excited or frowning now, but so serious his voice wasn’t even very loud—he said, “What does that mean?”

  Russell looked at him. “It means I can’t ride with them and maybe they can’t walk with me. Maybe they don’t walk the way I walk. You sabe that, Mexican?”

  “I helped you like you’re my own son!” Mendez’s voice rose and his eyes opened so that you could see all the whites. But Russell wasn’t looking. He was walking off. Mendez kept shouting, “What’s the matter with you!”

  “Let him go,” Dr. Favor said.

  We stood there watching Russell move off through the trees.

  “What do you expect?” Dr. Favor said. “Do you expect somebody like that to act the way a decent person would?”

  “I helped him,” Mendez said, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened.

  “All right, now he’ll help us,” Dr. Favor said. “He won’t have anything to do with us, but we can follow him, can’t we?”

  Nobody thought to try to answer that question at the time, because it wasn’t really a question. I thought about it later, though. I thought about it for the next two or three hours as we tried to keep up with Russell.

  It was about 3:30 or 4 o’clock when the holdup took place, with already a lot of shade on this side of the hills. From then on the light kept getting dimmer. I mean right from the time we started following Russell it was hard to keep him in sight, even when he was out in the open.

  In daylight the land was spotted with brush and rock, dead and dusty looking, but with some color, light green and dark green and brown and whitish yellow. In the evening it all turned brown and hazy looking, with high peaks all around us once we’d gone on down through the other side of the pines out into open country again.

  I say open, but by that I mean only there weren’t any trees. I don’t mean to say it was easy to travel over.

  We moved along with Dr. Favor usually ahead of us. Way up ahead you would see Russell. Then you wouldn’t see him. Not because he had hidden, but because of the time of day and just the way that country was, with little dips and rises and wild with all kinds of scrub brush and cactus. The saguaros that were all over didn’t look like fence posts now. They were like grave markers in an Indian burial ground, if there is such a place as that. This wasn’t what scared you though, it was what was coming behind us and trying to keep up with Russell that did.

  He must have known we were following. But he never once ran or tried to hide on us. The McLaren girl wondered out loud why he didn’t. I guess he knew he didn’t have to.

  There was a pass that led through these hills which Russell followed a little ways, then crossed the half mile or so of openness to the other side and headed up through a barranca that rose as a big trough between two ridges. Following him across the openness we kept looking back, but Braden and his men were not close to us yet.

  Russell left the barranca, climbing again up to the cover of trees. I think that climb was the hardest part and wore us out the most, all of us hurrying, wasting our strength as we tried to keep him in sight. Once up on this ridge, though, there was no sign of him.

  We kept to the trees, moving north because we figured he would. Then after a mile or so there was the end of the trees. This hump of a ridge trailed off into a bare spine and then we were working our way down again into another pass, a darker, more shadowed one, because now it was later. It was here that we sighted Russell again, and here that we almost gave up and said what was the use. He was climbing again, almost up the other side of this pass, way up past the brush to where the slope was steep and rocky, and we knew then that we would never keep up with him.

  Dr. Favor claimed he was deliberately trying to lose us. But the McLaren girl said no, he didn’t care if we followed or sprouted wings and flew; he was thinking of Braden and his men on horseback and he was making it as hard for them as he could, making them get off their horses and walk if they wanted to follow him.

  When she said this and we th
ought of Braden again, we went on, tired or not, and climbed right up that grade Russell had, skinning ourselves pretty bad because now it was hard to see your footing in the dim light.

  It was up on that slope, in trees again, that we rested and ate some of the dried beef and biscuits from the grainsack. Before we were through it was dark, almost as dark as it would get. This rest, which was our longest one, made it hard to get up and we started arguing about going on.

  Mendez was for staying. He said going on wasn’t worth it. Let Braden catch up for all he cared.

  Dr. Favor said we had to go on, practically ordering us to. Braden would have to stop because he couldn’t follow our trail in the dark. So we should take advantage of this and keep going.

  Keep going, the McLaren girl said. That sounded fine. But which way? How did we know we wouldn’t get turned around and walk right back into Braden’s hands?

  We would head north, Dr. Favor said. And keep heading north. The McLaren girl said she agreed, but which way was it? He pointed off somewhere, but you could tell he wasn’t sure. Or he could go on alone, Dr. Favor suggested, watching us to see our reaction. Go on alone and bring back help. He didn’t insist on it and let it die when nobody said anything.

  Why didn’t he mention his wife then? That’s when I started thinking about what the McLaren girl had said earlier: that he had forgotten about his wife and only the money was important to him.

  Could that be? I tried thinking what I would do if it was my wife. Hole up and ambush them? Try and get her away from them? My gosh, no, I thought then. Just trade them the money for her! Certainly Dr. Favor must have thought of that.

  Then why didn’t he do it? Or at least talk about it. When you got down to it, though, it was his business. I mean we had no right to remind him of what he should do. That was his business. I don’t mean to sound hard or callous; that’s just the way it was. We had enough on our minds without worrying about his wife.