by Lauran Paine
“What happened?” Warfield asked, looking long and carefully over toward that arroyo the lad had come up out of.
“Big ol’ grayback coyote tied into him. I tried to call him back but he’s just a pup, mister. The coyote went down into that arroyo, the pup jumped down after him, and before I could get over there, I heard him screamin’.”
Warfield dropped his eyes to the pup. “They’ll do that,” he observed. “You live hereabouts?”
“Two miles west. We ranch over there. Mister, can you do anything for him?”
“You alone out here, son?”
“Just me ’n’ the pup. We were rabbit huntin’. Can you help him, mister?”
Warfield bent slightly from the waist. The little dog was breathing but his eyes were cold and his nose was dry. He took him gently in both hands, turned, and immersed him up to his snout in the trough, then he went to work seeking the location of the coyote bites. As he did this, he eased down upon the trough’s stone edge and talked.
“When I was your age, I knew better’n to do what you did, son. There’s hardly a dog living that can whip a coyote, but a pup this size … he never had a chance.”
“He ran off though, mister. He acted scairt.”
“Naw,” said Warfield scornfully. “I’m surprised a feller like you doesn’t know more about coyotes. They’re smart. Smarter than foxes and sometimes smarter than men. He wasn’t running away … he was simply leading your pup, staying just far enough ahead to lure him on. Then he ducked down into that arroyo, cut back, and got set. When your pup jumped down there … crunch!”
The boy’s anguished eyes were brimful of unshed tears. “How bad off is he … will he die, mister?”
Warfield didn’t answer that for a long time. Not until he’d completed his minute examination. Then he shook his head. “He’ll live. But you’ve got to get him home. Fix up a box in the barn, somewhere it’s cool and sort of dark. Dogs need cool darkness when they don’t feel good. Feed him plenty of porridge and milk and don’t let the blowflies get to him.” Warfield threw an almost unconscious look out over the shimmering countryside. “You pa’s probably got some blue-vitriol ointment around. Put it on the wounds. Keep him quiet … and, boy, after this don’t take a pup like this hunting with you without having a gun along, too.”
The boy listened carefully, and, as Warfield passed him back his limp little furry bundle, he said: “Mister, why don’t you come along home with me?”
It was a spontaneously asked question, the kind a boy would ask a man when he had no reservations in his mind about the man. Warfield sat there on the old stone trough, gazing at the lad. Two miles west and in this empty world he could possibly find exactly what he needed—rest and provender for the bay. He idly kicked one leg back and forth.
“Your pa run cattle?” he asked.
“Yes, but he pulled out early this mornin’ bound for Daggett to fetch back supplies and rock salt for the animals. He’ll be home tomorrow sometime.”
“Just you and your ma at home now?”
“No, my sister’s there, too. But paw sent her to the upper place to check some heifers up there that’re springing.”
“You got close neighbors, son?”
The boy shook his head, shifted his hold on the little dog, and waited.
Warfield smiled. “My name’s Troy,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Will Crockett, same as my paw.”
Warfield stood up. “Lead out, Will,” he said. “My horse could use some hay and grain, and I could use some rest.”
They departed from the spring area, riding due west with dying day all around them, with shadows beginning to form thinly and with the smoke haze softening. But there still was no lessening of that punishing heat.
Young Will rode ahead, leading the way, and although he turned to look back every once in a while, he didn’t speak to Warfield unless Warfield spoke to him.
The pup whimpered shortly before they came within sight of the buildings ahead. “He hurts,” said the boy, sounding distressed.
Warfield was assessing those buildings as he answered. “Yeah, he hurts. And he’ll hurt a lot more tomorrow, too. But maybe he’ll learn. There are some things in this life it just doesn’t pay to tangle with.”
The boy nodded. He had his reins looped, his horse walking quietly along homeward bound with a horse’s solid instinctiveness. “One time my paw told me somethin’ about like that, Mister Troy. He said there are some things that even when a man beats ’em, he doesn’t really come out on top because they never forget and they always come back to try a feller again and again.”
Warfield looked queerly at the boy, rode along almost as far as the ranch yard, then he said: “Tell me, Will, how come your pa to settle ’way down here?”
Will shrugged, looked around the yard ahead as though seeking someone, and indifferently said: “I guess because he liked it.”
Chapter Four
When a man knows advantage is coming over to his side, when he can predict tomorrow as easily as he can recall yesterday, he feels within himself a letting down of all sense of urgency. It’s almost as though he and destiny are one and the same thing.
That was how Trent felt as he sat in Daggett’s most affluent saloon whiling away the night, waiting. He knew, after an hour’s careful searching, that Warfield hadn’t yet arrived in town. He thought he was still somewhere between Lincoln and Daggett, coming steadily southward as he’d never failed to do thus far. So he sat there at the green-cloth-covered poker table nursing his drink and considering Daggett’s town marshal, and feeling certain.
The town marshal was a bear of a slow-moving, dogged man with a craggy face chiseled out of an environment that had seldom been mild. He might lack imagination, but he didn’t lack that animal courage that was so essential to survival here in this desert world. His name was Chalmers. He was about forty years of age, and, when he lifted his eyes to view graying John Trent, there was a world of undisguised admiration in his glance.
“Maybe he figured he was far enough ahead to risk a catnap. Maybe he won’t show up in Daggett till later, when there ain’t so many folks stirring.”
Trent was very comfortable in a chair with his legs pushed out to their limit beneath the table, with that liquor lying in his stomach. He said: “It’s close to the end now, Marshal. For more than seven hundred miles it’s been a race of endurance, but Warfield made his one mistake back at Lincoln … he didn’t give his horse a chance.”
Chalmers turned thoughtful. “If he’d stayed there though, with you closin’ the distance like that, you’d have come into Lincoln before he’d have pulled out, so maybe, even though he made his mistake, he’s bought himself a little more time.”
Trent shrugged. “After seven hundred miles I can write off a town or two. Lincoln or Daggett, it’s all the same. He’ll be along. He’s got to trade a little time for the well-being of that bay thoroughbred. There’s nothing else he can do. He’s no kid, Marshal … he knows what lies ahead over that desert. And I’m here ahead of him.”
“You need sleep,” observed Chalmers. “Even a man as tough as you are, Mister Trent, needs rest sometime. Even an Apache couldn’t keep goin’ like this. I know my town, its folks, and every dark corner … you go get some rest on one of the cots over at the jailhouse and I’ll keep the vigil, Mister Trent.”
Around them the saloon’s noises came and went. There was the soft fall of chips, the clink of glasses against bottles, the constant run of masculine voices. It was like a familiar pattern to Trent, and it seldom varied. Release from the everyday stress and strain of living seemed always to fall into the identical framework in cattle country.
New Mexico wasn’t a whole lot different from Colorado. It was a world of extremes, of searing dryness and unreasoning cloudbursts, of drowsy summertime peacefulness and the wild flash of gunfire. It was a huge territory, raw and primitive. It burned softness out of a man, turned him resourceful, watchful, and oftentimes fierce.
It put a look upon a man’s bronzed face that never wholly departed even after he migrated to other, softer places. But not many departed because the West was a man’s land and even in its cruelest moments he stayed on.
Trent thought on these things as he sat there sipping whiskey, all loose and easy in his chair. He faintly shook his head at Chalmers. “It’s my affair,” he murmured. “I’ve pushed too hard and come too far not to be on hand at the finish. Thanks anyway.”
Across the room near the bar an angry woman exploded toward a wispy, youthful man with yellow hair and a tied-down, bone-handled .45. She slapped him, making a sound with that blow that carried because the steady hum of voices had atrophied at her first angry words. In a twinkling everyone was watching those two. Marshal Chalmers pushed his chair around, making the only sound as that youngish man brought his face back toward the girl. There was a livid imprint upon his left cheek, otherwise his face was white. Trent saw the little ripple where jaw muscles tightened and a bulge appeared along the young man’s jaw. His eyes, which were pale, got suddenly very bright.
Chalmers, heaving up out of his chair, said: “That’s enough.”
If he’d meant to stalk over there, he didn’t get the chance. With a blur and a slight lift of one shoulder, that bone-handled six-gun was out and up and leveled. Chalmers stopped in his tracks, blinking at that gun.
“Mind your own business, you old fool,” said the young man softly. “Butt in where you ain’t wanted and you’ll go out of here feet first.”
There wasn’t a sound in the place. Trent, with his left hand raised, still sipped whiskey, still sat over there, loose and easy, with his legs run out their full length under the table. He was carefully watching that yellow-haired cowboy. He knew the breed—another tumbleweed from the plains or the mountains or the cruel desert. Another drifter who had caught the scent of perfumed hair, who had been drawn to a woman like steel to a magnet, all his age-old instincts rushing over him, changing him completely from what he otherwise might have been—a good enough hand with a lariat, a branding iron, a spoiled mean horse, or a fry pan at some mescal fire behind the chuck wagon. A man who’d share his last drink of water or hand over his last clean shirt.
And there he stood upon the brink of murder, one breath away from doing something that would forever change him. And for what? Nothing. Within ten days he wouldn’t even be able to recall her face.
Trent slowly put down his whiskey glass, slowly said: “Now what, cowboy? Back out the door?” Trent shook his head. “You’d never make it. Put up the gun.”
Those narrowed blue eyes drifted a fraction of an inch past Chalmers to Trent. The younger man’s whole figure, unmoving as it was, seemed to tighten, to present menace to this new threat. But the eyes showed none of that same rancor, probably because Trent looked so entirely casual and harmless sitting there, his hat pushed far back, his whiskery face showing weariness, his unmoving gaze flat and dull and slightly hooded, not with any direct threat at all, but instead with cool interest.
“A man’s hungers can be his worst enemies,” went on Trent. “You pull that trigger and nothing afterward will ever again be the same for you. Put the thing away, cowboy. Buy a drink and that’ll be the end of it.”
There wasn’t a sound anywhere now, or a movement.
Death in capital letters was standing behind everyone’s shoulder, waiting. Trent let the cowboy’s flat stare slide by. He picked up his whiskey glass and slowly raised it with his left hand. Over the rim he said: “Believe me when I tell you I know what comes next … the running, the hiding, the being caught … the hanging, if you’re lucky. If not, dragging yourself behind a rock somewhere with your middle on fire from bullets, and leaking out your life in the dust where no one gives a damn.”
“For a preacher,” said the cowboy softly, flintily, “you sure like your whiskey, stranger.”
“I’m not a preacher,” replied Trent, still balancing his shot glass. “I’m a federal United States marshal … and right this minute I’ve got a Forty-Five aimed at your belly under this table.” Trent paused.
The tension drew out to its absolute limit. The cowboy’s pale gaze flickered downward. Then instantly lifted to Trent’s face again.
“A man’s got his pride, Marshal,” murmured the cowboy.
“I wouldn’t bruise your pride,” said Trent. “I’m not ordering you to holster that gun. I’m asking you to. I’m saying please.”
“Yeah? Then what, Marshal? Six months in Daggett’s lousy jailhouse?”
“Walk on out of here, get on your horse, and cool off under the stars, friend.”
“I got your word?”
Trent nodded. He felt Chalmers’s indignant stare swing half around and bore into him, but he nodded again anyway. “You got my word, friend.”
The cowboy’s nostrils quivered. He glanced elsewhere around the room. The woman was still standing there, her face twisted and ugly with fear, but the cowboy didn’t even see her. He let off a breath, holstered his weapon, and stood there.
“Adiós,” said Trent, finishing the last of his whiskey, putting the glass aside, and watching.
The cowboy started toward the door with little stiff steps. As he passed Trent, he said roughly: “I won’t forget, Marshal. Adiós.” He passed on out into the silent night.
Chalmers stood watching Trent. Around the room other men also considered him.
When the abrupt, harsh sound of a hard-hooked horse racing down the night came into that silence, a mustached bartender slapped the bar with his wiping rag and boomed out: “Drinks on the house, boys. Drinks on the house!”
Trent and that barman exchanged a fleeting look. They were worlds apart in everything except the fact that both had gray above the ears, both had lived. And if there was no place in this raw land for compassion, still, men possessed it in their secret hearts, even the toughest of them.
Chalmers sank back down into his vacated chair. He scowled into his empty glass, refilled it, and turned it in its own little sticky pool. He sat there thinking some private thoughts for a while, then he faintly shrugged, leaned over to refill Trent’s glass, too, and he raised his left hand.
“You done right. Even lettin’ him walk on out. I expect to me and any other average feller, that drawed gun was like wavin’ a red cape before a bull. But, Mister Trent, I see now why you’re famous as a peace officer. Here’s to your health and long life.”
They drank. Trent shifted a little on his chair. There was the sound of a gun sliding down across leather on his right side, and he said, without smiling: “Marshal, when you know you’re going to kill one, it makes you feel different toward the others that aren’t set upon the wrong trail yet. I apologize for butting into your business.”
Chalmers looked rueful. “He was faster’n lightning. He’d have got me sure. I’m figurin’ it’s maybe me ought to be doin’ the apologizin’.”
“Who was he?”
Chalmers wagged his head. “Don’t think I ever saw him before. They come and they go. You know how it is.”
A tall, dusty man hiked past, nodded at Chalmers, saying: “’Evenin’, Marshal.” This stranger put a careful gaze upon Trent, gravely nodded to him, also, and went on up to the bar.
Chalmers said indifferently: “Will Crockett. He’s got a place south and west of town. Desert rancher.” Then Chalmers pushed back and stood up. “Time to make my rounds, Mister Trent. Care to come along? We can hit the public corral and livery barn … just in case Warfield’s snuck in without us knowin’ it.”
Trent got up, hitched at his shell belt, and walked through a sea of veiled, carefully interested glances on out into the yonder night with his companion.
It was late. Daggett’s homes and stores were black and shrouded. Along Main Street the saloons and gambling rooms showed light. So did the livery barn, the jailhouse, and the local hotel, but, otherwise, the place was so darkly quiet the footfalls of Trent and Marshal Chalmers sounded unusually loud.
At t
he livery barn a bearded, big old man shook his head somberly to all Chalmers’s questions about a stranger riding in on a leggy bay horse.
“Been no one come in at all since nine o’clock, and even them warn’t strangers … ’twas local young folks out sparkin’ with buggies.” The bearded man shook his head at Chalmers, his sunken set eyes glowing with a firm light of powerful disapproval. “I tell you, Marshal, the younger generation’s skiddin’ straight to hell, and I don’t know what ails their parents these days … lettin’ them go buggy ridin’ in the night until nine, ten o’clock. The morals o’ the country are deterioratin’ fast, and that’s a fact.”
Chalmers led Trent out of there, stopped upon the plank walk, peered around to make sure that bearded, big old man wasn’t listening, and said: “He’s the lay preacher for the Methodists around here … when there’s a congregation to preach to, which isn’t too often.” Chalmers wryly waggled his head and started off.
Trent went along, near to smiling. Sometimes the bad ones in this life seemed more tolerable than the good ones.
Without encountering either Warfield or his thoroughbred horse, they made a complete circuit of Daggett, even going as far as the shanties a quarter mile from town.
The last half hour of this inspection turned Trent quiet. Somehow, probably by surrendering to weariness long before he sighted Daggett, Warfield had eluded Trent.
Once, he and Chalmers thought they might have stumbled onto him, at least onto something unusual. They heard a man snoring in the back of a battered wagon. But when they got over to investigate, Chalmers drew back with a disappointed grunt, and said: “Will Crockett, that desert cowman who came into the saloon right before we left, sleepin’ in the back of his rig. The hell with it, Mister Trent, come on down to the jailhouse and we’ll have a pot of coffee.”
Trent went but he no longer made good company.
He knew now, with dawn not too far off, that he’d not only lost another night’s much needed rest, but that Warfield wasn’t going to appear in Daggett after all.