by Max Brand
“It is as God wills,” he said with the most perfect indifference. “If He wills that I live, I live . . . or that I die, and then no man can help me.”
“You are ready to be left, then?”
“Certainly, sir.”
There was nothing more that I could do for him except to make him a soft bed, and this I managed by cutting a quantity of branches from the shrubs and piling them out a good two feet thick. It made a spring mattress, fresh and fragrant.
“Lie on this,” I said.
He paused to give me one questioning glance, and then he slunk onto the bed. The moment that he touched it, however, he uttered a faint groan of relief and joy and lay motionlessly for an instant, quivering. I could tell by that how bitterly the torment must have been wringing him. I suppose that every breath he drew was a torture.
I wrapped him as delicately as I could in my blanket, but in spite of my care he drew a gasping breath or two.
“Now,” I said at last, fairly sweating because of the way his pain had gone through me, “do you think that you’ll have a fairly comfortable night?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And are you warm enough?”
“Ah, my blood is ice.”
I took the saddle blanket and piled it over him. Then I built the fire higher. After that, he told me with a warm, drowsy voice that all was well—that the pain was better—that he would sleep.
But, after a moment, something wakened him.
“You, sir?” he said.
“Well?”
“What blankets remain for you, and what bed?”
I told him that it was not a cold night. And it was not—only nippy. I told him to forget about me and go to sleep. I thought in fact that he had gone to sleep, but after ten minutes I heard him whisper a prayer.
Perhaps it was not his pain that made him say it.
I spent a sufficiently uneasy night. For one thing, it was a bit nippy, and, although I could have made myself comfortable enough by building two fires and lying between them, I was not sure enough of my position to take such a measure. I could not tell at what time the remaining pair of the dead man’s friends would come snooping back to take a potshot at me if possible. And although by the manner of their going I felt that they would not hurry back, still, as I have said before, four years of a hunted life give one a stock of natural uneasiness.
When the dawn came, I built up the fire once more and I made it high enough to warm me well. The exercise of tearing out the brush and breaking it off to raise the tower of flames left me perspiring, and I threw off my coat while I cooked a breakfast.
I was in a black humor, with curses just behind the teeth all the time. For here was I nailed down to one spot in the mountains while the quarry to which I had given a week of hard hunting rolled farther and farther from my grasp.
You can imagine what was in my mind when, turning from the fire, I found that infernal, cold-blooded Negro had dared to reach out from his bed, unfurl a coat that I had thrown beside him, and was now busy in examining carefully the contents of the pockets.
I assure you that I was mute and frozen with rage. He was through estimating the contents of the wallet, which was jammed with $4,000 in bills of all sizes. That money lay in a ruffled heap in the coat. He was now perusing a deeply creased poster that I had picked up from a crossroad signboard a few days before. I knew what the contents of the poster were. It began with an excellent likeness of the face of Hugo Ames; it went on with an offer of $15,000 reward for my apprehension, dead or alive.
I leaned over the black man, quivering. And the confounded rascal had the effrontery to smile up in my face. He folded the poster with care, seeing that the creases corresponded with the old ones. Then he extended it to me—still smiling. He picked up my money and began to arrange it once more and restore it to the wallet.
“What in the devil do you mean by it?” I snarled at him.
“What do I mean?” he said, much surprised. “Why, sir, I, of course, wished to understand you if I could.” He paused and then nodded and added: “Now, sir, I understand what happened to Miguel and to me. You are Ames!”
What could one say to a fellow like that? He was not a dumb, dull brute. He simply did not understand things in the light with which they appeared to me and to other people. He had his own way of looking at the world, and it was so different from my way that I concluded it would be foolishness for me to reprimand him or to punish him. One doesn’t scold a partly tamed panther.
I was as angry as ever, as I finished the breakfast cookery, which was simple enough, and carried him his food and waited until he had drunk and eaten. For, of course, I had only one cup and one plate. Then I ate my own meal.
“Now that you know my name,” I said, “perhaps you’ll tell me yours?”
“Surely, sir. I am José.”
“José what?” I pursued.
“I am not a very big man, sir. And one name is enough for me.”
I damned him again—this time aloud. Then I went to saddle Spike.
VI
I described a circle about twenty miles in diameter, that day, and I came upon not a sign of a human being. I did not even reach a well-worn trail. In the evening, with Spike tired beneath me, and with myself very tired from the ride and from the sleepless night, I turned back toward the place where I had left black José.
I half expected that the other pair would be hidden there, waiting for me. I half hoped that José would be dead from despair, because I had not told him that I was coming back. I had left him my canteen of water and gone off without a word. A good many high-strung people, helpless and deserted in this fashion, would have blown their brains out—and he had a gun, loaded and ready to his hand. That was another provision that I had made without any misgivings or shame.
By this you can imagine the black frame of my mind when I left him in the morning. But when I came back, there was José, his body still stretched upon the bed of branches. He was smoking a cigarette, and his greeting was characteristic.
“You are late, sir.”
“Curse your eyes,” I said. “What made you think that I should come back at all?”
“What? Well, one must guess.”
“You are a gambler, José,” I said. “This time you won. Perhaps tomorrow will be a new day, though.”
“Perhaps,” said this brazen murderer.
I let him go hungry and thirsty—I saw that the canteen was empty—I even watched him eloquently trying to drain the last drops from it. In the meantime, he had watched my eyes with a look askance. But I refused to understand. I told myself that I should wait until he begged before I gave him any help—if then.
Meanwhile, I got out the little trenching shovel that I always carried in my pack. For there is hardly anything—except an axe—so convenient as a shovel when one has to camp out in the mountains in all manner of weather. With that shovel, but even more with my hands, rolling out big rocks, I made a sufficiently deep grave and into it I lowered the body of the other Negro, Miguel. There was the pale shining of a new moon to help me at this grisly work.
When I had finished that necessary task, my head ached and I was thoroughly exhausted. For some of the rocks I had tugged at had been whoppers. And I had put into the labor some of the spite that I felt toward José.
And while this went on the two who were my quarry were streaking their trail far away from me. Well, it was a desperately trying situation.
I went back and cooked a supper. I had shot a brace of rabbits on my ride, and I roasted them, but when I carried the food to José, he took it with a smile and began to maul it in a vague, uninterested way. I noticed closely and saw that he did not swallow a morsel.
“What the devil!” I said. “Have you had a full meal of sunshine?”
“Today,” said my black murderer, “José has a religious feeling, and therefore he fasts.”
I cursed him again, with much satisfaction. But on afterthought I remembered the water, and I brou
ght him the filled canteen. The poor rascal drained it to the last drop, hardly lowering it from his lips while he did so.
“It is good,” he whispered, and lay with closed eyes in the firelight, still grasping the emptied can.
After that he ate. Literally his throat had been closed with thirst. He ate, and he ate like a wolf. And then I examined his side. It was much swollen and fiery hot to the touch. So I bathed it for a long time with cold water.
How much torture he had endured from it during the day and while he ate I cannot say, but I know that as the water began to soothe it and take the inflammation away, he groaned loudly with great relief.
And, while I was still bathing it, he slept.
As for me, I was too weary to eat even half my food, and then, regardless of the perils that might lie in the night for me, I stretched out—heedless of the cold, too, and I slept like a dead man until the direct rays of the sun awakened me. Then I looked about me and considered my work that lay ahead.
It was definite in my mind, now. I could not abandon this injured fellow—even if he were murderer and a Negro at that. He was a human being, and that was all that counted. Strange how much more vital the life in itself becomes when one is in the mountains. One grows to love even the eagle in the air.
That day I made more ample provision for the comfort of José. I made him a fresh bed in a new place—beneath a thicket of small trees about 100 yards from my first camp—a trebly better place, because a little musical rivulet flowed out from the spring here. Next, I carried José to the new spot and bedded him down even more thickly than before. There I left him, with plenty of water, and with tobacco, papers, and plenty of cold roast rabbit if he grew hungry in the middle of the day.
I left him looking contentedly up through the branches of the tree at the sky above him, and I started off upon another round to see what I might discover. I struck off due east, traveled a full thirty miles, straightaway. But to my consternation, when I came to the end of that distance, I had not found a single sign of a house. Somewhere much nearer than this there must, of course, be the habitation of some men. But I was strange in those mountains, and, as I turned Spike back at noon, I decided that I must give up the attempt.
For there was no reason for hurrying on. With a two-day start, mounted as they were and now with spare horses to ride from time to time, the companions of José were sure to be vastly beyond my reach. I would need a race of another 1,000 miles at least to make up for such a handicap.
But it was a bitter sacrifice to make. I reached the camp and found, long before I got to it, a light but husky tenor voice wailing a song before me. It was José, stretched under his tree and whiling away the time with the most perfect good cheer.
He smiled upon me and nodded silently as I appeared.
I, hot from the journey under the sun and hotter still at his sang-froid, could not help breaking out: “Do you know where you are to be taken as soon as your ribs are healed enough to endure traveling?”
“Ah?” said José.
“To the nearest town, where I’ll turn you over as the murderer of Truck Janvers.”
He considered this for a moment, with the smile still upon his lips. “And you will stay, then, to keep me company in the jail, sir?”
“I’ll leave you tied hand and foot in the street at night and with a description of what you’ve done tied on your neck.”
“Ah, sir, will they hang me, then, because of the word of a man who dares not stand before me in the courtroom?”
His coolness dazed me. I kept thinking, because his skin was black and because he was so odd in so many ways, that he was a child and that he might be imposed upon like a child. But he baffled me continually.
There was nothing to do but to turn away to save my face, and I went on busily with the preparation of the supper.
I ventured only one question to him that evening: “Are your other two friends black, also?”
“Black? Perhaps, sir.”
“You have forgotten, I suppose,” I said sneeringly.
“It is a great time ago. Pain makes the days very long, sir.”
“Well,” I said in a new rage, “I warn you, José, that even if I heal you and turn you loose this time, I’ll find a way to get at you later on. I’ll find you and the other two, and I’ll tie you back to back and burn you over a slow fire . . . as cowardly assassins like you deserve to die.”
“My mother,” he said, “once saw a witch burned.”
I merely glared at him.
“What do you think that she did when the flames were around her?”
“How should I know, and why should I care?”
He waved my discourtesy aside. “She sang a song . . . a long song, from the beginning to the end. Then she leaned and breathed deeply of the flames, and she died. Well, sir, it must have been an excellent thing to see. Do you not think so?”
I left him without a word and strode off into the darkness, where I sat down and thanked heaven that I was alone.
Not quite alone. The thought of that black demon pursued me. And yet I did not altogether hate him. He was a camping companion through two days and two nights. And companionship would give certain virtues to Satan himself, I suppose. At least, it does in the mountains.
There is not the slightest use in dwelling over the long and weary days when I remained impatiently with José in the mountains. As he grew better, and then reached the time when he could sit up, I had to watch him like a hawk all the time. For I had given him a gun, and I felt that I should be ashamed to take it back from him—as though I could possibly fear a little man who I had crushed with one stroke of my hand.
A time came when I wished that I had crushed him utterly the first time I encountered him, or else that I had ridden off on the first morning and left him behind me to die like a fish out of water, or from thirst and the pain of his wound.
I had taken Spike with me every day until, on the sixteenth day of my wait, I took a short hunting trip in the early morning to get a bit of fresh meat for breakfast. I was not gone half an hour before I came back with squirrels. And I found that the fire was out and José was not in sight. I called for him, and there was no answer.
Then I yelled for Spike.
And out of the far distance I heard a faintly echoing bray. The infernal scoundrel had stolen the mule and made his get-away.
VII
I felt like a child, so angry that it wants to destroy the entire world and furious because it hasn’t the strength to do it. I picked up a big rock and smashed it to bits as a way of easing my mind. Then I sat down to consider.
My total possessions consisted of my rifle and two revolvers, together with a very scanty amount of ammunition, because, during the days I was taking care of the Negro, I had shot away a good deal of powder and lead to keep us in meat. And it takes as much ammunition to kill a squirrel as it does to kill a deer. My mule and my pack were now possessions of the grateful José.
After a time, my heat fell away a little. I told myself that I had been simply a fool, and, being a fool, I had to take the penalty. Since I had chosen to treat José like a man instead of like a snake, as he deserved, there was nothing for me to do but to dress myself with patience. But, at twenty-two, patience is the smallest of a man’s virtues.
Yet, although I was on foot, I had not the slightest idea of giving over the chase. In a few minutes I was up and plugging away on foot. My hope was the Negro would not understand Spike’s uncanny ability to negotiate steep cliffs, and, if he kept the mule off the rocks, I might still be able to keep to the trail, whereas if Spike followed the short cuts, it would need the eye of an eagle to make out his way.
I kept those hopes all through the morning, for the Negro apparently trusted that no man on foot would attempt to follow a mounted man. But, just before noon, I saw where Spike had lunged over the brow of the mountain and shortened the trail by going down into the valley beneath. And I knew that I was close to the end of my trailing.
/> Indeed, within a single hour the sign was lost. José, apparently seeing at once the peculiar talents of the mule, had pushed him straight ahead at every tangle of rock and was following an air-line course across the country. There among the rocks I lost the sign and sat down to think over what more I might be able to do. Finally I decided that I should try to cut for the sign of the four horses and their two riders, but I had no luck whatever.
I went back to the direction in which Spike had been traveling and I tried to lay a straight course across country in the general trend that the Negro had been following. The quartet had been using the easier ways of getting across the land, but José, on Spike, used him as an eagle uses its wings. I was fairly confident that he had picked out the exact direction.
So I laid out a landmark to the north and west and another to the south and east, exactly on the course that José had been following. And, for five long days, I pushed the leagues behind me. On the fifth day I dropped from the upper mountains into a little valley and saw, to my great delight, half a dozen ranch houses scattered here and there. Best of all, I saw some horses and I felt that the end of my long trek on foot had come. This was worth a pause. I wanted a horse, but I wanted one able to carry 220 pounds and carry it fast and far.
I found a tiny bit of freckled boyhood under the shadow of a great straw sombrero. He sat on a pot-bellied old pony—a caricature of age and weakness with that infant holding the reins.
I asked of him: “Sammy, whereabouts is there a good horse for sale?”
The boy looked me over with care and a fearless eye. There was a good deal to see. I had broken my razor six weeks before. There was already a considerable forest on my face before I started on this trail, and now my features were well hidden.
“Pa has a couple of hosses to sell,” he declared at last. “Hey, Spot, you old fool!”
And he cracked his blacksnake in the air. He was riding herd on a score of milk cows and heifers, to keep them on a stretch of pasture and away from a field of sowed barley hay.
“They’re too wore out for cutting wood,” said the boy. “Maybe they’d suit you, though.”