Return of the Tall Man

by Clay Fisher

  “Ben,” he said haltingly, voice soft, gaze faraway, “I don’t know where you’ll go or what you’ll do with this second chance that I say God has give to both of us. But wherever you go and whatever you do with it, you remember one thing I’ve told you, boy. There ain’t but this single truth in the whole world. It’s from the Scripture them wagon-train people called after me there in the Nevada badlands. Never forget it, boy; never fail it. It’s God’s law. You are your brother’s keeper.”

  2

  Joe Meeks’ Map

  Three weeks and four hundred miles from Nameless Creek and the Virginia City vigilantes, Ben made the last night’s camp at Arapaho Wells. Fire laid, coffee tin on, mount turned loose to forage, he sat back to wait for the water to boil. And to take belated stock, meanwhile, of his agreement with Chilkoot Johnston.

  His errant memory, while it refused to yield up material details of his past, still served him sharply in matters of the spirit. Who Ben Allison had been before the old man dug him out of the avalanche, he could not say, Neither could he recall where he might have gone or what he might have done in that former life. Yet certain things he knew about himself. One of these was that whatever trust he accepted, he would discharge. Having taken the locket from Chilkoot, he was bound to follow its trail as far from this point of its origin as human strength, wit, willpower, and the proverbial luck of fools would take him. It was quite a bargain. Glancing about the camp at the means available whereby he might keep it, Ben had to grin.

  If this forlorn oasis in the endless sage were the outset of that rare second chance in life which the old man had considered such a God-given privilege, all Ben could say was, the good Lord protect him from many more such chances. The prospects looked to him like betting a pair of deuces, hidden, into three queens showing.

  Assets: one ancient, on-loan, off-eyed prospector’s pack mule; one moldy, green grub sack, eaten down to two days’ remaining ration bannock flour and weevily beans; one 1860 army Colt, converted postwar to fire the new .44 Smith & Wesson metal cartridges; one rangy, rawboned body seeming to be somewhere between twenty and thirty years tough.

  Debits: one dented, soft gold locket, likeness baby girl, five months, inscription, “Amy Geneva Johnston, St. Joe, Mo., May 21, 1843,” plus one completely implausible promise to find the described child, if living, or if since departed, to determine the nature of her history beyond Arapaho Wells. And all this in a trackless desolation centered by the Great Salt Sink of Utah, bordered by arid desert waste and mountain ranges four ways around; the entire area, from Montana to Santa Fe and Tucson, from nomad Sioux in the north to bedouin Apache in the south, the uncontested haunt of the admitted worst of the white-hating horseback Indians.

  Again, it was quite a problem. But now, somehow, Ben had lost his grin for it. He took out the locket, let it spin slowly in the firelight on its slender chain.

  “Whichever way she points when she stops,” he said soberly to the old mule, Malachi, “that’s the way we’ll go …”

  Malachi, pawing out the snow-buried grass nearby, halted and threw up his head. He wagged his ears, blew the snow out of his nostrils, eyed the man at the fire. If it were not a hostile glance, neither could it be called friendly. Malachi plainly had his doubts about Ben Allison.

  When the locket had stopped spinning and was hanging dead still, its face cover pointed southeast. Ben shook his head, frowning slightly.

  “Arizona Territory?” he asked himself aloud. It was a natural thing to do for a man much used to the lonely places. Where the only companion is the passing wind, one talks to oneself or to no one. Unless, of course, one is so fortunate as to have along a four-footed friend of unusual sensitivity. “What do you think?” he said to the old mule. “You ever been to Arizona?”

  Malachi batted his one flop ear, laid back the other good one, walled his eyes, bared his worn yellow cusps. It was a mean look, and he meant it. The snort of dismissal with which he turned his back on Ben and any such mumbo-jumbo business as locket spinning was totally eloquent. Ben nodded quick agreement.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s got to be a better guess than Arizona. Something that makes at least some sense when hooked to the old man’s story. But what? What else is down that way that could put us on the trail?”

  With the question his frown lightened.

  “The map!” he cried. “Maybe it’s on the map!”

  He had forgotten Chilkoot’s last gift upon parting, an heirloom trapper’s chart of the region west and south of Salt Lake. This was reputed to be the work of the redoubtable Joe Meeks, done thirty years before when he and Bridger and Broken Hand Fitzpatrick and Crazy Bill Williams had planted beaver sets on every drainage from the headwaters of the Humboldt in Nevada to those of the Pecos in New Mexico. It covered a thousand-mile crescent of country still left blank and marked “desert” on the atlases even of Ben’s day. And it was, for all its crudeness, more reliable than any modern cartograph purporting to trace the untraced wastes beyond the Rockies.

  Further, Joe Meeks’ map was annotated in a singularly useful manner not to be found on any sophisticated documents of later date. No shining light of literacy, Joe had scratched a series of symbols at strategic points upon his masterpiece. These had been listed in a key by some contemporary who could read and write or, at least, print laboriously. And accurately. If the symbol marking some crawling, green-scummed seepage translated “good water” in the key, the thirsting traveler could drink deep without fear. If a clear, attractive pool was marked “don’t drink,” the wise wanderer moved on unslaked. And if, above all, there appeared upon the map a symbol which in the key stated simply, “unfriendly, go around,” the informed passerby swung wide, stayed in the saddle, lighted no fires, and traveled fast for forty-eight hours.

  Upon all this old Chilkoot had laid great stress in giving the map to Ben. The latter, in turn, had judged the gift on looks, promptly filed it away in his war bag with a mental note that it might serve for fire starter at some camp where natural tinder was lacking. Now he put the locket away and dug out the grimy document. There was even—almost—a benighted sense of reverence about the great care with which he brought forth from its oilskin pouch the graphic last will and hand-scrawled testament of Joe Meeks, mountain man.

  The delayed respect was well paid.

  Frowning to make out its faded detail in the poor light of the fire, Ben fell to studying the map. After a long, quiet moment, his gray eyes went wide.

  “Damn!” he said softly. “That’s fair-to-middling creepy! Right square where she pointed …!”

  His frown intensified. With big, slowly moving forefinger, he painstakingly retraced the spidery course set down so long ago. It was an ancient Indian trail leading south from Arapaho Wells. Coming to Pequop Summit, it detoured the base of this oft-noted landmark, continued down a long valley between the Toano and Pequop ranges, thence eastward over White Horse Pass back to the Utah side and the Goshute country. Skirting twelve-

  thousand-foot Haystack Peak and the Deep Creek hills, it bore south once more, threading the salt marshes of Snake Valley, climbing the Conger Range and crossing Ferguson Desert by way of Government Well to end at the foot of Sawtooth Peak in the Needle Mountains. At its terminus was one of Meeks’ strange symbols. The key read, “Main Paiute Village,” and it was when these three words leaped off the camp-soiled paper that Ben swore softly and knew where it was that he and Malachi would ride with first light tomorrow.

  The Paiutes were the parent tribe of the band which had carried the smallpox into Chilkoot’s camp at Arapaho Wells in ’43. If any human being yet alive in all that vast silence out beyond Ben’s fire had present, useful memory of what track the Johnston train may have taken away from its fatal halt at the Wells, the human being would most likely be some Utah desert Paiute. And one who was by now rheumy-eyed, his thinning braids touched by the snows of seventy and more winters. For
Ben knew that among the Indians, only the old ones remembered the things which happened long ago. The young people had trouble recalling what took place yesterday. They had no time for tribal history older than the last corn dance or most recent horse raid.

  When this thought took Ben, he grew apprehensive. Why would he know what the Indian mind and manner was like? Why should it be perfectly clear to him what the old people did and the young did not? There was no apparent reason for such assumptions, yet their assertions continued to occur to Ben as naturally as his next breath. Why? Ben knit his brows and could not answer the question now any more than he could the hundred and one others like it which had arisen the past weeks to plague him about his past. Damn! What was the mystery of his feeling for these people? And, indeed, of theirs for him?

  What could he have been to them that made him know the things he knew about them and their ways?

  How was it that he could lay a fire with flint and steel, a not common accomplishment even on the frontier?

  Why could he, as he had discovered from the first band of mounted red men met upon the long ride from Montana, understand and reply fluently to questions put in the Indian sign language of the High Plains? Where had he learned this art? Under what possibly sinister circumstances?

  Why was it that the ordinarily hostile red men looked carefully into his Indian-dark face and made the “brothers welcome” sign, instead of taking his mule, his gun, and his white man’s long blond hair back to their winter lodges? Was there some possible shred of hereditary truth in old Chilkoot’s sometimes testy complaints that he “all the time looked and too often acted like a damned redskin?” No, that had been no more than cabin fever on the old man’s part. The best of companions got edgy cooped up together through a hard winter. Yet Ben had seen his own face in the cabin’s shaving glass, and he had felt his own feelings of response to the wild horsemen met upon the trail, and he knew that there was something.

  What was it then?

  Was he a half-breed? A renegade white? A despised squaw man? A white foundling from some burned-out wagon train, reared by the savage riders of the northern plains? No, that could not be either, for he had no memory of the spoken languages of the northern tribes. He had met Piegans, Sioux, Shoshoni, Crows, Cheyenne, even a winter traveling band of Oregon Nez Percés. All had been friendly, yet none had used a tongue intelligible to Ben. So an Indian upbringing seemed unlikely, while having been a squaw man or renegade was simply one of those things he knew he could not have been. But what had he been? What in all the far-flung wasteland ranges of the wild horse tribes had Ben Allison been?

  He gave it up, as he always did.

  Whatever the answer was, it had to lie somewhere down the trail. He would find it, as he would find Chilkoot Johnston’s daughter, when and if. Meanwhile, given such inclusive odds, a good night’s sleep was the best beginning for the gamble. In the morning he and Malachi would start south. With decent luck and likewise weather, the old mule not going lame under him, he ought to pull into the Paiute village in ten days. Until then, with beans and flour for but two days, his chief concern was finding food. In late winter, along the margins and through the rugged subdeserts of the Great Salt Sink, this was apt to prove a pretty lean-bellied proposition all by itself.

  Ben’s rueful smile broke again.

  Well, at least they couldn’t say he hadn’t taken on a chore cut to size. Ben Allison of San Saba, or wherever, stood six feet four bowlegged inches above the floorboards, and that without benefit of his patched Confederate cavalry boots. Yet even if he towered life-size as all West Texas, the idea of merely looking, twenty-four years later, for a lost white baby in the blind gut of hostile Indian country, guided only by Joe Meeks’ map and a cheap gold locket, came out considerably short of horse sensible. Especially when measured against a man’s chances of going there and getting back with his hair in one piece.

  Looking now southward across his fire into the black winter night which hid the Paiute Trail, he shivered and nodded consolingly to himself. Old Chilkoot better have been right about the length of the material sent him by the good Lord to finish out that second chance; that was a mighty tall job waiting down there in the Utah darkness.

  Still, his grin widened. It was not that it was really funny; it was that Ben was inclined to grin more than to grit his teeth when trouble washed his way. As Chilkoot had observed, not infrequently and not altogether in admiration, he had a tendency to carry on as happy as though he had good sense.

  To the old mule, Malachi, he now said cheerfully:

  “Early to bed and early to rise

  Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and—

  Keeps his scalp stitched on straight.”

  Malachi regarded him with a mixed look of compassion and disgust. Why, the aging animal’s patient stare seemed to demand, atop all his other onerous physical burdens, must an honest, hardworking, blue-eyed Montana pack mule be made also to bear this added spiritual insult of having been delivered into the service of a stringhalted philosopher? What possible justification could exist for the imposition of this further injury of being forced to listen to the clear delusion upon the simple-minded part of this lanky young idiot that he had been dealt the gift of pithy observation? Or even of ordinarily intelligent comment?

  The old mule grunted and sighed unhappily.

  Life with the old man back on the creeks had never been like this. It was a sorry day for Malachi Johnston when the old man had made him pack this one home from the avalanche in Madison Canyon!

  3

  The Paiute Trail

  On the ninth day south from Arapaho Wells, the desert bared her sandstone gums to show the lone fang of Sawtooth Peak snagging the raw blue sky ahead. Topping a final rise of creosote scrub, Ben pulled in Malachi and sat him, sharp against the brilliance of the morning sun, looking down upon the Paiute village.

  It was not much to see. These Indians, if they owned horses, were not horse Indians. Ben could make out the ragged geometry of the few irrigation ditches taken off the small stream which drained the saddle of Old Sawtooth. The irregular squares were marked by the wind-drowned furrows of last year’s dead yields of corn, beans, and rattlesnake melons. Startlingly, there in the broom sage and greasewood, a naked-armed platoon of eastern-seeded fruit trees stood at straggling attention along the flanks of the row-crop fields. These would be the undoubted, if dubious, bequeathings of the Saints up at Salt Lake, Ben thought. You couldn’t beat those Mormons, by damn. You couldn’t even tie them. They got into and out of places years before the Gentiles got around to discovering the country that held those places. Then the second thought took him—how the devil did he know anything about Old Brigham’s band and their busy ways? Then the uneasiness about his past came on him again, and he put his attention back where it belonged—on the Paiutes.

  Clucking to Malachi, he started the old mule down the slope. As he approached the brush and animal-skin huts, a gathering of the elders drifted cautiously out to meet him. They were gaunt, shy-acting, withered both by their many snows and by their chronic want of sufficient good food. Their dress was of poorly fleshed rabbit furs pelted without troubling to remove the feet. In some cases the dessicated heads of the untanned skins also still dangled from the wearer’s garments. None of the oldsters carried a weapon, but one or two of them bore rabbit throwing sticks and a third, obviously the shaman of the band, came armed with a gourd rattle and a feathered medicine stick.

  When they drew closer together, they saw how poor Ben was. They came a little farther along, peering hard, making absolutely certain that he had with him nothing either of edible or tradable nature. Then their questioning half smiles faded. They stopped and gathered in an orderless rank across the trail, as though they would bar him from their dwellings. Ben rode up to them, stopping Malachi at the proper distance. With great dignity he then made the hand sign of Indian respect for the elder person.

>   When the Paiutes saw the gesture—a graceful touching of the brow with the fingertips of the left hand—they whispered quickly among themselves. Almost at once the shaman stood forth. He put both hands out, palms toward Ben, using both hand signs and some considerable “mountain man” English.

  “We are a poor people,” he signified. “You, too, are poor. Come into our houses, then, and be welcome.”

  Ben made the sign which returned his understanding of the invitation, got down off Malachi, and walked with the elders back to the council hut at town’s center. There a fragrant piñon log was asmolder, its wondrous pungent odor putting the bite of its smoke into the clear wine of the dry air. The shaman waved Ben to enter. The latter dropped to hands and knees to gain ingress, his height being half again that of his tallest companion. Inside, while waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, his nose was working on a marvelous odor he could not identify.

  It proved, directly, to be boiled cornmeal with bits of cactus rat, including at least one complete tail with hair intact and a recognizable, beady-eyed skull, together with some sort of yucca or wild onion root, steamed au jus, and served on the rare side.

  This was the community breakfast, just being readied as Ben topped the trail across the creek. Starved as he was, he would greatly have preferred his hosts to have gone ahead without him. But the Paiute would not touch a morsel of the gray stew until he had taken his fill of it. Ben ate gallantly, keeping his eyes closed tight, in this manner feigning to evidence a delight of the gustatory senses beyond that which sight might safely bear. The Indians were much pleased with this rapture over their simple fare. Ben was able at the same time to fortify himself without risking an abortive return to the dirt floor of the hut of any of the delicacies which he dipped so carefully from the iron pot which the shaman’s squaw had set before him.

  In the end, despite his artful dodging, he very nearly ruined everything when a sidelong glance at his final hand-scooped helping showed him he had drawn the cactus rat skull. Sheer inspiration saved him. Noting that several of the old people leaned forward eagerly when they saw him dip the skull, he graciously picked it from his hand, touched it to his forehead, passed it over with a flourish to the shaman.