by Jon E. Lewis
“Hey, Tony,” he called. Out of his dusty throat the cry was “throw some water into that mule of mine, would you, Tony?”
A voice pealed from the distance.
Durante, pouring down the second dipper of water, smelled the alkali dust which had shaken off his own clothes. It seemed to him that heat was radiating like light from his clothes, from his body, and the cool dimness of the house was soaking it up. He heard the wooden leg of Tony bumping on the ground, and Durante grinned; then Tony came in with that hitch and sideswing with which he accommodated the stiffness of his artificial leg. His brown face shone with sweat as though a special ray of light were focused on it.
“Ah, Dick!” he said. “Good old Dick! . . . How long since you came last! . . . Wouldn’t Julia be glad! Wouldn’t she be glad!”
“Ain’t she here?” asked Durante, jerking his head suddenly away from the dripping dipper.
“She’s away at Nogalez,” said Tony. “It gets so hot. I said, ‘You go up to Nogalez, Julia, where the wind don’t forget to blow.’ She cried, but I made her go.”
“Did she cry?” asked Durante.
“Julia . . . that’s a good girl,” said Tony.
“Yeah. You bet she’s good,” said Durante. He put the dipper quickly to his lips but did not swallow for a moment; he was grinning too widely. Afterward he said: “You wouldn’t throw some water into that mule of mine, would you, Tony?”
Tony went out with his wooden leg clumping loud on the wooden floor, softly in the patio dust. Durante found the hammock in the corner of the patio. He lay down in it and watched the color of sunset flush the mists of desert dust that rose to the zenith. The water was soaking through his body; hunger began, and then the rattling of pans in the kitchen and the cheerful cry of Tony’s voice:
“What you want, Dick? I got some pork.You don’t want pork. I’ll make you some good Mexican beans. Hot. Ah ha, I know that old Dick. I have plenty of good wine for you, Dick. Tortillas. Even Julia can’t make tortillas like me . . . And what about a nice young rabbit?”
“All blowed full of buckshot?” growled Durante.
“No, no. I kill them with the rifle.”
“You kill rabbits with a rifle?” repeated Durante, with a quick interest.
“It’s the only gun I have,” said Tony. “If I catch them in the sights, they are dead . . . A wooden leg cannot walk very far . . . I must kill them quick. You see? They come close to the house about sunrise and flop their ears. I shoot through the head.”
“Yeah? Yeah?” muttered Durante. “Through the head?” He relaxed, scowling. He passed his hand over his face, over his head.
Then Tony began to bring the food out into the patio and lay it on a small wooden table; a lantern hanging against the wall of the house included the table in a dim half circle of light. They sat there and ate. Tony had scrubbed himself for the meal. His hair was soaked in water and sleeked back over his round skull. A man in the desert might be willing to pay five dollars for as much water as went to the soaking of that hair.
Everything was good. Tony knew how to cook, and he knew how to keep the glasses filled with his wine.
“This is old wine. This is my father’s wine. Eleven years old,” said Tony. “You look at the light through it. You see that brown in the red? That’s the soft that time puts in good wine, my father always said.”
“What killed your father?” asked Durante.
Tony lifted his hand as though he were listening or as though he were pointing out a thought.
“The desert killed him. I found his mule. It was dead, too. There was a leak in the canteen. My father was only five miles away when the buzzards showed him to me.”
“Five miles? Just an hour . . . Good Lord!” said Durante. He stared with big eyes. “Just dropped down and died?” he asked.
“No,” said Tony. “When you die of thirst, you always die just one way . . . First you tear off your shirt, then your undershirt. That’s to be cooler . . . And the sun comes and cooks your bare skin . . . And then you think . . . there is water everywhere, if you dig down far enough. You begin to dig. The dust comes up your nose. You start screaming. You break your nails in the sand. You wear the flesh off the tips of your fingers, to the bone.” He took a quick swallow of wine.
“Without you seen a man die of thirst, how d’you know they start to screaming?” asked Durante.
“They got a screaming look when you find them,” said Tony. “Take some more wine. The desert never can get to you here. My father showed me the way to keep the desert away from the hollow. We live pretty good here? No?”
“Yeah,” said Durante, loosening his shirt collar. “Yeah, pretty good.”
Afterward he slept well in the hammock until the report of a rifle waked him and he saw the color of dawn in the sky. It was such a great, round bowl that for a moment he felt as though he were above, looking down into it.
He got up and saw Tony coming in holding a rabbit by the ears, the rifle in his other hand.
“You see?” said Tony. “Breakfast came and called on us!” He laughed.
Durante examined the rabbit with care. It was nice and fat and it had been shot through the head. Through the middle of the head. Such a shudder went down the back of Durante that he washed gingerly before breakfast; he felt that his blood was cooled for the entire day.
It was a good breakfast, too, with flapjacks and stewed rabbit with green peppers, and a quart of strong coffee. Before they had finished, the sun struck through the east window and started them sweating.
“Gimme a look at that rifle of yours, Tony, will you?” Durante asked.
“You take a look at my rifle, but don’t you steal the luck that’s in it,” laughed Tony. He brought the fifteen-shot Winchester.
“Loaded right to the brim?” asked Durante.
“I always load it full the minute I get back home,” said Tony.
“Tony, come outside with me,” commanded Durante.
They went out from the house. The sun turned the sweat of Durante to hot water and then dried his skin so that his clothes felt transparent.
“Tony, I gotta be damn mean,” said Durante. “ Stand right there where I can see you. Don’t try to get close . . . Now listen . . . The sheriff’s gunna be along this trail some time today, looking for me. He’ll load up himself and all his gang with water out of your tanks. Then he’ll follow my sign across the desert. Get me? He’ll follow if he finds water on the place. But he’s not gunna find water.”
“What you done, poor Dick?” said Tony. “Now look . . . I could hide you in the old wine cellar where nobody . . .”
“The sheriff’s not gunna find any water,” said Durante. “It’s gunna be like this.”
He put the rifle to his shoulder, aimed, fired. The shot struck the base of the nearest tank, ranging down through the bottom. A semicircle of darkness began to stain the soil near the edge of the iron wall.
Tony fell on his knees. “No, no, Dick! Good Dick!” he said. “Look! All the vineyard. It will die. It will turn into old, dead wood, Dick . . .”
“Shut your face,” said Durante. “Now I’ve started, I kinda like the job.”
Tony fell on his face and put his hands over his ears. Durante drilled a bullet hole through the tanks, one after another. Afterward, he leaned on the rifle.
“Take my canteen and go in and fill it with water out of the cooling jar,” he said. “Snap into it, Tony!”
Tony got up. He raised the canteen, and looked around him, not at the tanks from which the water was pouring so that the noise of the earth drinking was audible, but at the rows of his vineyard. Then he went into the house.
Durante mounted his mule. He shifted the rifle to his left hand and drew out the heavy Colt from its holster. Tony came dragging back to him, his head down. Durante watched Tony with a careful revolver but he gave up the canteen without lifting his eyes.
“The trouble with you, Tony,” said Durante, “is you’re yellow. I’d of fought
a tribe of wildcats with my bare hands, before I’d let ’ em do what I’m doin’ to you. But you sit back and take it.”
Tony did not seem to hear. He stretched out his hands to the vines.
“Ah, my God,” said Tony. “Will you let them all die?”
Durante shrugged his shoulders. He shook the canteen to make sure that it was full. It was so brimming that there was hardly room for the liquid to make a sloshing sound. Then he turned the mule and kicked it into a dog-trot.
Half a mile from the house of Tony, he threw the empty rifle to the ground. There was no sense packing that useless weight, and Tony with his peg leg would hardly come this far.
Durante looked back, a mile or so later, and saw the little image of Tony picking up the rifle from the dust, then staring earnestly after his guest. Durante remembered the neat little hole clipped through the head of the rabbit. Wherever he went, his trail never could return again to the vineyard in the desert. But then, commencing to picture to himself the arrival of the sweating sheriff and his posse at the house of Tony, Durante laughed heartily.
The sheriff’s posse could get plenty of wine, of course, but without water a man could not hope to make the desert voyage, even with a mule or a horse to help him on the way. Durante patted the full, rounding side of his canteen. He might even now begin with the first sip but it was a luxury to postpone pleasure until desire became greater.
He raised his eyes along the trail. Close by, it was merely dotted with occasional bones, but distance joined the dots into an unbroken chalk line which wavered with a strange leisure across the Apache Desert, pointing toward the cool blue promise of the mountains. The next morning he would be among them.
A coyote whisked out of a gully and ran like a gray puff of dust on the wind. His tongue hung out like a little red rag from the side of his mouth; and suddenly Durante was dry to the marrow. He uncorked and lifted his canteen. It had a slightly sour smell; perhaps the sacking which covered it had grown a trifle old. And then he poured a great mouthful of lukewarm liquid. He had swallowed it before his senses could give him warning.
It was wine!
He looked first of all toward the mountains. They were as calmly blue, as distant as when he had started that morning. Twenty-four hours not on water, but on wine!
“I deserve it,” said Durante. “I trusted him to fill the canteen . . . I deserve it. Curse him!” With a mighty resolution, he quieted the panic in his soul. He would not touch the stuff until noon. Then he would take one discreet sip. He would win through.
Hours went by. He looked at his watch and found it was only ten o’clock. And he had thought that it was on the verge of noon! He uncorked the wine and drank freely and, corking the canteen, felt almost as though he needed a drink of water more than before. He sloshed the contents of the canteen. Already it was horribly light.
Once, he turned the mule and considered the return trip; but he could remember the head of the rabbit too clearly, drilled right through the center. The vineyard, the rows of old twisted, gnarled little trunks with the bark peeling off . . . every vine was to Tony like a human life. And Durante had condemned them all to death!
He faced the blue of the mountains again. His heart raced in his breast with terror. Perhaps it was fear and not the suction of that dry and deadly air that made his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth.
The day grew old. Nausea began to work in his stomach, nausea alternating with sharp pains. When he looked down, he saw that there was blood on his boots. He had been spurring the mule until the red ran down from its flanks. It went with a curious stagger, like a rocking horse with a broken rocker; and Durante grew aware that he had been keeping the mule at a gallop for a long time. He pulled it to a halt. It stood with wide-braced legs. Its head was down. When he leaned from the saddle, he saw that its mouth was open.
“It’s gunna die,” said Durante. “It’s gunna die . . . what a fool I been . . .”
The mule did not die until after sunset. Durante left everything except his revolver. He packed the weight of that for an hour and discarded it in turn. His knees were growing weak. When he looked up at the stars they shone white and clear for a moment only, and then whirled into little racing circles and scrawls of red.
He lay down. He kept his eyes closed and waited for the shaking to go out of his body, but it would not stop. And every breath of darkness was like an inhalation of black dust.
He got up and went on, staggering. Sometimes he found himself running.
Before you die of thirst, you go mad. He kept remembering that. His tongue had swollen big. Before it choked him, if he lanced it with his knife the blood would help him; he would be able to swallow. Then he remembered that the taste of blood is salty.
Once, in his boyhood, he had ridden through a pass with his father and they had looked down on the sapphire of a mountain lake, a hundred thousand million tons of water as cold as snow . . .
When he looked up, now, there were no stars; and this frightened him terribly. He never had seen a desert night so dark. His eyes were failing, he was being blinded. When the morning came, he would not be able to see the mountains, and he would walk around and around in a circle until he dropped and died.
No stars, no wind; the air as still as the waters of a stale pool, and he in the dregs at the bottom . . .
He seized his shirt at the throat and tore it away so that it hung in two rags from his hips.
He could see the earth only well enough to stumble on the rocks. But there were no stars in the heavens. He was blind: he had no more hope than a rat in a well. Ah, but Italian devils know how to put poison in wine that will steal all the senses or any one of them: and Tony had chosen to blind Durante.
He heard a sound like water. It was the swishing of the soft deep sand through which he was treading; sand so soft that a man could dig it away with his bare hands . . .
Afterward, after many hours, out of the blind face of that sky the rain began to fall. It made first a whispering and then a delicate murmur like voices conversing, but after that, just at the dawn, it roared like the hoofs of ten thousand charging horses. Even through that thundering confusion the big birds with naked heads and red, raw necks found their way down to one place in the Apache Desert.
OWEN WISTER
At the Sign of the Last Chance
OWEN WISTER (1860–1938) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and majored in music at Harvard. After a nervous breakdown in 1885 he went to the West to improve his health. He returned to Harvard to take a law degree, but frequently revisited the West, particularly Wyoming, over the next decade. Following a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt about the literary possibilities of the frontier, Wister wrote his first Western story, “Hank’s Woman”, which was published in Harper’s in 1892. The story and its successor, “ How Lin McClean Went East”, were so successful that Harper’s financed Wister on a grand tour of the frontier, accompanied by the artist Frederic Remington. Wister, like many Easterners, considered the West to be a place of moral regeneration. Accordingly, Wister modified the West to suit this view, portraying the cowboy as a latterday knight-errant. In addition to his classic 1902 novel, The Virginian, Wister’s other Western fiction includes the novel Lin McClean (1897), and four volumes of short stories: Red Men and White (1896), The Jimmyjohn and Other Stories (1900), Members of the Family (1911), and When West Was West (1928).
“ At the Sign of the Last Chance” is from When West Was West. As well as being one of the last stories that Wister wrote, it remains amongst the most evocative stories written about the American West.
MORE FAMILIAR FACES than I had hoped to see were there when I came in after leaving my horse at the stable. Would I eat anything? Henry asked. Not until breakfast, I said. I had supped at Lost Soldier. Would I join the game? Not tonight; but would they mind if I sat and watched them till I felt sleepy? It was too early to go to bed. And sitting here again seemed very natural.
“ Does it, now?” said Stirling. �
� You look kind of natural yourself.”
“Glad I do. It must be five years since last time.”
“Six,” said James Work. “But I would have known you anywhere.”
“What sort of a meal did he set for you?” Marshal inquired.
“At Lost Soldier? Fried beef, biscuits, coffee and excellent onions.”
“Old onions of course?” said Henry. “Cooked?”
“No. Fresh from his garden. Young ones.”
“So he’s got a garden still!” mused Henry.
“Who’s running Lost Soldier these days?” inquired Stirling.
“That oldest half-breed son of Toothpick Kid,” said Marshal. “Any folks to supper with you?”
“Why, yes. Six or seven. Bound for the new oil-fields on Red Spider.”
“Travel is brisk down in that valley,” said Work.
“I didn’t know the stage had stopped running through here,” said I.
“Didn’t you? Why, that’s a matter of years now. There’s no oil up this way. In fact, there’s nothing up this way any more.”
They had made room for me, they had included me in their company. Only two others were not in the game. One sat in the back of the room, leaning over something that he was reading, never looking up from it. He was the only one I had not seen before, but he was at home quite evidently. Except when he turned a page, which might have been once every five minutes, he hardly made a movement. He was a rough fellow, wearing the beard of another day; and if reading was a habit with him it was a slow process, and his lips moved in silent pronunciation of each syllable as it came.
Jed Goodland sat off by the kitchen door with his fiddle. Now and then he lightly picked or bowed some fragment of tune, like a man whispering memories to himself.