by Jon E. Lewis
“Got to know if Will passed through here. If he didn’t, then he’s striking into the hills at a point higher up and I’ve missed his trail somewhere along the line. These folks are his friends, but there is one weak point—”
Turning, he rode farther down the street and dismounted at the general store. Inside the dim, musty place a single occupant’s gaunt body stooped over the counter, bald head shining through the half light; when he straightened it was to reveal a face like that of a bloodhound – sad and lined and somehow very honest.
“I’ll make out a snack on crackers and cheese, ’Lisha,” said the sheriff.
“Love you, Sher’ff,” drawled the storekeeper. “What brings you here?”
“Business, ’Lisha.”
“Sorry business then,” muttered the storekeeper. “It’s the only kind we know around these parts.”
Linza ate some cheese sandwiches, drank a bottle of warm beer and spoke abruptly: “ ’Lisha, did Will Denton pass this way?”
The storekeeper met the sheriff’s glance steadily. “No. What’s he done?”
“You’re the only man who would tell me the truth,” grunted Linza. “The only one in this town I could ask or believe.”
“My fault,” said the storekeeper and appeared unusually sad. “Truth is a bad habit up here.”
Linza paid for his lunch, went out and rode away to the north, considering the situation.
If his reasoning was correct, Denton’s avoidance of the town meant the six hundred square miles was halved to three hundred; in addition there was a constantly accruing advantage on the sheriff’s side, for, as the area of pursuit narrowed, the known waterholes, trails and hideouts became fewer. That night, long after dark, he struck a watering place and inspected its edges by match light. Seeing nothing of value, he suddenly changed his tactics, and under cloak of night left the prairie behind him to rise to the bench and its thin sweeps of timber. Some eyes had always been on him while he was in the open. Putting himself into semi-concealment at once switched the nature of the chase. “The hunted animal,” he reflected, “never runs when it figures pursuit is lost. It even circles back to find out where the hunter’s gone.” Dawn found him in a thicket and there he stayed while the fresh hours ran on to noon. Beside him a definite trail ran up in the direction of the range’s crest, and it was while he tarried here that a single rider came cantering down, passed him with eyes fixed on the earth and disappeared. Perhaps an hour later this man returned, riding fast and looking troubled.
“Somebody’s nervous,” reflected Linza. “Will’s got stout friends in these parts. Hell to fall back on a plain hunch but I believe I’ll go ahead in this direction.”
As he went forward, winding in and out of sloping meadows interspersed with yellow-dusted pines, the ever-present attitude of watchfulness continued to deepen. Like some hound in game country, he was keening for a scent he knew ought to be there. Tracks led him onward, passed through bands of cattle and were lost. After the second such happening, Linza left the trail and began to climb in a semicircular manner that around sundown brought him to the edge of a meadow in which a gray cabin sat remote and serene. A brown dog sprawled in the dirt; there was a half-masked lean-to behind the cabin sheltering some implements, and over at the far edge of the meadow an ewe-necked horse grazed. Inside the cabin a woman passed and repassed the door aperture. “Apparently no visitors,” said Linza, and went forward.
Instantly the brown dog sprang up snarling and immediately afterward a tall man in a red undershirt strode from the house and took a stand in the yard with a cradled rifle.
Linza rode up.
“Long day behind,” said he, amiably. “ Could I put up here?”
“You’re Linza?” said the man.
“That’s right.”
“No room fer you in my cabin, sir.”
Linza’s eyes betrayed a gleam of humor but he said quietly: “Fair answer. I’ll roll my blankets up yonder.”
“Go beyond my fences afore you do,” stated the man.
Linza nodded and rode around the cabin. Two hundred yards on he came to a gate and passed through it. Trees shut off sight of the cabin but he was strongly aroused now and interested in the squatter’s subsequent actions. So, a few hundred yards farther ahead, he quartered to the top of a small butte commanding the meadow. The man was not to be seen and Linza, about to retreat, had some oddity tick his mind. Looking more closely, he discovered what he had not observed before and what certainly had been missing at the time he went by the house – a string of white clothes hung on a clothesline.
“It ain’t Monday,” observed Linza. “And it seems odd the lady would wash near supper time.”
Watching for a moment, he finally turned down the butte and continued through the trees. “Will would have glasses and he’d see that washin’,” he reflected. “It’s a signal to him. Arranged for.” It was then dark, a clear cold violet giving way to velvet blackness against which the range made a ragged silhouette. One shot banged from the general direction of the squatter’s meadow and its echo sailed over the tree tops and died in small ricocheting fragments. The sound of that gun, primitive and lawless in effect, seemed to defy Henry Linza openly, to taunt and challenge him, and finally to bring him to a decision.
“I’m tradin’ on Will’s weakness,” he muttered. “ God knows it’s hard enough to have friend set against friend without that. But I’d trade on the weakness of any other and I will not make exceptions. Will, damn you, don’t fall into this trap.”
Linza moved rapidly toward a depression of the burn, dismounted and picketed his ponies fifty feet apart to keep them from fouling each other. He let the saddle remain on the ridden beast, but he unrolled his blanket beside a protecting deadfall and laid his rifle by it. Going on a distance, he built up a small fire, retreated to the log and ate a pair of cold biscuits.
Not far off, something snapped. A taut, husky voice struck through the shadows.
“Henry – that you?”
Linza swore under his breath. One faint, friendly hope died. “Will, why in hell did you come?”
“You’re too old a codger to be buildin’ fires for nothin’ in country like this. I saw the blaze and I knew you wanted to see me. Well, here I am.”
“So I figured,” replied Linza, keeping below the log. “Wanted to see you all right, but I had a mite of hope you’d stay away. It’s hard business, Will.”
Denton’s voice was increasingly cold. “Listen – get off my trail. When I heard you was the one after me I knew it had to be a showdown sooner or later. But I’m tellin’ you, I’ll not be took. Not by you nor anybody else. Get off my trail and keep off it!”
Linza shook his head. This was the inevitable way. Some odd thing happened to a man when he turned killer. Some suppressed fire flamed and would not die. Will Denton was only playing out an old, old story; he had turned wolf. But still the sheriff had his say.
“Give up, Will. Maybe a good lawyer could make out a case for you. Consider a life sentence with the even chance of a pardon some years later. Put down and come forward.”
Denton’s reply was almost a snarl. “Not me – never!”
“Think of this,” urged Linza. “What’s left for you now?You’ll never sleep sound again. For the rest of your life you’ll be ridin’ the edges, wishin’ to come in and afraid to. Come on, give up.”
“You’d make a fine parson,” jeered Denton, and the sheriff heard the man’s teeth snap, heard the sudden inrush of breath. “I’m on my own hook. I’m not comin’ in. Go on back. Get off my trail. I know you and I know myself. If we meet, somebody’s goin’ to die.”
“You know I can’t quit,” said Henry Linza.
Denton fell silent a moment. Presently he said: “All right, Mister Linza. You’ve had your warnin’. Expect no consideration from me while we collide. Don’t figure friendship will count for anything at all. It won’t. If I see you again I won’t call out. I’ll kill you.”
Linza
shouted, “ You everlastin’ fool!”
A single gunshot burst into the night and soared along the slope. Linza’s near horse winced, expelled a great gust of air and fell in his tracks. “Keep your head low, Linza!” roared Denton, and there followed a crunching of boot heels across the burn. Linza rose from the log and stared at the blank pall in front of him. Presently he heard Denton’s pony struggling up the mountain trail; then the sound of that died.
He crawled to the dead horse, unfastened the gear, and afterward saddled the second animal. Rolling up his blanket roll and tying it, he mounted and waited another long interval with his ear pressed against the night breeze. Far up the side of the range a shot broke out, seeming to be both a challenge and a defiance. When he heard it, Linza went across the burn, entered the trail and began to climb.
“No consideration now,” he muttered. “This is a man hunt. And if he thinks he’s put me afoot he’ll be a mite careless.”
The trail wound interminably through the dismal reaches of the night.
Occasionally Linza paused, but never for long, and always the cold, unrelenting thoughts of the hunter plagued him, and the stealth and wariness of the hunter kept him on guard. Sometime after midnight he oriented himself on a dome atop the world, withdrew to a thicket and rolled up for a short sleep. There was the faint smell of wood smoke in the wind.
When he rose the ravines of the range below were brimful of fog that moved like sluggish lake water. Kindling a cautious fire, he boiled coffee and considered it a breakfast.
The strategic importance of his location became more apparent when, after a chill and dismal two hours of waiting, the fog dissipated before sunlight coming across the range in flashing banners that outlined all the rugged angles of the hills boldly. From his station he looked away to lesser ridge tops, to sprawling glens, to the various trails and their intersections; and it was while his patient glance ran from one trail to another that a movement in a corner of his vision caused him to swing slightly and catch sight of a solitary rider slipping from the trees, momentarily pausing in full sight, and disappearing again. He was gone before Linza could get his glasses focused.
Linza lost no time in mounting and running down the slope of the knob he had been posted on – unavoidably exposing himself as he did so. He reached the still dew-damp shelter of the lower pines, struck a runway fresh with the mark of deer tracks and the plantigrade print of bear, and followed it faithfully until he presently arrived at a division point. One fork led descendingly to that crossing where he had seen the man; the other continued along the spine of the ridge.
Wishing to keep his tactical advantage, Linza accepted the latter way and fought through a stiffly resisting accumulation of brush before coming to a fairer path. Traveling faster and all the while sharply watching for the unexpected, he reached, about twenty minutes later, the junction point of his route and another laboring up from the depths of a canyon; and he barely had time to sink into the sheltering brush when the man he was stalking came into sight along the lower trail. Linza cursed silently. It was not Denton.
“Mistake,” he muttered. “And could have been damn near fatal to me. Am I bein’ towed around the landscape for Will to find?”
The thought stiffened him. He retreated deeper into the brush, scanning one narrow vista and another. Meanwhile the rider came out of the canyon, cut across Linza’s vision and disappeared, to reappear momentarily between two great pines at another quarter of the forest.
“Something in that,” thought Linza, the hunter’s instinct beginning to flow hotter in him. He hauled himself around until he discovered a way of bearing down in the direction of the man. Five minutes later, though hardly more than four hundred feet in distance, the trees ran out upon another meadow. There was a cabin built against a rocky bluff in front of which the rider was then dismounting. Smoke curled from a chimney, but other than that it seemed innocent of trouble. Linza dropped from his horse and crawled to a better vantage point.
The man had left his horse standing beside the cabin, reins down and saddle on. Meanwhile he had slouched forward to a patch of sunshine. Squatting there on his heels, he tapered off a cigarette, lit it and seemed to warm himself leisurely. But at every third or fourth drag of smoke his head made a swift half circle, snapped around and made another.
A moment later, in defiance to his attitude of indolence, the man rose abruptly and strode for an ax standing beside a chopping block. Lifting it, he brought it down, one stroke after another, in rhythmic attacks that sent long ringing waves of sound through the still air. Linza swore to himself, hitched his body a little more forward and turned his glance to that corner of the meadow where the trail entered.
“Something in that,” he muttered.
Down the trail was the softly indistinct “clop-clop” of a horse approaching at the canter. The ax strokes ceased and then Will Denton, riding light and alert and casting a continually revolving inspection to all sides, came into view.
Linza stood up behind a tree, the blue eyes assuming a narrower shape. That tolerant face had gone almost dry of emotion. The lips were thin to the point of being bloodless, the lines running down from either corner lay deep as if slashed by a knife. Lifting his gun and holding the snout of it in his free palm a moment, he stared at the nearing fugitive. “ I shall give him the chance he would have given me,” he whispered, and stepped from the trees directly in front of Denton.
“Throw up your hands, Will!”
Denton’s body seemed to spring up from the saddle, every muscle turning and twisting. The sun flashed in his eyes, the jerk of his head loosened his hat and it fell off to let a mane of sorrel hair shake loosely around his temples. Still in motion, his arm dropped, ripped the holstered gun upward and outward. Henry Linza raised his own weapon, took a cool aim at the chest broadly presented to him and fired once. Denton flinched back, sagged and fell from the saddle. There was no farewell; turning from the momentum of his fall, he stared sightlessly at the sky.
The man at the cabin let out a great cry. Linza wheeled to see him running forward in great stumbling strides and the sheriff’s metal words sheared through the space. “Drop your gun right there!”
The man halted, cast his gun from him and came on, still cursing. Linza walked forward to the dead Will Denton and stared down. The outlaw’s face, streaked with dirt and covered with a stubble beard, looked up with still a measure of that hot passion and that wild lawlessness that had been his at the moment of surprise. Linza’s head fell lower and the figure of his one-time friend grew blurred.
“So there’s the difference between his kind and mine,” said Linza, trying to keep his voice clear. “He’s dead – I’m alive.”
The other man ran up, halted there. “He mistook the signal! I meant for him to keep away! I wasn’t satisfied at all! I had a hunch something was wrong! But he got the signal twisted and come on in! Damn you, Linza!”
“No matter,” grunted Linza. “ Now or later – this is the end he was bound to meet. It was in the book. But it’s hard to see him lyin’ there.”
“Yeah?” snarled the man. “ Still yuh hounded him across the land and got him. It wasn’t too hard to do that!”
Henry Linza’s jaw came out to make him again seem as if he were biting into something. “You bet not. I will not lie and I won’t dodge. Not for him or any other lawbreaker, even down to my own brother. And that goes as long as I carry this star. Go back there and get your horse. I am takin’ him to Bonita for a Christian burial – as he would have done with me had he carried the star.”
OLIVER LA FARGE
The Young Warrior
OLIVER LA FARGE (1901–1963) was born a member of an elite East Coast family, and was educated at Harvard. His anthropology studies took him to New Mexico, where he became fascinated by Navajo Indian culture. La Farge’s 1929 novel set amongst the Navajo, Laughing Boy, was an immediate bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. As Dee Brown, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, once r
emarked, La Farge’s Navajos “stand amongst the first real Indians to appear in fiction”. La Farge’s other Western fiction includes The Enemy Gods (1937) and the short story collection, A Pause in the Desert (1959). In addition to writing fiction (and later working as columnist for Santa Fe New Mexican), La Farge continued his career as an anthropologist, leading expeditions to Mexico and Guatemala. For many years he was President of the Association of American Indian Affairs.
“The Young Warrior” was first published in Esquire in 1938.
“WE HAD GOOD profit and good fun,” he said. “Truly, we were much amused, and on the way home we laughed a lot. And I tell you that that Nantai, he is a great leader.”
He was about eighteen years old, at the age when young men wish to prove themselves and to recite their exploits in the presence of young women. He sprawled beside the fire in the camp of his cousin’s band, aware that he had an audience, men who had proved themselves on the warpath, old men, boys his age who had not yet gone fighting, and girls. The fire burnt generously in front of his cousin’s wickeyup, he had an audience, and he had something to tell.
He wore the usual knee-high Apache moccasins, a breechclout, a white man’s coat of very fine green material, much too large for him, and a heavy turban of shining, blue silk covered with a design of small, pink and yellow flowers. Across his lap he nursed one of the new, short rifles that load from the back.
Supper was over. He had been quiet, saying nothing about himself, until at last one of the old men asked him about the war party. He lit a corn-husk cigarette. Seeing that they all waited, listening, he went on with his narrative. Now and again a man grunted approval, from time to time a woman would laugh.