Eye of the Wolf

by Theodore V. Olsen

  EYE OF THE WOLF

  by Theodore V. Olsen

  Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1971

  Scanned and Proofed by RyokoWerx

  He rode out of the dusty pines to the edge of the road and stopped. He hesitated. It was the same twinge of reluctance in him every time, coming down from his mountains to the clot of frame-and-'dobe buildings that made up the town called Spurlock. Sitting his paint horse under the trees, he had the unthinking grace of all horsemen—a slim whip of a youth in a faded blue-and-white-checked calico shirt worn with the tails out and wear-grayed Levi's whose soft fray clung to his long catty legs.

  The paint was patient, trained, gaunt-barreled, an old partner of his master's. He sat utterly still except for twitching his tail at flies now and then. A leadrope trailed from the saddle pommel to a rope bridle on the rangy white colt following them. He was nearly three years old, his small head and sleek arch of neck pointing to strong Arabian blood, while the sinewy power of his legs and his deep chest showed the still-developing musculature of his mustang heritage. He swung his head, stamping restively.

  The youth looked around. "Ho-shuh" he said.

  The colt fidgeted a little more, a spurt of defiance for the horse-calming word, then quieted.

  The late sun of this May afternoon sprinkled fragile flakes of light through the needle-burred boughs, slanting a mild warmth into the youth's coffee-brown face. It was a thin face, fine-featured, rescued from delicacy by the pointed angles of jaw and cheekbones. His shoulder-length hair—black, thick, coarse as horsemane—was held back from his eyes by a strip of red worsted tied around his temples. Below it, his eyes were gray-dark, the color of fresh mortar. Young Will-Joe Cantrell, son of a Navajo woman who had hated the sight of him and a white man he had never seen, was eighteen this spring.

  The colt stamped again. Will-Joe said, "All right," speaking English, his voice solemn and soft, faintly guttural with the swallowed word-ends of his Navajo upbringing.

  He nudged the paint forward into the road, tugging the colt along, rocking easy to his mount's gait. Sun winked dully off the silver conches on the rawhide belt circling his waist over his shirt. In a land where half the grown men wore waist guns, his belt held only a knife in a beaded sheath, its hilt inset with silver and lapis lazuli. A Winchester rifle was snugged in the boot under his right knee.

  He had dropped most of the way down along the peaks shouldering the north end of Spurlock Valley before hitting the road, but even close to the valley floor it still switchbacked like a chocolate snake. The spring mud had shriveled to a damp ochre clay that balled the paint's hoofs, making him fiddlefoot with discomfort.

  Will-Joe's nose twitched. He could smell it already—the town. Still hidden from his sight, it sent mingled odors of stables, supper-hour smoke, cookery and other familiar yet unidentifiable white-man scents up along the stealthy wind currents. Will-Joe could hardly abide some of the smells that surrounded white men—few Indians could—but old Adakhai had always cautioned him on the fine points of courtesy when dealing with men whose ways were strange.

  And the whites still seemed strange to Will-Joe although, he supposed, he was now living as much like a white man as like a Navajo. He used white man's gear and Indian methods to trap his horses. He sold his rough-broken stock to white buyers and used the money to buy his few wants at the Spurlock stores, going down maybe once in three months. As he never visited his mother's people, he rarely heard his Navajo name, Jahzini. Since he dealt mostly with whites now, he'd added his father's last name to the mission name of Will-Joe he'd been given as a boy. Saul Cantrell—he knew that about his father, the real or false name he'd gone by.

  And that was almost all he knew.

  The road made a crook up ahead. Nearing it, Will-Joe heard a wagon approaching, its team chunking heavily through the mucky gumbo. He and the buggy came to the bend at the same time: the confrontation was sudden. The buggy team spooked, surging sideways in its harness. Will-Joe quickly heeled his nervous paint to the outside of the road. The colt rolled its eyes and acted skittish, shuffling back tight against the rope.

  The buggy's occupants were a hardscrabble rancher and his wife, both beefy and red-faced. The rancher swore at his skittery team and cracked his whip. They lunged into the harness and pulled on; Will-Joe held both his animals steady as the buggy swung past.

  "That Injun smell," he heard the wife mutter, "wa'n't it, Abel?"

  "Yeh." Without turning his head, the rancher spat across his arm toward Will-Joe. "The smell. It always sets 'em off."

  They were past him; Will-Joe heeled the paint lightly into motion again. If he hadn't forgotten long ago how to smile, he would have smiled now. Funny how he kept forgetting: that smell business was a two-way thing.

  The road made a couple more ragged switchbacks through the dense timber that mantled the lower edges of the range, then Spurlock was suddenly plain through a thinning scatter of trees. A sluggish ribbon of street divided the town roughly centerwise. Stores flanked it, buildings of rough-sawed boards elbowing against old shacks of crumbling mud. For at this place desert met high country; lumber and adobe mingled together as the Anglo and Mexican inhabitants did not. The best frame houses, set close together on an offside street, belonged to Anglo businessmen. The Mexes, as usual, were clustered in a haphazard Mextown south of the commercial district. The new Baptist church, painted white as its parish, was spanking-bright in the sun; its spire dominated the town. A humble 'dobe housed the Spanish mission established here nearly a hundred years before an Anglo had set foot in the country.

  Will-Joe pulled up, reluctance again cold in his belly. After a moment, though, he urged the paint forward with his moccasined heels. He could skirt east of the street and its flanking block of buildings, and he did. Today he hadn't come to town on business.

  The schoolhouse was set in a cottonwood park a few hundred yards south of town. Will-Joe had timed his arrival for the hour that school would let out. As he finished his circuit of the town and swung back onto the road, he passed the kids trooping down it, talking and yelling, running singly or lagging in groups. The schoolhouse, little more than a rude log shack, stood by itself in a sunny glade. Mounted on the roof was a big brass bell, a memento of steamer days on the Colorado River. The flat sunslant hit fire from its polished curve; some student had the job of keeping it rust-free, rubbed to a shine.

  Will-Joe swung down at the tie rail set off in the cottonwood shade a little ways from the building, looping his reins around it. As he undid the colt's leadrope, a brown-faced boy came out on the porch, arms full of blackboard erasers. He dumped them on the steps and banged them together by pairs, chalk dust flying.

  Will-Joe stood motionless, watching the boy. Seeing himself a few years ago, worshipfully lingering after class (he had bloodied another boy's nose for the privilege) to run all the after-school errands for Miss Bethany: sweeping floor, fetching firewood, cleaning blackboard erasers, doing little things that needed doing.

  Miss Bethany came out on the porch as the boy was scooping up the dusted erasers.

  "Thank you, Carlos. I think that will do for today. You may as well run along home… nothing else that wants tending to."

  The boy's face tipped up; Will-Joe could picture the disappointment in it. "Nothing, Miss Bethany?"

  She smiled. "No, Carlos. Not a blessed thing."

  Carlos went inside to replace the erasers, in a moment reappearing to cross the yard at a run. Miss Bethany walked to the edge of the porch and delicately stretched her arms. Her gaze strayed to the cottonwoods and the tie rail.

  "Why—Will-Joe!" With surprise and pleasure.

  He started forward. The colt backed against the rope again. "Ho-shuh!" The sharp word and his tug got t
he animal moving. Leading him, Will-Joe crossed the scuffed dust of the yard to the porch and halted by the bottom step. He held out the rope.

  "Will-Joe… why what is this?"

  "The white colt. He is a gift. He's yours."

  "But… mine?" She flattened a hand against her shirtwaist below her throat. "A gift for me? But why, Will-Joe?"

  He let his hand and the rope drop to his side, looking at her. "You don't remember?"

  "No, I'm afraid… oh, the colt! Yes, of course I remember. But you can't mean…"

  "I caught him. I have trained him, I have rough-broke him. Now he's yours."

  It had been a Saturday afternoon eight months ago. Miss Bethany had ridden up to his camp in the hills. He rarely had visitors, and he hadn't seen his former teacher in nearly a year. Having heard about his horse-trapping, she had come up to see for herself. Abashed and pleased by her interest, he'd taken her to one of his horse traps, a canyon with a brush wall and gate across its mouth.

  Then the white colt had appeared suddenly. He had stood profiled on a ridge a few hundred yards away and his creamy coat had been burnished silver by the sun.

  "Oh!" Miss Bethany had clapped her hands. "What a beauty!"

  "He'll be yours," Will-Joe had promised.

  She had laughed, forgetting that her solemn ex-pupil never joked.

  It had meant months of patient training and waiting and watching, a half-dozen abortive tries at driving the colt into a trap. And when finally he'd succeeded, he couldn't remember a longer or tougher stint at training down the spirit of a captured mustang.

  "He is yours," Will-Joe repeated.

  "Oh I couldn't… I couldn't, Will-Joe. He's yours, you went to all that trouble, and I really never thought—" She stopped, seeing his eyes. "Yes. A gift. Of course."

  She took the rope from him, eyes shining. "Oh. Oh Will-Joe, here—" She came down off the porch and took him by the shoulders and kissed his cheek and stepped back, laughing.

  He stood rooted and looked at her, his insides puddling. He wondered if what he felt showed in his face and he hoped not and also hoped it did. He veiled his eyes.

  "I'm glad you like the gift."

  "He's beautiful."

  She walked slowly to the colt, who swung his head away from her strangeness, the primness of starched white waist and dark skirt and delicate scent of verbena. "He is beautiful," she said softly and reached, touching the colt's satiny rippling shoulder with her fingertips. She lightly moved her fingers and he didn't stir.

  Beautiful. That was the horse. The word didn't do Bethany McAllister justice…

  He had thought the very same that day three years ago when Miss Bethany and her husband, Dennis McAllister, had arrived in Spurlock. Will-Joe had come to town that day to dicker his first sale of horses. Just a few months before, he'd left his mother's people to go mustanging on his own—a wiry untried urchin determined to be beholden to no one. Weeks of back-breaking work had netted him six stringy mustangs; rough-breaking the lot, he'd had the daylights battered out of him. Today he'd brought them to town and a stock dealer, only to get what he considered badly stung on the horse-trading.

  He'd been standing in the archway of the livery barn, jingling the double-eagles in his pocket and bitterly staring out through a driving rain at the white man's town, waiting for the cloudburst to stop so he could leave this hated place. A creaking prairie schooner had come sloughing down the mud-channeled street and wheeled into the livery archway. A hardscrabble outfit on its last legs: the flapping canvas was patched and grimy, the horses old and ganted-up, their ancient harness held together by wire and rawhide.

  "You. Kid. Give us a hand here."

  The man was unimpressive; Will-Joe barely heard his rough order. His eyes were all for the woman on the seat beside him. She was in her early twenties, tall, almost as tall as a man, but graceful and lovely as a spring willow. Her skin was like new cream, a brushing of color in her cheeks from the coldness of rain dewing her skin. Her hair was red-gold, shading to darkness of auburn and highlighting to sudden gold even in this gloomy light.

  Mustering enough aplomb to go along with the man's mistaking him for the hostler, Will-Joe had helped him unhitch and see to the team. Afterward, when the rain had slackened, he had helped carry their luggage to the hotel. McAllister had tipped him expansively. A dollar. Well above what the couple could afford, from their shabby clothes. Will-Joe had wordlessly accepted the money, then turned to leave. Miss Bethany had stopped him with a word.

  "Do you live here?"

  "No. In mountain." He had moved his arm vaguely north. "Catchem horse. Tradem here."

  "I see."

  No flicker of surprise. No remonstrations about his youth. Just a friendly and beautiful smile that said she understood. Will-Joe's heart had flip-flopped: he'd have thrown himself under wagon wheels for her.

  "I will be the new teacher," she had said. "Would you like to come to school? I'd like to see you there."

  He'd been older than the others in Miss Bethany's first class. And the only Navajo among a conglomeration of Anglo and Mexican children. For two years he had doggedly pursued his studies, eking a living meantime by such odd jobs as he could pick up.

  But in all the times he had seen Miss Bethany, the picture of how she had looked that rain-swept day had stayed most vivid in his mind. Until today: her standing in the sun with her fingers brushing the white colt's shoulder, sun's goldfire in her hair, grave eyes full of pleasure.

  "He's a wonderful gift. Thank you again… thank you so much, Will-Joe."

  "Maybe he will cost too much to keep," Will-Joe said. "But then you can sell him."

  "I will not! I'll never sell him. Mr. Rodriguez at the stable is a friend… he'll put the colt up for me."

  Will-Joe had known as much. Nearly everyone in Spurlock was in Miss Bethany's debt one way or another. Beyond the meager salary they paid her for teaching their children, people owed her for scores of favors. The sick mother who needed someone to sit up with her croup-ailing child, the unlettered line rider who wanted a letter written home, the retarded child of a peon who needed special teaching: they'd all learned to know and love Bethany McAllister in a special way.

  He felt the gentle probe of her glance against his face. "How are old John Thunder and Rainbow Girl? Do you see them often?"

  "No. Not in a long time."

  He didn't want to talk about old Adakhai whom the whites called John Thunder, or Adakhai's skinny granddaughter. Miss Bethany seemed just faintly amused, and he did not want that either.

  "I'll take the colt to the stable for you. He will have to learn to eat grain and be fat."

  "He won't get fat, that I promise. I'll exercise him… or have one of the boys do it." She relinquished the leadrope to him, then added, gently reproving: "I know you've been in town twice since I visited your camp… and you didn't come to see me."

  "I am sorry." He hesitated. "When I come again, we will talk."

  "Yes. A good long talk."

  She chatted awhile longer, mentioning pupils from Will-Joe's days at the school, what they were doing now. Will-Joe wasn't interested. Among his schoolmates he'd been the different one, always strange to them, shut out of their childish games. Enough to just watch Miss Bethany talk, the grave smile that reached her eyes more than her lips.

  When the goodbyes were said, he mounted his paint and, leading the colt, headed toward town and the stable.

  A rider was coming down the road. Will-Joe had no trouble identifying the man even from a distance. Sheriff Ulring. He felt a faint chill on his spine.

  Just seeing that big lean wolf of a man always had the same effect on him. Tsi Tsosi—Yellow Hair—was the name the Navajos had given Ulring. A fiercely warlike people till their defeat at Canyon de Chelly, the Navajos feared none of the worst elements in nature or men. Still they feared this white man. He went out of his way to be hard on Mexicans and Indians; any who transgressed the law, any he was even suspicious of, could look for n
o mercy from him.

  Ulring was close now, his eyes slitting coldly in the shadow of his hatbrim. They were strange eyes; their blue was ice-blue. Something stark, quick, restless prowled in them.

  "Howdy, boy."

  Will-Joe nodded, a puppet-string jerk of his head, and kept his face stony as he rode past the sheriff. He felt the same as the rest did about Ulring. He was different from other men. And somehow more ominous than any force in nature.

  Riding in the warm sun, Will-Joe shivered.

  Frank Ulring rode toward the schoolhouse, his mood dense and unquiet. Behind the hard intensity of his thoughts, he wondered idly what that siwash kid had been doing at the school. What was his name?—Will-Joe something. Cantrell, that was it, son of a squawman, so they said. Another of Bethany's proud protégés.

  Ulring's broad mouth twisted faintly. She picked up all kinds, Bethany did. Going out of her way, for Christ's sake, to coddle the children of pepperguts and siwashes. Let her hear of some clan of hill trash, white, Mexican or Indian, living back in the middle of nowhere, the kids growing up half-wild and illiterate —nothing for it but Bethany must give up a holiday to ride to their place and ask, exhort, plead that they send their slew of dirty-mouthed brats to school. She'd even offer to put them up in town at her own expense. In fact she'd been trying unsuccessfully for two years to get the county fathers to build a dormitory in Spurlock for the area's underprivileged children and foot the bill for boarding and feeding them.

  What a bushel of goddam nonsense.

  He ought to know. He, Ulring, hadn't been born to the kind of position and respect he now claimed. And nobody, by God, had coddled him into it. He'd pulled himself up from the literal gutter by his bootstraps, and he was damned proud of it. The influential treated him as an equal, the poor but law-abiding called him Mr. Ulring and talked soft to his face, the ne'er-do-wells tiptoed wide of him. The troublemakers knew him better than any—they understood the line he drew, knew he drew it hard and tight and would sniff them out like a birddog if they toed across it.