West of Nowhere

by Alan Lemay

  "Looks like rain!" he shouted into Whiskers's ear.

  "Damned if it don't," Whiskers returned. Then: "I shouldn't've reminded 01' Master about that lantern. He shore took me up!"

  A smother of ropes and canvas swept down to muffle his words. For half a minute the three 'punchers fought to free themselves from the tangle of wet canvas, blankets, ropes, arms, and legs. The tent had given it up. The buckboard wrenched and hurtled, flinging them this way and that as they struggled to win free of the all-enveloping wreckage. More than one set of knuckles received a tattoo of blows from the whizzing spokes of the wheels.

  Then, just as suddenly as the canvas had descended, another crescendo blast of the incessant wind plucked it away, sending the tent whistling and whirling into the unknown. It was now revealed to them that they were racing drunkenly along a dangerous part of the road. On their left, the mountain climbed vertically above them, a steep of forest, tangled brush, and jutting ledges. On their right, the world fell away abruptly into the valley, so that a pebble flipped from the buckboard would have fallen into the tops of tall pines below.

  All this they learned in one blinding, crashing flash of lightning, in which they saw the thrashing treetops dimly through rain thicker than fog. For an instant they glimpsed a pair of blankets, winging across the valley, flapping madly, like great crazy crows. The full force of the wind was now upon them, almost tearing the men off the buckboard. Whiskers swore afterward that the buckboard was sailing like a kite behind the stampeding horses. It touched the ground, he said, only four times in three miles to his positive knowledge.

  The rain was now pouring down upon them so solidly that it was difficult for them to catch their breath. Frantically they clutched at cracks in the flooring to hold themselves on with one hand each. Each cupped his other hand over his nose and mouth, that he might gulp a little of the drowning air. Their hats went and the handkerchief from around Whiskers's neck. Dixie Kane's shirt cracked down the back with the force of the wind, and the rags fluttered and snapped about him, gesticulating in a mad dance.

  "How heavy the dew is tonight," gasped Squirty Wallace, but the water drowned his voice.

  The buckboard was now plunging downgrade at a terrific rate, and Whiskers, taking his hand from his nose, clutched the reins in a heroic effort to hold the horses back. His labor steadied the team somewhat, but could not check their speed.

  A steep incline rose ahead of them. At that moment a series of lightning flashes blazed about them, and through the sheeting rain they saw that a tree was down across the road at the top of the rise. With one accord, Dixie and Squirty seized the reins near Whiskers's hands and pulled. The team came to a sliding stop, their hoofs in the brush of the tree.

  A few moments of utter darkness followed the series of flashes. Through the roar of the descending water they heard Whiskers yelling: "Get out an'...lead team...unhook... lift buckboard."

  Dixie leaped down from the buckboard and instantly discovered that he had leaped in the wrong place. Down and down he shot, with no ground under him, until a greasy clay bank brought his fall to an end in a harmless, scooping swoop. Before he could pick himself up, there was a hissing sound above him, and another man came rocketing down the slide, catching Dixie in the ribs with both feet as he slid to a stop. Evidently Squirty Wallace had made the same mistake.

  "Catch hold my belt!" yelled Squirty into Dixie's ear.

  No man was more swiftly master of an unexpected situation than this bowlegged little top hand.

  Dixie groped in the dark, found Squirty's belt, and crawled after Squirty as the latter began struggling up the almost perpendicular ascent. Dixie now became aware that someone was hanging onto his belt. A dazed checking up of his count proved to him that there were evidently three of them involved in the climb where he had thought there were but two. Assuming that Whiskers had also negotiated the flying descent, he said nothing in complaint of the unfairly heavy drag upon him as they climbed.

  Gripping roots, vines, stems of grass, anything, they crawled their way up the ascent, twisting about to dig the high heels of their boots into the face of the mountain. Eventually, half drowned, with their clothes full of sand and their boots brimming with water, they reached the top.

  At this point Dixie became slightly confused. As they floundered over the last overhanging edge on to the road and gained their feet, a flash of lightning revealed Whiskers standing erect in the downpour at the heads of the horses.

  "How did he get there so quick?" Dixie marveled. And then: "Can there be four of us here, I wonder?"

  There was no time for idle speculation or the meticulous counting of noses. Whiskers had found a way through the debris of the fallen tree, through which the horses might be led. Squirty unhooked the buckboard, and Whiskers led the skittering; frightened horses through the blockade. Then, with superhuman efforts, Dixie and Squirty set about getting the buckboard through.

  It is a curious thing, significant of the characters of these men, that not then or at any other time did they think of turning back. The idea did not so much as occur to them. They had started for a dance; they would keep going, and get there sometime.

  By a gigantic labor of heaving, hauling, twisting, and shouldering, working in alternate pitchy darkness and blinding flashes of blue light, they got the buckboard through almost. Somehow, in the tangle of tree, the hind wheels wedged and stuck. Whiskers was signaling frantically for haste. Abruptly they gave up getting the buckboard through by hand, and hooked the horses. Either the horses would jerk the buckboard free or they would not. They thought it worth the try.

  As they hooked the horses to the buckboard, Dixie thought he saw a tall figure standing motionless a little apart, spectral in the midst of the down-pouring water. He shot another glance in its direction in the inert flash, but it had gone.

  Whiskers now came tumbling back from the horses' heads, frantically sorting out the reins. He was yelling something in their ears: "Waterspout...Dead Woman's Gully...flood...make it across...race for it...for God's sake let's go!"

  His idea swept over them as a revelation. Down ahead, just before the climb through Dead Woman's Pass, lay the ravine called Dead Woman's Gully. Perhaps even now a raging torrent fifteen feet deep was boiling through the cut. Even if it were fordable at the moment, any instant might see a solid wall of water storming down the gully, smashing all before it, turning a dry wash into a foaming rapids in which nothing could live.

  "Let 'er buck!" yelled Squirty, tumbling onto the buckboard any old way, Dixie after him.

  Whiskers, perched just back of the horses' dripping tails, paused only to take a turn of the reins around his leg for surety, raised his quirt with a yell.

  There was a diversion.

  "Stick up yer hands!" roared a hard-edged voice, plainly understandable even in the steady roar of the sheeting rain. An icy wet muzzle pressed under Whiskers's ear, and another against the side of Squirty's neck. By the same flash of light that had guided the intruder's guns, they saw a long, evil face, singularly sinister in appearance in the blue light and disgustingly close to their own. They saw the water running off the stranger's mustache in streams. Then darkness, an awful moment of doubt and suspense.

  The wet sounding crack they heard then must have been the cut of Whiskers's quirt upon the streaming rump of the off horse. A wrench, a leap of the buckboard under them, a crashing noise, a three-foot drop, the thunder of receding hoofs, and Dixie and Squirty realized that the front wheels and axle of the buckboard had parted company with the rest. A vast blaze of white light showed them the fleeing horses and Whiskers, sitting on the small of his back in the mud, but traveling rapidly after the horses, by virtue of the reins he had wrapped about his leg.

  It showed them something else: the stranger, floundering on his back on the slippery incline of the buckboard, his guns waving at the heavens like ominous antennae of a great insect. With one accord the two cowboys leaped upon him.

  Guns went off, so close that
their ears rang with the explosions. Bony knees met them with jabbing blows. The butt of a revolver raked the side of Dixie's head. At one point in the struggle, the lightning revealed to them that Squirty was trying to break Dixie's arm, while Dixie was flailing punches at Squirty's eye. Over and over they rolled the three off the buckboard onto the road, where they wallowed and sputtered, fighting in the deep mud. Then off the road and down a twenty-five foot drop into the clay bank from which they had so recently emerged.

  That ended it. The cowboys had somehow managed to light on top, and the fight was knocked out of the obnoxious stranger.

  "Goin' t' keep this feller...souvenir!" shouted Squirty, sticking the gun that did not get lost into his belt. "Have sheriff... make dog meat!"

  They hauled the limply crawling enemy up the bluff and onto the road by the ears, as they might have dragged a bawling calf. Grimly they started down the road, their captive between them, looking for the wreck of Whiskers and the team. Thus, hurrying, they crashed into a wheel of the buckboard. In the next flash they discovered Whiskers, unhurt. He was trying to turn the team about to come after them.

  Squirty Wallace now found a rope end still trailing from the axle, and he tied it in a hard loop around the captive's neck.

  "Hang on to that axle or hang on the run!" was his brief advice.

  Whiskers asked no questions. As soon as this was done, they heard Whiskers yell. "Gra-a-ab the axle, boys! We'll race...Dead Woman's Gully... or bust! Hi-yah!"

  Gripping the reins and the axle with one hand and his quirt with the other, the astonishing old man lashed at the team. Dixie and Squirty made a flying dive at the axle, and just made it as the team and the remains of the buckboard plunged downgrade into the drenched dark. Dragging, floundering, sometimes gaining their feet to run a few monstrous hurtling steps before going down again, they clung to the axle.

  The water poured down from above more fiercely than ever, and the lightning roared almost continuously. Wind and water seemed to tear the breath from their mouths. Rocks in the leaping road beneath them beat and ripped at their knees, and in their faces splattered a ceaseless stream of mud from the horses' hoofs. But they hung on!

  Below them the gully moaned, its floor filled already with the water from the local downfall, a rushing, swirling muddiness perhaps waist-deep. But from above came an ominous, thundering roar, the accumulated water from the mountains above, coming down the gully in a solid wall. The horses heard it and slid to a trembling stop.

  "Don't try it!" shouted Squirty above the voice of the storm. "For God's sake hold that team!"

  "We can make it!" yelled Whiskers, his quirt slashing.

  The trembling horses, their ribs heaving, their eyes starting from their heads, shrank from the punishing lash, yet hesitated for an instant with hunched backs and downstretched noses on the brink of the gully. Then they plunged into the water below. Thrashing, struggling, half drowned, the horses plunging ahead in a wild panic, they fought their way toward the opposite bank.

  It seemed to Dixie Kane that he had never seen a gully so interminably wide before. Half dragged, half floated, almost torn away by the rush of the current, the men clung to that slender axle.

  "We've made it!" shouted Whiskers hoarsely.

  Just then the diapasons of the storm suddenly swelled to a terrific roar, multiplied and multiplied again as if an ocean were catapulting upon them. With their powerful backs straining with the fear of death, their flying hoofs gashing the slippery bank, the team went up the wall of the gulch like squirrels. A mighty weight of water, its front a heaving wall almost triple the height of a man, hurled itself down the gully in a deafening tumult.

  The crest of the wave struck Dixie Kane's trailing leg with an impact as solid as that of a club, and the grip of the water wrenched away his boot. The horses rushed on up the grade beyond danger. One by one the men dropped off, to lie gasping for air. All except the stranger who, because of the rope about his neck, was still in hazard of being summarily "hung on the run." The team, freed of the deadly, dragging weight, staggered to a level bit of ground and stopped.

  The men looked back and, by the blue flare of the lightning, saw thirty feet of the bank they had left collapse into the seething flood in the gulch. From wall to wall the draw was filled with a bulging wrath of water in which nothing could live. They saw a great hundred and twenty foot pine, its roots heaving skyward like clutching, imploring hands, swept tumbling down the torrent, as helpless in the teeth of the flood as a bit of shingle, or a man.

  Inside the big new barn of the Bar C, festivities had been proceeding undampened by the storm. Decorations were few, but there was plenty of kerosene light, and the crowd on the floor, while comprised chiefly of men, was colorful enough to make up.

  Enthroned in a manger rack in one corner was the orchestra. It consisted of a fiddle, played with spirit by a little, bald old man with a nutcracker face; a rather small accordion, energetically wheezed by a red-nosed miner with an oversize mustache; a huge banjo, thrummed mightily by a tousled, black-headed giant, bearded to the eyes; and a complete set of drums, operated with more enthusiasm than technique by a young cowboy with a copper-riveted face.

  As an auxiliary to this official orchestra, a corps of volunteer mouth organ experts, ranging in number from two to a dozen, according to whim, clustered in front of the orchestral manger, contributing their best. When the measures raced with turbulent abandon, the harmonicas were operated with both hands, while their owners bent and swayed, beating time with a thunderous stamping of feet.

  There was no sheet music. The little, bald old man with the fiddle led off with each piece, and the others trailed in. In case some of them didn't know just what the fiddle was playing, they improvised as best they could, the strength of their instruments undaunted by any slight vagueness as to what was being played. And if there were occasional discords as a result of these misunderstandings, no one noticed them.

  An uproarious atmosphere of merriment pervaded the crowd of fourscore people of plains and mountains who danced. The liberal scattering of flasks that were whipped out at the close of each dance, and the hogshead of beer that welcomed all comers in the corner, had already done a good deal toward relaxing restraint. The advent of the desperately needed rain, bringing financial salvation to many and new life to thousands of head of stock, did the rest. With the music at its height, the men whooped and cheered, and the building shook with the rhythmic trampling of feet.

  While the fewness of the women was a source of regret, it was not permitted to retard the dancing. Smooth-shaven cowboys with clicking heels and bearded miners who danced like bears reeled and whirled together in the waltz. Those who could not waltz did not hold back. Many a bearded, merry-eyed couple could be seen performing steps that appeared to be half ring-around-the-rosy and half wrestling match.

  The thunder and roar of the storm outside the insistent wail of the orchestra, bravely combating the hammer of the downpour on the roof the rhythmic thud of feet the bright dresses of the women and the untamed colors of the men's shirts and neckerchiefs enthusiastic whoops and cowboys' yells the kaleidoscopic whirl of movement laughing tanned faces twinkling eyes above brushy beards and the gay, flushed faces of the girls. These things made the barn dance a bacchanal, a riot of vigorous spirit.

  Big Shocky McCoy stepped up onto a keg to call a square dance. His powerful voice boomed clearly through the tumult of the rain, and the orchestra struck up once more at his command. A slight confusion occurred at the start, for the fiddler struck off with "Old Zip Coon," whereas the remainder of the orchestra had expected to play "Pop Goes the Weasel," and failed to note the change.

  A brief, unmusical struggle ensued, each laboring musician looking at his fellows with vaguely puzzled, accusing eyes. Then the majority won, and the fiddler was dragged into "Pop Goes the Weasel" against his will. Half a dozen squares were formed; the rest of the crowd, lining the sides of the floor, clapping their hands in time with the music.


  Swaying his shoulders, Shocky roared the dance calls: "Form a squar' with the four right hands, back to the left, an' ever'body swing! Allemande left, and watch yer step, an' gents all turn, an' promenade! Face yer pardners! Jine right hands! Grab yer girl, an' ever'body swing! Quarter a whirl! Fifty cents! Seventy-five! An' a dollar a whirl, whirl yer girl, why doncha!"

  The Spring River sheriff, a man with jovial red cheek bones and a jauntily upturned mustache, now remembered that he had forgot something. He strode to the door, the door representing the flattest available surface in a building chiefly of logs and poles, and dragged a large, damp handbill from his pocket. He also produced tacks and proceeded to affix the black and yellow sheet to the inside of the door.

  The orchestra stopped opportunely, and the sheriff seized the chance offered by the slight pause between the whoops of applause and the resuming music to make his announcement.

  "Leave me call yer 'tention," he roared, "leave me call yer `tendon to this here...!" He flung up an outstretched arm to point at the poster. At this moment the door was unlatched from the outside and, swung violently inward by the wind, it cracked the sheriff on the elbow. "What the...?" he began.

  Into the room filed Whiskers Beck, Squirty Wallace, and Dixie Kane. That is to say, the three that filed in knew themselves to be such. No one else recognized them. Drenched, their boots squirting water at every step, mudcolored all over, their clothing torn in shreds, the new comers baffled identification by even their closest bunkmates. The faces of the streaming three were masked with gooey mud through which rivulets of water had carved clean streaks, giving the masks a peculiar wavy, stripy appearance. From these masks their eyes looked out like three pairs of hard-fried eggs. One of the three appeared to have a beard, decorated tastefully with some intertwined sticks and leaves. But no one could be sure.