The pass through the forest was now only about thirty yards in front of us, but the chances of going that far appeared nil. I hit the warrior’s thigh as he hitched forward, but his long buckskin leggings resisted the bite of the lash. When he leaned forward and stretched to find the horse’s jugular, though, the blanket rolled back to show a patch of red flesh between the brave’s breechclout and the leather sheathing of his right leg.
If I live to be older than Nestor and Methuselah combined I will never cease to chortle at the thought of what I then found the skill to do. Putting all my force into a live-or-die blow, I sent the lash darting forward. I had to allow for the lift of the running horse, and for a moment I feared I had allowed too much. Holding my breath and helpless to do more than await the outcome, I watched the end of the long whip unfurling. It appeared to be poised in midair while its target rose slowly level with it. At that precise instant it plunged forward, like a skewer being driven into raw pot roast.
Sam Sudden Aim himself couldn’t have shot more accurately or to better purpose. That Apache bucked like a sun-fishing bronco. He had lost his knife, but it wasn’t on his mind when he dove sideways, trailing a blanket which failed to give him any defense against the pull of gravity. Forward momentum was working on him, too, and the combination hurled him into the lowest, stiffest and most prickly branches of a cedar on the edge of the woods.
We were all right then. On leaving open country the advantage passed from the attack to the defense, and the Indians decided to forget us. One warrior never would, however, and I was still chuckling, as we drove out of the woods, in sight of what I took to be Shakespeare.
There was still a question of what my relations to the bandits would now be, but I couldn’t push the horses farther without risking their collapse. Climbing down to the road, I was working the arrow out of my off-leader when my four passengers alighted.
No longer masked, they had the appearance of tough but by no means evil-looking range hands in their twenties. They didn’t know what to say, and I decided to give my attention solely to the suffering animal.
The outlaws were talking in low tones to each other when I at length approached them, my rough mission of mercy completed. “Are you all coming into town with me?” I asked, by way of finding out how I stood.
I directed my question mainly at the fellow I recognized as their spokesman from his disproportionately long arms. He looked at me thoughtfully with the eyes which had last regarded me from behind two pistols.
“You can sure drive a coach,” he offered, “but I don’t know as we’ll be your passengers any more. Suppose you got to feelin’ that you ought to blab what we was up to, now that you know how we look?”
He had a problem there, ticklish for all of us; but I had gained the upper hand from the moment I had taken the initiative back at the roadblock, and the knowledge of that ascendancy enabled me to grin at him. “Suppose you’d shove this arrow farther into me instead of pulling it out,” I said, turning my back to show the protruding shaft and gripping the rim of the wheel in front of me with both hands. “You could, if you’re that much of a louse, but I don’t think you will after what we’ve been through together.”
Chapter 9
LIKE WEDDING AND HANGING, a good drunk is not the result of planning but of destiny. Having got my wound dressed by a veterinary whose other patients I pitied, I went out to see the town with no thought but of refreshing myself after a hard day.
Unlike the other Western communities I had seen, this was built on a gridiron of short avenues instead of one or two long ones. All the streets in Shakespeare were named after the Swan of Avon’s plays, and all the streets that I investigated were enlivened by saloons.
My own progress, as nearly as I can chart it, was from the Bullwhackers’ Romp on Merry Wives of Windsor to the Eskimo Squaw. The latter, to employ the spelling used on the only street sign that I observed, was a Winter’s Tail establishment.
It was while I was about to order at the Eskimo Squaw that I heard someone say, “There’s the fellow who can drive a stage through a knothole and leave room for longhorns to pass on both sides.”
“Don’t take his money,” another voice advised the bartender. “I seen him just this afternoon with a bunch of robbers, and there ain’t no tellin’ how he come by it.”
A second later all four of my erstwhile passengers were around me, beaming as though they had encountered a long-lost friend. I found myself acting in kind.
“My turn first,” I insisted, pointing to the money I had tossed on the bar. “What are your Sunday names anyhow?”
“The ones we fool the sheriff with?” The leader pointed to a dark, squint-eyed fellow, who stopped chewing tobacco while he waited for his designation. “Let’s see; that’s Whitey, near as I can remember, and that rangy galoot is — er — El Paso Jake, and that freckle-faced Chinaman is Pinto. I don’t know their last names, and maybe they ain’t got none, but me I had parents that married.” He tapped himself on the chest and extended his long arm. “Shake the hand of Don Santiago Tequila Smith.”
We started on that relatively impersonal basis, but in no time we were gabbling about the brush with the Apaches like classmates recalling college days. To my sorrow none of them had seen me boost the Indian off the horse with my whip, but it was a sorrow soon cured. After I had recounted the episode a couple of times they all believed they had been witnesses, and they told about it with improvements as we progressed in search of new barkeeps to hear the saga of our adventure.
The incident seemed to make a particular appeal to the imagination of Pinto, who had an unusual manner of speaking for a Chinaman. “Mose the Bowery Boy couldn’t have done no better,” was his pronouncement. “The Apaches was swarmin’ on that team like flies on a sleepin’ drunk at the Five Pernts, but quick as a redskin would light, Baltimore would snatch his blanket off with one flick of the gad and then boin his brand on him with the next.”
Somewhere along the line we had a bite to eat, though it formed but an inconsequential part of the entertainment. It was following this interruption of our main pursuit that Smith looked at me regretfully.
“It’s our turn to buy, but I guess we’re all quittin’ on you. Me and the boys didn’t make our stake this afternoon, but you go on and have yourself a time.”
The suggestion that I might thus abandon them outraged me. “Bring us another round,” I told the bartender, by way of clearing myself of this imputation. “Any of you fellows feel like joining me in a cigar?”
Seeking no reward, this magnanimity earned one. Shoving his cigar into a corner of his mouth, Don S. Tequila Smith turned on the man called Whitey. “You’ve got to give it back,” he said.
The squint-eyed bandit looked from him to Pinto to El Paso Jake, and what he read in their eyes made him shrug sadly. “All right,” he mumbled. Unbuttoning his shirt, he drew Barringer’s revolver from where it was tucked in the waistband of his pants. “But it sure is a mighty pretty gun.”
I had been meaning to try to negotiate for the weapon, but my devotions to John Barleycorn had put it out of my thoughts. Now I indulged the pride of possession by examining it on both sides.
“I only see one other gun quite like that,” the barkeep volunteered. “Charlie Barringer packed the spittin’ image of it.”
The way he used the name showed that it was well known in New Mexico, a fact confirmed by the curious glances of my companions. “It’s got ‘C. B.’ on the butt,” Whitey put in. “Of course, the ‘B.’ could stand for Baltimore and both together for ‘Chased out of Baltimore.’”
It was an uncommon, made-to-order sidearm, and they knew as well as I did that the odds did not favor duplication. They also knew that such weapons are only given to great friends or one in combat. This I had done in a sense, though by no means in the course of a real test between us.
“Barringer dropped it, and I picked it up,” I said, sticking to the letter of the truth.
They rolled their eyes
at me while they were thinking that over. Then Smith lowered his voice.
“Why don’t you join us?” he asked.
“Somebody’s got to go on driving stages or they can’t be held up,” I answered him. “I gather Shakespeare’s already got a line, but maybe you’ve heard of some place that needs one. You probably know as much about the business as anybody I could find.”
“Well, I do know a lot about stages.” He was giving my problem earnest consideration while he puffed on his cheroot. “You’ve got to carry either mail or express to make your nut, and to get one of them contracts you’ve got to move into a camp pretty early.” Tossing off his whiskey, he drummed his fingers on the bar. “I can’t think of any good bets right around here, but they’re all the time starting new camps in Arizona, I hear. Why don’t you try over there?”
“That’s a good notion.” Having drained my own glass, I signaled to my other guests. “How about moving on, fellows? Let’s try the Damned Be He on Macbeth Street again.”
The best road into Arizona crossed the mountains south of Shakespeare. I didn’t use it. Learning that the chance of meeting more Apaches increased with every mile closer to the Mexican border, I drove my hangover at a gentle pace toward a pass which lay to the northwest. Such bands of roving Indians as had attacked us the previous day were rare around Shakespeare, I was told, so I had decided not to wait around for other travelers going my way.
My head no longer ached when I opened my eyes in high pine country the next day, but my crudely treated shoulder was bothering me. Feeling that I could minimize the chance of infection in the clean forest air, I stayed in the mountains ten days, contentedly limping through the Iliad on what I remembered of my Greek and exercising only to keep myself in fresh meat or to acquire more skill with the revolver.
When I finally emerged from the forest I was in a land of ruthless sunlight. The great hills looked larger because of their bareness, though grass was plentiful in the monstrous swoops of land between them. A tributary of the Gila poured quite a bit of water through one of these valleys, but there was only a little in the fork of it, along which wheel tracks later guided me.
Because the terrain afforded long vistas, the country gave the impression of being vaster and emptier than even the flatlands of the Panhandle and eastern New Mexico. All in all it looked to be a land where only loneliness was at home. Yet I caught up with a traveler, a horseman leading a pack mule, toward sundown.
He heard me coming long before I would have thought that possible and waited for me with a patience that seemed unmindful of the sun. Slanting down from beyond the creek, this must have turned his buckskin shirt into a scorching plaster for the shoulders. Touching those shoulders was his hair, but I could tell by the grizzled beard that he was no Indian.
Pursuant to my greeting, he looked me over from beneath the widest and floppiest hat I had ever seen. “Whereat you goin?” he demanded.
“I’m not sure that there is any place to go in Arizona,” I said. My horses were restive about stopping short of water, and I quieted them before I waved toward the southwest. “They say Tucson is somewhere in this grass and sagebrush, but I’m beginning to wonder.”
“They likely wouldn’t lie about a thing like that,” he decided. “How fur you goin’ tonight?”
Glancing toward the stream, I shrugged. The water would be warm and full of silt, but it would serve.
“I’ll camp somewhere along the creek in an hour or so, unless you know of a spring.”
I had added that just for something to say, but he surprised me by nodding. “Ain’t seen it myself, but if I ain’t got my bearin’s mixed, they’s supposed to be a tank on the shoulder of the valley tight against that butte that looks like a beaver lodge. An Injun told me about it.”
He was pointing east cross-country, but it didn’t look much more difficult to traverse than the road we were on. “Why don’t you hitch your animals on behind and ride along with me?” I suggested.
He had his rifle with him when he climbed up to the driver’s seat. “Where’d you meet the redskins?” he asked.
Not all the holes in the stage were owing to the Apaches, but I forbore to mention Barringer. “Over in New Mexico.”
“Ain’t been there in thirty year,” he said. “Twenty-nine anyhow, but I used to know the top end of it like that buzzard knows this valley. Trapped enough beaver there to make a hat for the Rocky Mountains.”
“Beaver!” After what I had seen of New Mexico, I’d have been hardly more astonished if he had spoken of hunting whales there. “What’d they do for something to swim in — milk buffalo?”
“ ’Twarn’t necessary,” he said. “Sure, a lot of New Mexico is dry as a locust hull, but in the mountains there’s good country, and I knowed it, man, and all the country piled north of it, clear to where the Sioux scalped Custer, and on west to the Snake country.” He braced his moccasined feet against the footboard of the driver’s seat and swept his arm out as though he were showing me the whole imperial spread of territory which he had just mentioned. “I trapped it all, and in summer when the pelts was poor I wouldn’t think nothin’ of ridin’ a thousand miles to Taos for a skinful of liquor and a wrastle with some of them half-breed gals.”
I had been furtively examining his rifle, which was a heavy, single-shot weapon. “Are you a mountain man?”
“They used to call some of us that,” he replied, “but ’twarn’t our doin’ that beaver lived in the hills, and we’d have been out on the ocean in boats if that was the way to find ’em. We was trappers, and maybe we was better trappers than was good for us, for the beaver has went.”
The ascent was quite steep, so I let the horses set their own pace. “What do you do now?” I asked.
“Trap gold.” He crinkled as much of his face as I could see above his beard. “I stuck by the beaver longer’n most of the rest, which is mostly dead anyways; but about fifteen year ago I see it was no use. After that I done some scoutin’ in a few Injun wars; but generals is an ornery lot, so I quit and took to prospectin’.”
We had climbed to a tableland, broken by outcroppings of rock. “This place doesn’t look good for anything else,” I said. “Perhaps there’s gold here.”
“Do you think so?” he asked, as though I had just given an expert’s opinion. “Well, I been to lots of places where there was gold, all the way from the Coeur d’Alenes on down, but it was always like bein’ the second man to trap a beaver crick. I never found nothin’ but scrapin’s, and I’ll sure be glad if we’re where I can get the first shot at it.”
Unlike the country down by the stream this big shelf of land was not largely covered by grass. There were bushes scattered among the broken fragments of ledges, while the shallow gully we crossed on our way to the ironwoods clustered around a seepage of cool water was bare of even this cover.
Seth Potter did his share of making camp, but as soon as the preliminary chores had been attended to he commenced picking up specimens of rock and looking at them as though he expected them to hatch gold nuggets. Smoking my pipe, I watched him with benevolent amusement. In my opinion he had about as much chance of profiting by his efforts as I had had when gambling with Dolly Tandy.
Of a sudden, I saw the old fellow catch up the rifle without which he never moved. He then pointed it at a bush some thirty yards distant, thereby conjuring up a man.
It was an Indian, much like the ones who had chased the stage toward Shakespeare, except that he was afoot. He was armed, as I saw when I strolled over to stand beside Seth, with a bow and a good-sized meat knife.
He and the prospector were engaged in dumb-show conversation, which I couldn’t follow but which the latter translated for me. “I can speak a passel of Indian languages, but not Apache, which is what he says he is,” Potter explained. “Says he’s Big Warrior, but I can’t figger out whether that’s his name or his brag. I never met an Injun that warn’t a big warrior, to hear him tell it, but this one looks like he’s lifted a lot of h
air in his day, sure enough.”
The Apache certainly appeared both fierce and capable. Actually he wasn’t a big man, but the muscles writhed when he gesticulated, and the hard, bright eyes peered at us out of a scarred face.
“Says he’s a friend of Americans but hates Mexicans, which is what he thought we was when he snook up on us,” Seth informed me after gravely watching Big Warrior’s motions. “He likely jumped a reservation and is on his way to join some band on the warpath, but he says he’s off to the mountains, huntin’. Says he’s hungry, and I guess that part ain’t no lie.”
It wasn’t. Big Warrior had a big enough appetite to clean up a pot of beans which I had counted on lasting me through the next day, and finished by munching some jerky supplied him by Potter.
“You watch your horses,” the prospector advised me, while we were cleaning up after the meal. “You got you a rifle in the stage? I seen him take a look inside.”
“Yes.” Having learned the folly of protecting my weapons too carefully, I had devised slings for them, instead of wrapping them in a blanket. “A shotgun, too, Seth.”
“He’d like ’em both,” Potter declared. “The only thing an Injun loves better’n guns is stealin’, and if they can steal a gun, man, they got Heaven beat to the draw.”
I was more concerned for my scalp than for my less personal possessions; but Big Warrior was a well-behaved, if silent, guest. After breakfast the next day he loped off, seemingly bound for distant parts, yet I remained uneasy. The place did not feel right to me, especially after Seth left camp in his quest for ore-bearing rocks.
Packing with more speed than usual, I loaded my gear in the stage and started rounding up my animals. While I was going for the second one, something moved in the brush. There was no sound; I merely caught a glimpse of a small brown object which I took to be a bird or one of the ground squirrels common to the country. I put it out of my mind, but it stole back after I had gone a little way. The longer I thought about it, the more I felt that it could have been a patch of weathered buckskin legging.
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