If she had had any lingering hopes of me, they vanished then. “Quit standing there looking hangdog, when you’re really as pleased with yourself as a boy that’s been stealing melons,” she ordered. “I don’t know why I — oh, go on away, Mosby.”
Nobody else had any kind of word for me, as the crowd made an aisle to let an alien pass from their midst. Unhitching Spanish Monte, I rode past the Vigilante’s office. I rode past the alley whence Terry and I had peered to watch the progress of the raiders from the range. I rode to the corner of Apache and Beaver Lodge, where Barringer and I had had our last meeting.
I turned east up Beaver Lodge, with my back toward the Anything Goes Variety Hall. I rode past the old Carruthers and Wheeler stage and freight depot, and the theater that would never be finished. I rode out on the mesa, where the works of a copper mining company marked the grave of an Indian I had killed.
I rode past boot hill and the graves of Slim Sanders and Rogue River Pete. I rode past the mining hoist from which Ace Ferguson had been cut down, that he might tour the saloons. I rode past the race track where, as Bet-a-gal Baltimore, I had lost Evalinda deVere to Dick Jackson.
I looked up once at the dying palms, forlorn on the empty campus of the university. I did not look back at the town because nothing was left of what had once been there. The winds which moaned through Three Deuces swept past healthier signs of life than were to be found in Horaceville. The houses below the cliffs of the Rinkatinks were not the shells of barnacles but the ripples left by free swimmers.
Subduing me as I went was the consciousness of defeat, throttled aspiration and of great energies spilled out on emptiness. Mixed with these, though, were feelings of a different kind. Hand in hand with the sense of loss was one of possession. The great bonanza had produced things which even Bedlington, that perverse Midas, could not bury under copper. Then, too, I knew Jonah’s wry-mouthed triumph. A sojourn in the entrails of leviathan had convinced both it as well as myself that we were not for each other, and I was a man at large.
In keeping with their nature and my own these volatile spirits started to work their way to the surface, as I rode around the north shoulder of Beaver Lodge Butte and could see the tree-clad mountains towering against the horizon. I had been pushing Spanish Monte up to that moment. Now I slowed him to an amble and breathed deeply.
After a minute or so I laughed; but it didn’t yet feel right, though mirth of a sort was flickering like heat lightning in the outskirts of my spirit. Noise of some kind I had to make, however, in order to alleviate my burden of emotional steam; and suddenly the words of a song rose up in my throat. It was the rolling saddle chant which Dolly had sung, following her dinner in honor of Droop-eye. Swaying from side to side with its split rhythm, I made a scandalized coyote break from cover by roaring it out.
Tom Harrigan got feeling right
And rode a shooting star one night,
One thirty hands and a finger high,
The beat of any in the sky.
Except that I wanted the cool greenery of the mountains as a refresher, I wouldn’t know my destination till I found it. That didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know where I was going, for I knew where I lived. I was the last inhabitant of the ghost town of Dead Warrior, and as such I bellowed out the rest of Dolly’s song about the man who had treated himself to the experience of riding a meteor.
But then it fell and burned to snuff —
To walk in boots is middling rough,
But all Tom said as he limped through space
Was, “We’d have won in a shorter race.”
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Copyright © 1956 by John Myers Myers, registration renewed 1984
All rights reserved.
Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting
Cover image(s) © Time Tunnel/The Wild West
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 10: 1-4405-6304-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6304-1
eISBN 10: 1-4405-6303-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6303-4
Dead Warrior Page 32