Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

  Quincy leaned back in his chair and spoke to Charlie. “Passed a lot of abandoned claims on the way up,” he said. “Silver pretty much played out around here?”

  “Not all the way. One or two o’ the strikes, the veins kept going—mining company’s got hold o’ them now. Good enough for prospectors to keep looking—but there ain’t many claims worth jumping.” Charlie gave a snort of a laugh.

  “The Gulch seemed pretty quiet to me.”

  “Is now. They say it was fair wide-open back during the boom, though. Before my time. Now the ore they ship out ain’t hardly worth anybody’s trouble to interfere with.”

  “Or the payrolls either, I guess.”

  “Chicken feed,” said Charlie laconically.

  Quincy grinned dryly. “Must’ve fallen off pretty quick,” he observed. “I knew a fella over in Nevada who said his brother got killed by claim-jumpers in Gorham Gulch not three years ago. Heck,” he added, “I even heard talk that the Dugan gang used to hang out around here. Probably just talk—Ralph Dugan would be too smart to waste his time on cheap ore.”

  There was a sudden scrape of one tin dish against another. Quincy looked at the other three, but he could not tell whose hand had caused the sound. But something had happened in the room. Wirt Timmins was staring studiously at nothing, and Charlie Conlan’s face and stocky neck had turned a slow, uncomfortable red. Quincy Burnett glanced across the table at Rosa Jean Kennedy and caught a brief flash of expression in her dark eyes. It was almost like hate.

  The moment was so short he almost thought he had imagined it. Rosa Jean leaned over the table, piled forks and cups on a stack of tin plates, and turned with them toward the kitchen. Charlie Conlan began in a voice pitched a little higher than before to tell a rambling anecdote about claim-jumpers that was clearly intended to fill the silence. By the time he finished, the tension that had been in the room, whatever it was, had gone.

  Rosa Jean came back from the kitchen, picked up the last empty cup and stray knife, and disappeared again. She did not even look at any of them, and Wirt and Charlie seemed to pay little attention to her—Wirt somnolent and nodding in his chair, Charlie on his feet stretching and yawning. Quincy got up and went to the door and opened it. A rim of pale light still rested round the horizon, and above it, a single glimmering star hung straight above the canyon. All else was blue-black. The silence was enormous, as if the vastness of the uninhabited mountains expanded after dark.

  “Guess we’ll get started in the morning after breakfast,” said Charlie. He shouldered past Quincy and down the wooden steps that creaked.

  Wirt trailed after him, his large head and hat floating along looking weirdly disembodied in the dusk, and Quincy pulled the door shut and followed them. He walked slowly across the dark yard, the crunch of crumbled sandstone underfoot—to his left were the crooked, grayish lines of corral fences, to his right a wall of mountainside more sensed than seen. He was thinking about the strange things a man saw sometimes along the roadsides of a journey through life.

  When the dishes were washed and put away, Rosa Jean emptied the dishwater out into the darkness. She wiped out the dishpan and hung it on its nail in the kitchen, and then she went back and stood for a moment in the open door. She had put out the lamp in the front room, so that before and behind her lay equally swallowed up in night—she stood as indistinguishable as a slender shadow in the darkened doorway. With the sun gone, a breath of cooler air came up across the yard to meet her. Rosa Jean laid her head against her hand on the doorframe—her head ached, and the breeze felt good on her sweaty forehead.

  Away to the right, a dim light filtered from one of the smeared windows in the bunkhouse. Rosa Jean shut her eyes. The ache was there again, not just in her head but in her very being, worse than it had been that afternoon. A long line of unwashed tin plates and cups jangled through her memory; endless pots of beans and endless sourdough biscuits. Men—fat men and thin men, unshaven men, shoveling food into their mouths, the odor of tobacco hanging round them—loud ones and taciturn ones, and the scant silver and copper coins they counted out in payment. Always a prickly guard to keep up for her own safety, and never any conversation more congenial than Charlie Conlan’s. And in between them, long spaces of vacancy. She realized dimly that the one who had spoken to her tonight was the first in months who had thought to say thank you.

  And then he had said that. It was always this way. A moment’s lightening of the load, a moment’s false peace, and then—the reminder.

  Rosa Jean opened her eyes. The light in the bunkhouse was out.

  From somewhere far, far above, in those mountains against which the ranch lay huddled, the howl of a solitary wolf fell like a dark meteor through the night. Wolves’ dens were up among the peaks, too well hidden for any hunter to find without risking his life. Packs of them preyed on the herds of wild horses that ran in the mountains, vanishing into their fastnesses afterwards too quickly for the occasional mustanger who spotted them to pursue. Her brother had taken a shot at a fleeing wolf once up in the mountains, but missed.

  In the darkness of the doorway, with her head resting against her hand, Rosa Jean brought her teeth together slowly and held them clenched tight. As long as that cry from the mountain was there to remind her, she would not weaken. She would keep to the lonely course she had set.

  II.

  Sunlight came pouring through the open door, and the sky over the canyon was a piercing light blue. Rosa Jean was setting the table when she heard a footstep and saw a crisp-cut shadow fall on the floorboards, and she looked up to see Quincy Burnett in the doorway. He stepped in and walked across to the table. “Good morning,” he said easily.

  “Good morning,” said Rosa Jean after the fraction of a second’s pause. She slid another tin plate across the table to its place.

  Quincy looked back through the open door. “Quite a view you’ve got up here,” he said. “I’ll bet some of those hills are in the next county.”

  She nodded. “You can see three counties on a clear day.”

  “It’s pretty grand, all right,” said Quincy. “It must get a—” he glanced at Rosa Jean “—a little lonesome up here, though… doesn’t it?”

  Asked in that honest way, it sounded like such a small, everyday thing—to be a little lonesome. Rosa Jean would have given a good deal not to answer the question, but she did not feel like being rude this morning—not to someone who had treated her better than most. She gave a noncommittal shrug. “A little.”

  She lifted her eyes from the table to find Quincy Burnett looking at her in a puzzled, meditative way. He had been intelligent enough to ask the question; he must be intelligent enough to see how she brushed it off. She had to lift her chin to look at him fairly, though she was tall enough for a girl; he looked down at her from a good six feet. He was a sturdy young giant, not at all bad-looking, with broad shoulders and hard-muscled arms more like a lumberjack’s than a mustanger’s, and tawny-gold curling hair.

  The bacon was snapping and sizzling in the skillet on the stove, and Rosa Jean put a handful of knives and forks on the table and went out to the kitchen to attend to it, then came back. Quincy Burnett pulled out a chair from the table and turned it around and sat down straddling it, folding his arms across the back, as she started putting the cutlery around at the places. “I didn’t know anybody lived up this far,” he said. “Wirt told me there was nothing much up here but wild horses and a few prospectors. Is there anybody else living up here?”

  “There’s the Joymans, a few miles further up—they’re a little odd, but they’re decent enough. I don’t see them very often, though. That’s about it.”

  “Then you—really live here all by yourself?” said Quincy, as if he had not quite believed it until then.

  Rosa Jean steeled herself to make the answer, as much to herself as to him. “I make out all right. I don’t need very much—I go down to the Gulch every few months for supplies, or Wirt or Charlie goes for me if they’re around.
”

  “Well—I didn’t mean that exactly. I mean, for a woman—don’t you ever get uneasy being alone with strangers stopping here?”

  Rosa Jean looked sideways at him. His blue eyes had a squint when he was puzzled, but somehow it was not like the screwed-up, fractious squint of Charlie’s that continually got on her nerves. She was used to making short, dismissive assessments of the characters of men who pulled chairs up to her table, out of self-defense, usually beginning by assuming the worst to make things easier. The attention Quincy Burnett was paying her was enough to be noticeable, but it did not feel threatening. “I don’t worry about it,” she said.

  “But should you?” said Quincy, his eyes following her as she moved away.

  Rosa Jean turned on her heel in the kitchen doorway and spoke crisply. “I can take care of myself all right. I don’t need to worry.”

  Charlie and Wirt arrived and came tramping in to breakfast before the conversation could go any further, and Quincy turned his chair around and joined them at the table. Rosa Jean, after bringing in the bacon and flapjacks, retreated to the kitchen and heated water to wash the dishes—listening to them discuss questions of rope halters and waterholes and box-canyons as they ate. And then in a little while they were gone—finished with breakfast and outside saddling their horses and loading the pack-horse. Rosa Jean went out into the bright blue-domed morning to feed the chickens while they were still at work. Quincy Burnett did not pay any further attention to her before they left, and Rosa Jean felt that if it had mattered more to her, she would have been a little sorry. He had been rather nice. But her rebuff had been very plain to understand, and no doubt he had taken it and had put her entirely out of his mind by now. He did not even look back when, the three men having mounted up, they rode out between the end of the corral and the bunkhouse and across the pasture to where the trail began its climb into the hills.

  But that was what she had intended, after all: to be invisible. To live here small and silent and dark and easily forgotten, to listen without being noticed, that all served her purpose. There was no sense in being disappointed when she succeeded.

  Through the brilliant hours of morning, with the sun growing hotter, the three riders climbed, winding deeper and deeper into the range of mountains toward the wild horses’ range. Quincy followed the others up a narrow but well-trodden trail, whose existence made him curious until he remembered there were other mountain-dwellers higher up. From time to time it took them into shadow up through a stand of pine, then out along a risky ledge strewn with loose stone, then again through a narrow defile with rock walls rising shoulder-high on each side. But no matter how they climbed, the great red peaks were always higher still, seemingly unscalable towers overhead.

  Around mid-morning they passed the Joymans’ cabin, and its inhabitants—Ma and Pa Joyman, solemn and aged, and their three grown sons, solemn and balding early—stood still at their tasks and watched the file of horses pass, rather like a family of tall prairie dogs. The Joymans had come up during the boom and wandered vaguely through the mountains for a while looking for silver without finding it, and eventually settled on the spot where they had decided to stop looking. A cluster of pigs and chickens shared their existence on the ledge, and Abe, Rube, and Zeb sometimes hunted wolves for their pelts, but not with any notable degree of success.

  All this and more Charlie Conlan conveyed to Quincy in scraps as they made their way up the trail, plus biographies of other denizens of Gorham Gulch and accounts of his own exploits there and otherwise. Charlie could not go without talking for long, and the flow of information, jerkily jolted by his horse’s gait, sometimes louder as he drew ahead or fell behind Quincy on the trail, went on all forenoon. Quincy listened with surprising patience, and paid more attention to the disconnected anecdotes than one would have thought they deserved. In the rear with the pack horse, Wirt rode with his head bobbing negligently and spoke not a word.

  They camped that night on a ledge overlooking a long, grassy canyon sunk among the cliffs, and slept in the open around their small fire, each using his saddle for a pillow. And when Quincy awoke the next morning, there in the soft new light, looking small and far-away down at the other end of the canyon, was a little group of ten or so brown and dun and buckskin mares grazing quietly among the scattered brush.

  Quincy kicked off his blankets and got up, leaving his companions still slumbering by the gray ashes of the fire, and went to the edge of the cliff. It was very quiet, in the flush of dawn—in every direction stretched the rocks and peaks, with no other sign of life besides the distant horses and a trio of birds flying against the morning sky, so far off that their wings were a mere blink of motion. One would not have known there was another human being within a hundred miles.

  He wondered if it was really as empty as it seemed.

  The herd stayed in the end of the canyon all the time the three men were eating breakfast, browsing slowly across the open space to the left. When the mustangers had finished their coffee and bacon they saddled their horses and worked their way carefully down a narrow switchback trail into the canyon, doing their best not to alarm the grazing herd. If they could ease down along the right wall and get between the horses and the canyon’s outlet at the far end, they would have a good chance at them.

  They spread out slowly, surreptitiously shaking out the loops of their ropes. Quincy, as befitting the newcomer in the venture, took the middle position. As they neared the herd one or two mares’ heads went up, nostrils flaring to snuff suspiciously—one of them stamped a hoof, but still they did not move. Then suddenly a trumpeting whinny rang from the canyon walls and a dark streak of a stallion plunged from the brush where he had been keeping watch, diving between the mustangers and the herd. Instantly the mares wheeled, feet lifted and tails flying, and headed for the canyon opening. Charlie Conlan lashed his mount into a gallop toward the same point, but the running mustangs closed on their goal too quickly for him to head them off and poured through, their tails whisking amid the cloud of dust lit by sunlight streaming back through the gap.

  Charlie pulled up when he saw it was no use, and Wirt and Quincy caught up with him. “We’ll get ‘em yet!” said Charlie. “That stallion’s too smart by half. But there’s other places on ahead where we can corner ‘em better.”

  For the rest of the day they played hide-and-seek with the mustang herd, catching fleeting glimpses of them from time to time, and once or twice coming close enough for another skirmish in which the dark stallion again came off victor. Quincy seemed interested by the network of canyons and passes through which they pursued their quarry, and occasionally dropped behind to examine a blind turn in which a mustang was assuredly too intelligent to be caught, scanning the red walls and sometimes squinting at a ledge or crevice masked by brush. There was little to be seen there, however, and he nudged his horse into a canter to catch up with the others again.

  Late in the afternoon as they crossed over an open cliff-top, angling to descend into the next valley ahead of the herd they were trailing, Quincy was surprised to see a thread of smoke winding up from below. He reined up for a moment to allow Wirt and the pack-horse to begin the stone-rattling descent ahead of him, and stood up in his stirrups to look down over the edge. Twenty yards below, where he could look directly down onto its flat roof, a wooden shack was backed up against the red rock at the head of a narrow cliff-ringed valley shaped roughly like a noose. A crooked bit of stovepipe protruded from the roof, from which smoke drifted slowly, and down in front of the shack a figure was moving about.

  Quincy turned to speak up over his shoulder to Charlie. “Say, I thought you said there was nobody else living up here.”

  “Oh, that’s only old man Sullivan. He don’t count,” said Charlie. “He’s more’n half cracked. Stays up here all by himself even though he could be livin’ down in Gorham Gulch with folks—his daughter’s married to the assay officer. He wouldn’t come down, though—insists on sittin’ up there on his old
mine and chippin’ out twopenny pieces of ore.”

  “Does he make a living at it?”

  “Thinks he does. Ore’s not much good, but he goes an’ trades it in every six months or so and believes he’s makin’ out fine. His daughter sends food an’ such up to him now and then, since he won’t come down. He’s good for a laugh, anyway. We stop for water whenever we’re up here, and he never remembers who we are. Don’t know his own daughter half the time.”

  Quincy gave a short laugh, half to himself. “I wonder, does everybody who lives up here have to be a little cracked?”

  “Huh?” said Charlie, squinting.

  “Nothing,” said Quincy. “What kind of mine—silver?”

  “Yep. He’s been here ten years, chippin’ away at it all by himself.” Charlie laughed. “Reckon the only reason the wolves haven’t et him an’ his old mule is ‘cause there’s hardly enough meat on their bones to be worth it.”

  The horses clattered down the slope to the left, and the rocks hid Sullivan’s shack from view. A quarter of a mile further down, they joined a narrow rocky trail sloping the same way and doubled back to follow it up to the right. Halfway up, the trail widened slightly, and here the crookedly gaping black hole and heavy timbers of a mine entrance hunched under a ledge of rock on the left. Beyond it the trail grew steeper—the horses expended all their effort in climbing, necks stretched forward, shoulder and flank muscles rigid. Finally they scrambled up over the crest of the incline and out onto the bare sun-baked patch of earth in front of the shack.

  Charlie and Wirt made with familiarity for the water trough by a pen of knobbly poles where a stunted small mule sheltered itself from the sun in a narrow slice of shade against the cliff; and from near the shack the old man watched them, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands hanging by his sides, his mouth drooping open loosely.