Riding at a canter Candy approached Willow Springs recalling, as she drew near, that her father had told her they had struck water at this, the first well attempted in the valley. Riding up to where the drill rig still stood, she swung down, looking at the pool of muddy water and considering what this could mean to the valley.
It was Barry Merrano’s drill rig that had brought in this well, and it was on his advice they had fed the cholla to their stock that saved so much of it. The prejudice against him had virtually disappeared. It could mean a new life for him, and might mean—
She did not hear the horse stop at the edge of the brush. Joe Stangle had seen her arrive, knew she was in there alone, in the gathering dusk. He dug into his saddlebag for the pint he carried there and took a pull at the bottle. He was leaving the country, anyway, and he’d show her what was what. Before anybody knew what had happened he’d be long gone.
He pushed his way through the willows, and Candy turned sharply at the unexpected crackling of the dry brush and saw Joe Stangle.
He was not a big man but he was hairy-chested and broad. His face was swollen and the flesh sodden from much drinking, and he was obviously in an ugly mood.
Candy realized her danger, but she was not given to screaming. She backed away warily; wishing her horse were closer. If she turned her back to run he would catch her before she had taken three steps.
He did not speak, just walked toward her.
“What’s the matter, Joe? Have you lost something?”
He made no reply, continuing to advance. She stepped back and her boot slipped in the mud and she fell, rolling quickly away and scrambling to her feet.
Drunk he might be, but he could move quickly. “Damn you! You stuck-up—!” She dodged away, but he grabbed at her and caught her wrist. “I’ll show you what—!”
In that instant they heard a voice they both knew.
“Oh, there was a young cowhand who used to go riding,
There was a young cowhand named Johnny Go-Day! He rode a black pony and he never was lonely,
For the girls never said to him ‘Johnny, go ’way!’
When they heard his bright laughter their hearts followed after,
And they called to him Johnny! Oh, ‘Johnny, come stay!’”
Stangle’s hand clamped over the girl’s mouth before she could cry out a warning. The pinto stood in plain sight, but Joe Stangle’s horse was hidden beyond the brush.
Holding her with one powerful arm and hand, a leg pressed before hers and jamming her back against the drill rig, with his free hand he drew his six-shooter.
The song ended and they heard the saddle creak as he dismounted and then as he started through the willows the song continued.
“He rode to town daily and always rode gaily,
And lifted his hat as he cantered along!”
Joe Stangle lifted his six-shooter, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The firing pin clicked on an empty cartridge. He had emptied his gun into Curt McKesson!
At the click of the cocking hammer Barry stopped dead, and with an oath, Joe Stangle threw the girl from him and grabbed feverishly at his cartridge belt for more shells. In his haste he dropped the first two shells but thrust the others into place.
Wild with fear, Candy dropped to the ground and began to scramble away, crying out, “Look out, Barry! It’s Joe Stangle!”
Barry grabbed for his gun, still tied down with the rawhide thong he wore when riding. He slid the thong and drew swiftly.
Dropping to one knee, the other leg thrust out before him, he waited. He could hear the breathing of Candy Drake, but in the darkness of the willow grove he could see nothing. Picking up a stick he threw it to one side. Nothing happened.
He moved slightly, gathering himself to leap aside, and at the sound a stab of flame seemed to leap right at his eyes and a bullet struck a tree behind him with an ugly thud. He fired in reply, and his bullet ricocheted off the drill rig.
He fired again, holding a little lower, and the shot drew a startled movement. He leaped aside, gun poised for another shot. There was an instant of silence, and then a shot. The bullet missed by a fraction of an inch.
Candy lay hugging the ground, and Barry could see her now. Carefully, he shifted position to get further away from her so as not to draw fire in her direction.
Hatred and fear were driving Joe Stangle, but even the courage of a cornered coyote had a breaking point. The liquor fumes had cleared from his mind, and he realized Barry was over there; he had a gun, and he was playing for keeps.
Suddenly what courage he had went out of him like a gust of breath, and like a shadow, he faded back toward the brush and his horse. He wanted desperately to kill, but he did not wish to be killed. He wanted nothing so much as to get a saddle under him and be off. He almost made it.
Merrano, hearing him at last, lunged through the brush after him. Stangle reached his horse and Merrano slid to a stop, and Joe Stangle saw him and tried one last shot. It was there, and he had to try.
Barry fired at the same instant, then he fired again. Joe Stangle’s horse leaped away, and Joe Stangle, shot through the belly, all the hatred oozing away with his life’s blood, swayed on his feet, the gun slipping from his fingers. Then he fell.
Barry Merrano turned and started back through the willows and then all of a sudden he seemed to step into a hole and he fell.
THE CLEAN WHITE BED and the doctor who was putting things away in a black bag were a surprise. Candy was there, and Cab Casady. “Stangle?” He started to rise.
“He’s gone, Barry. He had already killed Curt McKesson in some kind of drunken fight, and was leaving the country.”
“Dulin?”
Cab shifted his feet. “I come by and helped Candy get you home. Then I went down to town and run into Rock Dulin. He picked a fight and I had to shoot him.”
Cab started for the door. “You two might have something to talk about,” he said. “I want to go watch the rain. Seems like it’s years since I’ve seen any.”
Bluff Creek Station
The stage was two hours late into Bluff Creek and the station hostler had recovered his pain-wracked consciousness three times. After two futile attempts to move he had given up and lay sprawled on the rough boards of the floor with a broken back and an ugly hole in his side.
He was a man of middle years, his jaw unshaved and his hair rumpled and streaked with gray. His soiled shirt and homespun jeans were dark with blood. There was one unlaced boot on his left foot. The other boot lay near a fireplace gray with ancient ashes.
There were two benches and a few scattered tools, some odd bits of harness, an overturned chair, and a table on which were some unwashed dishes. Near the hostler’s right hand lay a Spencer rifle, and beyond it a double-barreled shotgun. On the floor nearby, within easy reach, a double row of neatly spaced shotgun and rifle shells. Scattered about were a number of used shells from both weapons, mute mementos of his four-hour battle with attacking Indians.
Now, for slightly more than two hours there had been no attack, yet he knew they were out there, awaiting the arrival of the stage, and it was for this he lived, to fire a warning shot before the stage could stop at the station. The last shot they fired, from a Sharps .50, had wrecked his spine. The bloody wound in his side had come earlier in the battle, and he had stuffed it with cotton torn from an old mattress.
Outside, gray clouds hung low, threatening rain, and occasional gusts of wind rattled the dried leaves on the trees, or stirred them along the hard ground.
The stage station squatted in dwarfish discomfort at the foot of a bluff, the station was constructed of blocks picked from the slide-rock at the foot of the bluff, and it was roofed with split cedar logs covered with earth. Two small windows stared in mute wonderment at the empty road and at the ragged brush before it where the Indians waited.
Three Indians, he believed, had died in the battle, and probably he had wounded as many more, but he distruste
d counting Indian casualties, for all too often they were overestimated. And the Indians always carried away their dead.
The Indians wanted the stage, the horses that drew it, and the weapons of the people inside. There was no way to warn the driver or passengers unless he could do it. The hostler lay on his back staring up at the ceiling.
He had no family, and he was glad of that now. Ruby had run off with a tinhorn from Alta some years back, and there had been no word from her, nor had he wished for it. Occasionally, he thought of her, but without animosity. He was not, he reminded himself, an easy man with whom to live, nor was he much of a person. He had been a simple, hardworking man, inclined to drink too much, and often quarrelsome when drinking.
He had no illusions. He knew he was finished. The heavy lead slug that had smashed the base of his spine had killed him. Only an iron will had kept life in his body, and he doubted his ability to keep it there much longer. His legs were already dead and there was a coldness in his fingers that frightened him. He would need those fingers to fire the warning shot.
Slowly, carefully, he reached for the shotgun and loaded it with fumbling, clumsy fingers. Then he wedged the shotgun into place in the underpinning of his bunk. It was aimed at nothing, but all he needed was the shot, the dull boom it would make, a warning to those who rode the stage that something was amiss.
He managed to knot a string to the trigger so it could be pulled even if he could not reach it. His extremities would go first and then even if his fingers were useless he could pull the trigger with his teeth.
Exhausted by his efforts he lay back and stared up at the darkening ceiling, without bitterness, waiting for the high, piercing yell of the stage driver and the rumble and rattle of the stage’s wheels as it approached the station.
FIVE MILES EAST, the heavily loaded stage rolled along the dusty trail accompanied by its following plume of dust. The humped-up clouds hung low over the serrated ridges. Up on the box, Kickapoo Jackson handled the lines and beside him Hank Wells was riding shotgun. Wells was deadheading it home as there was nothing to guard coming west. He had his revolving shotgun and a rifle with him from force of habit. The third man who rode the top, lying between some sacks of mail, was Marshal Brad Delaney, a former buffalo hunter and Indian fighter.
Inside the stage a stocky, handsome boy with brown hair sat beside a pretty girl in rumpled finery. Both looked tired and were, but the fact that they were recently married was written all over them. Half the way from Kansas City they had talked of their hopes and dreams, and their excitement had been infectious. They had enlisted the advice and sympathy of those atop the coach as well as those who rode inside.
The tall man of forty with hair already gray at the temples was Dr. Dave Moody, heading for the mining camps of Nevada to begin a new practice after several years of successful work in New England. Major Glen Faraday sat beside him at the window. Faraday was a West Point man, now discharged from the army and en route west to build a flume for an irrigation project.
Ma Harrigan, who ran a boardinghouse in Austin and was reputed to make the best pies west of the Rockies, sat beside Johnny Ryan, headed west to the father he had never seen.
Kickapoo Jackson swung the Concord around a bend and headed into a narrow draw. “Never liked this place!” he shouted. “Too handy for injuns!”
“Seen any around?” Delaney asked.
“Nope! But the hostler at Bluff Creek had him a brush with them a while back. He driv ’em off, though! That’s a good man, yonder!”
“That’s his kid down below,” Wells said. “Does he know the kid’s comin’ west?”
“Know?” Kickapoo spat. “Ryan don’t even know he’s got a kid! His wife run off with a no-account gambler a few years back! When the gambler found she was carryin’ another man’s child he just up and left her. She hadn’t known about the kid when she left Ryan.”
“She never went back?”
“Too proud, I reckon. She waited tables in Kansas City awhile, then got sickly. Reckon she died. The folks the boy lived with asked me to bring him back to his dad. Ol’ Ryan will sure be surprised!”
AT BLUFF CREEK all was quiet. Dud Ryan stared up into the gathering darkness and waited. From time to time he could put an eye to a crack and study the road and the area beyond it. They were there … waiting.
Delaney and Wells would be riding the stage this trip, and they were canny men. Yet they would not be expecting trouble at the stage station. When they rolled into sight of it there would be a letdown, an easing-off, and the Indians would get off a volley before the men on the stage knew what hit them.
With Brad and Hank out of the picture, and possibly Kickapoo Jackson, the passengers could be slaughtered like so many mice. Caught inside the suddenly stalled stage, with only its flimsy sides to protect them, they would have no chance.
Only one thing remained. He must somehow remain alive to warn them. A warning shot would have them instantly alert, and Hank Wells would whip up his team and they would go through and past the station at a dead run. To warn them he must be alive.
Alive?
Well, he knew he was dying. He had known from the moment he took that large-caliber bullet in the spine. Without rancor he turned the idea over in his mind. Life hadn’t given him much, after all. Yet dying wouldn’t be so bad if he felt that his dying would do any good.
The trouble was, no man was ever ready to die. There was always something more to do, something undone, even if only to cross the street.
Behind him the years stretched empty and alone. Even the good years with Ruby looked bleak when he thought of them. He had never been able to give her anything, and maybe that was why he drank. Like all kids he had his share of dreams, and he was ready to take the world by the throat and shake it until it gave him the things he desired. Only stronger, more able men seemed always to get what he wanted. Their women had the good things and there had been nothing much he could do for Ruby. Nor much for himself but hard work and privation.
Ruby had stuck by him even after he began to hit the bottle too hard. She used to talk of having a nice house somewhere, and maybe of traveling, seeing the world and meeting people. All he had given her was a series of small mining camps, ramshackle cabins, and nothing much to look forward to but more of the same. His dream, like so many others, was to make the big strike, but he never had.
The tinhorn was a slick talker and Ruby was pretty, prettier than most. He had talked mighty big of the places he would show her, and what they would do. Even when Dud followed him home one night and gave him a beating, Ruby had continued to meet him. Then they ran off.
At the time they had been just breaking even on what he made from odd jobs, and then he got a steady job with the stage line. He rushed home with the news, for it meant he’d have charge of the station at Haver Hill, a cool, pleasant little house where they could raise some chickens and have flower beds as well as a place to raise garden truck. It was always given to a married man, and he had landed it. He rushed home with the news.
The house was empty. He had never seen it so empty because her clothes were gone and there was only the note … he still had it … telling him she was leaving him.
He gave up Haver Hill then and took a series of remote stations where the work was hard and conditions primitive. His salary wasn’t bad and he had saved some money, bought a few horses, and broke teams during his spare time. The stage company itself had bought horses from him, and he was doing well. For the first time he managed to save some money, to get ahead.
There was no word from Ruby although he never stopped hoping she would write. He did not want her back, but he hoped she was doing well and was happy. Also, he wanted her to know how well he was doing.
He did hear about the tinhorn, and it was from Brad Delaney that he got the news. The tinhorn had showed up in El Paso alone. From there he drifted north to Mobeetie, and finally to Fort Griffin. There he had tried to outsmart a man who was smarter, and when caught cheating h
e tried to outdraw him.
“What happened?” Dud had asked.
“What could happen? He tackled a man who wouldn’t take anything from anybody, some fellow who used to be a dentist but was dying of tuberculosis. That dentist put two bullets into that tinhorn’s skull, and he’s buried in an unmarked grave in Boot Hill.”
Dud Ryan wrote to El Paso, but the letter was returned. There was no trace of Ruby. Nobody knew where the tinhorn had come from and the trail ended there. Ryan had about convinced himself that Ruby was dead.
He tried to move, but the agony in his back held him still. If only he could live long enough! Where the hell was the stage? It should have been along hours ago.
He ground his teeth in pain and set his mind on the one thought: Live! Live! Live!
Delaney, Wells, and old Kickapoo were too good to die in an ambush. They were strong men, decent men, the kind the country needed. They wouldn’t have let him down, and he’d be damned if he would fail them.
I’m tough, he told himself, I’m tough enough to last.
He tried and after a moment succeeded in lifting his hand. His fingers were clumsy and his hand felt cold. There were no Indians in sight but he dared not fire, anyway, for he could never load the gun again. He just had to wait … somehow.
He could no longer make out the split logs in the ceiling. The shadows were darker now, and the room was darker. Was it really that much later? Or was he dying? Was this part of it?
Once he thought he heard a far-off yell, and he gripped the trigger of the shotgun, but the yell was not repeated. His lips fumbled for words fumbled through the thickening fog in his brain. Live! he told himself. You’ve got to live!
“Ruby,” he muttered, “’s all right, Ruby. I don’t blame you.”
He worked his mouth but his lips were dry, and his tongue felt heavy in his mouth. “Live!” he whispered. “Please, God! Let me live!”
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7 Page 10