The Lawless West

by Louis L'Amour

“Does it?” said Joseph Bigot. “Man alive, d’you know what that fur is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s blue fox! It’s the finest fur that a man can get. It’s what every trapper dreams about. If I told you that a thousand dollars would be…”

  “A thousand dollars,” gasped Jack, amazed.

  “I dunno what the market will be,” said Joseph Bigot, “but I know this one thing…that I’m going to write to the girl today and tell her that in the spring we can get married.” He cast up both of his long arms and shook his fists at the ceiling. “The time’s come!” he said. “I’ve waited twelve years, and now the time’s come!”

  Jack Trainor forgot about the fox skin and the price it might bring. Instead, he could think of nothing but the last statement of the big Canadian.

  “D’you mean to say that you’ve been engaged to the same girl for twelve years?” he breathed.

  Bigot laughed. “Twelve years I have waited,” he answered enigmatically. “First I wait for one, and then I wait for the other…twelve years altogether.”

  And he would say no more about it until they had cooked and eaten their supper and cleaned up the tins. After that, they sat around for the long, bleak evening. Outside, the freezing sap in the trees was bursting with loud reports from time to time, for the thermometer had dropped fully thirty degrees since midday. At midday it had been cold enough, a wind at ten below zero coursing over the summit and shrieking through the trees. That wind had the edges of icy knives to go through and through even the thickest furs, and the only way to keep from being frozen was to stir about. Now, at night, there was not a stir of the air. The big pale moon moved up a cloudless sky. The mountains, under its light, were either black with forest and shadow or glistening in strange blue-white. And the cold was so terrible that it needed no wind to drive it home.

  In the sides of the little cabin it found crevices and cracks through which to slide like rapier points, stabbing every living thing it struck. The stove roared, and the wood within it kept up a steady hissing of sap and humming, while the top of the stove was red hot. All the air in the room above the top of that stove was clear and warm. All the air below the surface of that stove was glittering with hoar frost. The upper parts of the bodies of the men were almost too warm, but below the knees they were slowly freezing. One could feel the sharply defined borderline between the upper and the lower strata of atmosphere by passing the hand through the air. It was almost like moving the hands from warm water into ice water.

  Jack Trainor, in fact, had not stopped trembling during the first three weeks of his stay. But, after that, as he grew hardened exteriorly to the biting weather, and, as his body accumulated the natural protection of a thin layer of fat over its entire surface, he began to fare better. And now, thoroughly accustomed to the heavy weight of the thick clothes and the furs with which the generous Bigot had equipped him, inured to the drafts and the bitter sweep of the winds, Jack had commenced to enjoy his strange surroundings and his new life.

  He had been of little use to Bigot at first, but by constant study he made himself a sufficient master of the work to tend a line of traps after Bigot had set them out, and in this fashion he was able to double the amount of ground that the big man covered with his lines. To be sure, he could never be more than a very clumsy amateur, for to become a really fine trapper one must begin in childhood to study animals and the ways of taking them. More than that, one must be born with a certain gift.

  Merely by his ability to cover ground was he useful when it came to tending the traps. There were other ways in which he was of greater service, and chief among these was his skill as a hunter. To be sure, the hunting in the snow-covered mountains was quite a different thing from the hunting in the southern deserts. But, once a hunter, always a hunter, no matter in what climate or country or for what game. A man who can shoot deer will, up to a certain point, be an excellent hunter of anything else from coyotes to tigers. And Jack Trainor guarded the trap lines from those terrible enemies of the trapper that prowl through the night and devour before the dawn the prizes that the steel jaws have taken. Many a bobcat and lynx he dropped with his quick rifle, and Bigot, a most second-rate marksman in spite of a life spent in practice, wondered at these successes of his new ally.

  As for the work he was doing, Bigot promised a share in the profits when the spring came and they returned to the lowlands, but the profits meant nothing to Jack Trainor. He was glad to have a haven during this winter. Moreover, he was beginning to see that the resolution he had so lightly taken, to sacrifice himself in the interests of his brother-in-law, was apt to lead to most lasting and disastrous results. During this winter, he was more or less free, for the stern weather and the inaccessible mountains would shut him off from discovery. They had almost no communication with the outer world. Once a fortnight, Bigot tramped down to the nearest little town and post office. There he sent out his mail and collected what had come for him, purchased needed supplies—as much as he could carry upon his back—and turned again into the stern trail that led over the peaks to his little cabin. Other than this fortnightly touch with the world, they were utterly isolated. But what would happen when the spring came and the trails were opened? The arm of the law was long, and the servants of the law were fleet.

  So it was that many a solemn thought drifted slowly through the mind of Jack Trainor as he sat on this evening in the cabin and listened to the booming of the frozen trees and felt the cold numbing his feet. Also, he was much amused by the actions of the trapper. Joe had brought out writing materials and placed them upon the little homemade table. He was sitting, with his pencil poised above the paper, the expression upon his face that of one determined to do or die, and feeling that death was nearer than accomplishment.

  He felt that this time Bigot would welcome an opportunity to talk, and therefore he asked again: “And what about that story you started to tell me, Joe, about the twelve-year engagement? What’s the yarn behind that?”

  As he had half expected, Joe Bigot laid down his pencil with a sigh of relief and turned upon his companion.

  Chapter 4

  “You see,” said Bigot, “up to the time that I was twenty, I didn’t bother the girls none. I had other work, my friend, and I let them go their way while I went mine. But one day Nora Cary came walking by, and I turned around and looked after her. Ever since then I’ve never felt the same.”

  He paused, tamped his pipe, then frowned at the floor.

  “Next week,” he said, “I asked Nora to marry me. She laughed at me.”

  “And you forgot her, I hope?” said Jack fiercely. “If a girl laughed at me, I’d cut out my heart rather’n foller her.”

  “I guess that maybe you would,” responded the trapper mildly. There was much about Jack that he did not understand, and that he made no pretense of understanding. “But I didn’t. Next summer I asked her again, and she said no. Next winter I asked her again, and she stopped to think.”

  Jack Trainor swore softly. He was beginning to see in the steady patience of the big man a force that would easily wear down the patience, and impose upon the mind of a woman.

  “I asked her the next spring again, and she said yes,” went on the trapper, refilling his pipe. “After that I was happy for a couple of years, working all the time and saving up money until I had a lot of it put by. I had enough made to build a house and furnish it, and everything was all ready for the wedding next summer. But, when the time for the wedding came, Nora Cary wasn’t there.”

  He began smoking so furiously that his face was almost totally obscured behind the fog.

  “She’d run off with Bergen, that went to school with the both of us. They come back that fall and settled down, and next summer Nora had a baby.”

  He seemed entirely serene after that brief outburst of smoking. Jack Trainor leaned and listened to him with the most profound attention. He felt an actual awe of the big man, a mental awe as well as a physical one for the giant.

>   “Things kept on like that,” said Bigot.

  “You mean you never stopped loving Nora?”

  Bigot looked at him in mild amazement.

  “I said she was married,” he said in quiet rebuke.

  “I know…I know,” said Jack impatiently, “but I mean…you were pretty fond of her just the same. You didn’t pay much attention to any of the other girls in the town, eh?”

  “I ain’t got much time for girls,” said Bigot without emotion. “That is, for girls outside of Nora. Three years ago she died.”

  Jack started. It was like the shock that comes when we hear of the death of a person we know. He had visualized Nora. He had been thinking of her, on this bitter night, in a well-warmed room in some village in the lowlands. And now, suddenly, he knew that she was long since dead. It took his mind with a wrench back to the stolid face of Bigot.

  There was something so heart-wringing to him about that placid face that he rose and crossed the room with his quick, nervous step and dropped his hand upon the thick and heavily muscled shoulder of the trapper.

  “Good old Joe,” he said heartily and softly. “Good old Joe.”

  But Joe looked up to him in immense surprise.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Trainor, and turned and walked slowly back to his former place. When he faced the trapper again, all the signs of emotion were gone from his face.

  “After Nora died,” said Bigot, “I had my sister take the little ones.”

  “You did? Would her husband let you do that?”

  “Him? He went away,” said the trapper tersely.

  The character of the dead woman’s husband was blazoned in sudden light to the mind of Trainor.

  “Children cost a good deal,” explained Bigot.

  “But what’s this marriage in the spring?” asked, Jack, bewildered.

  “Nora has a sister,” said the trapper.

  There was another gasp from the cowpuncher. “Well,” he said with feeling, “I’ll be eternally lost. You beat all get out with a tin hat on it, Joe. But go on. She has a sister, eh? And you’re going to marry the sister so’s she can take care of the kids that Nora left behind her when she died?”

  This question the big man considered for a time with great care.

  “She has the same eyes that Nora had,” he replied after a time, “bright, snapping ones. They are black.”

  It was another blow to Jack.

  “How old is she?” he asked.

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty. And you’re thirty-two. That’s a good deal of difference in the ages, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is. But what difference does time make?”

  Again Jack was staggered. He had thought, before he began this conversation, that he knew the other from A to Z. Now he began to feel that he knew nothing except about the surface of Joe Bigot. Time meant nothing to Joe. Why should it mean anything to other persons?

  “There is a funny thing,” said Joe, sighing. “She must have letters. Every week she must have a letter.”

  “I’ve seen you writing them. But why? The mail only leaves once in two weeks.”

  “Why? I didn’t ask her,” replied the trapper. “All I know is that she wants me to write to her every week, a separate letter. And so I do it.” Sorrow spread over his face darkly. “I write a letter every week,” he reiterated. He said it as a man might speak of a plague. “It is very hard,” and he sighed. “But, you see, it angers her when she doesn’t get the letters, and yet it angers her when she gets them. Look!”

  He took out his wallet. From it he removed a sheaf of letters written upon very thin white paper. He selected one of these letters and presented it to Jack. The letter under his hand showed a swift-moving and rather delicate script flowing across the page. It was a “dashed-off” hand, so to speak. He read:

  Dear Joe:

  I was away last Saturday at Jessie Haines’s place. When I came back, I got three letters from you in a bunch. Oh, Joe, why do you write such letters?

  I could sit in this room and write more about the mountains in five minutes, and more about love, too, than you write in a whole winter.

  I know you’re brave and strong and good, but a girl can’t live forever on courage and strength and goodness. She needs something else.

  Alice

  Jack lowered the letter with a black scowl and passed it back to Bigot.

  “So, you see,” said Bigot, “that is why I am glad that I have the blue fox…that we have it, rather. It will be something for her to live on, eh?”

  “You think that’s what she meant…that she wanted money?” said Jack.

  “Now you are laughing at me?” queried Bigot pathetically. “I know I am stupid. When people talk, I feel like when I was a little boy at the end of the line and they played crack the whip. That’s the way when people talk, sometimes. I go sailing off into nothing. I don’t understand what they are saying.”

  Jack Trainor, still smiling in spite of himself, shook his head. “I wouldn’t mock you, Joe. In the first place, I like you too well. In the second place, I respect you too much. In the third place, I’m afraid to.”

  “Afraid to?” echoed the big man. He laughed softly. “You, Jack, fear nothing. You don’t know what fear is.”

  “You think not?”

  “I know it. Otherwise, you would never have walked into the mountains in that thin suit without food.”

  Jack Trainor shook his head. He had long before discovered that it was useless to argue with the trapper on this point. Joseph Bigot had decided to his own satisfaction that Trainor was a daredevil, and he could not be convinced to the contrary. He would have it that the braving of winter in the mountains, by a man to all intents and purposes unclothed and helpless, was a sign of sublime daring rather than ignorance.

  “We’ll drop that, then,” said Jack. “But this Alice Cary…Joe, she sure knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want, and one of the things that she doesn’t want is the sort of letter that you write to her. I’d like to see one of ’em if it wasn’t so personal you couldn’t show it to me.”

  “Personal?” echoed the mild-eyed giant. “Why, Jack, why shouldn’t you see it? Here’s a couple of ’em here.”

  “Ones you didn’t send?”

  “I sent ’em just the way they stand, except that I copied ’em clean.”

  He handed the two to Trainor, and the second one read:

  Dear Alice:

  I was glad to get your last letter. I hope you are feeling well now. I am getting along pretty well now. Last week I caught three red foxes and eighteen…

  “Say, Joe,” called Trainor, “doesn’t it strike you that she might be interested in something a pile more than she’d be interested in the sort of furs you collected?”

  “In what, then? Ain’t that what we got to live on?”

  “Forget what you got to live on,” said Jack. “A girl ain’t interested in that. She’ll live on grass seed and hope and be plumb happy, so long as she’s got a gent around handy to tell her every once in a while that he’s mighty fond of her. That’s the way a woman is put together.”

  Joe Bigot sighed. “You know pretty near everything, Jack,” he said. “If I had you to coach me, maybe I could write a letter that would keep her interested. Would you show me how it’s done?”

  “Why, look here”—Jack chuckled—“I ain’t no professional slinger of fancy English. The best I can do is to work up an interest talking about what I want and why I want it.”

  “But,” began Joe, “that won’t help me.”

  “Why won’t it?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Joe, tell me just why you want to marry Alice. Is it simply because she’s her sister’s sister?”

  The big man pondered. “She’s prettier than Nora ever was,” he decided. “And she’s brighter. And she’s kinder.”

  “Did you ever tell her all those things?” asked Jack.

 
“Ain’t she got a mirror? Can’t she look in her mirror and see a pile more than I could ever tell her?”

  “That right there,” cried Jack, “would be good enough to put into a letter! The thing for you to do is to loosen up. You got plenty to say. But you’re like a good pitcher at the beginning of the season…you’re afraid to put any stuff on the ball in the cold weather. Thing for you to do, Joe, is to thaw out. Show a few signs of spring…”

  “In January?” said Joseph Bigot, bewildered. “Spring in January? I don’t know what you mean, my friend Jack.”

  Trainor threw up his hands. “Here,” he said. “Are you dead certain that Alice Cary is more interested in you than she is in any other young gent down in those parts?”

  “She has promised to be my wife,” said Joe with an air of conclusiveness.

  Jack sighed. “Because she gave you a promise,” he said, “that’s a pretty good reason for her to want to change her mind…or for her to think about changing her mind…ain’t it? Man, man, when you tie up a dog with a rope, don’t that make the dog want to get away, even if the place you tied him is all covered with marrow bones?”

  “If he has the bones to eat,” said Joe, “why should the dog wish to go? Such a dog would be a fool, my friend Jack.”

  Jack Trainor studied his friend’s face with the air of one somewhere between anger and amusement and despair. At length he said: “If I sit down and work out a letter for you, will you use it to sort of get you started on a letter of your own?”

  “Sure,” said Joe. “Why not? Good Lord, Jack, that would be more than gold in my pocket.”

  “Then give me her picture, will you?”

  Joe Bigot drew out the picture, and his companion sat for some time studying it intently.

  “Who’s the young gent down in the plains,” he said, “that she likes the best?”

  “That’d be young Larry Haines,” said Joe. “He was courting her ever since she was a little one.”

  “Well,” said Jack, “this is where we start in giving Larry the outside edge of an outside chance. We’re going to freeze him out!”