The Lawless West

by Louis L'Amour

  Jack Trainor walked briskly to the table. He sat down and for ten or fifteen minutes stared constantly at the picture. Then he began to write, and Joe Bigot forgot to smoke, so great was his wonder at the oiled smoothness with which the pen of the smaller man fled across the paper.

  Chapter 5

  It was rolling ground, but not enough to limit the horizon with higher summits here and there. That sheet of green swept away eternally. It washed off to the ends of the earth, and through that clear air, indeed, one felt that the ends of the earth were well nigh visible. Only to the far westward there arose a cloud of pale and indefinite blue, wavering low against the sky. One had to be told to know that those were the Canadian Rockies. Standing on this high place in the low country, all at first seemed monotony. There was the marvelous green of the earth and the marvelous blue of the sky and the pure, pure white of the clouds that blew here and there. There was only the sky and the earth and, in between, a great space of freedom for the mind and the soul to wander. There were few trees. No trees were wanted. No hills were wanted. The smoother and the barer, the better. One did not wish for walls or checks of any kind.

  There was a great sense of life in that illimitable plain. One felt it when there was no moving thing in view save the swift clouds. It was a fruitful land. One knew that the soil was rich without seeing the patch of black, yonder, that the plow had turned up not later than that morning, and that was beginning to dry out to a fallow gray as the sun and the wind worked on it. There was such wealth of soil, indeed, that the careless proprietors rather chose to let the land produce as it would than encourage it with the plow to any great extent.

  There were groupings and dottings of cattle, also, wandering here and there, swinging their heads up and down slowly, while their mellow voices came booming, now in loud single calls, and now in more distant and more musical choruses. Toward the farther horizon, one could make out two small towns, each a blur of red roofs wonderfully pleasant between sky and green earth. Nearer at hand was another town—or, rather, just a chance cluster of houses.

  On the top of the hill the girl had halted her horse, and her companion had followed suit, although both his horse and he manifested impatience at the pause. But Alice Cary was enjoying every minute, as was attested by the way in which she threw back her head and smiled. She looked from the green hills to the blue sky, and from the wide limitless sky back to the flowing hills.

  “Ah, Larry,” she said, “maybe you have to have other things, but I like this pretty well. Maybe you have to have Montreal, but I like this for my part.”

  His horse was dancing. He allowed the high-headed creature to prance in front of the horse of Alice. Thereby he cut off her view and forced her to consider him more closely.

  “But that isn’t answering me, Alice,” he said. “And for the last week you’ve been dodging me. And…and you know that he’s apt to be back almost any time now. I don’t want to doubt you, but…but it sounds mighty as if you’d changed your mind.”

  His horse here worked past and threatened the roan of Alice with a flirt of his hoofs, whereat she reined her mount back deftly. She rode in divided skirts with a bold and swinging style that was extremely mannish in its pattern and extremely feminine in its effect. Her dress, too, with the cowboy red bandanna at her throat, her loose blouse, her heavy leather gloves, and the sombrero on her head was masculine in plan but wonderfully girlish in its results.

  “Larry Haines,” she said, “suppose I should tell you that I had changed my mind?”

  The horse of Larry Haines was changed to a statue, so closely did it follow the will of its master! Larry Haines, also, gained two inches in height as he jerked himself to rigidity. His lean, handsome face turned to iron, and his eyes glared at her. More than once before, he had half terrified her in this manner. Indeed, it was a part of the mystery and the charm of the man that attracted her. She knew Jessie Haines as well as she knew herself—or better. She knew herself like a book that had been carefully read. But Larry Haines, although she had grown up with him, remained unknown to her. He never shrouded himself with mystery, but there was about him a native strength that thrust other persons to a distance and kept them away from him. He had never wasted much time on girls until he had met her. And then his sudden burst of attentions, beginningonly a short while after her engagement to the former suitor of her sister, had fairly swept her off her feet. She was frankly flattered, because the attentions of Larry Haines made her the envied and the wondered at among the girls of the village.

  How he kept up that insistent siege; how, at length, in the absence of the big trapper, she had been won over and had given her promise to leave her home and run away with Larry to be married in the distant city of Montreal—all of these things made up a long story. And now she trembled as she faced the youth.

  He took it very quietly. She might have known that he would act in this manner. And yet his quietness was worse than the angry shouting of another man.

  “If you told me that you had changed your mind,” he said, “I should believe you, that’s all. You’re free. You’re independent. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t change your mind if you see cause for it.”

  But, while he spoke, the color went out of his cheeks and left them yellow—an unhealthy sallow. By that sign and the fixed glittering of his eyes she could guess at the emotion within him, but just the emotion was beyond her. It might be wild grief. Or it might be jealous rage. Or it might be simply injured vanity. But one could never tell what actually happened in the brain of Larry. Of his devilish temper, there could be no doubt. Since childhood, he had been a victim to silent bursts of rage that were dangerous to all around him. Now that he was grown older, his skill with weapons and the persistence of that same fierce temper made him dreaded by men of his own age. They actually shunned him. Wherever he went, he went alone. Strange to say, his dangerousqualities made him acceptable only in a company of girls, or old men and old women.

  Why this should be, Alice had often wondered. But now she understood. Always, before, she had never come closer to the darker side of Larry than the reports that others made of him. But today it was easy to see the panther in him stirring under the surface. All the time that he was attributing perfect freedom to her to do as she pleased, she knew that madness was growing in his brain.

  “You know that I wouldn’t change my mind easily, Larry, where you’re concerned?”

  “You flatter me,” said Larry.

  She looked fixedly at him. No doubt he was mocking both her and himself.

  “I’ve never been easy about it…you know that,” she said at length. “I’ve always felt that it was a sin to leave poor Joe in this way.”

  “A fellow that has to be pitied isn’t worth thinking about!” exclaimed Larry Haines fiercely. “But let that go.”

  “You know what he’s done and what he’s been,” said the girl. “He’s never changed. He was true to poor Nora when everyone was laughing at him. And then he took her babies. He took them just as tenderly as though he had been their father! A man like that…why, how could I refuse him when he asked me to marry him, Larry?”

  “I don’t suppose that you could,” said Larry slowly. “I suppose he’s fond of you just for the sake of your sister. But I see that makes no difference with you. You don’t care to be loved for your own sake.”

  She raised her hand. His malevolence showed through too plainly. It made her wince.

  “I admit,” she said, “that I may have made up my mind to marry him for some such reason. But lately, Larry, I…”

  “Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Lately you’ve been thinking about him, and, because he was a long distance from you, you suddenly began to make a hero out of him, you began to make him romantic!”

  She flushed hotly and made no answer. He realized that he had gone much too far and instantly changed his tactics. His tone altered to the most soothing smoothness.

  “It’s because you’re too good for him or for
any other man,” he said gently. “You see, Alice, you are ashamed of yourself because you can’t love him. You think it’s your duty. You don’t see that he’s exactly what he seems…a great clod of a man, Alice! There’s no spark of real feeling in him. There’s no fire in him! Why, you’d be miserable with him!”

  She shook her head and smiled at him in such a cocksure and confident manner that he was amazed. Her flush, also, had changed in quality. There was a misty touch to her eyes that alarmed young Haines.

  “I thought just what you think about Joe Bigot,” she answered. “I’ve thought it all my life. I’ll even confess now, Larry, that the reason I first became engaged to Joe was because I pitied him, and because I felt, if he were so willing to raise Nora’s babies, I should at least try to do my share. I thought, too, that the only reason he cared for me at all was simply because I’m Nora’s sister. But…” She paused.

  “Well?” asked Larry Haines impatiently. “Well?”

  “But a few weeks ago there was a change. The letters I have been getting from Joe Bigot would have driven a saint mad. He told me about the weather. He told me about the number of furs he was taking.And that was about all. Any plowman could have written such letters. Then there was a change! You see, all the time, from the very first, I had been half hoping that behind the dull exterior there might be fire. And it turned out that I was right…I was right! It was like the breaking of a dam. I opened a letter, and his words picked me up on a flood and carried me out of myself! Oh, I wish I could show you that letter!”

  “I wish you could,” said Larry dryly. “I’d sure like to see Bigot’s poetry.”

  “That’s exactly what it was. It was poetry. The words had actually a rhythm to them. They keep running through my mind…not the real words, you know, but the tune of them.”

  “I see,” said Larry in the tone of one who does not see and does not wish to see.

  “He began in just the way he usually began a letter…except that there was a little difference in between the words that took my breath away. He began by talking about the cold and the hoar frost and the bursting trees around the cabin and the sense in the air that the world was freezing to death. And, after he had made such a picture of it that I started to shiver myself, he went on to talk about what the mountains would be like when the spring came. And he made such a picture, Larry, such a picture.” Her words failed her; her voice trembled. “And all at once, toward the end of the letter, Larry, he told me that he felt he had been frozen all of his life, and that he had never been able to say what he felt, because he was really asleep…in a wintertime, so to speak. But now he felt a change. It was a thawing, a coming of spring. That was the first letter. It set me tingling to my fingertips to read it. I kept saying to myself…is the giant going to wake up? Oh, Larry, when I opened the next letter, I knew that he had. And all at once the spring was there! It seems that he loved Nora, or thought he did. But that is nothing to the way he cares for me. It isn’t true that I only shine by her reflected light. And…”

  “In one word, you love him at last, Alice.”

  “Yes!”

  “Then there’s no more to be said about Montreal, of course.”

  “But, Larry, I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Of course you are. You’re too nice a girl not to be sorry, Alice.”

  “Are you sarcastic now?”

  “I?”

  “I never know. I never can quite tell what’s going on in you.”

  “That’s because I’m so simple.”

  “At least, I know you’ll forget me quickly.”

  “Perhaps you hope so.”

  “And I’m right, Larry.”

  “You’re wrong. You know what I think of marriage.”

  “Marriage? You mean that a man should never marry more than once…that it’s sacrilege to marry more than once? But what has that to do with mere love?”

  “Mere love? It means just this…that a man, if he really is in love, can only love once. It’s nonsense to talk about any second affairs. It’s nonsense. It’s Continental, no doubt, but it’s not true. I tell you, my dear, that I shall never care for another woman.”

  “Oh, Larry!”

  He was silent.

  “I know it can’t be true. You are only bitter and angry now. A month from today in Montreal you’ll be smiling when you remember me off here in the grasslands.”

  “A month from today I’ll still be here.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I do.”

  “Larry, does it mean that there’s going to be trouble between you and poor Joe?”

  He started to deny it, then changed his mind, and there was a wicked gleam in his eye.

  Chapter 6

  They had shipped the pelts. Now they were ready to start eastward into the lowlands.

  “But why,” said Jack Trainor, “should I go with you?”

  Joe Bigot blinked. “How else will you get your share of the money?” he said simply. “Unless you want me to send it after you.”

  “Money is nothing,” said the cowpuncher. “Don’t you lie awake worrying about me and money. We’ll get on.”

  Bigot shook his head. “A quarter of that coin is coming to you…it belongs to you. If you don’t take it, I’ll put it in a jug and let it rest there until you come. I’ll never touch it.”

  Trainor slapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “Well,” he said, “let it rest in the jug, then. But I can’t go home with you.”

  “You’ve got work some place?”

  “I’ve got work all the time, now that the roads are opened up. I’ve got to keep moving, Joe. The law is behind me.”

  And he told the big man, for the first time, the true story about his flight to the North. At least, he told the truth from the point where he climbed onto the rods of the freight that took him on his first stage toward the Northland. But he left Joe to infer that the charges against him were true. When he had finished, he waited and studied the face of Joe with great curiosity. For all the simplicity of the big man, he was never able to tell exactly how Joe would act. He had not long to doubt.

  “I’m sorry,” said Bigot, “but when they come for you, we’ll give them a hard job, the two of us. Why, Jack, you can’t go off by yourself. You wouldn’t have anybody to guard your back if they came at you from two sides at once.”

  Trainor was so touched that the tears sprang into his eyes, but he laughed it off. “But suppose she should guess that I wrote these letters for you? If I go, we must arrange a story, Joe. We must pretend that you and I met when you were coming down from the mountains, eh?”

  It was so arranged. That simple lie would do harm to nobody. But the subject of the letters was a sore one with poor Joe. They made up the first real lie he had ever told in his life. He could not get over the fact that he had signed his name to words that he had not written.

  “Forgery,” he used to say, “that’s what it is!”

  “Bah!” Jack Trainor would answer. “It isn’t a check, Joe.”

  But all of his persuading could never quite lift the cloud from the brows of Bigot.

  “The only reason I can do it,” he used to say, “is because I feel all the things you have said for me. I feel all those things, Jack, but I can’t put them down in words. Because I feel them, it isn’t altogether a lie if I let you write the letters for me, is it?”

  And Jack, of course, would insist that it was a mere nothing. He himself had been passing through a strange time of trial. It had grown a peculiar pleasure and a peculiar torment to sit down before the picture of Alice Cary once a week and write to her as though he loved her. Not that the letters were hard to write, for, indeed, there was nothing easier. That faint smile of the girl in the picture was enough to keep his pen working forever, he felt. But, now that he was to see her in the flesh—what?

  There were two dangers. The first, and what he felt to be the more imminent, danger was that she would not be a tithe so charming as she was in the photogr
aph. That would mean the destruction of a pleasant dream that, otherwise, he might have taken with him to his grave. The second danger, although it was one that he declared to himself over and over would never become an actuality, was that when he saw her she might be a thing of beauty even greater than the picture promised. And in that case, what would happen to his poor head, already swimming from too much thinking of her? And what would happen to his friendship for the man who had saved his life, great-hearted, unsuspicious, gentle Joe Bigot?

  He knew his own impulsive nature well enough to fear what he might do. He dreaded seeing her because seeing her might make him desire to marry her. And once he desired to marry her, he felt that he would not be able to exercise any control. He would be gone in a flash.

  Because of this, he had dreaded going home with Joe Bigot. But now he succumbed to the temptation. It was decided that he would be described, in the village, as a man who Joe had simply encountered on his way down from the mountains, and who he had brought back to help him work his little farm. With this plan in mind, they started home.

  There was much to be done, however, before that journey was pressed on. In the first place, Jack Trainor must have a horse. Joe was equipped with a mighty-boned Canadian gray that was capable of carrying a ton on its back. Jack Trainor, a large man himself, was by no means content with such an animal.

  “I’ve got to have speed,” he declared to Joe, and for speed they started looking through the little town into which they had dropped out of the hills. They found what they wanted in the mid-afternoon on the place of a French-Canadian, 2,000 miles away from his beloved Quebec, cursing the land he farmed and caring nothing for the bad-tempered four-year-old that, as he said: “Eats the head off all day, and, when it is for riding…mon Dieu!…le bon Dieu!…it is a wild tornado!”

  He offered the colt and the saddle for hardly more than the price of the latter alone, and straightway Jack saddled the lithe-limbed bay tornado and gave it its head. There followed five savage minutes. When the tornado was breathless, Jack raked a spur down its neck—not cruelly, but with an eye to the future.