Oates’ voice trailed away into silence. The cabin was warm and outside jays were quarreling in the trees. Finally he said, “Jacob, I appreciate what you did for me, but I have to go after them. Somehow I got to make it right.”
“You plan on going up against the Halleck boys?”
“Maybe they left the women alone.”
The old man shook his head. “Shame on me for saying such things on the Sabbath, but those women, whores you said, are already in bondage. Mash and his sons will use them hard and when they’ve had enough, they’ll sell them, maybe down to Old Mexico way.
“The only way you’ll free the women from the Hallecks is at gunpoint, and even then, you’ll have to be mighty slick with the iron. Mash has killed his share, and so has his son Reuben, but Clem’s the gun hand, fast on the draw and shoot. Last I’d heard, he’d killed seven men, and the number has probably growed since then.”
Oates felt a small sickness rise in him. “I’ve never even shot a gun.”
Yearly nodded. “Figured as much. Then I don’t give much for your chances.”
The old man trod carefully, choosing his words. “Eddie, you’re still a hopeless drunk. I can see it on you. You’re only a glass of whiskey away from playing retriever dog for the cowboys again. The Hallecks would stomp you into the ground without breaking a sweat.”
Oates shook his head. “No matter, I’ve got it to do. If I walk away from it, I’ll have to crawl into a whiskey bottle and stay there until it kills me. I’m starting to think that I don’t want to be a drunken fool ever again.” He hesitated, then smiled weakly. “Anyway, that’s how I feel today. I don’t know about tomorrow.”
“Man can lay up troubles for himself by worrying about tomorrow. Hell, boy, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday and look at you, lying there all bandaged up an’ cozy as a bug in a rug.”
Yearly leaned toward Oates, his elbows on his knees. “Now, about them whores. The way I see it, you’ve got three months, Eddie. That’s how long I figure it will be before the Hallecks tire of them. Leastwise, that’s been their pattern with the Indian women they pick up.”
He rose to his feet, crossed to the stove and poured coffee into two cups. He passed one to Oates. “I only put an inch of coffee in there,” he said. “With those hands, I don’t want you scalding yourself.”
Yearly sat, lit his pipe and said through a cloud of blue smoke, “I’ve got a proposition for you, Eddie. You work for me the next three months and I’ll teach you how to shoot. Can you ride a hoss?” The old man saw Oates shake his head. “Teach you that too. If you can ride an’ shoot some, maybe you can meet the Halleck boys on something like level ground. Though I’m making no guarantees, mind.”
Oates looked around the cabin, searching for something that would suggest Yearly’s occupation. A rusty old bear trap hung on the far wall, but apart from that there was nothing. He said, “What do you do, Jacob? You a cattleman?”
“Hell, no, boy. Cowboying is something a man does when he knows he ain’t shaping up for anything else. I cut cinder block out of the side of Black Mountain an’ two, three times a year a Mormon man comes from Silver City with a couple of wagons and hauls them away. He brings me supplies and don’t quibble none, always pays a fair price.”
“What does he do with cinder blocks?” Oates asked.
“He’s never said. I heard tell that folks in Arizona use them to decorate gardens an’ parks an’ sich. But I don’t set much store by that.”
Yearly thumbed a match into flame and relit his pipe. Talking around the stem, he said, “Well, what’s your answer?”
Oates shrugged. “Sure. What have I got to lose?”
The old man smiled. “Eddie, as far as I can tell, not a damned thing.”
Chapter 9
Black Mountain was the northernmost sentinel of the Gila. A mile of hilly, broken ground, thick with sagebrush and piñon, lay between Yearly’s cabin and the rounded bulk of the peak.
The old man had a remuda of three horses penned up in a pole corral, a paint mustang, a rangy buckskin and a Morgan.
After breakfast each morning, he and Oates hitched the Morgan to a wagon and headed for the mountain, where they cut out red and black lava stones with a pick and shovel. The cinder blocks were stacked behind the cabin, and after three weeks of backbreaking labor were already as high as the top of a tall man’s head.
Yearly insisted that Oates take a daily bath in the creek that ran near the house and had him shave off his beard, leaving only a sweeping dragoon mustache that was then fashionable in the West.
Fed on a steady diet of venison stew, bacon and beans and elk steak, Oates put on weight and his shoulders and arms began to show muscle, even as his face thinned into hard, tanned planes.
Yearly was an affable, even-tempered host and employer with an easy way of talking and his rules were few—but for one.
At Oates’ insistence, the old man slept in the cot while he spread his blankets on the floor each night. The door to the cabin’s only bedroom remained locked at all times.
After their return from the mountain one evening, Oates asked him why. Yearly made a display of lighting his pipe, playing for time as he searched his mind for the right words. Finally he said, “That room is . . . well, it’s special to me. I don’t want anyone going in there. I don’t go in there myself.”
“Keep your treasure in there, huh, Jacob?” Oates joshed. He removed one of the oversized shoes the old man had given him and rubbed his aching foot.
“You could say that. I keep memories in there that are precious to me.”
“A woman?”
“No, not a woman.”
Oates placed a shoe on the floor, then removed the other. “That narrows it down,” he said.
Yearly said nothing. Again he made a show with his pipe as a rising night wind rustled around the eaves of the cabin, but for a while only an empty silence stretched between him and Oates.
Finally he said, “Eddie, what’s it been, a month? And already I see a difference in you as the whiskey greed has left. I think you’ve come so far because you’re still a young man and not too old for change. But you still have a ways to go, a long ways.”
The old man waved a hand toward the bedroom. “Maybe one day I’ll show you what’s behind that door, but not today. And not tomorrow or the day after that.”
Oates didn’t push it. He slipped his feet into his shoes and said, “I’ll go check on the Morgan.”
“We won’t need the Morgan tomorrow,” Yearly said.
“How come? We still have lava block to move back to the house.”
“I know, but tomorrow I’m going to teach you to shoot.”
Eddie Oates hefted the unfamiliar weight of the .44 Colt and looked out over the mesquite flats. “How about that dead cedar near the creek, Jacob?”
“Hell, boy, that’s a fair piece. If a man draws down on you from there, you got plenty of room to cut an’ run.” He stepped toward the cedar and Oates followed. When they were ten feet from the tree he stopped.
“You’ll shoot from here.” Yearly noted the puzzled look on the younger man’s face and said patiently, “Revolver fighters like Clem Halleck will come at you up close an’ real personal, especially them as makes fancy moves, skinning the iron fast like he does.
“You shoot the way I’m going to show you and you’ll kill your man every time. Don’t rush it, Eddie, and aim for the belly. Now, go to it.”
As Yearly had demonstrated, Oates took up a duelist’s stance, the inside of his left foot against his right heel, the Colt held out straight in front of him.
“Thumb back the hammer, boy, then cut ’er loose.”
The triple click of the Colt’s hammer was loud in the cool, red-tinted stillness of the morning. Oates squeezed the trigger.
The revolver roared and bucked and the bullet splintered wood dead center from the cedar’s trunk.
“Shoot her dry, boy.”
Oates did as he was told, firing until
the hammer clicked on a spent cartridge. He’d fired five shots at the tree and had scored five hits.
Turning in a drifting gray cloud of gunsmoke, Oates looked at Yearly and grinned. “I’d say that was pretty good.”
“I’d say the tree wasn’t shooting back at you.”
The old man reached into the pocket of the old army greatcoat he wore on cool mornings and passed a cardboard box to Oates. “There’s fifty cartridges. It’s old stuff that’s been lying around for years and it’s a mite uncertain, but it’s fine for practice. Shoot ’em all and let me see fifty hits on the tree. Cut it down if you can because I’m sick of looking at it.”
Yearly turned on his heel and started back to the cabin. “Where you going, Jacob?”
“For coffee. You can come get yours when all the cartridges are gone.” The old man stopped and turned. “There are Apaches around this morning, Eddie, so step careful.”
Oates swallowed the lump in his throat and managed to croak, “Wha . . .”
But Yearly was already out of earshot.
Oates’ mind was not on his target practice and he turned his head constantly for any sign of Apaches. He saw nothing, though every time jays quarreled in the piñons or a jackrabbit bounded across the flat, he jumped.
Despite his unease and the poor quality of his ammunition, which produced a number of duds and fliers, he hit the cedar nearly twoscore times.
Then he lit a shuck for the cabin, his shoes, fitted to Yearly, a much bigger man, flopping and slapping on his feet.
When he ran inside, the old man was sitting in his chair by the fire, smoking his pipe, a volume by Sir Walter Scott in his hands.
“Heard the shooting,” Yearly said without looking up. “I’d say, oh, forty-five rounds. You score any hits?”
“Scored with most of them.”
“Uh-huh,” Yearly said, a comment Oates considered neither approving nor disapproving.
A silence grew between them, then Oates said, almost accusingly, “I didn’t see any Apaches, though.”
“You won’t, unless they want to be seen. But they’re here.”
“Jacob, shouldn’t we be doing something?”
“Like what?”
“Like getting ready to defend ourselves.”
“The Apaches never bothered me before.”
“Who’s to say they won’t now?”
“The Apaches, I guess.”
The old man looked up from his book. “They’re carrying their hurting dead with them. I reckon they’ve had a bellyful of war for the present.”
“I still haven’t seen them.”
“You will. Coffee’s still on the bile if’n you want some. An’ clean the Colt while you’re at it, Eddie. A dirty gun has killed more than one man. Cleaning stuff in the drawer over there.”
The long day was just giving way to evening when the Apaches began to ride past the cabin, heading into the Gila.
Under a sky streaked with ribbons of red and jade, teased by a west wind, they came singly at first, then in groups of three or four. The endurance and fortitude of the Apache were legendary, but these warriors looked like they’d been through it. Many of them wounded, they slumped on their tired ponies, taking no interest in what lay around them. They must have been routed at Alma and it showed.
Oates and Yearly stood outside the cabin in the violet night and watched them pass.
Most of the warriors led ponies burdened by dead men roped facedown across their backs. Oates counted thirty bodies, but probably more had been abandoned along the trail.
“It’s too dark to make out faces clear,” Yearly whispered, “but I haven’t seen Victorio or ol’ Nana either.”
Asking a question to which he already knew the answer, Oates said, “You reckon they got beat at Alma?”
The old man nodded. “Looks like.” He gave Oates a sidelong glance. “Thinking of going back, Eddie?”
“One day, but only to settle some scores.”
Yearly nodded. “That can drive a man.”
One by one the Apaches melted into the distance and night, leaving only the solitude and silence on the land that God intended.
A match flared as Yearly lit his pipe. Then the old man turned to Oates and said, “Go inside, Eddie. Leave me to study on things for a spell.”
A small alarm rose in Oates. “You all right, Jacob?”
“I’m fine. Sometimes a man wants to be by himself, is all.”
“Then I’ll bring your coat. There’s a chill in the air.”
Coyotes were yipping somewhere out in the darkness and the wine-dark sky was full of stars.
“I’m not cold,” Yearly said. “Now leave me. I’ll be in soon.”
Oates turned away and started to walk back to the cabin. All his life he’d been isolated, but never alone. There had always been people around, a few friendly, most not, but they were always there. Why a man would stand in the crowding dark and seek out loneliness puzzled him.
He stopped and looked first at the shadowed land, then at the sky, hoping to see what Jacob was seeing and feel what he was feeling. He listened into the night and heard the sigh of the ceaseless wind, the restless rustle of the cedars around the cabin.
Then he began to understand. . . .
The night was coming down on him like a blessing and it had the power to heal the hurt in a man. Now he knew what Jacob knew.
He stepped into the cabin, and for the first time in a long time, the whiskey hunger had completely left him.
Yearly stepped inside an hour later, bringing the memory of the night with him. “Best you spread your blankets, Eddie,” he said. “We got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow.”
“No more Apaches passing through, huh?”
“Not passing through, no.” Seeing the expression on Oates’ face, he said, “There are Apaches out there, not many, maybe just a few broncos.”
“Why would they stay around?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at the younger man. “Eddie, there are bad apples in every barrel, and that applies to Apaches as much as it does to white men.”
He crossed to his cot, then stopped. “Load the Colt, boy, an’ keep it close.”
Chapter 10
Next morning Yearly said they wouldn’t go to the mountain that day but stay close to the cabin. The old man seemed to have a honed instinct for danger and Oates made no objection.
When Oates went outside to fork hay to the horses, Yearly went with him, his Winchester cradled in his arms. Oates carried the Colt in the pocket of his ragged pants and Jacob had told him to load all six cylinders.
The old man’s eyes were never at rest, scanning the land around them and the open ground behind the corral. Now and then he would raise his nose and read the wind, then frown, his knuckles whitening in the rifle stock.
“They still around?” Oates asked.
“Uh-huh. Watching us. They figured I was alone, but now they’ve seen you and it’s making them think.”
“Think about what?”
“How best to lift our hair. The Apache is brave, but he ain’t a fool. They’ll attack at the moment they figure the odds are on their side. That’s why we’ll stay together in the cabin.”
“I’ve got the Colt, Jacob. I could bring in the cinder block we’ve already cut. It will only take a couple of trips.”
Yearly shook his head. “You’d be out in the open, boy, an’ that’s bucking a stacked deck. They’d lift your hair for sure.” He smiled. “Hitting a tree with a .44 is one thing. Hitting an Apache is another.”
“How many do you figure, Jacob?”
“I don’t know any more than I did last night. Enough, I reckon.”
“I guess they’re pretty mad about the beating they took at Alma, huh?”
“Eddie, an Apache doesn’t get mad. He gets even.”
Oates threw the paint mustang a last forkful of hay, then followed Yearly back to the cabin.
The place was solidly built of pine logs and had a tar-paper
and shingle roof, rare and expensive at that time. But the chimney was of sticks and mud and Yearly said it constantly blew down in gales. There were only two openings to the front, a single window and the door, and none to the back.
The cabin looked as if it could withstand a siege and when the old man barred the door with an oak beam and closed the wood shutters on the window, the building seemed to Oates well-nigh impregnable.
Just before noon, under a blazing sun, the Apaches began to test the cabin’s defenses.
Searching bullets thudded into the pine door and walls. Then a shot shattered the glass of the cabin window and Yearly swore bitterly and long.
Oates stood at the cross-shaped gun port Yearly had cut in the window shutters and his eyes tracked back and forth along the terrain, then drifted back all the way to the Canyon Creek Mountains three miles to the northeast.
The air was sharp and clear, but the hilly ground to the front of the cabin was covered with cedar, piñon and thick stands of prickly pear. The ground rose gradually to a high, rocky ridge dotted with juniper and mesquite that gave good cover for a hidden rifleman.
With idle elegance a black hawk raptor rode the air currents above the ridge, then disappeared to the west and white clouds hung still above the Canyon Creek peaks.
Oates’ eyes began to feel the strain of his search. Nothing moved and the oppressive heat of the day lay heavy on the land. Sweat trickled down his cheeks and the rubber handle of the Colt felt slick in his fist.
“See anything, Eddie?” Yearly asked.
“Not a damned thing. You?”
The old man shook his head. He was peering out a hole in the door about a foot square that closed and opened with a hinged panel of pine. The gun port gave fairly good visibility without exposing a defender to enemy fire. “But that don’t mean they’re not out there,” he said.
Oates nodded. They were out there all right, but how many? Two, three . . . a dozen? That many would be too hard to handle for an old coot with milk in his eyes and a drunk.
Oates shifted position to ease a cramp in his leg and waited. Bees droned in the sage outside. A jay flew into a cedar and the branches stirred as it moved from place to place. The silent sky was an inverted, brassy blue bowl and heat waves shimmered along the crest of the ridge. There was no shadow to be seen anywhere and the trees drooped like tired belles after the ball’s last waltz has been played.
Ralph Compton The Man From Nowhere Page 5