A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  “That will be all, lad.” Pit tossed him a silver dollar.

  Josh laid a hand on Milton’s shoulder as he was headed for the door. “Your pa know you’re here?”

  “No sir. I get a whuppin’. But Mr. Pitt he pays better than the hotel.” He lowered his voice. “’Specially since he started paying real money.” He left.

  “Good lad. But I have hopes for him.” Pitt took another sip and set his glass on the billiard table, where it boiled over.

  “Who are you?” Josh asked.

  “I am a speculator.”

  “Persephone’s past speculating.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Marlow. My commodity is most plentiful here.”

  “What’s your commodity?”

  “Something that is valued by only three in town at present. Milton’s father Virgil, because he understands it. The half-breed Gordy Wolf, because he does not possess it. And I.”

  “What about me?”

  “You have been a signal disappointment. When you came to this territory, that item which you are pleased to call yours was more than half mine. Since then you have begun to reclaim it.”

  “You came to take it back?”

  Pitt laughed. It sounded like scales dragging over stone. “You exalt yourself. What is your soul against the soul of an entire town?”

  “Then Virge and Gordy was right. You’re him.”

  “Succinctly put. Gary Cooper would be proud.”

  “Who?”

  “Perhaps I should explain myself. But where to start? Aha. Has it ever occurred to you in your wanderings that the people you meet are a tad too colorful, their behavior insufferably eccentric, their language over-folksy? That they themselves are rather—well, broad? Half-breed Crows tending bar, drunken college professors, henpecked merchants, gossipy blacksmiths, Negro liverymen who talk as if they just stepped off the plantation—really, where does one encounter these types outside of entertainment?”

  “Keep cranking, Mr. Pitt. You ain’t drawed a drop yet.”

  “There. That’s just what I mean. Why can’t you say simply that you don’t follow? I don’t suppose you’d understand the concept of alternate earths.”

  Josh said nothing.

  “There is, if you will, a Master Earth, against which all the lesser alternate earths must be measured. Each earth has an equal number of time frames, and it’s my privilege to move in and out of these frames among the Master and alternate earths. Now, on Master Earth, the American West within this frame is quite different from the one in which you and I find ourselves. This West, with its larger-than-life characters and chivalric codes of conduct, is but a mythology designed for escapist entertainment on Master Earth. That earth’s West is a much drearier place. Are you still with me?”

  “Sounds like clabber.”

  “How to put it.” Pitt worried a whiskered lip between small ivory teeth. “You were a gunfighter. Were you ever struck by the absurdity of this notion that the faster man in a duel is the moral victor, when the smart way to settle a fatal difference would be to ambush your opponent or shoot him before he’s ready?”

  “We don’t do things that way here.”

  “Of course not. But on Master Earth they do. Or did. I get my tenses tangled jumping between time frames. In any case being who and what I am, I thought it would be fine sport to do my speculating in this alternate West. The fact that I am mortal here lends a nice edge to those splendid fast-draw contests like the one I enjoyed with Ned Harpy. His soul was already mine when I came here, but I couldn’t resist the challenge.” He sighed heavily; Josh felt the heat. “I’m aggrieved to say I’ve found none to compare with it. I’d expected more opposition.”

  “You talk like you got the town sewed up.”

  “I bagged the entire council this very afternoon when I promised them they’d find oil if they drilled north of Cornelius Street. The rest is sweepings.”

  “What do you need with Milton?”

  “The souls of children hold no interest for me. But his father’s would be a prize. I’m certain a trade can be arranged. Virgil will make an excellent pair of boots when these wear out.” He held up a glossy black toe and laughed. Wind and rain lashed the windows, howling like demons.

  “You trade often?”

  Pitt cocked an eyebrow under the derby. “When the bargain is sufficient. What are you proposing?”

  “I hear you’re fast against saloonkeepers. How are you with a genuine gunman?”

  “Don’t be ludicrous. You haven’t been in a fight in years.”

  “You yellowing out?”

  Pitt didn’t draw; the Peacemaker was just in his hand. Lightning flashed, thunder roared, a windowpane blew in and rain and wind extinguished the lamps in the room. All at once they re-ignited. The Peacemaker was in its holster. Pitt smiled. “What will you use for a gun?”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” He opened a drawer in the faro table and took out a glistening gray leather gun belt with a slate-handled converted Navy Colt in the holster. “I think you’ll find this will fit your hand.”

  Josh accepted the rig and drew out the pistol. The cylinder was full. “I sold this set in Tucson. How’d you come by it?”

  “I keep track of such things. What are the spoils?”

  “Me and the town if you win. If I win you ride out on that red-eyed horse and don’t come back. Leave the town and everybody in it the way you found them.”

  “That won’t be necessary. In the latter event I’d be as dead as you in the former. In this world, anyway. What is hell for a gunfighter, Marlowe? Eternity on a dusty street where you take on all challengers, your gun hand growing swollen and bloody, never knowing which man you face is your last? I’ll see you’re kept interested.”

  “Stop jawing and go to fighting.”

  Smiling, Pitt backed up several paces, spread his feet, and swept his coat-frock behind the black-handled pistol, setting himself. Josh shot him.

  The storm wailed. Pitt staggered back against the billiard table and slid to the floor. Black blood stained his striped vest. The glass-blue eyes were wide. “Your gun was already out! You didn’t give me a chance!”

  Josh shrugged. “Did you think you were the only one who could travel between worlds?”

  Glendon Swarthout wrote a number of highly successful novels, most notably The Shootist, that also became a highly successful movie. But he also wrote a number of novels that, while less successful commercially, secured his lasting place in the Western Writers Hall of Fame. The Shootist is one of the most important Western novels ever published. It completely destroys, then carefully rebuilds, the myth of the Western gunfighter, and was the perfect vehicle for John Wayne’s last movie. The prose is impeccable, as it is in such other Swarthout novels as They Came to Cordura and Skeletons. An educated man, a professor in fact, he seems to have had a first-rate understanding of the gears and mechanisms of American popular fiction. With The Shootist, he demonstrated that he could successfully write literature, as well. Swarthout was born in 1918 and his books reflect the concerns and obsessions of his generation, culminating in the sentimental but well-written novel Luck and Pluck.

  The Attack on the Mountain

  Glendon Swarthout

  This is about a general and a petticoat and three squaws and a rat roast and a sergeant and some other soldiers and a mutt dog and an old maid and a message.

  The general was Nelson A. Miles. He followed George Crook in charge of the military department of Arizona, in which vast command the Apaches, still feisty in the 80s were accustomed to breaking out of the agencies, stealing horses and cattle, burning ranches, deceasing the settlers, and being beat-all scampish. Tender in the beam, Miles was disinclined to spend much time in the saddle, as Crook had done, preferring to reign over military reviews and fancy-do’s in towns with the locals and let the terrain and the latest in tactics conduct his campaign for him.

  To this end he scattered his cav
alry in troops across that area most pested by the Indians, ready to strike at any raiding band close-range, and also set up the most intricate, cosmographical system of observation and communication ever seen in the West. The finest telescopes and heliographs were obtained from the chief signal officer in Washington. The heliostat consisted of a mirror set on a tripod and covered with a shutter; by means of a lever which alternately removed and interposed the shutter, long or short flashes of light coded out words, the distance depending on the sun’s brillance and the clearness of the atmosphere. Infantrymen were trained at Signal Corps school at Fort Myer, in Virginia, then shipped west and stuck up on peaks so as to form a network. There were twenty-seven stations, not only in Arizona but in New Mexico and even more were eventually added, reaching down into Sonora, Mexico. The entire system covered a zigzag course of over four hundred miles, a part of it being pieced out by telegraph. It was a monument to science and to General Miles’ administrative genius, and it was not worth a tinker’s damn.

  The Apaches took to moving by night. By day they observed the observers, using their own means of communication—fire, smoke, sunlight on a glittering conch shell. They yanked down the telegraph lines, cut them, and spliced them with wet rawhide which dried to look like wire, the cuts then being almost impossible for linemen to detect, thus degutting the system.

  But whatsoever General Field Order No. 7 establisheth on April 20th, 1886, at Fort Bowie must endure. The station could at least transmit messages like the following:

  RELAY C O FORT HUACHUCA PREPARE POST INSPECTION AND REVIEW GENL MILES

  So much for the general.

  On Bill Williams Mountain, five thousand feet up, set on a ledge, there were five men of the 24th Infantry and two mules and a mutt dog. This was the way they passed their time. Sergeant Ammon Swing was in command. He copied the messages sent and received, made sure there was always an eye to the telescope, and allowed himself only the luxury of an occasional think about Miss Martha Cox. Corporal Bobyne had charge of the heliograph. After two weeks training in the code, he worked the shutter with a flourish, youngsterlike. Private Takins cooked. He never bathed, and over the months built up such a singular oniony odor that they said of him he could walk past the pot and season the stew. The guards were Corporal Heintz and Private Mullin. Reckoning to grow potatoes, Heintz, a stubborn Dutchman from Illinois, hoed and hilled at a great rate while the studious Mullin took up botany, cataloging specimens of yucca, nopal, and hediondilla. In their brush corral the two mules tucked back their ears and pondered whom to kick next. Their names were Annie and Grover, the latter after Mr. Cleveland, who was then serving his first term in 1886. The mutt dog chased quail and was in turn hunted by sand fleas, who had better luck.

  There was no call for the men to be lonely or the mules mean or the dog to mope. Only six miles away, down in the valley, was Cox’s Tanks, a ranch from which water was packed up twice weekly on muleback; only twelve miles off, along the range at a pass, was the Rucker Canyon Station; and only thirty-four miles to the south was Fort Buford, whence supplies were hauled once a month. The five men had high, healthy air to breathe, the goings-on over a hundred square miles of nothing to watch, a branding sun by day and low fierce stars by night.

  In addition, they could gossip via heliograph with Rucker:

  YOU SEEN ANY PACHES? NOPE HEINTZ GROWED ANY TATER YET? NOPE

  But after May and June on Bill Williams Mountain they began to be lorn. In July they commenced talking to themselves more than to each other. One day in August the dog turned his eyes heavenward and ran at full speed toward the top of the mountain and death. Dogs had been known to commit suicide in that way hereabouts.

  OUR DOG RUN AWAY SO DID OURN

  So much for the mutt.

  When they rousted out one September morning there was smoke columning a few hundred yards down the ledge. Taking Mullin with him, Sergeant Swing went out to reconnoiter, snaking along through the greasewood until they reached a rock formation. What they spied was a mite insulting. They had Apaches on their hands, all right, but squaws instead of braves—three of them, and a covey of kids running about. The ladies had come during the night, built a bungalow of brush and old skins and set up housekeeping. The smoke issued from a stone-lined pit in which they were baking mescal, a species of century plant and a staple of the Apache diet. Ollas and conical baskets were scattered about. The squaws wore calico dresses, which meant they had at one time been on an agency, and one of them was missing the tip of her nose. The whites had not as yet succeeded in arguing the Apache warriors out of their age-old right to snick off a little when they suspected their womenfolk of being unfaithful. But the final indignity was dealt the sergeant when he and Mullin crawled out of the rocks. Two youngsters, who had watched their every move, skittered laughingly back to their mamas.

  Apaches or not, they were the station’s first real company in six months and the men were glad of them. Sergeant Swing was not. He could not decide if he should start an official message to department headquarters and if he did, how to word it so that he would not sound ridiculous.

  While he hesitated young Bobyne shuttered the news to Rucker Canyon anyway:

  THREE SQUAWS COME SARGE DUNNO WHAT TO DO

  The reply was immediate:

  HAVE DANCE INVITE US

  When this was decoded, since no one but Bobyne could read Morse, there was general laughter.

  “Folderol,” the sergeant says.

  “You tink dem squaws vill ’tack us?” Heintz asks, winking at the others. “Zhould ve zhoot dem kids?”

  Swing ruminated. “You fellers listen. If you expect them desert belles come up to cook and sew for us, your expecter is busted. Where there’s squaws there’s billy-bound to be bucks sooner or later.” He said further that he was posting a running guard at once. He wanted someone on the telescope from sunup to dark. “And here’s the gist of it,” he concludes. “We will stay shy of them Indians. Nobody to go down there calling, and if they come up here you treat them as kindly as ’rantulas, which they are.”

  “Dats too ztiff,” Heintz protests.

  “Sarge, you mean we ain’t even to be decent to the kiddies?” complains Mullin.

  “Not as you love your mother,” is the answer, “and calculate to see her again.”

  They grudged off to their posts and the sergeant went to sit by a joshua tree and study his predicament. He was more alarmed than he had let on. The news along the system had for two weeks been all bad. The most varminty among the Warm Springs chiefs had left the agency with bands and were raiding to the south—Naiche and Mangas together, Kaytennay by himself. With their example before him, it would be beneath Geronimo’s dignity down in Mexico to behave much longer. General Miles had cavalry rumping out in all directions, but there had as yet been neither catch nor kill. He had heard that the first thing sought by the Apaches on breakouts was weapons. What more logical than to camp a few squaws and kids near a heliograph station, cozy up to the personnel, then smite them suddenly with braves, wipe out the sentimental fools and help yourself to rifles and cartridges? Apaches had been known to wait days, even weeks, for their chance. And how was a mere sergeant to control men who had not mingled with humankind for six months?

  Had he been an oathing man, Ammon Swing would have. He had in him a sense of duty like a rod of iron. A small compact individual, he wore a buggy-whip mustache which youthened his face and made less New England his expression. Pushing back his hat, he let his gaze lay out, first at the far mountains on the sides of which the air was white as milk, then lower, at the specks of Cox’s Tanks upon the valley floor. This brought to mind Miss Martha Cox, with whom he might be in love and might not. The sister of Jacob Cox, she was a tanned leathery customer as old as the sergeant, which put her nigh on forty-four, too old and sensible for male and female farandoles. She ran the ranch with her brother, plowed with a pistol round her waist, spat and scratched herself like a man, and her reputation with a rifle, after twenty y
ears of raids, caused even the Apaches to give the Cox spread leeway. Swing had seen her five times in six months during his turns to go down with Annie and Grover to pack water. Only once, the last trip, had anything passed between them.

  “Ain’t you considerable mountain-sore, Mister Swing?”

  “Suppose I am,” says he.

  “Seems to me settling down would be suitable to you.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Sure,” says she. “Marry up and raise a fam’ly and whittle your own stick.”

  “Too old, Miss Cox.”

  “Too old?”

  “Old as you are,” says he.

  He knew his blunder when he saw the turkey-red under her tan. She squinted at the mules, then gave him a granite eye.

  “Mister Swing, if ever you alter your mind, I know the very one would have you.”

  “Who, ma’am?”

  “Annie,” says she.

  For the next few days Ammon Swing was much put on. The little Indians soon swarmed over the station, playing games, ingratiating themselves with the soldiers, eventually sitting on their knees to beg for trinkets. Shoo as hard as he might, the sergeant could not put a stop to it. Down the ledge the three squaws went on baking mescal and inevitably there commenced to be visiting back and forth. Takins was the first caught skulking off.

  “Takins,” says the sergeant, “I told you to stay shy of them.”

  “I be only humin, Sarge,” grumbles the cook, which was doubtful, considering his fragrance.

  “You keep off, that’s an order!” says Swing, losing his temper. “Or I’ll sent you back to Buford to the guardhouse!”

  “You will, Sarge?” Takins grins. “Nothin’ I’d like better ’n to git off this cussed mountin’!”

  Thus it was that the sergeant’s authority went to pot and his command to pieces. Men on guard straggled down the ledge to observe the baking and weaving of baskets and converse sociably in sign. The ladies in turn, led by Mrs. Noseless, a powerful brute of a woman, paid daily calls on the station to watch the operation of the heliostat and giggle at the unnatural ways of the whites.