by Les Weil
"But we don't tell about it, do we?" he dared me. And said quickly, "No, no, we don't even want to hear anybody else tell. Not because we're afraid for him. No, we're afraid our own eyes will give us away. We're afraid that sitting there hearing him and looking at him we'll let the pack know that our souls have done that too, gone barefoot and gaping with horror, scrambling in the snow of the clearing in the black woods, with the pack in the shadows behind them. That's what makes us sick to hear fear admitted, or lust, or even anger, any of the things that would make the pack believe that we were either weak or dangerous."
He turned his face fully toward me, furious and challenging. "That is what makes you sick now, to hear me," he told me. "That's what makes you so damned superior and cold and quiet." His voice choked him so I thought he was going to cry. "You're just hiding the truth, even from yourself," he babbled.
My hands were twitching, but I didn't say anything.
Then he said more quietly, "You think I'm crazy, don't you? It always seems crazy to tell the truth. We don't like it; we won't admit what we are. So I'm crazy."
I was thinking that. I don't like to hear a man pouring out his insides without shame. And taking it for granted everyone else must be like him. You'd have thought he was God, making everyone in his own pattern. Still, he was a kid and weak and unhappy, and his own father, they said, was his enemy.
"Every man's got a right to his own opinion," I told him.
After a moment he said, "Yes," low and to his saddlehorn.
Having heard myself speak I realized that queerly, weak and bad-tempered as it was, there had been something in the kid's raving which had made the canyon seem to swell out and become immaterial until you could think the whole world, the universe, into the half-darkness around you : millions of souls swarming like fierce, tiny, pale stars, shining hard, winking about cores of minute, mean feelings, thoughts and deeds. To me his idea appeared just the opposite of Davies'. To the kid, what everybody thought was low and wicked, and their hanging together was a mere disguise of their evil. To Davies, what everybody thought became, just because everybody thought it, just and fine, and to act up to what they thought was to elevate oneself. And yet both of them gave you that feeling of thinking outside yourself, in a big place; the kid gave me that feeling even more, if anything, though he was disgusting. You could feel what he meant; you could only think what Davies meant.
I heard him talking again. "Why are we riding up here, twenty-eight of us," he demanded, "when every one of us would rather be doing something else?"
"I thought you said we liked killing?"
"Not so directly as this," he said. "Not so openly. Not many of us, at least. We're doing it because we're in the pack, because we're afraid not to be in the pack. We don't dare show our pack weakness; we don't dare resist the pack."
"What do you want us to do," I asked him, "sit and play a harp and worry about how bad we are while some damned rustler kills a man and cleans out the country?"
"It isn't that," he said. "How many of us do you think are really here because there have been cattle stolen, or because Kinkaid was shot?"
"I'm not wrong about your being here, am I?" I asked him.
Then he was quiet. I felt mean. The thing that made me sorest about this whole talk was that I knew the kid was just scared. I knew he didn't want to quarrel; but he talked so you couldn't do anything else.
"No," he said finally. "I'm here, all right." He had dug himself up by the roots to say that.
"Well?" I said, easier.
"I'm here because I'm weak," he said, "and my father's not."
There wasn't anything a guy could say to that. It made me feel as I had once listening to a man describing just how he'd got to a woman, undressing her, so to speak, right in front of us, even telling us what she'd said; a woman we all knew at that. But at least he'd been drunk.
"That doesn't help, does it?" young Tetley was asking.
"I'm not claiming to be superior to anyone else," he said. "I'm not. I'm not fit to be alive. I know better than to do what I do. I've always known better, and not done it."
He burst out, "And that's hell; can you understand that that's hell?"
"You kind of take it for granted nobody else is as smart as you are, don't you, kid?" I asked him.
He hunched over the saddle, twisting the front of his coat, I thought, with one hand. It was too dusky to be sure. After a while he answered, as if he had forgotten what I'd said, and then remembered it again.
"I didn't mean it that way," he said. He sounded far away and tired; ashamed he'd said so much. It was as if he'd been on a jag, but it was over now and he was feeling sick. He couldn't let it drop, though.
"Maybe I am crazy, in a way," he said very quietly.
"You take it too hard, son," I told him. "You didn't start this."
"But I know this," he said, "if we get those men and hang them, I'll kill myself. I'll hang myself."
Louder he said, "I tell you I won't go on living and remembering I saw a thing like this; was part of it myself. I couldn't. I'd go really crazy."
Then he said, quietly again, "It's better to kill yourself than to kill somebody else. That settles the mess anyway; really settles it."
I'd had enough. I'd heard drunks talk like this and it was half funny, but the kid was cold sober.
"We haven't hung anybody yet," I told him. "You can go home and keep your own hands clean."
"No, I can't," he said.
"I can't," he said again; "and if I could it wouldn't matter. What do I matter?"
"You seem to think you matter a lot," I said.
I could see the pale patch of his face turned toward me in the dusk, then away again.
"It does sound that way, doesn't it?" he asked, as if I was wrong.
I began humming the "Buffalo Gal" to myself. He didn't say anything more, but after a bit dropped back and rode beside Sparks. They didn't talk, because I stopped humming and heard Sparks still singing to himself.
At the first level stretch in the road we stopped to breathe the horses. It was dark now, and really cold, not just chilly. There was frost on my blanket roll when I went to get my sheepskin out. The sheepskin was good, cutting the wind right away, and I swung my arms across my chest to get warm inside it. Others were warming themselves too. I could see them spreading and closing like dark ghosts, and hear the thump of their fists.
Gil came up alongside and peered to make sure who it was. Then he said, "Doing this in the middle of the night is crazy. Moore don't like it much either," he added. We sat there, listening to the horses breathe, and some of the other men talking in low voices.
Gil was still worrying about the dark. "If it hadn't clouded up," he said, "there would have been a full moon tonight, bright as day." Gil knew his sky like the palm of his hand. One place and another I'd read quite a lot about the sun and moon and the constellations, but I could never remember it. Gil had never read anything, but he always knew.
When the horses were breathing quietly again, and beginning to stamp, we started on, Gil and I riding together, which felt more natural. Except right in front of us and right behind us, we couldn't see the riders. We could only hear small sounds of foot and saddle and voice from along the line. The sounds were short, flat and toneless, just bits coming back on the rushing of the creek. Gil was quiet, for him. He didn't talk or hum; he didn't change position in his saddle or play with the quirt end of his bridle. He didn't look around. There wasn't much to see, of course, the broken shadows of the forest against the fainter but rearing and uniform shadow that was the mountain rising across the creek; that and the patches of snow, bigger and more numerous, showing at vague distances through the trees, like huge, changing creatures standing upright and seeming to move. Even so a man will usually look around even more when it's dark, unless he's got saddle-sleepy and dazed. Gil wasn't sleepy; he wasn't sitting his horse like a sleepy man. If I knew him, he was thinking about something he didn't like. I should have let
him alone, but I didn't.
"Still seeing those three guys reaching for the barrels, Gil?"
"No," he said, coming out of it. "I'd forgot all about them until you mentioned it. Why should I worry about that now?"
"What's eating you?"
He didn't say anything.
"I thought you liked excitement," I said. "I thought you'd be honing for something to do."
"I've got nothing against hanging a rustler," he said loudly. The riders ahead turned in their saddles and peered back at us. One of them hissed at us angrily. That made me sore on account of Gil; we were like that, fight each other a good part of the time, but be happier to pitch in together on somebody else. Though there was a difference between us. Gil really liked to fight, liked to let his temper slip and to feel the sweat and the hitting. I just fought because Gil got so pig headed and insulting when he wanted to fight that I had to or feel yellow.
"Why all the secret?" I said, as loud as Gil had. "Afraid the three of them will round us up?"
The man who had hissed pulled his horse in and reined half around. It was old Bartlett. For a minute I thought he was coming for us. But Gil rode right over toward him, like he would love to mix it, and Bartlett turned back into line, though slowly, to show he wasn't afraid of Gil.
When we were straightened out, Gil said, "It ain't that I don't believe in gettin' a killer, any way you have to. But I don't like it in the dark. There's always some fool will get wild and plug anything that moves; like young Greene there, or Smith, or maybe young Tetley."
"He won't do any shooting," I said.
"Maybe not; but he scares easy; he's scared now. And he's got a gun."
He went on, "That ain't what bothers me most, though. I like to pick my bosses. We didn't pick any bosses here, but we got 'em just the same. We was just herded in. So, and who herded us in? That kid Greene, if I remember, with a wild-eyed story he couldn't get straight, and Smith and Bartlett blowing off, and Osgood because he got us sore. That's a sweet outfit to tell you what you're going to do, ain't it?"
"They didn't really get us in," I said.
"They started us, them and Farnley. Not that Farnley's like them; Farnley's got plenty of sand. But when he's mad he's crazy. He's no kind of a guy to have in this business. When he's mad he can't think at all. He don't rile cool.
"I remember once," he began narrating, "I saw Farnley get mad. We was together in Hazey's outfit over on the Humboldt. It was beef roundup. Some wise guy, trying to improve his stock, had got a lot of long-horns in with his reds that spring. They was big as a chuckwagon, and wild. Some of 'em you couldn't drive; they was fast as a pony, and didn't want to bunch, like a steer. You had to get 'em one at a time with a rope, like you would for branding.
"Well, in the thick of it, all dust and flurry, one of these long-horns, a big gray-splotched fellow with legs like a horse and nine feet of horns, got under Farnley's pony and ripped him open like splitting a fish; the guts sagged right out in a belch of black blood. The steer pulled loose all right, but he'd got in deeper than it looked at first. The pony, stiff-legged, tried to get away from him, but then, all of a sudden, came red blood, a lot of it, and he went over all at once, his legs folding right under him. Farnley got clear, he's quick as a cat and smooth. But then you know what he done? He took one look at the pony, it was his best one, one he'd had four years, and then he went wild-eyed for that steer. Yes he did, on his feet, no gun or anything; like he thought he could break its neck with his hands. Lucky I saw him, and there was another fellow, Cornwall, Corny we called him, not too far off that I yelled to. We got the steer turned off before he'd more than punched one hole under Farnley's ribs; not too deep, a sort of rip along the side. And even then it wasn't enough for Farnley. He fought us like a wildcat to get at the critter again. I was sore enough to let him go ahead and be mashed, but Corny'd known him a long time, and knew how he got. So Corny climbs down, and says to me, 'Let him come,' and when I let Farnley go he went for Corny milling. Corny just stood there cool and knocked him out with one punch. He folded up like an empty sack, and we had to get water from the chuck-wagon to bring him to.
"You'd think that was enough, wouldn't you? Corny'd risked his own neck plenty, gettin' down in the middle of all that. The steer was near as wild as Farnley was, dodging around us, trying to get in another poke. I had all I could do to keep heading him out. He was blood crazy, and I didn't relish the idea of losing my pony the same way. But do you think Famley said thanks? He did not. Lying there in the shade of the chuck-wagon, while the cook tied up his side the best he could, he kept looking at us like he wanted to take a knife to both of us. By Godfreys, if he had of tried something I'da let him have it fer a nickel. Corny made me come off.
"It was pretty near the end of roundup before Farnley'd even see us when he went by. And he never did mention the thing, not to this day. That's how long he can stay thst way."
I thought Gil was off the track, but he wasn't.
"And that's the guy that's going to do something when it comes to doing something," he said.
"He's had a lot of time to think it over," I reminded him. "It's not the same. Tetley can stop him."
"Not Tetley or anybody else," Gil said. "And that's other thing. Who picked Tetley? He's not our man, the damn reb dude."
"It was Tetley brought us, when it came to the showdown," I said.
"I don't like it," Gil said.
"We can quit," I reminded him. "There's no law makes us be part of this posse."
Gil said quickly, "Hell, no. I'll see this thing out as far as any man will.
"You watch yourself," he added, "don't you let Davies and Osgood, or that loose-mouth Tyler, get to you. There's not a damn thing they can do to us as long as we stick together, and they know it."
"I didn't bring this up," I reminded him.
"Neither did I," he said, "I'm just warnin' you we got keep an eye on some of these guys. Farnley and Bartlett and Winder and Mapes, and Tetley too. No slick-smiling bastard's going to suck me into a job I don't like, that's all."
"Have your own way, whatever way that is."
"Shut up," he ordered.
We rode along saying nothing then, Gil still angry because he couldn't make his feelings agree, and me laughing at him, though not out loud. He'd have ridden right over me if I'd even peeped. We came to a steeper pitch, where I could feel Blue Boy's shoulders pump under the saddle and hear his breath coming in jerks. Then we came into a narrows and I knew we were nearly at the top of the pass. The road there just hung on the face of a cliff, and the other wall across the creek wasn't more than twenty feet away. On a night as dark as that you wouldn't think it could get any darker, but it did in that narrows. The wall went straight up beside us, probably forty or fifty feet. The clambering of the horses echoed a little against it even with the wind, and with the creek roaring as if we were on the edge of it. The wind was strong in the slot, and smelled like snow again. We all hugged the cliff side of the road, not being able to see the drop-off side clearly. I was on the inside, and sometimes my foot scraped the wall, and sometimes Gil and I clicked stirrups, he had pulled over so far. His horse sensed the edge and didn't like it, and kept twisting around trying to face it.
"A nice place for a holdup," Gil said, showing he was willing to talk again.
"In here three men could do in a hundred," I agreed.
"But they won't."
"I wouldn't think so."
After a minute I said, "It's going to snow."
He must have been testing the wind himself; then he said, "Hell. Won't that be just lovely! Still," he said, "it can't be much of a storm this time of year."
"I don't know. I remember trying to get through Eagle Pass the first week in June one year. I had to go back; the horse was up to his belly and we weren't half way to the summit. A fellow bringing the mail across on snowshoes said there was nine feet at the summit. He had a stick poked in up there with notches on it."
"Yeh, but that wa
sn't all new snow."
"Every inch of it. The trail had been clear two days before."
"Eagle Pass is higher, though."
"Some. But this is nearly eight thousand. That's high enough."
"Maybe they'll have to call it off," Gil suggested.
"Depend on how much of a lead they thought the rustlers had."
"Well, it won't be any picnic," Gil said, "but we'll be making a lot better time than they can. This was a fool way to come with cattle. And they'd have to stop when it got dark, too. You can't drive cattle on this road in the dark."
"By the same sign," I said, "we could go right by them and never know it."
Gil thought. Then he said, "Not unless they stopped in the Ox-Bow. There's no place else from here to the Hole where they could get forty head of cattle off the road."
The Ox-Bow was a little valley up in the heart of the range. Gil and I had stayed there a couple of days once, on the loose. It was maybe two or three miles long and half or three quarters of a mile wide. The peaks were stacked up on all sides of it, showing snow most of the summer. The creek in the middle of it wound back on itself like a snake trying to get started on loose sand, and that shape had named the valley. There was sloping meadow on both sides of the creek, and in the late spring millions of purple and gold violets grew there, violets with blossoms as big as the ball of a man's thumb. Beyond the meadow, on each side, there was timber to the tops of the hills. It was a lovely, chill, pine-smelling valley, as lonely as you could want. Scarcely anybody came there unless there was a dry season. Just once in a while, if you passed in the late summer, you'd see a sheepherder small out in the middle, with his burro and dogs and flock. The rest of the time the place belonged to squirrels, chipmunks and mountain jays. They would all be lively in the edge of the wood, scolding and flirting.