The Smoky Years

by Alan Lemay

  "I don't understand you."

  Marquita's glance swept the room the bare chinked walls, the dead boy. Her glance seemed to go beyond the door, where they were dressing Old Joe's wound: beyond the walls, to the cold windswept prairie, where men still rode this night, though morning was close.

  "What do you know," she said "what can you know of the lives of these men?"

  Jody lifted her head, then, and looked at Marquita; and again the simple words and the mask-like face of Marquita seemed to have a meaning for which she groped. In the silence that followed, it came to Jody that the night's fighting was not yet over, that she must still fight for herself and for Bill and somehow for that foolish house in Ogallala, with its tall tower overlooking the plain.

  "I was raised with Billy Roper," she said, stretching a point. But even as she said the words, she knew by Marquita's smile that this dance hall girl recognized the lie.

  "Through all this time, where have you been?"

  "You should know," Jody said with a flash of spirit. "My cowboys broke this thing wide open tonight!"

  Jody felt the strange obsidian eyes stroke the whole length of her body, as if she were being undressed. "Your cowboys?" asked Marquita. "You mean your father's cowboys, no? Do you belong to one of these men, do one of these men belong to you?"

  Marquita stood up, and, with the slow and deliberate stride that seemed a dramatization of her smile, she went to the window, and with one thumb tested a jag of the glass that the dead boy had struck out when he downed Jim Leathers. For a moment her profile stood pale against that outer night which, moonless and starless, seemed to open into a world without direction, without any heartening or familiar landmark. Jody felt suddenly empty and lost.

  "Do you ride with them?" the gentle, inexorable voice went on. "Do you share their blankets? Do you ride under their ponchos in the rain? Where are you when their guns speak? Who prays for them at dawn, knees down in this God-forsaken snow?"

  Marquita paused, and her body swung, lazily assured, across a shadowy angle of the room toward the closed door that had hid Roper, working now over the wounded men. Her hands were spread against the doorposts and it seemed to Jody, watching her, as if Marquita were a barrier between what might have been Jody's, and that she had lost now.

  "You don't have to bar the door," she said.

  Marquita's hands came away from the doorposts. "I know I don't."

  The words were so indolently cadenced that they might have been spoken in Spanish. And at their soft assurance something awoke in Jody Gordon.... Something was still worth fighting for. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Bill Roper, but it flowed deep into the roots of her life; deeper than her life with one man with any man could ever flow. And as she looked at Marquita, strange things came to her, that she herself could not have put into words.

  Into her mind came the faces of Texas women, women with level, honest eyes and gnarled hands. Behind them were shadowy generations of other enduring women-all the westward pushing generations who had given so much of themselves to the land. Those women dared all things, faced all things; but somehow, always and immutably, they carried with them the traditions of a way of living.

  When Jody Gordon thought of those women, she knew that Marquita and all her kind would presently pass. Perhaps Bill Roper, like all the rest of his bold riders, must also pass; but now suddenly Jody knew that whatever else might vanish from this prairie, what she herself stood for would remain. The hard riding and the savage raiding, the violent de struction and the violent pleasure when those were gone there would remain certain quiet things....

  When she spoke at last, she scarcely recognized her own voice. It seemed to her that in the quiet her thoughts were going up those long dusty trails that had been King-Gordon's. And she was thinking forward, too, into a future where those trails would lead, even though Bill Roper would not be on them.

  "I guess I was wrong," she said. Her words had a strange echo of Marquita's own directness. "You're Bill Roper's girl is that what you wanted to tell me?"

  The dance hall girl's words fell softly. "Si, that is what I wanted you to know."

  Jody stood up. She felt suddenly tired and numb.

  "I still think a world can be made where decency can live," she said.

  Beyond the splintered window the wind blew bitter off the prairie, where there was yet no hint of light. But Jody's head was up; her eyes were grey and clear. She seemed to speak through the smashed window frame to the dawn which could not be far off.

  "Leave us out of account," she said. "Some day, decent things will live on this prairie, whatever happens to us. But meantime - I guess he belongs to you."

  She held Marquita's stare for a moment, then turned and walked to the door. Opening it, she saw that the first forlorn cold grey of the winter dawn was coming into the sky east of Montana. The black hulk of the horse whose neck she had broken lay at her feet. She pulled from under it the coat with which she had blinded it when she charged the door, and pulled it on; the bitter cold of the dawn was enough to penetrate to the bones.

  Slowly she uncinched and worked the saddle free, then the bridle. She staggered a little as she shouldered the saddle, and walked out toward the corral where other, living ponies stood, dark humpedup shapes against the snow.

  ILL ROPER and Bob Stokes-The KingGordon cowboy whom Roper had not knownhad finished their makeshift dressing of Old Joe's wound, and were working on Jim Leathers by the time Marquita returned. Jim Leathers lay perfectly still; only his eyes seemed alive. Those grey, hard eyes watched them while they examined him, but he made no attempt to speak.

  "How's she feeling?" Bill Roper asked Marquita without looking up.

  "The Gordon girl? She's all right. She went out to look over the horses or something."

  "The Cheyenne Indians have a special way of doctoring a chest wound," Bob Stokes offered. "They catch as many red ants as they can get hold of, and they shove as many as they can in the wound, and eat the rest."

  "That's a real helpful suggestion," Roper complimented him. "Won't black ants do instead of red? Because we haven't got any black ants, either. Pull yourself together, Bob."

  Old Joe had tangled with Jim Leathers before and hated his guts. "We'll send to Texas for some," he croaked. "What the hell? He's got plenty time."

  Bob Stokes tossed over his shoulder to Marquita, "Get some more hot water, you."

  "Bob, you better go see nothing's happened to Jody."

  "I'll go in a minute, soon as we're through here."

  But Jody came in of her own accord, before that. She went straight to Old Joe.

  "Are you terribly uncomfortable, Joe?"

  "I feel great," Joe said with spirit. "I been hunting for a vacation for fifteen years, and this is my first excuse!"

  "I'm sorry, Joe. You'll never know how sorry I am. I tangled things up pretty badly, I guess."

  "You done wonderful," Joe told her. "You saved Bill's neck, all right. They had him hog-tied like a mosshorn, and the girl, too, when we busted in."

  Jody shot Marquita a glance in which the only light was a faint contempt, but she did not comment.

  "I'm riding back to Miles," she told Joe. "On the way I'll send help back, and everything you'll need. And I'll see that you're moved in a spring wagon, soon as you feel like moving. I appreciate what you've done, Joe; more than I can ever tell you."

  She stooped over swiftly and kissed his cheek before she turned to Bob Stokes. "Bob, you're staying here. I'll send someone to help you as quickly as I can. But if they're not here tonight they'll come some time tomorrow at the latest. Good luck to you; I'm leaving now." And she kissed Bob Stokes, too.

  "Hey, look," Bob Stokes began. "You can't be riding off like this in the middle of the night!"

  "It's coming daylight, fast. I'll be all right."

  As the door closed behind her, Bob Stokes smothered an oath and started after her; but Roper stopped him. "You'll stay here."

  "How come you to be giving o
rders?" Stokes flared at him.

  "I give orders wherever I am."

  Outside, in the grey light that seemed colder than the air, Jody Gordon had mounted as Bill Roper came to her stirrup.

  "You mustn't go yet," he told her gently. "These boys are fixed as comfortable as they can be; there's no hurry to get help. You'll be wanting some coffee; and I have to talk to you, Jody."

  "I'm not interested in talking to you," Jody said without expression.

  "Why, Jody-look here"

  "I got you into this," Jody said. "I got you into this because I was a fool. So I had to get you out. That's all over now. I don't want to talk to you, now, or any time."

  Roper, deeply puzzled, studied her gravely. "Jody," he asked, "tell me just one thing. Why did you come looking for me at Fork Creek?"

  Jody's voice broke abruptly, under the pressure of an emotion he could not identify. "Because I was a fool, an unbelievable fool! Such a fool as I'll never be again...."

  She whirled her horse sharply, so that its hoofs, breaking the crust, sent up a scurry of dry snow; then she was gone, her retreat covered by the cabin as she swung toward the trail.

  For a moment Roper stood looking after her. Then he stepped inside.

  "You'll stay here, Bob," he said. Nobody ever knew Roper himself did not know-why men who took orders from nobody else automatically took orders from him. "I'll saddle and ride after her; I'll see that she gets to Miles."

  "Wait a minute," Old Joe said. "You got to wait a minute! There's something else you got to know."

  "There's nothing else I need to know."

  "For one thing, every peace officer in Miles is waiting to lay hands on you, and you can't go there."

  "I was going to Miles anyway," Roper said. "I want to talk to Lew Gordon."

  "Lew Gordon airft in Miles!"

  "Then where the devil is he? His daughter-"

  "Somebody-Jim Leathers, I guess-sent a note to Lew Gordon that his daughter was all right, but couldn't be sent home just yet. Nobody signed that note. But it was plain to be seen from it that some war party of Ben Thorpe's was holding her some place. So Lew Gordon-"

  "How do you know all this?"

  "I was pony-riding back and forwards with Lew Gordon's orders on how we should go about hunting for Jody; and I happened to be there when this note came in. Lew Gordon well, you can imagine how Lew Gordon took it."

  "He blew up," Roper suggested.

  "Well, no that was a funny thing. He didn't exactly blow up. He just sits quiet for a long time. Then he says, This is the last straw; this sure is the last straw.' And after a long time he sets out to cleaning that big old Betsy gun."

  "You mean that Lew Gordon is going on the warpath himself? Hunting for Jody?"

  "He's going after it straighter than that. Everybody knows Ben Thorpe is at Sundance. Lew Gordon has gone to Sundance to tie into Ben Thorpe, and his old gun is hammering away at his side."

  "He figures to fight Thorpe?"

  "Bill, it sure as hell looks that way to me. What's strange about that? Thorpe has punished away at Lew Gordon all his life. He's stole his cattle and killed his trail bosses, and fought him in the market fit to break them both, and finally he kills Lew's partner, and still he keeps on." A dry twist of a smile appeared on Old Joe's leathery face. "I could have told Ben he'd better look out-some day he was liable to do something to make Lew mad."

  "Joe," Bill Roper said, "Joe Walk Lasham himself is with Ben Thorpe!"

  "Well-I ain't surprised."

  "But God Almighty, Joe, if he walks into a fight with those two, all hell can't save him! He's as good as dead, the minute he walks in there!"

  "That," said Old Joe, "is what I figured you ought to know."

  T WAS very early; the sun was only just breaking over the winter-starved prairie, that Sunday morning as Bill Roper splashed through the creek that runs by Sundance, and rode into the little town. Overhead the sky was such, a clear crystalline blue as Bill Roper had not seen since he left Texas, and underfoot his tired pony was sinking fetlock deep in thawed mud. The mud itself was predicting a spring which Roper believed now he would never see.

  Without sign from the rider, Roper's pony drew up before the Palace Hotel and Livery-a falsefronted building in a street of false fronts perhaps attracted by no more than the smell of stored hay.

  With some difficulty Bill Roper roused a sleepy and resentful individual upon whom the Missouri hills were written plain.

  "Feed this pony, and feed him well."

  Casually Roper strolled along the corral where stood the loose horses which were being boarded here. He was chewing a straw as he came back to the sleepy man who was now shaking down hay.

  "I see you have a 9B horse there - a good one."

  "Yeah?"

  "I figure Lew Gordon rode that horse in?"

  "And supposin' he did?"

  "Where is he stopping?"

  "How the hell should I know? This dump is good enough for his horse, but it ain't good enough for him. He went to sleep with some friend or something, out at the edge of town."

  Roper produced his tobacco and papers and slowly made himself a cigarette.

  "I'll take a room facing on this street," he said.

  "No you won't."

  "Why won't I?"

  "Last night was Saturday night. Rooms all filled up."

  At this point the argument was interrupted in a curious way. A tall and haggard man, in strangely nondescript clothes that were obviously not the clothes of a rider, appeared from the street. "You boys coming to church?"

  "Church?"

  "I've built a little church at the end of this street, in the name of the Lord; I carry the word of the Lord in this outlandish place. At the time of the service, you will hear its bell...."

  Roper remembered the ramshackle little hut to which the far-wandering preacher referred; he had seen it as he had ridden in-a pitiful edifice of crooked boards, with a little makeshift bell tower in which hung some lost bell, that nobody else wanted.

  Roper rummaged in his pocket and found a silver dollar. "Take this. Take this, and God help your work, and get goin'..."

  "I don't know whether he hurts business or helps it," the sleepy stableman said as the fantastic figure ambled away.

  Roper shrugged. "I'll take a front room on the street," he said again,

  "They're all-"

  "I don't care anything about that."

  In the end, because this man always commanded others, a last night's drunk was carried out of a front room above the stable-the room which Roper wanted; and Roper sat at last with his heels caught in the window sill, resting as he regarded the empty street.

  That Ben Thorpe was here was known to every cattleman in the north country. Ben Thorpe had been here many weeks; it was to Thorpe that Bill Roper was to have been delivered, here, if a kid horse wrangler following Jody Gordon had not shot Jim Leathers down. But, by the fine, hard-ridden 9B horse which Lew Gordon had ridden in, Bill Roper knew that Gordon had not been here long. He judged that he had got here in time.

  Lew Gordon would hardly rest from the saddle without making his rendezvous with Thorpe. Presently Lew Gordon, or Ben Thorpe or both would walk along this quiet street, under this clear blue sky, through this fresh atmosphere of spring that one of them was not to see again...

  Bill Roper sat there a long time. Seven o'clock passed, and eight, and nine, while he smoked and waited. He watched an old Mexican woman emerge from one nondescript house-front and take refuge in another. He watched a razor-back pig wander out into the mud of the street, and a cur Indian dog drive it away again. He watched the gaunt preacher at his unhopeful task of canvassing for strays who might be persuaded into the little church he had brought here before its time.

  Ten o'clock passed, and ten-thirty.

  Then upon the quiet main street of Sundance appeared a figure that he knew the one he had been waiting for.

  It seemed to Bill Roper that Lew Gordon walked like a younger ma
n than Roper had remembered. Bill Roper knew Lew Gordon by the flash of silver in his short beard, by the old hat, curiously like Dusty King's, which Lew Gordon had never changed. But he had to look twice to be sure that this man with the springy stride and erect bearing was the Lew Gordon he had known.

  When he was sure, Bill Roper stood up and stretched; he filled his lungs with air, and at last let it go again, with a whoof like that of a pony which knows that it has come to the end of the long trail.

  He drew a last drag from his cigarette, and strapped on the gunbelt which he had laid aside. Unhurriedly, he three or four times drew the iron from its leather, to be sure that it was running free. Then, with a purely unconscious motion, he cocked his hat over one eye and went down into the street.

  The drowsy Missourian was not in evidence as Roper walked through the stable; the raider took time to be sure that his hard-ridden pony was well cared for before he left the Palace Hotel and Livery. He believed he had plenty of time.

  He knew that Lew Gordon had gone into the Red Dog Saloon, and he walked toward it now. He was keenly conscious of the squish of his boot heels in the mud a sound he had always hated; but now that he believed he would never hear it again it was dear to him, as dear to him as breathing, as dear as needed food. All the blue sky, and all the gaunt prairie, melting out from under the winter snow, and the wet breeze from the spaces, and the sunlight itself all these were incredibly precious to him, now that he believed he had come to the end. He drew deep breaths of that air that was both crisp and wet; and, turning his eyes to the blinding smash of the young sun itself, he knew that he did not want to die.

  Down at the end of the street, where stood the ramshackle church with its crazy little steeple, half a dozen pigeons circled symbols of a homely peace that Roper had never known. For a moment Bill Roper, raider, night-rider, gunfighter-dreaded name of the Long Trail experienced a twist of the heart, terrible, unbelievably acute. Then he shrugged, and walked into the Red Dog Bar.