The Ox-Bow Incident

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  He spit aside on the floor, and then glared at Davies.

  That hatred of the railroad was Winder’s only original notion, and when he got mad that always came in some way. Everything else was what he’d heard somebody, or most everybody, say, only he always got angry enough to make it sound like a conviction. His trouble was that he was a one-love man, and stagecoaching was his one love. Guard and driver, he’d been in it from the start with Wells Fargo on the Santa Fe, but it had such a short life he’d outlasted it, and by now, 1885, Lincoln dead and Grant out, the railroads had everything but these little sidelines, like Winder’s. The driving was still tough enough, but the pay was poor as a puncher’s and the driver was no hero any more. Winder took it personally.

  Davies knew how he was, and let him cool. Then he said, without looking up, “Legal action’s not always just, that’s true.”

  “You’re damn shootin’ it ain’t.”

  “What would you say real justice was, Bill?”

  Winder got cautious. “Whadya mean?” he asked.

  “I mean, if you had to say what justice was, how would you put it?”

  That wouldn’t have been easy for anyone. It made Winder wild. He couldn’t stand getting reined down logical.

  “It sure as hell ain’t lettin’ things go till any sneakin’ cattle thief can shoot a man down and only get a laugh out of it. It ain’t that, anyway,” he defended.

  “No, it certainly isn’t that,” Davies agreed.

  “It’s seein’ that everybody gets what’s comin’ to him, that’s what it is,” Winder said.

  Davies thought that over. “Yes,” he said, “that’s about it.”

  “You’re damn shootin’ it is.”

  “But according to whom?” Davies asked him.

  “Whadya mean, ‘according to whom’?” Winder wanted to know, saying “whom” like it tasted bad.

  “I mean, who decides what everybody’s got coming to him?”

  Winder looked at us, daring us to grin. “We do,” he said belligerently.

  “Who are we?”

  “Who the hell would we be? The rest of us. The straight ones.”

  Gabe was standing up and looking at us again, with his hands working. Winder saw him.

  “Sit down, you big ape,” he yelled at him. “I told you once this is none of your business.” Gabe sat down, but kept watching us, looking worried. Winder felt better. It pleased him to see Gabe mind.

  Davies said, “Yes, I guess you’re right. It’s the rest of us who decide.”

  “It couldn’t be any other way,” Winder boasted.

  “No; no, it couldn’t. Though men have tried.”

  “They couldn’t get away with it.”

  “Not in the long run,” Davies agreed. “Not if you make the ‘we’ big enough, so it takes in everybody.”

  “Sure it does.”

  “But how do we decide?” Davies asked, as if it were troubling him.

  “Decide what?”

  “Who’s got what coming to him?”

  “How does anybody? You just know, don’t you? You know murder’s not right and you know rustlin’s not right, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but what makes us feel so sure they aren’t?”

  “God, what a fool question,” Winder said. “They’re against the law. Anybody …” Then he saw where he was, and his neck began to get red. But Davies wasn’t being just smart. He let his clincher go and made his point, mostly for Gil and me, that it took a bigger “we” than the valley to justify a hanging, and that the only way to get it was to let the law decide.

  “If we go out and hang two or three men,” he finished, “without doing what the law says, forming a posse and bringing the men in for trial, then by the same law, we’re not officers of justice, but due to be hanged ourselves.”

  “And who’ll hang us?” Winder wanted to know.

  “Maybe nobody,” Davies admitted. “Then our crime’s worse than a murderer’s. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.”

  “That’s cuttin’ it pretty thin,” Gil said.

  He’d let himself in. Davies turned to him. “It sounds like it at first,” he said earnestly, “but think it over and it isn’t.” And he went on to prove how the greater “we,” as he called it, could absorb a few unpunished criminals, but not unpunished extra-legal justice. He took examples out of history. He proved that it was equally true if the disregard was by a ruler or by a people. “It spreads like a disease,” he said. “And it’s infinitely more deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it’s simply inefficient, or even than when its elected administrators are crooked.”

  “But what if it don’t work at all,” Gil said; and Winder grinned.

  “Then we have to make it work.”

  “God,” Winder said patiently, “that’s what we’re tryin’ to do.” And when Davies repeated they would be if they formed a posse and brought the men in for trial, he said, “Yeah; and then if your law lets them go?”

  “They probably ought to be let go. At least there’ll be a bigger chance that they ought to be let go than that a lynch gang can decide whether they ought to hang.” Then he said a lynch gang always acts in a panic, and has to get angry enough to overcome its panic before it can kill, so it doesn’t ever really judge, but just acts on what it’s already decided to do, each man afraid to disagree with the rest. He tried to prove to us that lynchers knew they were wrong; that their secrecy proved it, and their sense of guilt afterward.

  “Did you ever know a lyncher who wasn’t afraid to talk about it afterward?” he asked us.

  “How would we know?” Winder asked him. “We never knew a lyncher. We’ll tell you later,” he added, grinning.

  I said that with the law it was still men who had to decide, and sometimes no better men than the rest of us.

  “That’s true,” Davies said, “but the poorest of them is better fitted to judge than we are. He has three big things in his favor: time, precedent, and the consent of the majority that he shall act for them.”

  I thought about it. “I can see how the time would count,” I said.

  He explained that precedent and the consent of the majority lessened personal responsibility and gave a man more than his own opinion to go on, so he wasn’t so likely to panic or be swung by a mob feeling. He got warmed up like a preacher with real faith on his favorite sermon, and at the end was pleading with us again, not to go as a lynching party, not to weaken the conscience of the nation, not to commit this sin against society.

  “Sin against society,” Winder said, imitating a woman with a lisp.

  “Just that,” Davies said passionately, and suddenly pointed his finger at Winder so Winder’s wry, angry grin faded into a watchful look. Davies’ white, indoor face was hard with his intensity, his young-looking eyes shining, his big mouth drawn down to be firm, but trembling a little, as if he were going to cry. You can think what you want later, but you have to listen to a man like that.

  “Yes,” he repeated, “a sin against society. Law is more than the words that put it on the books; law is more than any decisions that may be made from it; law is more than the particular code of it stated at any one time or in any one place or nation; more than any man, lawyer or judge, sheriff or jailer, who may represent it. True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind. None of man’s temples, none of his religions, none of his weapons, his tools, his arts, his sciences, nothing else he has grown to, is so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice. The true law is something in itself; it is the spirit of the moral nature of man; it is an existence apart, like God, and as worthy of worship as God. If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of
the conscience of all men in all time?”

  He stopped, not as if he had finished, but as if he suddenly saw he was wasting something precious.

  “Sin against society,” Winder repeated the same way, and got up.

  Gil got up too. “That may be all true,” he said, “but it don’t make any difference now.”

  “No,” Winder said, “we’re in it now.”

  Gil asked, “Why didn’t you tell them all this out there?”

  “Yeah,” Winder said.

  “I tried to,” Davies said, “and Osgood tried. They wouldn’t listen. You know that.”

  “No,” Gil said. “Then why tell us?” He included me. “We’re just a couple of the boys. We don’t count.”

  Davies said, “Sometimes two or three men will listen.”

  “Well,” Gil said, “we’ve listened. What can we do?”

  Winder grinned like he’d won the argument by a neat point, and he and Gil went back to the bar.

  Davies sat staring at the table, with his two hands lying quiet on top of it. Outside we could hear the men beginning to come back, the hoofs and harness and low talk. Finally he turned his head slowly and looked at me. His mouth had a crooked smile that made me sorry for him.

  “Why take it so hard?” I asked him. “You did all you could.”

  He shook his head. “I failed,” he said. “I got talking my ideas. It’s my greatest failing.”

  “They had sense,” I said.

  But I wasn’t sure of this myself. I’m slow with a new idea, and want to think it over alone, where I’m sure it’s the idea and not the man that’s getting me. And there’s another thing I’ve always noticed, that arguments sound a lot different indoors and outdoors. There’s a kind of insanity that comes from being between walls and under a roof. You’re too cooped up, and don’t get a chance to test ideas against the real size of things. That’s true about day and night too; night’s like a room; it makes the little things in your head too important. A man’s not clearheaded at night. Some of what Davies had said I’d thought about before, but the idea I thought was the main one with him, about law expressing the conscience of society, and the individual conscience springing from that mass sense of right and wrong, was a new one to me, and needed work. It went so far and took in so much. Only I could see how, believing that, he could feel strongly about law, like some men do about religion.

  When he didn’t say anything, I said, “Only it seems to me sometimes you have to change the laws, and sometimes the men who represent them.”

  Davies looked at me, as if to calculate how much I’d thought about it. I guess he didn’t think that was much, because finally he just nodded and said, as though it didn’t interest him, “The soul of a nation or a race grows the same way the soul of a man does. And there have always been impure priests.”

  There was a lot in that, but he didn’t give me time to get hold of it.

  “Will you do me a favor?” he asked all of a sudden.

  “That depends,” I said.

  “I have to stay here,” he said. “I have to stop them if I can, till they know what they’re doing. If I can make this regular, that’s all I ask.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to send Joyce for Risley and Judge Tyler. I want you to go with him. Will you?”

  “You know how Gil and I stand here. We came in at a bad time,” I said. I didn’t like being put over the fence into the open.

  “I know,” he said, and waited.

  “All right,” I said. “But why two?”

  “Do you know Mapes?” he asked.

  “The one they call Butch?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ve seen him.”

  “Risley’s made him deputy for times he’s out of town, and we don’t want Mapes.”

  “No,” I said. I could see why, and I could see why he didn’t want Joyce to have to go alone if there was a question of keeping Mapes out of it, though I still thought that was chiefly sucking me in. Mapes was a powerful man, and a crack shot with a six-gun, but he was a bully, and like most bullies he was a play-the-crowd man. He wouldn’t be any leader.

  “Tyler may not help much,” Davies said, as if to himself, “but he ought to be here. Risley’s the man we want,” he told me.

  We got up. Gil was looking at me, and so was Winder.

  Before we could get out the door, Smith came in. He had on a reefer jacket and a gun belt with two guns, and he had a coil of rope in his hand. When he saw Davies he grinned.

  “Well, if it ain’t big-business,” he said. “It looks like we’d be going after all, big-business.”

  He held up the rope. “Look,” he said. “Moore says I’m head executioner, so I come all primed.” He held the end of the rope up next to his ear, and nudged it a couple of times, as if he was tightening the knot, and then suddenly jerked it up and let his head loll over to the other side. He stuck his tongue out and crossed his eyes. Then he laughed.

  “Don’t tell me I don’t know the trade,” he said.

  He pretended to be looking at Davies closely, with a worried look. He shook his head and clucked his tongue against his teeth.

  “You don’t look well, Mr. Davies,” he said. “You don’t look at all well. Maybe you’d better stay to home and get rested up for the funeral.” He laughed again. “Maybe you could get the flowers,” he piled it on. “The boys wouldn’t begrudge showin’ a few flowers, even for a rustler,” he said seriously. “A good dead one.” And he laughed again.

  Osgood had come in in time to see Smith making the hanging motions. He stood in the door watching the act, white and big-eyed, like it was a real stretch he was seeing.

  Smith saw me looking at the preacher, I guess, and turned around, and when he saw him laughed again, as if he couldn’t stop.

  “Oh, Jee-zus,” he roared, “look at that. They’re all sick. The flower pickers,” he bellowed, and then, in a little thin voice, “Girls, shall we lay out the poor dear rustler wustler?” and roared again.

  The place was pretty quiet, most of the men not looking at Smith.

  “Never see a dead man, preacher?” Smith asked him. “Should, in your trade. But not the ones that was hung, is that it? Well, better not, better not. They get black in the face, and sometimes …”

  Gil banged his glass down and hitched up his gun belt. Smith turned at the sound, and when he saw Gil walking right at him, he half put up one arm, and wasn’t laughing at all. He backed to the side as Gil came closer. But Gil didn’t even turn his head to look at him, but went on out and down the steps. Smith stayed quiet, though. Davies and I went out too, Osgood pattering behind us, making a funny, half-crying noise.

  “But to go like that,” he cried at Davies, waving an arm back at the door. “To go like that,” he kept repeating.

  “I know,” Davies said.

  When he saw Joyce he went over and talked to him for a minute. The boy looked scared, and kept nodding his head in little jerks, as if he had the palsy.

  “Where you off to?” Gil was asking me, standing beside me.

  I rolled a cigarette and took my time to answer. When I’d had a drag I told him. He didn’t take it the way I’d thought he would, but looked at me with a lot of questions in his eyes that he didn’t ask, the way Canby had looked at both of us in the door. I was getting too many of those looks.

  “Davies is right,” I said. “Want to come along?”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but somebody’s got to keep this company in good ree-pute.” He said it quiet. I guess Smith’s act had made him wonder again, in spite of Winder.

  The sky was really changing now, fast; it was coming on to storm, or I didn’t know signs. Before it had been mostly sunlight, with only a few cloud shadows moving across fast in a wind that didn’t get to the ground, and looking like burnt patches on the eastern hills where there was little snow. Now it was mostly shadow, with just gleams of sunlight breaking through and shining for a moment on all the men and hors
es in the street, making the guns and metal parts of the harness wink and lighting up the big sign on Davies’ store and the sagging white veranda of the inn. And the wind was down to earth and continual, flapping the men’s garments and blowing out the horses’ tails like plumes. The smoke from houses where supper had been started was lining straight out to the east and flowing down, not up. It was a heavy wind with a damp, chill feel to it, like comes before snow, and strong enough so it wuthered under the arcade and sometimes whistled, the kind of wind that even now makes me think of Nevada quicker than anything else I know. Out at the end of the street, where it merged into the road to the pass, the look of the mountains had changed too. Before they had been big and shining, so you didn’t notice the clouds much. Now they were dark and crouched down, looking heavier but not nearly so high, and it was the clouds that did matter, coming up so thick and high you had to look at them instead of the mountains. And they weren’t firm, spring clouds, with shapes, or the deep, blue-black kind that mean a quick, hard rain, but thick, shapeless and gray-white like dense steam, shifting so rapidly and with so little outline that you more felt than saw them changing.

  Probably partly because of this sky-change and partly because a lot of them were newcomers who hadn’t heard that there were any doubts about this lynching, the temper of the men in the street had changed too. They weren’t fired up the way some of them had been after Bartlett’s harangue, but they weren’t talking much, or joking, and they were all staying on their horses except those that had been in Canby’s. Most of them had on reefers or stiff cowhide coats, and some even had scarves tied down around their heads under their hats, like you wear on winter range. They all had gun belts, and had ropes tied to their saddles, and a good many had carbines, generally carried across the saddle, but a few in long holsters by their legs, the shoulder curved, metal heeled, slender stocks showing out at the top. Their roughened faces, strong-fleshy or fine with the hard shape of the bones, good to look at, like the faces of all outdoor, hard-working men, were set, and their eyes were narrowed, partly against the wind, but partly not. I couldn’t help thinking about what Davies had said on getting angry enough not to be scared when you knew you were wrong. That’s what they were doing, all right. Every new rider that came in, they’d just glance at him out of those narrow eyes, like they hated his guts and figured things were getting too public. And there were new men coming in all the time; about twenty there already. Every minute it was getting harder for Davies to crack. They were going to find it easy to forget any doubts that had been mentioned. It just seemed funny now to think I’d been listening to an argument about what the soul of the law was. Right here and now was all that was going to count. I felt less than ever like going on my missions for Davies.