The Ox-Bow Incident

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  When Joyce came over for me, I took a look at Davies, and he was feeling it too. When he looked at the men in the street he had a little of the Osgood expression. It was hard for him to shift from the precious idea in which he had just been submerged, to what he really had to handle. Osgood was standing near him, at the edge of the walk, his baggy suit fluttering and his hands making arguing motions in front of him. They made a pair.

  But Davies was still going to try. When he saw me looking at him, and Joyce just standing there waiting for me, the muscles came out at the back jaw again, and he made a fierce little motion at us to get going. I started.

  “Take it easy, law-and-order,” Gil said to me. “This ain’t our picnic.”

  I was getting touchy, and for a second I thought he was still trying to talk me out of lining up with the party that wasn’t going to be any too popular, win or lose. I looked around at him a bit hot, I guess, but he just grinned at me, a soft, one-sided grin not like his usual one, and shook his head once, not to say no, but to say it was a tough spot. Then I knew he wasn’t thinking of sides right then, but just of me and him, the way it was when we were best. I shook my head at him the same way, and had to grin the same way too. I felt a lot better.

  Joyce and I crossed the street, picking our way among the riders, which made us step a bit because the horses were restless, not only the way they always are in wind bringing a storm, but because the excitement had got into them too. Any horse but an outlaw will feel with his rider. They were wheeling and backing under the bridles, and tossing their heads so you could hear the clinking of the bits along with the muffled, uneasy thudding. Now and then a rider would turn his horse down the street and let him go a bit away from the gathering, and then turn him back in, like racers waiting for a start. Joyce was horse-shy, and dodged more than he had to, and then went into a little weak-kneed run, like an old man’s, to catch up with me again. I knew the men were watching us, and I felt queer myself, walking instead of riding, but Joyce had said it wasn’t far, and he didn’t have a horse, and I’d have felt still queerer doubling up with him. I didn’t look at anybody. I could feel myself tighten up when I passed in front of Farnley’s horse, but he held him, and didn’t say anything.

  Just when we got to the other side of the street I heard Winder calling me by my last name. That can make you mad when it’s done right, and I checked, but then had sense enough to keep going.

  “Croft,” he yelled again, and when I still kept going yelled louder and angrily, “Croft, tell the Judge he’ll have to step pronto if he wants to see us start.”

  Joyce was breathing in little short whistles, and not from dodging either. I knew how he felt. That yell had marked us all right. I thought quickly, in the middle of what I was really thinking, that now I didn’t know any of those men; they were strangers and enemies, except Gil. And yet I did know most of them, at least by their faces and outfits, and to talk to, and liked them: quiet, gentle men, and the most independent in the world too, you’d have said, not likely, man for man, to be talked into anything. But now, stirred up or feeling they ought to be, one little yelp about Judge Tyler and I might as well have raped all their sisters, or even their mothers. And the queerest part of it was that there weren’t more than two or three, those from Drew’s outfit, who really knew Kinkaid; he wasn’t easy to know. And the chances were ten to one that a lot more than that among them had, one time or another, done a little quiet brand changing themselves. It wasn’t near as uncommon as you’d think; the range was all still pretty well open then, and those riders came from all ends of cow country from the Rio to the Tetons. It wouldn’t have been held too much against them either, as long as it wasn’t done on a big scale so somebody took a real loss. More than one going outfit had started that way, with a little easy picking up here and there.

  “Don’t mind that big-mouth,” I told Joyce.

  I’d underrated the kid. He was scared in the flesh, all right, but that wasn’t what he was going to think about.

  “Do you think he can hold them?” he asked.

  He meant Davies. When Joyce spoke about Davies he said “he” as if it had a capital H.

  “Sure he can,” I said.

  “Risley hang out at the Judge’s too?” I asked him.

  “When he’s here,” Joyce said, not looking at me. “We’ve got to get him, though. We’ve got to get him, anyway.”

  “Sure,” I pacified, “we’ll get him.”

  He led me onto the cross street and we walked faster. There was no boardwalk here, and the street wasn’t used so much, so my bootheels sank into the mud a little. There were only a few people standing in front of their houses or on the edge of the street, looking toward the crossing, men in their shirtsleeves, hunched against the wind, but more women, wearing aprons and holding shawls over their hair. They looked at us, not knowing whether to be frightened or to ask us their questions. One man, standing on his doorstep, with a pipe in his hand, joked to try us.

  “What’s going on, a roundup?”

  “That’s it,” I gave him back. “Yessir, a roundup.”

  Joyce got red, but didn’t say anything, or look at me yet. I woke up, and saw the kid was scared of me too. I was just one of those riders to him, and a strange one at that.

  “They’ll wait,” I picked up. “They don’t know what they’re going to do.”

  Joyce thought he ought to say something. “Mr. Davies didn’t think they’d go. Not if somebody stood up against them.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared. If rarity is worth, then moral courage is a lot higher quality than physical courage; but, excepting diamonds and hard cash, there aren’t many who take to anything because of its rarity. Just the other way. Davies was resisting something that had immediacy and a strong animal grip, with something remote and mistrusted. He’d have to make his argument look common sense and hardy, or else humorous, and I wasn’t sure he could do either. If he couldn’t he was going to find that it was the small but present “we,” not the big, misty “we,” that shaped men’s deeds, no matter what shaped their explanations.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “He says they have to get a leader; somebody they can blame.”

  “Scapegoat,” I said.

  “That’s what he calls it too,” Joyce said. “He says that’s what anything has to have, good or bad, before it can get started, somebody they can blame.”

  “Sometimes it’s just that they can’t get anywhere without a boss.”

  “It’s the same thing,” he argued. “Only one’s when it’s dangerous.”

  We kept moving. Joyce had to trot a little to catch up with me. Finally I said, “Mr. Davies doesn’t think we’ve got a leader, then?”

  “No,” Joyce said. “That’s why he thought they’d wait.”

  I gave that a turn, and knew he was right. That was half what ailed us; we were waiting for somebody, but didn’t know who. Bartlett had done the talking, but talk won’t hold. Moore was the only man who could take us, and Moore wouldn’t.

  “He’s not far wrong,” I said.

  “If we can get Risley,” he said, “before they pick somebody …”

  We passed a house with a white picket fence, and then another with four purple lilac trees in the yard. Their sweetness was kind of strange, as if we should have been thinking about something else.

  “You know,” I said, teasing, “I’m not so sure Davies wants those rustlers brought in at all. You sure he doesn’t think even the law’s a mite rough and tumble?”

  He really looked at me then, and I saw why Davies might talk to him. He was pimply and narrow and gawky, but his eyes weren’t boy’s eyes.

  “Maybe he does,” he said, “and maybe he’s right. Maybe it would be better if they got away.


  “Just because he’s gentle,” he flared.

  “Sure,” I said, “it’s a good thing to be gentle.”

  “But he wouldn’t let them get away,” Joyce said sharply. “Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t let them get away, if he thought they’d get any kind of a show.”

  “Sure,” I said. And then asked him, “How about you? Going, if we form the posse?”

  He looked where he was walking again, and swallowed hard.

  “If he wants me to go, I’ll go,” he said. “I don’t want to,” he told me suddenly, “but it might be my duty.”

  “Sure,” I said again, just to say something.

  “That’s the place,” Joyce said, pointing across the street. I flicked my cigarette away.

  Judge Tyler’s house was one of the brick ones, with a Mansard roof and patterns in the shingles. There were dormer windows. It was three stories high, with a double-decker veranda, and with white painted stonework around all the windows, which were high and narrow. The whole house looked too high and narrow, and there were a lot of steps up to the front door. There was a lawn, and lilac bushes, and out back a long, white carriage house and stable. It was a new place, and the brick looked very pink and the veranda and stonework very white. It looked more than ever high and narrow because there weren’t any big trees around it yet, but only some sapling Lombardies, about twice as high as a man, along the drive. The place looked as if it was meant to be crammed in between two others on a city street, going up because it didn’t have room to spread. That made it appear even sillier than that kind of a house naturally does, being in a village where hardly anything was more than one story high, and they all had plenty of room around them. The Judge, having settled on the edge of the village, had the whole valley for a yard, if he’d wanted it. You could see the southwest spread of it, and the snow mountains between his little poplars.

  I couldn’t help wondering where the Judge got the money for that house. Brick doesn’t come for nothing, that far out. But then, of course, the Judge had business in other parts too, and now and then a big stake did come out of some of the mining or water litigation.

  On the inside wall of the veranda, where you could see it plain from the road, was the Judge’s shingle, a big black one with gold letters. There was a fancy, metal-knobbed pull bell beside the front door.

  “Scrape your boots, put your hat on your arm, and straighten your wig,” I told Joyce as we went up onto the porch. He grinned like it hurt.

  I gave the knob a yank, and it was attached to something all right. Way inside the house there was a little, jingly tinkle that kept on after I let go of the knob. A door opened and closed somewhere inside, and there were slow, heavy steps coming. Then the door opened in front of us. It was a tall big-boned woman with a long, yellow, mistrustful face and gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a frilly house-cap and a purple dress that was all sleeves and skirt. Probably we’d just taken her out of something she was doing, but she acted like we were there to mob the Judge. She stood in the opening with her hands on her hips, so nobody could have squeezed by, and took a hard look at my gun-belt and chaps.

  “Well?” she wanted to know.

  I figured a soft beginning wasn’t going to hurt, and took off my hat.

  “The Judge in, ma’am?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  I waited for the rest, but it didn’t come.

  “Could we see him?” I asked.

  “You got business?”

  I was getting a little sore. “No,” I said, “we just dropped over for tea.”

  “Humph,” she said, and didn’t crack a bit.

  “Mr. Davies sent us, ma’am,” Joyce explained. “It’s important, ma’am. The Judge would want to know.”

  “Mr. Davies, eh?” she said. “That’s different. But it’s not regular office hours,” she added.

  I started to follow her in, and she stopped.

  “You wait here,” she told us. “I’ll ask the Judge if he’ll see you. What’s your name?” she asked me without warning.

  I told her, and she grunted again, and went about five steps in the dark, red-carpeted hall, and gave a couple of sharp raps on a door, half turning around at the same time to keep an eye on us.

  A big voice boomed out, “Come in, come in,” like it had been looking forward for hours and with a lot of pleasure to that knock. She gave us another look, and went in and closed the door firmly behind her. We weren’t going to get in on any secrets, anyway.

  “That the Judge’s wife?” I asked.

  Joyce shook his head. “She died before I came here. That’s his housekeeper, Mrs. Larch.”

  “How long she been with him?”

  “I don’t know. Ever since his wife died, I guess.”

  “Well,” I said, “you can see why the Judge has times when he don’t seem able to make up his mind.”

  Joyce grinned again as if he didn’t want to. I was making up a little.

  The office door opened again, and Mrs. Larch came out. She closed the door and advanced on us, but this time, when she halted, left us room to squeeze by.

  “Go on in,” she ordered.

  “Is the sheriff here too?” I asked her.

  She closed the outside door behind us, so we were trapped in the dark with her, except for a little oil flame burning in a red globe overhead.

  “No, he isn’t,” she said, and started her slow parade toward the back of the house.

  Joyce gave me a rabbity look and ran after her a few steps.

  “Mrs. Larch …”

  She stopped and wheeled into a company-front facing him.

  “Do you know where he is, Mrs. Larch? The sheriff, I mean?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, and went on back.

  After that I couldn’t help knocking at the office door too, and I kept my hat off.

  Joyce was whispering at me that we had to find the sheriff, we had to.

  The same big voice called, “Come in, come in,” again.

  When we got inside the big voice kept booming, “Well, well, Croft; how are things out in your neck of the woods?”

  “All right, I guess,” I said.

  But they weren’t all right here. The Judge looked the same as I’d always seen him outside, wide and round, in a black frock coat, a white, big-collared shirt and a black string tie, his large face pasty, with folds of fat over the collar, bulging brown eyes, and a mouth with a shape like a woman’s mouth, but with a big, pendulous lower lip, like men get who talk a lot without thinking much first. He got up from in front of his roller-top desk in the corner which was full of shelves of thick, pale-brown books with red labels, all pretty new-looking, and came to meet me with his hand out as if he was conferring a special favor. The Judge never missed a chance on that sort of thing. But not only Risley wasn’t there, but Mapes was. He was sitting with his chair tilted back right next to the door. His gun belt and sombrero and coat were hanging on the hooks above him.

  When he was done shaking hands with me, the Judge smoothed back his thick, black mane, cut off square at the collar, like a senator’s, put one hand in his pocket, played with the half-dozen emblems and charms on his watch chain with the other, teetered from his heels to his toes two or three times, lifted his head, smiled at me like I was the biggest pleasure he’d had in years, and drew a great, deep breath, like he was about to start an oration. I’d seen him go through all that when all he finally said was, “How-do-you-do?” to some lady he wasn’t sure he hadn’t met before. The Judge had a lot of public manner.

  “Well, well,” he said, “you don’t appear to have been pining away, exactly, since I last saw you.” He took Joyce in kind of on the side.

  “And what can I do for you gentlemen?”

  I knew he probably hadn’t the faintest notion where he’d seen me before, but I let that go, and nodded at Joyce to show he was doing the talking. But the kid was tangled. He didn’t know what to say with Mapes there. I had to risk it.

  “We’re her
e for Mr. Davies,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, so Mrs. Larch said. And how is my good friend Davies these days? Well, I trust?”

  “He’s all right, I guess,” I said. “Could we see you alone for a minute, Judge?”

  Mapes let his chair down, but it wasn’t to go. He sat looking at us.

  The Judge didn’t know what to do about that. He cleared his throat and inflated again, grinning more than ever.

  “So, so,” he said, “matters of a rather private nature, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mapes stayed there, though.

  Joyce got his breath. “Mr. Davies said particularly, just you and Mr. Risley, sir.”

  “So, so,” said the Judge again, and looked at Mapes.

  “Risley ain’t here,” Mapes said. “I’m actin’ sheriff.”

  “That’s right, quite right,” the Judge assured us, before I could speak. I tried to pick up the ground we’d lost.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked Mapes.

  “Down to Drew’s, early this mornin’.”

  “When’ll he be back?”

  “He didn’t say. Maybe not for a couple of days.” He grinned like he wanted to see me try to get out of that one.