Amigo was saying, in a clear, explanatory voice, “Eet was thees branding, si. What for you theenk I have the eyes, not to know heem; like thees,” and he held up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the second finger curved out and touching the forefinger at the nail, and placed a finger of his left hand across the space between the thumb and forefinger of the right. This made a fair figure of Drew’s joined H brand. “I theenk I not mees heem,” he said contemptuously, and spit and started to roll a cigarette to make his hands feel natural again. The mountain cut off the wind there.
“Look,” he said, pointing while he licked the cigarette, “he have made beeg track all the way, like the army.” He seemed to feel this halt was to test his word. He talked to Gil because Gil was beside him, but he didn’t care who heard.
He was right enough about the tracks; you didn’t have to ride out and scout to see them. The lane was churned with the sharp marks, fresh, the new grass crushed down into the mud still.
Mapes went about thirty or forty yards, then crossed the lane and came back up the other side in the same way. When he got back to Tetley he said something and mounted. Tetley nodded. I could guess he was smiling his I-knew-it-all-the-time smile. They rode back to us and Tetley said, “Amigo’s right. They’re fresh tracks, the first made this spring. We can’t tell how many head, of course …”
“Forty,” Amigo said, looking around at us.
“Possibly,” Tetley said. “There were three riders. They left tracks going both ways.” We nodded like that settled it.
Tetley rode around us to get ahead again. Mapes and Ma Grier and Winder followed him, and Gabe Hart. Farnley had ridden farther up the main road and waited alone, watching, below him, Tetley and Mapes playing field officers, but he let them pass him now, and turned in with the rest of us. I was nearer the middle of the bunch now, and when we strung out I was riding with young Tetley.
In the shadow under the mountain we felt hurried because of the lateness. We stepped up to the jog again until we came around the bend where the pass opened above us. There the road began to climb stiffly from the start and we had to walk. The soft lane of the meadow turned into a mountain track, hard and bouldery, with loose gravel and deep ruts made by the water, but already dry. The horses clicked and stumbled, climbing with a clear, slow, choppy rhythm. Where, at the side of the road, it was still muddy from seepage, the mud was already stiffening for the night.
Behind us Sparks began one of his hymns; it came in lonely fragments through the sounds of the horses and the rushing of the creek below us on the right. When I first heard him, I saw too that young Tetley shivered and bent a little, drawing his shoulders together. But that might have been only the wind. It sucked rapidly and heavily down this draw.
I looked back at Sparks. No one was riding with him, and he was grasping his horse’s shoulders and gripping the barrel with his long legs to keep from sliding back off. But he didn’t know he was having so much trouble; he was thinking about something else. Behind him were Davies, the two Bartlett boys, Moore and Gil riding together, and two men I didn’t know, except that one of them had been playing poker at the back table in Canby’s. I believe I looked back to keep from looking too much at young Tetley. But I looked at him again. He was riding easily, but too slumped for a cowboy. He was a thin, very young-looking fellow. In this light his face was a pale daub with big shadows for eyes. His black hair came out over his shirt collar in the back. I’d noticed before, in better light, how heavy and shining it was, as if oiled. He looked lonely and unhappy. I knew he didn’t know me.
“Cold wind,” I began.
He looked at me as if I’d said something important.
Then he said, “It’s more than wind,” and stared ahead of him again.
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t get his drift, but if he wanted to talk, “maybe” shouldn’t stop him.
“It’s a lot more,” he said, as if I’d contradicted him. “You can’t go hunting men like coyotes after rabbits and not feel anything about it. Not without being like any other animal. The worst animal.”
“There’s a difference; we have reasons.”
“Names for the same thing,” he said sharply. “Does that make us any better? Worse, I’d say. At least coyotes don’t make excuses. We think we can see something better, but we go on doing the same things, hunt in packs like wolves; hole up in warrens like rabbits. All the dirtiest traits.”
“There’s still a difference,” I said. “We’ve got it over wolves and rabbits.”
“Power, you mean,” he said bitterly.
“Over your wolves, and bears too.”
“Oh, we’re smart,” he said, the same way. “It’s the same thing,” he cried; “all we use it for is power. Yes, we’ve got them scared all right, all of them, except the tame things we’ve taken the souls out of. We’re the cocks of the dung-heap, all right; the bullies of the globe.”
“We’re not hunting rabbits tonight,” I reminded him.
“No; our own kind. A wolf wouldn’t do that; not a mangy coyote. That’s the hunting we like now, our own kind. The rest can’t excite us any more.”
“We don’t have to hunt men often,” I told him. “Most people never have. They get along pretty well together.”
“Oh, we love each other,” he said. “We labor for each other, suffer for each other, admire each other. We have all the pack instincts, all right, and nice names for them.”
“All right,” I said, “what’s the harm in their being pack instincts, if you want to put it that way? They’re real.”
“They’re not. They’re just to keep the pack with us. We don’t dare hunt each other alone, that’s all. There’s more ways of hunting than with a gun,” he added.
He’d jumped too far for me on that one. I didn’t say anything.
“Think I’m stretching it, do you?” he asked furiously. “Well, I’m not. It’s too nice a way of putting it, if anything. All any of us really want any more is power. We’d buck the pack if we dared. We don’t, so we use it; we trick it to help us in our own little killings. We’ve mastered the horses and cattle. Now we want to master each other, make cattle of men. Kill them to feed ourselves. The smaller the pack the more we get.”
“Most of life’s pretty simple and quiet,” I said. “You talk like we all had knives out.”
“Your simple life,” he said. “Your quiet life. All right,” he said, “take the simplest, quietest life you know. Take the things that are going on around us all the time, so we don’t notice them any more than old furniture. Take women visiting together, next-door neighbors, old friends. What do they talk about? Each other, all the time, don’t they? And what are the parts they like, the ones they remember and bring home to tell to the men?”
“I don’t know anything about women,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “You know anyway. Gossip, scandalous gossip, that’s what wakes them up, makes them talk faster and all together, or secretively, as if they were stalking enemies in their minds; something about a woman they know, something that can spoil her reputation: the way she was seen to look at a certain man, or that she can’t cook, or doesn’t keep her parlor clean, or can’t have children, or, worse, could but won’t. That’s what wakes them up. And do you know why?” He turned the white shape of his face toward me sharply.
I didn’t like the way the talk was getting to sound like a quarrel. I tried to ease it off.
“No,” I said. “Why?” as if I was really curious.
“Because it makes them feel superior; makes them feel they’re the wolves, not the rabbits. If each of them had it the way she wants it,” he said after a moment, “she’d be the only woman left in the world. They can’t manage that, so they do the best they can toward it.”
“People can be pretty mean sometimes,” I admitted, “picking on the weak ones.” It was no good.
“It’s not always the weak ones,” he said angrily. “They’re worse than wolves, I tell
you. They don’t weed out the unfit, they weed out the best. They band together to keep the best down, the ones who won’t share their dirty gossip, the ones who have more beauty or charm or independence, more anything, than they have. They did it right there in Bridger’s Wells this spring,” he blazed.
“How was that?” I asked, remembering what Canby had said about Rose Mapen.
“They drove a girl out. Made a whore of her with talk.”
“Why? what did she do?”
“Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you. You know what they had against her? You know what was her intolerable sin against the female pack?”
“How would I know?”
“She was better looking than any of them, and men liked her.”
“That can make a whore sometimes,” I said.
“She wasn’t and they knew it.”
“There must have been something.”
“There was when they got done,” he said. “Everything. But not before. They were scared of her, that’s all.”
“Why should they be?”
“Men. They’re the biggest part of a woman’s power.”
I had to grin; this kid talking about women like he’d had the testing of the whole breed. And he the kind that would fall over himself to do anything for any of them if they asked it, or just looked it.
He didn’t say anything more for a moment, and I heard the creek far down, and the horses clicking and heaving on the grade.
Then he asked, “Do you know Frena Hundel?”
“No,” I said. So far we’d kept it pretty general; anyway, no names.
“The wild-looking woman who was so afraid we wouldn’t come out and hunt down these three, the whole heroic thirty of us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about her?”
“You know what’s the matter with her?”
“How would I know?” I asked again. It didn’t freeze him.
“She wants those men to die.”
He’d got beyond me again, chasing his own hate.
“Before you came,” I told him, “she was wild because Larry Kinkaid had been killed. That was what she kept yelling about. I thought she was sore about Larry, maybe sweet on him.”
“Oh, yes,” he said scornfully, “now he’s dead, she’s sweet on him. She’d take any dead man as her personal grief; it makes her feel important.”
“What’s the sense in that?” I asked.
“He wasn’t anything to her before he was shot. In her heart she’s glad he’s dead.”
That still didn’t make sense to me. I waited, twisting a hand in Blue Boy’s mane and feeling his big shoulders working under it.
“Frena can’t get a man,” he explained, “so she wants to see them all die. Yes, all of them. She’s glad Kinkaid’s dead. She doesn’t know these men we’re after, doesn’t know anything about them, but she’s wild to have us kill them. And she’s wild to get the rest of us the same way, too, to push us into something that will kill our souls, if we have any; that will make us afraid to face men again, anyhow. Because she can’t get a man.”
“It’s a big project,” I said, “to kill us all because she can’t get one of us.”
“I don’t say she can. I say it’s what she wants.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If there were no men, she could do what she pleased with most women, make them her slaves. Men are the part of power she can’t get, and Frena wants power. Frena’s got a bigger appetite for power than the pack will tolerate because most of them couldn’t stand it themselves. It would tear them to pieces in a week to want anything as much as Frena wants everything.”
“You don’t think much of women, do you?” I said.
“Men are no better,” he said. “Men are worse. They’re not so sly about their murder, but they don’t have to be; they’re stronger; they already have the upper hand of half the race, or they think so. They’re bullies instead of sneaks, and that’s worse. And they’re just as careful to keep up their cheap male virtues, their strength, their courage, their good fellowship, to keep the pack from jumping them, as the women are to keep up their modesty and their hominess. They all lie about what they think, hide what they feel, to keep from looking queer to the pack.”
“Is there anything so fine about being different?” I asked him.
“Did you ever hear a man tell another man about the dreams he’s had that have made him sweat and run his legs in the bed and wake up moaning with fear? Did you?”
“What do you want? Everybody running around telling his dreams, like a little kid?”
“Or any woman tell about the times she’s sighed and panted in her sleep for a lover she wasn’t married to?”
“For Lord’s sake,” I said.
“No,” he babbled on, “you never did and you never will.”
“It’s all right with me if I don’t.”
The white of his face was to me again. “You’re like all the rest,” he raged. “You’ve had dreams like that; you know you have. We’ve all had those dreams. In our hearts we know they’re true, truer than anything we ever tell; truer than anything we ever do, even. But nothing could make us tell them, show our weakness, have the pack at our throats.
“Even in dreams,” he said, after a bit, as if he was talking to himself, but so I could hear, “even in dreams it’s the pack that’s worst; it’s the pack that we can never quite see but always feel coming, like a cloud, like a shadow, like a fog with our death in it. It’s the spies of the pack who are always hidden behind the next pillars of the temples and palaces we dream we’re in, watching us go between them. They’re behind the trees in the black woods we dream about; they’re behind the boulders on the mountains we dream we’re climbing, behind the windows on the square of every empty dream city we wander in. We’ve all heard them breathing; we’ve all run screaming with fear from the pack that’s coming somewhere. We’ve all waked up in the night and lain there trembling and sweating and staring at the dark for fear they’ll come again.
“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 t
he 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?”
The Ox-Bow Incident Page 13