“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 Farnley 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 that 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 another 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 to keep an eye on some of these guys. Farnley and Bartlett and Winder and Ma; yes, 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-offside 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 halfway 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 wasn’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.
Someone had lived there once, though, and tried to ranch the place. In the shelter of a few isolated trees extending from the forest on the west side, he’d built a log cabin with a steep roof to slide the snow off. There’d been a corral too, and a regular barn with a loft to store hay. But whoever he was, he’d given up years before. The door and windows were out of the cabin, and the board floor was rotten, seedling pines and sagebrush coming up through it. There were only a few posts of the corral left, and the snow had flattened the barn, splitting the sides out and settling the roof right over them. Small circles
of blackened stone showed where short stoppers, like Gil and me, had burned pieces of the barn and fences.
We discussed the chances of the rustlers using the Ox-Bow. The road ran right along the edge of it at the south end; there was good grazing and water and wood to be picked up. But then, there was only that one way in and out, at least for men driving cattle. On the other three sides the mountains were steep, heavily timbered at the base, then grown thick with manzanita, then covered with frost-split, sliding shale, and they didn’t let you out anywhere except into more mountains. On the other hand there was no other place on the trail where they could have stopped. There was a clearing right at the summit, but the road ran through the middle of it and there was no grass or water. And the road down the other side was like this one, steep and narrow all the way; a few little washes big enough for the coach to get off the track and stand, but none to hold forty head of cattle. We couldn’t see anything but the Ox-Bow or keep going.
On the summit the wind hit full force, as if you’d stepped out from behind a wall. It was bitter cold and damp. I thought I felt a few flakes of snow on my face, but my face was already too numb to be sure. Even the horses ducked their heads into the wind.
In the clearing Tetley and Mapes stopped us to breathe the horses again. Also they began arguing what Gil and I had thought about the trail and the Ox-Bow, and some were for turning back. With snow beginning to come, and that wind blowing, they felt sure of a blizzard. Tetley maintained that was all the more reason for pressing the chase. With their trail covered with snow, and a day or two start, time to switch brands, what would we have to go on? Davies, and Moore backed him up this time, was for sending a couple of riders on across to Pike’s Hole, and getting the men there to pick the rustlers up. I could see what he wanted. Kinkaid was nothing to most of the Pike’s men, and it wasn’t their cattle had been rustled. They’d pick the men up on principle, but they’d be willing to hold them for the sheriff and a trial. Winder and Ma sided with Tetley. Winder was accusing Davies, and even Moore, of being so scared of the job they’d rather let a murderer slip than do it. Davies admitted he’d rather let ten murderers go than have it on his soul that he’d hung an honest man. Tetley said he wasn’t going to hang an innocent man; he’d make sure enough of that to suit even Davies. To Farnley, even Tetley’s manner smacked of delay. He told them he’d rather see a murderer hanged than shot, it was a dirtier death, but that he’d bush-whack all three of those men before he’d let one of them get out of the mountains free. I tried to shut Gil up when he started, but he went ahead and told Farnley that nobody who wasn’t a horse-thief himself would bush-whack any man, let alone three men for one, and the one a man he hadn’t seen do it. Farnley was going to climb Gil, for which I couldn’t blame him, but they couldn’t pick each other out in the dark, and others held them down. I tried to talk Gil quiet, but he said, “Aw, hell,” in disgust, and spit as if it was on the whole bunch of us, and rode farther out by himself. It looked as if it might be another long squabble. I’d been walking Blue Boy back and forth along the edge so I could hear some of the talk, but still keep him from cooling too fast. Cold as it was, the climb had sweated him. Other punchers were doing the same.
The Ox-Bow Incident Page 14