Novel 1962 - High Lonesome (v5.0) (9 page)

Joshua trees lifted their contorted arms toward the empty skies as though caught and petrified in some agonized writhing. On their right was an inclined shelf of almost smooth rock, half a mile long and reaching upwards, unbroken for several hundred feet—a great upthrust, honed and smoothed by wind and rain and sand.

He was reaching back into his memory now. Before High Lonesome Canyon there was a box canyon. That could be the trap…it was an ideal place for an attack, a place to be skirted widely.

Spanyer turned abruptly at right angles away from the mountains, and out into the tumbled forest of boulders. When well among the boulders he turned westward again.

“A man like Considine,” Spanyer said suddenly, “is apt to be heedless of discipline, and every man needs discipline. If it isn’t given to him, he had better discipline himself. Somewhere Considine took a wrong turn, and it is up to him to take a right one. But he has to do it himself.”

“You did.”

“Without your Ma…well, without her maybe I’d never have done it.”

“Considine could do it.” She spoke with confidence.

“A man needs a push sometimes. He needs something outside of himself.”

“Pa…the gray’s limping.”

Dave Spanyer felt the cold hand of death touch him. He turned, almost afraid to look, and led the horse forward, watching it. The gray was limping, all right.

He stopped briefly in the shade of a boulder and examined the hoof. The shoe was broken, and half of it had fallen away. He pried the other half loose, and then with his knife he pared the hoof flat.

They moved on, dipping into a forest of Joshua trees. The sun was very hot, glaring into their faces, bathing them in impossible heat. Nothing moved. Not a dust devil…not a wisp of grass…nothing.

Then suddenly a rabbit plunged into the trail, saw them, and veered sharply off.

Instantly, Spanyer drew his gun and moved back into the rocks. He pressed Lennie down, drew the horse into shelter. He listened into the stillness and it gave back no sound. Holstering his pistol, he shifted his rifle to his right hand from the saddle scabbard.

“Something up there,” he said. “A rabbit don’t jump like that in this heat unless he’s scared.”

He squatted on his heels, his Winchester ready. He eased back the hammer, almost to full cock, then, grinding his heel into the sand to stifle the sound, to full cock.

He started to turn his head when he heard the scrape of moccasins on rock. He turned swiftly on the ball of his right foot, slamming his back against the rocks just as the Indian sprang.

The Winchester leaped in Spanyer’s hand, and the Apache’s throat vanished in a red smear as the bullet tore through, ripping the neck wide.

The sound of the shot slapped against the rock walls, then echoed away and lost itself among the distant sands.

Lennie shrank from the body, which had fallen within reach of them. He had been young, this Apache, and overeager—and the chance-takers never last.

Silence followed.…Were there others near? Or had this one raced on ahead?

The Indian had carried a Winchester and had a Mexican bandolier filled with cartridges. Spanyer shucked these from their loops one by one and filled his pockets. The Winchester was old. He took it in his hands and smashed it against a boulder, then threw it aside.

Lennie glanced at the Indian. “He looks very young,” she whispered.

“Old as he’ll ever be,” Spanyer said dryly.

Dave Spanyer knew patience. Somewhere out there were enemies, so for the time he would not move. He settled back, trying to think his way out.

The horse must be saved. Food and water and a fresh shoe would put it in shape again, and they would need the horse when they got where they were going. And if they took a route out past that basaltic rock they would be in the sand, where their steps would make no sound.

Only a mile farther and the entrance to High Lonesome began. It was no sanctuary, for there was no such place with Indians around, but it was a better place to make a stand. There was water, and they would be on familiar ground.

He plotted every move they must make, once darkness came, and then he set back and rolled a smoke. Having done all that a man could do, he waited.

The rest would do them good…tomorrow would be a long, long day.

A
T SUNDOWN, WHEN the first shadows moved out from the cliff walls, Considine found the horse with its broken leg and cut throat. He drew rein, and the others came up and ranged alongside in a ragged line, looking down upon the dead animal.

The scene required no explanation. It told its own grim story, perhaps the prelude to one even more stark; for without a horse, in desert country, with Apaches on their trail, they would have small chance. This was no country in which to ride double, even if there were no Indians.

Whatever a man does leaves a trail behind, and in his passing he leaves indications of the manner of man he is, of his character, and even something of his plans. It requires only the observant and understanding eye to read what the trail can show.

Nor does any person stand completely alone in this world, for when he passes he brushes, perhaps ever so slightly, upon others, and each is never quite the same thereafter. The passing of Lennie Spanyer had left no light touch upon the consciousness of the man called Considine.

The four men, loaded with the loot of their robbery, looked upon that dead horse and upon those tracks, and for each there was some personal message. Each was disturbed, but these were men without words, unused to voicing their thoughts for all to hear. Nor had they quite shaped those thoughts into words they could share with each other.

Each of these men was worried, for in those moments in the store each had found that Lennie was in some part his own.

For a brief instant her freshness, her brightness, and her open charm had brought something to them that had not been there before, and left a mark upon them. The danger to Lennie was a danger they all felt.

Nor were they free of the images their own minds held of themselves. The man on horseback, the lone-riding man, the lone-thinking man, possessed an image of himself that was in part his own, in part a piece of all the dime novels he had read, for no man is free of the image his literature imposes upon him.

And the dime novel made the western hero a knight-errant, a man on horseback rescuing the weak and helpless. Never consciously in their thoughts, to these men without words the image was there—and more. For Lennie was the sweetheart, the sister, the wife, each one of them would have…if only in daytime dreams.

“That’s the girl’s horse.”

Dutch cleared his throat uneasily. “No time to waste. We’d better push on.”

They pushed on…and the tracks of the led horse lay in the dust before them.

Spanyer, each man was thinking, was shrewd. Trust him to know what to do…else Lennie’s dark hair would hang in some wickiup.

“None of our business,” Hardy said brusquely. “I’m a-worryin’ to see that Mex gal down Sonora way.”

“It isn’t far to that
tinaja
in the Pedregosas,” Considine said; “let’s get along.”

When they made that turn toward the
tinaja
they left this trail behind, they left Lennie and Dave Spanyer behind, and they turned south into the desert that lay between them and the Mexican border.

They saw one last smoke before the sun went down, a smoke that ascended straight and unbroken, and then broke twice sharply and clearly. It gave them something to remember during the dark hours of the coming night.

Darkness comes suddenly to the desert, where twilight is quickly gone. A bat dipped and fluttered above them, a star appeared…the serrated ridges gnawed at the deep, deep blue of the evening sky. A far-off coyote spoke the moon, and the hoofs of their horses, the creaking of their saddles, made the only other sounds.

Hardy could contain himself no longer. “It must come to sixty thousand. Sixty thousand in gold!”

There was no response. They were four belted men riding for the border, four men who had chosen to live by the gun…and some day to die by it. One was a man who wanted a woman in Mexico; one was a man who wanted a long, quiet drunk; and there was an Indian who wanted nothing at all. And there was one man who did not know what he wanted.

Only he was beginning to be afraid that he did know.

The Kiowa drew up suddenly. “Dust,” he said. “Horses pass.”

They waited, a tight knot of men, sitting still in the leather, listening.

The tracks of the Spanyers were hours old, and no other white man would be riding in this country now. So it had to be Indians…and they would be camping somewhere close by.

“A big party…a war party.”

“Now how do you know that?” Hardy demanded.

“By the smell.” The Kiowa spoke softly. “The paint smell…the medicine smell.”

They still waited…listening. One of their horses stamped impatiently. With darkness the desert had become cool. In the thin, clear air of the desert, with no vegetation or water to hold the heat, it is quickly gone.

At last they moved out, and when they stopped, hours later, it was in a nest of boulders where a defense could be made. The way they must go on the morrow was a way that must be watched with care. The
tinajas
where water could be had were few, and to miss one might well be fatal.

They lighted no fire. Nor did they make any sound but the faint whisperings of their clothing as they moved. No boots were removed tonight, only gun belts and hats, and the gun belts and saddle guns were kept close at hand.

Overhead there were many stars. The Kiowa was restless. Finally he spoke very quietly. “Woodsmoke…they are very near.”

No comment was made. Considine remembered two men he had found, suspended head down over fires that had cooked them until their skulls burst…and Dutch thought of something he had once seen: a man staked out near an ant hill, up to his chin.

The smoke might come from a fire a hundred yards off—but it was more likely to be half a mile away.

Considine was tired, but not sleepy. “You rest,” he told them. “I’ll stand watch.”

He wrapped his blanket about his shoulders and sat against a boulder, a huge rock that leaned over their small camp. The night was cool, but pleasant. Somewhere nearby someone had broken a branch of
thamnosma
. He could smell the pungent, peculiar odor of the Indian witch-plant.

Under the shelter of his blanket he lighted a cigarette, cupping its tiny red eye in his palm, liking the dry, hot taste of the tobacco. The horses cropped grass, a comforting sound…there was the smell of the horses, of the
thamnosma
, and the stale smell of his own unwashed clothing. That he would change when he got to Mexico. There was little time for washing clothes on the trail.

Why should his thoughts turn to Lennie now? What had there been about that slim, tanned girl in her proud dress, faded from many washings? Had it been the feel of her young body through the thin slip? Or the memory of her cool lips? Or was it something deeper? Was it some response from deep within himself, some response of his own loneliness to the loneliness in her?

He was no thinker, and he had no answers. He drew deep on the cigarette and snubbed it out in the sand. He got up and went among the horses, then he moved beyond the rocks, where he stood listening to the night. There was no sound.

As it was growing gray in the east he shook Dutch awake. The big man got up silently, and Considine then stretched out and slept.

When he was awakened scarcely an hour later, Dutch was making coffee over a tiny, smokeless fire. Hardy was saddling his horse, and the Kiowa had slipped away somewhere before daylight. Considine saddled his own horse and that of the Kiowa, then went to the fire for coffee.

The Kiowa returned, coming in among the boulders, and squatted by the fire. “Fourteen…they have fresh scalps.”

They looked at him, afraid to ask the question that was in all their minds.

“No long hair…no woman.”

The Kiowa drew on a cigarette, and gulped coffee. “They are gone now, but they follow a trail. They expect more scalps today.”

“Dave’s no fool,” Dutch said. “He’ll know those Indians are trailing him.”

“That Pete Runyon,” Hardy said, “he’ll be right behind us. We’d better light a shuck.”

The desert morning opened around them, bright and amazingly clear. The rocks stood out in sharp relief, the distant mountains seemed close by, and only the solemn finger of beckoning smoke touched an ominous note.

But the smoke, like their hard-hewn faces and the smell of smoke and sweat, was of the desert.…

Chapter 9

W
HEN IT WAS quite dark, Dave Spanyer took up the lead rope and started out from among the rocks. He had discarded the saddle, for it was more weight than it was worth, and he could come back for it later, if such an opportunity developed.

When the bulk of Packsaddle Mountain was behind them, he turned left into the velvety darkness. He could see only a little, but it was light enough to keep from stumbling over rocks or blundering into cactus. The mountains before them were a black wall offering no identifying features.

Lennie walked beside him, and when possible they kept to the soft sand. When passing through occasional patches of desert brush they carefully held the branches aside so they would not brush against their clothing, a sound easily heard and recognized in the desert night.

At last the sudden dampness told them they faced the canyon, for cool air usually came down those canyons, and to a knowing man it was an indication. Once within the canyon, they were engulfed in a vaster, deeper darkness, for the walls rose five hundred feet above them.

The sand was firm from recent floods following the rain, and it made walking easier, but it would leave tracks.

Spanyer blessed his luck in having a daughter who did not complain. Lennie was a girl to make a mother of men, not weak, sniveling mama’s boys. She was a good walker, too, and better than the average man with a rifle.