Waiting for nothingwas stamped plain upon him from head to foot
Waiting for nothingwas stamped plain upon him from head to foot
Waiting for nothingwas stamped plain upon him from head to foot
Yet he did not seem a miser; his willingness to help at anything in camp was unchanging, and a surer test of not being stingy was the indifference he showed to losing or winning the little sums we played at cards for after supper and before bed. The score I kept in my diary showed him to belong to the losing class. His help in camp was real, not merely well meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he had said he could do, he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him, he was somehow forever pitiful.
“Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio.
“Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never to have been born.”
“That probably applies to several million people all over this planet.”
“Sure,” assented Scipio cheerfully. He was not one of these.
“He’s so eternally silent!” I said presently.
“A man don’t ask to be born,” pursued Scipio.
“Parents can’t stop to think of that,” I returned.
“H’m,” mused Scipio. “Somebody or something has taken good care they’ll never.”
We continued along the trail, engrossed in our several thoughts, and I could hear Timberline, behind us with the pack horses, singing:—
If that I was where I would be,Then should I be where I am not.
If that I was where I would be,Then should I be where I am not.
If that I was where I would be,Then should I be where I am not.
Our mode of travel had changed at Fort Washakie. There we had left the wagon and put ourselves and our baggage upon horses, because we should presently be in a country where wagons could not go. I suppose that more advice is offered and less taken than of any other free commodity in the world. Before I had settled where to go for sheep, nobody could tell me where to go; now almost every one advised some other than the place I had chosen. “Washakie Needles?” they would repeat unfavorably; “Union Peak’s nearer;” or, “You go up Jakey’s Fork;” or “Red Creek’s half as far, and twice as many sheep;” or, “Last spring I seen a ram up Dinwiddie big as a horse.”
This discouragement, strung along our road, had small weight with me because it was just the idle talk of those dingy loafers of the Western cabin and saloon who never hunted, neverdid anything but sit still and assume to know your own business better than you knew it yourself; it was only once that the vigorous words of some by-passer on a horse caused Scipio and me to discuss dropping the Washakie Needles in favor of the country at the head of Green River. We were below Bull Lake at the forking of the ways; none of us had ever been in the Green River country, while Timberline evidently knew the Washakie Needles well, and this was what finally decided us. But Timberline had been thrown into the strangest agitation by our uncertainty. He had said nothing, but he walked about, coming near, going away, sitting down, getting up, instead of placidly watching his fire and cooking; until at last I told him not to worry, that wherever we went I should keep him and pay him in any case. Then he spoke:—
“I didn’t hire to go to Green River.”
“What have you got against Green River?”
“I hired to go to the Washakie Needles.”
His agitation left him immediately upon our turning our faces in that direction. What had so disturbed him we could not guess; but later that day Scipio rode up to me, bursting with a solution. He had visited a freighter’s camp, ahundred yards off the road in the sage-brush (we were following the Embar trail), and the freighter, upon learning our destination, had said he supposed we were “after the reward.” It did not get through my head at once, but when Scipio reminded me of the yellow poster and the murder, it got through fast enough: the body had been found on Owl Creek, and the middle fork of Owl Creek headed among the Washakie Needles. There might be another body,—the other Eastern man who had never been seen since,—and there was a possible third, the confederate, the cook; many held it was the murderer’s best policy to destroy him as well.
Owl Creek had yielded no more bodies after that one first found. Perhaps the victims had been killed separately. Before starting on their last journey in this world, they had let it get out somewhere down on the railroad that they carried money; this was their awful mistake, conducting death to them in the shape of the man who had offered himself as their guide, and whom they had engaged without more knowledge of him than he disclosed to them himself. Red Dog was his name in Colorado, where he was “wanted.” The all-day sitters and drinkers inthe cabins along the road had their omniscient word as to this also:theycould have told those Easterners not to hire Red Dog!
So now we had Timberline accounted for satisfactorily to ourselves; he was “after the reward.” We never said this to him, but we worked out his steps from the start. As stock-tender at Rongis he had seen that yellow poster pasted up, and had read it, day after day, with its promise of what to him was a fortune. To Owl Creek he could not go alone, having no money to buy a horse, and being afraid, too, perhaps. If he could only find that missing dead man—or the two of them—he might find a clew. My sheep hunt had dropped like a Providence into his hand.
We got across the hot country where rattlesnakes were thick where neither man lived nor water ran, and came to the first lone habitation in this new part of the world—a new set of mountains, a new set of creeks. A man stood at the door watching us come.
“Know him?” I asked Scipio.
“I’ve heard of him,” said Scipio. “He married a squaw.”
We were now opposite the man’s door. “You folks after the reward?” said he.
“After mountain sheep,” I replied, somewhat angry.
We camped some ten miles beyond him, and the next day crossed a low range, stopping near another cabin for noon. They gave us a quantity of berries they had picked, and we gave them some potatoes.
“After the reward?” said one of them as we rode away, and I contradicted him with temper.
“Lie to ’em,” said Scipio. “Say yes.” He developed his theory of truthfulness; it was not real falsehood to answer as you chose questions people had no right to ask; in fact, the only real lie was when you denied something wrong you had done. “And I’ve told hundreds of them, too,” he concluded pensively.
Something had begun to weigh upon our cheerfulness in this new country. The reward dogged us, and we saw strange actions of people twice. We came upon some hot sulphur springs[3]and camped near them, with a wide stream between us and another camp. Those people—two men and two women—emerged from their tent, surveyed us, nodded to us, andsettled down again. Next morning they had vanished; we could see the gleam of empty bottles on the bank opposite where they had been. And once, riding out of a little valley, we sighted close to us through cottonwoods a horseman leading a pack horse out of the next little valley.
He did not nod to us, but pursued his parallel course some three hundred yards off, until a rise in the ground hid him for a while; when this was passed he was no longer where he should have been, abreast of us, but far to the front, galloping away. That was our last sight of him. We spoke of these actions a little. Did these people suspect us, or were they afraid we suspected them?
All we ever knew was that suspicion had now gradually been wafted through the whole air and filled it like a coming change of weather. I could no longer look at a rock or a clump of trees without a disagreeable thought: was something, or somebody, behind the clump of trees and the rock? would they come out or wait until we had passed? This influence seemed to gather even more thick and chill as we turned up the middle fork of Owl Creek; magpies, that I had always liked to watch and listen to, had become part ofthe general increasing uncomfortableness, and their cries sounded no longer cheerful, but harsh and unfriendly.
As we rode up the narrowing cañon of Owl Creek, the Washakie Needles, those twin spires of naked rock, rose into view high above the clustered mountain-tops, closing the cañon in, shutting out the setting sun. But the nearness of my goal and my sheep hunt brought me no elation. Those miserable questions about reward, the strange conduct of those unknown people, dwelt in my mind. I saw in memory the floating image of that poster; I wondered if I, in my clambering for sheep, should stumble upon signs—evidence—an old camp—ashes—tent-pegs—or the horrible objects that had come here alive and never gone hence. I could not drive these fancies from me amid the austere silence of the place whereithad happened.
“Hecantalk when he wants to.”
It made me start, this remark of Scipio’s as he rode behind me.
“What has Timberline been telling you?”
“Nothing. But he’s been telling himself a heap of something.” In the rear of our single-file party Timberline rode, and I could hear himrambling on in a rising and falling voice. He ceased once or twice while I listened, breaking out again as if there had been no interruption. It was a relief to have a practical trouble threatening us; if the boy was going off his head, we should have something real to deal with. But when I had chosen a camp and we were unsaddling and throwing the packs on the ground, Timberline was in his customary silence. After supper I walked off with Scipio where our horses were.
“Do you think he’s sick?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Scipio. And that was all we said, for we liked the subject too little to pursue it.
Next morning I was over at the creek washing before breakfast. The sun was coming in through the open east end of our cañon, the shaking leaves of the quaking-asp twinkled in a blithe air, and a night’s sleep had brought me back to a much robuster mood. I had my field-glasses with me, and far up, far up among patches of snow and green grass, I could see sheep on both sides of the valley.
“So you sleep well?” said Scipio.
“Like a log. You?”
“Like another. Somebody in camp didn’t.”
I turned and looked at Timberline cooking over at camp.
“Looking for the horses early this morning,” pursued Scipio, “I found his tracks up and down all over everywheres.”
“Perhaps he has found the reward.”
Scipio laughed, and I laughed. It was the only thing to do. How much had the boy walked in the darkness?
“I think I’ll take him with us,” I then said. “I’d rather have him with us.”
During breakfast we discussed which hill we should ascend, and, this decided on, I was about to tell Timberline his company was expected, when he saved me the trouble by requesting to be allowed to go himself. His usually pale, harmless eyes were full of some sort of glitter: did his fingers feel that they were about to clutch the reward?
That was the thirtieth of August; a quarter of a century and more has passed; my age is double what it was; but to-day, on any thirtieth of August, if I think of the date, the Washakie Needles stand in my eyes,—twin spires of naked rock,—and I see what happened there.
The three of us left camp. It was warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet day smelled of the pines. We should not have taken horses, they served us so little in such a climb as that. On the level top our legs and breathing got relief, and far away up the next valley were sheep. This second top we reached, but they were gone to the next beyond, where we saw them across a mile or so of space. In the bottom below us ran the north fork of Owl Creek like a fine white wire drawn through the distant green of the pines. Up in this world peaks and knife-edged ridges bristled to our north away and away beyond sight.
We now made a new descent and ascent, but had no luck, and by three o’clock we stood upon a lofty, wet, slipping ledge that fell away on three sides, sheer or broken, to the summer and the warmth that lay thousands of feet below. Here it began to be very cold, and to the west the sky now clotted into advancing lumps of thick thundercloud, black, weaving and merging heavily and swiftly in a fierce, rising wind. We got away from this promontory to follow a sheep trail, and as we went along the backbone ofthe mountain, two or three valleys off to the right, long, black streamers let down from the cloud. They hung and wavered mistily close over the pines that did not grow within a thousand feet of our high level. I gazed at the streamers, and discerned water, or something, pouring down in them. Above our heads the day was still serene, and we had a chance to make camp without a wetting. This I suggested we should do, since the day’s promise of sport had failed.
“No! no!” said Timberline, hoarsely. “See there! We can get them. We’re above them. They don’t see us!”
I saw no sheep where he pointed, but I saw him. His eyes looked red-hot. He insisted the sheep had merely moved behind a rock, and so we went on. The strip of clear sky narrowed, and gray bars of rain were falling between us and the pieces of woodland that, but a moment since, had been unblurred. Blasts of frozen wind rose about us, causing me to put on my rubber coat before my fingers should grow too numb to button it. We moved forward to a junction of the knife-ridges upon which a second storm was hastening from the southwest over deep valleysthat we turned our backs upon, and kept slowly urging our horses near the Great Washakie Needle.
We stopped at the base of its top pinnacle, glad to reach this slanting platform of comparative safety. No sheep were anywhere, but I had ceased to care about sheep. Jutting stones, all but their upturned points and edges buried in the ground, made this platform a rough place to pick one’s way over—but this was a trifle. From these jutting points a humming sound now began to rise, a sort of droning, which at first ran about here and there among them, with a flickering, æolian capriciousness, then settled to a steady chord: the influence of the electric storm had encircled us. We all looked at each other, but turned immediately again to watch the portentous, sublime scene.
At the edge of our platform the world fell straight a thousand feet down to a valley like the bottom of a cauldron; on the far side of the cauldron the air, like a stroke of magic, became thick white, and through it leaped the first lightning, a blinding violet. An arm of the storm reached over to us, the cauldron sank from sight in a white sea, and the hail cut my face soI bowed it down. Mixed with the hail fell softer flakes, which, as they touched the earth, glowed for a moment like tiny bulbs, and went out. On the ground I saw what looked like a tangle of old, human footprints in the hard-crusted mud. These the pellets of the swarming hail soon filled. This tempest of flying ice struck my body, my horse, raced over the ground like spray on the crest of breaking waves, and drove me to dismount and sit under the horse, huddled together even as he was huddled against the fury and the biting pain of the hail.
From under the horse’s belly I looked out upon a chaos of shooting, hissing white, through which, in every direction, lightning flashed and leaped, while the fearful crashes behind the curtain of the hail sounded as if I should see a destroyed world when the curtain lifted. The place was so flooded with electricity that I gave up the shelter of my horse, and left my rifle on the ground and moved away from the vicinity of these points of attraction. Of my companions I had not thought; I now noticed them, crouching separately, much as I crouched.
So I sat—I know not how long—chilled from spine to brisket, my stiff boots growingwet, my discarded gloves a pulp, like my hat, and melted hail trickling from the rubber coat to my legs. At length the hail-stones fell more gently, the near view opened, revealing white winter on all save the steep, gray Needles; the thick, white curtain of hail departed slowly; the hail where I was fell more scantily still.
It was slowly going away,—the great low-prowling cloud,—we should presently be left in peace unscathed, though it was at its tricks still. Its brimming, spilling-over electricity was now playing a new prank—mocking my ears with crackling noises, as of a camp-fire somewhere on earth, or in air. While I listened curiously to these, my eye fell on Timberline. He was turning, leaning, crouching, listening too. When he crouched, it was to peer at those old footprints I had noticed. There was something frightful in the sight of his face, shrunk to half its size, and I called to reassure him, and beckoned that it was all right, that we were all right. I doubt if he saw or heard me.
Something somewhere near my head set up a delicate sound. It seemed in my hat. I rose and began to wander, bewildered by this. The hail was now falling very fine and gentle, when suddenly I was aware of its stinging behind my ear more sharply than it had done at all. I turned my face in its direction and found its blows harmless, while the stinging in my ear grew sharper. The hissing continued close to my head whenever I walked. It resembled the little watery escape of gas from a charged bottle whose cork is being slowly drawn.
I was now more really disturbed than I had been during the storm’s worst, and meeting Scipio, who was also wandering, I asked if he felt anything. He nodded uneasily, when, suddenly—I know not why—I snatched my hat off. The hissing was in the brim, and it died out as I looked at the leather binding and the stitches. I expected to see some insect there, or some visible reason for the noise. I saw nothing, but the pricking behind my ear had also stopped. Then I knew my wet hat had been charged like a Leyden jar with electricity. Scipio, who had watched me, jerked his hat off also.
“Lights on steer horns are nothing to this,” I began, when a piercing scream cut me short.
Timberline, at the other side of the stony platform, had clapped his hands to his head.
“Take off your hat,” I shouted.
But he had fallen on his knees, and was ripping, tearing his clothes. He plucked and dragged at the old rags next his skin. Then he flung his hands to the sky.
“O God!” he screamed. “Oh, Jesus! Keep him off me! Oh, save me!” His glaring face now seemed fixed on something close to him. “Leave me go! I didn’t push you over. You know he made me push you. I meant nothing. I knowed nothing, I was only the cook. Why, I liked you—you was kind to me. Oh, why did I ever go! There! Take it back! There’s your money! He give it to me when you was dead to make me hush up. There! I never spent a cent of it!”
He tore from his rags the hush-money that had been sewed in them, and scattered the fluttering bills in the air. Then once more he clapped his hands to his head as he kneeled.
“Take off your hat!” I cried again.
He rose, stared wildly, and screamed: “I tell you you’ve got it all. It’s all he gave to me!”
The next moment he plunged into the cauldron, a thousand feet below.
On the following day we found the two bodies—that second victim the country had wonderedabout, and the boy. And we counted the money, the guilty money that had for a while closed the boy’s innocent mouth: five ten-dollar bills! Not much to hide murder for, not much to draw a tortured soul back to the scene of another’s crime. The true murderer was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.
Highup the mountain amid white Winter I sat, and looked far down where still the yellow Autumn stayed, looked at Wind River shrunk to map-size, a basking valley, a drowsy country, tawny and warm, winding southeastward away to the tawny plain, and there dissolving with air and earth in one deep, hazy, golden sleep. Somewhere in that slumberous haze beyond the buttes and utmost foothills, and burrowed into the vast unfeatured level, lay my problem, Still Hunt Spring.
I had inquired much about Still Hunt Spring. Every man seemed to know of it, but no man you talked with had been to it. Description of it always came to me at second hand. Scipio I except; Scipio assured me he had once been to it. It was no easy spot to find; a man might pass it close and come back and pass it on the other side, yet never know it was at his elbow: so they said. The Indians believed a supernatural thing about it—that it was not thereevery day, and few of them would talk readily about it; yet it was they who had first showed it to the white man. And because they repeated concerning a valley two hundred feet deep, a mile long, and a quarter-mile wide at its widest, this haunted legend of presence and absence, its name now possessed my mind. Like a strain of music it recurred to my thoughts each day of my November hunting in the mountains of Wind River. Still Hunt Spring; down there, somewhere in that drowsy distance, it lay. One trail alone led into it; from one end of the secret ravine to the other—they said—grew a single file of trees lank and tall as if they stood on stilts to see out over the top, and at the further end was a spring, small, cold, and sweet; though it welled up in the midst of sage-brush desert, there was no alkali—they said—in that water. Still Hunt Spring!
That night I announced to my two camp companions my new project: next summer I should see Still Hunt Spring for myself.
“Alone?” Scipio inquired.
“Not if you will come.”
“It is no tenderfoot’s trail.”
“Then if I find it I shall cease to be a tenderfoot.”
“Go on,” said Scipio, with indulgence. “We’ll not let you stay lost.”
“It is no tenderfoot’s place,” the cook now muttered.
“Then you have been there?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I am in this country for my health,” he drawled. On this a certain look passed between my companions, and a certain laugh. A sudden suspicion came to me, which I kept to myself until next afternoon when we had broken this camp where no game save health seemed plentiful, and were down the mountains at Horse Creek and Wind River.
“I don’t believe there is any such place as Still Hunt Spring.”
This I said sitting with a company in the cabin known later on the Postal Route map as Dubois. The nearest post-office then was seventy-five miles away. No one spoke until a minute after, I suppose, when a man slowly remarked: “Some call that place Blind Spring.”
He was presently followed by another, speaking equally slowly: “I’ve heard it called Arapaho Spring.”
“Still Hunt Spring is right.” This was a heavy, rosy-faced man, of hearty and capableappearance. His clothes were strong and good, made of whipcord, but his maroon-colored straw hat so late in the season was the noticeable point in his dress. His voice was assertive, having in it something of authority, if not of menace. “Some claim there’s such a place,” he continued, eying me steadily and curiously, “and some claim there’s not.” (Here he made a pause.) “But I tell you there is.”
He still held his eye upon me with no friendliness. Were they all merely playing on my tenderfoot credulity, or what was it? I was framing a retort when sounds of trouble came from outside.
“Man down in the corral,” exclaimed somebody. “It’s that wild horse.”
Scipio met us, running. “No doctor here?” he panted. “McDonough has bruck his leg, looks like.”
But the doctor was seventy-five miles away—like the post-office.
“Who’s McDonough?” inquired the rosy-faced man with the straw hat.
A young fellow from Colorado, they told him, a new settler on Wind River this summer. He had taken up a ranch on North Fork and built him a cabin. Hard luck if he had broken hisleg; he had a bunch of horses; was going to raise horses; he had good horses. Hard luck!
We found young McDonough lying in the corral, propped against a neighbor’s kindly knee. The wild horse was snorting and showing us red nostrils and white eyes in a far corner; he had reared and fallen backward while being roped, and the bars had prevented dodging in time. Dirt was ground into McDonough’s flaxen hair, the skin was tight on his cheeks, and his tips were as white as his large, thick nails; but he smiled at us, and his strange blue eyes twinkled with the full spark of undaunted humor.
“Ain’t I a son of a—?” he began, and shook his head over himself and his clumsiness. Further speech was stopped by violent retching, and I was enough of a doctor to fear that this augured a worse hurt than a broken leg. But no blood came up, and he was soon talking to us again, applying to himself sundry jocular epithets which were very well in that rough corral, but must stay there.
He was lifted to the only bed in the cabin, no sound escaping him, though his lips remained white, and when he thought himself unobserved he shut his eyes; but kept them open and twinkling at any one’s approach. They were strange, perplexed eyes, evidently large, but deep-set, their lids screwed together; later that evening I noticed that he held his playing-cards close to them, and slightly to one side, Scipio called him “skew-bald,” but I could see no such defect. He was not injured internally, it proved later, but his right leg was broken above the ankle. We had to cut his boot off, so swollen already was the limb. The heavy man with the straw hat advised getting him to the hospital at the post without delay, and regretted he himself had not come up the river in his wagon; he could have given the patient a lift. With this he departed upon a tall roan horse, with an air about him of business and dispatch uncommon in these parts. Wind River horsemen mostly looked and acted as if there was no such thing as being behind time, there being no such thing as time.
“Who is he?” I asked, looking after the broad back of whipcord and the unseasonable straw hat.
All were surprised. What? Not know Lem Speed? Biggest cattleman in the country. Store and a bank in Lander. House in Salt Lake. Wife in Los Angeles. Son at Yale.
“Up here looking after his interests?” I pursued.
“Up here looking after his interests.” My exact words were repeated in that particular tone which showed I was again left out of something.
“What’s the matter with my questions?” I asked.
“What’s the matter with our answers?” said a man. Truly, mine had been a tenderfoot speech, and I sat silent.
McDonough’s white lips regained no color that night, and the skin drew tighter over the bones of his face as the hours wore on. He was proof against complaining, but no stoic endurance could hide such pain as he was in. Beneath the sunburn on his thick hand the flesh was blanched, yet never did he once ask if the hay wagon was not come for him. They had expected to get him off in it by seven, but it did not arrive until ten minutes before midnight; they had found it fifteen miles up the river, instead of two. Sitting up, twisted uncomfortably, he played cards until one of the company, with that lovable tact of the frontier, took the cards from him, remarking, “You’ll lose all you’ve got,” and, with his consent, played his hand and made bets for him.McDonough then sank flat, watching the game with his perplexed, half-shut eyes.
What I could do for him I did; it was but little. Finding his leg burning and his hand cold, I got my brandy—their whiskey was too doubtful—and laid wet rags on the leg, keeping them wet. He accepted my offices and my brandy without a sign; this was like most of them, and did not mean that he was not grateful, but only that he knew no way to say so. Laudanum alone among my few drugs seemed applicable, and he took twenty drops with dumb acquiescence, but it brought him neither sleep nor doze. More I was afraid in my ignorance to give him, and so he bore, unpalliated, what must have become well-nigh agony by midnight, when we lifted him into the wagon. So useless had I been, and his screwed-up eyes, with their valiant sparkle, and his stoic restraint, made me feel so sorry for him, that while they were making his travelling bed as soft as they could I scrawled a message to the army surgeon at the Post. “Do everything you can for him,” I wrote, “and as I doubt if he has five dollars to his name, hold me responsible.” This I gave McDonough without telling him its contents. Off they drove him in the cold, mutenight; I could hear the heavy jolts of the wagon a long way. Six rocky fords lay between here and Washakie, and Scipio thus summed up the seventy-five miles the patient had before him: “I don’t expect he’ll improve any on the road.”
In new camps among other mountains I now tried my luck through deeper snow, thicker ice, and colder days, coming out at length lean and limber, and ravenous for every good that flesh is heir to, yet reluctant to turn eastward to that city life which would unfailingly tarnish the bright, hard steel of health. Of Still Hunt Spring I spoke no more, but thought often, and with undiscouraged plans to visit it. I mentioned it but once again. Old Washakie, chief of the Shoshone tribe, did me the honor to dine with me at the military post which bore his name. Words cannot describe the face and presence of that old man; ragged clothes abated nothing of his dignity. A past like the world’s beginning looked from his eyes; his jaw and long white hair made you silent as tall mountains make you silent. After we had dined and I had made him presents, he drew pictures in the sand for me with his finger. Not as I expected, almost to mydisappointment, this Indian betrayed no mystery concerning the object of my quest.
“Hé!” he said (it was like a shrug). “No hard find. You want see him? Water pretty good, yes. Trees heap big. You make ranch maybe?”
When he heard my desire was merely to see Still Hunt Spring, I am not certain he understood me, or if so, believed me. “Hé!” he exclaimed again, and laughed because I laughed. “You go this way,” he said, beginning to trace a groove in the sand. “So.” He laid a match here and there and pinched up little hillocks, and presently he had it all set forth. I tore off a piece of wrapping-paper from the stove and copied the map carefully, with his comments. The place was less distant than I had thought. I thanked him, spoke of returning “after one snow” to see him and Still Hunt Spring. “Hé!” he shrugged. Then he mounted his pony, and rode off without any “good-by,” Indian fashion. I counted it a treasure I had got from him.
McDonough’s leg had knit well, and I met him on crutches crossing the parade ground. He was discharged from hospital, and (I will not deny it) his mere nod of greeting seemed somewhat too scant acknowledgment of the good willI had certainly tried to show him. Yet his smile was very pleasant, and while I noted his face, no longer embrowned with sun and riding, but pale from confinement, I noted also the unsubdued twinkle in his perplexed eyes. After all, why should I need thanks? As he hobbled away with his yellow hair sticking out in a cowlick under his hat behind, I smiled at my own smallness, and wished him good luck heartily.
The doctor, whose hospitable acquaintance I had made on first coming through the Post this year, would not listen to my paying him anything for his services to McDonough. Army surgeons were expected, he said, to render what aid they could to civilians, as well as to soldiers, in the hospital; he good-humoredly forbade all the remonstrance I attempted. When civilians could pay him themselves, he let them do so according to their means; it was just as well that the surrounding country should not grow accustomed to treating “Uncle Sam” as a purely charitable institution. McDonough had offered to pay, when he could, what he could afford. The doctor had thought it due to me to let him know the contents of my note, and that no such arrangement could be allowed.
“And what said he to that?” I asked.
“Nothing, as usual.”
“Disgusted, perhaps?”
“Not in the least. His myopic eyes were just as cheerful then as they were the second before he fainted away under my surgical attentions. He scorned ether.”
“Poor fellow! He’s a good fellow!” I exclaimed.
“M’m,” went the doctor, doubtfully.
“Know anything against him?” I asked.
“Know his kind. All the way from Assiniboine to Lowell Barracks.”
“It has made you hard to please,” I declared.
“M’m,” went the doctor again.
“Think he’ll not pay you?”
“May. May not.”
“Well, good-by, Cynic.”
“Good-by, Tenderfoot.”
The next morning, had there been time to catch the doctor, I could have proved to him that he was hard to please. At the moment of my stepping into the early stage I had a surprise. McDonough had been at breakfast at the hotel, and had said nothing to me; a nod sufficed him, as usual—it was as much social intercourse as
The stage rattled up as I sat
The stage rattled up as I sat
The stage rattled up as I sat
was customary at breakfast, or, indeed, at any of the meals. The stage rattled up as I sat, and I, its only passenger, rose and spoke a farewell syllable to McDonough, who repeated his curt nod. My next few minutes were spent in paying the bill, seeing my baggage roped on behind the stage, and in bidding Scipio good-by. One foot was up to get into the vehicle when a voice behind said, “So you’re going.”
There was McDonough, hobbled out after me to the fence. He stood awkwardly at the open gate, smiling his pleasant smile. I replied yes, and still he stood.
“Coming next year?”
Again I said yes, and again he stood silent, smiling and awkward. Then it was uttered; the difficult word which shyness had choked: “If you come, you shall have the best horse on the river.”
Before I could answer he was hobbling back to the hotel. Thus from his heart his untrained lips at last had spoken.
I drove away, triumphing over the doctor, and in my thoughts my holiday passed in review,—my camps, and Scipio, and Still Hunt Spring, and most of all this fellow with his broken leg and perplexed eyes.
At Lander, they said, had I come two days earlier, I should have had the company of Lem Speed. So he and his maroon straw hat came into my thoughts too. He had started for California, I heard from the driver, whose society I sought on the box. He assured me that Lem Speed was rich, but that I carried better whiskey. Trouble was “due” in this country, he said (after more of my whiskey), “pretty near” the sort of trouble they were having on Powder River. For his part he did not wonder that poor men got tired of rich men; not that he objected to riches, but only to hogs. He had nothing against Lem Speed. Temptation to steal stock had never come his way, but he could understand how poor men might get tired of the big cattlemen—some poor men, anyhow. Yes, trouble was “sure due”; what brought Lem Speed up here so long after the beef round-up? Still, he “guessed” he hadn’t told Lem Speed anything that would hurt a poor fellow. Lem Speed had “claimed” he was up here about his bank. If so, why had he gone up Wind River, and all around Big Muddy, and over to the Embar? The bank was not there. No, sir; the big cattlemen were going to “demonstrate” over here as they had on the DryCheyenne and Box Elder. I perceived “demonstration” to be the driver’s word for the sudden hanging of somebody without due process of law, and I expressed a doubt as to its being needed here; I had heard nothing of cattle or horses being stolen. This he received in silence, presently repeating that Lem Speed hadn’t got anything fromhim. We broke off this subject for mines, and after mines we touched on topic after topic, until I confided to him the story of McDonough.
“Of course I would never accept the horse,” I finished.
“Why not?”
“Well—well—it would hardly be suitable.”
“Please yourself,” said the driver, curtly, and looking away. “Such treatment would not please me.”
“You mean, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth,’ as we say?”
“I don’t know as I ever said that.” A steep gulley in the road obliged him to put on the break and release it before he continued: “I’d not consider I had the right to do a man a good turn if I wasn’t willing for him to domeone.”
“But I really did nothing for him.”
“Please yourself. Maybe folks are different East.”
“Well,” I ended, laughing, “I understand you, and am not the hopeless snob I sound like, and I’ll take his horse next summer if you will take a drink now.”
We finished our journey in amity.
The intervening months, whatever drafts they made upon my Rocky Mountain health, weakened my designs not a whit; late June found me again in the stagecoach, taking with eagerness that drive of thirty-two jolting hours. Roped behind were my camp belongings, and treasured in my pocket was Chief Washakie’s trail to Still Hunt Spring. My friend, the driver, was on the down stage; and so, to my regret, we could not resume our talk where we had left it; but I again encountered at once that atmosphere of hinted doings and misdoings which had encompassed me as I went out of the country. At the station called Crook’s Gap I came upon new rumors of Lem Speed, and asked, had he come about his bank again?
“You and him acquainted?” inquired a man on a horse. And, on my answering that I was not, he cursed Lem Speed slow and long, lookingabout for contradiction; then, as none present took it up, he rode sullenly away, leaving silence behind him.
When I alighted next afternoon at the Washakie post-trader’s store and walked back to the private office of the building whither I was wont always to repair, what I saw in that private room, through a sort of lattice which screened it off from the general public, was a close-drawn knot of men round a table, and on a chair a maroon-colored straw hat! Rather hastily the post-trader came out, and, shaking my hand warmly, drew me away from the lattice. After a few cordial questions he said: “Come back this evening.”
“Does he never get a new hat?” I asked.
“Hat? Who? What? Oh; yes, to be sure!” laughed the post-trader. “I’ll tell him he ought to.”
I sought out the doctor, soon learning from him that McDonough had paid him for his services. But this had not softened his opinion of the young fellow, though he had heard nothing against him, nor even any mention of his name; he repeated his formula that he had known McDonough’s kind all the way from Assiniboine to Lowell Barracks, whereupon I again calledhim “cynic,” and he retorted with “tenderfoot,” and thus amicably I left him for my postponed gossip with the post-trader. Him I found hospitable, but preoccupied, holding a long cigar unlighted between his taciturn lips. Each topic that I started soon died away: my Eastern news; my summer plans to ramble with Scipio across the Divide on Gros Ventre and Snake; the proposed extension of the Yellowstone Park—everything failed.
“That was quite a company you had this afternoon,” I said, reaching the end of my resources.
“Yes. Nice gentlemen. Yes.” And he rolled the long, unlighted cigar between his lips.
“Cattlemen, I suppose?”
“Cattlemen. Yes.”
“Business all right, I hope?”
“Well, no worse than usual.”
Here again we came to an end, and I rose to go.
“Seen your friend McDonough yet?” said he, still sitting.
“Why, how do you know he’s a friend of mine?”
“Says so every time he comes into the Post.”
“Well, the doctor’s all wrong about him!” Iexclaimed, and gave my views. The post-trader watched me in his tilted chair, with a half-whimsical smile, rolling his eternal cigar, and I finished with the story of the horse. Then the smile left his face. He got up slowly, and slowly took a number of turns round his office, pottered with some papers on his desk, and finally looked at me again.
“Tell me if he does,” he said.
“Offer the horse? I shall not remind him—and I should take it only as a loan.”
“You tell me if he does,” repeated the post-trader, now smiling again, and so we parted.
“I wonder what he didn’t say?” I thought as I proceeded to the hotel; for he had plainly pondered some remarks and decided upon silence. Between them, he and the doctor had driven me to a strong hope that McDonough would vindicate my opinion of him by making good his word. At breakfast next morning at the hotel one of the invariable characters at such breakfasts, an unshaven person in tattered overalls, with rope-scarred fists and grimy knuckles, to me unknown, asked:—
“Figure on meeting your friend McDonough?”
“Not if he doesn’t figure on meeting me.”
They all took quiet turns at looking at me until some one remarked:—
“He ain’t been in town lately.”
“I’m glad his leg’s all right,” I said.
“Oh, his leg’s all right.”
The tone of this caused me to look at them. “Well, I hope he’sallall-right!”
Not immediately came the answer: “By latest reports he was enjoying good health.”
Truly they were a hopeless people to get anything direct from. Indirectness is by some falsely supposed to be a property of only the highly civilized; but these latter merely put a brighter and harder polish on it.
That afternoon I drove with my camp things out of town in a “buggy,”—very different from the Eastern vehicle which bears this name,—and the next afternoon between Dinwiddie and Red Creek, on a waste stretch high above the river, who should join me but McDonough. He was riding down the mountain apparently from nowhere, and my pleasure at seeing him was keen. His words were few and halting, as they had been the year before, and in his pleasant, round face the blue eyes twinkled, screwed up and as perplexed as ever. I abstained from more thanglancing at the fine sorrel that he rode, lest I should seem to be hinting.
“Water pretty low for this season,” he said.
“Was there not much snow?”
“Next to none, and went early.”
I turned from my direct course and camped at his cabin on North Fork.
“What’s your hurry?” he said next morning, when I was preparing to go.
There was no hurry; those days had no hurry in them, and I bless their memory for it. I sat on a stump, smoking a “Missouri meerschaum,” and unfolding to him my plans. To the geography of my route he listened intently—very intently.
“So you’re going to keep over the other side the mountains?” he said.
“Even to Idaho,” I answered, “and home that way.”
“Not back this way?”
“Not this year.”
He thought a little while. “You’re settled as to that?”
“Quite.”
He rose, and put some wood into the stove in his cabin; then he returned to me where I sat onthe stump. “Sure you’re quite settled you’ll keep on the west side of the Divide?”
“Goodness!” I laughed, “why should I lie to you?”
Again he pondered in silence, and I could not imagine what he had in his mind. What had my being east or being west of the mountains to do with him?
He now jerked his head toward the corral. “Like him?” he inquired gruffly. It was the sorrel horse that he meant, and I perceived that it was standing saddled. I said nothing. The fellow’s embarrassment embarrassed me. “Like him?” he repeated.
“Looks good to me,” I replied, adopting his gruffness.
He rose and brought the horse to me. “Get on.”
“Hulloa! You’ve got my saddle on him.”
“Get on. He ain’t the one that bruck my leg.”
I obeyed. Thus was the gift offered and accepted. I rode the horse down and up the level river bottom. “How shall I get him back to you?” I asked.
McDonough’s face fell. “He’ll be all right in the East,” he protested.
I smiled. “No, my good friend. Not that. Let me send him back with the outfit.”
We compromised on this, and caught trout for the rest of the day, also shooting some young sage chickens. The sorrel proved a fine animal. Again McDonough delayed my departure. “I can broil those chickens fine,” he said, “and—and you’ll not be back this way.”
He would not look at me as he said this, but busied himself with the fire. He was lonely, and liked my company, and couldn’t say so. Dense doctor! I reflected, not to have been warmed by this nature. But later this friendless fellow touched my heart more acutely. A fine thought had come to me during the evening: to leave my wagon here, to leave a note for Scipio at the E-A outfit, to descend Wind River to the Sand Gulch, strike Washakie’s trail to the northeast of Crow Heart Butte, and on my vigorous sorrel find Still Hunt Spring by myself. The whole ride need take but two days. I think I must have swelled with pride at the prospect of this secret achievement, to be divulged, when accomplished, to the admiring dwellers on Wind River. But I intended to have the pleasure of divulging it to McDonough at once, and Iforthwith composed a jeering note to Scipio Le Moyne.
“Esteemed friend” (this would anger him immediately); “come and find me at Still Hunt Spring, if you don’t fear getting lost. If you do, avoid the risk, and I will tell you all about it Friday evening. Yours, Tenderfoot.”
I pushed this over to McDonough, who was practising various cuts with a pack of cards. “That will make Scipio jump,” I said.
Somewhat to my disappointment, it did not have this or any effect upon McDonough. He held the paper close to his eyes, shutting them still more to follow the writing, and handed it back to me, saying merely, “Pretty good.”
“I’ll leave it over at the E-A for him,” I explained. “He thinks I’m afraid to go there alone.”
“Yes. Pretty good,” said McDonough, as if I were venturing nothing. Was all Wind River going to treat it as such a trifle? Or—could it be that McDonough alone among white men and red hereabouts knew nothing of the mystery and menace by which Still Hunt Spring was encircled?
Next morning my perplexity was cleared. I made an early start, tying some food and a kettleand my “slicker” to the saddle. McDonough watched me curiously.
“Leavin’ your wagon and truck?” he inquired.
“Why, yes, of course. I’ll be back for it. I’m going to the E-A now. Are you a poet?” I continued. “I’ve begun a thing.” And I handed him some unfinished lines, which I had entitled “At Gift Horse Ranch.” “You don’t object to that?”
“Object to what?”
“Why, the title, ‘At Gift Horse Ranch.’”
He took the paper down from his eyes, and I saw that his face had suddenly turned scarlet. He stood blinking for a moment, and then he said:—
“I’d kind of like to hear it.”
“But that’s all there is to hear—so far!” I exclaimed, feeling somehow puzzled.
He put the verses close to his eyes once more. Then he held them out to me, and stood blinking in his odd, characteristic way. “Won’t y’u read ’em to me?” he at length managed to say. “I’ll not foolyou.”
For yet one moment more I was dull, and did not understand.
“I can’t read,” he stated simply.
“Oh!” I murmured in mortification. And so I read the lines to him.
He stretched out his hand for the scribbled envelope on which I had pencilled the fragment. “May I keep that?”
“Wait till I have it finished.”
“I’d kind of like to have the start to keep.” He took it and shoved it awkwardly inside his coat. “I can’t read or write,” he said, more at his ease now the truth was out. “Nobody ever taught me nothin’.”
But I was not at ease. “Well, that stuff of mine is not worth reading!” I said. Cards had a meaning for him—kings, queens, ten-spots—these had been the fellow’s only books! He went on, “Never had any folks, y’u see—to know ’em, that is.—Well, so-long till you’re back.” He turned to his cabin, and I touched my horse.
The sorrel had gone but a few steps when I looked over my shoulder, and there stood the solitary figure, watching me from the cabin door. Suddenly it occurred to me that, as he had not been able to read my letter to Scipio, he knew nothing of my project.Thiswas why he had manifested no surprise! “Do you think,” Icalled back, laughing, “that your horse can take me to Still Hunt Spring?”
I am now sure that a flash of some totally different expression crossed his face, but at the time I was not sure; he was instantly smiling. “Take y’u anywhere,” he called. “Take y’u to Mexico, take y’u to Hell!”
“Oh, not yet!” I responded, and cantered away. So he thought I would not dare to go alone to Still Hunt Spring! Well and good; they should all believe it by Friday evening.
My cantering ceased soon,—it had been for dramatic effect,—and as I had before me a long ride, it behooved me to walk the first miles. Yet I was soon up the easy ascent from North Fork, and though my descent to the main river from the dividing ridge was through precipitous red bluffs, and accomplished with caution, I reached the E-A ranch (where it used to be twenty-five years ago) in less than two hours. To leave my note there for Scipio took but a minute, and now on the level trail down Wind River I made good time, so that before ten o’clock I had crossed back over it above the Blue Holes, skirted by where the Circle fence is to-day, crossed North Fork here, gone up a gulch, and dropped downagain upon Wind River below its abrupt bend, and reached the desolate Sand Gulch. I nooned at the spring which lies, no bigger than a hat, about seven miles up the Sand Gulch on its north side. This was the starting-point of the trail that old Washakie had drawn for me; here I crossed the threshold of the mysterious and the untrodden.
The sense of this heightened the elation which my ride through the bracing hours of dawn had brought me, and as I turned out of the Sand Gulch it was as if some last tie of restraint had stepped from my spirit, leaving it on wings free and rejoicing. This gleamy, unfooted country always looked monotonous from the bluffs of Wind River, but I found no tedium in it; its delicious loneliness was thrilled at each new stage of the trail by recognizing the successive signs and landmarks which Washakie had bidden me look for. The first was a great dull red stone, carved rudely by some ancient savage hand to represent a tortoise. Perhaps in another mood, the grim appearance of this monster might have seemed a symbol of menace, but when I came upon the stone just where my map indicated that it was to be expected, I hailed it with triumph.Nor did the caked and naked earth of the region through which I next traced my way dry up my ardor. Gullies sometimes hid all views from me, and again from mounds and rises I could see for fifty miles. Should this ever meet the eye of some reader familiar with Wind River, he will know my whereabouts by learning that far off, but constantly in plain sight to my left, were Black Mountain and Spring Mountain; that I must have been headed toward a point about midway between where the mail camp now is and the pass over to Embar; that I crossed Crow Creek and (I think) Dry Creek, and that I saw both Steamboat Butte and Tea Pot Butte at different points. Even to write these names is a pleasure, for I loved that country so; and sometimes it seems as if I must go there and smell the sage-brush again—or die!
After the tortoise came several guiding signs: a big gash in the soil, cut by a cloud-burst; an old corral where I turned sharp to the left; a pile of white buffalo bones five miles onward; until at length I passed through a belt of low hills, bare and baked and colored, some pink, like tooth-powder, and others magenta, and entered a more level region covered with sparse grass and sage-brush. Great white patches of alkali, acres in extent, lay upon this plain. There was no water (Washakie had told me there would be none), and the gleamy waste stretched away on all sides; endlessly in front, and right and left to long lines of distant mountains, full of light and silence. Let the reader who is susceptible to tone combinations listen to the following dissonant, unresolved measures, played slowly over and over:—