by Alan Lemay
Up in the hospital, the room where they had Lee Macklin was cool and shadowy, very quiet. Polly could feel the desertcountry grit of the arena in her fine, soft hair, and it made her feel out of place in that clean room, with its smell of formaldehyde and ether. But she was happy, for Lee knew her now and was glad that she was there, and they let her stay.
They were going to operate on him, but it was going to be all right. Maybe he would never ride again, but even so the quiet and the reassurance were like spring coming on, after what they had had before that. Lee had raved deliriously for an hour - knocked cuckoo, just plain knocked cuckoo - before they even found out what he was raving about. He had been obsessed with the idea that Polly was about to ride Black Powder! She had forgotten about Black Powder.
After that, they had let her in, and Lee had come around all right. And now she sat beside him, and he held both her hands in one of his. They didn't talk much. Lee was supposed to keep his mouth shut.
Only, he finally said: "1 don't care whether you like it or not. But somebody has to stick around and keep an eye on you. Seems like nobody has been taking care of that since you turned me out on the free range. 1 never seen anybody so crazy reckless. You got no more notion of taking care of yourself than a new colt. From here out 1 aim to stand by and ride circle on you, and I aim to keep it up until you get somebody that suits you better to take my place."
Polly marveled. He might have taken the words right out of her mouth, so accurately they fitted the thought that was running in her head. How was it that he couldn't see he was the crazy, reckless one, whom someone had to ride circle on? You could hardly dare leave him out of your sight, lest he dive headlong into his come-uppance. He had no more notion of how to take care of himself than a - but those were his words.
"Whether you like it or not," he said again, doggedly.
She bent her head, and pressed her eyes against his hand. "1 guess 1 can make out to put up with it, Lee."
With twilight it began snowing in soft, broad flakes, salting the dark backs of the cattle. Daylight blurred out slowly, leaving behind it that odd luminous quality that night is sometimes given by a sheeted moon and the almost phosphorescent snow. The crawling dusk had a curious electric feel, a subtle, edgy warning, in spite of the stillness: the sort of thing felt before a thunderstorm sometimes, or at sea when the barometer is dropping unaccountably in the midst of a calm.
Whiskers Beck felt the unrest in the twilight as he stood hugging his sheepskin coat about him on the canon's low rim. From there his keen old blue eyes squinted down into the bedding ground of the eight hundred white faces, a hundred feet below. He was tired, for he had worked hard in the cold, and he was old, but that odd expectancy in the air kept him from wanting to sit down.
The cattle felt it, too. He could see that. They should have been grazing, or trying to, for, although the drive had been slow, they had picked up very little forage on the way. Instead, they stood quietly, heads downcafion, in a too compact mass. Only here and there a few had drawn off to tear at the scant thicket along the foot of the rock walls.
The old cowboy clawed at the ice in his white beard, wondering what they had better do in place of circle riding tonight. It was Beck's religion that virtue lay not so much in how well you did a thing as in how easily you did it well enough. The cattle were dog tired and hemmed in by the canon walls. Three more miles of widening canon were ahead before the cut lost itself on the prairie. Whiskers was badly tempted to mount no rider at all. Still.. .old man Rutherford, for whom they rode, was in a corner again. When he had got his full beef herd to the railroad, he had found himself without cattle cars - a circumstance foreseen but unavoided. He had been obliged to sell at a loss. The winter hay he must have was not available on his shaken credit.
He had cattle cars waiting for him now, enough cars for two or three brands. The cattle were not in them. The critters were strung out over their winter range; the ponies were scattered into the hills; the cowboys paid off and departed. To buck this bleak situation three remaining riders had set out to get a herd for those cars. And Whiskers Beck, after almost sixty years spent in avoiding that contingency, was boss.
For three men the rounding up of the cattle, strong from the summer's forage and wild from the fall roundup, had been a long, tough race against the day when the cars would wait no more. Holding the growing herd, necessarily a one-man job, had been harder yet - it would have been impossible in the day of the Sonora longhorns. The long circle rider peeled a pessimistic eye and offered fervid, blasphemous prayers. And cutting the herd, so that chiefly beef steers of their own brand should take the trail to market, had been hardest of all.
It had been a monstrous, Herculean labor for those three men. There are cattlemen who will tell you it should have been easy; there are others who will tell you it could not have been done. Under the particular combination of conditions, it was just possible, and that was all. Somehow, they had wangled through, proud that they were the boys who could tackle such a job and make it stick, too proud of their own abilities to offer other comment than complaint. Later they would tell about their feat, casually, with ever-increasing figures: "1 mind once me an' two other fellers went out to get a winter beef herd, an' we picked up three, four thousand head...."
But if they lost another half day now, there would be nothing to tell. The cars would be missed, and their labors lost, reduced to a futile ramming about that accomplished nothing. Whiskers guessed, after all, that they would have to sit up with the cows.
Squirty Wallace, wiry little top hand, came to stand beside Whiskers on the edge of the bluff. Wrapped to the eyes in his sheepskin coat, his swerving legs in winter chaps, he looked like a big cocoon, mounted on the two halves of a furry barrel hoop. He had opinions of his own about working cattle, but he kept them to himself, lest they happen to be more exacting than orders from some other source.
"Tomorrow," said Whiskers Beck, "we'll prod along right smart, an' aim to make Apricot Creek. Next day we'll have to go slower, but we'll hit Spring River all right, about eight o'clock at night, an' shove right into the corrals an' feed hay. An' then is when three hired men take a rest."
Below in the gathering chill dark the cattle stood motionless, oddly quiet. There was no breeze; you could about hear the settling of the snow. The men kept listening, expecting to hear, perhaps, the munch of the grazing ponies off somewhere in the gloom. At regular intervals one lone calf blatted dismally, separated from its ma. It had no business there, in this beef cut, but that could not be helped now.
Behind Whiskers sounded the steady drone of Dixie Kane's voice as he cooked supper. The young broncho peeler crouched gracefully by his frying pan, his high, thin nose catching the firelight like the back of a knife. He wore a black and white Navajo coat, belted close about his slim body with a broad leather strap.
"That's the young feller of it," Dixie was saying, evidently under the delusion that Squirty Wallace still stood beside him. "Never figurin' the cost. Old fellers keep thinkin' about the time some onion got the saddle horn through him.. .they see his eyes rollin' 'round, an' the blood runnin' out through his teeth. Young fellers figure different. Take me. I never think about cost ...don't even come into my head. Me, I'm jumpin' into hell an' high water, gettin' the work done. Why....,,
Whiskers Beck repressed a snarl. "We'll ride circle same as usual," he said loudly, so Dixie would hear him and shut up. "Though o' course there ain't nothin' to do but set around at the lower end, this time, 1 know you been thinkin', mebbe them cattle would stay put, an' I think the same. But 1 got a phony feelin'. An' we ain't goin' to take any chances now, an' mebbe miss out. So, Squirty, you stay up to eleven o'clock, an' I'll take the graveyard miserableness until two, an' then it's mornin', insofar as Mister D.Kane is concerned. An' about two, three hours before daylight, here we come."
The snow muffled sound so that, even when they raised their voices, they seemed to be speaking in hushed tones.
"What's the
idea?" demanded Squirty Wallace hotly. Ordinarily he moved and spoke with a low calm, but the nerves of the three were worn and jangling now. "The cows won't run out on us...an' steers don't stampede in a canon."
"That's nice," said Whiskers noncommittally.
"Say!" yelped Dixie Kane. "What yuh think us fellers is made outta?"
"Glass," said Whiskers. "An' right here's somethin' else. Ever'body keep a horse tight saddled, right close. If they kin be rid tight an' live, 1 guess they kin stand tight for once. Now listen, riffraff. You know this here gully... she makes a hook up here a piece, an' curves about three miles. But there's a short cut here through the timber. It comes out on the canon again in about a mile and a half, at a place we used to call the Stepladder. You mind the Stepladder! Dixie, you mind the Stepladder?"
"Ya-as!" yelled Dixie with sarcastic emphasis.
"The canon's pretty deep right there. But it can be got down in at the Stepladder. The shortcut will make up the ground we'll lose gettin' started, an' we kin plunk down in ahead o' the rumpus. So's we'll be out in front when we come to a place where we kin mill `em, instead o' bein' behind an' scarin' 'em along. You hear?"
They heard. "You make me sick," said Squirty under his breath. Whiskers let it pass.
They ate wolfishly, in silence. Squirty mounted, and his pony started down into the canon with little unwilling steps, like a cat hating the snow. Whiskers Beck retied his muffler over his bald head and rolled into his blankets under a runty piiion pine.
For a few moments he let his mind turn to smoking food and plenty of it, a bed with hay under it in the weather-tight bunkhouse of the Triangle R, and men tired but comfortable, who hardly spoke except to give something a humorous twist, so that they were better than a show. Only the weather fighters - riders, loggers, seamen - know the deep, keen savor of these plain things, just as only desert men know the sweetness of water. Food, warmth, laughter, a long postponed smoke - they are the things a man remembers after the bitternesses are gone.
"All right, midnight," he growled to himself. "1'm ready."
It seemed as if Whiskers Beck never pulled his head under the blankets without it instantly being time to get up. He did not know how long he had slept. He awoke on his elbow, listening with every nerve, while the frozen air quickly stiffened the moisture in his nostrils. Only an instant, while his ears confirmed what his unconscious mind had known! From the canon came an increasingly ominous shuffle, swiftly rising to a murmur, a rumbling groan. Wham! spoke Squirty's pistol, a heavy, muffled jolt. Wham! His long yell shrilled through the rising mutter of hoofs.
One gnarled and buckskinned hand jammed Whiskers's hat down over his ears, the other had already found the reins where he had laid them over a pinon limb. His pony stood head up, snorting.
"Easy, boy," said Whiskers, "plenty time." He put the reins over the horse's head, mounted stiffly, and they wheeled.
They started off through the scraggly timber at a light lope, Beck holding the pony in. That cantering gait gave the blood time to start in the pony's cold legs, made him watch where he put his feet among rocks and logs half concealed and slippery under the snow. Whiskers noticed that the snowfall had stopped, that there was a dim light of moon through the clouds.
Behind them, over the ashes of the dead fire, the dark, confused figures of a man and horse whirled and reared. Dixie, who had made a sleepy rush and grab, was still trying to mount. His violent voice, excited to desperation, rang through the trees: "Haar! Stand down, you dirty...!"
They dodged through the timber in easy bounds, leaping windfalls and brush. Five minutes, going on ten, while they drove steadily up grade. The pony blew a long, thrumming breath and took to the full gallop; it seemed almost as if he knew both the work and the trail. The blood began to course in Whiskers's arteries, waking him up. He could hear Dixie's pony crashing through the brush, a long way back and coming hard. But mostly he listened to that long mutter of the running herd. It was almost a mile away now in the bend of the canon, but it filled the night with a distant, low roar, like a mighty wind far away. It had reached its ebb and was coming slowly nearer again, rising almost imperceptibly as the timber thinned, the drum of hoofs that must at all cost be stopped.
Whiskers put the pony into a sprint. He spoke to the horse in short yelps - "Hip!...Hip!" - gradually stringing him up, getting the speed without breaking that quick, clever placing of feet that kept them bounding over the tricky ground. "Hip... Hip!" One more rise, a break in the timber, an avoided gully - the Stepladder was a hundred yards ahead. The earthly rumble of the herd sounded close, stronger... stronger, a steady slow increase. He thought he could distinguish the click of horns.
Whiskers drew down the gait. In the dim light of clouds and snow he picked the landmarks at the drop of the trail - a dead lodgepole pine, with a fir tree by its side. They came hammering to the brink, hesitated, the pony's head down to pick its footing for the first jump - and the pony suddenly squatted on quivering haunches, and stopped.
Something turned over inside Whiskers Beck. His mouth partly opened, and the upper lip sucked in under his teeth. Something had happened to the Stepladder - if this was it. Where once had been a steep, barely passable zigzag trail, a footing for goat-like ponies, there now opened before the man and horse what looked to be a sheer drop, not perpendicular, but to all purposes so. The eye fell away into the dark below, found a little projection of stone that might have been footing or might not, then on down, lost in the little light, with no further suggestion of anything to break the fall. Two hundred feet to the bottom and, at the bottom, the rocks.
The shock of failure, no less than the swift vertigo of the drop before him, sent a quick whirl of sickness to Beck's head. This passed, and he slumped in his seat, feeling suddenly the accumulated weariness of his saddle years.
For a long moment he sat there, alone with his defeat, while the pony waited, quivering, and the night was alive with that rising moan of hoofs, like a voice from the deep throat of the canon itself.
He did not hear Dixie Kane racing up until man and pony came alongside with the stiff bounding hops that a horse uses to check a thousand pounds of galloping bone and flesh and leather.
"This it?" yelled Dixie. The open mouth of the pony turned upward as it struggled to swerve this way or that from the brink, with a great stuttering of hoofs.
"1 guess it is," said Whiskers.
Dixie's quirt slapped, and his pony sprang crouching to the edge. With a great shock Whiskers saw that Dixie was going to take the plunge.
He tried to yell to him, but it was already too late. The horse put its head low over the edge, its hindquarters squatting - far down the wall with braced, curving forelegs, trying to shorten by a length that ugly drop, then for an instant seeming to check, fighting gravity, as if it would have pulled back.
That moment seemed an hour, while man and horse toppled forward slowly, slowly - though no more than a second elapsed. Whiskers saw Dixie lengthen his reins, holding high the end of the swinging loop, so that the horse had a free head. He sat straight up, lithe and slim, apiece with the brute. Then over they dived - snatched out of sight as if a great hand had jerked the horse over the edge of the world.
Whiskers, bending forward, saw the horse strike once and bound sidewise, far down, in a high flurry of snow, then man and horse disappeared, catapulting over a bulge of the drop. The searing air returned to Whiskers's lungs. As the first shock of his astonishment passed, his feeling was that of a crushing mortification and disgrace. He somehow did not doubt that Dixie would make it to the bottom. He only saw that he had sat there, old and beaten, fearful to go on, while the younger man had gone slashing over, unfaltering, into the face of the impossible. He heard Dixie's words again, a bitter though unintended taunt. "Young fellers figure different.. .1 never think about the cost...."
Two hundred yards away, at the hook of the canon, the first cattle came streaking around the shoulder of the bluff, black against the snow like big flie
s. He made out Squirty Wallace, galloping hard ahead of the herd, and to one side.
An insane rage came into Whiskers Beck, a rage at the precipice, a rage at the long, grinding years that slowly bent a man, holding him up at the last a fool and a drag, shamed by the younger men. He had been a top hand before Dixie Kane was born.
"Old and beat," he muttered. "No, by gad!"
He struck the spurs into the horse, uncaring whether he lived or died. Over the edge they dropped, down and down in a roaring slide of stone and snow. An upstriking ledge ripped at his left chap, and his stomach jumped against his throat as the canon floor rushed up to meet them. Only a moment of it - a bound, a carom, half up and down again - and it was over! Miraculously they swung in beside Squirty and his horse, at the head of the stampeding parade. Afterward, when they pointed out the scene of that mad descent, the descent that no horse had a right to make and live, listeners believed Dixie, but not Whiskers, for Dixie had broken his pony's leg.
The herd milled at last in the widening flats, resolved upon itself by their yells and fusillading shots. The cattle rotated slowly, and more slowly, and finally stopped, heads down, the vapor of their breathing going up from the mass of them as if they slowly leaked puffs of steam.
Two hours had passed since some unknown agency - a rolling stone, perhaps - had stampeded the herd. Dixie Kane was there by that time. A dozen horses of the remuda had seen fit to stampede inanely after the cattle, and Dixie, pulling himself together and watching his chance, had roped one of them and changed his saddle to it from his dead mount. But, when all was quiet again, it was Whiskers Beck who could not be found.
"Where's the old goat got to?" Squirty demanded in a queer voice. There is something uncanny about the disappearance of a man from your side. "I been singing out to him fer fifteen minutes."
