Spanish Crossing

by Alan Lemay

  "He shore ain't around here," said Dixie.

  "You seen him get out in front, didn't yuh?"

  "1 seen a landslide."

  "Well, he did. An' he helped me mill 'em when we got 'em stopped."

  "Maybe that was me," offered Dixie hopefully. "1 kind o' swang in on the tail end."

  "This wasn't no tail end, an' it wasn't you. We gotta find the old buzzard, Dixie. Mebbe he's hurt an' down some place."

  "Well ...let's take one more swing around."

  They turned and rode, and presently met on the far side of the herd with still no word of Whiskers Beck.

  "Suppose he's under them steers," said Squirty pessimistically. "They keep snortin' in there an' edgin' away from one place."

  "What'd be the use? Anyway, cows won't stand by blood. Move off an' build a fire, Dixie. 1 can hold 'em now."

  It was another half hour before Squirty left his circle, riding for a bit to consult with Dixie at the fire. Dixie was mounting to ride back. And then, mysteriously, Whiskers Beck reappeared.

  "Well, hell almighty," said Dixie. "Where you been? We had a heck of a time here."

  "Oh, yuh did? Well, 1 was here an' you wasn't. An' yuh want to know where 1 been? Take a look at this here."

  He hefted a faintly struggling carcass from his saddle bow, and awkwardly lowered it to the ground. It bleated, and staggered off toward the herd.

  "1 went back after that doggie calf," Whiskers said, "that's where 1 been. 1 figgered he'd git left behind, an' that's what he done. 1 don't know what'd become o' the stock if I left it to you fellers!"

  Dixie and Squirty stared, tired men on blown horses.

  "A calf," said Squirty at last. "Shore enough, a calf!"

  "What kind of old buzzard is this? He jumps his horse two hundred feet, an' somersaults in a pile o' rocks with the horse on top, an' gets stampeded over, an' what's he thinkin' about? A four-dollar calf!"

  "Oh?" said Dixie, smarting under his own mischance. "1 s'pose he was lookin' for the calf when 1 passed him at the top o' the bluff!"

  Whiskers leaned far out to look at his horse's legs. There was hide missing from the animal's belly, and a long gash on the inside of a foreleg.

  "Who, me?" Whiskers said, making his horse walk away. "I was pickin' the best way down."

  The two cowboys sat looking at each other, through the half transparent dark.

  Silvertip Hughes had gone out to the stable to put up Old Snoop's horses, leaving Larry MacShane and Old Snoop alone. Even so, the young deputy would not have dared speak as he did had not the drone of the wind in the New Mexican spruce so filled the night that a man listening outside the lean-to could have heard nothing within.

  "What are you doing here?" he demanded, the moment that Silvertip had disappeared into the snow. "1 told you to go back down to town as soon as you had investigated the Magpie shaft."

  "This blizzard ...1 figured 1 couldn't make it down to Underholt, MacShane. And this cabin bein' on the way, and me knowin' you'd already be here lookin' for Silvertip Hughes..."

  "Blizzard!" scoffed Larry MacShane. "Well, what did you find at the Magpie?"

  "Nothin'." Old Snoop, who would have been called Mr. Willis Jones if he had had his rights, had a scrawny figure, a scraggly mustache, a bottle nose, and an ill-preserved look. No chin seemed to have been included. "Nothin'. Except, o' course, Dad Young's corpse."

  "Nothin'," MacShane mocked him, "except Dad Young's ...you old fool! How was he killed?"

  "Seemed like he might 'a' died natural, MacShane."

  "Did you examine him?"

  "Not to no extent. I knowed you'd never be satisfied on my say so, so 1 rigged a travois and brung him along."

  "You brung him...oh, you infernal old idiot! Where is he now?"

  "Here." Snoop shoved at a long canvas-wrapped bundle with his foot. "1 put him here in the lean-to before 1 come in.,,

  MacShane remembered now that noises in the lean-to, which he and Silvertip had attributed to wind and rats, had been audible for several minutes before Snoop's unexpected appearance at the door of the cabin itself. Rage swept him as he now flung open the cabin door and found, by the light from within, that Snoop's statement was verifiable.

  "Here!" he ordered. "Help me heave him back in the corner! If Silvertip sees this.. .listen, you...I'm workin on Silvertip on the grounds that Dad Young is alive, you hear?"

  "Alive?" said Snoop dimly. "But...?"

  "The second he finds out I've been lying to him, it's a shoot-out, d'you understand?"

  "Lyin' to him? You been lyin'?"

  "Didn't you just hear me tell you?"

  "But 1 thought you figured Silvertip might 'a' killed Dad Young?"

  "Never mind what you thought 1 figured! You...."

  "You're the darnedest feller ever 1 see," said Snoop. His watery eyes, now thoroughly scared, traveled quickly upward from MacShane's high-heeled boots, over the scarred chaps and faded brush jacket, to the young deputy's lean face, burned brown by the wind, but dropped again before encountering MacShane's gray eyes.

  "If Silvertip killed Dad Young, like 1 bet you think," said Snoop, "I'd say he has cause to know Dad Young's dead, it stands to reason. And here you want to try and convince him different... and with the corpse right here in the house, at that!"

  "That last is your contribution," snarled MacShane. "Catch hold. Gosh, the old boy weighs a ton!"

  "Fact is," said Snoop hesitantly, "there's a kind of reason this...."

  "Where's Midnight Zachary?" MacShane suddenly recalled that the Negro muleskinner whom he had sent with Snoop had not reappeared. "Didn't 1 tell you to keep him in sight, so he wouldn't talk? Did you let him go on back to Underholt alone?"

  "1'm tellin' you," said Old Snoop with injury, "Midnight didn't like this spooky business.. .he kept takin' another drink. Finally he got so illuminated he couldn't walk, and 1 piled him on top of the...the bundle on the travois. But he kept rollin' off, and 1 see we wasn't gettin' no place, so finally, when a hard bump busted loose the lacin' o' Dad Young's canvas, 1 jest laced Midnight inside the canvas with Dad."

  "Oh, gosh," moaned MacShane. "Dad Young is the only dead man in the world that could spoil my game, and I suppose Midnight Zachary is the only Negro within five hundred miles, and here you come and dump both of 'em onto me in the same sack! Say! We've got to get that superstitious fellow out of there before...."

  "Too late," said Snoop stoically. "Here comes..."

  "Shut up! And stay shut up, you hear? I'll do the talking here!"

  The towering frame of Silvertip Hughes came stumping in as he spoke, but MacShane had to finish the cautioning command.

  "All right," said Snoop. "Only...."

  "Shut up! 1 sent this old fool to Clear Springs," he explained to Hughes, "to hand out a writ of attachment, but he has to get switched off and go hunting a bear he heard about. And to show what kind of an optimist he is, he borrows a mule to pack the hide and meat."

  "Clear Springs?" said Snoop blankly. "But...?"

  Arrgh!" said Mac Shane. He hunched his left shoulder significantly, so that his shoulder-holstered weapon shifted visibly under his brush jacket, and Snoop subsided.

  "Snoop's a card, all right," Hughes agreed. He led the way into the cabin proper, flung off his sheepskin, and warmed enormous hairy hands that dwarfed to a red-hot melon the stove over which they were held. His blanket-thick woolen shirt was now open part way down the front, and MacShane saw, with a sudden keen anticipation of action, that a shoulderholster bulge, similar to that under his own left arm, had now appeared under Silvertip's arm as well.

  Silvertip was conspicuously tall in a country in which most men were tall. He had a mighty breadth of shoulder, and arms as powerful as legs. Between a tangled red beard and the shag of his forelock Silvertip's eyes were slits, sleepy looking and a little slanted. The violent beard and the veined, belligerent nose suggested that the eyes might be a fiery red.

  Old Snoop fidgeted unhappily. Old Snoop might
not be very smart, but he knew the makings of trouble when he saw them. Even without those unfortunate mysteries in the lean-to, which he himself had so unadvisedly introduced, Snoop could see that MacShane plus Silvertip added up to spell dynamite.

  Cowboys like Larry MacShane gave Snoop a distinct pain. The faintly melancholy philosophy always present in those reckless and hell-bent riders never prevented any of them from diving into danger with glad whoops head on and without reservation, like frogs into soup. This did not endear them to Snoop. Whatever might be said against Snoop, he certainly was not reckless.

  Unfortunately, Snoop's only asset was a marked flair for nosing out facts that were none of his business - this, and a natural dog-like genius for the life of a professional hangeron. The worst possible luck had landed him in New Mexico in a day when direct action was more popular than discretion. And his temporary professional attachment to Deputy MacShane was the ultimate disaster in a life that had been one long series of winters.

  MacShane's slight limp was a reminder to Snoop, if not to MacShane, that the cowboy deputy habitually put his horse headlong down steeps upon which practically no horse could be expected to live. The slight notch in MacShane's left ear was permanent testimony that he would rather try to kick a gun out of a drunkard's hand than actually have trouble. Worst of all, just now, was the speciously innocent look in MacShane's eyes - a faintly entertained, faintly hopeful, faintly expectant look - that told Snoop clearly more than a thousand probably futile explanations that any moment might produce unfortunate surprises. MacShane was not the right company for an old gentleman who had long suspected himself of a weak heart.

  MacShane seemed to be waiting for Silvertip to open a conversational lead. Long minutes trailed away while Snoop fidgeted, suffering unknown agonies of apprehension, while Midnight Zachary, presumably, snored unheard in the lean-to, peacefully unaware of his peculiar bedfellow, and while MacShane smoked, apparently unconscious of them all. In the mountain cabin prevailed a silence about which the howling wind in the spruce wrapped a blanket of extraneous sound.

  Old Snoop would have been horrified to know that MacShane had chosen these uncertain moments to let his thoughts wander ten miles downmountain to the little town of Underholt, and there to focus on the daughter of Dad Young. Early that afternoon MacShane had been sitting in Underholt's best and only boarding house. By letting his thoughts return there, he gave himself a big advantage in the nervous game of waiting out Silvertip Hughes.

  MacShane seemed to recall that he had absent-mindedly ladled a spoon of beans into his coffee cup, and stirred them around and around. His eyes had been elsewhere. The dining room in which he sat was run by valiant old Mrs. Minsterhoff, who denied that she had been found running exactly the same place and in the same way the year that the first white man had showed up in what was now New Mexico. But table was waited on by Molly Young. Since old Dad Young had left his daughter in Mrs. Minsterhoff's care, while he and Silvertip reopened the old Magpie shaft, business in Mrs. Minsterhoff s eating department had flourished no end.

  "Anybody would think," Molly Young had said, "that law officers in this part of the country would have to be alert, wide-awake, young men."

  A certain sharpness of tongue, that Molly had perhaps inherited along with her turned-up nose from an Irish mother, had given the cowboy deputy a pleasant sort of homesick sensation.

  "You sure have pretty eyes," he had offered. "They put me in mind of them blue flowers that come out all over the Cimarron hills in spring."

  "The Cimarron hills," Molly had reminded him, "are frozen tighter than a drum under three feet of snow."

  "Only bluer," Larry MacShane had said. "A feller don't know what to say about anything that's such a blue-blue as that."

  "Is it necessary to say anything?"

  "It ain't the sort of thing," MacShane had said solemnly, "that a feller wants to leave pass without favorable remark."

  At this point Old Snoop had come in, obviously bursting with news that he could not keep, yet he was afraid to spill.

  "Somethin's happened," he had said. "There's a feller waitin' to see you out here."

  "Then you go keep him company," MacShane had ordered.

  "But...!"

  "You lam, now!" Of course, if he had known then that Molly's future had been involved....

  Snoop had tried a series of mysterious grimaces and gestures behind Molly's back, but MacShane had started to rise, and Snoop had lammed.

  "Molly," MacShane had said, "don't you ever get tired of foolin'?"

  "No," Molly had replied.

  Old Snoop then had reappeared, cautiously following his extended nose.

  "1 guess," he had offered doubtfully, "1 got to speak to the deputy alone, Miz Young."

  "He'll do nothing of the kind, Molly," MacShane had declared.

  "He certainly may," Molly Young had said. She had whisked out.

  "Midnight Zachary's out here," Snoop had said in sibilant whispers. "He's the black packer that prods a mule of grub up to Miz Young's paw, up at the Magpie every two weeks, if sober. He's just come back. There's a dead feller up there, MacShane."

  "Which one?" Larry had asked grimly.

  Old Snoop had rolled an apprehensive eye toward the kitchen door.

  "Dad Young," he had said almost soundlessly.

  "Damn!" MacShane had said.

  "Of course," Snoop had agreed, "of the two it couldn't have been Silvertip Hughes. Dad Young shouldn't have gone pardners with that feller. Who's goin' to break the news to Molly. You?"

  "Not yet," MacShane had decided.

  "Too bad about Molly," Snoop had said. "Left without a dime. Hughes ain't tried to conceal lately that the Magpie's worthless. His own self, he calls it the Magpie Salt."

  MacShane's eyes had hardened. Somehow, even then - without evidence, and without knowledge of mining - even then he had known that Hughes had lied, and that there was something of value in the reopened Magpie shaft.

  Now, as he sat in Silvertip's cabin, the job of telling Molly about her father's death remained undone. He dreaded it a lot. He'd rather get shot in eight places than call up tears into those blue eyes. Nobody but Midnight, Snoop, and himself - and possibly Silvertip? - knew that Dad Young lay dead. He was trying to find out just what Silvertip knew - that was his mission here tonight.

  His mind suddenly snapped back to the present as Silvertip spoke.

  "So," said Silvertip, "you seen Dad Young, did you?"

  "Yes," said MacShane, "1 saw him."

  "Today?"

  "No, yesterday."

  "You sure," pressed Silvertip, "it was yesterday?"

  "Yeah, it was yesterday, all right," MacShane asserted. "1 was surprised when 1 heard he was in town, because he hasn't been down to Underholt for so long."

  Silvertip grunted. Another session of waiting seemed to be beginning. Silvertip could have outwaited him two to one, MacShane knew, but for the ease with which MacShane's thoughts turned to Molly Young.

  After Snoop's news had dragged MacShane out of the boarding house, the deputy had talked to Midnight Zachary. Zachary was chocolate brown, and of dignified deportment. He claimed to have been a preacher once. A scar on his neck that looked suspiciously like a rope burn perhaps explained his unnatural fear of entanglements with the law.

  MacShane had led Zachary and Snoop into the deserted back room of a bar. "Midnight, what's the story?"

  "This mornin', when I led my mule into the cabin up at the Magpie Mine, thar lies Dad Young daid in his baid."

  "See anything else, Midnight?"

  "No, suh. 1 come rapidly away."

  "Silvertip," Old Snoop had put in, "is at the cabin in Big Cat Gulch. It's ten miles up.. .about five miles this side of the Magpie shaft. 1 saw him when 1 was huntin'. He didn't see me, though. 1 don't trouble folks much. That was last week."

  "1 expect that's right," Midnight Zachary had said. "1 seen a sign of life at that shack, as 1 drawed nigh."

  "You had to
pass that shack on the way up to the Magpie," MacShane had told Midnight. "Did you see Silvertip?"

  "No, suh, Big Cat Gulch is given to ha'nts, Mistah MacShane. When 1 seen movement at that shack from afar off, 1 stopped. And the Lawd said unto me.. .Mister Zachary, 1 wouldn't go nigh that dump, was I you. Best go 'round... way 'round. Mister MacShane, 1 so done."

  "And coming back.. .did you go by that Cat Gulch shack again?"

  "No, suh, Mistah MacShane. 1 went 'round. 1 ain't goin' tun forget no such commandment as that go 'round business."

  "1 betcha he ain't," Snoop had said.

  "Snoop, saddle up, and go up to the Magpie. Go around that cabin where you saw Silvertip, just as Midnight did. Find out anything you can up there. Midnight... you go with Snoop, and show him that way around you know so much about. I'm going to ask some questions here in Underholt. Then I'm going up and call on Silvertip. I'll see you here when 1 get back."

  MacShane saw now that he had been mistaken on that last point, at least. His reunion with Old Snoop was at Silvertip's cabin, after all, and poor Midnight's dread of the trip was justified, for he was sleeping it off laced to a tarpaulin with Dad Young himself. MacShane wondered nervously how soon Midnight, and consequently Silvertip, would find that out.

  Once more Silvertip broke the silence, recalling MacShane to his immediate surroundings.

  "1 been worried about Dad's health for a long time," Hughes began tentatively.

  "Somethin' wrong with him?"

  "Fellers his age," said Silvertip, "is terrible suckers for ailments."

  "Come to think of it," MacShane improvised, "he was looking peaked. Looked like a feller come out of the grave."

  Silvertip said nothing, and MacShane, recalling that he was skating near the edge of mighty thin ice, decided it best to keep his gaze vacuously upon the stove. Certainly, he thought, Silvertip must know that old Dad Young was dead. If the deputy's suspicions were correct, Silvertip had personally seen to Dad's demise.