Last of the Breed

by Les Savage, Jr.

  At last, however, he settled back into the saddle of his fiddling, excited horse. He glanced contemptuously at Nacho, who was groaning and trying to roll over. Brian knew a moment of relief that the man’s neck hadn’t been broken.

  The rage left Tiger’s face abruptly, and he let out an explosive laugh. He looked at Brian, with a frosty gleam in his eyes that could have been grudging pride.

  “Dammit,” he said, “maybe the cub has some starch in his backbone after all. Maybe.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Apache Wells was a desert town, lying on a flat table of land that ran twenty miles northward to the Rim and outward in every other direction beyond sight. From ten miles off the windows began flashing at a man like heliographs in the blinding sun. From half a mile away the buildings looked like toy playing-blocks strewn on the floor by a careless boy. The Salt River Trail came down off the Rim and became Cochise Street where it met the town, running four blocks between false fronts and wooden overhangs and sagging tie-racks. Alkali was everywhere, sifting up from beneath the traffic to hang in the air like a silken haze, powdering the rumps of horses at the racks, caking thick and white on the windows and walls of the buildings.

  Brian and his father reached the town on Saturday morning. They had ridden the previous night out, coming down off the Rim, driving Nacho and Ramsey along with them. Tiger had meant to take them directly to the sheriff’s office and swear out a warrant, but when he saw his foreman’s big Choppo horse in front of the Black Jack he pulled to a halt. Men began to gather immediately, hailing the two Sheridans and looking curiously at the prisoners.

  Without offering explanation, Tiger sent Robles into the saloon after Latigo. In a few minutes the Double Bit foreman appeared. He was a tall, heavy-framed man in linsey-woolsey jeans and a buckskin shirt turned chalky by a week of roundup dust. He had a long bony jaw shadowed by a blue stubble of beard, and his heavy-lidded, indolent eyes were red-rimmed from the sleepless nights and driven labor of the past weeks.

  “What the hell you doin’ in town?” Tiger asked.

  “Boys been three weeks without a letup,” Latigo said. “I thought I’d give ‘em a day off.”

  Tiger considered that, then glanced at Nacho. “We caught this man with two hundred Double Bit steers. He said you hired him to run ‘em down.”

  Latigo looked at Nacho. The breed said thinly, “They wouldn’t believe me. They was going to string me up.”

  “I offered Nacho a dollar a head for every steer he recovered,” Latigo told Tiger.

  It seemed to take all the wind out of Tiger. He settled in his saddle, glowering at Latigo. For a moment he was just an old man, exhausted and confused. Then he sent an oblique glance at Nacho, swearing softly. “What right’ve you got makin’ deals with him?” he asked Latigo.

  A rush of color dyed the foreman’s bony cheeks. “What’s wrong with Nacho? Seems like he got more cattle back in one haul than we’ve got all this year with the other ways you been trying.”

  Tiger shook his head. “Dammit, I wish you’d tell me these things before you let me go makin’ a fool of myself.” A deeper color crept into Latigo’s face under the rebuke. Tiger jerked his hand angrily at the prisoners. “Give ‘em back their hardware,” he told Brian. He stepped off his horse, wheezing and grunting like an old bull. “I guess there’s only one way to make it right. Let’s all go have breakfast. If you want to git drunk after that, it’s on the Double Bit.”

  His stubborn old pride wouldn’t let him look at Nacho or Ramsey. Brian handed the breed back his six-shooter, speaking tiredly. “Tiger means you too. Give him a chance to unwind. This has made a fool of him.”

  Nacho looked at Tiger. He licked his lips and ran his thumb across one pock-marked cheek. Then he grinned, slowly and balefully. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  The whole crowd moved after Tiger into the Black Jack. Brian dismounted wearily and made his tie at the rack. He heard George Wolffe hail him and turned to see the man crossing the street. Wolffe handled all the Double Bit’s business and had a successful practice in town, but he had never lost the painful conservatism molded into him by his hard youth. His broad, solid body was still clothed in a shabby black clawhammer coat and homespun jeans. In his black eyes was an unceasing watchfulness of life’s minutest details and the caliper grooves on either side of his lips compressed them into chronic disapproval of any variation in the status quo.

  Wolffe had been orphaned at fourteen, forced to work as a stable hand to support himself and his sister. At seventeen he had begun studying law at night and at twenty had passed the bar examination. He had gone into the office of Sam Root, Apache Wells’s only other lawyer, and when Root had died a year ago, Wolffe had inherited all the legal business in town. George Wolffe wasn’t much to look at, but he was a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and why.

  He looked worriedly at the dust caked on Brian. “What happened now?” he asked.

  Brian told him the story and Wolffe broke in with a surprised sound. “And you went with them?” he asked.

  “I had to,” Brian explained ruefully. “I was the only one around home besides Robles. Tiger read those smoke signals and got this thing in his craw and even Robles couldn’t stop him with all that talk of bad sign on the range.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh at Robles,” Wolffe said. “Those Indians know things we don’t. Personally I think there is something strange going on.”

  Brian chuckled. “What’s the matter, George? Price of feed go up two cents?”

  “Don’t joke, Brian. We got word another band of Apaches has jumped reservation and disappeared in the Superstitions. You don’t find them that restless without good reason.”

  Brian glanced past Wolffe to the Superstitions, lying like pale blue ghosts on the horizon. They were the mountains of a hundred legends and a hundred lies. A dozen men had disappeared back there during Brian’s lifetime, hunting the mythical Lost Dutchman or on the trail of marauding Apaches. When Geronimo had surrendered there were some among his renegades who could not be accounted for. It was said they had fled to the Superstitions and were being joined, year by year, by the other bronco Apaches who jumped reservation.

  For a moment the sight of the mountains, cloaked in haze and seeming to float like a pale vapor on the horizon, touched something primitive in Brian. He recalled the strange hush on the Rim yesterday, and Robles’s apprehension—and a hint of the old Indian’s superstitious fears brushed him.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “Robles didn’t want Tiger to go after those cattle. He really didn’t.”

  Wolffe grasped his arm. “That’s what I mean, Brian. You shouldn’t have let Tiger go. He’s too old to do the things he used to. You’ve got to take some responsibility on your own shoulders.”

  Brian poked him affectionately in the ribs. “I like you, George, but you should be an undertaker. Right now I feel too grimy to enjoy breakfast. How about a shave?”

  Wolffe hesitated, then pulled a key from his pocket and gave it to Brian. “You know where the stuff is. And please don’t leave lather in my mug.”

  Brian laughed and clapped him on the back and started across the street. Wolffe lived with his sister in rooms over the feed store. They were reached by a rickety outside stairway that led to a second floor landing.

  The first room was Wolffe’s office, containing a battered pigeon-hole desk and a pair of sagging leather chairs. Arleen Wolffe’s frilly curtains and hooked rugs seemed a pitiful feminine attempt to cover the barren simplicity so characteristic of Wolffe.

  Their bedrooms were more livable. In George’s room Brian found the razor and soap and shaving mug in the precise place and the precise position he had found them a hundred other times after an all-night binge in town. He removed his shirt, filled a crockery bowl with water, and began lathering up. He was humming tunelessly to himself when the outer door opened.

 
“George?” It was Arleen’s voice.

  “Brian,” he answered.

  She came to the door, her arms full of groceries. She was as Indian-dark as her brother, black-haired, black-eyed, with lips that bloomed like an exotic flower in the fragile oval of her face. A close-fitting basque coat outlined the supple lines of her body as far down as the waist; then they were lost in the flaring foam of lace and ruffles that formed her skirt.

  She pouted wryly. “Winners?”

  He began to shave. “No card game. I was out being responsible.”

  Her delicate black brows arched in surprise. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Tiger and me. Hunting down rustlers. All day and all night. You’d have been proud of me.”

  “Did you catch them?”

  “Strung ‘em up.”

  “Brian, you didn’t!”

  He flipped soap into the bowl, chuckling. “Hardly. They turned out to be Latigo’s men, bringing back some Double Bit stuff that had been run off.”

  Her lips grew petulant and she shook her head, sighing in disappointment. “You can’t even do it when you try, can you?”

  “Fate,” he said. “I wasn’t meant to be responsible.”

  She disappeared and he could hear the crackle of paper sacks as she put the groceries down in the kitchen. Then she was back, taking off her bonnet and shaking out her hair. She studied him a moment, soberly, then said:

  “Brian, what do you want in life?”

  “Wine, women, song.”

  “Really?”

  He stopped shaving, looking at her in the mirror. He knew this was just another way of asking him when he was going to settle down. It seemed to come around to that with everybody, lately. And yet, somehow, the question stuck in his craw. He frowned at his reflection.

  “I guess I hadn’t thought much about it,” he said.

  “Think now.”

  “You sound like George.”

  “Are you afraid to face it?”

  He grew impatient. “What should I want? I’ve got everything the rest of you scramble for.”

  A change came to her face; her eyes narrowed and her mouth grew fuller, almost pouting. Then she smiled. “You’re right, Brian. I do sound like George.”

  She came to the stand, wet the towel in the basin, and washed the remains of the lather off his jaw. Standing this close, the perfumed sensuality of her body enveloped him. He felt a heated flush come to his face and the pulses began their warning thump at his temples.

  He took the towel from her hands, dropping it on the stand, and reached for her. A tight shape came to her lips and she wheeled out of his arms, walking to the window. He started to follow her, then checked himself. They were on the edge of something foreign to their relationship. She had been one of the few who could take him as he was, who could laugh wholeheartedly at his escapades, who could accept whatever measure of lighthearted and capricious romance he chose to give, without questioning or asking for more.

  “No games?” he asked flippantly.

  She tilted her head back, face drawn and pale about the mouth. Looking at the sky, through the window. Looking at nothing.

  “Won’t the day ever come when you want to get serious?” she asked.

  He took his shirt off the chair and slipped into it. “You’re in a strange mood today.”

  She did not answer. He finished buttoning his shirt. She turned, slowly. A change had gone through her again. The impudent look was on her face, the slow, knowing smile. Then she threw back her head and laughed. It was a rich, wild laugh, and with the loosened black hair cascading down her back and framing her face it made her look savage. For a moment it convinced him that she had been baiting him all along. He started toward her across the room.

  “I should paddle you,” he said.

  She evaded him and ran into the office. He followed and she circled the desk, breathing heavily now, a flush on her laughing face. She evaded him again and ran across the room and stood with her back against the wall. He started to follow but her head came up and her whole body was stiff against the wall and though the flush of laughter still tinted her face there was a note to her voice that stopped him.

  “Please, Brian. Not today.”

  He was held moveless by her strange mood. This wasn’t the Arleen he knew. She had always been able to play the game, laughingly, perhaps a little sardonically.

  “What is it, Arleen?”

  She looked at him a long time, searching for something, in him, perhaps in herself. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Before he could speak again there was a tramping on the stairway outside and a pounding on the door. He turned and opened it to see Dee Hadley, the banker’s kid, panting on the landing.

  “Better come quick, Brian. Tiger’s drunk and there’s a big fight at the Black Jack.”

  Brian sent a helpless look at Arleen, then hurried past the boy and down the stairs. As he quartered across the street he could hear the sounds from a block away—the shouting, the crash of glass, the smashing of furniture. As he approached the saloon a man pitched through the open door and fell on his back, skidding into the street. Brian saw that it was Ramsey.

  “What is it?” Brian called.

  The man rolled over in the dust, shaking his head dazedly. “Tiger drank too much before eatin’. He’s mad because we made such a fool of him.”

  Brian plunged into the saloon. It was a shambles. There were so many men fighting it was hard to tell who stood against whom. It was always this way with Tiger’s brawls; his enormous animal explosions seemed to infect the whole place. Charlie Casket, the house man for the Black Jack, was backed against the wall, defending himself with a chair against two Mexicans. Jigger, the keg-shaped little bartender, had jumped on top of the bar. Barefooted, with a bungstarter in each hand, he was running up and down and shouting and cracking any heads that came within range.

  Brian jammed his way through the struggling mass, buffeted back and forth, dodging wild blows, Latigo had apparently been standing with Tiger at the far end of the room but somebody had downed the foreman and he huddled on hands and knees against the bar, spitting blood. Tiger was the center of a vortex in the corner. Three men were on him, slugging, kicking, trying to pull the old man down.

  One of them was Nacho. A second was Wirt Peters, a small cattle operator from south of Apache Wells. The third was Cameron Gillette, eldest son of Pa Gillette, a dry farmer from the Salt River Valley. Brian saw Wirt Peters smash Tiger across the side of the head with a roundhouse that knocked the old man back against the wall. Tiger jackknifed one leg, planted his boot in Peters’s middle, and drove him halfway across the room. But Nacho struck Tiger in the belly, swinging him around so that his back was to Cameron.

  Cameron came in with his fist raised to sledge Tiger across the back of the neck. But Brian caught Cameron from the flank, swung him around, and drove a blow at his chin. Cameron was a heavy, plodding man, not quick enough to dodge. He took the blow full; his face went slack and he staggered backward and sat down.

  At the same time Wirt Peters came back in. Feet stamping wide, arms crooked, he had all the momentum of a charging bull. His rush smashed Brian against the wall. Stunned, Brian tried to tear loose. Peters swung a blow that caught him on the side of the face.

  For a moment Brian was blinded. He pawed for Peters’s hair and got a hold, yanking the man’s head down and bringing his own knee up. It struck flesh and bone with a sodden crack and Brian felt the man’s weight fall away from him.

  Vision was returning in bright speckled flashes and Brian saw that Cameron was on his feet again. Brian was sick from the blows and his legs were like water. He knew he was in no shape to meet Cameron.

  As the man came at him, Brian pushed away from the wall, feinting him into a lunge, then swinging out of the way. The big man plunged helplessly past, going rig
ht into the wall. Before he could turn back, Brian caught up a chair, bringing it down across the man’s head and shoulders with the last of his strength.

  Cameron made a deep grunting sound and went to his knees against the wall. He remained that way with his head bent and his hands braced flat against the wall. He groaned and tried to rise. He got a few inches up the wall and then sank back.

  Tiger stood five feet away, swaying above Nacho. The breed lay flat on his back, glassy-eyed and out cold. Red veins netted Tiger’s eyes and his neck was swollen till it looked ready to burst.

  “Come on,” he roared. “I just got my second wind. Who says I ain’t got the right to string up a rustler?”

  But it was over as quickly as it had started. Those who hadn’t been knocked down stood limp and winded in the wreckage, gaping foolishly around them. Brian dropped the chair he was holding.

  Swaying, Tiger looked around at Cameron Gillette, still crouched dazedly against the wall—at Wirt Peters, sitting on the floor and holding a bloody face. Tiger’s eyes swung to Brian, and there was a grudging pride in his broad grin.

  For a moment Brian felt closer to the old man than he’d been in a long time. Why did it have to be this way? Why did it take a crazy, schoolboy thing like a saloon brawl to bring out their real affection for each other?

  “Been a long time since we stood back to back in a fight,” Tiger said.

  Brian grinned weakly. “Oughtta do it more often.”

  Reaction was setting in now and he fought to keep from being sick. The old man was right. His night life had left him soft as dough. The fight hadn’t lasted more than a minute after he joined it and here he was trembling like a schoolgirl. Tiger saw the foggy look to his eyes, the pinched expression around his lips. Some of the gruff pride left the old man’s face. He caught hold of a chair and swung it away from the table for Brian.

  “You better git back in training before we do it more often,” he said.