Way of the Outlaw

by Lauran Paine

  Trent turned, scowling. “Let him do his own talking,” he ordered.

  Vidal shrugged apologetically, and kept right on smiling softly over at the liveryman.

  “Well?” said Trent.

  “Well,” mumbled the liveryman while he massaged his arms, “I reckon that’s right enough, mister. It sounded like the first volley come from over there. ’Course, you got to remember I was tied up in here and didn’t actually see any of the actual fightin’.”

  Trent turned saturnine. He was wasting time with this man. He was wasting time with them all. A very real wall of silence had settled over Fulton now. The townsmen had broken the back of Bricker’s domination, which satisfied them, and it required no great powers of divination to see that from this day forward they would present a solidly unified opposition to anyone seeking to single out particular ringleaders for prosecution.

  He walked out into the barn’s runway and halted. There was in the back of his mind a strong doubt that prosecution should be levied against these people anyway, law or no law. But John Trent was not, as he’d said, the judge. When he got back, he’d make a full report, turn it in, and if the federal authorities thought an investigation was called for, that was their business, not his.

  He ran a hand up along his scratchy, raw face. But he could do one thing. If any such demand was made, he could take over the investigation himself. This would be his only concession though. He shrugged. It would be enough. He could see that these people were justified. Had in fact been justified a long time before they finally rose up and killed Lem Bricker.

  “¿Señor?”

  Trent turned. Campos was standing there with those backgrounding dark and sober faces around him. It struck Trent those Mexicans were looking too bland, too solicitous.

  “You are wasting valuable time, señor. Your fugitive is even now riding swiftly southward on across the desert.”

  Trent stood for a moment, gauging Campos and the other armed Mexicans. He knew as surely as he knew his own name these people, with their powerful sense of personal loyalty, would never permit him to apprehend Warfield, the man who had given them back more than their town, who had also given them back their respect as human beings. He looked away, looked down through the empty barn, caught the liveryman standing over there in his doorway gazing at him, and said: “Mister, when Bricker brought me here I was riding a steeldust gelding. Have you seen him?”

  Without answering, the liveryman made a gesture toward the roadway. He seemed unable to speak, or unwilling to.

  Trent turned on his heel and walked on out into the settling night. There he saw his horse saddled and bridled with several kneeling Mexicans around him making little clucking, regretful sounds. He walked on up, shouldered past, and glanced down. His horse was standing on three legs, holding a swollen foreleg up off the ground.

  Trent kneeled as all the watching Mexicans became quiet. That swollen ankle was tender to the touch. Trent probed it and found something that didn’t surprise him at all. Someone had pulled out a dozen tail hairs from his horse, plaited them into a strong little circlet, and had then tied them very tightly around the ankle just above the joint. Circulation had been stopped and his horse had been rendered lame.

  Trent broke loose the little hair rope, stood up, and looked into those blank faces.

  Vidal said: “Is it serious, señor?”

  Trent walked back into the livery barn without answering. He collared the double-chinned owner of this establishment and said: “My horse will be lame until morning. Someone shut off his blood at the ankle. I need another horse.”

  The liveryman looked helpless. “Someone turned all my animals loose out on the desert a half hour ago,” he said. “I’m sorry, Marshal. I can’t help you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The night closed in with its formless hush. Desert owls winged past, low and silent, seeking rodents. Off in the murky west a little fox yapped in his excited, swift-pealing way, and farther along a coyote rammed down to a stiff-legged halt, flung back his head, and bayed at the pale yellow moon.

  The heat was gone but its strong scent lingered. Boulders yielding up their day-long store of sun blast made little brittle sounds as they cooled and the roadway smelled strongly of alkali dust. Far ahead, against the southward horizon, a peculiar soft brightness lingered above some low stark hills, and Warfield watched that light gradually die as he passed along.

  Two days farther. Or a night and a day. Then he would be over the line and safe. He would make that watering trough he’d been told of perhaps by dawn, but, if he did this, it would only be because his bay horse was thoroughly rested and strong again after a full day’s rest and recovery. The trough, people had told him, was forty miles below Fulton, which was a very long ride to make without a stop. On a lesser horse he couldn’t even hope to make it.

  He recalled the fighting back there, the things those people had said to him, the looks in their eyes and upon their faces, which were reflections of the pure things in their hearts. He thought, too, of John Trent, but he had no illusions there. You didn’t know a man’s unswerving dedication to duty as well as Warfield knew Trent’s dedication, and believe such an unsolicited obligation as saving that man’s life was going to change anything between you.

  He didn’t believe he’d want it that way. For a long, long way he and John Trent had been running nearly neck and neck—sometimes one leading, sometimes the other leading. After a while this grim race became more than that; it became a personal will to triumph. Not to escape for Warfield and not to make the arrest for Trent, but instead to prove by their pitted strength and their matched wits which was the better man.

  It was the way of the outlaw. The chase of the hunted and the hunter. The personal involvement of their individual manhood. Now Warfield was in the lead again. He hadn’t asked anyone back there to delay Trent. It would detract from his victory—if he proved victorious—to have such a thing happen. And yet there was another aspect to such a delay if it happened. It would prove that Warfield, by his unselfishness in Fulton, had earned the esteem and the prayers—and the physical assistance—of those people, so perhaps, in a way, he could say it was also part of his personal triumph if Trent were delayed to help him get safely along.

  Time passed slowly as it always must when a man rides alone through the dark hours of a summertime night. And time brings its thoughts, its recollections, and its little hurting reflections.

  He recalled Vidal’s handsome, proud wife, and envied Vidal. He remembered Abbie’s uninhibited willingness, and felt strong regret for that, too. He even remembered Derby Hat back in the town of Lincoln, and Derby Hat’s panting greed. And Will Crockett with his furry pup, and the powerful love of a boy for his one true friend.

  He also remembered other things, farther back in other towns, all running together to form a loose pattern that also was the way of the outlaw because every one of those things had made an impression upon his heart and his mind, exactly as his passing had left its imprint upon the hearts and minds of others.

  This seemed to Warfield, as he went down the hushed night, to be the sum and substance of a man’s life, this touching the lives of others and having their lives also touch him.

  If there was a reason for it, it must be that good and bad are the result of chance encounters among people who are already whatever they will always be, and whatever that is, brushes off a little upon others, making them better or worse for the brief little meetings. A man without conscience, for instance, wouldn’t have left Abbie back there with her powerful, natural hungers. He would have taken a moment of rapture first—then he would have ridden on. And ever afterward that imprint would have colored Abbie’s life.

  It hadn’t happened like that, so Abbie still had her wistfulness, her resentment against a sere, lonely environment. But someday the man would come riding who would belong with Abbie, and then her world wouldn’t be tinged with regret for the other affair and she would grow to be a better woman becaus
e there was no guilt.

  And Warfield’s short encounter with young Will and the pup. There, it hadn’t been Warfield who had given, it had been Will. A boy’s wholesome longing for affection had been strengthened by Warfield’s experienced hands saving the little dog. Now that belief in the good would grow firmer in a forming lad, and conversely Warfield’s own belief in the power of affection had been strengthened, also. It was very easy in this life to become cynical. But now and then a meeting with a lad and his pup kept even a man with reason for cynicism, from turning bitter and hating.

  Warfield made a cigarette with his reins loose and swinging. He lit up and deeply inhaled, exhaled, and looked up into the endless mystery of the heavens. Life would end for him somewhere, sometime, perhaps tomorrow or the next day. Perhaps not for many years yet. But a man’s imprint lasted on through time being perpetuated in others because in even the smallest way he had touched their lives, confirming whatever it was they already were, for good or for evil, so even an outlaw on the run left his imprint in the sands of time.

  He killed the smoke atop his saddle horn, dropped it into the roadway, and took in a big breath, blew it out, and watched the tailrace of a shooting star blaze down the long slope of the westerly heavens. He was a part of this night, and even after the faintest pastel brightness began to firm up off in the east, he remained a part of it, the only visible moving thing in all the desert emptiness.

  Dawn came softly creeping ahead of the sun-burst rush of hard yellow light, and with it came a brisk picking up of the bay’s footsteps. He had caught the scent of water on ahead.

  Warfield had covered his forty miles.

  The trough was there beside the road exactly as he’d expected to find it. It was very old with round stones protruding from its crumbly masonry. In one corner someone had made the mark of the trinity in that worn-smooth cement. Warfield saw this and thought the old-time mission priests had erected the trough.

  He drank first, then filled his canteen, and afterward off-bridled so that his horse wouldn’t suck air around the bit’s high-port mouthpiece and later on have an ache in his stomach.

  He loitered there in the coolness, feeling refreshed and totally apart from all the rest of the world. He sighted a small desert deer coming along, her large ears up and moving, her small feet delicately, warily lifting and falling. Then she saw the bay horse and in a twinkling was gone again. Warfield smiled and got back astride, turned southward, and passed downcountry again.

  The sun jumped up an hour later, flooding the desert world with its fierce, golden brightness. Within another hour Warfield heard a stage coming and left the road, sat far out, watching as that rocking, plunging vehicle with its driver, its guard, and its four straining horses raced by.

  Afterward he went along with the dusty smell of roiled air accompanying him until he saw his first tree. It was a silvery-barked old cottonwood twisted and turned from wintertime’s buffetings, its leaves green on top and pewter-colored underneath.

  He watched that tree for a long time, until he was abreast of it, and then he felt the softer sponginess of loam, instead of gritty sand, under his horse as he gradually left the desert behind, passing now into a less astringent world where a steady coolness from green places ameliorated that increasing heat.

  It was near 10:00 a.m. by the sun’s position when he sighted the town. Although he had never been here before he knew its name—Hayfork. Like a great many names in this raw world, Hayfork had its connotations for Warfield. Even if he’d come here in the darkness, he still would have thought this was a farming-ranching country. In the desert country names ran from Gila to Blue Water to Apache Pass to Purgatory, but in greener places the names were more like Meadowland or Tanque Verde—or Hayfork.

  The air was like clean glass, which made Hayfork appear two miles closer than it really was. But those two miles gave a stranger all the time he needed to make his appraisals, his adjustments, and his decisions.

  Hayfork lay beside a willow-lined creek that ran east and west. It was the usual scattering of buildings hugging a central, congested area where stores stood shoulder to shoulder.

  There were trees around Hayfork, which was not usual in this part of the West, as well as what was obviously the remains of the customary old-time plaza. All borderland towns had these plazas. In the old days Spanish soldiers had been quartered here to protect people from marauding Indians. Now, those ancient plazas served more pleasant purposes. The customary dug well was there for people to get water. The ankle-deep dust was there, also, waiting to burst upward under the impact of booted feet making little puffs that hung in the still air.

  Hayfork had less of the raw newness Fulton had possessed. It seemed not only much older, but much more peaceful, which was what Warfield was looking for as he approached the place.

  There were the saloons, the variety houses where men gambled and danced. There was even a bank, indicating that law and order as well as thrifty prosperity existed here. And there was a low-roofed forbidding, thick-walled old adobe building in the center of town with the nearly illegible lettering across its upper front stating that this was Hayfork’s calabozo—jailhouse.

  Warfield passed two outbound freighters with ten mules to each rig and a bronzed driver sitting high up with his swamper upon the spring-set seat. They waved and he courteously waved back.

  It was good to be in a place where a man could greet others without wondering about their motives. He reined over to head down the main roadway, his decision made.

  He would lie over here all day if he could, before tackling that last forty miles, but he would also keep close watch upon the northward roadway that was visible from almost every part of town, because sooner or later, he very well knew, Marshal Trent would come swinging along.

  At the livery barn an old man steadily puffing a corncob pipe from his tipped back position upon a chair closed his whittling knife with a positive snap and looked quietly upward as Warfield turned in. He removed the pipe, looked northward up into the visible desert, spat, and said drawlingly: “Hell of a country on women and horses.”

  Warfield stepped down, slapped alkali dust off his pants with his hat, and smiled. “Not too good on men, either.”

  The old man soberly nodded, jerking his thumb backward toward the barn. “The day man’s inside. He’ll take care of your critter.”

  As Warfield struck out through the doorway, the old man’s frosty glance stayed upon him.

  Across the way was a fairly good painting upon a saloon’s front wall of a tall glass of beer with an inviting ring of foam atop it. Warfield was drawn over there by that wordless suggestion, while behind him the old man with the corncob pipe kept watching.

  The saloon was gloomy and all but deserted. A bartender leaned disconsolately upon his high counter with his chin resting upon one cupped hand. His eyes picked up Warfield at the door and studied him all the way across the room. Without a word the barman turned his broad back, drew a glass of beer, turned back, and wordlessly set it on the bar before his solitary customer. Warfield dropped a small coin, upended the glass, and drank it down.

  As he handed over the glass for a refill, the barman said conversationally: “It’s that sign out there. The second I see a stranger with trail dust on him come through that door … I know exactly what’s on his mind.”

  Warfield took the second glass but held it upon the bar top. He glanced around. Over in a dingy corner sat the only other patron of the place—an old man exaggeratedly scowling at a newspaper in his hands while he held it to the light forming each word with his lips as he laboriously read.

  “Pretty quiet yet,” said the barman, seeing Warfield’s glance around. “Things don’t get goin’ in Hayfork much before evenin’. But after that, there’ll be poker and monte, if you feel like waitin’.”

  Warfield said: “Mister, I feel like a bath, not a card game.”

  “Sure. Two doors south at the first intersection. There’s a tonsorial parlor around there. For
a dollar they’ll shear you, shave you, and shine you. For two bits they’ll give you two buckets, show you the pump out back, and let you use the tub room.” The barman shook his head. “Hell of a price ain’t it … two bits for a lousy bath and a man has to pack his own water.”

  “Not to me,” said Warfield, drinking down that second glass of beer. “It’ll be worth five times that much to me just to see that much water.” He pushed back the glass, nodded, and started back out of the saloon.

  As Warfield hit the walkway outside, he caught the hat-shadowed leathery old face of the man across the road in front of the livery barn upon him. He turned and started along toward the first intersecting roadway.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The alternatives for John Trent were simple. He could lie over in Fulton until morning and possibly his lamed horse would be capable of traveling by then, and, if so, then Trent could head for Hayfork via the old water trough in the blast-furnace heat of the day.

  But if his steeldust wasn’t ready for the trail by morning, then Trent would have wasted an entire night, and also would have to wait out the night and leave the following morning, and this, he thought as he ate a greasy meal at Fulton’s only café, would be giving Warfield all the advantage.

  Trent tossed off the dregs of his second cup of coffee, paid up, and strolled back out into the shadows. Across the way he saw several men spiritedly talking in front of the stage office. One of them was Agent Harrison but he didn’t recognize the others. Around him, Fulton seemed pretty much as it had seemed before, except that the hitch rack in front of Bricker’s place was significantly empty of tied saddle horses, and the saloon was unlit.

  There were a few other noticeable differences, too, but since Trent did not know this town, had never seen it before the battle, they went unnoticed by him. For one thing, there were Mexicans strolling the hot night up along the business section. For another thing the merchants and townsmen seemed relieved, seemed willing to remain out after dark, and over at the livery barn two men sat on tilted-back chairs out front where they could catch the slightest breeze if one happened along. One of these was the liveryman himself and the other was that tall Mexican, Vidal Campos, who had looked Trent straight in the eye and told him, without ever opening his mouth, and yet as plainly as a man could be told, that if he went after Warfield, Fulton’s Mexicans would make a point of seeing to it that he never caught Warfield.