by Jon E. Lewis
Mike Braneen didn’t hear him. He was staring at the Lucky Boy. The Lucky Boy was dark, and there were boards nailed across the big window that had shown the sign. At last Mike went over onto the board walk to look more closely. Annie followed him, but stopped at the edge of the walk and scratched her neck against a post of the arcade. There was the other sign, hanging crossways under the arcade, and even in that gloom Mike could see that it said Lucky Boy and had a Jack of Diamonds painted on it. There was no mistake. The Lucky Boy sign, and others like it under the arcade, creaked and rattled in the wind.
There were footsteps coming along the boards. The boards sounded hollow, and sometimes one of them rattled. Mike Braneen looked down slowly from the sign and peered at the approaching figure. It was a man wearing a sheepskin coat with the collar turned up around his head. He was walking quickly, like a man who knew where he was going, and why, and where he had been. Mike almost let him pass. Then he spoke.
“Say, fella—”
He even reached out a hand as if to catch hold of the man’s sleeve, though he didn’t touch it. The man stopped, and asked, impatiently, “Yeah?” and Mike let the hand down again slowly.
“Well, what is it?” the man asked.
“I don’t want anything,” Mike said. “I got plenty.”
“O.K., O.K.,” the man said. “What’s the matter?”
Mike moved his hand toward the Lucky Boy. “It’s closed,” he said.
“I see it is, Dad,” the man said. He laughed a little. He didn’t seem to be in quite so much of a hurry now.
“How long has it been closed?” Mike asked.
“Since about June, I guess,” the man said. “ Old Tom Connover, the guy that ran it, died last June.”
Mike waited for a moment. “Tom died?” he asked.
“Yup. I guess he’d just kept it open out of love of the place anyway. There hasn’t been any real business for years. Nobody cared to keep it open after him.”
The man started to move on, but then he waited, peering, trying to see Mike better.
“This June?” Mike asked finally.
“Yup. This last June.”
“Oh,” Mike said. Then he just stood there. He wasn’t thinking anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to think.
“You know him?” the man asked.
“Thirty years,” Mike said. “No, more’n that,” he said, and started to figure out how long he had known Tom Connover, but lost it, and said, as if it would do just as well, “ He was a lot younger than I am, though.” “Hey,” said the man, coming closer, and peering again. “You’re Mike Braneen, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Mike said.
“Gee, I didn’t recognize you at first. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Mike said. He didn’t know who the man was, or what he was sorry about.
He turned his head slowly, and looked out into the street. The snow was coming down heavily now. The street was all white. He saw Annie with her head and shoulders in under the arcade, but the snow settling on her rump.
“Well, I guess I’d better get Molly under cover,” he said. He moved toward the burro a step, but then halted.
“Say, fellow . . .”
The man had started on, but he turned back. He had to wait for Mike to speak.
“I guess this about Tom’s mixed me up.”
“Sure,” the man said. “It’s tough, an old friend like that.”
“Where do I turn up to get to Mrs. Wright’s place?”
“Mrs. Wright?”
“Mrs. William Wright,” Mike said. “Her husband used to be the foreman in the Aztec. Got killed in the fire.”
“Oh,” the man said. He didn’t say anything more, but just stood there, looking at the shadowy bulk of old Mike.
“She’s not dead too, is she?” Mike asked slowly.
“Yeah, I’m afraid she is, Mr. Braneen,” the man said.
“Look,” he said more cheerfully. “It’s Mrs. Branley’s house you want right now, isn’t it? Place where you stayed last winter?”
Finally Mike said, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”
“I’m going up that way. I’ll walk up with you,” the man said.
After they had started, Mike thought that he ought to take the burro down to John Hammersmith’s first, but he was afraid to ask about it. They walked on down Canyon Street, with Annie walking along beside them in the gutter. At the first side street they turned right and began to climb the steep hill toward another of the little street lights dancing over a crossing. There was no sidewalk here, and Annie followed right at their heels. That one street light was the only light showing up ahead.
When they were half way up to the light, Mike asked, “She die this summer too?”
The man turned his body half around, so that he could hear inside his collar.
“What?”
“Did she die this summer too?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Wright,” Mike said.
The man looked at him, trying to see his face as they came up toward the light. Then he turned back again, and his voice was muffled by the collar.
“No, she died quite a while ago, Mr. Braneen.”
“Oh,” Mike said finally.
They came up onto the crossing under the light, and the snow-laden wind whirled around them again. They passed under the light, and their three lengthening shadows before them were obscured by the innumerable tiny shadows of the flakes.
ERNEST HAYCOX
When You Carry the Star
ERNEST HAYCOX (1899–1950) was born in Portland, Oregon, and spent his boyhood around the mills and lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest. He served with the US Army in France during World War One, and on his return he entered the University of Oregon, graduating in 1923. His literary career was initially unsuccessful – he was reduced to living in a chicken coop, which he decorated with rejection slips – but took off after a period as a reporter for The Oregonian and his marriage to Jill Marie Chord. By the 1940s, after a decade of phenomenal output for the pulps, Haycox had become the principal Western writer for the “slick” magazine Saturday Evening Post. Unlike many popular writers of the period, Haycox did not merely make his characters men of action: he gave them a moral awareness and psychological depth (something which subsequently influenced the entire course of the popular Western). Although Haycox wrote several fine Western novels – in particular, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944) and The Border Trumpet (1939) – his real skill always remained the Western short story, at which he was largely unrivalled in the popular tradition. Among the many Haycox stories filmed by Hollywood is “ Stage to Lordsburg”, which formed the basis for John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939).
“ When You Carry the Star” is from the Haycox collection Murder on the Frontier (1952).
SHERIFF HENRY LINZA was taking the evening’s ease on the porch of his ranch house, ten miles out of Bonita, when he saw the rider come beating across the prairie; and even at that distance he knew. His face settled a little and he tapped the bowl of his pipe against an arm of his chair as if to signal the end of twilight’s long peace. “ It’s Bob Boatwright,” said he to his wife. “ Funny how he likes to lug bad news to me.”
“How can you tell?” asked Miz Linza.
“He’s sittin’ all over the saddle,” chuckled Linza. “ Kind of a St Vitus’ dance catches him when he gets excited.” But when Boatwright, marshal of Bonita, came abreast the porch, Linza was quite grave. Indian summer’s cloudy beauty lay over the land and it was hard to think of the crimes of men.
“This is bad, Sheriff,” said Boatwright. “Will Denton – he’s turned wild.”
“Will Denton!” exclaimed Miz Linza. “Why, I don’t believe it!”
But Henry Linza shook his head slowly and, leaning forward, prompted Boatwright. “As how, Bob?”
“He walked into Neal Sampson’s store an hour ago, pulled the gun and asked for the extra money Neal keeps to accommodate ranch hands after the bank
closes. Wouldn’t been nothin’ but ord’nary robbery but Neal is rattled, makes a move toward the counter and gets a bullet in the heart.”
“What then?” grunted Linza.
“It was all over in three minutes,” said Boatwright. “Last we saw of Denton he was goin’ due west into the heat haze. I couldn’t get a posse organized so I come here. The boys are shy of Denton’s educated rifle, Sheriff.”
“I don’t believe it,” repeated Miz Linza. “Why, he ate supper with us two weeks ago.”
“I hated to come here,” said Boatwright, “knowin’ he was a friend of yours.” And after a lengthening silence he spoke again. “What’ll you do, Sheriff?”
Linza’s head fell thoughtfully forward. Lines curved down from his lip corners into a squarely definite chin, thus creating an aspect of doggedness, of biting into difficulties and hanging on. Without alleviating humor, that cast of jaw and mouth would have seemed unforgiving and almost brutal; but it was Linza’s eyes that gave him away. Candidly blue, they mirrored the shrewdness of a full life and the inevitable compassion arising therefrom.
As an observer and dealer in the misdemeanors of men he had grown great without becoming hard; of that splendid line of southwestern peace officers which had left its impress on an unruly land, there was in him always a puzzlement that certain things had to be.
“Go after him,” said he, following a long spell of silence.
“Now?” pressed the marshal.
“Mornin’s soon enough,” replied Henry Linza. “He’s got twelve hundred square miles to roam in and one day makes no difference. Light and rest, Bob.”
“Thanks, no, I’ve got to get back,” said Boatwright and cantered away into the deepening dusk.
“He sat here on this porch two weeks ago,” murmured Miz Linza. “It don’t seem possible.”
“He was on the border line then,” reflected Linza. “I saw it in him. He wasn’t the same. He held a little off from me. He was debatin’ the jump whilst he ate my beef.”
“But what could make him?” pressed Miz Linza.
Linza shook his head. “If anybody knew the answer to that they’d have the answer to all things. Wild blood, a dark thought, a bad day, a tippin’ of the balance in a man’s mind, a sudden move – and then it’s done and never can be undone. One more rider in the wild bunch.”
“Your own friend,” said Miz Linza.
“Was,” agreed Linza, rising. “ But it’s himself that took the step across the line, and he’d be the first to realize I’ve got to go after him. Such,” and a deepening regret came to his voice, “is the constituted order of things in a mighty queer world. We better turn in, Henrietta. I’ll ride early.”
It was, in fact, still short of daylight when Henry Linza pulled out from the ranch, riding one horse and leading another. There was a single gun at his hip, a rifle in its boot, a few necessities within the saddlebags, and some quick grub inside the blanket roll tied to the cantle strings. In addition he carried a pair of binoculars. “Can’t say when I’ll return,” he told his wife. “My intention is to take Will peaceably. Knowin’ his disposition I dunno if he’ll agree. But don’t worry.”
She had been a peace officer’s wife too long to show her concern outwardly. All she did was to touch him gently and return to the porch. A hundred yards off he swung in his saddle and raised his hand as a farewell; it was a comfort to know she’d be there waiting for him to come back.
He swung wide of Bonita and thus when day fully arrived and a splendid sun swelled through the sky with a rose-red light, he came to a bridge over a dry river bed, crossed it and stood on the edge of his venture. The leagues rolled away to the distance, southwesterly into a horizon unbroken, northwesterly to a line of hills even now beginning to fade behind an autumn haze. Somewhere yonder Will Denton rode. Halting a moment, Linza was summing up as follows: wherever Denton went the need of food and water and rest would inevitably bring him to certain crossroads.
It became a matter of guessing who, out of Denton’s many stanch friends in the country ahead, would shelter the man. As for the first crossroad, the dimmed smudge of Joe Waring’s ranch in the distance seemed most likely. Hungry and worn, Will Denton would seek that friendly shelter while debating whether to turn to the southern open or to the northern hills. Waring’s was the jump-off.
The day’s course outlined, he pushed forward at a gait designed to protect both himself and his horses over a continued trail. It was not one that would have overtaken any hurrying fugitives, but Linza, having twenty years’ tracking to his credit, knew wild ones seldom if ever retreated in a straight line after the initial dash. They shifted, they halted, they doubled from point to point. As those more gentle, abiding men whose ranks they forsook, outlaws liked home soil best of all.
For the most part it was a trackless, lonely land and as he plodded on, Linza relapsed into the protection of his thoughts. “Punched cattle with him, ate and slep’ with him under the stars. Knew him well, but apparently never knew him at all. He was a laughing man. Now he’s got a price on his head. Good wine can stand in the keg too long.” Beyond noon he camped under a scrub oak.
Afterwards, riding the second horse, he pressed through heat haze as heavy as fog; and around six o’clock he crossed the Waring front yard to find the owner standing in wait for him – a big, broad man with fat cheeks and a pair of blandly observant eyes.
“Saw you comin’, Henry,” said he. “ Glad to have your feet under my table again. Get down.”
“Your conscience is clear, I take it,” drawled the sheriff cheerfully and allowed an arriving puncher to take his horses away.
“Why shouldn’t it be clear?” retorted Waring; and the both of them grinned.
There were punctilios in this matter that had to be observed, a kind of code grown up from the common mingling of honesty and outlawry. Waring, himself straight as a string, was a friend to both the sheriff and Denton. More than that, there was in him a wide streak of sentiment for the underdog, and many men on the dodge had received casual aid from him. But what he knew he kept strictly behind his smiling eyes. Comprehending this, Linza maintained his peace, ate and returned to sit on the porch with a cigar between his teeth while purple dusk deepened and a faintly stirring breeze brought the fragrance of sage across the yard. The thing went even deeper. Waring’s sympathy for the underdog might well lead him into getting word out to Denton of his, Henry Linza’s, probable course of hunt. So it became a matter of wits, played on either side with a shrewd courtesy.
“You’re in no hurry?” said Waring.
“Plenty of time. The world’s a wide place.”
“Ahuh,” drawled Waring and added gently, “one of the boys came back from town last night. Heard about Will Denton from him.”
Linza remained silent, wondering whether this were truth or evasion. Waring leaned forward, concern in his words. “You’re both friends of mine of long standing. Hard for me to realize you’re the man that’s got to take Denton’s trail. Henry, one of you is going to get hurt.”
“I carry the star,” said Linza very quietly.
“And not for a million dollars would you go back on it,” muttered Waring. “That damn’ fool Denton! He might’ve known this would happen. You never give up, Henry. I never knew you to give up. And he won’t be taken alive. I can tell you that.”
“I’ll give him every chance to drop his guns,” said Linza.
“Why didn’t you put a deputy on his trail?”
Linza shook his head slowly. “It would be the same as a lie, Joe. No deputy could catch Will. It takes an old dog full of tricks. It wouldn’t even be average honesty for me to send another man out.”
“Damn a system that makes this business possible,” growled Waring.
Linza sighed a little, remembering Will Denton’s recklessly pleasant face as of old. “Maybe – maybe. But bear in mind that Will committed the murder, not the system. I’m turnin’ in.”
Waring got up, watching the sher
iff closely through the shadows. “Listen, you’re traveling light. Better let me give you a couple of extra water bags tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” said Linza casually. “Not a bad idea.” And he climbed the stairs to his bedroom. But he didn’t immediately roll up for the night; instead, he pulled a chair soundlessly to a window and took station there. A long while afterward he was rewarded by the sight of a rider going off from the barn. In the distance hoofbeats rose and died out. With something like a grim smile on his face, the sheriff abandoned his post and went to bed. “The twelve hundred square miles is cut in half, I think,” he mused.
He was away next morning before the mists had risen. Five miles from the ranch he drew in, knowing it was time to make a decision. If he meant to hit for the open land southwesterly it was necessary to swing left at this point; otherwise the hill country beckoned him to turn north. Dwelling on Waring’s apparently innocent offer of the water bags and the subsequent rider faring out through the darkness, Linza made up his mind. “Me taking those water bags indicates to Waring I intend to hit the dry trail into the southwest; his messenger would tell Denton that, and Denton would do just the opposite – ride for the hills.” Acting on that reasoning, Linza swung somewhat and advanced squarely toward the range of hills shooting tangentially out of the north.
The country began to buckle up and long arroyos led downgrade to a high-bluffed canyon with a silent river idling at the bottom. Linza, roused from his saddle laze, entered the canyon, followed the slanting trail around a bend and found himself in a forlorn, shrunken town hidden from the horizon altogether. This habitation of man appeared to have no purpose and no vitality; and in truth it was but a gateway to the hills and a supply point for the nervous-footed who dodged in and out of sight. Linza, watching all things carefully, knew he had definitely put safe territory behind; the mark of hostility lay on the faces of the few loungers who scanned him with surreptitious, narrow-lidded glances. Pausing to let his horse drink at a stable trough, he considered his surroundings.
