Mavericks

by Jack Schaefer

  Old Jake hunkers down on his heels to study the sandy rim of the small basin. Each evening he brushes it smooth so he can read a fresh story each morning. Sometimes the tracks are so mixed and overlaid that he has trouble deciphering them. But he has more than time enough and it is a matter of pride to him to identify them all except the almost imperceptible indentations left by the almost weightless smallest of his neighbors. This morning most of the regulars have left their imprints. A spotted skunk. A jackrabbit. A rock-squirrel. A coyote. No, two coyotes, one a bit smaller than the other. A porcupine. A badger.

  There is something new. Tracks big and plain, though the one who made them is perhaps the most wary and elusive of all the southwestern animal folk. A bobcat. "What d'ya know," says Old Jake. "Short-tail's fin'lly figgered I'm harmless."

  The jackrabbit prints hold his attention. Those at the water's edge. They are deep sunk, deeper than usual. "Took off fast," he says and ambles on around the small basin in a wide arc searching the ground. He finds plenty of tracks. They are scattered and confusing but his keen old eyes hunt them out. Jackrabbit tracks and coyote tracks and at last a smudged place and a few drops of blood already dried. This chapter of this morning's story has an abrupt ending. One coyote was belly-flat behind that bunched chamisa twenty feet from the spring. It jumped the jack and the jack skimmed off, confident of its ability to outrun any single cnemy. The second coyote intercepted from that clump of brush on ahead and the jack, dodging frantically now, was caught between them.

  "Sorry about that," says Old Jake. "But that's how things go. I reckon it's all the same to the jack, but somehow it seems more nat'ral. Better'n bein' mashed by a truck."

  The pink flush has faded out of the sunlight. It is pure gold that streams through the east-wall window frame, slanting down to the plank floor. Old Jake stands by the shelf on the west wall and the cracked mirror above it. He is honing his straight-edge razor on his spare belt that hangs from a nail in the wall. He hones it carefully with slow strokes. The stubble sprouting from his leathery face is tough and demands a sharp cutting edge.

  He takes a torn piece of cloth and dips this in the bucket resting now on a rickety table and moistens his face. He takes a piece of soap, high quality scented soap, the kind Henry W. Harper has in the big house in town and brings out here, and he dibbles this in the water to soften it and rubs a film over his cheeks and chin and down his scrawny neck in front. He takes the razor again and goes to work with it, carefully, peering into the old mirror, extra careful not to disturb the wide mustache that droops over his upper lip.

  Fresh-shaven, face and neck scrubbed, smelling some of the soap, Old Jake drops a handful of new coffee grounds into a battered pot that has an inch or more of old grounds on its bottom and fills this with water dipped from the bucket. He sets the pot on the small cast-iron stove in a corner, opens the draft in the pipe that goes up and out through the wall, and busies himself building a fire in the stove's belly. Shavings first, whittled with his ancient pocketknife, gently grouped in a small conical pile, lit with a match scratched on the stove top, coaxed into flame by soft blowing. Then twigs from the pile on one side of the stove and, when these are burning properly, larger pieces of seasoned cottonwood from the pile on the other side.

  He pulls up, grunting, from kneeling position and ambles over to stand by the shelves that climb from floor to ceiling beside the doorless door frame in the north wall. Many rows of cans of many sizes and shapes march along those shelves. "Hank sure does me proud," he says, studying the array of cans, trying to decide on the morning menu. A good breakfast and he can forget lunch and coast along until suppertime. He selects a large can of beef stew and a small can of chopped green chili to add to the stew and a middle-sized can of sliced peaches. Preparing the meal can fill many long moments for him.

  All of these morning activities, taken slow and easy, can fill in a great deal of time for him. They have their own strong savor drawn from the knowledge deep in his old bones that not many more mornings will the rising sun summon him awake.

  The sun is high overhead, reaching for noontime. Old Jake is in the inside shadow cast by the few remaining warped roofboards at one end of the sagging barn. He is looking down at an old doublecinch A-fork high-cantle free-swinging-stirrup saddle with a silver-topped horn that rests on a makeshift sawhorse high enough to hold it with stirrups barely touching the ground. He pulls from a pocket a faded bandanna and wipes from the sweat-darkened fly-chewed scratched and scuffed old leather the thin layer of dust which has settled since the last wiping twenty-four hours ago.

  He shakes the bandanna and folds it and tucks it back into a pocket. He stares down at the battered and cracked old saddle. Slowly his eyes lose their focus on it. "Jimmie Dun," he says. "That's what I called 'im. Never did know how Leyba tagged 'im." And suddenly he is no longer standing in the shade of a few warped roofboards. He is out in limitless distances of rangeland. He is a lean hard cowhand, on foot, leading a tired cowpony, walking towards another horse whose flanks are hollowed and whose strangely misshapen head hangs low.

  Four days he has been hunting this horse, ever since the morning he and two other hands of the Triple X have come on the border outlaw Remigio Leyba dying by the burned-out ashes of a campfire from a gunshot wound out of the dusk of the evening before. He has caught a few words from the final mumblings of the dying man, something about a caballo and a morral and a reata quehrada. The words have meant nothing to the other two hands but to him they have meant much. He has grasped the message, the appeal. Somewhere about there is a horse trailing a snapped picketrope and with a feed bag over its muzzle. If it can not get free of that deadly thing looped over its head, such a horse, unable to graze, will starve in the very midst of fine forage.

  Now he drops the reins of the cowpony and it stops, ground reined. He advances slowly towards the hollow-flanked horse and friendly reassuring wordless sounds come from his lips. The horse backs away a few steps and stands, hesitant, uncertain, hopeful yet half-afraid. Slowly, making no quick movement, he circles around and reaches down and has the frayed end of the picket-rope. He advances hand over hand along the rope, slowly, cautiously, and is close and reaches to rub gently along the quivering neck. He hears a soft muffled whiffling sound in the leather bag enclosing the muzzle and at the sound his own pent breath leaves his lungs in a sigh of relief. Swiftly now he takes out his pocketknife and opens the bigger of the two blades and cuts through the rope that is tight over the head behind the ears and the bag falls to the ground. The horse snorts, blowing dust from its nostrils, and swings its head to push and rub against him. The head drops and the horse is snatching at tufts of bunch-grass by his boots.

  Pure mustang all through. A dusty dun in color with a darker streak along the backbone running from almost-black stringy mane to almost-black long stringy tail. Smallish, stunted, barely fourteen hands tall. Dingy and awkward in appearance with big head and short neck joined like the two parts of a hammer and with flanks now hollowed by hunger. Not much to catch the eye at first glance, but a second or third might note the depth of chest and the strength of bone beneath the dirty hide, the clean trim neatness of legs dropping down to rock-hard hoofs. Cut, yes, but cut proud, as shown by the swelling of that short neck holding that almost-too-big head. Not pretty, nothing splendid or noble, but power and endurance plain to the knowing in the compact solidity of the whole.

  It snatches greedily at grass. But every now and then the head rises and it whiffles softly at him.

  This is the horse that time and again has carried the outlaw Leyba out of the reach of hard-riding posses, that has taken the outlaw Leyba for days on end across seemingly interminable miles of desert and along dangerous mountain trails. Now it is going to be the willing hard-working partner of an all-around hard-working hard-playing cowhand.

  "Yessiree bob," says Old Jake. "He sure was glad I happened to come along."

  A dust devil whirls past the sagging barn, slapping a few tiny pebbles
against the end wall. Old Jake shakes himself a bit. He ambles out of the inside shade into the open sunlight and looks all around, peering intently into the distances. There is no one in sight anywhere. There is never anyone in sight except once a fortnight when Henry W. Harper comes bouncing in his big car and the next time for that is still almost a week away. But Old Jake wants to be absolutely certain no one will see him at his silly senile game. He ambles back into the barn. Grunting some, he swings a leg up and over the old saddle. He hitches his body about until it is solid in the seat and searches with his boot toes until they are sunk into the stirrups.

  Quiet and motionless, withdrawn into himself, he sits on the worn scuffed leather and his old mind moves, searching backward through the years. And now he is no longer an ancient cartoon caricature of a man in a decrepit ruin of a once-fancy saddle on a makeshift wooden sawhorse. He is Young Jake Hanlon, point man of the Triple X trail crew that has delivered a herd of rough and rangy steers to a ranch near Deadwood in the Black Hills of Dakota just ten days ago. He is tall in a plain tough working saddle on a smallish dun-colored mustang and he is ramming steadily forward along an excuse for a road through the sandhills of Nebraska.

  Many people think he has played the fool, talking too much in that same Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood in which Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back by Jack McCall. Talking big about a little mustang. Saying it could make a good showing in the 530-mile race from Deadwood to Omaha scheduled to start in a few days. What? That scrubby misfit piece of wolf-bait that must already be worn out from a thousand miles of bringing a trail herd out of the southwest all the way to Dakota? Make a showing against the big strong halfbreds and Thoroughbreds picked out and brought from back east by rich ranchers and bigtime gamblers who plan to make a killing on the betting? Why, a scrawny little half-dead horse like that won't even be in the running against those fine big horses, bred right and fed right, that have been in training several months and more for this race.

  .

  There is plenty of money riding the route. Bets are high on the other horses. All that has been put on the little mustang is what the others of the Triple X trail crew have been able to scrape together, not much because they have spent most of their pay on liquor and cards and women before finding out that a Triple X horse is entered. Perhaps it is only loyalty to the outfit that has prompted them to empty their pockets. Perhaps not. They have been given odds of five to one and they know a thing or two of their own. On the long trail north they have seen that little dun, after the cavvy was thinned by drownings at a rivercrossing, do the work of two horses and never turn a hair. They have run mustangs themselves and they have a few in their strings and they know the feel of them under saddles and that when it appears to be done, worn out, finished, a little southwestern mustang has just begun to fight ...

  They pushed on, Young Jake and Jimmie Dun, a lanky cowhand and a smallish mustang, two working partners from the far desert distances of New Mexico, following now the rutted traces of a road through the unfamiliar distances of Nebraska. They moved steadily, not fast, not slow, at a jogging foxtrot that gnawed away at the miles.

  Young Jake had this race planned in his mind. He knew no long-distance race was ever won by speed at the start, by burning up reserve energy in the early days of the running. This was the morning of the fifth day and almost 300 miles were behind him and still he held to his strict routine: an easy trot for an hour, an easier flat-footed walk for the next hour, then the trot again and repeat. Out of blanket at daybreak each morning and trot-walk-trot till noon. Stop by water, a stream or ranch or farmhouse pump, and strip down Jimmie Dun and let him drink sparingly and rub him thoroughly and give him the small bait of mixed feed carried in a bag behind the saddle cantle and chomp hungrily himself on the two sandwiches from the one saddlebag and lie down in a spot of shade for several hours' rest. Up again and trot-walk-trot through the afternoon until dusk and stop at the quick camp made by his advance man, Petey Corle, who was traveling ahead with a light supply wagon drawn by the two long-legged mules that had brought the Triple X chuck wagon to Deadwood. Another rubdown and rations of water and feed for Jimmie Dun and a meal of Petey's campfire cooking for himself and an hour of rest for them both. In saddle again and trot-walk-trot until about midnight. Then pull off the road a bit and unsaddle and picket Jimmie Dun by good grass on a good length of rope and roll himself in the one thin blanket carried with the bag behind the cantle and sleep until the familiar summons of dawn.

  They pushed on, Young Jake and Jimmie Dun, and heard hoofbeats coming up behind and alongside. The thin-faced man on the big black Thoroughbred called Cannonball. He was frowning, annoyed. "So you're still with us," he said.

  "Why, sure," said Young Jake. "Ain't you heard? We're headed for Omaha."

  The thin-faced man kept the frown, glancing down sidewise at Jimmie Dun. "That thing won't last the day," he said. Contemptuous, impatient, he used his spurs and the big black leaped into a canter, dwindling into distance ahead.

  Young Jake grinned to himself. He had seen the sweat streaks starting already on the big black in the cool of the morning before the heat of the day. He rubbed a hand along Jimmie Dun's neck. He felt along the hard flanks. No moisture. Only an even warmth. Jimmie Dun could do what he was doing all day without working up a real sweat. No overdoses of rich food in him and no consequent overweight of hot flesh on him. And generations of stubborn desert endurance behind him. Young Jake grinned again. Then he shook his head slightly. "All the same," he muttered, "that'll be one to beat. Thoroughbred. Never know just what they've got left when the finish line's in sight."

  They pushed on and they heard hoofbeats again coming up and alongside. The black-bearded man on the tall big-boned half-bred bay called Jay Bird. He was moving at a fast pace and he glared once at Young Jake as he went past and then he and the big bay were diminishing into distance ahead.

  "Two," said Young Jake. "Wonder how many it'll be this time."

  Each morning it was the same. Others came up and passed him, impatient, hurrying, hammering on ahead of him as they all had done at the start on the first day. They rode too hard when they rode and had to stop too often to breathe their horses and were taking too much out of them too early and they themselves were too soft, too civilized, insisting on three meals a day and plenty of sleep. His own routine wore away at the miles more slowly but more steadily and for longer hours. Each evening, when he stopped at Petey Corle's quick camp, he would not be far behind them. When he rode on he would see in the last hour or two before midnight the last winking embers of the various fires where they were stopped at the camps made by their advance men. And in the morning they would be surprised, irritated, angry, to find him trotting easily along, having passed them in the night.

  They pushed on, Young Jake and Jimmie Dun, not fast, not slow, and heard hoofbeats again and these came alongside and slowed to the same pace. The red-haired man with jutting chin on the big reddish-brown high-shouldered Thoroughbred and Hambletonian cross called Sorrel Clipper. "So you did it again," he said, stating a fact. He stared down at Jimmie Dun trotting quietly, lazy-eyed and relaxed. "Must be related to a turtle," he said. "Looks half-starved and half-dead to me. But I thought the same at the start. Maybe he'll last after all."

  "Why, sure," said Young Jake. "He'll last."

  "Lasting ain't winning," said the man. He jabbed with spurs and the big sorrel picked up speed and moved out ahead.

  The time clock in his mind gave its signal and he relayed the message along the reins. Jimmie Dun slowed to a walk, the flat-footed walk that was almost a resting for him. And again hoofbeats sounded and came up. The thin-lipped eyetwitching man on the big long-bodied gray Morgan and Standard cross called Thunderbolt. His thin lips twisted as if he would say something and what he would say would be mean and nasty and he thought better of it and said nothing and spurred on and Young Jake saw the flecks of foam dropping from the bit in the big gray's mouth and its energywasting head tossing un
der the impact of the spurs.

  Time passed and the clock in Young Jake's mind nudged and Jimmie Dun knew and leaned forward into a trot, the jogging foxtrot that gnawed away at the miles. Young Jake looked back. He could see along the road at least a mile. Not another rider in sight. "Four," he said.

  There had been nine others the first day, all of them joking and jeering at Jimmie Dun and hurrying on ahead in the excitement of the start. Eight had passed him on the morning of the second day, one man already out with his horse lamed by a stone in a hoof not noticed and removed in time. Seven on the morning of the third day, another man out with a horse that had suffered from colic and cramps all night, probably caused by too quick watering after a bucket of oats. Five on the morning of the fourth day, two more men out, one with a horse limping badly from a sprained ankle, the other frankly admitting he was outclassed and voluntarily withdrawing.

  "Four today," said Young Jake. "With Jimmie'n me that makes five left."

  It was nearly noon when Jimmie Dun raised his head higher, scenting water, and quickened pace a bit. Ten minutes later they topped a low hill and Young Jake saw the Niobrara River a quarter mile ahead, a wide expanse of sandbars and shallow water and deeper-cut channels. He saw too the four horses and their riders bunched on the near bank where the road dipped to the ford.

  "Why, shucks," said Young Jake. "Afraid of a lil 0l' runnin' river."

  The other horses stood, heads hanging, glad of the rest. Their riders were silent in their saddles. They had been talking together as he approached, but now they were silent, watching him. Only the red-headed man on the big sorrel had anything to say. "It's been raining up-country," he said. "Could be over your head in some places out there."