West of Nowhere

by Alan Lemay

  Evidently, at some time, the man had fallen face downward into a fire. He had been burned and blackened and scarred beyond the resemblance to a human being. The tiny, peaked, misshapen nose looked as though it had been formed by some amateur surgeon. The lips were twisted into a mirthless smile. It disclosed teeth that flashed in the light of the moon. It was a perpetual and ghastly smile. Strange to behold, the eyes were undamaged, and they were large and bright in the setting of that frightful face.

  No one spoke or moved.

  "Yuh don't know me," the man said after a pause, "but I'm yore old neighbor, Dan Morgan. I am one of the victims of that man."

  He pointed a finger at Wade Jeffries who started back and drew in his breath with a hissing sound.

  "I had a wife," the man continued. "She was young and beautiful and didn't understand. This man ruined her life as well as mine. She is now in Juarez, drug-crazed and dyin'. He tried to kill me, and left me for dead in the fire. I was rescued by an old prospector who had been a surgeon. He saved my life for this night. Wade Jeffries, I have come for huh."

  "What do huh want?" The cattle king's voice was scarcely above a whisper.

  "I want you. Give him his gun, men. I ask it, and I have the right to ask. We will stand together, back to back, and at the count we will go ten paces forward. Then we will turn and fire. I'm givin' him a fair chance for his long-ago forfeited life."

  Manley stood weakly against the cabin. As in a dream he saw the two men standing back to back, each with a drawn gun in his hand.

  Bart Connel counted. "One...two...three...," he began.

  It was the second time that night that Manley had heard that slow count.

  Both men started forward.

  "Four...five...six...."

  Again Manley noticed the dark mass moving over the prairie. He wondered if more of Wade's men were coming. He wanted to cry out, but his tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth.

  "Seven...eight...."

  Jeffries whirled. A stab of red flame shot out from his gun, and the crash rang out on the still night.

  Morgan stumbled and fell. Jeffries jumped backward a pace and held the others at the point of his waving gun.

  "Don't move!" he cried. "I'll shoot the first one that...."

  Spang!

  It was the crack of a gun in the hand of the prone Morgan. Jeffries spun halfway around. Again his gun flamed, but this time the bullet went into the ground before him as his knees buckled and he fell at full length.

  Manley staggered to Morgan's side. The man's eyes were very bright in the moonlight.

  "Is... is Jeffries dead?" he gasped.

  "He shore is," came the voice of Johnny Royce. "Shot plumb through the heart."

  "Dale," Morgan gasped, "you were our friend. Find her ... in Juarez. Tell her...tell her...I killed him...man to man. Tell...her...I'll be...waitin'...."

  The sentence ended in a rattle, Dan Morgan had died the death of a man.

  The roll of many hoofs sounded on the prairie, and a group of fifty or more men rode up. At the head was Randall, the square-shooting sheriff.

  "What's this, men?" he asked as he looked about him.

  Briefly Bart Connel explained.

  "I brought this posse from the other side o' the divide," the sheriff told them. "I got the evidence clear against Jeffries, and was after him to bring him to trial."

  He looked about him, and then removed his hat.

  "Yore war is over with Wade Jeffries," he announced in a low voice, "and peace has come back to the Trionte. I guess it's best that way."

  Do a man a favor=thought Sanders and he's as likely as not to expect you to take care of him the rest of his life. Just as now, for instance, Sanders's Mojave law office seemed once more in danger of becoming headquarters for the lank, unregenerate figure known from one end of the desert to the other as Twenty-Mule Bill.

  "What's the matter now?" Sanders demanded.

  There was injury in Bill's blue eyes, and accusation in the droop of his mustache when he spoke. "Mister Sanders," he said, "I'm looking for work. And I would appreciate to get hold of the loan of five dollars."

  "Looking for work?" Sanders repeated. "What's the matter with the job I got you three weeks ago, freighting for the Smoky Glory?"

  Bill sighed. "Mister Sanders, I am pained to state it was the same old story. I got run out."

  "I'm going to give you up," Sanders said. "Here you are, the best jerk-line driver in three states...about the only one left that can handle a twenty-mule hitch with distinction...and here I get you one more job, and you even blow that! What was the complaint this time?"

  "Mister Sanders, they claim I choked off the town of Coyote Wells. I can't go back there any more."

  "You mean you got boiled and shot up the town?"

  "Oh, no...nothing superficial like that. Coyote Wells is choked off right at the root this time. You know, that town ain't got any excuse except the Smoky Glory mine is behind it... no mine, no town. And the mine has about gone out of business since I left."

  "But, Bill, how the dickens could you, single-handed, put a ten million dollar property out of business?"

  "Why, that, Mister Sanders, was due to the Smoky Glory losing them mules. Ab Mackenzie... it seems like he has an affinity for mules or something. Maybe that's how come he's boss of the Smoky Glory. Anyway, he won't give an inch when it comes to a question of mules. So now the railroad won't haul no high-grade until Mackenzie settles up ...and Mackenzie won't settle up until the railroad hauls the high-grade. The Smoky Glory can't pay off until the ore is hauled, and business has become very stagnant and depressed around there... I never seen such an exasperated lot of people. It sure looks like the mining business is a thing of the past at Coyote Wells. And the railroad aims to sue the Smoky Glory about the mules."

  "But...look here! What have lost mules to do with the railroad suing the Smoky Glory?"

  "I'll tell you about it," Bill said courteously, "if only you'll be so kind, sir, please, sir, as to shut your damn' yap, enough to listen like a reasonable man. After I'd been working for the Smoky Glory about two days" TwentyMule Bill went on "Ab Mackenzie begun to depend on me a lot. Naturally the best twenty-mule jerk-line driver in the country, me, is an awful valuable man around a dump like that. So I was naturally the one Mackenzie picked out to go down to New Ballarat to straighten out the mule mystery.

  "It seems that Mackenzie had been expecting a team of mules in by freight, and he had just found out that his mule team had got only as far as the siding at New Ballarat. Seems like at New Ballarat all them leatherheads had took wings or something, for that was the last anybody had heard tell of them mules. My job was to go down and solve the mystery...the mystery principally being who the heck had fastened onto our long team.

  "Well, Mister Sanders, I went to New Ballarat by fast freight, and I sized up the situation. It seems Mackenzie had sent Tonopah Shorty down to bring this team upcountry in a cow car. Shorty had loaded his mules down in the Imperial all right, and managed to get hooked onto a freight. And they started upcountry all regular and serene, the mules riding inside the cow car and Shorty riding on top, to feed hay and water such as mules almost continually require. So far, so good.

  "But at New Ballarat it seems that Shorty let the situation get out of hand. His cow car of mules bust loose from the freight, and run up a siding, and made a thing of the past out of a bunk car belonging to a railroad grading outfit that was working there. And that would have been all right, too, and served the railroad right. Only, about half the slats got ripped off of the cow crate, and those dam' mules sallied out and lit for open country.

  "I looked up Shorty. He had got hold of some forty rod, and he was punishing it severely. I asked him why he hadn't rounded up his mules, and he said it was because he was discouraged. When they hit the bunk car, Shorty flew off the top and lit in some Fresno scrapers, and it discouraged him. I got that much out of Shorty before he went back to sleep on me. I woke him up a
gain and tried to show him it was his duty to come and help round up the stock, but he said he'd resigned and guessed he would retire on the county. And that was all I got out of him.

  "Well, I looked around New Ballarat, and I hired a fellow name of Slim Hinkle to help out, and me and Slim set out to round up them wandering harness canaries.

  "I suppose you realize, Mister Sanders, that a twentymule team is made up of eighteen mules and two horses. Me and Slim found the two horses right off. But when it come to those eighteen mules....

  "Mister Sanders, I went through hell making the gather of them mules. We couldn't find 'em.

  "`Slim,' I says, `Ab Mackenzie is an impetuous man. If we don't get him back his leatherheads, he is sure liable to view this thing in an unfavorable light. We got to round up that stock if it takes us hours.'

  "Hours, hell! It took us close onto a week!

  "In some ways them was the most stirring days of my life. What you don't realize, Mister Sanders, is that a man gets somewhat saddle-sore, after he hasn't rode for a couple years. It's only the last couple of days, Mister Sanders, that I have so recovered that I can sit down comfortable.

  "And to make things worse, the grading outfit moved fifteen miles down the track after the first day, depriving us of the sole place for bumming meals. If ever men made a supreme effort in behalf of their brand, it was me and Slim after them mules. I want you to understand that distinctly, Mister Sanders.

  "Because in the end we foozled. I have to own up to the truth. It ain't happened often, Mister Sanders...there's very few times in my life that I've had to admit that I fell down. But finally, when we got word we would have to hook our cow cage onto the next freight, the mule chorus was still shy one tenor voice, valued at forty dollars.

  "`Slim,' says I, `this lost jughead has busted my spirit. This is a good job, Slim...but you take it. Go ahead and ride to Coyote Wells on the cow Pullman and explain to Ab Mackenzie that the seventeen mules we rounded back was probably the pick o' the lot.'

  "`Not much,' says Slim. 'I'll help you load stock, but after that...eight dollars, please! I'm done.'

  "And furthermore, our troubles had only begun. What you don't realize, Mister Sanders, is that it's no child's play to load mules, especially in them little short cars they give you nowadays. You take a mule in a sitting position at the bottom of a steep plank by hand, and you try to shoot him up that plank by hand, and, I tell you, you'll find it very tiring, Mister Sanders, in the course of a forenoon. I had kind of counted on talking the gang from the grading outfit into elevating them brutes up into the car, but, wouldn't you know it, they was a long ways off by this time, like I said.

  "The worst of it was, those were awful big swivel-ears, Mister Sanders. I never seen such whoppers. Toward the end it got to be a bad problem to fit them things in there.

  "But we loaded 'em, Mister Sanders. I'm proud to say we done it. I even kind of persuaded myself that Ab Mackenzie would maybe overlook the lack of that one other mule, seeing all the work I'd been put to about the rest.

  "Mister Sanders, that hope was one of these holler shells. That train run the two hundred and fifty miles to Coyote Wells awful slow, but not by no means slow enough to suit me. The hour and the day finally come when I had to stand before Ab Mackenzie and state that I was one heavy-gauge jack rabbit shy.

  "`Mister Mackenzie,' said I, `frankly, I have went to work and fell down on you. Seventeen mules was every last mule I could dig up.'

  "Mister Sanders, what use is it to try to get sympathy and understanding from a wild-eyed Scotchman that is nuts about mules? I answer you that it ain't any use.

  "So there's the story, Mister Sanders. You now know the whole thing of how come the Smoky Glory has fired its best twenty-mule jerk-line man, me, and the railroad is suing Ab Mackenzie, and Ab Mackenzie has got one of his stubborn streaks, and the whole end of the desert is tied up in a hard knot."

  "Twenty-mule Bill," said Sanders after a short period devoted to thought, "I must say your story is unclear in the extreme. I can see how Mackenzie might have a case against the railroad, but exactly how can the railroad sue Mackenzie?"

  "Why, it seems," Bill explained, "that this construction outfit, being out of commission at just the wrong time, tied up the line, and there was forty carloads of melons that couldn't get through. And those melons, being tied up in the desert so long, they claim cost the railroad...."

  "But how in time," Sanders demanded, "could the railroad construction outfit be put out of commission by the fact that Mackenzie lost a mule?"

  "What mule?"

  "You said you got out of New Baccarat with seventeen mules."

  "Oh, yeah, that's right. But damn the luck! That was just the trouble. That construction gang can holler all they want, Mister Sanders, but no man can say I ain't top champion when it comes to rounding up lost stock. You see, we was two hundred and fifty miles down the track, and them seventeen compressed mules was unloaded and the car sent on, before we found out that Shorty had only had six mules in that cow crate to start out with."

  "Six to start with, and seventeen to end up...look here ...you mean you...?"

  "Mister Sanders, am I supposed to be able to come up with a mule in the desert and tell who he belongs to just by reading his mind? And is it my fault if the construction outfit was the only other people around there using mules? It wasn't until this construction argument came up that I found out why I could never get hold of that last mule I thought I needed."

  "Why?"

  "Come to find out, I'd already accidentally picked up all the mules that construction gang had."

  In some ways that rodeo at Las Cruces was one of the funniest I ever saw. It seemed like everybody was always ready to fight at the drop of a hat, so that it was very seldom that an hour went by without a brawl going on some place. There is always some scrapping behind the scenes at a rodeo, but during this show we had fighting all the time, until you would have doubted if cowboys were really peaceable men after all.

  The funny thing was that nobody seemed to know just what he was sore about, or if he thought he knew, it was no good reason, and no two reasons alike. But as I think back now, I believe it was because of the way the Heimholtz brothers homed in that year and sort of took over that rodeo, until there was a kind of shadow of them all over the whole darned works.

  These four Heimholtz brothers had started out in cattle, and got kind of halfway into banking, and ended up with a cattle loan company business that was now likely to own more cattle than any three outfits in the state. Now, I've seen plenty of cattle taken up to meet loans, and the people who lost their cattle were often some displeased, and I don't know exactly what was different about the way the Heimholtz brothers did business.

  But I don't think you can find anybody who will admit he ever got a square deal from those Helmholtzes, and I suppose half the cattlemen in the state had a knife honing for that outfit. So you can see why it made everybody feel rollicky to have these Helmholtz brothers come in and start out to run the Las Cruces rodeo, and get away with it, too, for a little while.

  I was sitting on a bale of hay, back of the chutes, the day before the rodeo began, talking to Whiskers Beck and Ben Cord. And they were giving me a few reasons why they had gone sour on the Helmholtz outfit. It seems that Ben and Whiskers Beck were the only two riders left to Johnny Fraser and his Star Loop outfit up on the Tonto Rim. Johnny was a good kid and a white man, but the Helmholtzes had got him tied where he stood to lose the whole works what of it the Helmholtzes hadn't grabbed already. I wish now I had listened closer, for, if I had, maybe I would be able to explain to you better what happened.

  But just then I was thinking about something else. You see, I knew Ben Cord pretty well, or did once, but I had never seen Whiskers Beck before. And I had a special reason for wanting to get to know him.

  Whiskers Beck was a bald old cowboy, with white whiskers that were short but very bushy. While I knew him, he always wore a wool brush jacket with b
ig black and white checks, and held up his Levi's pants with a four-inch leather belt with big silver conchos on it. But what interested me was that I understood this old boy had a running horse cached in the bushes, and was figuring to run him in the 440 that was coming off the second day of the rodeo.

  I had brought a little sprint horse to this rodeo myself. So Whiskers Beck and I were sizing each other up, each one of us trying to figure out what he was up against in the case of the other fellow's horse. The upshot of it was that by and by Whiskers and I agreed there wasn't any use of cow folks like us fighting among each other, so we just took our ponies off in the brush and tried them out.

  As it worked out, both of us were kind of disappointed in the little difference between our two horses, and I may as well say right now that neither one of us ever ran his horse in that quarter-mile race. But that was how it came about that I got to be a very close friend and you might say a partner for a little while of Whiskers Beck.

  "You and me might as well figure to split second money, if any at all," I told him. "There's a feller here has a pony that can beat us both from here to Tuesday."

  Whiskers was terrible let-down because his pony had not stood out against mine the way he'd hoped and figured.

  "Darned if I know where I'm going to head in," he said, very hopeless. "Some way or another I've got to make an awful lot of money out of this rodeo show."

  "How much money do you call a lot?"

  He looked me over very cool. "About five thousand pesos," he said at last.

  I looked at him with pity.

  "Maybe," said Whiskers Beck, "I can rouse up a few good odds against Ben Cord taking first money in the bronc' riding."

  I started to tell him he was crazy, but I let it pass. This Ben Cord was a good husky kid, maybe thirteen years old. He was half Indian, but one of the best built men I ever saw long in the legs and thin in the middle, with a chest like a barrel and shoulders fit for an ox. He had a head like a lion, wide-set eyes, high cheek bones, and all cut very square out of one piece. But when it came to riding, I knew Ben was just a fair to average bucking horse rider. As we went back to the corrals I was feeling sorry for Whiskers Beck, and figuring on how much I could do for myself by taking up some of those bets that Whiskers was so anxious to lay.