West of Nowhere

by Alan Lemay

  A hush fell upon the throng, broken only by the drumming of the subsiding rain on the shakes above. For a moment the fourscore stared at the three, and the three stared at the fourscore. Then the leader of the three he with the twiggy beard pointed a thumb half over his shoulder at one of the other mud-masked figures.

  "Dixie was just wishin' it would rain," he solemnly intoned.

  Pandemonium broke loose. Shrieks and howls of laughter shook the roof, drowning out the sound of the rain. 'Punchers reeled, roaring with laughter, into each other's arms, beat their nearest friends with hard hands, and sank, doubled convulsively, to the floor. Hats sailed into the air. An unsuspected gun went off, potting the roof, and an instant stream of water was admitted by the wounded shingles. The first cupful of water, with divine justice, went down the gun-toter's neck, cooling his ardor somewhat.

  While this uproar was going on, the three had stood limply, without facial expression. There is no expression to mud. But suddenly he of the dripping beard set eyes upon the sheriffs posted handbill and galvanized into life.

  "You want Saragossa Pete, do yuh?" he yelled above the shrieks of the laughter-racked mob.

  "Right," replied the laughing sheriff.

  "Well, we got him right here!"

  At this the sheriff from Spring River became swiftly sober and alert. "What?"

  "We got him! How much does that reward read?"

  "Three thousand...dollars...reward!" yelled the sheriff as impressively as he could. "For mail robbery, shootin' up o' seven men, rustlin' o' cattle, robbery on the highway, blowin' o' the Hogjaw bank, settin' fire to the...."

  "Well, here he is!" yelled Whiskers excitedly. "I know his pan, an' I seen it tonight by lightnin'." He seized upon the hindmost member of the three, and hauled the bedraggled fellow forward. "This is him."

  The sheriff promptly thrust a gun into the shirtless stomach of the man thus presented. At this the news that something extraordinary was going on at the door spread over the assemblage like ripples in a pool, and all fell silent to listen and watch.

  "Wait!" protested the man who confronted the sheriff's gun. "I ain't him. It's me!"

  "Damned if it ain't!" Whiskers admitted. "My mistake, Dixie. Reel in that rope!"

  Dixie Kane, he of the missing boot, carried the end of a rope that extended out the door into the night. He now threw his weight upon it. In response to this peremptory summons a huge, shadowy figure appeared in the doorway. At first the crowd thought that a horse was being led in, but instead a fourth man, in every way like the mud-disguised three, lurched in weakly, led by the rope knotted about his neck. The arms of this latest entry were bound behind his back, and his feet were hobbled so that only short, teetering steps were possible.

  In spite of these handicaps, the prisoner was seen to make a game attempt to bite through the rope that led him, an attempt that was ended by a harsh command from Dixie Kane.

  The sheriff ripped off his own handkerchief and thrust it outside into the drip of the eaves. It came back soaking wet, and he used it to get some of the worst mud off the face of the prisoner. "It's him for sure!" he exulted. "I know by the scar over his right eye!"

  While the sheriff had washed the prisoner's face, Dixie, Squirty, and Whiskers had followed out the idea by rinsing and rubbing some of the thickest clay off of their own. They were now recognizable to those who knew them well.

  "Well, if it ain't Whiskers!" declared the sheriff. "An' Squirty! An' Dixie Kane! All from the Triangle R.How come yuh to get this feller?"

  "Well," Squirty began, "I knowed there was somethin' phony about him soon's he stuck that gun in my ear, so we thought...."

  "We went after him," Whiskers interrupted loudly, drowning Squirty out.

  The sheriff swiftly shoved the reeling prisoner ahead of him into the room, his gun at the man's back. He held up his free hand to silence the general buzz of excitement.

  "Listen!" he yelled, and they did. "Whiskers Beck, Squirty Wallace, and Dixie Kane, all o' the Triangle R, has run down an' captured alive this here Saragossa Pete, the same feller that shot his way through three posses. They took him with the' bare hands, follerin' a long chase through this storm! Yuh can see for yourselves they ain't got guns!"

  There was a moment of silence except for the steadily decreasing hum of the rain while this sunk in.

  "Three thousand dollars reward is comin' to these boys," the sheriff concluded, "an' I'm gonna see that they get it!"

  A great cheer went up, continuing, with whoops and yells and leaps into the air, for many minutes. Flasks were thrust into the hands of the three, and they were mauled and thumped by many hands. Then swiftly they were swept up onto the shoulders of six brawny men. Shocky McCoy leaped onto his keg.

  "All form for th' gran'march!" he bellowed.

  The fiddler struck up "Hail to the Chief," and the orchestra crashed in.

  The three dripping 'punchers from the Triangle R, each with a flask in each hand and a thousand dollars gold in prospect, were carried triumphantly at the head of the grand march on the shoulders of shouting men.

  "How was the rain, Dixie?" Whiskers yelled over his shoulder.

  "Rain?" Dixie Kane shouted back. "Where?"

  It was already past midnight when, through the blinding run of the snow, Jud Hyatt pushed against the sod wall of the stable and knew that he was home. Hyatt's sense of direction was equal to any in the territory, but in the black sear of the blizzard a man could lose track of anything that he could not reach out ar touch, so that he was both surprised and immeasurabl relieved that he had made it, after all.

  Dismounting, he groped along the wall to the door, kicked it free of the ice that jammed it, and led his pony in. He unsaddled, slinging his hull into a comer as if he were never going to need it any more, groped for a fork, and shook down a bait of hay. Then he drew a deep breath, plunged out into the blizzard again, and ran, stumbling, toward the house.

  The blast of the norther ripped the breath from his lungs. It seemed to fill all space with a vast thunder and the snarl of dry ice particles rushing horizontally across ironcrusted plains. So thick was the night that he was unable to see a faint patch of lighted window until he barged into the massive log wall. Then he was inside, in stove heat and lamplight at last.

  Jean Campbell was standing by the big wood range in the little kitchen. Her red-gold hair was the single vivid spot of color in the room. She was staring at Jud Hyatt as if he were a ghost.

  Jud Hyatt felt curiously stunned and dazed, now that his struggle with the night was so suddenly at an end. His head was still ringing with the blast of the norther as he heard himself say: "Hello...why, what's the matter?"

  "Jud, are you crazy?" Her low voice was furious. "We thought you'd hole up in the southwest storm noddy... haven't you any sense at all?"

  "Well, shucks, honey, I thought I'd better come on in."

  Jean Campbell gave a little whimper and ran into his arms, disregarding the mass of snow needles that had pinned themselves into his coat and were now melting with the heat of the stove. She clung to him, and the quick tears upon her lashes were warm and wet against his frosted cheek.

  "Jud, if I'd known you were riding back against the blow, I'd have died."

  Late though it was, nobody at the Bar Cross had turned in. A hum of talk that had been going on in the big main room had stopped as the blast of cold air through the house announced Jud's arrival. Now there were people crowding to the kitchen door, their eyes startled, like Jean's.

  Abe Campbell, for whom Jud Hyatt rode, was the first to press into the kitchen, his close-clipped beard bristling like a handful of shingle nails. "Good Lord, Jud!" There were nearly a dozen people gathered here tonight, and because they were all cow folks, range people, they knew what manner of death walked in those black blizzards, in which a man could lose himself and die while trying to go from his house to his barn. That a man should have attempted to travel in such a night and have made his destination was an incredible
thing.

  Mrs. Campbell, a billowing motherly woman with sober eyes, seemed most surprised of all. "Jud, are you all right? I declare I don't know what gets into you youngsters. It's got so I can't draw a peaceable breath any more with a storm up and you boys not in. Froze anything?"

  "Shucks, no. I just thought I'd better...."

  Mrs. Campbell said crossly: "Don't be a fool, Jud! Everybody get out of here... all of you. How am I going to feed this boy with the whole passel of you underfoot?" She began to make a great clatter of pans.

  As the people who had pushed into the kitchen shuffled out again, Abe Campbell kicked shut the battened door, and instantly Jud Hyatt turned upon his boss.

  "Luther Kendricks get here?"

  "Sure he got here! He said he was coming, didn't he? What he says he'll do, he does. He's in there now."

  For a moment Jud stared dumbly at his boss, then he turned away and began pulling off his coat.

  For six months Abe Campbell had been trying to get old Luther Kendricks to come here to discuss putting a block of money into the Silver Bow cattle. Old Kendricks had half the money in the territory, and, having made it in cattle, he kept it there.

  To invest in the Silver Bow was to invest in Abe Campbell purely, for the range encompassed but three brands, and it was Campbell who had gone on the notes of the other two, and held them up. By himself he could hold them up no more, or even save himself any longer in the face of the bad years. And now that Luther Kendricks had come at last, he had arrived just in time to see the Silver Bow getting away from them, stripped and scoured clean by such a blizzard as few of them could remember.

  "Where'd you come in from, Jud?" Campbell demanded.

  "From the Hat Crick bluffs."

  Campbell exploded at Hyatt. "Why didn't you say so? Are they there? Don't stand there like a ninny! Are they under the bluffs? Are they there?"

  "No," said Jud Hyatt heavily. "There's no cows under the Hat Crick bluffs."

  Campbell looked as if he could not believe his ears. "You're crazy! They've got to be there! Where else can they stand against the norther? They've got to be there.. .you hear me?"

  "I was there before dark. I doubt if there's a hundred head between Wagon Bend and the Sauk Breaks."

  For several moments more Abe Campbell stared at the cowboy without change of expression, but, when he spoke again, his voice was curiously low and the stiffening was out of it.

  "All night," he said, "I've thought of Hat Crick as our one best bet. If they drift before it, hell can't save 'em, Jud."

  It's the fool whiteface strain, Jud Hyatt thought. We should have kept more longhorn blood.

  Mrs. Campbell was slamming things around the stove. Already the little cook room was filling with a grateful smell of frying beef. She said: "There's still a chance that a big part of them can stand to it in the Silver Bow bottoms."

  "I touched the Silver Bow at the upper bend," Hyatt said, "and the wind's whamming through there to turn 'em wrong side out. There's a big bunch of stock in there, about half of 'em down. I tailed up near forty head before it come dark. They wouldn't hardly move, but only just jerk their horns and bawl. Looks to me like they're good as gone... those I saw."

  Old Campbell's bristly jaw was set. "We'll come through this yet," he said stubbornly. "In a couple hours more this storm should turn."

  "And if," Mrs. Campbell said, "it doesn't turn?"

  "By God," said old Abe Campbell, "she's got to turn!" He went stomping out into the main room, slamming the door.

  Mrs. Campbell set out hot beef and potatoes for Jud Hyatt, and Jean sat on the other side of the home-made table as he ate. While Jean was in sight, nothing else ever actually existed for Jud, and now the ringing was going out of his head, and the black punishing hours of his cross-wind fight were beginning to fall away behind him. Sometimes she made him feel as if he wanted to fight and smash things, and other times as if nothing was worthwhile but to take her protectively in his arms and tell her how beloved she was, what a bright, warm decoration she was to the gaunt prairies.

  In the three years in which his fortunes had been linked with those of Abe Campbell, she had become the center of his whole existence. He could ride a lonely week and hear her voice under the wind all the way. At night by his fire he could see her hair bright in the glowing smoke, and her smile teasing him from the flame.

  "Jud, do you think...?"

  "A few of the leatherheads might get through. Not many, I guess."

  Jean's words sprang from her passionately. "If this isn't a cattle country, in heaven's name, what is it?"

  "It's grand cattle country," Hyatt said, still believing. "This come at an unhandy time, that's all."

  "And now.. .what's ahead?"

  "Your father's the best cattleman in the north, Jean.

  He'll make his stake again."

  "I mean.. .you and me."

  Jud Hyatt shrugged. He had had five hundred head of his own running with Campbell's Bar Cross stock, until the blizzard struck. "I better slope down Texas way, and see to a job. Pretty soon I'll build me a new stake. Someday, if the big company brands don't grab up all the range...." He saw the tears come into her eyes, and he reached across the table to grip her hand. "We've still got a chance. If the storm turns, a lot of stock may pull through in the willow breaks. Meantime, we've got to play up to Kendricks. By God, we'll find a way out of this yet! Who all's in there?"

  "Nearly everybody in the Silver Bow. All of the Bassetts ...Charline and her brothers, and Grandpappy Noah... and Lief Norgaard's two girls, and Curt Webb, who rides for him... and, of course, Rees Butler."

  "Lief Norgaard.. .where's he?"

  "He went down just before dark to cut the south drift fence so the cattle won't be piled up there, if they drift. Sigrid and Helga came on here, with Curt Webb."

  "You'd better come on in if you've et," Mrs. Campbell said.

  "We're coming."

  As they stood up, Jud stepped around the table, caught Jean in his arms, and forced a hard unexpected kiss against her cheek bone. For an instant she turned her face upward and pressed her lips against the corner of his mouth before she pushed him away.

  The main room was a big one, for this house had been built for a barn only, the barn had proved so much more comfortable than the soddy that the Bar Cross people had moved into it. Campbell had meant it to shelter horse rakes and mowers, when he got squared around. The huge stove at one end, red-hot as it was, could heat only a little space around itself tonight.

  The storm was searching out every last crevice, so that within the house a hundred faint icy breezes kept moving about from unexpected angles. The blizzard bawled like a world in torment, wrenching at the sturdy logs. The night was an enormity, an illimitable blackness filled with unworldly sound and intense, rushing cold. Something was going on out there that was terrible in its immensity, yet specific and deadly in its meaning here.

  The people gathered here were cow folks, all of them, men who had put the best of their lives into opening a range, and youngsters born to the saddle. They sat soberly, silent for the most part, not trying to conceal that they were waiting-waiting for the barely possible turn of the storm that would give them a little hope.

  Jud Hyatt grinned and spoke to his friends, then walked across to shake hands with Luther Kendricks, who he had never seen before. As Hyatt shook hands with the visitor, he was comparing him with his own boss, wondering if Campbell, the cowman whose herds were withering under the stroke of the storm, could sway this other Westerner, who could raise a million dollars, or five million, if he had the mind.

  Kendricks's long, smooth-shaved face had the heavy folds that age puts into only the thickest and toughest skin; his smile, rueful and grim, was of the mouth alone. The eyes were old past smiling, it seemed, but hard as rock drills. Hyatt judged that nothing was to be hoped for from this man if morning showed the cattle dead.

  Hyatt heard Ma Campbell say: "It doesn't seem to be slacking much... it ev
en seems to be getting worse." And Abe Campbell's dogged answer: "She's bound to turn." Then silence again.

  They sat so stoically impassive under the continuing disaster that they seemed to him more like Indians than like his friends. Then he ran up the ladder into the loft and brought his fiddle down. He sat down between Ma Campbell and Jean.

  "Jud Hyatt," said Jean, "don't you dare play that thing! Because, if you do, I know I'm going to cry."

  "Me, too, maybe," said Ma Campbell. "He can make that saw-box bawl like a baby!"

  Jud began tuning the strings. "This outfit looks like a ring of coyotes fixing to sing gloom over last year's buffalo bones. What kind of a sorry outfit will Kendricks think this is?"

  "You'll only make everybody feel worse, I bet."

  Jud grunted, and the fiddle began to sing, a shrill, thin voice under the vast growl of the blizzard. The tone of that fiddle was slightly nasal, and it was fingered none too accurately, but Jud bowed it with a careless abandon.

  Soddy back of Silver Bow....

  Hyatt saw Luther Kendricks's head come up slowly, like the head of a weary old dog. Even to Kendricks that song must have been familiar, although the version Jud was singing was a localized one that he had made himself.

  Those who had danced to Hyatt's fiddle had never heard "Silver Bow Soddy" as they heard it now, against the realization that the range had beaten them at last. Even the indomitable youth of Jud Hyatt could not bar from his mind the fact that spring and the new grass on the range would probably find neither Jean nor himself in the Silver Bow, and that their paths would thenceforth be separated, perhaps forever.

  That was not the effect Hyatt had started out to get at all, but, slash away as he might at the thumping beat, he couldn't get any other. He turned his eyes to Jean in a wordless appeal. For several moments they looked at each other. "All right," Jean said at last, "I'll try." Jud switched his tune to the "Irish Washerwoman."