Her quizzing was in order, but I hadn’t wanted to be the bearer of the money, and now I was irritated with the whole affair. “I don’t know whether I am or not, ma’am, and I don’t in the least know why he was fool enough to trust me with all that cash.”
“Well, I do.” Her voice was friendly again. “He’s the one you did the favor for, but I’m grateful anyhow,” she went on, as she tossed the envelope in the fire and slipped the roll of bills up one sleeve. “Where is Blackfoot Terry, do you know?”
Once more we shared a curiously detached amity, lasting for the fifteen minutes or so before she rose. “At the risk of being buffaloed, I’ll see you to the coach,” I told her, offering her my arm.
Although we both laughed, that brief ceremony made up a softer moment, immediate in that we were conscious of each other, and nostalgic in that it took us back to another way of life, common to our separate lives. The stage glowed faintly in the light cast by the fading rind of moon, as we reached the door. There she gazed up at me like a belle who has just been escorted home from the cotillion and offered me her cheek.
“Good night,” she murmured, when I brushed it with my lips. “No, wait.”
Reaching into the coach, she moved us from the South of our past to the West of our present by handing me the revolver. “I’ll have no further use for a weapon until we reach Socorro,” she said. “Thank you, Baltimore.”
Chapter 8
ALTHOUGH I DOZED WHEN I was again stretched out on the tarpaulin by the fire, I made sure of being awake as soon as it was light enough under the trees to search for my rifle and shotgun. After a little poking around I found them behind a tree.
The man who had hidden them from me sat up somewhat later. In a while he left off groaning and eyed me reproachfully.
“You hadn’t ought to sneak up behind a man and hit him,” he chided.
“I didn’t hit you,” I rasped. “She beat me to it.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “I remember now that she grabbed me by the hair. Why, she didn’t have no call to do that.”
Engaged in cutting some bacon for breakfast, I didn’t look up. “You’re lucky it was the barrel and not a bullet.”
“Shucks, I wasn’t fixin’ to do nothin’ but ask her how’s about it,” he protested. “I see right off that she wasn’t the kind to ask me.”
“Well, you got your answer, and I’ve got something to add to it,” I said through my teeth. “Get out of here, and don’t come back.”
Sparks looked at me like a dog that’s been kicked for reasons beyond comprehension. “What’re you sore about? I give you first chance, but you just went on sleepin’, so I says to myself, ‘Old Baltimore don’t go for her.’ But I thought I’d better hide them guns so’s I’d have a weapon in case you changed your mind and got jealous. Some fellows are like that, you know. They don’t want nothin’ theirselves until they see somebody else have a try at it.”
“Try walking to Nutmeg or wherever else you want to go,” I ordered.
“Walkin’!” He had the horror of foot locomotion peculiar to the West. “Why it’s maybe twelve miles to Nutmeg, and nobody ever walked that far.”
“You can make a name for yourself by establishing a world’s record,” I said. “Beat it.”
Dolly Tandy joined us at that point, and Sparks did not scruple to ask her to intercede for him. “Baltimore don’t want to take me into Nutmeg, and me nor nobody else couldn’t hoof it there,” he ended his complaint.
“I think we should do that much for him.” She turned from looking at Roy as though he were an interesting but harmless bug and raised her brows inquiringly. “Is there any reason why we can’t?”
“Well, I don’t want to ride with him, and neither do you,” I pointed out.
“That’s right,” she concurred, “but there’s a way around that. He can have the coach to himself.”
She was something else again from either the remote professional gambler I had found at Midas Touch or the self-contained young woman I had talked with by the campfire. Violet-eyed and clad in a flowery summer dress, she had the air of a girl enjoying a day’s outing, as we forded the shallow remnant of the flood which had barred our way the night before. It was only when I saw her in this lighter mood that I could place her age: not more than twenty-two or twenty-three.
“You handle the reins well, but you don’t appear to have studied the map,” she criticized. “I was at Three Deuces myself, you see, and rode in this stage when I left. How did you happen to get possession of it and miss the road? You’ll never get to Chuckwalla this way.”
“I’m a little better at poker than I am at faro,” I said in concluding my explanation.
“I should think anybody would be,” she mused. “And now that you’re rambling the length and breadth of the frontier in all the glory of a coach and six, what’s the object of your quest?”
“To find a place where I’ll be safe from sharp-tongued females,” I retorted, slackening the reins to let the horses work off their excess energy.
“Ideal but impractical,” Dolly decided. “Have you a second choice?”
“Maybe just to find a town where I’d like to live,” I suggested. “Does that sound more reasonable?”
“Some people live where they are,” she said. “What was the matter with Maryland?”
“Possibly the same thing that afflicted Georgia,” I said, risking my first inquiry into her past.
“Alabama,” she corrected me, “or that’s where Mobile was before that part of the world came to an end. But the topic is your wanderings and not my own.”
“Then you should ask about my ports of call, not my starting point,” I said, determined not to deal in bygones if she wouldn’t. “Three Deuces was satisfactory until it joined Nineveh, Tyre and Company. The horizons of Chuckwalla were too limited for a man of my capacities and vision. There was no limit at all to what a fellow could achieve at a place called Rustlers Roost, but title to property was so uncertain as to make the future questionable. As for Midas Touch, although the town seemed substantial and money flowed with an all but unparalleled freedom, I found society too cliquish to be enjoyable.”
During that recital I kept my eye on a thin rock, standing on end, which I thought would careen the coach, if I hit it right. When I did so and Dolly slid toward me, I went on.
“What I want is a town that will combine the excellent features of all the foregoing places except Chuckwalla, which had none.” Her head struck my shoulder when the stage rocked way over, and for lack of anything else to hold onto she clutched my arm. “Have you any recommendations?” I asked, while she was struggling to right herself.
“Anybody who can steer that accurately shouldn’t need any guidance.” She was still holding onto my arm, as she peered back at the rock. “Do you sing, Baltimore?”
We sang favorites old and new, both before we had deposited Sparks, and the five dollars I tossed him, in Nutmeg, and after we were on the twenty-mile stretch to Socorro. The chores attendant upon stopping for lunch silenced me, but Dolly crooned, just loud enough for me to hear, as she scrambled some eggs we had purchased from a Mexican farmer.
Old Sam Sudden Aim,
Who had a gun and wore it,
Would switch your brand or jump your claim
And charge you nothing for it;
A prince of men,
He was so kind
That now and then
He’d even find
The time to help a railroad line or else assist Wells Fargo
By easing them of mail, express, or a heavy bullion cargo.
Oh, Sam was a good man. Sam could shoot.
When she had dolefully intoned the line which capped the rattling lilt of the stanza, Dolly raised her voice. “By the time you finish watering the horses, everything will be ready, my appetite included.” Having passed on that information, she once more told of Sam in her sweet, low-pitched tones.
Old Sam had accounts
At all the banks
he’d enter;
He’d draw on them for large amounts
Because he shot dead center.
It was a fact
The gun he had
Could both subtract
And also add,
Or Sam could take a point of law and argue till he’d won it —
He couldn’t have been bad or, jinks, he never could have done it.
No, Sam was a good man. Sam could shoot.
The pleasant lunch which followed was the true finale of our experience together. By then we had said as much to each other as our mutual reserve would permit, and I made no effort to talk her out of it when she elected to ride in the coach for the remainder of the trip.
When I left her at the hotel which served as the stage station in Socorro, my chief feeling was that I had already carried our acquaintance as far as I knew how to handle it. She was going her own way, a strange one for a woman, and if anybody could undertake to walk beside her, I did not have either the qualities or the desire to be that man. Already her face was beginning to assume a suggestion of the gambler’s mask I had first encountered, and her words of farewell served to stress the gap between us.
“I hope you find the permanent diggings you’re looking for. Take care of yourself when you get farther south, Baltimore, and don’t let the Apaches get you.”
The smile she gave me showed she didn’t mean to be condescending; but the sting of the words reached me, even though there was no poison in the intention. She could take care of herself, as I had seen, right up to the point where all of one foot and four toes of the other were in the grave. This was an art I had not mastered. Whatever my other trifling claims to virtue, I did not have the paramount one possessed by Sam of the song. I couldn’t yet shoot well enough to have a rectitude which amounted to anything.
Driving down along the Rio Grande the next day, I brooded over what I had learned at Midas Touch and during the intervening journey. What both galled and sobered me was that I wasn’t as much at home on the frontier as I had thought myself, following a pleasant time of it at Three Deuces and an easy bout or so with trouble under the aegis of Terry McQuinn. Facing danger alone, things had gone differently. With a revolver hanging from my belt I had been captured by Barringer’s men as easily as a mouse that’s fallen into a wastepaper basket. Furthermore, if Sparks had been vicious instead of merely a fool, he could have shot me with one of the weapons he took from me under cover of my complacence.
Previous to those experiences I had viewed the frontier as a sort of Garden of the Hesperides for bachelors who didn’t like to work too hard. Now I was aware that it was also a place where alertness and the power to resist violence were essential to survival.
Barringer’s revolver was a handsome forty-four, nickel-plated and with ivory stocks. It was geared for swift firing, too, as I found when I commenced practicing with it. This I now did whenever I halted the stage for any length of time. I also whiled away the hours spent in the driver’s seat by drawing and throwing down on targets marked in passing.
My preparations for war proved inadequate, however, a couple of days after I had cut off west into meagerly forested mountains, lured by the name of a town called Shakespeare. Not many miles short of that community, I found a dead tree blocking the road. Stopping perforce, I was joined by four men who sprang from behind an adjacent clump of cedars.
Though afoot, they were spurred for riding. From the direction of some trees farther back from the road I heard their horses whinny in answer to my own. What I had already learned was that human relations were not to be on so friendly a plane. A trio with pistols at the ready made for the coach. The remaining fellow aimed two guns steadfastly at me.
“Reach high!” he snarled through the bandanna tied below his eyes.
“There ain’t no passengers,” one of his associates reported.
“Get the mail, then, and one of you come here and take this boy’s pistola.”
“There’s no mail,” I said. Furious at having been caught again so soon after making high resolves to be on my guard, I glared at the man who menaced me. “If you’d look at the coach instead of standing there like Bob Bloodhound, the Boy Bandit, you’d see it isn’t the one you’ve been waiting for.”
“By Jesus, it ain’t the Shakespeare stage at that,” one of the others announced. “Three Deuces and Chuck — Chuckwalla, it says.”
The discovery upset them and caused dissension. A couple of them were for letting me pick a way around the roadblock, which would have been feasible if I backed to a point where the road banks weren’t so steep. The other pair held that it would be wise to hold me captive.
The argument was never settled. Because I was watching the bandits, it was I who first caught sight of movement behind them. Riders were coming out from behind a grove some two hundred yards away, and at sight of us they scourged their horses into a run.
“Indians!” I yelled.
“Apaches!” The gang leader narrowed my definition. All four started for where they had left their horses, then seeing that they would be cut off, they made for the only shelter, which was the stage.
The Indians were whooping for blood, but my own roar rose louder. “Grab the log,” I yelled, as the bandits started to scramble into the coach. “The road’s the only way out! Clear it, you sons of bitches! Hump yourselves or die.”
About a dozen Apaches had guns while the remaining nine or ten were armed with bows. Bullets started coming our way by the time the outlaws got a grip on the tree trunk. They couldn’t shove the butt end back out of the way because the branches caught in the cedars. They couldn’t drag the tree across the road, because of the high bank which had led them to select that spot for their trap. Their only recourse was the laborious one of opening the roadblock like a door.
Breaking their backs to accomplish this, they were not slow in terms of time but not fast when clocked by the emergency. The leading Indians were close enough for arrows to join bullets in the air.
They shot better from the saddle with bows than with rifles. An arrow struck the rump of my off-leader. His squeal made panic out of fright for the others. The whole team was with him in his determination to go elsewhere, and they took me along.
“Jump for it!” I howled to the bandits, and then had no energy for anything but trying to guide the horses. To be sure of clearing the tree, I would have had to put one wheel higher up on the bank than I thought safe. The alternative was to make contact with the trunk, but not so sharply as to risk breakage. We slowed down to the tune of a metal tire peeling off bark and slivers. Then I was rocked back in my seat as we wheeled free.
In the midst of threading that needle, I was conscious of the outlaws, swarming over the back to perch on the roof. Used for passengers when trade was brisk, this was furnished with a guard rail, without which my enemies-turned-allies would never have been able to hold on. As it was, they were able to brace themselves and return the fire of the Apaches, now calling back and forth as they maneuvered to box us.
In their effort to escape from both sound and fury, my team pulled ahead at first, but I knew that the stage was bound to be too much of a drag. “How far to Shakespeare?” I asked, managing to dodge just such a rock as I had hit plumb center when Dolly had been sitting with me.
“Too far,” one of the bandits said. “Four mile, maybe.”
There was a hollow too big to drive around without slackening speed. Even though I avoided the worst of it, we almost didn’t swing back after tipping far over.
“Duck inside, if you can,” I urged. “We’re top-heavy this way.”
They were glad enough to let themselves down and in through the door tops, but I had occasion to regret my request. One of them might have stopped the arrow which buried its point below my left shoulder blade.
We did ride better, though. At the speed we were going, in fact, we would never have pulled through the dry wash we came to, if the load hadn’t been shifted to put more weight below.
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p; Yet swift as our passage was, the Indians gained on us there. A couple were almost abreast of me to the right and left now, tearing along just out of range of the revolver shots the bandits kept fruitlessly snapping at them. I tried to tell the outlaws of the rifle and shotgun wrapped in a blanket tucked under one of the seats, but could not make myself heard.
Having spent their ammunition recklessly, too, the Apaches were holding their remaining fire, pending the moment when they would be in a position to head us. This was something which could not be long delayed, for my horses were already laboring.
There was never a sign of Shakespeare or of any other habitation, as I braked us around curves and cracked my whip on straightaways. Indeed, there was nothing at all to cast doubt on the outcome until we came in sight of a cedar woods. An expanse of matted greenery, it permitted one passageway for anybody in a hurry, and that was the road.
If we made it first the Apaches would have to pull in their flankers to follow us from behind, and the business of enveloping us would have to start all over again. They were as prompt to see that as I was, of course. While giving my team the whip, I could hear them yelping with the excitement of hounds racing to turn a fox before it can go to earth.
Some of their ponies had more left to give than did my coach-burdened horses, but they also had farther to go. To reach the break in the woods first, they had to swing toward us as well as pull ahead. One did so too sharply and got winged by one of the bandits. Another warrior maneuvered more wisely, however.
Making an outpost of the woods his first point, he cut in, using the clump of cedars as a shield. Although I tried to warn the outlaws of this menace, they were too engrossed with the Indians they could see to bother with one they could not. No shots deterred this brave when he dashed into view once more, out of arrows but with a surer weapon for close-range work. Once he had cut the throat of the near-leader with the knife in his fist, we would be done for.
I swung a whip at him, but he wasn’t yet close enough, and all I accomplished was to show him what he must do. Like all mounted Indians taking the field, he had a blanket with him. Deftly unrolling it, he pulled it over his bare shoulders. Then he swooped in and sprang to the back of the horse he meant to butcher.
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