The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7

by Louis L'Amour

  He took out some of the meat and by signs indicated to the girl what he wanted. She was gone into the brush only a few minutes and then returned with green and yellow inflated stems. “Squaw cabbage!” he said. “I’ll be durned! I never knowed that was good to eat!” He gestured to indicate adding it to the stew and she nodded vigorously. He peeled his one lone potato and added it to the stew.

  All three ate, then rolled up and slept. The girl sleeping close to her father, but refusing to accept one of his blankets.

  They started early, heading farther east. “Water?” he questioned. “Agua?”

  She pointed ahead, and they kept moving. All day long they moved. His lips cracked, and the face of the old man was flushed. The girl still walked, plodding on ahead, although she looked in bad shape. It was late afternoon when she gestured excitedly and ran on ahead. When he caught up with her, she was staring at a water hole. It was brim full of water, but in the water floated a dead coyote.

  “How far?” he asked, gesturing.

  She shook her head, and gestured toward the sky. She meant either the next afternoon or the one following. In either case, there was no help for it. They could never last it out.

  “Well, here goes,” he said, and swinging down he stripped the saddle from the horse. Then while the girl made her father comfortable, he took the dead coyote from the water hole, and proceeded to build a fire, adding lots of dry wood. When he had a good pile of charcoal, he dipped up some of the water in a can, covered the surface to a depth of almost three inches with charcoal, and then put it on the fire. When it had boiled for a half hour, he skimmed impurities and the charcoal, and the water below looked pure and sweet. He dipped out enough to make coffee, then added charcoal to the remainder. When they rolled out in the morning the water looked pure and good. He poured it off into his canteen and they started on.

  Now the girl at last consented to climb up behind him, and they rode on into the heat of a long day. Later, he swung down and walked, and toward night the girl slipped to the ground. And then suddenly the vegetation grew thicker and greener. The country was impossibly wild and lonely. They had seen nothing, for even the buzzards seemed to have given up.

  Then the girl ran on ahead and paused. Tensleep walked on, then stopped dead still, staring in shocked amazement.

  Before him, blue with the haze of late evening, lay a vast gorge, miles wide, and apparently, also miles deep! It stretched off to the southwest in a winding splendor, a gorge as deep as the Canyon of the Colorado, and fully as magnificent.

  The girl led him to a steep path and unhesitatingly she walked down it. He followed. Darkness came and still she led on, and then suddenly he saw the winking eye of a fire! They walked on, and the girl suddenly called out, and after a minute there was an answering hail. And then they stopped on a ledge shaded by towering trees. Off to the left was the vast gorge; somewhere in its depths a river roared and thundered. Indians came out of the shadows, the firelight on their faces. Behind them was the black mouth of a cave, and something that looked like a wall with windows.

  The old man was helped down from the burro and made comfortable. An old woman brought him a gourd dish full of stew and he ate hungrily. The Tarahumaras gathered around, unspeaking but watching. They seemed to be waiting for something, and then it came.

  A man in a sombrero pushed his way through the Indians and stopped on the edge of the fire. Obviously an Indian also, he was dressed like a peon. “I speak,” he said. “This man an’ the girl say much thank you. You are good hombre.”

  “Thanks,” Mooney said, “I was glad to do it. How do I get out of here?”

  “No go.” The man shook his head. “This man, Don Pedro, he will seek you. Here you must wait … here.” He smiled. “He will not come. Here nobody will come.”

  Tensleep squatted beside the fire. That was all right, for a while, but he had no desire to remain in this canyon for long. He could guess that the gorge would be highly unsafe for anyone who tried to enter without permission of the Tarahumaras. But to get out?

  “How about downstream?” He pointed to the southwest. “Is there a way?”

  “Sí, but it is long an’ ver’ difficult. But you wait. Later will be time enough.”

  They brought him meat and beans, and he ate his fill for the first time in days. Squatting beside the fire he watched the Indians come and go, their dark, friendly eyes on his face, half-respectful, half-curious. The girl was telling them of all that happened, and from her excited gestures he could gather that the story of his facing down Don Pedro and his vaqueros was losing nothing in the telling.

  For two days Mooney loitered in the gorge. Here and there along the walls were ledges where crops had been planted. Otherwise the Indios hunted, fished in the river, and went into the desert to find plants. Deeper in the canyon the growth was tropical. There were strange birds, jaguars, and tropical fruit. Once he descended with them, clear to the water’s edge. It was a red and muddy stream, thinning down now as the rainy season ended, yet from marks on the walls he could see evidence that roaring torrents had raged through here, and he could understand why the Indios suggested waiting.

  “Indio,” he said suddenly on the third day, “I must go. Ain’t no use my stayin’ here longer. I got to ride on.”

  The Indian squatted on his heels and nodded. “Where you go now?”

  “South.” He shrugged. “It ain’t healthy for me back to the north.”

  “I see.” Indio scratched under his arm. “You are bueno hombre, Señor.” From his shirt pocket he took a piece of paper on which an address had been crudely lettered. “Thees rancho,” he said, “you go to there. Thees woman, she is Indio, like me. She ver’ … ver’ … how you say? Rico?”

  “Yeah, I get you.” Mooney shrugged. “All I want is a chance to lay around out of sight an’ work a little for my grub. Enough to keep me goin’ until I go back north.” He rubbed his jaw. “Later, if I can get some cash I might go to Vera Cruz and take a boat for New Orleans, then back to Wyomin’. Yeah, that would be best.”

  Indio questioned him, and he explained, drawing a map in the dirt. The Indian nodded, grasping the idea quickly. He seemed one of the few who had been outside of the canyon for any length of time. He had, he said, worked for this woman to whom Mooney was to go. She was no longer young, but she was very wise, and her husband dead. Most of those who worked for her were Tarahumaras.

  They left at daybreak, and the girl came to the door of the house-cave to motion to him. When he entered, the old Indian lay on the floor on a heap of skins and blankets. He smiled and held up a hand whose grip was surprisingly strong, and he spoke rapidly, then said something to the girl. When she came up to Mooney she held in her hands a skin-wrapped object that was unusually heavy. It was, Mooney gathered, a present. Awkwardly, he thanked them, then came out and mounted.

  Once more his pack was rounded and full. Plenty of beans, some jerky, and some other things the Indians brought for him. All gathered together on the ledge to wave good-bye. Indio led him down a steep path, then into a branch canyon, and finally they started up.

  It was daylight again before they reached the rancho for which they had started, and they had traveled nearly all day and night. Lost in the chaparral, Tensleep was astonished to suddenly emerge into green fields of cotton beyond them were other fields, and some extensive orchards. And then to the wall-enclosed rancho itself.

  The old woman had evidently been apprised of his coming, for she stood on the edge of the patio to receive him. She was short, like the other women of her people, but there was something regal in her bearing that impressed Mooney.

  “How do you do?” she said, then smiled at his surprise. “Yes, I speak the English, although not well.” Later, when he was bathed and shaved, he walked into the wide old room where she sat and she told him that when fourteen, she had been adopted by the Spanish woman who had lived here before her. She had been educated at home, then at school, and finally had married a young Mexican
. He died when he was fifty, but she had stayed on at the ranch, godmother to her tribe.

  Uneasily, Mooney glanced through the wide door at the long table that had been set in an adjoining room. “I ain’t much on society, ma’am,” he said. “I reckon I’ve lived in cow camps too long, among men-folks.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “There will come someone tonight whom I wish you to meet. Soon he goes north, over the old Smuggler’s Crossing into the Chisos Mountains beyond the Rio Grande, and then to San Antonio. You can go with him, and so to your own country.”

  Suddenly, she started to talk to him of cattle and of Wyoming and Montana. Startled, he answered her questions and described the country. She must have been sixty at least, although Tarahumara women, he had noticed, rarely looked anywhere near their true ages, preserving their youth until very old. She seemed sharp and well informed, and he gathered that she owned a ranch in Texas, and was thinking of sending a herd over the trail to Wyoming.

  Suddenly, she turned on him. “Señor, you are a kind man. You are also a courageous one. You seem to know much of cattle and of your homeland. We of the Tarahumara do not forget quickly, but that does not matter now. You will take my herd north. You will settle it on land in Wyoming, buying what you need, you will be foreman of my ranch there.”

  Mooney was stunned. He started to protest, then relaxed. Why should he protest? He was a cattleman, she was a shrewd and intelligent woman. Behind her questioning there had been a lot of good sense, and certainly, it was a windfall for him. At twenty-seven he had nothing but his saddle, a horse and a burro—and experience.

  “I am not a fool, señor,” she said abruptly. “You know cattle, you know men. You have courage and consideration. Also, you know your own country best. There is much riches in cattle, but the grass of the northland fattens them best. This is good for you, I know that. It is also good for me. Who else do I know who knows your land of grass and snow?”

  When he gathered his things together, she saw the skin-wrapped package. Taking it in her graceful brown fingers she cut the threads and lifted from the skin an image, not quite six inches high, of solid gold.

  Mooney stared at it. Now where did those Indians get anything like that?

  “From the caves,” she told him when he spoke his thought. “For years we find them. Sometimes one here, sometimes one there. Perhaps at one time they were all together, somewhere. It is Aztec, I think, or Toltec. One does not know. It is ver’ rich, this thing.”

  When dinner was over he stood on the edge of the patio with Juan Cabrizo. He was a slim, wiry young man with a hard, handsome face. “She is shrewd, the Old One,” he said. “She makes money! She makes it like that!” He snapped his fingers. “I work for her as my father worked for old Aguila, who adopted her. She was ver’ beautiful as a young girl.” His eyes slanted toward Mooney. “This Don Pedro? You must be careful, sí? Ver’ careful. He is a proud and angry man. I think he knows where you are.”

  At daybreak they rode northeast, and Cabrizo led the way, winding through canyons, coming suddenly upon saddles, crossing ranges into long empty valleys. For two days they rode, and on the second night as they sat by a carefully shielded fire, Mooney nodded at it. “Is that necessary? You think this Don Pedro might come this far?”

  Cabrizo shrugged. “I think only the Rio Grande will stop him. He is a man who knows how to hate, amigo; and you have faced him down before his vaqueros. For this he must have your heart.”

  There were miles of sun and riding, miles when the sweat soaked his shirt and the dust caked his face and rimmed his eyes. And then there was a cantina at Santa Teresa.

  Juan lifted a glass to him at the bar of the cantina. “Soon, señor, tomorrow perhaps, you will cross into your own country! To a happy homecoming!”

  Tensleep Mooney looked at his glass, then tossed it off. It was taking a chance, going back into Texas, but still, he had crossed the border from Arizona, and they no doubt would not guess he was anywhere around. Moreover, he had crossed as an outlaw, now he returned as a master of three thousand head of cattle.

  “Señor!” Cabrizo hissed. “Have a care! It is he!”

  Tensleep Mooney turned slowly. Don Pedro had come in the door and with him were four men.

  Mooney put down his glass and stepped swiftly around the table. Don Pedro turned to face him, squinting his eyes in the bright light. And then the barrel of Mooney’s gun touched his belt and he froze, instantly aware. “You’re a long ways from home, Don Pedro,” he said. “You chasin’ another Indian?”

  “No, señor.” Don Pedro’s eyes flashed. “I chase you! And now I have caught you.”

  “Or I’ve caught you. Which does it look like?”

  “I have fifty men!”

  “An’ if they make one move, you also have, like I warned you before, a bellyful of lead.”

  Don Pedro stood still, raging at his helplessness. His men stood around, not daring to move. “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted coldly. “Because I am not so skillful with the gun as you.”

  “You have another weapon?”

  “I?” Don Pedro laughed. “I like the knife, señor. I wish I could have you here with the knife, alone!”

  Tensleep chuckled suddenly, the old lust for battle rising in his throat like a strong wine, stirring in his veins. “Why, sure! Tell your men we will fight here, with the knife. If I win, I am to go free.”

  Don Pedro stared at him, incredulous. “You would dare, señor?”

  “Will they obey you? Is your word good?”

  “My word?” Don Pedro’s nostrils flared. “Will they obey me?” He wheeled on them, and in a torrent of Spanish told them what they would do.

  Cabrizo said, “He tells them, amigo. He tells them true, but this you must not. It is a way you would die.”

  Coolly, Mooney shucked his gun belts and placed them on the bar beside Cabrizo. Then from a scabbard inside his belt he drew his bowie knife. “The gent that first used this knife,” he said, “killed eight men with it without gettin’ out of bed where he was sick. I reckon I can slit the gullet of one man!”

  Don Pedro was tall, he was lean and wiry as a whip, and he moved across the floor like a dancer. Mooney grinned and his slate-gray eyes danced with a hard light.

  Don Pedro stepped in quickly, light glancing off his knife blade, stepped in, then thrust! And Mooney caught the blade with his own bowie and turned it aside. Pedro tried again, and Mooney again caught the blade and they stood chest to chest, their knives crossed at the guard. Mooney laughed suddenly and, exerting all the power in his big, work-hardened shoulders, thrust the Mexican away from him. Pedro staggered back, then fell to a sitting position.

  Furious, he leaped to his feet and lunged, blind with rage. Mooney sidestepped, slipped, and hit the floor on his shoulder. Pedro sprang at him but Mooney came up on one hand and stabbed up. He felt the knife strike, felt it slide open in the stomach of Don Pedro, and then for one long minute their eyes held. Not a foot apart, Don Pedro’s whole weight on the haft of Mooney’s knife. “Bueno!” Don Pedro said hoarsely. “As God wills!” Slowly, horribly, he turned his eyes toward his men. “Go home!” he said in Spanish. “Go home to my brother. It was my word!”

  Carefully, Tensleep Mooney lowered the body to the floor and withdrew the knife. Already the man was dead. “What kind of cussedness is it,” he said, “that gets into a man? He had nerve enough.” But remembering the Indian, he could find no honest regret for Pedro, only that this had happened.

  “Come, amigo,” Cabrizo said softly, “it is better we go. It is a long ride to Wyoming, no?”

  “A long ride,” Tensleep Mooney agreed, “an’ I’ll be glad to get home.”

  Mistakes Can Kill You

  Ma Redlin looked up from the stove. “Where’s Sam? He still out yonder?”

  Johnny rubbed his palms on his chaps. “He ain’t comin’ to supper, Ma. He done rode off.”

  Pa and Else were watching him, and Johnny saw the hard lines of tem
per around Pa’s mouth and eyes. Ma glanced at him apprehensively, but when Pa did not speak, she looked to her cooking. Johnny walked around the table and sat down across from Else.

  When Pa reached for the coffeepot he looked over at Johnny. “Was he alone, boy? Or did he ride off with that no-account Albie Bower?”

  It was in Johnny neither to lie nor to carry tales. Reluctantly, he replied. “He was with somebody. I reckon I couldn’t be sure who it was.”

  Redlin snorted and put down his cup. It was a sore point with Joe Redlin that his son and only child should take up with the likes of Albie Bower. Back in Pennsylvania and Ohio the Redlins had been good God-fearing folk, while Bower was no good, and came from a no-good outfit. Lately, he had been flashing money around, but he claimed to have won it gambling at Degner’s Four Star Saloon.

  “Once more I’ll tell him,” Redlin said harshly. “I’ll have no son of mine traipsin’ with that Four Star outfit. Pack of thieves, that’s what they are.”

  Ma looked up worriedly. She was a buxom woman with a round apple-cheeked face. Good humor was her normal manner. “Don’t you be sayin’ that away from home, Joe Redlin. That Loss Degner is a gunslinger, and he’d like nothin’ so much as to shoot you after you takin’ Else from him.”

  “I ain’t afeerd of him.” Redlin’s voice was flat. Johnny knew that what he said was true. Joe Redlin was not afraid of Degner, but he avoided him, for Redlin was a small rancher, a onetime farmer, and not a fighting man. Loss Degner was bad all through and made no secret of it. His Four Star was the hangout for all the tough element, and Degner had killed two men since Johnny had been in the country, as well as pistol whipping a half dozen more.

  It was not Johnny’s place to comment, but secretly he knew the older Redlin was right. Once he had even gone so far as to warn Sam, but it only made the older boy angry.

  Sam was almost twenty-one and Johnny but seventeen, but Sam’s family had protected him and he had lived always close to the competence of Pa Redlin. Johnny had been doing a man’s work since he was thirteen, fighting a man’s battles, and making his own way in a hard world.