by Lauran Paine
“Start one …!” Zeke exploded.
Uriah’s upflung arm stopped him. The old man nodded; he understood this kind of man. This quiet-talking, level-eyed kind. He understood them perfectly. No quarter given or asked. No words wasted.
“We’re going to fight only to protect what is ours, Marshal, you have my word on that. But … we’ll wade to our hocks in blood to do that,” he ended fiercely. “Law or no law.”
“I think you already have,” Marshal Garner stated, and wheeled away without a nod.
They watched him angle back down the sheep runs toward the flat country, each with different thoughts. Uriah put a hand out to touch his youngest son.
“Go saddle my horse, Lee. I think we’ll have visitors in force at one of the camps tonight. I aim to pass the word to keep a close watch.”
Lee went. Uriah watched him a moment, then faced his eldest son. “Zeke, mind your brother while I’m gone. Stay out of the light and pay no mind to the call of sheep-killing coyotes tonight … the cowmen learned a lot from Indians.”
“I’ll watch,” Zeke growled, still watching the diminishing figure far out over the range. “He sure didn’t act like he was fixing to arrest anyone for Asa and Pete and Clint.”
“He’s got to have more than just three corpses, boy. He’s got to have witnesses, at least.”
“Those,” Zeke said with emphasis, “he’ll never get if I’m along.”
Uriah bobbed his head. “Just you remember that, son. A dead man never hung anybody.”
Chapter Two
Logan, Hoag, and Slocum were buried. The law had come into the hills. Not just Deputy US Marshal Burt Garner from Denver, but Town Marshal Will Harper from Bethel—who owned two large bands of sheep and hired Basques to herd them—and another town marshal, Bob Ander from Union City, the cowmen’s stronghold. Ander made it plain what he thought, but attempted no arrests. Neither had fat Will Harper, but then he wouldn’t have anyway.
Uriah Gorman had met with the other sheepmen, and had found most of them sunk in remorse, and fearful. It made him sick, he said. The cowards could kill from ambush but that was the end of their courage.
“Guts,” he told Zeke and Lee. “It’s a man’s guts that make the difference between a sniper and a bushwhacker. One’s got ’em, t’other hasn’t.”
He flung his saddle down and flagged the horse away from camp with a big hand. Overhead, a lop-sided, yellow moon filled the world with ugly light. It was warm and still. From the pens came restless bleats but for the most part there was a hush.
“Go on to bed,” Uriah said to his boys. “I’ll set out here for a spell, then I’ll be along.”
But hours passed before he stirred. He sat there hunched in the night’s stillness, hair awry as it always was, great beard splayed out stiff from the unconscious combing of bent fingers, stained trousers and shirt in near tatters, long feet encased in old cracking boots, strong-smelling and raw-boned, bent over by the dying fire like an aged, defeated dirt farmer—until you saw his face, the gray-green eyes with something wild-like showing, and something faintly brooding, the iron thrust of jaw, and the mouth sucked down in bitterness. There was something more to him, then, than his appearance of poverty. There was a vitality, an urgency you could not describe or grasp, but you felt it. Sitting there now, with a faint, acrid scent of black-oak embers in his nostrils, he brooded alone.
Something would be done. Something had to be done. The bands were diminishing, the graze was low, and the cowmen hedged them around. And quickly, because the cowmen would grow stronger as they, the sheepmen, grew weaker.
Today two more had given up—Schwartz and Koeppfler. Dutch immigrants, true, but sheepmen nonetheless and each one who quit burdened those who remained with heavier loads. Something had to be done.
There could be no appeal to justice. The simple fact was that Wyoming had no justice, not in the mountains or out upon the prairies. It didn’t have but one white man to the mile, and two-thirds of those were cowmen or their hirelings. (In six years, when Wyoming would become a state, it would still have only two people per square mile.)
Fight! Uriah thought. Fight them in the mountains and out upon the prairies. From the Flint Hills to their door stoops. Fight them till hell freezes over and for ten days on the ice!
There was nothing else to do. Unless they fought now they’d be broken later. The cowmen surrounded them, kept their sheep from the plains, raided their camps, and killed their herders when they tried to break clear of the mountains. They poisoned water holes and stampeded their woollies over cliffs, resisted every effort the sheepmen made to survive.
Uriah stirred, rubbed circulation into one leg.
It wasn’t only the cowmen who could not afford another bad winter; sheep froze to death, also. But sheep could survive where cattle couldn’t—if they had access to brush browse. Cattle would stand and bawl and lie down like dumb brutes in the midst of a thicket and die. Not sheep. They’d bleat protest, but, before they’d give up, they’d eat the thicket to survive.
Fight! Uriah thought with a wild fullness running through him. One man could overturn the universe if he fought for right … for survival. If justice was framed into unjust laws, then we must fight the law. If the government, in the form of steady-eyed Burt Garner, upheld injustice, then we must resist the government, too. There is a higher law.
The wildness mounted in the old man’s heart. His strange eyes burned with unshed tears. Fight! They would come again, this time in retaliation, and this time sheepmen would die. That was right. He would not lift a hand to stop it because it would make the sheepmen band together. They would come to him and he would lead them.
When the cowmen came this time there would be war. From this time on.
He left the dead fire, went to his blankets, and sank down, weary of body but fierce in mind. He did not sleep. Overhead a million stars flickered, congealed tears shed by a ravished universe. Appomattox … Reconstruction … Alabama … Tennessee. Amethyst and the Missouri River bottoms … Wyoming … A man could live with defeat but he never ceased to struggle against it so long as breath remained. Happiness? Hope? Who was he to hope, to be happy, Uriah Gorman of Virginia. Remember that: Uriah Gorman of Virginia, battler against oppression, Yankee or cowman oppression.
* * * * *
Morning came. The weather was balmy. Columbine and lupine showed against the rich soil. Zeke and Lee had let the sheep out. They were drinking their second cup of coffee when their father returned from the creek, face shiny-cream and youthful-looking, only the eyes unchanged, being slightly bloodshot and a little wilder-looking than they had been the day before.
He ate in silence as was his custom. Zeke and Lee waited. He was finishing when the wagon hove into view down below the camp.
“Looks like Amaya’s outfit,” Zeke said.
They paid no more attention to the wagon. Pedro Amaya was a Mexican sheepman from Arizona. He was a diffident person, the color of saddle leather, and, when he spoke, he smiled apologetically. They called him Pete and he was a good sheepman. He had been at the rocks with the others when Slocum, Hoag, and Logan had died.
Lee cleaned up the breakfast mess. He was stowing tin plates and cups in the side box of the camp wagon when Pete Amaya’s team breasted the last lift of the trail and grunted on to the plateau. Lee went back where Zeke and Uriah stood watching the wagon grind toward them. Uriah was motionless. When he spoke it was in a low tone.
“He isn’t smiling.”
Amaya drew up, looped his lines, and got down heavily. He faced the three Gormans only a moment, then he nodded without speaking and walked back along the wagon. Uriah saw him lift a canvas and stare downward. He went forward, followed by his sons.
“It is Evans and Buell,” Amaya said quietly.
Uriah looked at the frozen faces and the blood-stained clothing. Beside him Zeke sucked back a sh
arp breath. Lee turned away.
Amaya dropped the canvas. “Their bands did not come to water this morning. I went over to see was ever’thing all right …” A shrug.
“Didn’t you hear any shooting in the night?” Uriah demanded.
“I hear nothing. Nothing at all.”
Amaya removed his hat, swiped a grimy sleeve across his forehead, and replaced the hat. He was looking out over the plain below. “It could have been me.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one. Your camp was closest. I come here with them.”
“Zeke,” Uriah barked, “ride to the other camps. Tell ’em we got a burying to attend to. Go on!”
They left the wagon in the sun and went down by the pens to wait. Hours passed; gloom was heavy over the camp. Pete Amaya sat, motionless and silent, his eyes fixed on the far curve of earth. When the others began riding in, nothing changed much. The men stood about, strained and restless, sharing the common deep fear in vague talk.
Like their own sheep, Uriah thought, milling around, peeking at the corpses, leaderless. He got up, sent Lee for faggots, and told him to make fresh coffee. Zeke was there, and he helped.
“Over here!” old Gorman called, and waited for them to approach the cooking fire’s stone ring. Eleven of them, counting Pedro Amaya, who still hadn’t moved. Eleven sheepmen more like sheep than men. Well, from this time on they will be men, Uriah said to himself.
“You saw!” he thundered at them. “They come in the night like coyotes … like cowards. They killed Lester Evans and Carter Buell. They’ve killed others. They’ll kill us all in time …”
Beside and below him Lee made the fire, keeping his head down. Zeke stood back with the black coffee pot, harkening to his father’s wrath, thrilled to the heart by it. Of them all he was most under Uriah’s spell. He would do whatever Uriah told him, anything at all at any time.
“We’re human beings … We’ve got a right to live … Do we have to wear crowns of thorns because we’re sheepmen …?”
He played them, touched their rawest nerves, bolstered their courage, and drained away the fear and timidity.
“We can kill, too … We’ve got to kill. It’s kill or be killed. We can’t run … we can’t hide … we can’t leave with only the rags on our backs. From now on we’ve got to give as good as we get. We’ve got to give better than we get …!”
Lee straightened up when the fire was going. He moved back to let Zeke move forward and place the pot over the stones. His face was white. Words formed in his head. Don’t do it, Father. Don’t kill them in cold blood. It’ll make you as low as they are. Find another way. You’re talking these men into dying. Father, don’t do it!
A slight man with a scraggly fawn-colored moustache and intense black eyes interrupted Uriah. “We got to fight, yes … but how?”
“The same way they do!” Uriah roared. “With the night as our ally. With guns and torches!”
A bottomless hush came. Men stirred. They looked away from the elder Gorman. They looked at one another. They thought a hundred thoughts but his hold was on them. Their blood was running full. They muttered: “Yes … the same way they do. Yes.”
They cheered Uriah. They struck one another across the shoulders. They felt good. Like men. Like real men. Even Pedro Amaya’s despair was gone; his teeth flashed white and a cruel light shone from his eyes. “¡Seguro!” he cried into the shouts. “We fight … los vengadores, sí, sí.” The conflicting heritages of Castile and Anahuac moved in Amaya; his diffidence vanished; he drew a pistol and flourished it. “We follow Uriah … we fight back!”
“Get your horses!” Uriah called over the noise. “Your horses and your guns.”
Their voices diminished. They looked toward him, flush-faced and eager.
“XIH brought us to this and, by God, XIH will harvest what it’s sown. Get your horses … let’s go!”
They moved swiftly away. No one had touched Zeke’s coffee. Uriah started toward the wagon where his rifle was. He passed Lee, standing alone, white and tortured. He stopped to throw his youngest a quick look.
“Take Amaya’s wagon to Bethel … No, no. Take it to Union City. Take it where the cowmen’s womenfolk can see what’s been done. Let Bob Ander see, too. Let everyone see what happens to people who want only to live … to …”
He didn’t finish. The others were mounted and calling for him. He pushed on by, went into the wagon, grabbed up the rifle, rummaged for shells, then returned into the sunlight. There was a spring in his step; the awry hair and gray beard jerked with each movement of his body. He was a young man again. He was hastening toward Bull Run, toward victory.
They clattered down off the plateau trailed by a pall of thick dust. Sunlight winked off their armament. They rode straight in the saddle with the roar of blood in their ears. As the sounds of their passing atrophied, plaintive bleating filled the hush. Lee heard.
He watched until even the dust was gone, then he went to the stone ring and filled a cup with coffee. His father was wrong; he’d seen him wrong before and on those occasions he’d tried to meet the old man’s green-burning gaze. But he never could. The other’s will was stronger. Even when he struggled the hardest, he knew he was lost. At times his bitterness and anguish were almost hatred for his father.
He didn’t want to wander the earth, to run from memories. He wanted to put down roots, to live and let live. To grow things from the soil. He didn’t want a bullet or a hemp rope. He wanted to plant corn and watch it tassel out, to coax life into newborn lambs, to build a cabin with his hands …
He went to the wagon, climbed up, untwisted the lines, and flicked them without a backward glance at the rumpled canvas. He drove down off the plateau and cut northwest like he’d been told to do—toward the cowmen’s town of Union City.
All morning the wagon creaked along over the plains. It was hot, away from the mountains. He was without cover and a burning sun was on him. He knew the bodies that jounced behind his back were swelling. The team raised dust in dun clouds, choking dust. He got thirsty and detoured toward Cottonwood Creek.
There was a sullen glow over the prairie, a sallowness hurting to the eye, a painful glare that quivered like jelly when he strained to see ahead where the creek showed glassy, dark, and sullen. There grew a fringe of slim willows along the spongy bank, and, as he let the team plod close and drink, he smelled oak-wood smoke. It would be coming from the Foster place over the near rise of land, easterly.
He didn’t alight right away. The team made gulping sounds, sucking water around their bits. It was a good sound on a hot day. It was good, also, to be in among the green willows.
He got down finally, went ahead and kneeled to drink. It was the sound of a shod horse crossing rock that wrenched him upright, fear souring his stomach. The rider was approaching leisurely. He pushed willows aside to see better—and his legs went loose with relief. It was Ann Foster, youngest daughter of Lew and Molly Foster, the squatters who had a place beyond the creek and over the land swell. She was coming toward the creek bottom where coolness lay, thick enough to bend. He moved through the shade toward her, saw her dismount to water her horse, and drew up straighter. He could not help but notice the fullness of her figure before he spoke.
“Hello, Ann.”
She spun, and when she replied, saying his name, it squirted out of her mouth sharp-sounding. “Lee!” There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead, her upper lip, and the darkness of her gaze was wide and all-seeing. She seemed scarcely to breathe. The fullness of her blouse, jutting and heavy, was stilled. “You put a scare into me.”
“I expect I did,” he said, listening to her horse sucking water. “You like to give me a start, too.” He moved closer. “You looking for your paw’s cattle?”
“Not the cattle, our sheep. I was up at the saltlick and got thirsty. It’s hot today.”
“Coo
ler in here all right,” he agreed, feeling the drying sweat under his shirt cooling his flesh.
“What’re you doing down here?”
“Got thirsty. I’m on my way to Union City.”
She blinked thick lashes at him. “Union City …?”
He glanced at the drinking horse, moved up to the very edge of the creek where the soil was spongy, and stood looking across, where cloud shadows spotted the endlessness of heat-dancing land.
“Lee? You in trouble, or something?”
He faced around to look at her in an unblinking way. “Trouble? Seems like that’s about all there is, here.”
She turned away from the slow-changing look in his eyes. “Not right here,” she murmured. “It’s peaceful along the creek. Sometimes I come here just to sit and daydream.”
“Ann … you’re sure pretty standing there like that.”
She tugged at the horse’s reins. “Shame on you, Lee … talking like that.”
“No, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You really are pretty, there.”
“You hadn’t ought to say that, though.”
“I guess I hadn’t,” he said, and reached for the horse’s reins. She relinquished them. He tied the beast and touched her arm. “Walk with me along the creek.”
She looked up quickly. There was nothing in Lee Gorman’s face to cause fear or anger. She’d known him almost a year and had never seen anything wrong in his face. Uriah was different and so was Zeke—but Lee was sound.
They walked, twisting through the rank growth of willows following the creek and the lean shade along its bank, and beneath the straining cloth of her blouse the girl’s heart beat solidly. A girl knew things like an animal knew them, by instinct. Ann Foster was like that. She breathed deeply of the fragrant warm spring air full of flower scent, and walked beside him, all quiet and wary and willing. All still inside and tremulous.
