The Lawless West

by Louis L'Amour

  There was another gasp from the wretched Bill. Confession of his guilt, and his despair for the consequences of his act that now confronted him, showed at once in his face.

  “It was only because I…” He stopped short. “Who says I did it?” he asked.

  “You’re guilty, Bill,” said Trainor. “And they know it. They know that the gent that stuck up the stage rode a gray horse. They recognized that high-headed young gray of yours, that Mike horse that you been riding lately.”

  “They co-couldn’t,” stammered Bill. “It was dark and…”

  “You did it, then?”

  “Lord help me,” groaned Bill.

  “Better start by helping yourself. Bill, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. They were to start by moonrise and then…”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “You’re crazy, Bill. That’ll be ruin. They’ll get you sure. You ain’t got the face to stand up before a jury. They’ll see through you as clear as day.”

  “I don’t care what they do to me. It would be ruin if I ran for it. What would become of Mary and the kids if I ran for it?”

  The heavy truth of that statement bore in upon the mind of Jack Trainor. He regarded his sister’s husband bitterly.

  “Does Mary know that I’ve come back?” he asked.

  “No. She’s sound asleep, I guess.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take the gray horse and make a getaway. You stay here where you are and, if they ask, tell them that I was out last night, you don’t know where, and that I’ve gone out again tonight, and that both times I took the gray horse. Understand?”

  “Good Lord, Jack, you don’t mean that you’ll take the crime on your own head? Man…”

  “Shut up that talk. We ain’t got the time for it. You got a family, and it’s the needs of the family that made you do it…but you’ll never try it again, I guess.”

  “Never, so help me…”

  “Help yourself, Bill,” said the other sternly. “You been looking around to the Lord and other folks for help long enough.”

  “But I can’t let you…I’m not a low-enough hound to let you step in and take the blame for this.”

  “You got to let me. You got three people depending on you. I got none.”

  “But Mary knows that you didn’t leave the house…”

  “She’ll let it go as I want her to do…she knows that the family mustn’t be ruined.”

  “But this may wreck your life, Jack.”

  “My life is young. If it’s wrecked now, I got time to make a new life over again. Stop arguing and help me get the gray and throw a saddle over him.”

  Ten minutes later, on the back of gray Mike, he wrung the hand of his brother-in-law.

  “They’ll think that I started back for town and registered for a room at the hotel just as a bluff. Meantime, I’m going to ride for Jerneyville and show myself, and, when I get through at Jerneyville, there won’t be any doubts about me being the man that done the stick-up of the stage last night. Good bye, Bill. Go straight. And put every cent of that money you got by the hold-up in such a place that it will be found and returned to them that lost it. A gent can’t get on by taking things that he don’t own by rights. So long!”

  And, as he gave the gray his head, they could hear the drumming of many hoofs far down the road coming out from town. But Jack Trainor regarded them not. He had under him a fresh horse with a fine turn of speed, and, by the time the posse had finished making its examination of Bill Vance, he would be so far away that they could never hope to head him off without a change of horses.

  So he swung toward Jerneyville, keeping the gray well in hand, and at an easy pace cantered down the main street of the village at midnight. There he picked out the bank, which was well guarded, he knew, dismounted, broke in the back door, making noise enough to attract the attention of an army, and, of course, he was promptly encountered by the watchman.

  He knew that worthy, a fat and harmless fellow with a smile as bland as a summer sky. He had often thought that thieves who could not handle such a watchman as he must be stupid villains, indeed. Now Trainor tested his theory and found that it was perfectly workable. He stopped the first yell of the fat watchman with a blow of his fist and then knocked the gun out of the hand of the other.

  It exploded as it struck the floor, while the half-strangled shriek of the fat man echoed through the village: “Murder! Robbery! Jack Trainor is robbing the bank!”

  With that hubbub behind him, and the grim knowledge that he had certainly established his reputation as a criminal and been identified as such, Trainor hurried outdoors, sprang into his saddle, and let the eager gray show some of the speed that had been going into the steady pull at the bit earlier in the night.

  Chapter 2

  The cry that the fat man raised in the bank at Jer-neyville proved to be louder and longer than Trainor had dreamed. It struck up echoes that, so it seemed, raised men out of the ground for hundreds of miles. He rode southward at first, aiming at the Río Grande and safety in the confusion beyond that muddy little river. But the first four days brought twice that many brushes with pursuing posses.

  The first day of his flight went by well enough. The second day it ceased to be a joke. The third day, hard pressed on two sides, he became a criminal in fact as well as in theory by stealing a horse, even though he left behind him the worn-out gray of twice the value of the animal he took in exchange. The law had no time to waste on such trifles as this. The point was that he now rode on property that was not his. The written law of the land would send him to prison for the act, and the unwritten law of the Southwest would hang him for the same reason.

  It was on the third night that he decided that the trail southward was growing entirely too hot for him. The trouble was that they knew exactly what his goal was. 200 miles away flowed the Río Grande, but every mile of the 200 would be policed with men ready to shoot to kill.

  There was another border to the north, ten times as far away, but, since his pursuers never dreamed that he would strike in that direction, he might safely reach it. So that night he turned his pinto north and west and rode like mad for the railroad. Before dawn he was beside the tracks. In the gray of the early morning light he was lying stretched on the rods of a thundering freight that shot him northward, covering a day’s ride for a horse in the space of a single hour.

  Yet all was not smooth on that trip to the Northland. By no means! Before it ended, he knew the hardness of the fists of a brakeman, and many a shack knew the hardness of the quick fists of Jack Trainor. He knew other things, also, but, at the end of ten days of fighting and starving and freezing, with the bitter weather biting him more and more, he found himself at length flung from a speeding train that was roaring through a mountain pass.

  He turned a dozen somersaults when he struck the ground, but he sat up, sound in body and bone, although sadly bruised. And then he watched the train thunder away out of view down the pass. He was left alone, half frozen, with the cold of an early winter night numbing his body, and the Canadian Rockies soaring up on every side toward the cold shining of the stars. And never in his life had he felt such loneliness, such a sense of utter helplessness. To him, home meant the wide silence of the desert with hills rolling softly against the horizon. Such monster forest trees as those that marched in ragged ranks up these mountainsides were almost like human beings to Jack Trainor.

  Yet, he must trust to fortune to strike through those same dark and forbidding trees and attempt to find food, for he was desperately hungry. Thirty-six hours of exposure without food of any kind gave him the appetite of a wolf, and like a wolf he stalked up the slope among the trees, bent on finding game.

  A rising moon made the cold visible, so to speak, and gave it teeth to pierce to the very heart of the scantily clad cowpuncher. He trudged on up hill and down dale, feeling that, if he paused, the cold would numb his muscles so that they could not be used. And yet there was no sign of life befo
re him or on any side.

  The white moonshine was displaced by an ugly dawn, for no sooner did the sun show its edge than the sky was covered by a mass of clouds driving rapidly before the wind, and the day came up dim with the storm howling through the trees. A sort of madness came on Trainor. He had put many a long mile behind him, and now he decided that there was no chance of coming across the habitation of man in this direction, for he had reached not the slightest sign of a trail in all the distance he had covered. Therefore, he determined to turn back toward the tracks. Only madness could have given him that determination, for he was long past the point where he had sufficient strength to bring him to the spot from which he started during the night. Moreover, even if he wished to get back, that was now becoming increasingly difficult, for whirls of snow began to appear on the wind, blowing through the branches above him softly, and spotting the solid black of the evergreens with white. This fall of snow was quickly transformed into such a downpouring as he had never dreamed of in his southland. It was like the descent of a myriad of gigantic moths flying down on noiseless wings and piling up on the ground.

  Before an hour passed he was staggering through drifts knee high, where the wind had whipped and piled them on the edges of the open places. The air in front of him was filled with white. His senses began to reel; long since, he had lost all sense of direction. In fact, he had reached that point at which many a man would have given up, but pride kept him going. He could not admit defeat, no matter to what extreme he were pushed, and, just as he would have fought a human enemy to the bitter end, so he fought on mutely against weariness, cold, and devastating hunger.

  Once he stumbled. He roused himself later to find that he had fallen into a profound sleep. And he was numb to the elbows and the knees. He got up and beat the circulation back in a frenzy, and then rushed blindly ahead, for he knew that, if he paused once again to rest in that fashion, the exhaustion of nearly three days without sleep would, combined with the cold, destroy him.

  But now he found that his senses were swimming. He could not distinguish the way that he kept. Sometimes, he crashed into the trunks of trees. Sometimes, when he hooked an arm across his face to protect himself from the thicket that he seemed about to plunge into, he found that there was nothing but empty air and the rushing of the snow before him.

  Every step he was taking now was straight away from the railroad. Indeed, ever since he started, save for a brief half hour, he had been working on a line due north from the tracks. And now a mere chance floored him, so greatly was he reduced. He slipped on a stone under the lee of a great tree, struck his head violently against the trunk, and collapsed to the ground. Had he possessed a tithe of his ordinary strength, he would not have minded that fall and blow on the head at all, but in his present condition of exhaustion it was enough to throw him into the deep oblivion of senselessness.

  He was roused from that senselessness as from a profound sleep by a huge voice that called to him out of an immense distance. He smiled and shook his head. It seemed to him that someone was calling to him to get up and start a day’s work in the pitiless cold of the world—someone was asking him to leave a cozy bed.

  But the voice thundered over him again. He felt himself being shaken. Cruelly he was wrenched to his feet. He was beaten and thumped, and ever that immense voice roared at him. Then suddenly the veil dropped from his eyes, and he beheld himself standing in the midst of a forest full of blowing snow with a monstrous man looming above him, pommeling him with one fist while with the other arm he held him erect, and all the while shouting to him to make him regain his senses.

  That glimpse of the startling truth ended in a mist of blackness again, and he crumpled into a deep sleep once more. But, just before the sleep came on, he felt himself lifted and pitched over the shoulder of the stranger.

  It seemed to him that a nightmare journey began. Sometimes, he was enduring another of those beatings. Again, he was being carried on by the giant, althoughthis was obviously folly. What man was large enough to carry him through such a bitter storm as this, while the wind plucked at them and swung them back and forth?

  After that a longer sleep ensued, and it was broken, at length, with a sense of burning in his throat and burning, also, of his feet and his face and his hands. He opened his eyes and looked up. Brandy had been poured down his throat. He was swathed in hot blankets. He was lying beside a red-hot stove. Then, as his senses cleared still further, he saw above him the strange giant of the storm, black-bearded, with bright, bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a tangle of uncombed hair. Out of his throat issued a great roar, that familiar voice of his dreams: “Hello…hello…hello!”

  The voice fairly drowned the mind of Jack Trainor, but he managed to smile faintly. “I’m here, right enough,” he said.

  At that, the big man slumped into a chair and heaved a great sigh. Jack saw that the other was on the point of collapse from exhaustion. Sweat was running down his face. The rosy cheeks were veined with purple from overexertion.

  “Lord, Lord,” groaned the big man. “I thought that you’d never come ’round. I thought you was going…”

  He did not finish his suggestion, but lolled back more heavily in his chair, laughing weakly and making a gesture to Jack to signify that all was well.

  The man of the cattle ranges of the southland heaved himself up on his elbow and looked about him. He found that he was in a small cabin, the walls of which were of massive logs, with a small stove in the center, a bunk on one side, and guns,traps, and fishing tackle covering the walls. Plainly it was a trapper who had blundered upon him. Then it occurred to him with a start that he weighed a full 180 pounds.

  “How far did you carry me?” he asked.

  “Three miles…I guess,” gasped the other.

  “Three miles?” echoed Jack, and then, looking more closely at his companion, he saw that it was indeed possible. The man was a giant, standing several inches above six feet, and weighing twenty or thirty pounds above 200—and all of this solid muscle.

  But now the prostrate giant recovered himself. He rose from his chair and staggered to a corner from which he began to produce bacon and flour, and in a few minutes he had the beginnings of a meal smoking on top of the stove. As for Jack, he felt that, had he been 100 miles away and soundly asleep, his nose would have brought him these tidings of food and roused him.

  Sitting up to throw back his covers, he found that he was astonishingly weak. He had to lean back against the side of the cabin again, and the big man, reeling with weakness as though from liquor, laughed joyously at him.

  “The last mile pretty near finished me,” he declared. “I thought I was gone, my friend, I promise you. But I prayed to the good Lord. He gave me strength. And so here we are, both of us!” And he laughed again.

  There was something at once so kindly and so childishly simple in what he said, and in his manner of saying it, that Jack felt his very heart warmed by the big man.

  “Partner,” he said, and found that his voice was strangely small and husky, “you’ve saved my life.Nobody else that I know of could’ve carried me the way you carried me.”

  “I?” said the other, shaking his head violently. “What I have done is nothing…nothing. But only think of the luck…that I saw the toe of your boot sticking up through the surface of the snow, and that I knew it was not a branch showing.”

  Jack Trainor shuddered and caught his breath. Had he been as near to death as that? Had the snow entirely drifted over him?

  He held out his hand to the big man. “What’s your name? I’m Jack Trainor.”

  “And I, Joseph Bigot.”

  “Joseph, before I come to the end of my life, I’ll show you how I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”

  “Tush,” said the other, flushing a brighter red. “You talk about such things later. Now I got no time!”

  And he resolutely turned his back upon his guest and went ahead with the preparation of the food.

  Chapter 3
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  A month had passed. The mountains were covered with a thick white crust that would bear the weight of a man. And behold a new Jack Trainor, whistling down the mountain trail! He was clad in a clumsy fur garment that obviously had been made for a bigger man than he. His appearance was that of a monster in a sagging skin. But he walked freely and easily on the far side of the trail, he entered the cabin, and he exhibited the duster of pelts that he had carried in.

  Big Joseph Bigot sat cross-legged on the floor, working over the last broken trap that he had stayed at home to repair that day. His practiced eye looked swiftly over the catch of the day, and he shook his head.

  “No more days like yesterday…but then, my friend, that is enough luck for one season, eh?”

  “Sure,” said Jack, smiling, “luck enough, I guess. And here’s another that I forgot to throw in with the rest.”

  And, so saying, he threw down a dark and shiningpelt, a fox skin, the fur of which was like blowing feathers, so soft and light was it. It brought a shout from Bigot. He plunged to his feet and seized the skin. He sprang to the door with it. He let the gray light fall upon it. Then he whirled and executed about the cabin a clumsy bear dance that threatened to wreck the place.

  “Ah,” he cried when he could speak, “ah, Jack, it is true, what I told you yesterday when we brought in the catch! You have beginner’s luck! If we keep on, we shall be rich. You hear? Rich!”

  Jack Trainor regarded his companion with a great deal of curiosity and even a trace of scorn. According to his own code, it was far better to conceal all traces of emotion. As for the bit of soft fur that he had taken from the trap, and that he now had shown, he had known that it was a particularly fine one to look at and to touch. But why it should bring such rejoicing from the trapper he could not imagine.

  “I dunno,” he said slowly, “but it looks to me like a pretty far cry from this here fur to being rich.”