A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  Babe fired twice, walking forward. One of the bullets knocked Hooks down, the other hit with a force that seemed to lift him an inch and drop him again.

  Still, despite the awful shocking power of those .45 slugs, he managed to get to his knees, to his feet. He lurched into the firelight, a huge, stumbling, bent-over figure with both arms wrapped around his chest. There he fell, facedown, the toes of his boots together, heels out, his wicked, Mexican-roweled spurs making little pinpoint circles of reflection.

  Babe kept walking and stood over him. Made sure he was dead. He had no feeling of sorrow, none of triumph. He just looked at him and knew he was dead.

  Lily said his name. “Babe!” He turned and she was there, close enough to reach, to touch. She’d been there he didn’t know how long. Stood there while their bullets roared by.

  He rammed his gun back in the holster. It seemed natural that she should be in his arms. Her cheeks glistened from tears. She pressed her head against his breast and said his name over and over.

  He said, “Your dad!”

  They ran together and found him sitting up, trying to tear a bandage for his leg. It was bleeding badly. Lily found a dish towel that had been hanging over the line, and, soaking full, it slowly checked the flow of blood.

  Dawn was coming. House now a smoldering oblong of logs. Jinks Henry rode up with Blackfoot Charley and one of the McGruder boys.

  Jinks said, “That was Alderdyce I got, and he wasn’t dead. So I guess Hooks got away after all.”

  “He’s in the barn,” Babe said.

  He looked in Babe’s eyes and said, “Oh.” He understood and let it drop there. Then he said, “Blackfoot and Mick, here, got stirred up before Clint’s bunch made a show. They came cross-country and scared off the ones we tackled. You think they’ll bounce back on us today, Babe?”

  “They won’t,” he said.

  Babe hitched a team to the buckboard and asked Blackfoot to help him with Hooks. It wasn’t easy looking at him, and he was glad when Blackfoot brought the tarp. All Babe’s hatred was gone. Gone, with sour feeling left behind.

  Lily ran up to him and said, “Babe, you’re not going back there and—”

  “Yes, I’m taking him home to Rufe. I stayed around to inherit my share of the place, so I guess I stayed around for this, too.”

  “Babe, they’ll kill you up there.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back. Don’t you see? I have to face them today. They’ll understand. I’ll really be talking the Coltons’ own language today. I ought to know. I guess I’m sort of a Colton myself.”

  The first great novel of the Old West, and a prototype for hundreds of others over the past eighty years, was Owen Wister’s The Virginian, published in April of 1902. A bestseller for more than ten years, it led Wister (an easterner, curiously enough, educated at Harvard) to write other memorable Western adventures, among them the novel Lin McLean and numerous short stories collected under such titles as Members of the Family and When the West Was West. “Timberline,” which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on March 7, 1908, is one of his (undeservedly) lesser known stories; it is a pleasure to reprint it here.

  Timberline

  Owen Wister

  Just as the blaze of the sun seems to cast wild birds, when, by yielding themselves they invite it, into a sort of trance, so that they sit upon the ground tilted sidewise, their heads in the air, their beaks open, their wings hanging slack, their feathers ruffled and their eyes vacantly fixed, so must the spot of yellow at which I had sat staring steadily and idly have done something like this to me—given me a spell of torpor in which all thoughts and things receded far away from me. It was a yellow poster, still wet from rain.

  A terrifying thunderstorm had left all space dumb and bruised, as it were, with the heavy blows of its noise. The damp seemed to make the yellow paper yellower, the black letters blacker. A dollar sign, figures and zeros, exclamation points, and the two blackest words of all: reward and murder, were what stood out of the yellow.

  Two feet from it, on the same shed, was another poster, white, concerning some stallion, his place of residence, and his pedigree. This also I had read, with equal inattention and idleness, but my eyes had been drawn to the yellow spot and held by it.

  Not by its news; the news was now old, since at every cabin and station dotted along our lonely road the same poster had appeared. They had discussed it, and whether he would be caught, and how much money he had got from his victim.

  The body hadn’t been found on Owl Creek for a good many weeks. Funny his friend hadn’t turned up. If they’d killed him, why wasn’t his body on Owl Creek, too? If he’d got away, why didn’t he turn up? Such comments, with many more, were they making at Lost Soldier, Bull Spring, Crook’s Gap, and Sweetwater Bridge.

  I sat in the wagon waiting for Scipio Le Moyne to come out of the house; there in my nostrils was the smell of the wet sage brush and of the wet straw and manure, and there, against the gray sky, was an afterimage of the yellow poster, square, huge, and blue. It moved with my eyes as I turned them to get rid of the annoying vision, and it only slowly dissolved away over the head of the figure sitting on the corral with its back to me, the stocktender of this stage section. He sang, “If that I was where I would be, Then should I be where I am not; Here am I where I must be, And where I would be I cannot.”

  I could not see the figure’s face, or that he moved. One boot was twisted between the bars of the corral to hold him steady, its trodden heel was worn to a slant; from one seat pocket a soiled rag protruded and through a hole below this a piece of his red shirt or drawers stuck out. A coat much too large for him hung from his neck rather than from his shoulders, and the damp, limp hat that he wore, with its spotted, unraveled hatband, somehow completed the suggestion that he was not alive at all, but had been tied together and stuffed and set out in joke. Certainly there were no birds, or crops to frighten birds from; the only thing man had sown the desert with at Rongis was empty bottles. These lay everywhere.

  As he sat and repeated his song there came from his back and his hat and his voice an impression of loneliness, poignant and helpless. A windmill turned and turned and creaked near the corral, adding its note of forlornness to the song.

  A man put his head out of the house. “Stop it,” he said, and shut the door again.

  The figure obediently climbed down and went over to the windmill, where he took hold of the rope hanging from its rudder and turned the contrivance slowly out of the wind, until the wheel ceased revolving.

  The man put his head out of the house, this second time speaking louder: “I didn’t say stop that. I said stop it; stop your damned singing.” He withdrew his head immediately.

  The boy—the mild, new yellow hair on his face was the unshaven growth of adolescence—stood a long while looking at the door in silence, with eyes and mouth expressing futile injury. Finally he thrust his hands into bunchy pockets, and said, “I ain’t no two-bit man.”

  He watched the door, as if daring it to deny this, then, as nothing happened, he slowly drew his hands from the bunchy pockets, climbed the corral at the spot nearest him, twisted the boot between the bars, and sat as before only without singing.

  Thus we sat waiting, I for Scipio to come out of the house with the information he had gone in for, while the boy waited for nothing. Waiting for nothing was stamped plain upon him from head to foot. This boy’s eyebrows were insufficient, and his front was as ragged as his back. He just sat and waited.

  Presently the same man put his head out of the door. “You after sheep?”

  I nodded.

  “I could a-showed you sheep. Rams. Horns as big as your thigh—bigger ’n your thigh. That was before tenderfeet came in and spoiled this country. Counted seven thousand on that there butte one morning before breakfast. Seven thousand and twenty-three, if you want exact figgers. Quit your staring!” This was addressed to the boy on the corral. “Why, you’re not agoing without another?” This convivi
al question was to Scipio, who now came out of the house and across to me with the news that he had failed on what he had went in for.

  “I could a-showed you sheep—” resumed the man, but I was now attending to Scipio.

  “He don’t know anything,” said Scipio, “nor any of ’em in there. But we haven’t got this country rounded up yet. He’s just come out of a week of snake fits, and, by the way it looks, he’ll enter on another about tomorrow morning. But drink can’t stop him lying.”

  “Bad weather,” said the man, watching us make ready to continue our long drive. “Lot o’ lightning loose in the air right now. Kind o’ weather you’re liable to see fire on the horns of the stock some night.”

  This sounded like such a good one that I encouraged him. “We have nothing like that in the East.”

  “Hm. Guess you’ve not. Guess you never seen sixteen thousand steers with a light at the end of every horn in the herd.”

  “Are they going to catch that man?” inquired Scipio, pointing to the yellow poster.

  “Catch him? Them” No! But I could tell ’em where he’s went. He’s went to Idaho.”

  “Thought the ’76 outfit had sold Auctioneer,” Scipio continued conversationally.

  “That stallion? No! But I could tell ’em they’d ought to.” This was his good-bye to us; he removed himself and his alcoholic omniscience into the house.

  “Wait,” I said to Scipio as he got in and took the reins from me. “I’m going to deal some magic to you. Look at that poster. No, not the stallion, the yellow one. Keep looking at it hard.” While he obeyed me I made solemn passes with my hands over his head. “Now look anywhere you please.”

  Scipio looked across the corral at the gray sky. A slight stiffening of figure ensued, and he knit his brows. Then he rubbed a hand over his eyes and looked again.

  “You after sheep?” It was the boy sitting on the corral. We paid him no attention.

  “It’s about gone,” said Scipio, rubbing his eyes again. “Did you do that to me? Of course you didn’t! What did?”

  I adopted the manner of the professor who lectured on light to me when I was nineteen. “The eye being normal in structure and focus, the color of an afterimage of the negative variety is complementary to that of the object causing it. If, for instance, a yellow disk (or lozenge in this case) be attentively observed, the yellow-perceiving elements of the retina become fatigued. Hence, when the mixed rays which constitute white light fall upon that portion of the retina which has thus been fatigued, the rays which produce the sensation of yellow will cause less effect than the other rays for which the eye has been fatigued. Therefore, white light to an eye fatigued for yellow will appear blue—blue being yellow’s complementary color. Now, shall I go on?” I asked.

  “Don’t y’u!” Scipio begged. “I’d sooner believe y’u done it to me.”

  “I can show you sheep.” It was the boy again. We had not noticed him come from the corral to our wagon, by which he now stood. His eyes were eagerly fixed upon me; as they looked into mine they seemed almost burning with some sort of appeal.

  “Hello, Timberline!” said Scipio, not at all unkindly. “Still holding your job here? Well, you better stick to it. You’re inclined to drift some.”

  He touched the horses and we left the boy standing and looking after us, lonely and baffled.

  “Why Timberline?” I asked after several miles.

  “Well, he came into this country the long, lanky innocent kid you saw him, and he’d always get too tall in the legs for his latest pair of pants. They’d be half up to his knees. So we called him that. Guess he’s most forgot his real name.”

  “What is his real name?”

  “I’ve quite forgot.”

  This much talk did for us for two or three miles more.

  “Do you suppose the man really did go to Idaho?” I asked then.

  “They do go there—and they go everywhere else that’s convenient—Canada, San Francisco, some Indian reservation. He’ll never get found. I expect like as not he killed the confederate along with the victims—it’s claimed there was a cook along, too. He’s never showed up. It’s a bad proposition to get tangled up with a murderer.”

  I sat thinking of this and that and the other.

  “That was a superior lie about the lights on the steers’ horns,” I remarked next.

  Scipio shoved one hand under his hat and scratched his head. “They say that’s so,” he said. “I’ve heard it. Never seen it. But—tell y’u—he ain’t got brains enough to invent a thing like that. And he’s too conceited to tell another man’s lie.”

  “There’s St. Elmo’s fire,” I pondered. “That’s genuine.”

  Scipio desired to know about this, and I told him of the lights that are seen at the ends of the yards and spars of ships at sea in atmospheric conditions of a certain kind. He let me also tell him of the old Breton sailor belief that these lights are the souls of dead sailor men come back to pray for the living in peril; but stopped me soon when I attempted to speak of charged thunderclouds, and the positive, and the negative, and conductors and Leyden jars.

  “That’s a heap worse than the other stuff about yellow and blue,” he objected. “Here’s Broke Axle. We’ll camp here.”

  SCIPIO’S SLEEP WAS superior to mine, coming sooner, burying him deeper from the world of wakefulness. Thus, he did not become aware of a figure sitting by our little fire of embers, whose presence penetrated my thinner sleep until my eyes opened and saw it. I lay still, drawing my gun stealthily into a good position and thinking what were best to do; but he must have heard me.

  “Lemme show you sheep.”

  “What’s that?” It was Scipio starting to life and action.

  “Don’t shoot Timberline,” I said. “He’s come to show us sheep.”

  Scipio sat staring stupefied at the figure by the embers, and then he slowly turned his head around to me, and I thought he was going to pour out one of those long corrosive streams of comment that usually burst from him when he was enough surprised. But he was too much surprised.

  “His name is Henry Hall,” he said to me very mildly. “I’ve just remembered it.”

  The patient figure by the embers rose. “There’s sheep in the Washakie Needles. Lots and lots and lots. I seen ’em myself in the spring. I can take you right to ’em. Don’t make me go back and be stocktender.” He recited all this in a sort of rising rhythm until the last sentence, in which the entreaty shook his voice.

  “Washakie Needles is the nearest likely place,” muttered Scipio.

  “If you don’t get any you needn’t to pay me any,” urged the boy; and he stretched out an arm to mark his words and his prayer.

  We sat in our beds and he stood waiting by the embers to hear his fate, while nothing made a sound but Broke Axle.

  “Why not?” I said. “We were talking a ways back of taking on a third man.”

  “A man,” said Scipio. “Yes.”

  “I can cook, I can pack. I can cook good bread, and I can show you sheep, and if I don’t you won’t have to pay me a cent,” stated the boy.

  “He sure means what he says,” Scipio commented. “It’s your trip.”

  Thus it was I came to hire Timberline.

  Dawn showed him in the same miserable rags he wore on my first sight of him at the corral, and these provided his sole visible property of any kind; he didn’t possess a change of anything, he hadn’t brought away from Rongis so much as a handkerchief tied up with things inside it. Most wonderful of all, he owned not even a horse—and in that country in those days five dollars’ worth of horse was within the means of almost anybody.

  But he was unclean, as I had feared. He washed his one set of rags, and his skin-and-bones body, by the light of that first sunrise on Broke Axle, and this proved a habit with him, which made all the more strange his neglect to throw the rags away and wear the new clothes I bought as we passed through Lander, and gave him.

  “Timberline,” said Scipio t
he next day, “If Anthony Comstock came up in the country he’d jail you.”

  “Who’s he?” Timberline screamed sharply.

  “He lives in New York and he’s agin the nood. That costume of yours is getting close on to what they claim Venus and other Greek statuary used to wear.”

  After this Timberline put on the Lander clothes, but we found that he kept the rags next to his skin. This clinging to such worthless things seemed probably the result of destitution, of having had nothing, day after day and month after month.

  His help in camp was real, not merely well-meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he had said he could do he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him he was somehow forever pitiful.

  “Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio.

  “Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never have been born.”

  We continued along the trail, engrossed in our several thoughts, and I could hear Timberline, behind us with the packhorses, singing: “If that I was where I would be. Then should I be where I am not.”

  OUR MODE OF travel had changed at Fort Washakie: we had left the wagon and put ourselves and our baggage upon horses because we should presently be in a country where wagons could not go.

  Once the vigorous words of some bypasser on a horse caused Scipio and me to discuss dropping the Washakie Needles for the country at the head of Green River. None of us had ever been in the Green River country, while Timberline evidently knew the Washakie Needles well, and this decided us. But Timberline had been thrown into the strangest agitation by our uncertainty. He had said nothing, but he walked about, coming near, going away, sitting down, getting up, instead of placidly watching his fire and cooking; until at last I told him not to worry, that I should keep him and pay him in any case. Then he spoke.

  “I didn’t hire to go to Green River.”