A Century of Great Western Stories

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

  “What have you got against Green River?”

  “I hired to go to the Washakie Needles.”

  His agitation left him immediately upon our turning our faces in that direction. What had so disturbed him we could not guess; but, later that day, Scipio rode up to me, bursting with a solution. He had visited a freighter’s camp, and the freighter, upon learning our destination, had said he supposed we were “after the reward.”

  It did not get through my head at once, but when Scipio reminded me of the yellow poster and the murder, it got through fast enough; the body had been found on Owl Creek, and the middle fork of Owl Creek headed among the Washakie Needles. There might be another body—the other Eastern man who had never been seen since—and there was a possible third, the confederate, the cook; many held it was the murderer’s best policy to destroy him as well.

  So now we had Timberline accounted for satisfactorily to ourselves: he was “after the reward.” We never said this to him, but we worked out his steps from the start. As stocktender at Rongis he had seen that yellow poster pasted up, and had read it, day after day, with its promise of what to him was a fortune. My sheep hunt had dropped like a providence into his hand.

  We got across the hot country where rattlesnakes were thick, where neither man lived nor water ran, and came to the first lone habitation in this new part of the world—a new set of mountains, a new set of creeks. A man stood at the door, watching us come.

  “Do you know him?” I asked Scipio.

  “Well, I’ve heard of him,” said Scipio. “He went and married a squaw.”

  We were now opposite the man’s door. “You folks after the reward?” said he.

  “After mountain sheep,” I replied, somewhat angry.

  We camped some ten miles beyond him, and the next day crossed a not high range, stopping near another cabin at noon. Two men were living here, cutting hay in a wild park. They gave us a quantity of berries they had picked and we gave them some potatoes.

  “After the reward?” said one of them as we rode away, and I contradicted him with temper.

  “Lie to ’em,” said Scipio. “Say yes.”

  Something had begun to weigh upon our cheerfulness in this new country. The reward dogged us, and we met strange actions of people, twice. We came upon some hot sulphur springs and camped near them, with a wide creek between us and another camp. Those people—two men and two women—emerged from their tent, surveyed us, nodded to us, and settled down again.

  Next morning they had vanished; we could see empty bottles where they had been. And once, coming out of a little valley, we sighted close to us through cottonwoods a horseman leading a packhorse coming out of the next little valley. He did not nod to us, but pursued his parallel course some three hundred yards off, until a rise in the ground hid him for a while; when this was passed he was no longer where he should have been, abreast of us, but far to the front, galloping away. That was our last sight of him.

  We spoke of these actions a little. Did these people suspect us, or were they afraid we suspected them? All we ever knew was that suspicion now closed down upon all things like a change of climate.

  I DROVE UP the narrowing canyon of Owl Creek, a constant prey to such ill-ease, such distaste for continuing my sheep hunt here, that shame alone prevented my giving it up and getting into another country out of sight and far away from these Washakie Needles, these twin spires of naked rock that rose in front of us now, high above the clustered mountaintops, closing the canyon in, shutting the setting sun away.

  “He can talk when he wants to.” This was Scipio, riding behind me.

  “What has Timberline been telling you?”

  “Nothing. But he’s telling himself a heap of something.” In the rear of our single-file party Timberline rode, and I could hear him. It was a relief to have a practical trouble threatening us; if the boy was going off his head we should have something real to deal with. But when I had chosen a camp and we were unsaddling and throwing the packs on the ground, Timberline was in his customary silence.

  Next morning, the three of us left camp. It was a warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet days smelled of the pines. By three o’clock we stood upon a lofty, wet, slippery ledge that fell away on three sides, sheer or broken, to the summer and the warmth thousands of feet below. Here it began to be very cold, and to the west the sky now clotted into advancing lumps of thick thunderclouds, black, weaving and merging heavily and swiftly in a fierce rising wind.

  We got away from this promontory to follow a sheep trail, and as we went along the backbone of the mountain, two or three valleys off to the right long black streamers let down from the cloud. They hung and wavered mistily close over the pines that did not grow within a thousand feet of our high level. I gazed hard at the streamers and discerned water, or something pouring down in them. Above our heads the day was still serene, and we had a chance to make camp without a wetting.

  “No! No!” said Timberline hoarsely. “See there! We can get them. We’re above them. They don’t see us.”

  I saw no sheep where he pointed but he insisted they had merely moved behind a point, and so we went on to a junction of the knife-ridges upon which a second storm was hastening from the southwest over deep valleys that we turned our backs on to creep near the Great Washakie Needles.

  Below us there was a new valley like the bottom of a cauldron; on the far side of the cauldron the air, like a stroke of magic became thick white and through it leaped the first lightning, a blinding violet. A sheet of the storm crossed over to us, the cauldron sank from sight in its white sea, and the hail cut my face, so I bowed it down. On the ground I saw what looked like a tangle of old footprints in the hard-crusted mud.

  These the pellets of the swarming hail soon filled. This tempest of flying ice struck my body, my horse, raced over the ground like spray on the crest of breaking waves, and drove me to dismount and sit under the horse, huddled together even as he was huddled against the fury and the biting pain of the hail.

  From under the horse’s belly I looked out upon a chaos of shooting, hissing white, through which, in every direction, lightning flashed and leaped, while the fearful crashes behind the curtain of the hail sounded as if I should see a destroyed world when the curtain lifted. The place was so flooded with electricity that I gave up the shelter of my horse, and left my rifle on the ground, and moved away from the vicinity of these points of attraction.

  At length the hailstones fell more gently, the near view opened, revealing white winter on all save the steep, gray needles; the thick white curtain of hail departed slowly, the hail where I was fell more scantily still.

  Something somewhere near my head set up a delicate sound. It seemed in my hat. I rose and began to wander, bewildered by this. The hail was now falling very fine and gentle, when suddenly I was aware of its stinging me behind my ear more sharply than it had done before. I turned my face in its direction and found its blows harmless, while the stinging in my ear grew sharper. The hissing continued close to my head wherever I walked. It resembled the little watery escape of gas from a charged bottle whose cork is being slowly drawn.

  I was now more really disturbed than I had been during the storm’s worst, and meeting Scipio, who was also wandering, I asked if he felt anything. He nodded uneasily, when, suddenly—I know not why—I snatched my hat off. The hissing was in the brim, and it died out as I looked at the leather binding and the stitches.

  I expected to see some insect there, or some visible person for the noise. I saw nothing, but the pricking behind my ear had also stopped. Then I knew my wet hat had been charged like a Leyden jar with electricity Scipio, who had watched me, jerked his hat off also.

  “Lights on steer horns are nothing to this,” I began, when he cut me short with an exclamation.

  Timberline, on his knees, with a frightful countenance, was tearing off his clothes. He had felt the prickling, but it caused him thought different from mine.
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  “Leave me go!” he screamed. “I didn’t push you over! He made me push you. I never knowed his game. I was only the cook. I wish’t I’d followed you. There! There! Take it back! There’s your money! I never spent a cent of it!”

  And from those rags he had cherished he tore the bills that had been sewed in them. But this confession seemed not to stop the stinging. He rose, stared wildly, and screaming wildly, “You got it all,” plunged into the cauldron from our sight. The fluttered money—some of the victim’s, hush-money hapless Timberline had accepted from the murderer—was only five ten-dollar bills; but it had been enough load of guilt to draw him to the spot of the crime.

  We found the two bodies, the old and the new, and buried them both. But the true murderer was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.

  Jack London (1876–1916) was a master of the adventure story whose novel, The Call of the Wild, will live forever as the definitive example of the American spirit. An adventurer himself, he knew what he wrote, having spent parts of his early life living as a hobo, searching for gold in Alaska, and even serving time in prison for oyster pirating. Much of his work, such as his science-fiction novel, The Scarlet Plague, contains considerable political content, a strange combination of Marxism and rugged individualism. But he also wrote knowingly of the frontier and the search for wealth, as in this powerful story.

  All Gold Canyon

  Jack London

  It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plain and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-deep in the water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated, many-antlered buck.

  On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow, a cool, resilient surface of green that extended to the base of the frowning wall. Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up to meet the opposing wall. Fine grass covered the slope—grass that was spangled with flowers, with here-and-there patches of color, orange and purple and golden. Below, the canyon was shut in. There was no view. The walls leaned together abruptly, and the canyon ended in a chaos of rocks, moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers and boughs of trees. Up the canyon rose far hills and peaks, the big foothills, pine-covered and remote. And far beyond, like clouds upon the border of the sky, towered minarets of white, where the sierra’s eternal snows flashed austerely the blazes of the sun.

  There was no dust in the canyon. The leaves and flowers were clean and virginal. The grass was young velvet. Over the pool three cottonwoods sent their snowy fluffs fluttering down the quiet air. On the slope the blossoms of the wine-wooded manzanita filled the air with springtime odors, while the leaves, wise with experience, were already beginning their vertical twist against the coming aridity of summer. In the open spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita, poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jeweled moths suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder red, breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells. Creamy white were these bells, shaped like lilies of the valley, with the sweetness of perfume that is of the springtime.

  There was not a sigh of wind. The air was drowsy with its weight of perfume. It was a sweetness that would have been cloying had the air been heavy and humid. But the air was sharp and thin. It was as starlight transmuted into atmosphere, shot through and warmed by sunshine, and flower-drenched with sweetness.

  An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of light and shade. And from all about rose the low and sleepy hum of mountain bees—feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the board, nor found time for rough discourtesy. So quietly did the little stream drip and ripple its way through the canyon that it spoke only in faint and occasional gurgles. The voice of the stream was as a drowsy whisper, ever interrupted by dozings and silences, ever lifted again in the awakenings.

  The motion of all things was a drifting in the heart of the canyon. Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place. It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of far wars.

  The red-coated many-antlered buck acknowledged the lordship of the spirit of the place and dozed knee-deep in the cool, shaded pool. There seemed no flies to vex him and he was languid with rest. Sometimes his ears moved when the stream awoke and whispered; but they moved lazily, with foreknowledge that it was merely the stream grown garrulous at discovery that it had slept.

  But there came a time when the buck’s ears lifted and tensed with swift eagerness for sound. His head was turned down the canyon. His sensitive, quivering nostrils scented the air. His eyes could not pierce the green screen through which the stream rippled away, but to his ears came the voice of a man. It was a steady, monotonous, singsong voice. Once the buck heard the harsh clash of metal upon rock. At the sound he snorted with a sudden start that jerked him through the air from water to meadow, and his feet sank into the young velvet while he pricked his ears and again scented the air. Then he stole across the tiny meadow, pausing once and again to listen, and faded away out of the canyon like a wraith, soft-footed and without sound.

  The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and the man’s voice grew louder. It was raised in a sort of chant and became distinct with nearness, so that the words could be heard.

  “Tu’n around an’ tu’n yo’ face

  Untoe them sweet hills of grace

  (D’ pow’rs of sin yo’ am scornin’!).

  Look about an’ look aroun’

  Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’ groun’

  (Yo’ will meet wid d’ Lord in d’ mornin’!).”

  A sound of scrambling accompanied the song, and the spirit of the place fled away on the heels of the red-coated buck. The green screen was burst asunder, and a man peered out at the meadow and the pool and the sloping sidehill. He was a deliberate sort of man. He took in the scene with one embracing glance, then ran his eyes over the details to verify the general impression. Then, and not until then, did he open his mouth in vivid and solemn approval.

  “Smoke of life an’ snakes of purgatory! Will you just look at that! Wood an’ water an’ grass an’ a sidehill! A pocket-hunter’s delight an’ a cayuse’s paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people ain’t in it. A secret pasture for prospectors and a resting place for tired burros. It’s just booful!”

  He was a sandy-complexioned man in whose face geniality and humor seemed the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas chased across his face like wind flaws across the surface of a lake. His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was an indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naiveté and wonder of the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and experience of the world.

  From out the screen of vines and creepers, he flung ahead of him a miner’s pick and shovel and gold-pan. Then he crawle
d out himself into the open. He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and camp smoke. He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyon garden through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight. His eyes narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud, “Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me! Talk about your attar o’ roses an’ cologne factories! They ain’t in it!”

  He had the habit of soliloquy. His quick-changing facial expressions might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard after, repeating, like a second Boswell.

  The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its water. “Tastes good to me,” he murmured, lifting his head and gazing across the pool at the sidehill, while he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The sidehill attracted his attention. Still lying on his stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a practiced eye that traveled up the slope to the crumbling canyon wall and back and down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his feet and favored the sidehill with a second survey.

  “Look good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and gold-pan.

  He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to stone. Where the sidehill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of dirt and put it into the gold-pan. He squatted down, holding the pan in his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream. Then he imparted to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and out through the dirt and gravel. The larger and the lighter particles worked to the surface, and these, by a skillful dipping movement of the pan, he spilled out and over the edge. Occasionally, to expedite matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large pebbles and pieces of rock.