“I tell yuh, Joe, I ain’t a man to go out of my way to find trouble, but this doggone’ country shore gets on my nerves. The cards don’t lay right whatsoever. Peril an’ strife is due to break down on us like a ton o’ bricks. Did yuh hear somethin’ sneakin’ around our camp last night?”
“Sagebrush rustlin’,” murmured Joe.
Indigo sighed. “Joe, I ain’t never ceased to marvel how yuh reached this ripe stage o’ maturity sound and unhalted. Yo’re as innocent as a babe in three-cornered overalls. Sagebrush, eh? First time ever I heard sagebrush stumblin’ over rocks.”
Joe smiled, a slow and crinkling smile that was like throwing wide the doors of a warm and glowing house. Joe was a tall and muscular man with silvering hair and blue eyes. He was a lazy moving man, he spoke slowly and with a drawling gentleness, a trick that was even more pronounced when he became thoroughly roused. But even without action or speech the character of Joe Breedlove was plainly to be seen upon the fine, bronzed features—an even, humorous serenity that inevitably drew others to him. On the long trail of his life were a thousand friends who had said goodbye to him with a sharp and personal sense of regret. For Joe could not walk among his kind without creating affection and respect.
“Let it pass,” said he, still smiling at his peppery consort. “You been at peace with the world for a week straight and the monotony is sort of makin’ you nervous.”
“Yuh can’t slink it off thataway,” grumbled Indigo, rubbing his peaked nose. “Tell me a time when I ain’t been right about this feelin’.”
“It’s a fact,” admitted Joe. “I believe you could walk inside the pearly gates and drum up friction. They’s somethin’ about you which makes the buzzards rise off the topmost crags and shout for a meal. Indigo, I figure you send out waves of irritation or somethin’ like that. You’d ought to be more calm. Why go out of your way to step on somebody’s bunion?”
“I don’t,” was Indigo’s severe answer. “I mind my own business strictly. But folks always got a notion they can tromp on me unrestrained. Which is shore wrong. It shore is. Yuh talk about bein’ calm—hell! What’s it brought you? Seems like yuh get into trouble jusasame.”
Joe swept the horizon with a long and raking glance and for an instant his attention tarried on a certain point. His smile broadened. He shook his head as if his conviction had been maintained. “My motto is peace. A soft word goes a long, long ways, Indigo.”
“Yeah,” grunted Indigo, and stopped. His sharp eyes likewise sought the horizon, and his small body stiffened, much as a pointer freezes on quarry. Joe chuckled and rolled a cigarette.
“Somebody comin’ in a sweat,” muttered Indigo. And for many minutes he watched the distance with jealous attention. A rider drew out of the gray air, galloping posthaste. He bore directly toward the partners for several hundred yards, then veered almost at right angles and swept upward to higher ground. Presently he was abreast of them but a half mile on their flank. And in a little while more he dropped from sight. Indigo nodded. “Avoided us,” said he with a grim satisfaction.
“Which is his right,” suggested Joe.
“It ain’t nacheral, though,” argued Indigo. “It’s impolite. They’s a reason behind that, you wait an’ see.”
* * * *
They went on at a leisurely gait. The day was half gone and they had no exact idea where the next town lay or where they would tarry the ensuing night. It didn’t much matter. They had been going on like this for a long summer. Rolling leagues of sand and sharp mountain ranges rose in front of them, were traversed and left behind. The days fell endlessly into each other. Hot, sultry days and cold, clear nights with the mystery of the infinite for a lullaby. Joe’s mellow character was in tune with all this. Cross-legged before the evening’s fire he watched the blue tent of heaven and in the long silences he drew out of his memory those relics of the past which were now aged and precious. Joe was not much more than thirty-five but he had traveled the wide West from early boyhood and down that far trail were green spots with their treasured recollections. Of the night in Abilene when he had won his spurs as a man; of a girl just across the threshold of womanhood who had looked up to him in the faint moonlight and cried. At this point Joe looked to the stars and his features always settled a little.
“Hah,” muttered Indigo with a kind of strangled pleasure. “Another gent dustin’ his pants.”
The second rider moved with about the same speed as the first had done, but he closed the distance with no attempt at shying away. The partners came to a standstill, waiting. Indigo shifted nervously and there was a hardening of his cheek muscles that surely and completely told of the battle chant rising within his small and skinny frame. He had been weary and jaded and morose all the morning. Now he freshened and sat erect in his saddle. Joe chuckled again, shrewdly studying the newcomer.
The rider flung himself directly in front of the partners and brought his pony to a squatting, sliding halt. He pushed back his hat with a fretful jerk and he hauled out his cigarette ingredients with the same petulance of spirit. And with the sack of makin’s dangling between a set of hard white teeth he stabbed the two with a flashing glance. He was youthful looking but in no manner innocent; and his bronzed face needed washing.
“Fire or disaster over yonder?” grunted Indigo. “Sudden demise, epidemical disease, peril on human hoof, or wrath o’ God? Or was yuh just limberin’ up the hoss?”
“If,” countered the newcomer, completing the masonry of his cigarette with a sidewise slap of his tongue, “that is the only direction you boys is able to go, it is just too bad.”
“Ain’t the climate salubrious?” pressed Indigo, growing brighter.
The rider lit his cigarette, inhaled a mighty volume of smoke and delivered himself of a solemn sermon. “If that valley from which I jus’ took myself hence was the vale of Eden I wouldn’t go back. If they was a Persian maid every square yard to anoint my blistered spirit with kind words and lovin’ emoluments, if they was melons on every sage bush and a pot o’ gold hangin’ from each and sundry juniper tree, if all cow critters gave milk and said milk when sparin’ly partook of give a gent everlastin’ life, I wouldn’t go back. Boys, I’m on my way.”
He touched his spurs and boosted his horse around them. Indigo cried after him, “Hey, what’s so doggone’ turrible about it?”
The rider flung a phrase over his shoulder. “Dead Card John is on the warpath.” And he was gone, seeming to push the earth faster around its axis with each surge of his pony’s flying feet.
Indigo blew a mighty blast from his nose and looked toward Joe with a sinister triumph. “Ain’t I been tellin’ yuh?”
“Makin’ allowances for a youthful imagination,” began Joe mildly.
Indigo interrupted with one of his rare classical similes. “Once when I was a boy I used to see a picture in a book of all the animals fleein’ from the Flood. Reminds me of that now. Joe, they’s a heap of trouble ahead of us. Let’s go a mite faster.”
“It ain’t our trouble,” said Joe. They broke into a canter, with Indigo now and then rising in his saddle to scan the gray afternoon. “Listen, Indigo, it ain’t no trouble we got to buy or share.”
“Well,” was Indigo’s defensive answer, “I jus’ want to look in.”
The broken desert fell behind. To either side the parallel benches marched up and down and gradually sank with a falling slope. Some sort of a valley lay in the immediate foreground. Far away was the dim outline of high, sharp peaks. And Joe Breedlove who all this time had been sweeping the earth, murmured softly and drew his horse to a complete stop. The sand to one side was scuffed with the print of hoof and human shoe. And with the outline of some heavy object dragged along its surface. Joe slid from the saddle, first spending a moment’s watchfulness toward a strip of lava rock a hundred yards farther aside. “Jus’ sorter keep your eyes on that rock,” he muttered to Indigo, and bent over the broken sand.
* * * *
There was
a story written tragically on that area of earth. A horse had trotted back and forth, another horse had advanced into the disturbed circle and then gone off at a tangent. Two sets of boot tracks, one imperceptibly larger than the other; the gouge of knee and elbow and, ten feet from these telltale marks the broad and deep trail of a dragged body. All this was elementary reading to Joe. He saw it immediately; his gloved finger dropped to a darkened patch in the sand. “That’s somebody’s blood, Indigo. Let’s have a look over behind them rocks.”
He stepped into the saddle. And out of ingrained wariness, the pair of them split and quartered upon the rock from different angles, closing again when they had a clear view of what lay beyond. Indigo was somewhat impatient. The horizon drew him like a magnet and he waited, not bothering to get down, while Joe sought stolidly from one rock barricade to another.
“Why waste time?” Indigo demanded. “This ain’t nothin’. Tracks is six hours old anyhow. The main event’s on ahead. Come on, Joe.”
Joe’s shoulders dropped. He boosted himself upright, holding a shell between thumb and forefinger. “The guy doin’ the shootin’ squatted right here, Indigo. And he must’ve figgered he hadn’t killed his man with the first shot for he ejected this shell and got set for another aim.” He studied the shell with minute interest. “You wasn’t in the Spanish-American War, was you, Indigo?”
“No,” grunted the small partner. “I had a Spanish-American girl down at Yuma them days and that was enough fightin’ for one year.”
“I shouldered a Krag-Jorgensen rifle durin’ said scrap,” mused Joe. “This is a sure-enough Krag shell. They ain’t too common now. I guess we’ll store this in a pocket.”
“Let’s go. They’s a house two-three miles below.”
* * * *
They went on, Indigo’s eyes growing narrower and narrower with smoldering excitement. Joe, on the other hand, was in a profound study, head dropped forward on his chest. He had just finished reading a chapter of violence. Some human being had threshed out his life in agony on that sand; and Joe’s sympathetic imagination reconstructed the scene detail by detail as the tracks suggested. Men had to die. Sure. But why, under the western sky and with all the immense distances for freedom of use, did men have to ambush each other? Indigo’s voice cut sharply across his pondering.
“Somebody on the porch.”
They had traversed a gradual downward slope. A hundred yards to the fore stood a weathered, sagging frame shanty. Obviously a nester’s home, for a fence with a single strand of wire boxed a few barren acres, and one small patch of ground had been scratched loose for a garden. A row of sunflowers skirted the house. A man sat motionless in a rocking chair near the front door.
The partners waited a moment for the customary invitation to light and rest. None came. Joe Breedlove stepped down, smiling cheerfully. “I reckon you’ll pardon the intrusion. But it is a new country to us and we’re wonderin’ just what direction town is from here.”
The man was very old and shriveled. His clothes hung loosely, showing the sharp points of his frame; the hands resting on the rocker arms were blackened by long years of sun and twisted by long years of work. And he had nothing to say to Joe in reply. At first it seemed to the genial partner that this old fellow was a mute, or deaf, or that age had drugged his tongue. He thought so only for a moment. The rocker stirred and began a slow swinging. The fellow’s head came up and Joe saw misery in his faded blue eyes. Joe had seen torture of spirit before. He knew the stamp of it; he recognized it here. The old man swayed as if to soothe and relieve pain. Then the partners heard a strangled laboring of breath inside the house; such a weird and blood-chilling suspiration that Indigo tipped on his heels and threw a startled glance at his companion. Joe circled the rocker and entered the half darkened shanty.
There was a woman huddled in a dim corner; crying dismally. She had an apron thrown over her head and her hands were spread against the wall, slowly slipping to the floor. Joe started to back away, and stopped. Nearer the door and directly under a window was a bunk, occupied now with the rigid and lifeless body of a young puncher. A single blue spot stood out in startling clearness upon the gray and settled face.
“Nesters,” whispered Joe. “The kid was the support o’ the family. So some outfit plugged him to keep his kind outen the land. Damn ’em, Joe!”
“I reckon it’s the end of the story all right,” agreed Joe, soberly. He went outside, staring into the distance. The serenity and the kindliness was gone from Joe then. “Somebody,” said he, “ought to be crucified for that, Indigo, somebody ought to suffer!”
“Don’t worry none, somebody will.”
Both of them turned as if pulled by the same spring to face a newcomer slouched by the corner of the house. Where he had been the meanwhile or where he had come from they didn’t know. But here he stood, a slim tall man with iron gray hair and delicate fingers and a face that seemed as cold as marble. He was dressed like a circuit rider—string tie and white shirt and a black broadcloth suit. But there was no religion on the gentleman’s face. He had been nurtured on a different training. Joe saw it instantly. Along the silver-haired partner’s trail there had been other men like this—solitary and secretive and coldly watchful. He studied the man with an interest that seemed to intensify with each passing moment.
Indigo shifted, growing restive and angry under the newcomer’s steady stare. “Glad to hear it. But what’s the idee o’ slinkin’ around the premises like a feline? I would also like to ask yuh if they’s anything funny about my nose which makes yuh goggle at it so unmannerly?”
“Where are you strangers from?” inquired the man, bluntly.
“North,” replied Joe.
“If it’s any of yore doggone’ business,” added Indigo with an equal bluntness.
“Where to?” snapped the inquisitor.
“South,” drawled Joe. His blue eyes bored into the fellow’s face. He smiled and Indigo, seeing the quality of that smile, stepped promptly aside and held his peace. “I reckon you’d be the gentleman called Dead Card John,” pursued Joe in the same sleepy manner. “Yore repute goes ahead to greet all pilgrims. A friend or relation of yours—the boy in there?”
All he had for an answer was a slight inclination of Dead Card John’s head. Joe likewise nodded. “Yeah. And you’ll maybe be writin’ somebody’s ticket. I’d like to ask the caliber and make o’ yore rifle, mister. Just for to satisfy a curiosity.”
“I give you credit,” said Dead Card John, lids rising from his strange and unfathomable eyes. A man only got that kind of a fixed expression through years at one particular vocation. As well as the cold and marble pallor of cheeks that defied sun and wind. “I give you credit,” repeated Dead Card John, each word the more chilly. “But I won’t answer that question. If you are riding south don’t let me keep you waiting. And you might tell anybody who asks you in Terese,” each syllable piling up to a higher, more biting and bitter pitch, “that Dead Card John’s riding. You’ll do me a favor.”
Joe nodded. “Maybe I’ll do it, if anybody asks me. But I reckon the country may know it before we get to Terese. I’m some accustomed to the West, friend. And which way is Terese, anyhow?”
“South along the valley,” said Dead Card John. As the partners swung up and turned from the house he added another impersonally polite warning. “When you get there, I wouldn’t be in any hurry to declare yourselves.”
“’Most every county has two kinds of politics,” observed Joe. He spent a last penetrating look upon Dead Card John. “I reckon, friend, I’ve covered some little territory in the last sixteen years. It’s been a long while since I was a younker settin’ out for to see the world in ’95. A fellow absorbs a heap. We bid you good day.”
* * * *
They passed a horse saddled and waiting. Joe gave it a quick inspection and passed on. The rifle boot was on the far side and he couldn’t make out the fellow’s weapon. Indigo grumbled for a half-mile before arriving at a conviction.
“It might’ve been his bullet, Joe. What was he snoopin’ around for? He shore registers poison to me. I’ve seen poker faces like his’n before.”
“When we rounded the corner,” mused Joe, “he’d put his hand on the old gent’s shoulder.”
Indigo looked queerly at his partner. “Say, for the love o’ Jupiter, Joe, are yuh a-tryin’ to make out a case for that stone-eyed gent? It ain’t like yuh. It ain’t. Usually yo’re a man to ketch a fellow’s disposition pretty quick. Yuh’d ought to know he was poison.”
“Well, to tell the truth,” confessed Joe, almost meekly, “I found points about him I liked. Yeah, I did.”
“All yo’re tryin’ to do now is start an argument. Yuh don’t mean it. But what was the idee o’ throwin’ dates at him like yuh did. It ain’t yore habit to brag, Joe.”
“Sometimes I naturally spill over with past history,” murmured Joe. The blandness left him. “It ain’t so much the dead youngster, Indigo. Well, it’s hard enough for them kind to go. But it’s the old ones. It gets me. I won’t sleep well for some nights. Why has that got to be? Whenever I hear a woman cry like that—or an old man with a dead look in his eyes—it gets me, Indigo.”
“Well, it ain’t settled yet,” grunted Indigo. “I sorter feel like we’ll be in this deal.” He looked at Joe from the corner of his eye, assaying the result of the remark. And when Joe nodded assent Indigo straightened and snorted like an impatient war horse. “Sometimes I understand yuh, Joe. Sometimes I do. This day shore is fadin’ fast.”
The Western Megapack - 25 Classic Western Stories Page 39
