We kept going all that afternoon and a good part of that night, stopping now and then to rest our horses and rousing friends to get fresh ones. We had a fair moon to light our way. A moonless trail would have been very dangerous in that terrain. As it was, we had to be careful. The way was often treacherous and full of fog. The fog drifted inland and sat over canyons, gullies and coves, showing only the tops of the highest hills and sometimes slinking far inland. We would hit patches of it lasting half a mile and go in and out of it as if we were passing through smoke-filled rooms. It silenced everything, making the surf sound like a long-drawn sigh, our voices as thin as in a snowstorm, and the hoofbeats as if the shoes were covered with burlap. There was much to do guiding our horses, picking their way through fog and moonshadow for them. Although they were good horses and probably knew more about all this than any man could ever know, we could not take a chance at such a time and we let them only carry us, we ourselves supplying eyes, nose, ears and seventh sense. We camped out without a fire and ate our dinner cold: jerkin, whiskey and some bread. We took turns standing watch. We figured we were somewhere east of Lucia. The next night we made it to about Point Piedras Blancas and the following night to the outskirts of San Luis. And so in three days we made that lonely trip and came out near the main coast road.
The next night we camped out in a wooded place near a stream. It was so remote that we chanced a fire to have us some hot food. It was my turn to take the first watch and practically a minute after we finished eating I was the only one awake. Bob and Harvey were asleep over on the left, the horses were quietly stomping in the shadows near by, and the Kid, propped against a tree-trunk, seemed to be asleep on the right of the fire. He looked like a greaser sitting there, with his black tight trousers, black high-heeled boots, black sombrero tilted over his face, and the brown blanket covering his shoulders like a serape.
I poked at the fire, thinking that the time had come to tell him about Nika and hating to have to do it. I went over to him and crouched down beside him.
“Kid,” I whispered.
After a little pause he said, “Hm?” I could not see his face because of the sombrero.
“Kid I got something to tell you.”
“Hm.”
“Nika got married.”
He did not stir. For a second I thought he was asleep.
Then he said, “What about it?” in a bored voice.
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Who to?”
“Miguel. Miguel Gomez.”
“When?”
“Wednesday.”
He said nothing. I got tired of crouching and stood up. When Harvey’s watch came I woke him and fell asleep almost at once. The Kid was still propped against that same pine tree.
*
In the mountains behind Santa Barbara we had friends. We got fresh horses and a good stock of food and we rested up for the night. Next morning very early we rode down toward the foothills and looked down at the town from a clump of pines. It looked white and peaceful in the bright sun and very green with all the trees and gardens. The sea lay blue beyond it. We sat our horses and looked at it, tired of running, tired of the back trails and the salt taste in our mouths and the dried meat and the canned goods and the stink of dried sweat on us. My left shoulder ached from holding the reins and I was beginning to feel as saddle-sore as a tenderfoot. We were getting tired of everything—even of each other’s company, even of the smell of our horses.
We returned to the back trails and headed in the direction of Ventura. Harvey knew these trails pretty well and so we had to approach the main road only occasionally. It was not surprising that he knew them. Each of us knew parts of that country. We had tried to study as much of it as we could. A fellow in our business rarely studied the main roads except to know where they were. It was the back trails we wanted to know and we made a habit of learning them throughout a whole territory, the way a fellow will learn a language his life may depend on. In that way our heads got to be full of stuff that would have amazed a man in another line of business. We knew caves, gullies, shacks, shortcuts, ranchos, adobes and friends up and down that terrain, the way a river pilot would know snags, currents, islands, changing banks, depths and whatelse not, know them so well that he felt them, even in the dark. We passed behind Ventura not far from the mission and, making good time, did not quit until we were just short of Camarillo that night.
After supper the Kid and I stretched our legs a bit, with Harvey and Bob minding camp, and the Kid turned to me and asked, “Why didn’t she come to see me in that calabozo?”
“She meant to,” I said. “But he got sick and she nursed him. I think she was going to see you on Friday, in the afternoon.”
“What was the matter with him?”
“Got kicked by a mare. Started coughing blood. Then he came down with fever. May be dead right now for all I know.”
“What she marry him for?”
I shrugged. “You got me.”
“She say anything to you about it?”
“Me? She kept clear of me. Only thing she said was she had no use for you. She can’t forgive you for that Juanita.”
“Wonder how old Dad is doing,” he said.
“Yeh. Good old Dad.”
“I’d give Bob’s right eye to know what he’s doing.”
“He must be catching hell.”
The Kid laughed. I glanced at him. He had changed all right but it was hard to put your finger on it. Maybe the closeness of that noose had changed him—I don’t know. He was more quiet than ever and there seemed to be something eating at him behind his eyes.
*
On our eighth day out the Kid had a hankering, as he put it, to see some new faces and so we made our way over to a little place called El Segundo on the coast, and as luck would have it they had a baile going. We hoisted in a cargo of aguardiente and started dancing and people kept drinking toasts to the Kid’s escape and after a while there were a couple of fistfights from all the good feeling and I could see the Kid was feeling great.
“Well how does it feel to be out?” I asked and slapped him on the back.
“Kiss me baby,” he said and tossed down some aguardiente, then went back to dancing with a little Mexican girl he had taken a liking to. They were dancing like that when up comes this fellow named Tom Murphy, a forty-niner, and pokes her in the rear and meows. She was scared to death and jumped three feet high. The Kid caught him by the collar but the women began to scream and he let him go.
“You better beat it,” said the Kid.
But the old fellow only cackled and went to the other side of the room. He had a bushy gray beard and a paunch and two bum thin legs and a little scar across one nostril and under his eye.
“He’s always doing that,” a fellow said. “Likes to snake up behind somebody and poke a finger up their rear.”
“That’s a good habit,” said the Kid.
“Yeh,” said the fellow. “Tried it on a cowpuncher a couple of months back and this fellow horsewhipped him on the main street.”
A little while later this old coot sneaked up and goosed the Kid’s girl again. This time some men led the old fellow out and the Kid just stood there with his hands in his back pockets and his small close-cropped head hunched over and watched Murphy with his cold slate-colored eyes and I knew that he wanted to see the corpse of that old bird. Sure enough, about five minutes later he excused himself and went outside, caught up with Murphy in a potato field, cracked down on him and shot him through the chest, without a word.
The ball hit Murphy on the left side and sent him spinning as if he had been yanked backward by a reata. He landed on his hands and knees, gasping, the blood all over his back, a great look of surprise on his face, and he looked down at his chest and looked at the Kid, his face white as death, and saw the Kid smiling at him, and he tried to get up to explain something, probably that the Kid had made a mistake, and then something hit him and his eyes clouded over and he fe
ll in a heap in the mud of the potato field.
I had followed the Kid outside.
“Let’s get going,” said the Kid. “That fellow has spoiled my fun.”
But before we left El Segundo we went down to the ocean for a swim and the Kid’s mood improved. We shouted and whooped and dived off the rocks, having a hell of a time. We lay on the rocks in the moonlight, then slowly dressed and strapped on our belts. While Harvey and Bob and I sat around, the Kid practiced drawing.
“About time you did that,” I said.
“He doesn’t need it,” said Harvey.
“Everybody needs it,” the Kid said.
“They had you cooped up a long time,” said Bob.
“Never again,” said the Kid.
You thought he was kind of dreaming the way he stood there, his legs spread a little and his body hunched over, his toes turned in, he looking out toward the ocean, his right hand meanwhile going through the motions of the draw. He didn’t wear his scabbard slung low, like the rest of us. He said a low scabbard made you reach and wasted time. He would raise his hand about as high as his head and bring it down and just touch the gunbutt, getting his last three fingers under it, his trigger finger pointing straight out and the thumb standing straight up and ready. He would do that over and over again. Then he would hold his hand down by his side and do the same thing. He would practice getting his last three fingers under the butt from various parts of his body, sometimes looking down at the butt and at other times just feeling where it was. He didn’t bother to draw the gun out of its scabbard.
Of course he sometimes did draw the gun and sometimes he drew both of them but when he was in action he never used both at the same time. I’ve never known a good gunfighter stupid enough to try to fight with two guns at the same time, or one who did and lived long enough afterward to write home about it, if he had a home and if he could write. Fact is it takes only one bullet to kill a man and one gun to send the bullet home and if you mess around with two guns, even if you can shoot pretty well with your left hand as well as your right, you’re going to have your grave dug for you. Those stories about the Kid shooting in two directions at the same time and bringing down both men were made up by boys who were great fighters with their pencils. The Kid used to laugh at such stories.
I don’t mean to say that fellows wouldn’t draw two guns. They would, but the good ones shot only one at a time, using the second for a spare and to prove they had reserve power, especially if they were facing a mob. When the first gun went empty they could make the border shift faster than your eye could spot it and then the second gun would come into play, but not before then. That way they shot cool and straight, which is why they stayed alive.
Same thing with gunfanning. You’ve probably heard of Smoky Hill Clifton, a great gunfanner in his day—great in exhibition matches. He had no trigger on his guns and could make them pour lead in a stream. One day he and the Kid had words and Smoky Hill, who had only heard of the Kid but had never seen him operate, asked the Kid to come outside (they were in a saloon in Salinas) and exchange the compliments of the season.
“Glad to oblige,” said the Kid, smiling.
They went out into the street, Smoky Hill going out first and walking a way south, and then they started coming toward each other. Fellows were saying that the Kid didn’t stand a chance against this kind of fighter. Smoky Hill was a tall Texas man and he came down the street tall and cool-looking, wearing spurs that clanked. He started shooting first and before you knew it his gun was empty. The Kid kept coming, without drawing his gun. Then he stopped and I thought sure he had been hit. His right hand was hanging at his side and then, before you knew he had tried to draw, the forty-four was in his hand and he took aim and fired one shot which hit Smoky Hill in the heart and that was the end of that shooting match. Two of Smoky Hill’s shots had hit the Kid, one grazing his left shoulder and the second his left thigh, but it was Smoky Hill who was lying there dead. His gunfanning hadn’t helped him a hell of a lot.
I got tired of just sitting there watching the Kid practice and so I stood up and practiced too, yanking my sixshooter every time, until I could feel the hard tightness in the front of my shoulder. It was good to feel the gun fly up into my hand. As soon as I began to practice the Kid turned his back on me and climbed behind a ledge out of view. I was used to that and I didn’t mind. He didn’t like to see a man draw, no matter who it was. Well we all have our peculiarities, that’s for sure.
*
We sensed the change of climate clearly. The sea winds became softer, the fog got thinner until there was almost none of it and the ocean looked softer and bluer on the occasions when we came out of the hills and saw it. The trees thinned out and changed, the pines giving way to eucalyptuses, chestnuts and olives, and the mountains and hills did not seem as rugged as those of the Santa Lucias which we had left behind. But meanwhile we were fagging out, losing fat fast and feeling it and in need of sugar and red meat all the time. We had stubbles and looked haggard and our eyes were shot from the dust and lack of sleep and the brilliant light. It was not doing our tempers any good.
The Kid and Bob kept having words. I don’t think the Kid ever liked Bob much. Bob was a big fellow, tall and heavy, light-haired, with a ruddy face, and he weighed more than two hundred pounds, probably. The Kid had no love lost for that size of fellow. Bob ate like a horse and young as he was had a paunch and was a great farter. The Kid didn’t take to that free and easy farting. He was very neat and gentlemanly in his manners and would never have done a thing like that in anybody’s company. But Bob did it because it seemed natural to him and because he thought it was funny and he was not too neat about his eating and clothes. But he was easy to get along with and there were some of us who were a lot less delicate than he was. It was Bob, you will remember, who came for my horses the first time I met the Kid and who backed down when I outdrew him. We got along all right after that. But I had a hunch even then the Kid didn’t like him and I was pretty sure of it when he asked Bob to cook for us then, to cook for me too, and I being a stranger to the bunch.
When the Kid and I were alone I told him that while it was none of my business I hoped it was not serious between him and Bob because it was not good to think there was trouble among us. He said I had it all wrong, that there was no trouble at all, and I could see by that that he did not like my mixing in and so I dropped the matter. My own temper was pretty bad. We had taken to riding all day without as much as twenty words except at mealtimes. But what can you expect when you ride together day in day out, morning noon and night? Even Harvey had times when he was glum but for the most part he sure fooled me. I had never thought he would take that kind of grind in good humor but he did. I’ll be damned to this day if I can make out what he had to be laughing about. He was always grinning, making jokes, doing jigs and acting as if he was drunk. I had never seen him like that. I wonder if he had a hunch he was going to die soon. I have been around a number of fellows that have taken off, old and young, and have noticed that sometimes they have this hunch, although they usually aren’t aware of it. They themselves are not aware of it but a fellow who knows them is and is puzzled by it. Then when you have seen them take off you understand what it meant.
What did Harvey have to be laughing about? I did not understand what the big joke was about and he got on my nerves with all that glad face and we had some words ourselves. But the Kid never said an unpleasant word to Harvey. He was saving them all for Bob. There would be nothing ugly but it would have been better if there had. We’d be riding along a mountain trail, single file or maybe two abreast, and the Kid would say thinly, with a dry smile,
“I wish you wouldn’t pull up short like that Bob.”
I’d look around to see what was up and so would Harvey, for it was not like Bob to pull up short unless he had to. Then Bob would say, “What do you mean Kid?” and there would be that whiteness around his lips.
“Just don’t pull up short,” the Kid woul
d say evenly and Bob would say,
“I didn’t,” and the Kid would say,
“You’re wrong Bob you did. I wish you wouldn’t do it again,” and Bob would reply, trying to control his voice.
“What are you getting at Kid?”
“Nothing.”
“Why don’t you tell me what it’s about?”
“Just don’t pull up short.”
“All right,” Bob would say, seeing it was useless to argue.
And then we’d have hours of silence from everybody, until the next little incident. Meanwhile Harvey would break out into singing now and then. I wondered if he had gone loco. As for the Kid, it seemed to me that he should have been in good spirits, having made his great escape. I know I would have been if I were in his boots. But I wasn’t in his boots and that’s a fact, isn’t it? Now if you’d have come to me after I made a great escape like that and said, “Doc is there anything eating you?” I would have said, “Bob somebody’s got to do a little work on your noodle—a major operation I guess.”
Once I went off to a stream to wash and when I came back to our camp I saw the Kid poke a forefinger against Bob’s chest and say, “Bob I wouldn’t keep talking like that if I was you.”
“Why? What’d I say?”
“I’m just telling you.”
Bob looked amazed and even though I didn’t know what it was about I couldn’t blame him. What was eating the Kid? Bob should have lit out then and there. Anyhow that was how it began and you know the consequence, how the Kid killed Bob and how that killing affected him more than any other killing of his life. The Kid was sure acting peculiar, as if his attention was hundreds of miles away, as if he had something important to tend to, somebody important to see and set things straight with. I had never seen him like that.
*
We were very tired now and believe me mister it’s not my habit to exaggerate. You stay on a horse all that time, pushing hard every day and part of the night when you can, and after a while you’ve got no legs, bottom or arms and you don’t care, except that you’ve still got that jumpy spine, which never stops expecting a bullet to come out of somebody’s Sharps gun a long way off and cut you in two. We didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for, heading for the border all in one swallow. To hear some folks tell of our ride you’d think it was a Sunday-afternoon trot. All I know is, young as we were it pretty near knocked hell out of us. Santa Monica, San Juan Capistrano, Encinitas—we hit the outskirts of them all, laying out at night. And then, on the thirteenth, we crossed the border outside of Tijuana and knew we had made it. They had border guards on the outlook for us but we had friends who had heard of our coming and we slipped across at night in their company. Luckily there was no moon.
The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Page 8
