He braced himself against the roll of the stage and stared out the window for an instant as if collecting his thoughts. Then his eyes pinned Judson to his seat as a collector pins a butterfly. Judson squirmed, but there was no escape.
“You understand,” Macomber continued, “I’m not accusing these men of including items for their own advantage. No doubt at the moment they believe the item essential, yet when viewed logically it usually proves such claims were arrived at without due consideration.
“Take, for example, the ridiculous request of this man Wells, at Alkali Basin. Four times now he has written us demanding we send him blasting powder!
“Now think of that! Blasting powder, of all things! What earthly use would a station agent have for blasting powder? In our reply to his first request, we suggested he submit his reason for wanting it, and he replied that he wished to blast some rocks.
“Were the rocks on the road? No, they were not. They were some seventy yards off the road in the desert. The request was, without doubt, the whimsical notion of an uneducated man at a moment when he was not thinking. By now he no doubt realizes the absurdity of his notion.
“It is such items as this that can be eliminated. And I observed,” Macomber added severely, “that you recommended his request be granted. I was surprised, Judson. Needless to say, I was very surprised. We expect better judgment of our district superintendents.”
Judson mopped his brow and said nothing. In the past one-hundred-and-ten miles he had learned it was wiser to listen and endure. Price Macomber’s voice droned on into the hot, dusty afternoon with no hint of a letup.
The best arguments Judson had offered had been riddled with logic, devastating and inescapable. He would have liked to say that sometimes logic fell short of truth, but lacked the words, and no argument of his could hope to dam the flow of words that poured over the spillway of Price Macomber’s lips.
Molly Macomber stared wearily at the desert. Her uncle, so polished, immaculate, and sure of himself, had failed to materialize into the superman he had seemed in Kansas City and St. Louis.
Against the background of the rolling grasslands, she had noticed that his stiff white collar and neat black suit seemed somehow incongruous. Also, among the ragged, stark ridges of the desert, his mouth seemed too prim and precise, his eyes seemed flat and rather foolish. They were like the eyes of a goldfish staring from a bowl at a world it neither understood nor saw clearly.
“Keep the expense down,” Macomber was saying, “and the profits will take care of themselves.”
Judson stared at the desert and shifted his feet. He felt sorry for Molly, who evidently expected glamour and beauty on this westward trek. He also felt sorry for himself. He took a drink with his stage drivers, and played poker with them. Somehow he had always got results.
He had visited Alkali Basin just once before, and heartily wished he would never have to again. If Wells, keeper of the station there, wanted blasting powder, Judson was for letting him have it. Or anything else, for that matter, including a necklace of silver bells, a Cardinal’s hat, or even a steamboat—anything to keep him contented.
In the three months before Wells took over the station at Alkai Basin, no fewer than six station agents had attempted the job.
The first man stuck it ten days. It was a lonely post where he had only to change horses for two stages each day, one going east, and one west. After ten days that agent had come to town on the stage and shook his head decisively. “No!” he said violently. “Not for any price! Not even Price Macomber!”
Four days after the next agent took over, the stage rolled into Alkali Basin and found no horses awaiting it. The horses were gone from the corral, and the agent lay across his adobe doorstep shot three times through the body, mutilated and scalped.
Two more men had tried it, one after the other. The Apaches got the first one of these on his second day, and the other man fought them off for a couple of hours, then went to Mexico with two teams of six horses each, and had not been heard from since.
Blasting powder might be somewhat extreme, but in Judson’s private, and oft expressed opinion—to everyone but Macomber—any man who would stick it out for as much as ten days in the white dust and furnace heat of Alkali Basin, was entitled to anything he wanted.
The man called Wells had been on the job for two solid months, and so far, except for the powder, his only request had been for large quantities of ammunition. He sent in a request for more by every stage.
Macomber leaned with the sway of the stage as it swung around a corner of red rock. The movement awakened Molly who had dozed, made sleepy by the motion of the stage and the heat. A thin film of dust had settled on her face, her neck, and her hair. Perspiration, extremely unladylike perspiration, had left streaks on her face.
Her eyes strayed out over the white, dancing heat waves of the basin’s awful expanse. The hot sun reflected from it and the earth seemed to shimmer, unreal and somehow ghastly. In the far distance, a column of dust arose and skipped along over the white desolation like some weird and evil spirit. It was the only movement.
The stage reached bottom and paused briefly in the partial shade while the horses gathered breath for the long, bitter run across the desert bottom, inches deep in alkali.
The pursuing dust cloud caught up with and settled over the stage and the clothing of the occupants. Even Price Macomber’s dauntless volubility seemed to hesitate and lose itself in space. He was silent, staring out the window as though totaling a column of figures. Money saved, no doubt.
As the stage stumbled into movement once more, he glanced at Judson. “How much farther to our stop?”
“Forty miles to a decent place. It’s no more than ten miles to Alkali Basin. We change horses there, but we’d better get food and water at Green’s Creek.”
The horses, as though aware of the coming rest, lunged into the harness and charged at the heat waves.
Six hours earlier, morning had come to Alkali Basin. The sun, as though worn from its efforts of the previous day, pushed itself wearily over the jagged ridge in the distance and stabbed with white hot lances at the lonely stone building and the corrals.
Wells, his stubble of beard whitened with alkali, stared through one of the small windows with red-rimmed, sleepless eyes. The Apaches were still there. He couldn’t see them, but he knew without seeing. They had been there, devilish in their patience, for eighteen hours now. They were out there in front of him, behind that low parapet of rocks.
He was a big, rawboned man, hairy chested, and hard-bitten. His reddish hair was a rumpled, uncombed mass, his shirt was dirty and sweat-stained.
A rough board table occupied the center of the room, and on it was a candle in a bowl, and a lantern. The coals in the fireplace were dead long since and his bunk was a tumbled pile of odorous blankets. Close beside him as he knelt by the window was a wooden bucket. The wood was ingrained with white, and there was a milky film in the bottom. The water looked like skim milk. It was heavy with alkali. It was all he had.
Beside him on the floor, two boxes of shells were broken open. The floor around him was littered with empty shells, and the skin of his right hand was broken by a furrow, raw and bleeding, where a bullet had cut across the back of it.
He squinted his eyes at the desert sun and rolled his quid of chewing in his jaws. Then he spat. No head showed, no hand. Then a shot hit the stone wall near the window and whined away into the dancing heat.
He knew what they were waiting for. Eventually, he would have to sleep, but it was not that. They were waiting for the stage. By only a few minutes they had missed the last of yesterday’s stages, and they had no intention of missing the one coming today. Wells believed there were only eight or ten Apaches out there now, but that was plenty. There wouldn’t be more than three or four men on the stage, and they would be caught in the open.
From his window he could cover the front approaches to the stone barn beyond the corrals. The horses were in the
barn, hence they were reasonably secure. The Indians had rushed him just as he had put them away, and if they had dashed for the house instead of for him, he would have been headed off, killed, scalped and dying by now.
Shooting with his pistol, he had made a break for the house. One bullet made a flesh wound in his side, and he had dropped two Indians. One of them was only wounded, but Wells had finished him off as he crawled for shelter in the rocks.
It was hot and stuffy in the closed-up stage station. Sweat trickled down his face and down his body under the sagging shirt. There was no time after daybreak that Alkali Basin could be described as cool.
Wells was nearing forty and looked all of fifty when unshaven. None of his years had been easy or comfortable. He had punched cows, driven a stage, placer mined. Nobody had ever called him a pleasant man, and when he smiled, which was rare, his parted lips revealed yellowed and broken teeth. His eyes were black and hard, implacable as the eyes of the Apaches he faced across that seventy yards of alkali and sand.
No one had ever known his real name. When asked, he merely said he came from Wells, so they called him that, and it served its purpose. The Apaches hated, feared, and respected him. They were not concerned about his name.
In the two months of his stay at Alkali Basin, they had attacked him five times. Nine Apaches died in those five attacks. To an Apache, who is supple as a rattler and hard to hit as a hell diver, that meant the stage tender was a warrior of the first order. Several more had been wounded, and two of their ponies killed. It now was a matter of honor that he die.
Wells put a finger in the water bucket and passed it over his cracked lips. He thought he glimpsed a toe against the white of the Alkali behind the end of the wall. Taking careful aim, he squeezed off a shot. A startled yell rewarded him, then a hail of bullets. The storm died as soon as it began.
He crawled to the table and picked up a chunk of dried beef and cut off a piece. Putting it in his jaws, he went back to the window.
His battered hat lay on the floor. A pair of boots, whitened with alkali, stood in a corner under a stringy yellow slicker. On an extra chair was a cracked enamel washbasin containing some bloody water, a day old.
An hour passed slowly. He stared at the rocks in front of the house. They offered the only shelter available to more than one man at a time within a quarter of a mile. From the sides and back, there was no covered approach as the open alkali plain stretched off as far as the eye could reach in all directions. From the station, a slow rise of ground concealed the hills, miles away.
Almost a mile in front of the stage station lay a series of rocky ridges—foothills of the higher mountains beyond. A tongue of scattered rocks offered occasional concealment to a point some distance in front of the station. From there, to get within killing range, the Apaches had to dodge from rock to rock to get behind the low, natural wall in front of the station. Once there nothing could prevent them from lying entrenched for days and maintaining a sporadic fire on the station.
Water was no problem for them. Among the ridges, less than a mile off, was a good spring of only slightly brackish water. It was much better than that offered by the dug well at the station. Wells had killed one Indian going for water, but they offered only a fleeting, flickering target, visible for no more than a moment.
Time was running out. He knew that when he looked at the water in the bucket—yet he knew there would still be water left when his time was up. That would be when the stage reached the station. If it pulled up between the Indians and himself, they could use the stage as cover from his fire to get closer, while firing on the stage.
They knew as well as he that they had not much longer to wait. That made them careful. A little while longer and then the stage would come rolling up to them. He could, of course, fire a few shots to warn the stage, but it would be in the open and fairly close up before they could hear, unless the wind was right.
Warned, they might get away, but with spent horses, and in that heat, he doubted it. Whether they did or not, he was a gone gosling.
Suddenly, his bloodshot eyes squinted, and then slowly widened with expectant triumph. Several feet behind the rock wall was a lone, flat-faced boulder. Lifting his rifle, Wells took aim at the face of that rock, and fired.
He was rewarded by a startled yell, and he fired three times, as rapidly as he could squeeze off the shots. One Indian, struck by a ricocheting bullet, lunged to full height, emitting a shrill scream, and Wells triggered his rifle again, to make sure of that one.
The Indian toppled forward over the wall, then hastily was dragged from view.
Wells, chuckling, reloaded his rifle and fired again. An Indian lunged to his feet and raced for the shelter of the rocks toward the ridge, and Wells let him go, content to be rid of him. Then a second Indian left. Wells tried two more shots at the flat rock, then lay quiet, staring with his smarting, red-rimmed eyes at the long, white emptiness of the desert.
An hour dragged slowly by, an hour of unrelenting heat and the endless white glare. A buzzard swung in lazy circles, high overhead. Wells left the muzzle of his rifle leaning against the sill, and put his head against the wall near the window. He dozed, only coming out of it at intervals to stare toward the wall. They might be gone, and they might not. He knew Apaches.
Once he tried a swallow of the thick, alkali water, but it choked him and he was only more thirsty than before. He tried a shot at the rock, but drew no answering fire. Then, after an interval, another shot. Silence, silence and the heat.
It would soon be stage time. He was very sleepy. He leaned his head against the wall and his lids grew heavy. His head bobbed loosely on his neck. Then he slept.
An instant only. His subconscious jerked him awake, frightened at what might have happened. He fired again, three quick shots.
There was no sound, no movement.
He crawled across the floor and looked from the window facing east. Only the wheelmarks showed, the wheelmarks that reached to the crest of the low rise that obscured his eastern view of the long, alkali basin and the distant hills. He returned to his vantage point and tried another shot.
He would get out of this on the next stage after the one coming. She had been right, of course, those eighteen years ago when she picked Ed instead of him. Ed settled into a quiet, easy life, but as for himself, he had lived on, a hard, lonely life along the frontiers. He had the ranch, of course, a cozy little place, and pleasant, but memories of her always drove him away, even after eighteen years.
A long hour dragged away before he heard the stage. It came over the rise and swept down upon the station with its pursuing cloud of dust, then braked to a halt. Wells got to his feet and lounged to the door. His eyes threw a brief glance at the desert and the wall, then he walked out to the stage.
“Howdy, Jim! How was the trip?”
“Hot.” Jim climbed down from the stage top. “Where’s the hosses?”
“Been sort of busy,” Wells said. “I’ll get them.”
While Jim unhooked the spent team he went down to the stone barn. More asleep than awake he threw the harness on the horses. Jim came down to help him.
“Got the old man aboard,” he said. “Macomber.”
“Wonder if I’ll get that powder?”
“Blazes, no! Judson says all he talks about is cuttin’ expenses!”
They led the horses back and noticed that Price Macomber and his niece were out of the stage. Judson was watching them, wearily. Some little thing about the girl’s face looked familiar to Wells.
“Any fresh water, my man?” Macomber asked.
“No”—Wells looked around, his eyes bloodshot and hard—“but there’s the well.”
The name was the same, of course. Wells looked at the girl again. Price Macomber was glaring at him.
“I’d think,” Macomber replied testily, “you could at least have some water ready for the passengers!”
Wells looked around, glaring. Then he saw the girl. She was standing helple
ssly, staring at him. Perspiration had streaked the dust on her face. She was the first woman he had seen in two months.
He straightened from fastening a trace chain, staring at the girl. She paled a little, but watched him, wide-eyed and fascinated.
Macomber noticed his stare and was suddenly angry. “Here!” he demanded. “Get us some water!”
Wells turned his head and looked at Macomber. His black eyes were cold and ugly. “Get it yourself !” he said.
Molly moved away from them and looked off across the alkali. She heard her uncle talking, low-voiced, to Judson. She heard him say, “We’ll discharge this man!”
Judson was protesting. “Macomber, don’t do it. We can’t get anybody else. They are all afraid of this station because of the Apaches!”
“Nonsense! No man is indispensable!”
Molly noticed something bright and gleaming lying on the ground near a bundle of dusty hides and clothing. Curious, she started toward it. Then she stopped sharply, and her breath seemed to leave her. She felt as if she were going to faint. It was not a bunch of old hides and clothing, it was a dead man. A dead Indian.
“Uncle Price!” she cried. She turned and started on a stumbling run for the stage, her eyes great spots of darkness in her dead-white face.
“What’s the matter?” Price Macomber wheeled about. “A snake?”
“No,” she gasped, one hand on her heart, “it’s a dead man! A dead—Indian!”
Price Macomber had heard about dead Indians, but he had never seen any kind of a dead man. He put one arm around his niece and stared at it, alarmed and fascinated.
Wells had not noticed. He was helping Jim carry bundles of food and ammunition into the stage station. When Jim put his armload down, he glanced around, noticing the bright brass of the empty shells. Mentally, he calculated, and then he looked up at Wells, his eyes respectful. “Trouble?” he asked.
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 1 Page 30
