The American’s pipe, sticking carelessly in the corner of his mouth, was twisted until the wrong side was uppermost, and he held his frying pan poised in the air. He surveyed with evident surprise this apparition in the mesquite. “Hello, José!” he said. “What’s the matter?”
The Mexican spoke with the solemnity of funeral tollings: “Beel, you mus’ geet off range. We want you geet off range. We no like. Un’erstan’? We no like.”
“What you talking about?” said Bill. “No like what?”
“We no like you here. Un’erstan’? Too mooch. You mus’ geet out. We no like. Un’erstan’?”
“Understand? No; I don’t know what the blazes you’re gittin’ at.” Bill’s eyes wavered in bewilderment, and his jaw fell. “I must git out? I must git off the range? What you givin’ us?”
The Mexican unfolded his serape with his small yellow hand. Upon his face was then to be seen a smile that was gently, almost caressingly murderous. “Beel,” he said, “git out!”
Bill’s arm dropped until the frying pan was at his knee. Finally he turned again toward the fire. “Go on, you doggone little yaller rat!” he said over his shoulder. “You fellers can’t chase me off this range. I got as much right here as anybody.”
“Beel,” answered the other in a vibrant tone, thrusting his head forward and moving one foot, “you geet out or we keel you.”
“Who will?” said Bill.
“I—and the others.” The Mexican tapped his breast gracefully.
Bill reflected for a time, and then he said: “You ain’t got no manner of licence to warn me off’n this range, and I won’t move a rod. Understand? I’ve got rights, and I suppose if I don’t see ’em through, no one is likely to give me a good hand and help me lick you fellers, since I’m the only white man in half a day’s ride. Now, look; if you fellers try to rush this camp, I’m goin’ to plug about fifty per cent of the gentlemen present, sure. I’m goin’ in for trouble, an’ I’ll git a lot of you. ’Nuther thing: if I was a fine valuable caballero like you, I’d stay in the rear till the shootin’ was done, because I’m goin’ to make a particular p’int of shootin’ you through the chest.” He grinned affably, and made a gesture of dismissal.
As for the Mexican, he waved his hands in a consummate expression of indifference. “Oh, all right,” he said. Then, in a tone of deep menace and glee, he added: “We will keel you eef you no geet. They have decide’.”
“They have, have they?” said Bill. “Well, you tell them to go to the devil!”
II
Bill had been a mine owner in Wyoming, a great man, an aristocrat, one who possessed unlimited credit in the saloons down the gulch. He had the social weight that could interrupt a lynching or advise a bad man of the particular merits of a remote geographical point. However, the fates exploded the toy balloon with which they had amused Bill, and on the evening of the same day he was a professional gambler with ill fortune dealing him unspeakable irritation in the shape of three big cards whenever another fellow stood pat. It is well here to inform the world that Bill considered his calamities of life all dwarfs in comparison with the excitement of one particular evening when three kings came to him with criminal regularity against a man who always filled a straight. Later he became a cowboy, more weirdly abandoned than if he had never been an aristocrat. By this time all that remained of his former splendor was his pride, or his vanity, which was one thing which need not have remained. He killed the foreman of the ranch over an inconsequent matter as to which of them was a liar, and the midnight train carried him eastward. He became a brakeman on the Union Pacific, and really gained high honors in the hobo war that for many years has devastated the beautiful railroads of our country. A creature of ill fortune himself, he practised all the ordinary cruelties upon these other creatures of ill fortune. He was of so fierce a mien that tramps usually surrendered at once whatever coin or tobacco they had in their possession; and if afterward he kicked them from the train, it was only because this was a recognized treachery of the war upon the hoboes. In a famous battle fought in Nebraska in 1879, he would have achieved a lasting distinction if it had not been for a deserter from the United States army. He was at the head of a heroic and sweeping charge which really broke the power of the hoboes in that county for three months; he had already worsted four tramps with his own coupling stick, when a stone thrown by the ex-third-baseman of F Troop’s nine laid him flat on the prairie, and later enforced a stay in the hospital in Omaha. After his recovery he engaged with other railroads, and shuffled cars in countless yards. An order to strike came upon him in Michigan, and afterward the vengeance of the railroad pursued him until he assumed a name. This mask is like the darkness in which the burglar chooses to move. It destroys many of the healthy fears. It is a small thing, but it eats that which we call our conscience. The conductor of No. 419 stood in the caboose within two feet of Bill’s nose and called him a liar. Bill requested him to use a milder term. He had not bored the foreman of Tin Can Ranch with any such request, but had killed him with expedition. The conductor seemed to insist, and so Bill let the matter drop.
He became the bouncer of a saloon on the Bowery in New York. Here most of his fights were as successful as had been his brushes with the hoboes in the West. He gained the complete admiration of the four clean bartenders who stood behind the great and glittering bar. He was an honored man. He nearly killed Bad Hennessy, who, as a matter of fact, had more reputation than ability, and his fame moved up the Bowery and down the Bowery.
But let a man adopt fighting as his business, and the thought grows constantly within him that it is his business to fight. These phrases became mixed in Bill’s mind precisely as they are here mixed; and let a man get this idea in his mind, and defeat begins to move toward him over the unknown ways of circumstance. One summer night three sailors from the U.S.S. Seattle sat in the saloon drinking and attending to other people’s affairs in an amiable fashion. Bill was a proud man since he had thrashed so many citizens, and it suddenly occurred to him that the loud talk of the sailors was very offensive. So he swaggered upon their attention and warned them that the saloon was the flowery abode of peace and gentle silence. They glanced at him in surprise, and without a moment’s pause consigned him to a worse place than any stoker of them knew. Whereupon he flung one of them through the side door before the others could prevent it. On the sidewalk there was a short struggle, with many hoarse epithets in the air, and then Bill slid into the saloon again. A frown of false rage was upon his brow, and he strutted like a savage king. He took a long yellow night stick from behind the lunch counter and started importantly toward the main doors to see that the incensed seamen did not again enter.
The ways of sailormen are without speech, and, together in the street, the three sailors exchanged no word, but they moved at once. Landsmen would have required three years of discussion to gain such unanimity. In silence, and immediately, they seized a long piece of scantling that lay handy. With one forward to guide the battering ram and with two behind him to furnish the power, they made a beautiful curve and came down like the Assyrians on the front door of that saloon.
Strange and still strange are the laws of fate. Bill, with his kingly frown and his long night stick, appeared at precisely that moment in the doorway. He stood like a statue of victory; his pride was at its zenith; and in the same second this atrocious piece of scantling punched him in the bulwarks of his stomach, and he vanished like a mist. Opinions differed as to where the end of the scantling landed him, but it was ultimately clear that it landed him in southwestern Texas, where he became a sheepherder.
The sailors charged three times upon the plate glass front of the saloon, and when they had finished, it looked as if it had been the victim of a rural fire company’s success in saving it from the flames. As the proprietor of the place surveyed the ruins, he remarked that Bill was a very zealous guardian of property. As the ambulance surgeon surveyed Bill, he remarked that the wound was really an excavation.
III
As his Mexican friend tripped blithely away, Bill turned with a thoughtful face to his frying pan and his fire. After dinner he drew his revolver from its scarred old holster and examined every part of it. It was the revolver that had dealt death to the foreman, and it had also been in free fights in which it had dealt death to several or none. Bill loved it because its allegiance was more than that of man, horse, or dog. It questioned neither social nor moral position; it obeyed alike the saint and the assassin. It was the claw of the eagle, the tooth of the lion, the poison of the snake; and when he swept it from its holster, this minion smote where he listed, even to the battering of a far penny. Wherefore it was his dearest possession, and was not to be exchanged in southwestern Texas for a handful of rubies, nor even the shame and homage of the conductor of No. 419.
During the afternoon he moved through his monotony of work and leisure with the same air of deep meditation. The smoke of his supper-time fire was curling across the shadowy sea of mesquite when the instinct of the plainsman warned him that the stillness, the desolation, was again invaded. He saw a motionless horseman in black outline against the pallid sky. The silhouette displayed serape and sombrero, and even the Mexican spurs as large as pies. When this black figure began to move toward the camp, Bill’s hand dropped to his revolver.
The horseman approached until Bill was enabled to see pronounced American features and a skin too red to grow on a Mexican face. Bill released his grip on his revolver.
“Hello!” called the horseman.
“Hello!” answered Bill.
The horseman cantered forward. “Good evening,” he said, as he again drew rein.
“Good evenin’,” answered Bill, without committing himself by too much courtesy.
For a moment the two men scanned each other in a way that is not ill-mannered on the plains, where one is in danger of meeting horsethieves or tourists.
Bill saw a type which did not belong in the mesquite. The young fellow had invested in some Mexican trappings of an expensive kind. Bill’s eyes searched the outfit for some sign of craft, but there was none. Even with his local regalia, it was clear that the young man was of a far, black Northern city. He had discarded the enormous stirrups of his Mexican saddle; he used the small English stirrup, and his feet were thrust forward until the steel tightly gripped his ankles. As Bill’s eyes traveled over the stranger, they lighted suddenly upon the stirrups and the thrust feet, and immediately he smiled in a friendly way. No dark purpose could dwell in the innocent heart of a man who rode thus on the plains.
As for the stranger, he saw a tattered individual with a tangle of hair and beard, and with a complexion turned brick-color from the sun and whiskey. He saw a pair of eyes that at first looked at him as the wolf looks at the wolf, and then became childlike, almost timid, in their glance. Here was evidently a man who had often stormed the iron walls of the city of success, and who now sometimes valued himself as the rabbit values his prowess.
The stranger smiled genially and sprang from his horse. “Well, sir, I suppose you will let me camp here with you tonight?”
“Eh?” said Bill.
“I suppose you will let me camp here with you tonight?”
Bill for a time seemed too astonished for words. “Well,” he answered, scowling in inhospitable annoyance, “well, I don’t believe this here is a good place to camp tonight, mister.”
The stranger turned quickly from his saddle girth.
“What?” he said in surprise. “You don’t want me here? You don’t want me to camp here?”
Bill’s feet scuffled awkwardly, and he looked steadily at a cactus plant. “Well, you see, mister,” he said, “I’d like your company well enough, but—you see, some of these here greasers are goin’ to chase me off the range tonight; and while I might like a man’s company all right, I couldn’t let him in for no such game when he ain’t got nothin’ to do with the trouble.”
“Going to chase you off the range?” cried the stranger.
“Well, they said they were goin’ to do it,” said Bill.
“And—great heavens!—will they kill you, do you think?”
“Don’t know. Can’t tell till afterwards. You see, they take some feller that’s alone like me, and then they rush his camp when he ain’t quite ready for ’em, and ginerally plug ’im with a sawed-off shotgun load before he has a chance to git at ’em. They lay around and wait for their chance, and it comes soon enough. Of course a feller alone like me has got to let up watching some time. Maybe they ketch ’im asleep. Maybe the feller gits tired waiting, and goes out in broad day, and kills two or three just to make the whole crowd pile on him and settle the thing. I heard of a case like that once. It’s awful hard on a man’s mind—to git a gang after him.”
“And so they’re going to rush your camp tonight?” cried the stranger. “How do you know? Who told you?”
“Feller come and told me.”
“And what are you going to do? Fight?”
“Don’t see nothin’ else to do,” answered Bill, gloomily, still staring at the cactus plant.
There was a silence. Finally the stranger burst out in an amazed cry. “Well, I never heard of such a thing in my life! How many of them are there?”
“Eight,” answered Bill. “And now look-a here: you ain’t got no manner of business foolin’ around here just now, and you might better lope off before dark. I don’t ask no help in this here row. I know your happening along here just now don’t give me no call on you, and you’d better hit the trail.”
“Well, why in the name of wonder don’t you go get the sheriff?” cried the stranger.
“Oh, hell!” said Bill.
IV
Long, smoldering clouds spread in the western sky, and to the east silver mists lay on the purple gloom of the wilderness.
Finally, when the great moon climbed the heavens and cast its ghastly radiance upon the bushes, it made a new and more brilliant crimson of the campfire, where the flames capered merrily through its mesquite branches, filling the silence with the fire chorus, an ancient melody which surely bears a message of the inconsequence of individual tragedy—a message that is in the boom of the sea, the sliver of the wind through the grass-blades, the silken clash of hemlock boughs.
No figures moved in the rosy space of the camp, and the search of the moonbeams failed to disclose a living thing in the bushes. There was no owl-faced clock to chant the weariness of the long silence that brooded upon the plain.
The dew gave the darkness under the mesquite a velvet quality that made air seem nearer to water, and no eye could have seen through it the black things that moved like monster lizards toward the camp. The branches, the leaves, that are fain to cry out when death approaches in the wilds, were frustrated by these mystic bodies gliding with the finesse of the escaping serpent. They crept forward to the last point where assuredly no frantic attempt of the fire could discover them, and there they paused to locate the prey. A romance relates the tale of the black cell hidden deep in the earth, where, upon entering, one sees only the little eyes of snakes fixing him in menaces. If a man could have approached a certain spot in the bushes, he would not have found it romantically necessary to have his hair rise. There would have been a sufficient expression of horror in the feeling of the death-hand at the nape of his neck and in his rubber knee joints.
Two of these bodies finally moved toward each other until for each there grew out of the darkness a face placidly smiling with tender dreams of assassination. “The fool is asleep by the fire, God be praised!” The lips of the other widened in a grin of affectionate appreciation of the fool and his plight. There was some signaling in the gloom, and then began a series of subtle rustlings, interjected often with pauses during which no sound arose but the sound of faint breathing.
A bush stood like a rock in the stream of firelight, sending its long shadow backward. With painful caution the little company traveled along this shadow, and finally arrived at the re
ar of the bush. Through its branches they surveyed for a moment of comfortable satisfaction a form in a gray blanket extended on the ground near the fire. The smile of joyful anticipation fled quickly, to give place to a quiet air of business. Two men lifted shotguns with much of the barrels gone, and, sighting these weapons through the branches, pulled trigger together.
The noise of the explosions roared over the lonely mesquite as if these guns wished to inform the entire world; and as the gray smoke fled, the dodging company in back of the bush saw the blanketed form twitching. Whereupon they burst out in chorus in a laugh, and arose as merry as a lot of banqueters. They gleefully gestured congratulations, and strode bravely into the light of the fire.
Then suddenly a new laugh rang from some unknown spot in the darkness. It was a fearsome laugh of ridicule, hatred, ferocity. It might have been demoniac. It smote them motionless in their gleeful prowl, as the stern voice from the sky smites the legendary malefactor. They might have been a weird group in wax, the light of the dying fire on their yellow faces and shining athwart their eyes turned toward the darkness whence might come the unknown and the terrible.
The thing in the gray blanket no longer twitched; but if the knives in their hands had been thrust toward it, each knife was now drawn back, and its owner’s elbow was thrown upward, as if he expected death from the clouds.
This laugh had so chained their reason that for a moment they had no wit to flee. They were prisoners to their terror. Then suddenly the belated decision arrived, and with bubbling cries they turned to run; but at that instant there was a long flash of red in the darkness, and with the report one of the men shouted a bitter shout, spun once, and tumbled headlong. The thick bushes failed to impede the rout of the others.
The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane Page 45
