High Lonesome (1962)

by L'amour, Louis

  It was close in the tightly shut room, and she felt stifled. Rising with infinite careueven though her father slept more soundly in these daysushe went to the door wearing only her flimsy shift. She glanced once more toward her father, and then eased open the door and stepped out on the long veranda.

  After the hot, stuffy room the rain was cool and pleasant. She crossed the yard toward the stable, liking the feel of the mud between her toes, as she had when she was a little girl. Often when lonely she came to the horses, filled with the need to give affection and tenderness.

  A flash of lightning revealed low, massive thunderheads above the mesa’s black rim. Somewhere above the storm clouds the moon was out, and a diffused grayness lay over the rainscape.

  She walked to the barn and entered. The horses rolled their eyes at her, snorting gently in mock terror. She could see the white of their eyeballs in the vague light within the barn. She whispered to them and rubbed the neck of her mare.

  The mare’s head bobbed suddenly, and Lennie turned swiftly to see Considine come through the curtain of rain and into the barn. She drew back against the stall’s side, frightened.

  “You shouldn’t be out here at this hour, Lennie.” He spoke quietly, and her fears left her. “This is Apache country.”

  “It was so hot and stuffy,” she said.

  “I know … but you can never tell about Apaches. They don’t like to fight at night, but that doesn’t keep them from prowling.”

  She had no words with which to respond, and she stood there, wanting to say something, to break down the wall between them, to let him see that she was a woman, to feel the tenderness she suspected lay within him. She had talked with few men, and those few were friends of her father’s, and older than she.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” he said gloomily. “I’m no kind of a man to talk to a girl like you.”

  “I … I like you.”

  She said it hesitantly, feeling herself blush at saying such a thing to a man she scarcely knew. It was the first time she had said that to any man, and she was very still inside herself with the wonder of it.

  “I’m an outlaw.”

  “I know.”

  They stood together, facing each other, only a few feet apart, and on the roof above them the rain fell with a pleasant, soothing sound. The thunder had retreated sullenly into the canyons where it muttered and grumbled.

  She shivered.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “You’d better go in.”

  But she did not move to go, and he took her in his arms and kissed her gently on the lips. She held very still, trembling and frightened, yet liking it, and wanting him to hold her closer.

  Outside the rain whispered and something moved. He reached behind him, feeling for the pitchfork. She had felt his hand leave her side, but had not divined its purpose.

  “Afterwards … what will you do?”

  “Go to Mexico.”

  She knew about Mexico. Her father had told her that long ago men in trouble always went to Texas, but now they went to Mexico. Her father and mother had lived there before she was born.

  “Will you ever come back?”

  “Maybe … I don’t think so.”

  He was listening, but there had been no further sound. Had he really heard something? He considered it, and knew there had been a sound that was not of the rain and the night. He turned around, lifting the pitchfork. He cursed himself for a fool, so preoccupied with the girl that he had come out without a gun.

  Suddenly a man stepped into the barn and faced them. It was Dave Spanyer, and he had a gun in his hand.

  He gestured at Lennie. “You! Get to the room!”

  As she went by him he said from the corner of his mouth, “And get dressed. We’re pullin’ out.”

  Considine stood still, holding the pitchfork in his hand, but realizing he would not use it against this man, for he held nothing against him, and he could understand how it must seem to him.

  “Next time I see you,” Spanyer said, “you be wearin’ a gun.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions,” Considine said quietly. “There was nothing wrong. She came out to be with the horses, and I was afraid there might be Indians around.”

  “You heard me.”

  Dave Spanyer backed to the door and stepped out, and then there was only darkness and the falling rain.

  Chapter V

  There are no dawns like the dawns that come to desert lands, nor are there colors anywhere like the pastels of the wastelands. There is no atmosphere anywhere with half the sharp clarity of the desert air following a rainuand no land holds death so close, so ready, so waiting.

  Now the rain was over, the dry washes had carried away the weight of water, their swift torrents running away to leave their sands once more exposed to the relentless heat of the sun. Only the desert plants were greener, and the countless tiny roots that lay just beneath the surface had drunk greedily of the sudden rush of desert water.

  Nowhere is survival so sharply geared to the changes of weather. Seeds lie dormant, mixed with the sand; a little rain falls, and nothing happens, for the water that has fallen is not enough for the seed to sprout. Within the seed some delicate mechanism awaits sufficient water; then suddenly, when it comes, the seed sprouts and grows, other plants put out their quick leaves, and for the moment the desert is alive, glowing, beautiful.

  This morning the tracks of animals and birds were sharp on the unblemished sand, but there were no tracks of horses nor of men. Dave Spanyer’s cold eyes swung to the hills, searching for smokes, the talking smokes of the Indian that might carry word of his passing.

  He was a worried man. He had been brusque with Lennie, and he was sorry for it now; but he had a way of forgetting that she was no longer a child, that she was a young lady, and of an age when she would be thinking of a man. Yet ‘lady” was the key word in his thinking. Her mother had been a lady, and he wanted Lennie to be no less.

  Lennie was angry with him, and letting him know it. He knew her ways, for she was very much like her mother … she carried her chin high when she was mad about something, and kept her eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “There’s good men around,” he said. “I don’t want my daughter marrying a gunfighter.”

  “My mother married one!”

  That silenced him, and she knew it would. Her mother had married him, and it had been the making of him. After his rough and wasted life, she had tamed him down without making him less a man; and the few good years, the few happy years of his life had been with her.

  Uneasily, Spanyer’s thoughts returned to Considine. Grudgingly, he admired the man. Any man to whom Dutch would run second was sure to be quite a man. And the Kiowa, too. The Kiowa had always played a lone hand except for once … the one time when he had been in the outfit that tried to rob the Obaro bank … the Kiowa had been the only survivor of that raid.

  Considine did not seem like an outlaw. He had the air of a gentleman, and there was something undefined in his manner that set him apart. Dave Spanyer, who knew men, found himself doing some straight thinking about Considine.

  Just the same, the man was an outlaw. And it was unlikely they would ever meet again. Especially, Spanyer reflected grimly, if they went ahead with what they were undoubtedly planning … a strike at the bank in Obaro.

  The sun cleared the ridge behind them and lay hot on their backs. On their left, they were approaching a high rocky hogback, its rifts and gullies drifted with fine white sand.

  All around them were clumps of bear grass, saltbush, and desert five-spot. Here and there along the washes the ironwood was in bloom, the flowers appearing along with the misty green of the first leaves.

  If they could get to California, he was thinking, it would still not be too late to put in a crop.

  “Pa?”

  Spanyer glanced around, surprised.

  “There’s a smoke.”

  He followed her finger. The smoke was rising straight and tall from
somewhere beyond that hogback ridge. He watched it break, then break again, shooting up puffs of smoke.

  Turning in the saddle, he looked back, and saw behind them another smoke. It was north of their last night’s camp.

  “We’ll eat,” he said suddenly. “We may not get a chance later.”

  He glanced at the point of rocks ahead. There would be a place up there, with some protection. He slid his Winchester from the boot and they rode on toward the rocks.

  They kept wide of the rocks until they were past them, and then he swung sharply around and rode up into them. Only when he was sure there was no one there did he motion for Lennie to join him.

  He helped her down, thinking of his wife. Then he took the grub bag down. “Ain’t much,” he said, ashamed of how little there was.

  A man with a daughter should have more. He had felt that way with his wife, too, and it had been a long time before he realized that it was him she loved, and she did not care whether he had much or little. The discovery had been a real shock, for he had never thought of himself as a lovable man, and it stirred him so deeply that he was never quite the same afterward. From that day on his devotion to her had been the ruling passion of his life.

  But he had never been at ease with Lennie … maybe it was that school she had gone to. He had never been to school, and he could write only a little, and read scarcely more.

  He had known little about women, and now with a daughter who had suddenly become a woman he found himself lacking the knowledge he needed. Being a serious man with a profound sense of duty, this lack troubled and worried him.

  The idea that a decent woman could actually like being in a man’s arms went against all his upbringing. His wife had … but his wife occupied a place in his consciousness that set her apart from all other women, and he could not even consider her as a sample of womanhood. She was different. She was very special.

  He found a few sticks of dried-out wood fallen from a dead cedar up on the hill, and a few partly burned sticks left by some previous traveler. In a hollow among the rocks, where they could observe all who approached without themselves being seen, he built a very small fire.

  The wood was completely dry and made no smoke, only a faint shimmer of heat in the air. As he worked, his thoughts returned to Considine.

  No gunfighter, sheriff, or outlaw is ever completely unknown to others of his kind. The grapevine of trail herd, stagecoach, and saloon conversation allowed each to know all the others. Thus Dave Spanyer had known of Considine for a long time, had known how he wore his gun, how many men he had killed, what sort of man he was.

  A few gunfighters, such as the Earps, Hickok, Billy the Kid, John Ringo, and Wes Hardin, because of some accident that drew public attention became better known than many others who were their equal or better. Along the cattle trails the names of Johnny Bull, Joe Phy, Luke Short, Longhair Jim Courtright, Jeff Milton, Dallas Stoudenmire, King Fisher, and Ben Thompson were just as well known.

  Bending over his fire, with occasional glances up and down the trail or at the surrounding country, Dave Spanyer considered all that. He knew of Considine in the way he knew of the others, and Considine had a reputation for being a square man, and one who could stand up and trade bullet for bullet. In Spanyer’s hard, tight little world this made him a man.

  Still, there was only one end to such a life. You died gun in hand or went to prison, and Dave Spanyer was determined that no daughter of his would have anything to do with a gunfighter.

  Yet even as he said these things to himself he was thinking that Pete Runyon had been both an outlaw and a gunfighter, and now he was an officer of the law and a respected citizen. Western people were notoriously ready to forgive … they could forgive anything but lies or cowardice.

  A kangaroo rat moved nearer, sniffing inquisitively at the coffee smell. Lennie broke off a corner of a biscuit and tossed it to him. The tiny animal made a prodigious leap, all of seven feet, then stopped and looked back. Seeing there was no pursuit, the inquisitive little creature scuttled back, hopped around, and finally, after inspecting the piece of biscuit, it picked it up in its forepaws and ate daintily.

  The pause was brief. They moved on, and the sun was hot; cicadas hummed in the greasewood. They saw the trail where three peccaries had crossed the road. Once a rattler sounded off from the shade of a rock as they rode by. Above them a lone buzzard circled lazily against the vault of the brassy sky.

  Spanyer was thinking of the men he had left, knowing how they felt right now. “Well,” he said aloud, “good luck to them.”

  Lennie glanced at him. She had no need to ask of whom he spoke, for she had been thinking of them, toouof Considine at least, and the way the dark hair curled over his forehead.

  How quietly he had faced her father, neither asking for nor refusing trouble! Nor had he made any excuses. The only words had been to clear her, the simplest words he could have spoken, and without apology.

  “Pa … “

  He looked over at his daughter, aware of the change in her, for she was no longer angry with him.

  “Do you think they’ll make it?”

  He considered that in the slow way he had; considered the town of Obaro, and then he thought about Considine. After a while he commented, “He’ll do it if anybody can.” He paused briefly “The trouble is, Kitten, that’s only the beginning. After that they chase you, and you run, if you’re smart. Maybe you get away that time, but you can’t always get away. When a man lifts his hand outside the law, he sets every man’s hand against him.

  “And you don’t make anything. Leaving honesty out of it, you just can’t make it that way. Mighty few outlaws ever sit down to figure out how little they make over the years.

  “Knew a big-time outlaw once … a man everybody talked about as being smart. Why, that man had spent a third of his grown-up life in prison, had two death sentences hanging over him, and he was living on handouts from other outlaws and folks.”

  Spanyer narrowed his eyes at the horizon where the heat waves shimmered above the desert. In the southwest, a smoke was rising…

  Chapter VI

  Considine looked at his big silver watch. “You boys come into town at twenty minutes to one. I can promise you ten minutes … fifteen maybe.”

  Hardy shot him a quick glance. “That’s a long fightuHe’s a tough man.” He grinned at them, a reckless grin they all knew. “And I’d better be.”

  He eased himself in the saddle. “And no shooting. Only if it is absolutely necessary. Once the shooting starts, you boys will be bucking some of the best shots in the West. I knowuI’ve shot against them in target matches.”

  He started off, looked back once and saw them wave, and it gave him a turn to realize what he was leading them into … and they were good men. Good men, and tough.

  His thoughts turned to Lennie. It was strange, how right something like that could seem when he had only met the girl. It came to him suddenly that he could not remember ever feeling that way about Mary … Had it simply been that he was young and Mary was the prettiest girl around?

  Or was it that he had finally grown up? His father had said something to him once that he had never forgotten. “Folks talk a lot about the maternal feeling in women, but they say nothing about man’s need to protect and care for someone; yet the one feeling is as basic as the other.”

  There could be something to that. When he was a youngster he had believed his father was out of date and didn’t know what was going on, but as he grew older he realized it had been he himself who didn’t know what it was all about. And now he had nobody to care for, and nobody who cared a thing about him.

  He had drifted into crime when it seemed like a prank. The trouble was, it wasn’t any prank. When you threaten men or steal their property it no longer is a prank. It’s man stuff, and not very good man stuff, either…

  Maybe that was why Lennie appealed to him, because she needed somebody. She needed a man and she needed a home. Maybe it was because he wan
ted to give her the things a woman needs … and no woman was much account without a home or a man, or both. Anything else was unimportant. All the rest was play-acting.

  He drew rein when he came near enough to see the town, and there was little enough of it to see. There were three long streets and a few cross streets, and the bank was there on the main street, right in plain sight. The corral at the livery stable was at the other end of town.

  If people knew he was in town they would be expecting a fight, and everybody would be excited and ready for it. The first thing was to let them know he was in town, and the second was to make Pete Runyon good and mad. That would not be easy, for Pete was a cool-headed man who thought things out carefully.

  Mary, though … he must see Mary. That would make Pete mad if anything would.

  The crowd would gather fast, once word of the fight got around. The fight would draw everybody down near the corrals, and probably only one man would be left in the bank. The holdup should take no more than five minutes. It could be a smooth, fast job, and with luck they would be off and away before the fight was over.

  If something happened so that guns were fired, then he would lose his crowd fast, and he would have to get out of town the best way he knew how. But what if Pete grew suspicious and started putting two and two together? Then his tail would really be in the crack.

  Considine started his horse again. He drew his gun and spun the cylinder, then checked the spare gun he always carried in his saddlebag.

  The horse he was riding was strange to him, but Honey Chavez said it was the fastest he had. Their own horses would be waiting for them at the box canyon hideout, so they could run these hard getting away, make a quick switch, and head south on their fresh horses.

  The great difficulty, of course, was in these things for which one could not plan successfullyuthe unexpected, the mistakes made by others which could not be foreseen. A man packing a gun might walk into the bank at the wrong time; somebody might leave the bank and then return; or somebody with a rifle handy might be in one of the second-floor windows.