The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  They splashed into the water-hole and drank thirstily and long. They stood there as though they were luxuriating in the feel of more water than they could drink, and one horse blew the moisture from his nostrils with a sound that made Happy Jack jump.

  After a few minutes that seemed an hour to those who waited with fingers crooked upon gun-triggers, the horse that looked vaguely like Johnny turned away from the water-hole and sneezed while he appeared to be wondering what to do next. He moved slowly toward the packs that were thrown down just where they had been taken from the horses, and began nosing tentatively about.

  The others loitered still at the water-hole, save one—the buckskin, by his lighter look in the dark—that came over to Johnny. The two horses nosed the packs. A dull sound of clashing metal came to the ears of the Happy Family.

  “Hey! Get outa that grain, doggone your fool hide,” Pink called out impulsively, crawling over his saddle and catching his foot in the stirrup leather so that he came near going headlong.

  Applehead yelled something, but Pink had recovered his balance and was running to save the precious horsefeed from waste, and Johnny from foundering. There might have been two Indiana on every horse in sight, but Pink was not thinking of that possibility just then.

  Johnny whirled guiltily away from the grain bag, licking his lips and blowing dust from his nostrils. Pink went up to him and slipped a rope around his neck. “Where’s that bell?” he called out in his soft treble. “Or do you think we better tie the old son-of-a-gun up and be sure of him?”

  “Aw,” said Happy Jack disgustedly a few minutes later, when the Happy Family had crawled out of their ambush and were feeling particularly foolish. “Nex’ time old granny Furrman says Injuns t’ this bunch, somebody oughta gag him.”

  “I notice you waited till he’d gone outa hearing before you said that,” Luck told him drily. “We’re going to put out extra guards tonight, just the same. And I guess you can stand the first shift, Happy, up there on the ridge—you’re so sure of things!”

  CHAPTER XV

  “NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!”

  Indians are Indians, though they wear the green sweater and overalls of civilization and set upon their black hair the hat made famous by John B. Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity. You may travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep or hoeing corn or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or you may watch them dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still think that civilization is fast erasing the savage instincts from their natures. You will be partly right—but you will also be partly mistaken. An Indian is always an Indian, and a Navajo Indian carries a thinner crust of civilization than do some others; as I am going to illustrate.

  As you have suspected, the Happy Family was not following the trail of Ramon Chavez and his band. Ramon was a good many miles away in another direction; unwittingly the Happy Family was keeping doggedly upon the trail of a party of renegade Navajos who had been out on a thieving expedition among those Mexicans who live upon the Rio Grande bottomland. Having plenty of reasons for hurrying back to their stronghold, and having plenty of lawlessness to account for, when they realized that they were being followed by nine white men who had four packed horses with them to provide for their needs on a long journey, it was no more than natural that the Indians should take it for granted that they were being pursued, and that if they were caught they would be taken back to town and shut up in that evil place which the white men called their jail.

  When it was known that the nine men who followed had twice recovered the trail after sheep and cattle had trampled it out, the renegades became sufficiently alarmed to call upon their tribesmen for help. And that was perfectly natural and sensible from their point of view.

  Now, the Navajos are peaceable enough if you leave them strictly alone and do not come snooping upon their reservation trying to arrest somebody. But they don’t like jails, and if you persist in trailing their lawbreakers you are going to have trouble on your hands. The Happy Family, with Luck and Applehead, had no intention whatever of molesting the Navajos; but the Navajos did not know that, and they acted according to their lights and their ideas of honorable warfare.

  Roused to resistance in behalf of their fellows, they straightway forsook their looms, where they wove rugs for tourists, and the silver which they fashioned into odd bracelets and rings; and the flocks of sheep whose wool they used in the rugs and they went upon a quiet, crafty warpath against these persistent white men.

  They stole their horses and started them well on the trail back to Albuquerque—since it is just as well to keep within the white men’s law, if it may be done without suffering any great inconvenience. They would have preferred to keep the horses, but they decided to start them home and let them go. You could not call that stealing, and no one need go to jail for it. They failed to realize that these horses might be so thoroughly broken to camp ways that they would prefer the camp of the Happy Family to a long trail that held only a memory of discomfort; they did not know that every night these horses were given grain by the camp-fire, and that they would remember it when feeding time came again. So the horses, led by wise old Johnny, swung in a large circle when their Indian drivers left them, and went back to their men.

  Then the Navajos, finding that simple maneuver a failure—and too late to prevent its failing without risk of being discovered and forced into an open fight—got together and tried something else; something more characteristically Indian and therefore more actively hostile. They rode in haste that night to a point well out upon the fresh trail of their fleeing tribesmen, where the tracks came out of a barren, lava-encrusted hollow to softer soil beyond. They summoned their squaws and their half-grown papooses armed with branches that had stiff twigs and answered the purpose of brooms. With great care about leaving any betraying tracks of their own until they were quite ready to leave a trail, a party was formed to represent the six whom the Happy Family bad been following. These divided and made off in different directions, leaving a plain trail behind them to lure the white men into the traps which would be prepared for them farther on.

  When dawn made it possible to do so effectively, the squaws began to whip out the trail of the six renegade Indians, and the chance footprints of those who bad gone ahead to leave the false trail for the white men to follow. Very painstakingly the squaws worked, and the young ones who could be trusted. Brushing the sand smoothly across a hoofprint here, and another one there; walking backward, their bodies bent, their sharp eyes scanning every little depression, every faint trace of the passing of their tribesmen; brushing, replacing pebbles kicked aside by a hoof, wiping out completely that trail which the Happy Family bad followed with such persistence, the squaws did their part, while their men went on to prepare the trap.

  Years ago—yet not so many after all—the mothers of these squaws, and their grandmothers, had walked backward and stooped with little branches in their hands to wipe out the trail of their warriors and themselves to circumvent the cunning of the enemy who pursued. So had they brushed out the trail when their men had raided the ranchos of the first daring settlers, and had driven off horses and cattle into the remoter wilderness.

  And these, mind you, were the squaws and bucks whom you might meet any day on the streets in Albuquerque, padding along the pavement and staring in at the shop windows, admiring silken gowns with marked-down price tags, and exclaiming over flaxen-haired dolls and bright ribbon streamers; squaws and bucks who brought rugs and blankets to sell, and who would bargain with you in broken English and smile and nod in friendly fashion if you spoke to them in Spanish or paid without bickering the price they asked for a rug. You might see them in the fifteen-cent store, buying cheap candy and staring in mute admiration at all the gay things piled high on the tables. Remember that, when I tell you what more they did out here in the wilderness. Remember that and do not imagine that I am trying to take you back into the untamed days of the pioneers.r />
  Luck and the Happy Family—so well had the squaws done their work—passed unsuspectingly over the wiped-out trail, circled at fault on the far side of the rocky gulch for an hour or so and then found the false trail just as the Indian decoys had intended that they should do. And from a farther flat topped ridge a group of Indians with Dutch hair-cuts and Stetson hats and moccasins (the two hall-marks of two races) watched them take the false trail, and looked at one another and grinned sourly.

  The false trail forked, showing that the six had separated into two parties of three riders, each aiming to pass—so the hoofprints would lead one to believe—around the two ends of a lone hill that sat squarely down on the mesa like a stone treasure chest dropped there by the gods when the world was young.

  The Happy Family drew rein and eyed the parting of the ways dubiously.

  “Wonder what they did that for?” Andy Green grumbled, mopping his red face irritatedly. “We’ve got trouble enough without having them split up on us.”

  “From the looks, I should say we’re overhauling the bunch,” Luck hazarded. “They maybe met on the other side of this butte somewhere. And the tracks were made early this morning, I should say. How about it, Applehead?”

  “Well, they look fresher ’n what we bin follerin’ before,” Applehead admitted. “But I don’t like this here move uh theirn, and I’m tellin’ yuh so. The way—”

  “I don’t like anything about ’em,” snapped Luck, standing in his stirrups as though that extra three inches would let him see over the hill. “And I don’t like this tagging along behind, either. You take your boys and follow those tracks to the right, Applehead. I and my bunch will go this other way. And ride! We can’t be so awfully much behind. If they meet, we’ll meet where they do. If they scatter, we’ll have to scatter too, I reckon. But get’em is the word, boys!”

  “And where,” asked Applehead with heavy irony, while he pulled at his mustache, “do yuh calc’late we’ll git t’gether agin if we go scatterin’ out?”

  Luck looked at him and smiled his smile. “We aren’t any of us tenderfeet, exactly,” he said calmly. “We’ll meet at the jail when we bring in our men, if we don’t meet anywhere else this side. But if you land your men, come back to that camp where we lost the horses. That’s one, place we know has got grass and water both. If you come and don’t see any sign of us, wait a day before you start back to town. We’ll do the same. And leave a note anchored in the crack of that big bowlder by the spring, telling the news. We’ll do the same if we get there first and don’t wait for you.” He hesitated, betraying that even in his eagerness he too dreaded the parting of the ways. “Well, so long, boys—take care of yourselves.”

  “Well, now, I ain’t so dang shore—” Applehead began querulously.

  But Luck only grinned and waved his hand as he led the way to the south on the trail that obviously had skirted the side of the square butte. The four who went with him looked back and waved non-committal adieu; and Big Medicine, once he was fairly away, shouted back to them to look out for Navvies, and then laughed with a mirthless uproar that deceived no one into thinking he was amused. Pink and Weary raised their voices sufficiently to tell him where he could go, and settled themselves dejectedly in their saddles again.

  “Well, I ain’t so darned sure, either,” Lite Avery tardily echoed Applehead’s vague statement, in the dry way he had of speaking detached sentiments from the mental activities that went on behind his calm, mask-like face and his quiet eyes. “Something feels snaky around here today.”

  Applehead looked at him with a glimmer of relief in his eyes, but he did not reply to the foreboding directly. “Boys, git yore rifles where you kin use ’em quick,” he advised them grimly. “I kin smell shootin’ along this dang trail.”

  Pink’s dimples showed languidly for a moment, and he looked a question at Weary. Weary grinned answer and pulled his rifle from the “boot” where it was slung under his right leg, and jerked the lever forward until a cartridge slid with a click up into the chamber; let the hammer gently down with his thumb and laid the gun across his thighs.

  “She’s ready for bear,” he observed placidly.

  “Well, now, you boys show some kinda sense,” Applehead told them when Pink had followed Weary’s example. “Fellers like Happy and Bud, they shore do show their ign’rance uh this here, dang country, when they up ’n’ laff at the idee uh trouble—now I’m tellin’ yuh!”

  From the ridge which was no more than a high claw of the square butte, four Indians in greasy, gray Stetsons with flat crowns nodded with grim satisfaction, and then made baste to point the toes of their moccasins down to where their unkempt ponies stood waiting. They were too far away to, see the shifting of rifles to the laps of the riders, or perhaps they would not have felt quite so satisfied with the steady advance of the four who had taken the right-hand fork of the trail. They could not even tell just which four men made up the party. They did not greatly care, so long as the force of the white men was divided. They galloped away upon urgent business of their own, elated because their ruse had worked out as they had planned and hoped.

  Applehead took a restrained pull at the canteen, cocked his eyes back at the butte they had just passed, squinted ahead over the flat waste that shimmered with heat to the very skyline that was notched and gashed crudely with more barren hills, and then, screwing the top absent-mindedly on the canteen-mouth, leaned and peered long at the hoofprints they were following. Beside him Lite Avery, tall and lean to the point of being skinny, followed his movements with quiet attention and himself took to studying more closely the hoofprints in the sandy soil.

  Applehead looked up, gauged the probable direction the trail was taking, and gave a grunt.

  “You kin call me a fool,” he said with a certain challenge in his tone, “but this yere trail don’t look good to me, somehow. These yere tracks, they don’t size up the same as they done all the way out here. ’N’ another thing, they ain’t aimed t’ meet up with the bunch that Luck’s trailin’. We’re headed straight out away from whar Luck’s headed. ’N’ any way yuh look at it, we’re headed into country whar there ain’t no more water’n what the rich man got in hell. What would any uh Ramon’s outfit want to come away off in here fur? They ain’t nothin’ up in here to call ’em.”

  “These,” said Lite suddenly, “are different horse-tracks. They’re smaller, for one thing. The bunch we followed out from the red machine rode bigger horses.”

  “And carried honey on one side and fresh meat on the other; and one horse was blind in the right eye,” enlarged Pink banteringly, remembering the story of the Careful Observer in an old schoolreader of his childhood days.

  “Yes, how do you make that out, Lite? I never noticed any difference in the tracks.”

  “The stride is a little shorter today for one thing.” Lite looked around and grinned at Pink, as though he too remembered the dromedary loaded with honey and meat. “Ain’t it, Applehead?”

  “It shore is,” Applehead testified, his face bent toward the hot ground. “Ain’t ary one uh the three that travels like they bin a travelin’—’n’ that shore means something, now I’m tellin’ yuh!” He straightened and stared worriedly ahead of them again. “Uh course, they might a picked up fresh horses,” he admitted. “I calc’late they needed ’em bad enough, if they ain’t been grainin’ their own on the trip.”

  “We didn’t see any signs of their horses being turned loose anywhere along,” Lite pointed out with a calm confidence that he was right.

  Still, they followed the footprints even though they were beginning to admit with perfect frankness their uneasiness. They were swinging gradually toward one of those isolated bumps of red rockridges which you will find scattered at random through certain parts of the southwest. Perhaps they held some faint hope that what lay on the other side of the ridge would be more promising, just as we all find ourselves building air-castles upon what lies just over the horizon which divides present facts from
future possibilities. Besides, these flat-faced ledges frequently formed a sharp dividing line between barren land and fertile, and the hoofprints led that way; so it was with a tacit understanding that they would see what lay beyond the ridge that they rode forward.

  Suddenly Applehead, eyeing the rocks speculatively, turned his head suddenly to look behind and to either side like one who seeks a way of escape from sudden peril.

  “Don’t make no quick moves, boys,” he said, waving one gloved band nonchalantly toward the flat land from which they were turning, “but foller my lead ’n’ angle down into that draw off here. Mebbe it’s deep enough to put us outa sight, ’n’ mebbe it ain’t. But we’ll try it.”

  “What’s up? What did yuh see?” Pink and Weary spoke in a duet, urging their horses a little closer.

  “You fellers keep back thar ’n’ don’t act excited!” Applehead eyed them sternly over his shoulder. “I calc’late we’re just about t’ walk into a trap.” He bent—on the side away from the ridge—low over his horse’s shoulder and spoke while he appeared to be scanning the ground. “I seen gun-shine up among them rocks, er I’m a goat. ’N’ if it’s Navvies, you kin bet they got guns as good as ours, and kin shoot mighty nigh as straight as the best of us—except Lite, uh course, that’s a expert.” He pointed aimlessly at the ground and edged toward the draw.

  “Ef they think we’re jest follerin’ a stray track, they’ll likely hold off till we git back in the trail ’n’ start comin’ on agin,” he explained craftily, still pointing at the ground ahead of him and still urging his horse to the draw. “Ef they suspicion ’t we’re shyin’ off from the ridge, they’ll draw a fine bead ’n’ cut loose. I knowed it,” he added with a lugubrious complacency. “I told ye all day that I could smell trouble a-comin’; I knowed dang well ’t we’d stir up a mess uh fightin’ over here. I never come onto this dang res’vation yit, that I didn’t have t’ kill off a mess uh Navvies before I got offen it agin.