Big Bend

by John Benteen

  Ramsey sank back, panting, exhausted. Above him, the high, blue bowl of the sky turned to brass as the sun climbed to zenith. Against the limitless space, black flakes swirled and circled—vultures.

  Presently, he regained strength and tried again. He fought the dead horse, pushed, pulled, shoved at it savagely, desperately. But as if, in death, it bore a grudge, it would not let him go. Now Ramsey was more afraid than sick. Even if he didn’t die here, a few more hours and gangrene in that pinned leg was a certainty. It seemed impossible that he could die—of thirst, dehydration, starvation—not a mile from his own house; but unless he worked that leg free, it would not be impossible at all.

  If he yielded to panic, all was lost. Breathing hard, fighting back fear and frustration that made him want to scream, he grasped the saddle horn and pulled himself into an awkward sitting position. Craning his head, he looked around as far as he could.

  The grass of the empty pastures rippled under a slight breeze. The horse had fallen not far from the wire gate, and the gate itself was wide open. To one side of it lay the body of the first man he had ever killed, face up.

  Ramsey twisted farther around, straining every muscle. Then he tensed. Far out in the brood-mare pasture, there was a solitary dot, mouse-gray against the golden grass.

  Hope rose in Ramsey, but he fought it down. It could be one of the Mexican cattle, with which he worked his horses. Or it could be one of the young geldings that had wandered into the other pasture—maybe one too young to be fully trained. But there was a chance that the raiders had missed a full-grown brood mare in the darkness, and if that were the case ...

  Ramsey licked dried and cracked lips. He sucked in a deep breath, put fingers to his teeth, and blew a quivering parody of a whistle.

  The mouse-colored dot did not move.

  Ramsey mustered saliva, soaked his lips, rolled his tongue around his mouth, and this time it was better, a loud, piercing sound.

  He thought the gray dot moved. He whistled again. Then the dot was in full motion, trotting toward him through the hock-high grass. And as it neared, he saw that it was Gibson Girl, a nine-year-old mare. As she approached, she nickered curiously.

  Meanwhile, Ramsey was busy. Grunting with effort, he unlatched the rope on his saddle, tied one end hard to the horn. Now, as the mare came up to the fence, he awkwardly tried to spread out a loop.

  Gibson Girl backed away from the tangled wire and would not cross it. That was just as well, Ramsey thought; she’d only tangle herself hopelessly. But what he needed was for her to come to him through the gate.

  So now he began to talk her to him, in a crooning, encouraging voice. She was gentle, well-trained and intelligent; there was no reason for her not to come; and in a moment, she trotted down the fence line, and Ramsey twisted to see what she would do.

  She reached the gate; then she balked, planting her feet, tossing her head, snorting loudly. She did not like the dead man directly in her path; it was something new, frightening. Ramsey crooned to her desperately, but instead of moving forward, she snorted again and backed away.

  She was spooky now, Ramsey saw despairingly. Though his throat was dry, he kept up his litany of encouragement and blandishment. Gibson Girl walled her eyes, trotted off in the direction from which she’d come, paused, snorted, and then came back toward the fence. But she halted well clear of it, liking that tangled wire and the carcass on the other side of it no better than she had the dead man. She was a good twenty feet away and nervous as a cat from the smell of death and the excitement of the night, and Ramsey knew she would come no closer and that it was now or never.

  It would be the most important throw with a rope he had ever made—and the most impossible. Propped on one elbow, tangled in fence—But he whirled the loop a couple of times as best he could and prayed as he let it sail.

  Maybe, he thought later, he was entitled to that much miracle after everything else. The loop sailed wide, but Gibson Girl was startled by it, jumped sideways, and rammed her head straight through it. As the line slid tight through the honda, the mare, unused to being roped, gave way to panic and turned and tried to run. When she did, the rope snapped taut with strain, and as it brought her up short, her own weight lifted the dead horse by the saddle horn. Not much, but a fraction of an inch, and that was enough for Sam Ramsey to slide frantically out from under, tangled stirrup and all.

  Then, gasping and exhausted, he fell back, while Gibson Girl fought nervously at the end of the line. He knew that he was in for pain, but how much, he could not guess. Until the blood started to flow, until the pain came, he did not even know whether he had a broken bone.

  The pain came, all right, enough of it to make him grit his teeth and curse and hammer the ground with his clenched fists. Gibson Girl quit her fighting and stood motionless at rope’s end, looking at him with ears pricked curiously.

  After an eternity, the agony subsided a bit. Carefully, Ramsey untangled himself from the wire. Then, with tremendous effort, he got his good leg under him and pushed himself erect. But his knee buckled; he fell forward against a standing fence post and clung there.

  At last, he tried his weight on his left leg. To his surprise, it bore him with no additional agony, and he let out a sound of relief—nothing was broken in it. He took a stumbling step, then another, and then another still; and at last he was leaning against Gibson Girl’s withers, and she was nuzzling him gently.

  When he could move freely again, he dragged the saddle off the dead gelding and put it on the mare. He found his empty Colt in the grass a dozen feet away, and reloaded it and thrust it in its holster. Then he examined the dead man.

  In this sun, the body had already blackened and begun to swell, but the sightless eyes were blue, the hair and mustache fair, the clothes not Mexican, but ordinary Texas range garb. In the pockets there was nothing but a couple of gold double eagles, a few pesos, a hawk-billed knife, and cigarette makings.

  The vultures were circling lower. Ramsey tied Gibson Girl up short and fought her until he got the body up behind the saddle and lashed in place. Then he mounted and began the dismal circuit of his pastures.

  They were empty, except for a handful of wild-eyed steers and the body of Dancing Man. A vulture dropping low led Ramsey to the carcass, its legs jutting stiffly. He dismounted and examined it, his mouth a thin line. The horse had been shot four times. Ramsey swore softly: Not only had the stallion been immensely valuable, but he had raised and trained it from a foal. Fierce and aggressive in the protection of his mares from predators, Dancing Man had been as gentle with Ramsey as a pet dog. Ramsey looked up at the vultures and cursed them; but that was all he could do. Then he mounted up and rode on.

  Geldings, mares, foals—they were all gone. The wire along the south side of the pasture had been cut for nearly two hundred feet, and the herd’s trail was clear. Beyond the wire, chaparral began, a spiky wilderness of cactus and mesquite. This was part of Harrigan’s ranch, overgrazed and gone to wasteland, a deserted corner never patrolled by Lazy H riders. Ramsey sketched a map of the country in his brain. Men who knew it could follow these thickets all the way across the Harrigan ranch and out the other side and still travel by daylight without too much fear of being spotted. Everything in Ramsey shrieked for him to plunge into the brush, along that clearly marked trail, but he kept Gibson Girl tight-reined. The rustlers had at least a six-hour start on him and they were ten or twenty to one against him. Then he pulled Gibson Girl around and made her give all she had on the ride to North Wells.

  ~*~

  Sheriff Shan Williams said, “So they finally got around to you after all, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Sam Ramsey said impatiently.

  “Well, you got one of ’em anyway. That’s better than Denning did.”

  “Goddammit, Shan,” Ramsey said, “there ain’t no time to stand here talkin’. If you can git some men together—”

  Williams looked at him for a moment, dark eyes in a hawk’s face expressionl
ess. “From where?”

  “From the town—”

  “All right,” Williams said. “I got two deputies here, and you and me, that makes four. And there’s ten, twenty of ’em, you say?”

  “Call Harrigan on the phone! Damn it, they crossed his land. Call Denning—this is his chance!”

  “Yeah,” Williams said. It was cool here in his thick-walled adobe office. He strode across it to a map of the county pinned on the wall. It covered a huge expanse; there were states in the Union smaller than this. “Six hours, you say, before you got loose from that dead horse. Another hour to git to town. Now, say, two hours at the least to git some men together. That’s nine hours start.” He dragged his finger down the map. “Time for ’em to git down here, off the Lazy H, into this broken country. Even if we could swing around and cut ’em off there, which we’d have to kill horses ridin’ ’em to do, they could stand off an army in there. And do what they did to Tom and his bunch, just sift on out ahead of us, down into deep Big Bend, then across the Rio and into Mexico.” He walked back to his desk and sat down. “It ain’t no use, Sam.”

  “You’re a hell of a sheriff, to talk that way!” Ramsey flared.

  “I’ll excuse that, Sam,” Williams said calmly. “You’re at the end of your string. But the fact remains, maybe I could git four, five men together. That ain’t enough. Dammit, Sam, you wouldn’t ride with Denning and them when they asked you. You think they’re gonna saddle up again today and come running because you’ve been hit now? After just comin’ back yesterday, dead-beat and two men lost?” He shook his head. “When I told ’em it was your stock we was after, they’d just laugh in my face.”

  Ramsey stared at him a moment. “I see,” he said thinly.

  “Sam, I know how you feel, but I can’t do the impossible. If it was anybody but you—”

  “I know,” Ramsey said. “I know.”

  “Once the Rangers either catch or give up on Chico Cana, they’ve promised they’ll come down in here and clean up this bunch. But Cana’s killed men; these rustlers haven’t. The Rangers gotta git him first, and they got every man they can muster pulled off station and patrollin’ around Presidio, over west. Meanwhile, Tom and I wired the Governor, both Senators, and the Commandant at Bliss yesterday afternoon. Maybe in a week or two, the Army will—”

  “In a week or two, my horses will be across the Rio.” Ramsey stood there a moment, then sat down across the desk from Williams and lifted a penstaff out of its holder. “Shan, I’d like to borrow a piece of paper.”

  Williams blinked at him, then took a ruled tablet from his desk and passed it across.

  Sam Ramsey began to write. For a long time the scratch of the pen was the only sound in the sheriff’s office. Then Ramsey shoved the pad back across the desk. “Witness that for me, will you?”

  Williams picked up what Ramsey had written and began to read, with a deepening frown.

  “It’s a will,” Ramsey said. “If you witness it, it ought to be legal. I got this aunt in Pennsylvania—I never seen her, but she’s my only living relative. If I don’t come back in six months, sell my place at auction and send the money to her—there’s the address down at the bottom.”

  Williams slapped down the pad. “Don’t be a goddam fool, Ramsey. You can’t go down in that Big Bend country alone. Tom Denning went down there with twenty men, and you saw what happened to him!”

  “I can’t help it,” Ramsey said. “The trail’s still fresh and I got to follow it. Shan, I got to try to git my horses back.”

  “But not alone. Those rustlers and Mescans’ll eat you alive.” His voice was sharp, edged with authority. “No. I won’t allow it.”

  “I don’t know of any way you can stop me,” Ramsey said.

  Williams grinned without humor. “You forgot that dead body you brought in. We’ll hold an inquest on it. But not for a week. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll lock you up as a material witness. By then, maybe we’ll have word from the Army—”

  “Screw the Army,” Ramsey said. “And don’t you try to lock me up, Shan.” His eyes were expressionless as he stood up.

  Williams stared at him for a moment. Then he said, “All right, goddammit, it’s your funeral. Go ahead.”

  “Thanks,” Ramsey said wryly. Then, in a different tone, he said, “Don’t forget, Shan. One man don’t stir the dust of twenty.”

  “Nor throw the lead,” Williams said heavily, getting up. Then he put out a hand. “All right, Sam. Good luck.”

  Ramsey took it. “Thanks, Shan. I’ll be back when I find my horses.”

  “Yeah,” Williams said, and he was still standing there when Ramsey turned and went out.

  ~*~

  Impatient as he was, another full day passed before Ramsey could get under way. A man didn’t go into bad country like that without careful preparation. Sam Ramsey’s mind was methodical and dogged; maybe the horse-thieves would get him, but foolish to let the desert do their work for them.

  The County Land Office had a few poor maps of the deep Big Bend—sketchy affairs compiled by the Army in the old Apache-chasing days. Ramsey studied them carefully.

  The Big Bend country as a whole was an immense triangle within the sharp turn of the Rio Grande that gave the southern part of west Texas its outline. North Wells and the good ranching country around it filled part of the triangle’s northeast corner. But, traveling south, the range land dwindled away; finally, about where the Santiago Mountains sliced across the region from northwest to southeast, it ended nearly completely, and the badlands began. It was the area south of the Santiagos that Ramsey studied intently on the maps. At least the main mountain ranges were indicated and the location of a few creeks, springs, and water holes—most of them, now, in early May, would be dry.

  Still, rough as they were, the maps gave an indication of the immensity of that wasteland in the deep Big Bend. Three thousand or more square miles of mountains, deserts, and rock, with only a pathetic skein of rough trails leading to the few isolated ranches or the occasional mine within its reaches. Down there, he’d heard, there were arroyos that could swallow up the whole town of North Wells, canyons that could hide half the population of Texas. Across the border, there were armies of Mexican revolutionaries and gangs of bandits, even still a few bunches of half-wild Indians. There were wild horses and burros, deer and javelinas, mountain lions, rattlers, scorpions, and maybe even an occasional jaguar. And somewhere in there, as well, were the men who had his Morgans—men who were the last wild remnant of the old lawless days, outlaws and army deserters who preferred the bleak freedom of the desert to jail or hanging ...

  He had no idea how he was going to find them or what he would do when he did. All he knew was that he had to try to get his horses back.

  Down in Mex town on the south side of North Wells, he bought four goatskin waterbags, checking them carefully for leaks or flaws. He had plenty of ammunition for the .45 and the Winchester at home, as well as the rest of the gear he needed.

  Besides Gibson Girl, three geldings remained in his corral. One of these, Sunrise, was fully broken; the other two needed a lot of work, but they could be ridden and would do for pack animals. He worked far into the night assembling his outfit: pack saddles; bags of grain for the horses; guns and ammunition; binoculars; canteens; first-aid equipment; a light tarp for shelter against brutal sun or driving night wind; ropes, hobbles, picket pins ... When he was finished, he showered—probably the last bath he’d have in weeks—and slept for three hours. He awakened with the sun, and it took him another hour to get the animals loaded. Then he mounted Gibson Girl and, leading his pack string, set out. There was an advantage to riding the mare—anxious to rejoin her bunch, she would serve almost as a bloodhound, helping to keep him to the trail, even if it dimmed.

  He rode directly back to the pastures, where the vultures and coyotes had not left much of Dancing Man. Then he pushed through the gap in his fence and into Harrigan’s chaparral.

  The trail was a little wind-bl
own, yet still easy to read. But it was slow-going to follow it. The chaparral was a jungle of vicious thorns and barbs, and he did not want his horses torn by it. His jaw set as he saw that the raiders had not been troubled by such considerations; frequently, there were blood spots on the trail. The bastards, he thought. Every horse in that bunch will have fly-blown wounds in another day ...

  Chapter Four

  He made poor time the first day. Unused to loads, the pack horses gave him continual trouble; moreover, the trail led through miles more of the nearly impenetrable tangle of mesquite and cactus. The second day was better; he came clear of the chaparral, and the land stretched open and rolling before him, with blue mountains in the distance. Those were the Santiagos, and once he was over them, he’d be truly in the badlands. It would be like crossing the Pecos in the old days, he thought; there was no law south of the Santiagos.

  Now, hour by hour, the country changed. Grass and fences were far behind. This was a tableland of sand, gravel, creosote bush and prickly pear. Pointed toward the Santiagos, the trail, though wind-blown, was easy to read. The rustlers were sacrificing concealment to speed; and twice in those two days, Ramsey came across dead foals, already gnawed by vultures and coyotes. Too young to keep up with the herd, they’d been left where they’d fallen, and no one had even spent a cartridge to put them out of their misery. After each such discovery, Sam Ramsey would push his own animals hard, until common sense returned and he reined in to a saner gait.

  On the second night, he camped within fifteen miles of the Santiagos, on the rim of a barranca forty feet deep, from the bottom of which welled a little spring. The herd had been watered here, and Ramsey found two more dead foals up the ravine. Though everything within him shrieked for him to move on, he made camp. The rustlers might have strung out sentries along their backtrail, and he did not want to overreach and run into them in darkness. Besides, he was getting an idea of the terrain ahead—a crazy-quilt of jumbled hills and draws and sand-flats ... not the kind of country to take a half-raw pack-string through at night unless you wanted a broken neck at the bottom of some rockslide or had time to travel stupidly miles out of your way to a dead end in some box-canyon.