from the Listening Hills (Ss) (2004)

by L'amour, Louis

  THE NEXT MORNING Tony lay on his back staring at the ceiling. He wondered where Doreen was. Probably the papers were full of the Robbins killing. Slowly he crawled out of bed, drew on his robe, and retrieved the morning paper from his apartment door. His eyes sought the headliners, blaring across the top in bold type:

  GANG GUNS SLAY FEDERAL OPERATIVE.

  MACHINE GUNS GET WATSON WITNESS.

  Tony's eyes narrowed. A federal man, eh? That wasn't so good. Who would have thought Robbins was a federal man? Still, they were never where you expected them to be. Probably he'd been working a case on Baronski when Corney bumped him off. That would be it.

  His eyes skimmed the brief account of the killing. It was as usual. They had no adequate description of either Doreen or the car. Then his eyes glimpsed a word in the last paragraph that gripped his attention. His face tense, he read on.

  Slowly, he looked up. His eyes were blank. His face looked old and strained. Walking across to the table he picked up his heavy automatic, flipped down the safety, and still staring blankly before him, put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  His body toppled across the table, the blood slowly staining the crumpled paper and almost obliterating the account of the Robbins killing. The final words of the account were barely visible as the spreading stain wiped it out:

  "A fact unknown until the killing was that Jack Robbins, witness for the prosecution in the Baronski killing, was in reality George Bretherton, a Federal operative recently arrived from the Pacific Coast and working on his first case. He is survived by a brother whose present whereabouts are unknown."

  -

  From the Listening Hills

  THE HUNTED MAN lay behind a crude parapet in a low-roofed, wind-eroded cave on the north slope of Tokewanna Peak. One hundred yards down the slope, at an approximate altitude of eleven thousand feet, just inside a fringe of alpine fir, were scattered the hunting men.

  The bare, intervening stretch of rock was flecked here and there with patches of snow. Within the fringe of trees but concealed from his view except for the faint wisps of smoke, were the fires of his pursuers.

  Boone Tremayne had no fire, nor at this time dared he make one, for as yet his position was not exactly known to the armed men.

  It was very cold and he lay on his stomach, favoring his left side where the first bullet had torn an ugly wound. The second bullet had gone through his thigh, but his crude bandages as well as the cold had caused the bleeding to stop.

  A low wind moaned across the rock, stirring the icy bits of snow on the cold flanks of the peak which arose two thousand feet above and behind him. Within the low cave it was still light, and Boone Tremayne clutched the stub of pencil and looked down at the cheap tablet at his elbow.

  He must write with care, for what he wrote now would be all his son, as yet unborn, would ever know of his father and uncles. He would hear the stories others would tell, and so it would be important for him to have some word in his father's hand.

  The pencil clutched awkwardly in his chilled fingers, he began to write:

  "It's getting mighty cold up here, Son, and my grub's about gone. My canteen's still half full, but it ain't no use, they've done got me.

  "Time to time I can hear them down in the brush. There must be a hunert of them. Seems an awful lot of folks to git one lone man. If I only had Johnny here I wouldn't feel so bad. Johnny, he always sort of perked a feller up no matter how bad things got.

  "Except for you, I'm the last of the Tremaynes. Somehow it ain't so lonely up here knowing there's to be a son of mine somewheres.

  "Now, Son, your ma is a mighty good woman as well as a pretty one. I never figured, no way you look at it, to get such a girl as Marge. If she'd married up with Burt, or Elisha, I'd no-ways have blamed her. They were the pick of the lot, they were.

  "Just had me a look down there an' I reckon they are gitting set to rush me. Wished they wouldn't. I never aimed to kill nobody. They figured to hang me if I'm got alive, and I promised Ma I'd never stretch no rope. Least a man can do is die with his face toward them who aims to kill him."

  Boone Tremayne put down the stub of pencil and chafed his cold fingers, peering through the stacked flakes of rock he had heaped into a wall before the opening. The cold was all through him now, and he knew he would never be warm again. That was okay, he had this one last job to do...and then he no longer cared. The wind whispered to the snow and then he saw a man, bulky with a heavy coat, lunge from the trees and come forward in a stumbling run.

  A second man started as the first dropped behind a shelf of rock, and Boone put his cheek against the cold stock of the Winchester and squeezed off his shot. He put the bullet through the man's leg, saw the leg buckle and saw the man fall. Another started and Boone dropped him with a bullet through the shoulder.

  He gnawed at his lip and stared, hollow-eyed and gaunt, at the shelf of rock where the first man had fallen. "Reckon I'd best let you git cold, too, mister," he said, and flicked a glancing shot off the rock over the man's head. That would let him know he had been seen, that it would be dangerous to try moving.

  He shifted his position, favoring his wounded side and leg. Nobody moved, and the afternoon was waning. At night they would probably come for him. He glanced at the sullen gray sky. There was still time.

  "It started over a horse. We Tremaynes always found ourselves good horse flesh. Johnny, he ketched this black colt in the hills near Durango. Little beauty, he was, and Johnny learned him well and entered him in a race we always had down around there.

  "Dick Watson, him and his brothers, they fancied horses too and one of Dick's horses had won that race four years running. We all bet a sight of money. Not so much, when you figure it, but a mighty lot for us, who never had much cash in hand. Johnny's black just ran off and left Watson's horse, and Watson was mighty put out.

  "He said no horse like that ever run wild, and that Johnny must of stole him somewheres. Johnny said no he never and that Watson's horse just wasn't all that fast. Watson said that if Johnny wasn't such a boy, him being just sixteen, he'd whup him good. Then our brother Burt, he stepped up. Burt was a mighty big, fine figure of a man. He stepped up and said he wasn't no boy, if it was a fight Watson wanted.

  "Well, Burt, he beat the tar out of Dick Watson. There was hard words said, and Ma, she reckoned we all better git for home. We did, an' everything went along for a time. Until that black was found dead. Somebody shot her down in the pasture. Shot her from clost up.

  "Johnny, he was all for going to town and gitting him a man, but Ma, she said no and Burt and Lisha, they sided with her. But Johnny...well, it was some days afore he tuned up that mouth organ of his. And when he done it, it was all sad music.

  "We wasn't cattlemen, Son, not like other folks around. We was farmers and trappers, or bee hunters, anything there was to git the coon. Mostly, them days, we farmed and between crops we went back in the high meadows and rounded us up wild horses.

  "They was thousands of them, Son. Land sakes, I wished you could of seen them run! It were a sight too beautiful for man to look upon. We rounded up a sight of them, but we never kept but a few. We'd pick the youngest and prettiest. We'd gentle them down with kindness and good grass and carrots, then we'd break them. My Pap, he broke horses for a gent in Kentucky, a long time ago and he knew a goer and a stayer. I guess none of us ever did forgit that little black mare.

  "Now that horse was shot clost up. It was no accident. And no man would kill a good horse like that. Except for if he done it in pure meanness. And who had him a reason? Dick Watson. That black mare beat Watson's horse once and he would do it again. Johnny, he never said much, but from that day on he packed him a gun, and he never had afore.

  "Them boys down in the bresh is fixing to move. Gitting cold I reckon."

  Boone Tremayne's head throbbed with fever and he stared through the chinks in the flaked rock. The man under the ledge stirred cautiously and Boone put a shot down there to keep him fro
m stretching out too much. He rubbed his hands and blew upon the fingers. A man moved in the brush and Boone laid a bullet in close to the ground., Bullets hailed around his shelter, most of them glancing off the rocks, but one got inside and ricocheted past his head. A hair closer and he would have been dead.

  Flat on his belly he stuffed the tablet and pencil in his pocket and crawled along the bottom of the shallow cave. Painfully, he wormed his way along the cave for thirty yards and found a place where it was a few inches deeper and where some animal or bird had long since gathered sticks for a nest or home. Gathering some of the dead sticks together, Boone built a fire.

  The long-dead wood made little smoke and the tiny flame was comforting. Later, when it was dark the reflection would give him away so he tried to shield it with rocks as much as he could. He held his blue and shaking fingers almost in the flame, but it was a long time before any warmth reached him.

  They were waiting now, waiting for darkness. He must finish his letter. There would be no time later.

  "Mighty cold, Son, I've moved a mite and got me a fire. Well, the black was dead but we had us about forty head of good horses ready to move. Sam and Lisha, they set out for Durango. We figured to buy Ma a new dress for her birthday and to get us some tools we needed and other fixings. Going in the boys had to drive past the DW where the Watsons ranched. They seen Dick a-watching them, but thought nothing of that at the time.

  "Well, when they got into Durango the sheriff come high-tailing it up with five, six men, all armed heavy. They tell the boys they are under arrest for stealing horses. The boys tell them they trained them horses, that they was wild stock afore. The sheriff and that bunch with him, one of them was a Watson, they just laughed.

  "Well, the boys was throwed in jail, but the sheriff, he wouldn't let them get word to the rest of us. Only Johnny, he got to thinking and when the boys was slow gitting back, he mounts up and heads for town. But they was ready for him, the Watsons was.

  "Johnny, he seen the horses in the corral, and he high-tails it for the sheriff. The sheriff is out of town, maybe a-purpose, and Johnny, he goes into the T-Diamond Saloon. And there's three Watsons and two brothers-in-law of theirs, all setting around.

  "These brothers-in-law, one named Ebberly, the other Boyd. This Boyd was some gun-slinger or had that reputation. Johnny, he never knowed them at all, but he knowed the Watsons. He asked the barkeep where was his brothers, and Dick Watson speaks up and says they are in jail for stealing horses, where he'll soon be. Johnny, he knows what Ma would say, and remarkable for him, keeps his head. He says nothing and turns to go and Dick Watson says, "Like you stole that black mare.'

  "The three Watsons are spread out and ready. He seen then it was a trap, but still he never knowed those other two which sat quiet near the door, never saying I, yes, or no. Johnny, he says, "I trained that black mare, Watson, an' you kilt her. You snuck up an' shot that pore little horse dead.'

  ""I never!' Watson says, and folks say he looked mighty red in the face. "You're a liar!'

  "Watson grabbed iron and so did Johnny. The Watsons, they got three bullets into Johnny, but he still stood, so this Boyd, he shoots him in the back. Johnny went down, but there was two Watsons on the floor, one dead, and Dick badly hurt.

  "Johnny, they figured for dead, and they was so busy gitting their kin to the doc they never thought of him. He was alive and he crawled out of there. A girl he knowed in town, she got her Pap, who was a vet, and he fixed Johnny up and hid him out.

  "This here girl, she run down to the jail and told Lisha and Sam through the bars. She said they better get set, there'd be trouble. She had Johnny's gun and she passed it through the bars and along with it a chunk of pipe standing close by.

  "We heard about it after. The one Watson that was on his feet, him and Ebberly, Boyd and some half dozen others, they got them masks and come down to the jail to lynch the other boys. They got into the jail and the jailor he just stepped aside, easy as you please, and says, "In the second cell.'

  "They rushed up. The boys just stood a-waiting, just like they didn't know what was going to happen. The barred door swung open and then Lisha, he outs with his gun and that bunch scrambled, believe you me. One of them turns to slam shut the door, but Sam, he got his pipe betwixt the door and the jam to keep it from closing. That feller dragged iron, so Sam raised the pipe and shoved it into his throat. That feller went down. The mob beat it, and so the boys, they took out. They told that jailer they would surrender to a U. S. Marshal, but nobody else.

  "Lisha and Sam, they went to the corral and got their horses, every head, and they started out of town. By that time the story got around that the Tremayne boys had killed two men and wounded a couple of others, then broke jail. So they fetched their guns and come running.

  "They got Sam right off. Folks said he was shot nine times in that first volley. At that, Lisha rode back to pick him up, but he couldn't get nigh the body, and could see by the way Sam was that he must be dead. So he headed off to home with his horses."

  Boone Tremayne put aside his letter and added a few tiny sticks to his little fire. It was so small a man might have held it in his two hands, but the little flame looked good, and it warmed his fingers which were cramped from writing and the cold.

  An icy wind blew over the slope of the mountain. Boone looked longingly at the woods below, and the first silver line that was the Middle Fork of the Green, which stretched away almost due north from where he lay. If he could get down there he might still have a chance...but there was no chance. The lost blood, the lack of food and the cold had drawn upon his strength until he was only a dank shell of a man, huddled in his worn clothes, shivering and freezing and looking down at the hunters who held him.

  Cautiously, the man under the shelf below was moving. He, too, was feeling the cold. "Well, feel it," Boone whispered, "maybe next time you won't be so anxious to go hunting a lone man!" He ricocheted another bullet off the rock shelf.

  Several rifles replied, and suddenly angry, Boone fired a careful shot at the flash of one of the guns. He heard a rifle rattle on rocks as it fell, and then a heavy body tumbling into brush. More shots were fired, but now he had turned ugly, the loneliness, the cold, the fear of death, all crowded in upon him and he shot rapidly and frantically, at rifle flashes, and dusting the brush around the smoke of the fires. He fired his rifle empty and reloaded and then with careful shots, proceeded to weed the woods below.

  Then he doused his fire and moved further along the undercut rock and found another place, almost as good as the last. Here he started another tiny blaze, shielding it with a large slab of flat rock.

  "Finished off telling how Sam was kilt. Johnny, he was shot bad and we didn't know if he was dead for two days, then that girl, Ellie Winters, she come up the mountain with the news. The town was mighty wrought up. Some of them was coming up after us.

  "We kept watch, Burt, Lisha and me. Meanwhile, we tried figuring what to do. For Ma's sake we would have to pull out, git up into the high meadows or west into the wild country over the Utah line.

  "Now we knowed they was hunting Johnny, and Ellie's Pa was worried too. So the three of us ups and goes down to Durango. Johnny, he mounted the horse we brought for him, and we dusted out of there.

  "Slow, and careful not to leave no tracks, we moved out, leaving our cabin, our crop, everything but the horses. We made it west-northwest past Lone Cone and finally crossing the San Miguel into Uncompahgre Plateau country. We found us a little box canyon there with grass and water, and we moved in. By hunting we made out, but Ma was feeling poorly so Burt, he stayed with her while Lisha and me, we mounted up and with five head of horses, we headed for a little town north of us on the river. We sold our horses, bought up supplies and come back.

  "Ma, she didn't get no better, and finally, she died one morning, just died a-setting in her rocker. We'd brung that rocker along, and it had been a sight of comfort for her. So Ma died and Johnny played his mouth organ, and we buried he
r. Then there was just the four of us, with Johnny still recuperating from his bullet wounds.

  "Them horses we sold let folks know where we was, and soon there was a posse after us. We were figured to be outlaws, real bad hombres. We'd killed folks and we'd busted jail. That posse cornered us in the mountains and we shot it out and got away.

  "That began the bad and lonely time, made pleasant only because we were together. We drifted west into the La Balas and sold our horses except for an extry for each of us, and then drifted into the Robber's Roost country. It was there I kilt my first man. It was that there Boyd. The same one who shot Johnny in the back.

  "He'd kilt a woman in Colorado, and then her man. After that the country got too hot to hold him so he drifted west to the Roost. There was a shack in the Roost them days, a log shack, long and low. The floor was adobe and there was a bar and a few tables. It was low-roofed, dark, and no ways pleasant. It was outside of that place I come up to Boyd.

  "He seen me and he stopped. "Another one of them miserable Tremaynes!' he sneers.

  "Men stopped to listen and watch. "You shot Johnny in the back,' I tell him, "and I figure you're good for nothing else!' He grabs iron and about that time my gun bucks in my hand and this gent he just curls up and folds over.

  "The boys come a-running and we look at that passel of rustlers, thieves and no accounts, with a few mighty good men scattered among them. "Anybody got a argyment?' Burt asks.

  "One gent, his name was Cassidy, he chuckles, and says, "Boyd was no good and we knowed it. Anyway,' he grins at us, "the weight o' the artillery is on your side!' Then he bought a round of drinks.

  "We drifted north through Wyoming, selling a few horses we broke and working time to time on spreads in the Wind River and Powder River countries. We drifted north into Montanny, and finally down to Deadwood. Here and there we heard rumors. Folks said we were robbing banks and trains, which we never done. Folks said we had killed this man or that one, and without ever doing a thing, we got us a name 'most as bad as the James boys. All on account of how people love to talk and gossip.