The Westerners Part 35

They seized torches and a rope, ran up the gulch, and beat in the door of the office, only to encounter Billy enraged to the point of frenzy.

That individual rushed them out at the muzzle of a pistol, with such a whirl of impetuous anger that it quite carried them off their feet, after which he planted his back against the building and stood there in the full light of the torches, reviling them. Why he was not shot I cannot tell. Billy was something of a dominant spirit when roused.

That was the reason why, in the old days, he had made such a good scout. After he had called them all the names he could think of, he slammed the door on them. They went away without knowing why they did so.

When they got back to town, they gathered again in the Little Nugget saloon, drinking, swearing, shouting. The morale of the camp was broken. It was a debauch. They cried out against Billy, and they feared him for the moment. They made a stable-boy hide in the brush with a bottle of whisky, to watch the works, to spy on they knew not what. Lafond drank with them. He had never done so before. As they became more noisy, he fell into a sullen fit, and went to sit over behind the stove where he crooned away to himself an old _chanson_. He stopped drinking, but the effects remained. It seemed to his befogged mind that the wave had broken and that he was falling through the air.

Shortly he would be cast up against the beach. "A fool for luck!" he muttered to himself, trying to rehabilitate his denuded confidence. He took out the Company's letter to him, saying that the deeds were at Rapid awaiting his action, and read it. Then he put a stick of wood on the fire. He shivered and rubbed his eyes. Finally he went over to the hotel, where he washed his head again and again in cold water.

After a time, he returned to the Little Nugget, feeling somewhat better.

It was now daylight, although the sun was not up. The stable-boy came in from the upper gulch to say that Billy Knapp was. .h.i.tching his horses to the buckboard. The news sobered them somewhat. Ten minutes later, the stable-boy again returned with the news that Knapp had loaded his buckboard, and was on the point of driving through town. A dozen men at once ran out into the street and concealed themselves behind the corners of buildings.

x.x.xII

IN WHICH THERE IS SOME SHOOTING

Billy sat in a chair and boiled. He did not calm down until after daylight, and then he found that his depression had vanished. He was full of vigor. He went out and looked over the property very carefully. The entire lay-out, he found, had weighed on his spirits, and this last ungrateful episode had made him sick of the whole miserable business. He ought never to be tied down. He could see his mistake clearly enough now. If he was going to stick to gold hunting, it ought to be as a prospector, not as a miner. A prospector enjoyed the delight of new country, of wilderness life, of the chase, and then, when civilization came too near, he could sell his claims to the miner and move on to a virgin country. A miner, on the other hand, had to settle down in one place and attend to all manner of vexatious details.

Billy felt a great impatience to shake himself free. With the thought came a wave of anger against the men of the town. After all, what had he to gain by staying? This outfit was a fizzle; nothing could be done with it in the future. He might save something of the wreck by grubbing about in the debris, but grubbing was exactly what he wanted to get away from.

He looked over the works again. He was astonished to find how little of it he cared for personally. There remained not much more than the Westerner's outfit, when it was winnowed--four good horses, the buckboard, his saddle, clothes, his weapons, and the beautiful trotting horse. Billy could not let that go. The camp outfit they could have and welcome. He kicked the rubber stamper into s.p.a.ce, scattering potential literature about the landscape. Many things he hesitated over, but finally discarded. The heap was not very large when all was told.

He began to experiment with the buckboard. Billy was a master of the celebrated diamond hitch. After an hour's earnest work, he drew back triumphantly to observe to himself that all he wished to take with him was securely packed on the vehicle. Then he coupled in his grays, and led out the beautiful trotting horse. He was glad that he had lately paid the English groom his wages; which individual he remembered seeing, the night before, dead drunk in a corner. Billy made himself some coffee in the empty cookee's shack, and was ready to start.

He did not know exactly where he would go; that was a matter of detail, but somewhere West in all probability--somewhere in Wyoming, where Jim Buckley was hidden up in the mountains, living a sane sort of a life, removed from the corroding influences of civilization. He did not realize that in this impatient shaking off of responsibility, he was little better than a moral coward. Even Billy's worst enemies would have denied the justice of that epithet.

He climbed in, deliberately unwound the reins from the long brake handle, clucked to the horses, and took his way, whistling, down the narrow trail. The beautiful trotting horse followed gingerly, tossing his head. At the entrance to town, Billy's whistling suddenly ceased.

The street was quite bare and silent. Not even from the Little Nugget saloon or the new dance hall came the faintest sound of human occupancy. A tenderfoot might have argued that this was indicative of deep sleep after last night's festivities, but Billy knew better. At seven o'clock in the morning, after excitement such as that of a few hours before, the normal ensuing pow-wow would still be raging unabated. He reached under the seat for his Winchester, the new 40-82 model of his prosperous days, and laid it softly across his lap, and caught the end of the long lash in his whip hand. Then he resumed his tune exactly where it had been broken off, looking neither to right nor left, and jogging along without the slightest appearance of haste or uneasiness. No one could have called Billy Knapp a coward at that moment.

Near the first cabin the whistling broke off again. A little figure stumbled out into the deserted street, weeping and afraid. Billy pulled up. It was the Kid.

"They're goin' to shoot you," he sobbed, "from behind the Little Nugget, without givin' you a chanst! I had to tell you, an' they'll most kill me!" he wailed. Billy's eyes began to sparkle. The Kid tried to hold within the other's reach his little 22 calibre rifle, his most precious possession. "Here, take this!" he begged.

Billy laughed outright, a generous, hearty laugh with just a shade of something serious in it. "Thank ye," said he, "I got one. And let me tell ye right yere, you Kid. Yore a white man, you are, and yore jest about the only white man in the place." He cast his eyes about him in the buckboard at his feet. "Yere ye be," he said, tugging at a pair of huge silver-ornamented Mexican spurs and leaning over to give them to the boy; "jest remember me by them thar; they has my name in 'em; and, look yere," he went on with a sudden inspiration, "you-all gets up gulch to my camp and takes what grub you finds and lies low until yo'

paw an' th' rest gits over bein' mad. I don't know but what they _does_ kill you, if you shows up afore that." And he laughed again to see the boy's face brighten at this prospect of escaping the immediate wrath to follow.

The little scene had been enacted in the middle of the silent street, so silent and so empty that the princ.i.p.al actors in it experienced an uncomfortable emotion of publicity, perhaps a little like that of an inexperienced speaker before the glare of footlights. The Kid, followed friskily by Peter, scuttled up the gulch, Billy stood up in his buckboard and faced the inscrutable row of houses.

"Yo' d.a.m.n coyotes!" he yelled, "thar goes the only _man_ in the whole outfit. Shoot! yo' Siwashes, shoot!" and he brought his long whip like a figure 8 across the flanks of all four horses at once.

_Bang!_ reverberated a shot between the hills, and a bullet splashed white against the brake bar.

Billy dropped the reins to the floor of the buckboard, and planted his foot on them. He steadied his knee against the seat, and threw down and back the lever of his Winchester for a shot. The beautiful trotting horse was pulling back in an ecstasy of terror at the end of his long lariat, shaking his head and planting his forefeet. Billy cursed savagely, but jerked loose the knot, and the beautiful trotting horse, with a final snort of terror, turned tail and disappeared in the direction of the mine.

_Bang! Bang! Bang!_ went other shots from behind puffs of white smoke. The hills caught up the sound and rolled it back, and then back again, until it was quite impossible to count the discharges.

There were perhaps a half-dozen men with rifles and a dozen or so with six-shooters, all pumping away at it as fast as they could. The buckboard was struck many times. One horse was. .h.i.t, but only slightly--not enough to interfere with, but rather to encourage his speed. Billy fastened his eyes on the spot whence the first bullet had sped. Suddenly he threw his rifle to his shoulder.

_Crack!_ it spoke, strangely flat out there in the open against the fuller reports of the other pieces.

The bullets which undershot kicked up little puffs of dust, like gra.s.shoppers jumping, while those that pa.s.sed above, ricochetted finally from rocks and went singing away into the distance. It was a wonder, with so large a mark, that neither the man nor the horses were hit. It must be remembered, however, that the marksmen were more or less drunk, and that Billy's speed was by now something tremendous.

_Crack!_ went his Winchester again.

At the end of the straight road was, as has perhaps been mentioned, a turn of considerable sharpness, flanked by bold cliff-like rocks. In the best of circ.u.mstances, this bit of road requires careful driving.

With a runaway four and a light buckboard, a smash up was inevitable.

The hidden a.s.sailants and spectators of the strange duel realized this suddenly. In the interest of the approaching catastrophe, the fusillade ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Billy maintained his first att.i.tude, one knee on the seat, the other foot braced against the floor, keenly expectant. The silence became breathless, and one or two men leaned forward the better to see.

"_Crack!_" spoke Billy's rifle for the third time. The man who had fired the first shot pitched suddenly forward from behind his sheltering corner, and lay still.

With one swift motion the scout dropped his Winchester in the seat, grasped the four reins, and threw his enormous weight against the bits.

The grays had been ranch-bred. They bunched their feet, hunched their backs, and in three heavy buck jumps had slowed down from a breakneck run to a lumbering gallop. Billy Knapp gave vent to the wild shrill war cry of his foster parents, the Oglallah Sioux, and jogged calmly out of sight around the bend of the road.

A great crowd pressed about Tony Houston, p.r.o.ne on the ground. They discovered that the ball had pa.s.sed through the point of the shoulder, not a dangerous place in itself, but resulting in a serious wound because of the smashing power of the express rifle.

"d.a.m.n fine shooting!" they said, looking at each other with admiration.

"_d.a.m.n_ fine."

They began to feel a little more kindly toward Billy on account of this evidence of his skill. They set about bandaging the wounded man.

x.x.xIII

FUTILITY

And around that lower bend, half a mile beyond Durand's cabin, Billy encountered in the person of Jim Buckley the very man he intended to search for, and that by not so very strange a chance when all is considered.

After the scouting days were quite over, not long ago, by the way, Jim Buckley had struck out for Wyoming, where he looked about him and finally settled in the Crooked Horn district all alone. He was prospecting. And as he was a great big leisurely sort of fellow, never in a hurry, and quite unconvinced of the necessity for being so, it took him a great many years to complete the prospecting to his satisfaction. In fact it was only recently that he had fully convinced himself and others of the value of what he had found. At first he had worked the surface over inch by inch Then he had staked out his more experimental claims. Then he had burrowed and grubbed and delved, single-handed, through a network of shafts, tunnels, and drifts. It is slow work--single-handed. In the morning you make little holes with a hand drill, and fill them with powder. At noon you blast. In the afternoon you cart away debris by means of an inadequate little bucket.

This takes time and patience, both of which Jim Buckley possessed.

Once a month he went to town, riding one horse and leading another, for the purpose of buying supplies. The rest of the time he lived alone.

That is, he lived alone except that directly opposite the window, where the light always struck it fair, he had carefully fastened a small colored portrait on ivory. It was the picture of a woman, delicately tinted, young with laughing blue eyes and a mouth whose corners turned upward in so droll a manner that you would have sworn its owner had never known a care in her fresh young life. It was the picture of another man's wife. She had known care, of the bitterest, blackest kind, and in her darkest days she had been murdered, mercifully perhaps. After he had hauled the last little bucket of broken rock up to the surface of the ground, and had ranged all sorts of utensils in the open fireplace for the evening meal, Jim Buckley used to light his pipe and sit looking at this little portrait for a long time. For, you see, he was simply made, with no complexities--a few simple purposes, a few simple ideas, a few simple friendships, a few simple pa.s.sions--but they were the stronger and deeper and more soul-satisfying for that.

He did not need incident or sorrow or regret to round out his life. It was well poised and sufficient.

So he used to look upon the face of this other man's wife from under sombre brows, but through clear eyes. No one could have guessed what his slow deep thoughts were at such times, nor what he found, whether of peace or unrest, in his contemplation of a portrait of the past. He said it made him better. Perhaps it did.

But there came a time when the windla.s.ses over the rabbit-burrow prospector's shafts had made their last necessary revolution. Jim Buckley knew the cross section of that country as well as you or I know the cross section of an apple we have just cut in two. Then, having satisfied his purposes, he looked to his friendships. He had never had many. Alfred, Billy Knapp, Hal Townsend, Charley Fanchild--why you could count them on the fingers of one hand--and two of these were dead, and another was so far away in the cattle country of Arizona that he might as well have been so. Jim would have liked well to have gathered this old band of comrades about him and said, "Here, boys, is what I have. It is more than enough for me: it is more than enough for all of us. Let us share it, just as we used to share our bacon or our coffee in the old days, and so we can grow old together in the way that suits us best, the way of the pioneer." As he sat in the cabin now, or stalked the hills with his rifle, this old comradeship took more and more shape from the mists of the past, and there grew up in his breast a sharp craving for old times, old faces, old friends. It was a peculiarity of his nature that his ideas possessed a sort of c.u.mulative force. They gathered added reasons for their carrying out as a rolling s...o...b..ll gathers snow. Toward the end of that month, he packed a strange old valise with clothes for the journey, strapped on his best six-shooter, put his cabin in order, and rode his horse down to Crooked Horn. There he left the animal with Billy Powers and took the train for Edgemont and thence to Rapid.

He knew that Billy was somewhere in the Hills. At Rapid he learned of that individual's new importance. His heart sank a little at the thought that this prosperity might forfend his own scheme of comradeship, but nevertheless he took Blair's stage for Copper Creek and Custer.

Near Rockerville the axle gave way. The brake was repaired at a miner's forge with some difficulty, but the job carried on so late into the afternoon that Blair refused to go farther that night, and the party slept at Rockerville. The next morning they pushed on again about daylight, in order that Blair might start back from Custer before noon, thus reducing his delay by a few hours. A half mile below Durand's shack the axle again gave way, this time with a sudden violence that sent flying the baggage which had been piled on top. Jim found his valise in the bushes. The catch had snapped when the bag hit the ground, so that it lay half open; but fortunately its contents had not emptied. Jim closed it with the two end-clasps, and set it by the side of the road. He did not notice that the ivory miniature had dropped out, and now lay face downward at the roots of a _mesquite_.

Blair looked up from his inspection.

"Bad break!" he said, with a string of oaths. "Copper Creek's under a mile ahead. You'll save time by pushin' on afoot. I'll be in as soon as I can get this sulphurated axle tied together with a strap."

"No hurry," replied Jim; "I'll help you."