Part 7

“I could a-showed you sheep. Rams. Horns as big as your thigh--bigger’n _your_ thigh. That was before tenderfeet came in and spoiled this country. Counted seven thousand on that there butte one morning before breakfast. Seven thousand and twenty-three, if you want exact figgers. Set on this porch and killed sheep whenever I wanted to. Some of ’em used to come on the roof. Counted eight rams on the roof one morning before breakfast. Quit your staring!” This was addressed to the boy on the corral. “Why, you’re not a-going without another?” This convivial question was to Scipio, who now came out of the house and across to me with news of failure.

“I could a-showed you sheep--” resumed the man, but I was attending to Scipio.

“He don’t know anything,” said Scipio, “nor any of ’em in there. But we haven’t got this country rounded up yet. He’s just come out of a week of snake fits, and, by the way it looks, he’ll enter on another about to-morrow morning. But whiskey can’t stop _him_ lying.”

“Bad weather,” said the man, watching us make ready to continue our long drive. “Lots o’ lightning loose in the air right now. Kind o’ weather you’re liable to see fire on the horns of the stock some night.”

This sounded like such a promising invention that I encouraged him. “We have nothing like that in the East.”

“H’m. Guess you’ve not. Guess you never seen sixteen thousand steers with a light at the end of every horn in the herd.”

“Are they going to catch that man?” inquired Scipio, pointing to the yellow poster.

“Catch him? Them? No! But I could tell ’em where he’s went. He’s went to Idaho.”

“Thought the ’76 outfit had sold Auctioneer,” Scipio continued conversationally.

“That stallion? No! But I could tell ’em they’d ought to.” This was his good-by to us; he removed himself and his alcoholic omniscience into the house.

“Wait,” I said to Scipio, as he got in and took the reins from me. “I’m going to deal some magic to you. Look at that poster. No, not the stallion, the yellow one. Keep looking at it hard.” While he obeyed me I made solemn passes with my hands over his head. I kept it up, and the boy sat on the corral bars, watching stupidly. “Now look anywhere you please.”

Scipio looked across the corral at the gray sky. A slight stiffening of his figure ensued, and he knit his brows. Then he rubbed a hand over his eyes and looked again.

“You after sheep?” It was the boy sitting on the corral. We paid him no attention.

“It’s about gone,” said Scipio, rubbing his eyes again. “Did you do that to me? Of course y’u didn’t! What did?”

I adopted the manner of the professor who lectured on light to me when I was nineteen. “The eye being normal in structure and focus, the color of an after-image of the negative variety is complementary to that of the object causing it. If, for instance, a yellow disk (or lozenge in this case) be attentively observed, the yellow-perceiving elements of the retina become fatigued. Hence, when the mixed rays which constitute white light fall upon that portion of the retina which has thus been fatigued, the rays which produce the sensation of yellow will cause less effect than the other rays for which the eye has not been fatigued. Therefore, white light to an eye fatigued for yellow will appear blue--blue being yellow’s complementary color. Shall I go on?”

“Don’t y’u!” Scipio begged. “I’d sooner believe y’u done it to me.”

“I can show you sheep.” It was the boy again. We had not noticed him come from the corral to our wagon, by which he now stood. His eyes were now eagerly fixed upon me; as they looked into mine they seemed almost burning with some sort of appeal.

“Hello, Timberline!” said Scipio, not at all unkindly. “Still holding your job here? Well, you better stick to it. You’re inclined to drift some.”

He touched the horses, and we left the boy standing and looking after us, lonely and baffled. But when a joke was born in Scipio it must out:

“Say, Timberline,” he called back, “better insure your clothes. Y’u couldn’t replace ’em.”

“I’m no two-bit man,” retorted the boy with anger--that pitiful anger which feels a blow but cannot give one.

We drove away along the empty stage-road, with the mountains and the dying storm, in which a piece of setting sun would redly glow and vanish, making our leftward horizon, and to our right the great undulations of a world so large as to seem the universe itself. The air was wet still, and full of the wet sage-brush smell, and the ground was wet, but it could not be so long in this sandy region. Three hours would see us to the next house, unless we camped short of this upon Broke Axle Creek.

“Why Timberline?” I asked after several miles.

“Well, he came into this country the long, lanky, innocent kid like you saw him, and he’d always get too tall in the legs for his latest pair of pants. They’d be half up to his knees. So we called him that. Guess he’s most forgot his real name.”

“What is his real name?”

“I’ve quite forgot.”

This much talk did for us for two or three miles more.

“Must it be yellow?” Scipio asked then.

“Red’ll do it, too,” I answered. “Only you see green then, I think. And there are others.”

“H’m,” observed Scipio. “Most as queer as chemistry. D’ y’u know chemistry?”

“Why, what do you know?”

“Just the embalmin’ side. Didn’t y’u know I assisted an undertaker wunst in Kansas City?”

“What’s that?” I interrupted sharply, for something out in the darkness had jumped.

“Does a stray steer scare you like that to-night? Now, that embalmin’ trick give me a notion I’ll work out some time. What do you miss worst in camp grub?”

“Eggs,” said I, immediately.

“That’s you. Well, I’m going to invent embalmed eggs--somehow.”

“Hope you do,” said I. “Do you believe I’m going to get sheep this time? It’s all I came for.”

“You’ll get sheep,” Scipio declared, “or I’ll lose my job at Sunk Creek ranch.” Judge Henry had lent him to me for my hunting trip. “Of course I’d not _call_ ’em embalmed eggs,” he finished.

“Condensed,” I suggested. “Like the milk. Do you suppose the man really did go to Idaho?”

“They do go there--and they go everywheres else that’s convenient--Canada, San Francisco, some Indian reservation. He’ll never get found. I expect like as not he killed the confederate along with the victims--it’s claimed there was a cook along, too. He’s never showed up. It’s a bad proposition to get tangled up with a murderer.”

I sat thinking of this and that and the other.

“That was a superior lie about the lights on the steers’ horns,” I remarked next.

Scipio shoved one hand under his hat and scratched his head. “They say that’s _so_,” he said. “I’ve heard it. Never seen it. But--tell y’u--he ain’t got brains enough to invent a thing like that. And he’s too conceited to tell another man’s lie.”

“Well,” I pondered, “there’s Saint Elmo’s fire. That’s genuine.”

Scipio desired to know about this, and I told him of the lights that are seen at the ends of the yards and spars of ships at sea in atmospheric conditions of a certain kind. He let me also tell him of the old Breton sailor belief that these lights are the souls of dead sailor-men come back to pray for the living in peril; but he stopped me soon when I attempted to speak of charged thunder clouds, and the positive, and the negative, and conductors, and Leyden jars. “That’s a heap worse than the other stuff about yellow and blue,” he objected. “Here’s Broke Axle. D’ y’u say camp here, or make it in to the station?”

“Well, if that filthy woman still keeps the station--”

“She does. She’s a buck-skinned son-of-a-gun. We’ll camp here, Professor.”

Scipio had first called me by this name before he knew me, in Colonel Cyrus Jones’s Eating Palace in Omaha, intending no compliment by the term. Since that day many adventures and surprises shared together had changed it to a word of familiar regard; he used it sparingly, and as a rule only upon occasions of discomfort or mischance. “You’ll get sheep, Professor,” he now repeated in a voice of reassurance, and went his way to attend to the horses for the night.

The earth had dried, the plenteous stars were bright in the sky, we needed no tent over us, and merely spread my rubber blanket and the buffalo robes, and so beneath light covers waited for sleep to the gurgle, sluggish and musical, of Broke Axle. Scipio’s sleep was superior to mine, coming sooner and burying him deeper from the world of wakefulness. Thus he did not become aware of a figure sitting by our little fire of embers, whose presence penetrated my thinner sleep until my eyes opened and saw it. Such things give me a shock, which, I suppose, must be fear, but it is not at all fear of the mind. I lay still, drawing my gun stealthily into a good position and thinking what were best to do; but he must have heard me.

“Lemme me show you sheep.”

“What’s that?” It was Scipio starting to life and action.

“Don’t shoot Timberline,” I said. “He’s come to show us sheep.”

Scipio sat staring stupefied at the figure by the embers, and then he slowly turned his head round to me, and I thought he was going to pour out one of those long, corrosive streams of comment that usually burst from him when he was enough surprised. But he was too much surprised. “His name is Henry Hall,” he said to me very mildly. “I’ve just remembered it.”

The patient figure by the embers rose. “There’s sheep in the Washakie Needles. Lots and lots and lots. I seen ’em myself in the spring. I can take you right to ’em. Don’t make me go back and be stock-tender.” He recited all this in a sort of rising wail until the last sentence, in which the entreaty shook his voice.

“Washakie Needles is the nearest likely place,” muttered Scipio.

“If you don’t get any, you needn’t to pay me any,” urged the boy; and he stretched out an arm to mark his words and his prayer.

We sat in our beds and he stood waiting by the embers to hear his fate, while nothing made a sound but Broke Axle.

“Why not?” I said. “We were talking of a third man.”

“A man,” said Scipio. “Yes.”

“I can cook, I can pack, I can cook good bread, and I can show you sheep, and if I don’t you needn’t to pay me a cent,” entreated the boy.

“He sure means what he says,” Scipio commented. “It’s your trip.”

Thus it was I came to hire Timberline.

Dawn showed him in the same miserable rags he wore on my first sight of him at the corral, and these proved his sole visible property of any kind; he didn’t possess a change of anything, he hadn’t brought away from Rongis so much as a handkerchief tied up with things inside it; most wonderful of all, he owned not even a horse--and in that country in those days five dollars’ worth of horse was within the means of almost anybody.

But he was not unclean, as I had feared. He washed his one set of rags, and his skin-and-bones body, by the light of the first sunrise on Broke Axle, and this proved a not too rare habit with him, which made all the more strange his neglect to throw the rags away and wear the new clothes I bought and gave him as we passed through Lander.

“Timberline,” said Scipio the next day, “if Anthony Comstock came up in this country he’d jail you.”

“Who’s he?” screamed Timberline, sharply.

“He lives in Noo York, and he’s agin the nood. That costume of yours is getting close on to what they claim Venus and other immoral Greek statuary used to wear.”

After this Timberline put on the Lander clothes, but on one of his wash-days we discovered that he kept the rags next his skin! This clinging to such worthless things seemed probably the result of destitution, of having had nothing, day after day and month after month. His poor little pay at Rongis, which we gradually learned they had always got back from him by one trick or another, was less than half what I now gave him for his services, and I offered to advance him some of this at places where it could be spent; but he told me to keep it until he had earned the whole of it.

Yet he did not seem a miser; his willingness to help at anything in camp was unchanging, and a surer test of not being stingy was the indifference he showed to losing or winning the little sums we played at cards for after supper and before bed. The score I kept in my diary showed him to belong to the losing class. His help in camp was real, not merely well meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he had said he could do, he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him, he was somehow forever pitiful.

“Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio.

“Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never to have been born.”

“That probably applies to several million people all over this planet.”

“Sure,” assented Scipio cheerfully. He was not one of these.

“He’s so eternally silent!” I said presently.

“A man don’t ask to be born,” pursued Scipio.

“Parents can’t stop to think of that,” I returned.

“H’m,” mused Scipio. “Somebody or something has taken good care they’ll never.”

We continued along the trail, engrossed in our several thoughts, and I could hear Timberline, behind us with the pack horses, singing:--

If that I was where I would be, Then should I be where I am not.

Our mode of travel had changed at Fort Washakie. There we had left the wagon and put ourselves and our baggage upon horses, because we should presently be in a country where wagons could not go. I suppose that more advice is offered and less taken than of any other free commodity in the world. Before I had settled where to go for sheep, nobody could tell me where to go; now almost every one advised some other than the place I had chosen. “Washakie Needles?” they would repeat unfavorably; “Union Peak’s nearer;” or, “You go up Jakey’s Fork;” or “Red Creek’s half as far, and twice as many sheep;” or, “Last spring I seen a ram up Dinwiddie big as a horse.”

This discouragement, strung along our road, had small weight with me because it was just the idle talk of those dingy loafers of the Western cabin and saloon who never hunted, never did anything but sit still and assume to know your own business better than you knew it yourself; it was only once that the vigorous words of some by-passer on a horse caused Scipio and me to discuss dropping the Washakie Needles in favor of the country at the head of Green River. We were below Bull Lake at the forking of the ways; none of us had ever been in the Green River country, while Timberline evidently knew the Washakie Needles well, and this was what finally decided us. But Timberline had been thrown into the strangest agitation by our uncertainty. He had said nothing, but he walked about, coming near, going away, sitting down, getting up, instead of placidly watching his fire and cooking; until at last I told him not to worry, that wherever we went I should keep him and pay him in any case. Then he spoke:--

“I didn’t hire to go to Green River.”

“What have you got against Green River?”

“I hired to go to the Washakie Needles.”

His agitation left him immediately upon our turning our faces in that direction. What had so disturbed him we could not guess; but later that day Scipio rode up to me, bursting with a solution. He had visited a freighter’s camp, a hundred yards off the road in the sage-brush (we were following the Embar trail), and the freighter, upon learning our destination, had said he supposed we were “after the reward.” It did not get through my head at once, but when Scipio reminded me of the yellow poster and the murder, it got through fast enough: the body had been found on Owl Creek, and the middle fork of Owl Creek headed among the Washakie Needles. There might be another body,--the other Eastern man who had never been seen since,--and there was a possible third, the confederate, the cook; many held it was the murderer’s best policy to destroy him as well.

Owl Creek had yielded no more bodies after that one first found. Perhaps the victims had been killed separately. Before starting on their last journey in this world, they had let it get out somewhere down on the railroad that they carried money; this was their awful mistake, conducting death to them in the shape of the man who had offered himself as their guide, and whom they had engaged without more knowledge of him than he disclosed to them himself. Red Dog was his name in Colorado, where he was “wanted.” The all-day sitters and drinkers in the cabins along the road had their omniscient word as to this also: _they_ could have told those Easterners not to hire Red Dog!

So now we had Timberline accounted for satisfactorily to ourselves; he was “after the reward.” We never said this to him, but we worked out his steps from the start. As stock-tender at Rongis he had seen that yellow poster pasted up, and had read it, day after day, with its promise of what to him was a fortune. To Owl Creek he could not go alone, having no money to buy a horse, and being afraid, too, perhaps. If he could only find that missing dead man--or the two of them--he might find a clew. My sheep hunt had dropped like a Providence into his hand.

We got across the hot country where rattlesnakes were thick where neither man lived nor water ran, and came to the first lone habitation in this new part of the world--a new set of mountains, a new set of creeks. A man stood at the door watching us come.

“Know him?” I asked Scipio.

“I’ve heard of him,” said Scipio. “He married a squaw.”

We were now opposite the man’s door. “You folks after the reward?” said he.

“After mountain sheep,” I replied, somewhat angry.

We camped some ten miles beyond him, and the next day crossed a low range, stopping near another cabin for noon. They gave us a quantity of berries they had picked, and we gave them some potatoes.

“After the reward?” said one of them as we rode away, and I contradicted him with temper.

“Lie to ’em,” said Scipio. “Say yes.” He developed his theory of truthfulness; it was not real falsehood to answer as you chose questions people had no right to ask; in fact, the only real lie was when you denied something wrong you had done. “And I’ve told hundreds of them, too,” he concluded pensively.

Something had begun to weigh upon our cheerfulness in this new country. The reward dogged us, and we saw strange actions of people twice. We came upon some hot sulphur springs[3] and camped near them, with a wide stream between us and another camp. Those people--two men and two women--emerged from their tent, surveyed us, nodded to us, and settled down again. Next morning they had vanished; we could see the gleam of empty bottles on the bank opposite where they had been. And once, riding out of a little valley, we sighted close to us through cottonwoods a horseman leading a pack horse out of the next little valley.

He did not nod to us, but pursued his parallel course some three hundred yards off, until a rise in the ground hid him for a while; when this was passed he was no longer where he should have been, abreast of us, but far to the front, galloping away. That was our last sight of him. We spoke of these actions a little. Did these people suspect us, or were they afraid we suspected them?

All we ever knew was that suspicion had now gradually been wafted through the whole air and filled it like a coming change of weather. I could no longer look at a rock or a clump of trees without a disagreeable thought: was something, or somebody, behind the clump of trees and the rock? would they come out or wait until we had passed? This influence seemed to gather even more thick and chill as we turned up the middle fork of Owl Creek; magpies, that I had always liked to watch and listen to, had become part of the general increasing uncomfortableness, and their cries sounded no longer cheerful, but harsh and unfriendly.

As we rode up the narrowing cañon of Owl Creek, the Washakie Needles, those twin spires of naked rock, rose into view high above the clustered mountain-tops, closing the cañon in, shutting out the setting sun. But the nearness of my goal and my sheep hunt brought me no elation. Those miserable questions about reward, the strange conduct of those unknown people, dwelt in my mind. I saw in memory the floating image of that poster; I wondered if I, in my clambering for sheep, should stumble upon signs--evidence--an old camp--ashes--tent-pegs--or the horrible objects that had come here alive and never gone hence. I could not drive these fancies from me amid the austere silence of the place where _it_ had happened.

“He _can_ talk when he wants to.”

It made me start, this remark of Scipio’s as he rode behind me.

“What has Timberline been telling you?”

“Nothing. But he’s been telling himself a heap of something.” In the rear of our single-file party Timberline rode, and I could hear him rambling on in a rising and falling voice. He ceased once or twice while I listened, breaking out again as if there had been no interruption. It was a relief to have a practical trouble threatening us; if the boy was going off his head, we should have something real to deal with. But when I had chosen a camp and we were unsaddling and throwing the packs on the ground, Timberline was in his customary silence. After supper I walked off with Scipio where our horses were.

“Do you think he’s sick?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Scipio. And that was all we said, for we liked the subject too little to pursue it.

Next morning I was over at the creek washing before breakfast. The sun was coming in through the open east end of our cañon, the shaking leaves of the quaking-asp twinkled in a blithe air, and a night’s sleep had brought me back to a much robuster mood. I had my field-glasses with me, and far up, far up among patches of snow and green grass, I could see sheep on both sides of the valley.

“So you sleep well?” said Scipio.

“Like a log. You?”

“Like another. Somebody in camp didn’t.”

I turned and looked at Timberline cooking over at camp.

“Looking for the horses early this morning,” pursued Scipio, “I found his tracks up and down all over everywheres.”

“Perhaps he has found the reward.”

Scipio laughed, and I laughed. It was the only thing to do. How much had the boy walked in the darkness?

“I think I’ll take him with us,” I then said. “I’d rather have him with us.”

During breakfast we discussed which hill we should ascend, and, this decided on, I was about to tell Timberline his company was expected, when he saved me the trouble by requesting to be allowed to go himself. His usually pale, harmless eyes were full of some sort of glitter: did his fingers feel that they were about to clutch the reward?

That was the thirtieth of August; a quarter of a century and more has passed; my age is double what it was; but to-day, on any thirtieth of August, if I think of the date, the Washakie Needles stand in my eyes,--twin spires of naked rock,--and I see what happened there.

The three of us left camp. It was warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet day smelled of the pines. We should not have taken horses, they served us so little in such a climb as that. On the level top our legs and breathing got relief, and far away up the next valley were sheep. This second top we reached, but they were gone to the next beyond, where we saw them across a mile or so of space. In the bottom below us ran the north fork of Owl Creek like a fine white wire drawn through the distant green of the pines. Up in this world peaks and knife-edged ridges bristled to our north away and away beyond sight.