Part 8

We now made a new descent and ascent, but had no luck, and by three o’clock we stood upon a lofty, wet, slipping ledge that fell away on three sides, sheer or broken, to the summer and the warmth that lay thousands of feet below. Here it began to be very cold, and to the west the sky now clotted into advancing lumps of thick thundercloud, black, weaving and merging heavily and swiftly in a fierce, rising wind. We got away from this promontory to follow a sheep trail, and as we went along the backbone of the mountain, two or three valleys off to the right, long, black streamers let down from the cloud. They hung and wavered mistily close over the pines that did not grow within a thousand feet of our high level. I gazed at the streamers, and discerned water, or something, pouring down in them. Above our heads the day was still serene, and we had a chance to make camp without a wetting. This I suggested we should do, since the day’s promise of sport had failed.

“No! no!” said Timberline, hoarsely. “See there! We can get them. We’re above them. They don’t see us!”

I saw no sheep where he pointed, but I saw him. His eyes looked red-hot. He insisted the sheep had merely moved behind a rock, and so we went on. The strip of clear sky narrowed, and gray bars of rain were falling between us and the pieces of woodland that, but a moment since, had been unblurred. Blasts of frozen wind rose about us, causing me to put on my rubber coat before my fingers should grow too numb to button it. We moved forward to a junction of the knife-ridges upon which a second storm was hastening from the southwest over deep valleys that we turned our backs upon, and kept slowly urging our horses near the Great Washakie Needle.

We stopped at the base of its top pinnacle, glad to reach this slanting platform of comparative safety. No sheep were anywhere, but I had ceased to care about sheep. Jutting stones, all but their upturned points and edges buried in the ground, made this platform a rough place to pick one’s way over--but this was a trifle. From these jutting points a humming sound now began to rise, a sort of droning, which at first ran about here and there among them, with a flickering, æolian capriciousness, then settled to a steady chord: the influence of the electric storm had encircled us. We all looked at each other, but turned immediately again to watch the portentous, sublime scene.

At the edge of our platform the world fell straight a thousand feet down to a valley like the bottom of a cauldron; on the far side of the cauldron the air, like a stroke of magic, became thick white, and through it leaped the first lightning, a blinding violet. An arm of the storm reached over to us, the cauldron sank from sight in a white sea, and the hail cut my face so I bowed it down. Mixed with the hail fell softer flakes, which, as they touched the earth, glowed for a moment like tiny bulbs, and went out. On the ground I saw what looked like a tangle of old, human footprints in the hard-crusted mud. These the pellets of the swarming hail soon filled. This tempest of flying ice struck my body, my horse, raced over the ground like spray on the crest of breaking waves, and drove me to dismount and sit under the horse, huddled together even as he was huddled against the fury and the biting pain of the hail.

From under the horse’s belly I looked out upon a chaos of shooting, hissing white, through which, in every direction, lightning flashed and leaped, while the fearful crashes behind the curtain of the hail sounded as if I should see a destroyed world when the curtain lifted. The place was so flooded with electricity that I gave up the shelter of my horse, and left my rifle on the ground and moved away from the vicinity of these points of attraction. Of my companions I had not thought; I now noticed them, crouching separately, much as I crouched.

So I sat--I know not how long--chilled from spine to brisket, my stiff boots growing wet, my discarded gloves a pulp, like my hat, and melted hail trickling from the rubber coat to my legs. At length the hail-stones fell more gently, the near view opened, revealing white winter on all save the steep, gray Needles; the thick, white curtain of hail departed slowly; the hail where I was fell more scantily still.

It was slowly going away,--the great low-prowling cloud,--we should presently be left in peace unscathed, though it was at its tricks still. Its brimming, spilling-over electricity was now playing a new prank--mocking my ears with crackling noises, as of a camp-fire somewhere on earth, or in air. While I listened curiously to these, my eye fell on Timberline. He was turning, leaning, crouching, listening too. When he crouched, it was to peer at those old footprints I had noticed. There was something frightful in the sight of his face, shrunk to half its size, and I called to reassure him, and beckoned that it was all right, that we were all right. I doubt if he saw or heard me.

Something somewhere near my head set up a delicate sound. It seemed in my hat. I rose and began to wander, bewildered by this. The hail was now falling very fine and gentle, when suddenly I was aware of its stinging behind my ear more sharply than it had done at all. I turned my face in its direction and found its blows harmless, while the stinging in my ear grew sharper. The hissing continued close to my head whenever I walked. It resembled the little watery escape of gas from a charged bottle whose cork is being slowly drawn.

I was now more really disturbed than I had been during the storm’s worst, and meeting Scipio, who was also wandering, I asked if he felt anything. He nodded uneasily, when, suddenly--I know not why--I snatched my hat off. The hissing was in the brim, and it died out as I looked at the leather binding and the stitches. I expected to see some insect there, or some visible reason for the noise. I saw nothing, but the pricking behind my ear had also stopped. Then I knew my wet hat had been charged like a Leyden jar with electricity. Scipio, who had watched me, jerked his hat off also.

“Lights on steer horns are nothing to this,” I began, when a piercing scream cut me short.

Timberline, at the other side of the stony platform, had clapped his hands to his head.

“Take off your hat,” I shouted.

But he had fallen on his knees, and was ripping, tearing his clothes. He plucked and dragged at the old rags next his skin. Then he flung his hands to the sky.

“O God!” he screamed. “Oh, Jesus! Keep him off me! Oh, save me!” His glaring face now seemed fixed on something close to him. “Leave me go! I didn’t push you over. You know he made me push you. I meant nothing. I knowed nothing, I was only the cook. Why, I liked you--you was kind to me. Oh, why did I ever go! There! Take it back! There’s your money! He give it to me when you was dead to make me hush up. There! I never spent a cent of it!”

He tore from his rags the hush-money that had been sewed in them, and scattered the fluttering bills in the air. Then once more he clapped his hands to his head as he kneeled.

“Take off your hat!” I cried again.

He rose, stared wildly, and screamed: “I tell you you’ve got it all. It’s all he gave to me!”

The next moment he plunged into the cauldron, a thousand feet below.

On the following day we found the two bodies--that second victim the country had wondered about, and the boy. And we counted the money, the guilty money that had for a while closed the boy’s innocent mouth: five ten-dollar bills! Not much to hide murder for, not much to draw a tortured soul back to the scene of another’s crime. The true murderer was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.

V

THE GIFT HORSE

High up the mountain amid white Winter I sat, and looked far down where still the yellow Autumn stayed, looked at Wind River shrunk to map-size, a basking valley, a drowsy country, tawny and warm, winding southeastward away to the tawny plain, and there dissolving with air and earth in one deep, hazy, golden sleep. Somewhere in that slumberous haze beyond the buttes and utmost foothills, and burrowed into the vast unfeatured level, lay my problem, Still Hunt Spring.

I had inquired much about Still Hunt Spring. Every man seemed to know of it, but no man you talked with had been to it. Description of it always came to me at second hand. Scipio I except; Scipio assured me he had once been to it. It was no easy spot to find; a man might pass it close and come back and pass it on the other side, yet never know it was at his elbow: so they said. The Indians believed a supernatural thing about it--that it was not there every day, and few of them would talk readily about it; yet it was they who had first showed it to the white man. And because they repeated concerning a valley two hundred feet deep, a mile long, and a quarter-mile wide at its widest, this haunted legend of presence and absence, its name now possessed my mind. Like a strain of music it recurred to my thoughts each day of my November hunting in the mountains of Wind River. Still Hunt Spring; down there, somewhere in that drowsy distance, it lay. One trail alone led into it; from one end of the secret ravine to the other--they said--grew a single file of trees lank and tall as if they stood on stilts to see out over the top, and at the further end was a spring, small, cold, and sweet; though it welled up in the midst of sage-brush desert, there was no alkali--they said--in that water. Still Hunt Spring!

That night I announced to my two camp companions my new project: next summer I should see Still Hunt Spring for myself.

“Alone?” Scipio inquired.

“Not if you will come.”

“It is no tenderfoot’s trail.”

“Then if I find it I shall cease to be a tenderfoot.”

“Go on,” said Scipio, with indulgence. “We’ll not let you stay lost.”

“It is no tenderfoot’s place,” the cook now muttered.

“Then you have been there?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I am in this country for my health,” he drawled. On this a certain look passed between my companions, and a certain laugh. A sudden suspicion came to me, which I kept to myself until next afternoon when we had broken this camp where no game save health seemed plentiful, and were down the mountains at Horse Creek and Wind River.

“I don’t believe there is any such place as Still Hunt Spring.”

This I said sitting with a company in the cabin known later on the Postal Route map as Dubois. The nearest post-office then was seventy-five miles away. No one spoke until a minute after, I suppose, when a man slowly remarked: “Some call that place Blind Spring.”

He was presently followed by another, speaking equally slowly: “I’ve heard it called Arapaho Spring.”

“Still Hunt Spring is right.” This was a heavy, rosy-faced man, of hearty and capable appearance. His clothes were strong and good, made of whipcord, but his maroon-colored straw hat so late in the season was the noticeable point in his dress. His voice was assertive, having in it something of authority, if not of menace. “Some claim there’s such a place,” he continued, eying me steadily and curiously, “and some claim there’s not.” (Here he made a pause.) “But I tell you there is.”

He still held his eye upon me with no friendliness. Were they all merely playing on my tenderfoot credulity, or what was it? I was framing a retort when sounds of trouble came from outside.

“Man down in the corral,” exclaimed somebody. “It’s that wild horse.”

Scipio met us, running. “No doctor here?” he panted. “McDonough has bruck his leg, looks like.”

But the doctor was seventy-five miles away--like the post-office.

“Who’s McDonough?” inquired the rosy-faced man with the straw hat.

A young fellow from Colorado, they told him, a new settler on Wind River this summer. He had taken up a ranch on North Fork and built him a cabin. Hard luck if he had broken his leg; he had a bunch of horses; was going to raise horses; he had good horses. Hard luck!

We found young McDonough lying in the corral, propped against a neighbor’s kindly knee. The wild horse was snorting and showing us red nostrils and white eyes in a far corner; he had reared and fallen backward while being roped, and the bars had prevented dodging in time. Dirt was ground into McDonough’s flaxen hair, the skin was tight on his cheeks, and his tips were as white as his large, thick nails; but he smiled at us, and his strange blue eyes twinkled with the full spark of undaunted humor.

“Ain’t I a son of a--?” he began, and shook his head over himself and his clumsiness. Further speech was stopped by violent retching, and I was enough of a doctor to fear that this augured a worse hurt than a broken leg. But no blood came up, and he was soon talking to us again, applying to himself sundry jocular epithets which were very well in that rough corral, but must stay there.

He was lifted to the only bed in the cabin, no sound escaping him, though his lips remained white, and when he thought himself unobserved he shut his eyes; but kept them open and twinkling at any one’s approach. They were strange, perplexed eyes, evidently large, but deep-set, their lids screwed together; later that evening I noticed that he held his playing-cards close to them, and slightly to one side, Scipio called him “skew-bald,” but I could see no such defect. He was not injured internally, it proved later, but his right leg was broken above the ankle. We had to cut his boot off, so swollen already was the limb. The heavy man with the straw hat advised getting him to the hospital at the post without delay, and regretted he himself had not come up the river in his wagon; he could have given the patient a lift. With this he departed upon a tall roan horse, with an air about him of business and dispatch uncommon in these parts. Wind River horsemen mostly looked and acted as if there was no such thing as being behind time, there being no such thing as time.

“Who is he?” I asked, looking after the broad back of whipcord and the unseasonable straw hat.

All were surprised. What? Not know Lem Speed? Biggest cattleman in the country. Store and a bank in Lander. House in Salt Lake. Wife in Los Angeles. Son at Yale.

“Up here looking after his interests?” I pursued.

“Up here looking after his interests.” My exact words were repeated in that particular tone which showed I was again left out of something.

“What’s the matter with my questions?” I asked.

“What’s the matter with our answers?” said a man. Truly, mine had been a tenderfoot speech, and I sat silent.

McDonough’s white lips regained no color that night, and the skin drew tighter over the bones of his face as the hours wore on. He was proof against complaining, but no stoic endurance could hide such pain as he was in. Beneath the sunburn on his thick hand the flesh was blanched, yet never did he once ask if the hay wagon was not come for him. They had expected to get him off in it by seven, but it did not arrive until ten minutes before midnight; they had found it fifteen miles up the river, instead of two. Sitting up, twisted uncomfortably, he played cards until one of the company, with that lovable tact of the frontier, took the cards from him, remarking, “You’ll lose all you’ve got,” and, with his consent, played his hand and made bets for him. McDonough then sank flat, watching the game with his perplexed, half-shut eyes.

What I could do for him I did; it was but little. Finding his leg burning and his hand cold, I got my brandy--their whiskey was too doubtful--and laid wet rags on the leg, keeping them wet. He accepted my offices and my brandy without a sign; this was like most of them, and did not mean that he was not grateful, but only that he knew no way to say so. Laudanum alone among my few drugs seemed applicable, and he took twenty drops with dumb acquiescence, but it brought him neither sleep nor doze. More I was afraid in my ignorance to give him, and so he bore, unpalliated, what must have become well-nigh agony by midnight, when we lifted him into the wagon. So useless had I been, and his screwed-up eyes, with their valiant sparkle, and his stoic restraint, made me feel so sorry for him, that while they were making his travelling bed as soft as they could I scrawled a message to the army surgeon at the Post. “Do everything you can for him,” I wrote, “and as I doubt if he has five dollars to his name, hold me responsible.” This I gave McDonough without telling him its contents. Off they drove him in the cold, mute night; I could hear the heavy jolts of the wagon a long way. Six rocky fords lay between here and Washakie, and Scipio thus summed up the seventy-five miles the patient had before him: “I don’t expect he’ll improve any on the road.”

In new camps among other mountains I now tried my luck through deeper snow, thicker ice, and colder days, coming out at length lean and limber, and ravenous for every good that flesh is heir to, yet reluctant to turn eastward to that city life which would unfailingly tarnish the bright, hard steel of health. Of Still Hunt Spring I spoke no more, but thought often, and with undiscouraged plans to visit it. I mentioned it but once again. Old Washakie, chief of the Shoshone tribe, did me the honor to dine with me at the military post which bore his name. Words cannot describe the face and presence of that old man; ragged clothes abated nothing of his dignity. A past like the world’s beginning looked from his eyes; his jaw and long white hair made you silent as tall mountains make you silent. After we had dined and I had made him presents, he drew pictures in the sand for me with his finger. Not as I expected, almost to my disappointment, this Indian betrayed no mystery concerning the object of my quest.

“Hé!” he said (it was like a shrug). “No hard find. You want see him? Water pretty good, yes. Trees heap big. You make ranch maybe?”

When he heard my desire was merely to see Still Hunt Spring, I am not certain he understood me, or if so, believed me. “Hé!” he exclaimed again, and laughed because I laughed. “You go this way,” he said, beginning to trace a groove in the sand. “So.” He laid a match here and there and pinched up little hillocks, and presently he had it all set forth. I tore off a piece of wrapping-paper from the stove and copied the map carefully, with his comments. The place was less distant than I had thought. I thanked him, spoke of returning “after one snow” to see him and Still Hunt Spring. “Hé!” he shrugged. Then he mounted his pony, and rode off without any “good-by,” Indian fashion. I counted it a treasure I had got from him.

McDonough’s leg had knit well, and I met him on crutches crossing the parade ground. He was discharged from hospital, and (I will not deny it) his mere nod of greeting seemed somewhat too scant acknowledgment of the good will I had certainly tried to show him. Yet his smile was very pleasant, and while I noted his face, no longer embrowned with sun and riding, but pale from confinement, I noted also the unsubdued twinkle in his perplexed eyes. After all, why should I need thanks? As he hobbled away with his yellow hair sticking out in a cowlick under his hat behind, I smiled at my own smallness, and wished him good luck heartily.

The doctor, whose hospitable acquaintance I had made on first coming through the Post this year, would not listen to my paying him anything for his services to McDonough. Army surgeons were expected, he said, to render what aid they could to civilians, as well as to soldiers, in the hospital; he good-humoredly forbade all the remonstrance I attempted. When civilians could pay him themselves, he let them do so according to their means; it was just as well that the surrounding country should not grow accustomed to treating “Uncle Sam” as a purely charitable institution. McDonough had offered to pay, when he could, what he could afford. The doctor had thought it due to me to let him know the contents of my note, and that no such arrangement could be allowed.

“And what said he to that?” I asked.

“Nothing, as usual.”

“Disgusted, perhaps?”

“Not in the least. His myopic eyes were just as cheerful then as they were the second before he fainted away under my surgical attentions. He scorned ether.”

“Poor fellow! He’s a good fellow!” I exclaimed.

“M’m,” went the doctor, doubtfully.

“Know anything against him?” I asked.

“Know his kind. All the way from Assiniboine to Lowell Barracks.”

“It has made you hard to please,” I declared.

“M’m,” went the doctor again.

“Think he’ll not pay you?”

“May. May not.”

“Well, good-by, Cynic.”

“Good-by, Tenderfoot.”

The next morning, had there been time to catch the doctor, I could have proved to him that he was hard to please. At the moment of my stepping into the early stage I had a surprise. McDonough had been at breakfast at the hotel, and had said nothing to me; a nod sufficed him, as usual--it was as much social intercourse as

was customary at breakfast, or, indeed, at any of the meals. The stage rattled up as I sat, and I, its only passenger, rose and spoke a farewell syllable to McDonough, who repeated his curt nod. My next few minutes were spent in paying the bill, seeing my baggage roped on behind the stage, and in bidding Scipio good-by. One foot was up to get into the vehicle when a voice behind said, “So you’re going.”

There was McDonough, hobbled out after me to the fence. He stood awkwardly at the open gate, smiling his pleasant smile. I replied yes, and still he stood.

“Coming next year?”

Again I said yes, and again he stood silent, smiling and awkward. Then it was uttered; the difficult word which shyness had choked: “If you come, you shall have the best horse on the river.”

Before I could answer he was hobbling back to the hotel. Thus from his heart his untrained lips at last had spoken.

I drove away, triumphing over the doctor, and in my thoughts my holiday passed in review,--my camps, and Scipio, and Still Hunt Spring, and most of all this fellow with his broken leg and perplexed eyes.

At Lander, they said, had I come two days earlier, I should have had the company of Lem Speed. So he and his maroon straw hat came into my thoughts too. He had started for California, I heard from the driver, whose society I sought on the box. He assured me that Lem Speed was rich, but that I carried better whiskey. Trouble was “due” in this country, he said (after more of my whiskey), “pretty near” the sort of trouble they were having on Powder River. For his part he did not wonder that poor men got tired of rich men; not that he objected to riches, but only to hogs. He had nothing against Lem Speed. Temptation to steal stock had never come his way, but he could understand how poor men might get tired of the big cattlemen--some poor men, anyhow. Yes, trouble was “sure due”; what brought Lem Speed up here so long after the beef round-up? Still, he “guessed” he hadn’t told Lem Speed anything that would hurt a poor fellow. Lem Speed had “claimed” he was up here about his bank. If so, why had he gone up Wind River, and all around Big Muddy, and over to the Embar? The bank was not there. No, sir; the big cattlemen were going to “demonstrate” over here as they had on the Dry Cheyenne and Box Elder. I perceived “demonstration” to be the driver’s word for the sudden hanging of somebody without due process of law, and I expressed a doubt as to its being needed here; I had heard nothing of cattle or horses being stolen. This he received in silence, presently repeating that Lem Speed hadn’t got anything from _him_. We broke off this subject for mines, and after mines we touched on topic after topic, until I confided to him the story of McDonough.

“Of course I would never accept the horse,” I finished.

“Why not?”

“Well--well--it would hardly be suitable.”