Part 9

“Please yourself,” said the driver, curtly, and looking away. “Such treatment would not please me.”

“You mean, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth,’ as we say?”

“I don’t know as I ever said that.” A steep gulley in the road obliged him to put on the break and release it before he continued: “I’d not consider I had the right to do a man a good turn if I wasn’t willing for him to do _me_ one.”

“But I really did nothing for him.”

“Please yourself. Maybe folks are different East.”

“Well,” I ended, laughing, “I understand you, and am not the hopeless snob I sound like, and I’ll take his horse next summer if you will take a drink now.”

We finished our journey in amity.

The intervening months, whatever drafts they made upon my Rocky Mountain health, weakened my designs not a whit; late June found me again in the stagecoach, taking with eagerness that drive of thirty-two jolting hours. Roped behind were my camp belongings, and treasured in my pocket was Chief Washakie’s trail to Still Hunt Spring. My friend, the driver, was on the down stage; and so, to my regret, we could not resume our talk where we had left it; but I again encountered at once that atmosphere of hinted doings and misdoings which had encompassed me as I went out of the country. At the station called Crook’s Gap I came upon new rumors of Lem Speed, and asked, had he come about his bank again?

“You and him acquainted?” inquired a man on a horse. And, on my answering that I was not, he cursed Lem Speed slow and long, looking about for contradiction; then, as none present took it up, he rode sullenly away, leaving silence behind him.

When I alighted next afternoon at the Washakie post-trader’s store and walked back to the private office of the building whither I was wont always to repair, what I saw in that private room, through a sort of lattice which screened it off from the general public, was a close-drawn knot of men round a table, and on a chair a maroon-colored straw hat! Rather hastily the post-trader came out, and, shaking my hand warmly, drew me away from the lattice. After a few cordial questions he said: “Come back this evening.”

“Does he never get a new hat?” I asked.

“Hat? Who? What? Oh; yes, to be sure!” laughed the post-trader. “I’ll tell him he ought to.”

I sought out the doctor, soon learning from him that McDonough had paid him for his services. But this had not softened his opinion of the young fellow, though he had heard nothing against him, nor even any mention of his name; he repeated his formula that he had known McDonough’s kind all the way from Assiniboine to Lowell Barracks, whereupon I again called him “cynic,” and he retorted with “tenderfoot,” and thus amicably I left him for my postponed gossip with the post-trader. Him I found hospitable, but preoccupied, holding a long cigar unlighted between his taciturn lips. Each topic that I started soon died away: my Eastern news; my summer plans to ramble with Scipio across the Divide on Gros Ventre and Snake; the proposed extension of the Yellowstone Park--everything failed.

“That was quite a company you had this afternoon,” I said, reaching the end of my resources.

“Yes. Nice gentlemen. Yes.” And he rolled the long, unlighted cigar between his lips.

“Cattlemen, I suppose?”

“Cattlemen. Yes.”

“Business all right, I hope?”

“Well, no worse than usual.”

Here again we came to an end, and I rose to go.

“Seen your friend McDonough yet?” said he, still sitting.

“Why, how do you know he’s a friend of mine?”

“Says so every time he comes into the Post.”

“Well, the doctor’s all wrong about him!” I exclaimed, and gave my views. The post-trader watched me in his tilted chair, with a half-whimsical smile, rolling his eternal cigar, and I finished with the story of the horse. Then the smile left his face. He got up slowly, and slowly took a number of turns round his office, pottered with some papers on his desk, and finally looked at me again.

“Tell me if he does,” he said.

“Offer the horse? I shall not remind him--and I should take it only as a loan.”

“You tell me if he does,” repeated the post-trader, now smiling again, and so we parted.

“I wonder what he didn’t say?” I thought as I proceeded to the hotel; for he had plainly pondered some remarks and decided upon silence. Between them, he and the doctor had driven me to a strong hope that McDonough would vindicate my opinion of him by making good his word. At breakfast next morning at the hotel one of the invariable characters at such breakfasts, an unshaven person in tattered overalls, with rope-scarred fists and grimy knuckles, to me unknown, asked:--

“Figure on meeting your friend McDonough?”

“Not if he doesn’t figure on meeting me.”

They all took quiet turns at looking at me until some one remarked:--

“He ain’t been in town lately.”

“I’m glad his leg’s all right,” I said.

“Oh, his leg’s all right.”

The tone of this caused me to look at them. “Well, I hope he’s _all_ all-right!”

Not immediately came the answer: “By latest reports he was enjoying good health.”

Truly they were a hopeless people to get anything direct from. Indirectness is by some falsely supposed to be a property of only the highly civilized; but these latter merely put a brighter and harder polish on it.

That afternoon I drove with my camp things out of town in a “buggy,”--very different from the Eastern vehicle which bears this name,--and the next afternoon between Dinwiddie and Red Creek, on a waste stretch high above the river, who should join me but McDonough. He was riding down the mountain apparently from nowhere, and my pleasure at seeing him was keen. His words were few and halting, as they had been the year before, and in his pleasant, round face the blue eyes twinkled, screwed up and as perplexed as ever. I abstained from more than glancing at the fine sorrel that he rode, lest I should seem to be hinting.

“Water pretty low for this season,” he said.

“Was there not much snow?”

“Next to none, and went early.”

I turned from my direct course and camped at his cabin on North Fork.

“What’s your hurry?” he said next morning, when I was preparing to go.

There was no hurry; those days had no hurry in them, and I bless their memory for it. I sat on a stump, smoking a “Missouri meerschaum,” and unfolding to him my plans. To the geography of my route he listened intently--very intently.

“So you’re going to keep over the other side the mountains?” he said.

“Even to Idaho,” I answered, “and home that way.”

“Not back this way?”

“Not this year.”

He thought a little while. “You’re settled as to that?”

“Quite.”

He rose, and put some wood into the stove in his cabin; then he returned to me where I sat on the stump. “Sure you’re quite settled you’ll keep on the west side of the Divide?”

“Goodness!” I laughed, “why should I lie to you?”

Again he pondered in silence, and I could not imagine what he had in his mind. What had my being east or being west of the mountains to do with him?

He now jerked his head toward the corral. “Like him?” he inquired gruffly. It was the sorrel horse that he meant, and I perceived that it was standing saddled. I said nothing. The fellow’s embarrassment embarrassed me. “Like him?” he repeated.

“Looks good to me,” I replied, adopting his gruffness.

He rose and brought the horse to me. “Get on.”

“Hulloa! You’ve got my saddle on him.”

“Get on. He ain’t the one that bruck my leg.”

I obeyed. Thus was the gift offered and accepted. I rode the horse down and up the level river bottom. “How shall I get him back to you?” I asked.

McDonough’s face fell. “He’ll be all right in the East,” he protested.

I smiled. “No, my good friend. Not that. Let me send him back with the outfit.”

We compromised on this, and caught trout for the rest of the day, also shooting some young sage chickens. The sorrel proved a fine animal. Again McDonough delayed my departure. “I can broil those chickens fine,” he said, “and--and you’ll not be back this way.”

He would not look at me as he said this, but busied himself with the fire. He was lonely, and liked my company, and couldn’t say so. Dense doctor! I reflected, not to have been warmed by this nature. But later this friendless fellow touched my heart more acutely. A fine thought had come to me during the evening: to leave my wagon here, to leave a note for Scipio at the E-A outfit, to descend Wind River to the Sand Gulch, strike Washakie’s trail to the northeast of Crow Heart Butte, and on my vigorous sorrel find Still Hunt Spring by myself. The whole ride need take but two days. I think I must have swelled with pride at the prospect of this secret achievement, to be divulged, when accomplished, to the admiring dwellers on Wind River. But I intended to have the pleasure of divulging it to McDonough at once, and I forthwith composed a jeering note to Scipio Le Moyne.

“Esteemed friend” (this would anger him immediately); “come and find me at Still Hunt Spring, if you don’t fear getting lost. If you do, avoid the risk, and I will tell you all about it Friday evening. Yours, Tenderfoot.”

I pushed this over to McDonough, who was practising various cuts with a pack of cards. “That will make Scipio jump,” I said.

Somewhat to my disappointment, it did not have this or any effect upon McDonough. He held the paper close to his eyes, shutting them still more to follow the writing, and handed it back to me, saying merely, “Pretty good.”

“I’ll leave it over at the E-A for him,” I explained. “He thinks I’m afraid to go there alone.”

“Yes. Pretty good,” said McDonough, as if I were venturing nothing. Was all Wind River going to treat it as such a trifle? Or--could it be that McDonough alone among white men and red hereabouts knew nothing of the mystery and menace by which Still Hunt Spring was encircled?

Next morning my perplexity was cleared. I made an early start, tying some food and a kettle and my “slicker” to the saddle. McDonough watched me curiously.

“Leavin’ your wagon and truck?” he inquired.

“Why, yes, of course. I’ll be back for it. I’m going to the E-A now. Are you a poet?” I continued. “I’ve begun a thing.” And I handed him some unfinished lines, which I had entitled “At Gift Horse Ranch.” “You don’t object to that?”

“Object to what?”

“Why, the title, ‘At Gift Horse Ranch.’”

He took the paper down from his eyes, and I saw that his face had suddenly turned scarlet. He stood blinking for a moment, and then he said:--

“I’d kind of like to hear it.”

“But that’s all there is to hear--so far!” I exclaimed, feeling somehow puzzled.

He put the verses close to his eyes once more. Then he held them out to me, and stood blinking in his odd, characteristic way. “Won’t y’u read ’em to me?” he at length managed to say. “I’ll not fool _you_.”

For yet one moment more I was dull, and did not understand.

“I can’t read,” he stated simply.

“Oh!” I murmured in mortification. And so I read the lines to him.

He stretched out his hand for the scribbled envelope on which I had pencilled the fragment. “May I keep that?”

“Wait till I have it finished.”

“I’d kind of like to have the start to keep.” He took it and shoved it awkwardly inside his coat. “I can’t read or write,” he said, more at his ease now the truth was out. “Nobody ever taught me nothin’.”

But I was not at ease. “Well, that stuff of mine is not worth reading!” I said. Cards had a meaning for him--kings, queens, ten-spots--these had been the fellow’s only books! He went on, “Never had any folks, y’u see--to know ’em, that is.--Well, so-long till you’re back.” He turned to his cabin, and I touched my horse.

The sorrel had gone but a few steps when I looked over my shoulder, and there stood the solitary figure, watching me from the cabin door. Suddenly it occurred to me that, as he had not been able to read my letter to Scipio, he knew nothing of my project. _This_ was why he had manifested no surprise! “Do you think,” I called back, laughing, “that your horse can take me to Still Hunt Spring?”

I am now sure that a flash of some totally different expression crossed his face, but at the time I was not sure; he was instantly smiling. “Take y’u anywhere,” he called. “Take y’u to Mexico, take y’u to Hell!”

“Oh, not yet!” I responded, and cantered away. So he thought I would not dare to go alone to Still Hunt Spring! Well and good; they should all believe it by Friday evening.

My cantering ceased soon,--it had been for dramatic effect,--and as I had before me a long ride, it behooved me to walk the first miles. Yet I was soon up the easy ascent from North Fork, and though my descent to the main river from the dividing ridge was through precipitous red bluffs, and accomplished with caution, I reached the E-A ranch (where it used to be twenty-five years ago) in less than two hours. To leave my note there for Scipio took but a minute, and now on the level trail down Wind River I made good time, so that before ten o’clock I had crossed back over it above the Blue Holes, skirted by where the Circle fence is to-day, crossed North Fork here, gone up a gulch, and dropped down again upon Wind River below its abrupt bend, and reached the desolate Sand Gulch. I nooned at the spring which lies, no bigger than a hat, about seven miles up the Sand Gulch on its north side. This was the starting-point of the trail that old Washakie had drawn for me; here I crossed the threshold of the mysterious and the untrodden.

The sense of this heightened the elation which my ride through the bracing hours of dawn had brought me, and as I turned out of the Sand Gulch it was as if some last tie of restraint had stepped from my spirit, leaving it on wings free and rejoicing. This gleamy, unfooted country always looked monotonous from the bluffs of Wind River, but I found no tedium in it; its delicious loneliness was thrilled at each new stage of the trail by recognizing the successive signs and landmarks which Washakie had bidden me look for. The first was a great dull red stone, carved rudely by some ancient savage hand to represent a tortoise. Perhaps in another mood, the grim appearance of this monster might have seemed a symbol of menace, but when I came upon the stone just where my map indicated that it was to be expected, I hailed it with triumph. Nor did the caked and naked earth of the region through which I next traced my way dry up my ardor. Gullies sometimes hid all views from me, and again from mounds and rises I could see for fifty miles. Should this ever meet the eye of some reader familiar with Wind River, he will know my whereabouts by learning that far off, but constantly in plain sight to my left, were Black Mountain and Spring Mountain; that I must have been headed toward a point about midway between where the mail camp now is and the pass over to Embar; that I crossed Crow Creek and (I think) Dry Creek, and that I saw both Steamboat Butte and Tea Pot Butte at different points. Even to write these names is a pleasure, for I loved that country so; and sometimes it seems as if I must go there and smell the sage-brush again--or die!

After the tortoise came several guiding signs: a big gash in the soil, cut by a cloud-burst; an old corral where I turned sharp to the left; a pile of white buffalo bones five miles onward; until at length I passed through a belt of low hills, bare and baked and colored, some pink, like tooth-powder, and others magenta, and entered a more level region covered with sparse grass and sage-brush. Great white patches of alkali, acres in extent, lay upon this plain. There was no water (Washakie had told me there would be none), and the gleamy waste stretched away on all sides; endlessly in front, and right and left to long lines of distant mountains, full of light and silence. Let the reader who is susceptible to tone combinations listen to the following dissonant, unresolved measures, played slowly over and over:--

[Music]

their brooding harmonies will picture or at least convey that landscape better than any words. I think it was really a mournful landscape, grand and grave with suggestion of ages unknown, of eras when the sea was not where it is now, and animals never seen by man wandered over the half-made world. Earth did not seem one’s own here, but alien, but aloof, as if, through some sudden translation, one had lit upon another planet, perhaps a dying one. Yet during these hours of nearing my goal no such melancholy fancies

overtook me; I rode forward like some explorer, and I tried to complete the verses which I had begun at McDonough’s:--

Would I might prison in these words, And so keep with me all the year Some inch of this bright wilderness Of freedom that I move in here.

But nothing resulted from it, unless a surprisingly swift flight of time. I was aware all at once that day was gone, that the rose and saffron heavens would soon be a field of stars. I had matched one by one the signs on my map with the realities around me, and now had reached the map’s last word; I was to stop when I found myself on a line between a hollow dip in the mountains to the left and a circular patch of forest high up on those to the right. On this line I was to travel to the right “a little way,” said Washakie. This I began to do, wondering if the twilight would last, and for the first time anxious. After “a little way” I found nothing new--the plain, the sage-brush, the dry ground--no more; and again a little further it was the same, while the twilight was sinking, and disquiet grew within me. Lost I could not well be, but I could fail; food would give out, and before this the sorrel and I must retrace our way to water at the Sand Gulch, seven hours behind us. The twilight deepened. Had I passed it? Should I ride in a circle? Rueful thoughts of a “dry camp” began to assert themselves, and my demoralized hand grew doubtful on the reins, when I gradually discovered that the sorrel _knew where he was_. There was no mistaking the increasing alertness that passed through him.

As this extraordinary fact became a certainty the chasm opened at my feet; the sorrel was trotting quickly along the brink of Still Hunt Spring! In broad day I should have seen it a moment sooner, and the suddenness with which, in the semi-obscurity, it had leaped into my view close beside me produced a startling effect. The success of my quest did not bring the unmixed pleasure that I had looked for; the dying day, the desolate shapes of the hills, the unbefriending hush of the plain, the odd alertness of the sorrel--all this for a while flavored my triumph with something akin to apprehension, and it seemed as if the ravine beneath me had been lurking in a sort of ambush until I should be fully within its power. The Indian legend was now easy to account for; indeed, I have met often enough, among our unlettered and rustic white population, with minds that would have believed, after such a shock as I had just received, that they had beheld the earth open supernaturally. The sorrel’s trot had become a canter as we continued to skirt the brink. Looking down I discovered in shadowy form the line of tall cottonwoods, spindled from their usual shape to the gaunt figures described as being on stilts; then the horse turned into the entrance. This steep and narrow trail was barred at a suitable place by a barrier of brush, which I replaced after passing it. A haunting uneasiness caused me to regret that I had not arrived in full daylight, but this I presently overcame. Before we reached the bottom I saw a number of horses grazing down among the trees, and they set up a great running about and kicking their heels at the sight of a human visitor. There must have been twenty or thirty.

Lassitude and satisfaction now divided my sensations as I made my way to the spring, whose cool, sweet water fulfilled all expectation. My good map served me to the last; with it I lighted my cooking fire, addressing it aloud as I did so, “Burn! your work is done!” I needed no map to go back! I had mastered the trail! In my recovered spirits I quite forgot how much I owed to the sorrel. While picking up dry sticks I stumbled upon what turned out to be a number of branding irons, which were quite consistent with the presence of the horses and the barrier at the entrance. Evidently the place sometimes served as a natural pasture and corral for stock gathered on the round-up and far strayed from where they belonged. Perhaps some one was camping here now. I shouted several times; but my unanswered voice merely made the silence more profound, and for a while the influence of the magic legend returned. With this my fancy played not unpleasingly while the kettle--or rather the coffee-pot--was boiling. The naturalness of building a fire, of making camp, of preparing a meal, helped common sense to drive out and keep out those featureless fears which had assailed me. What stories could be made about this place by a skilful writer! The lost traveller stumbles upon it, enters, suspects himself to be not alone, calls out, and immediately the haunted walls close and he is shut within the bowels of the earth. How release him? Therein would be the story. Or--the lost traveller, well-nigh dead of thirst, hastens to the spring amid the frolicsome gambols of the horses. No sooner has he drunk than he becomes a horse himself, and the others neigh loud greetings to a brother victim. Then a giant red man appears and brands him. How release all the horses from the spell?

As I lay by my little cooking fire in the warm night, after some bacon and several cups of good tea made in the coffee-pot, I was too contented to do aught in the way of exploration, and I continued to recline, hearing no sound but the grazing horses, and seeing nothing but the nearer trees, the dark sides of the valley, and the open piece of sky with its stars. My saddle-blanket and “slicker” served me for what bed I needed, the saddle with my coat supplied a pillow, and the cups of tea could not keep me from immediate and deep slumber.

I opened my eyes in sunlight, and the first object that they rested upon was a maroon-colored straw hat. With the mental confusion that frequently attends a traveller upon first waking in a new place, I lay considering the hat and wondering where I was, until at a sound I turned to see the hat’s owner stooping to the spring. Instantly Lem Speed, cattleman and owner of a store and bank in Lander, a house in Salt Lake, a wife in Los Angeles, and a son at Yale, was covering me with a rifle.

“Stay still,” was his remark.

Not a suspicion that it was anything but a joke entered my head. I lay there and I smiled. “I could not hurt you if I wished to.”

“You will never hurt me any more.”

Another voice then added: “He is not going to hurt any of us any more.”

“Stay still!” sharply reiterated Lem Speed, for at the second voice I had half risen.

“For whom do you take me?” I asked.

“For one of the people we want.”

I continued to be amused. “I’ll be glad to know what you want me for. I’ll be glad to know what damage I’ve done. I’ll be happy to make it good. I came over here last night for--”

“Go on. What did you come for?”

“Nothing. Simply to see this place. I’ve wanted to see it for a year. I wanted to see if I could find it by myself.” And I told them who I was and where I lived.

“That’s a good one, ain’t it?” said a third man to Lem Speed.

“And so,” said he, “you, claiming you’re an Eastern tenderfoot, found this place, first trip, all by yourself across fifty miles of country old-timers get lost in?”

“No. Washakie gave me a map.”

“Let’s see your map.”

“I lighted my fire with it.”

Somebody laughed. There were now five or six of them standing round me.

“If some of you gentlemen will condescend to tell me what you think my name is, and what you think I have done--”