Part 2

‘I guess not,’ said Letchie. ‘Wouldn’t look so pretty when we got back, to have you tell ’em you sat rifle-up over the prisoner while we got our beauty sleep back.... No, I’m figurin’ out a different way from what I saw up yonder--just as we broke into town.’

He meant the blacksmith shop. Bob Leadley saw Mort Cotton standing in the dark like a dirt-stained corpse. It might have been Batten himself.

‘I won’t take part in it,’ Bob thought. ‘I ain’t marshal to say what’s what, but I won’t take no part.’

Bart was looking his way, but Bob didn’t turn to meet his son’s eyes. ‘I ain’t a man of law,’ he was thinking. At the same time he felt Bart’s eyes turning to him persistently, but he couldn’t look. ‘I ain’t a man of law.’

The marshal was managing it alone....

Bob had been famished riding into town, but the stuff left in his saddle-bags tasted like worms to his tongue, and the water, as if running out of a sore. Though he was half dead for it, there was no sleep--with that racket from the blacksmith shop down the dirt road of Red Ante. He didn’t meet Bart’s eyes again. It was as if he had said good-bye to his son for life.

Bob had dragged his blankets away from the empty huts, far out on the sand to get beyond the cries, but they were already in his soul--no getting away. Long afterward, lying out there, he heard the sound of a single shot from the direction of the blacksmith shop--the end of all cries. Welton was there before him, Mort Cotton appearing from the side. Palto’s troubles were over--Bart missing. It was not until daybreak that the father found a note pinned to his saddle--written by Bart before the shot had been fired.

I guess I don’t belong here, Dad. I’ll take Palto with me, if I can get him loose. Otherwise--well, you’ll know. So long for good, BART.

I

THIRTY YEARS LATE

ARRIVING when the present century was well started, Elbert Sartwell had now concluded that his was a most untimely birth. For instance, all that war amounted to in his case, was the matter of wearing puttees to school. The magic of his youth was moreover smothered in a houseful of sisters--imprisoned in a sorority-house, he found himself--all his aching and persistent dreams unexpressed.

But the end had come. Elbert had reached decision; so had his father on the same point. They were at odds. It was a matter of grief to the son that for once there could be no compromise.

Fall darkness had closed about him, as these things appeared before Elbert’s mind with finality. He left his room, followed the long wide hall to the door of his father’s dressing-room and knocked. It was the last quarter of an hour before dinner, and the tone of the ‘Come in’ was not encouraging, but it didn’t occur to Elbert to wait until dinner and tobacco had combed down his father’s tag-ends of the day.

Mr. Sartwell was standing before his mirrors and did not turn, as the hall door opened. Elbert nodded at the reflection; also he observed in the glass a look of fresh vexation, which reminded him that his sister Nancy this very afternoon had smashed the fender and left front wheel of the new phaëton. His father had probably just heard about it. The present moment couldn’t be worse, but Elbert didn’t see how he could back out now with his ultimatum unreported.

‘I’ve been thinking it over,’ he said, ‘and I can’t start to work in the office, at least not now. You see, I’ve always wanted--’

‘“Always wanted”--’ broke in Mr. Sartwell, ‘“always wanted” against my better judgment.... A houseful of “always wanteds”! How can a man be expected to stand in the midst of six people, always wanting in different directions?’

‘I hate to be an added trouble to you,’ Elbert said in his unruffled way, ‘but there’s no use of my trying to go into the business, the way I feel.’

‘What is it now?’

Still addressing the mirror, the younger man outlined with some embarrassment that he hadn’t been able to get over his ardor to tackle life on a cattle range. The broad back before him suddenly jerked about. Elbert was held by the first direct look of one whose son has proved a definite disappointment. Many words followed; some heat:

‘... pack a pair of pistols! Step along out over the real-estate ranges and prairie sub-divisions! Why, I’m actually ashamed to have to tell you, what any kid half your age knows--that there isn’t a West any more, no cattle country--hasn’t been for--why, you’re only about thirty years late--’ Also a final sentence, as Elbert withdrew, to the effect that if he did go forth, he would have to pay his own car fare ‘out into the fenceless spaces.’

There was present at dinner that evening one of sister Nancy’s young men friends, who had no dreams of the West whatsoever. The Sartwell family, diminished by recent marriages of two elder daughters, was pulling together socially, in spite of internal trouble. Elbert’s thoughts were mainly afar on his own problem, but after a time, he couldn’t help noticing the art with which the gentleman-guest played up to his father. It could be done, Elbert reflected. The two sons-in-law, already connected up, had also gone about it this way. He felt like a crossed stick; a spectator merely, in the home dining-room. His glance moved from face to face in the soft creamy light that flowed down through a thin bowl of alabaster, hanging from the ceiling. He alone, an only son, lacked a sort of commonplace craft to smooth his ways. He might have asked for a trip around the world before settling down to a business career--and gotten it.

Elbert retired to his room early. The Sartwell mansion faced the West, and sunsets had reddened his windows from as far back as he could remember. Long ago he had stared into a crimson foam of one certain day’s end, thinking that it was the color of Wyoming. The lure of that crimson foam hadn’t ceased, though it had moved farther South and farther West--Apache country, Navajo country--leading on over the border of late into Mexico itself.

He had been given an automobile at the end of high-school days, but he had wanted a pony. Hours at home he had spent in the garage, secretly wishing all the time it was a corral.

Elbert turned on the lights. Over the back of the chair he was sitting on, was a blanket of Indian red. There were framed Western drawings on the wall, paintings of rodeo and round-up, lonely cattlemen, bison, longhorns, desert and mountain scenes; and in among his books, pasted in an old ledger, was his collection of Indian pictures--heads of all the tribes, famous braves and medicine men--from cigarette, gum, candy packages--no end to the lengths he had gone to get the lot together. He looked back upon the time when the bronzed head of Red Cloud, of the Nez Perces, was the noblest countenance he had ever gazed upon.

A tall, cool person, Elbert could hardly remember ever being really tired. He was practically a stranger to all stimulants and dwelt altogether unaware in a calm that made nervous people either envious at once or hopeless altogether. His steady, homely hands were of that considerable size as to appear empty most of the time, and his blue eyes were so steady and cool that any one undertaking to go against his will, felt a surge of fatigue and irritation at the outset.

Elbert had been pondering a good deal of late on what sort of stuff he was made of. When he read of some hero’s exploits in a newspaper, he asked himself could he have done that. And when he heard of some great suffering or privation of explorers, he wondered how he would have acted, had he been along. But it was the Southwest that perennially and persistently called. He moved to his phonograph, and picked out a book of records from the shelf below. The one he wanted wasn’t there; in fact, he found it still in the machine, from a solitary performance of last evening--a Mexican record. He set it going now and a man’s announcement in Spanish preceded the music, something about ‘Paquita Conesa, tonadillera española, la mas famosa en Mexico y Sudamerica--’

... His favorite record. The song was ‘La Paloma.’ It always seemed to Elbert as if Señorita Paquita were singing in the open air. He smiled at a secret thought that always came to him, too--that the words of the song were carved out of starlight.

‘Cuando sali de la Habana, Valgame Dios--’

Up from the street, at the end of the song, reached his ears the tiresome sweep and swish of tires and carbureters, and from the drawing-room, Nancy’s singing voice. Her young man would be standing beside the piano at this time, his waxen hair brushed back. Elbert smiled wistfully. ‘Thirty years late.’

II

AT HEASLEP’S RANCH

FROM Kansas City, he sent his first letter back, regretting to leave home without talking it over further, but there didn’t seem to be any use. Possibly there wasn’t any more West, he allowed, but he had to go out and see. He hopped off the train at Tucson and heard of a stage that ran south toward the Border. That sounded right, and he walked three blocks with his bags to perceive--no jehu with long flicking lash, but a chauffeur, the stage being a motor-bus.

Elbert couldn’t appreciate the scenery. Yes, there was a big ranch down yonder, the driver said. Yes, there was cattle. Irrigation and alfalfa had reclaimed this waste stuff. Some cows presently appeared wearing an ‘HCO’ brand.

‘What does that stand for?’ Elbert asked.

‘Heaslep and Company.’

No Circle X or Lazy M--but irrigation, alfalfa fields, Heaslep and Company!

‘The HCO runs everything down here--big land grant stretching almost to the Border,’ the stage driver said.

Elbert was let down and made his way to a group of low buildings in the distance. At the farrier’s shop, he inquired for the foreman, and was told to look for a door ahead, marked ‘Office.’ ‘You’ll find Frost-face in there or somewhere about,’ the blacksmith said.

Elbert’s pulse picked up a little at the name of the foreman, but it was certainly a business office he entered.

‘We’re not short-handed,’ snapped the little gray man, with worried face. ‘Things dull down in winter. Nothin’ much to do right now but keep off the hoof-and-mouth disease.’

Outside there was a succession of sick blasts from a truck--the sound of an engine, not only decrepit, but dirty and dry. Elbert turned to the door.

‘Wait a minute, young fellow. We might use a man on the chuck wagon--I wonder if you could drive old Fortitude?’

‘A mule?’ said Elbert. ‘I’m sure I could learn--’

‘Mule, hell, motor truck--can’t you hear her?’

‘I’m afraid I can,’ Elbert said wearily. His father had been right.

One distinct value about Heaslep and Company, however--no women in the establishment. Even the cooking staff was Chinese. But the rest was hard to bear. Efficiency and trade had settled down as unromantically as upon a tannery. Heaslep’s was a stock farm, a beef factory, anything but the cattle ranch of dreams. This part of Arizona was sunk in no foam of Indian red. The vast range lay on a squat mesa, partly penciled over with irrigation ditches. Elbert’s tardy soul, longing for the thunder of a stampede, sickened at the sight of thousands of domesticated moos, rack-fed in winter, market-fattened from fenced alfalfa fields, branded in chutes and railroaded as scientifically as tinned biscuit. The only longhorns hung over the mantelpiece in the dormitory of the cowhands. Even the imported bulls were businesslike.

Most of the ranges were deserted by this time, the cold weather settling down. Elbert had been taken on as ‘Bert’ Sartwell, but his first letters from home gave the real thing away. All hands relished the discovery. Over a dozen of the men were in for his first Sunday, the day they started him in filling up gopher holes in the environment of the main buildings. Elbert was told that the best way was to soak old newspapers into a pulp and poke them down into the holes with a stick; necessary business every week or ten days during the gopher season. This was the height of it, he was informed.

‘You see, the paper hardens down,’ Cal Monroid said.

‘And gets fire-proof,’ added Slim Gannon, his side-kick.

Elbert set about his work, a bit coldish and blank at the extent of the job before him. He had never read of this department of ranch work, and wondered if it meant he was to be relieved of the motor truck. Toward midday he looked up from his poking, to find that at least ten of the cowhands had closed in, having stalked him like an Indian band. Their enthusiasm was high and prolonged. Elbert smiled and blushed, but said nothing. For a day or two after that they tried to call him ‘Poke,’ but the name didn’t take hold. The men liked to say Elbert too well. ‘Elber-r-rt,’ they would chirrup, and inquire if he had ever done any bull-dogging.

He was not relieved from the truck. His work was to carry mails and bring in supplies from the town of Harrisburg, eleven miles to the north. He sometimes made two trips a day when the truck would permit, but the tantrums of old Fortitude were a subject of conversation at Heaslep’s only a little lower in the scale than the hoof-and-mouth disease.

On his third or fourth Sunday, Elbert spread newspapers on the ground and set about taking down Fortitude’s strained and creaking mechanism part by part. His activity and absorption began to attract a Sabbath crowd.

‘He’s gettin’ her whole plumbin’ out,’ Slim Gannon remarked. ‘I’m layin’ four to three that we’ve heard her last belch.’

Cal Monroid considered for half a minute, noting the orderly lay-out of tools, inwards, greases and oils, and how carefully Elbert had numbered the parts. Cal began to fancy a vague purpose underneath it all and casually remarked: ‘I’ll just take you on, Slim, for half a month’s pay.’

Elbert toiled through the hours. By sundown when he took his place at the wheel, all Heaslep’s was taut with strain. The works purred, the car moved. ‘It’s down-grade, she’s just rollin’!’ breathed Slim. But Elbert reversed; old Fortitude backed and curved, did a figure eight to new music without hitting post or wall.

‘I win,’ said Cal.

‘She ain’t belched yet,’ said Slim.

The two moved off to settle the technicality.

Dreary months of trucking. Elbert’s insatiable interest in horsemanship had been little encouraged at Heaslep’s. He was permitted to learn the bad ones by experience, and was rapidly disconnected several times, discovering his audience when it was too late, as on the day of ‘poking’ gopher holes. Though it was generally allowed things looked up a little when the range grass began to grow, Elbert lost heart before the winter was over. It seemed a long time to him since he had left home, but it wasn’t so by the calendar. To judge by letters, the family had its hands out beckoning, but Elbert felt neither his father nor sisters would miss having the laugh at his expense.

Hard to leave Cal and Slim. This pair had warmed up a trifle toward the last. It was Cal Monroid who helped Elbert up from the turf the last time he was spurned by an HCO untameable, and Cal’s easy tones had a soothing effect:

‘It’s about time you were sitting a real horse, Kid. Give me your shoe--’

And Elbert was lifted up on old Chester, who had his ‘stuff’ down so fine, you wouldn’t believe he knew anything. Chester was the morning-star of Cal’s string, and right then Elbert began to know the difference between an outlaw and a real man-horse. That one brief word ‘Kid,’ still sounded in his ears. It seemed to have let him into a new world, the world of Cal Monroid and Slim Gannon, the latter said to have taken the Tucson Bronk Cup two years straight; both men being held as cool and fast in a pinch. This episode held the faintest possible answer to what he had come West for, but Elbert had already decided to depart, his plan being to go on to the coast, before starting back East.

III

THE LEATHER-STORE

HIS first night in Los Angeles was like summer, though it was February. In the core of the old town he found the Plaza, and strolled through the Mexican crowd. His heart started a queer beat as the band struck up ‘La Paloma,’ his lips forming the words of the first line or two:

‘Cuando sali de la Habana, Valgame Dios--’

A wonder took him as to what Los Angeles used to be like when there were empty hills all around and how ‘La Paloma’ would have sounded in those days. ‘Carved out of starlight,’ he whispered.

The next day in the window of an old leather-store near the Plaza, he saw a cardboard sign reading: ‘Young man wanted.’ Elbert didn’t suppose they would take on one without experience, but the impulse grew upon him to try his luck. The thought of going East so soon hadn’t become any easier, nor did he consider with relish the idea of asking his father for money to stay away with. To his surprise he was given a trial in the leather-shop, and gradually he became pleased with the arrangement, for the store proved to have quality and background. Real cattlemen used to swear by it, he found out, and occasionally, even now, an old-timer would come in and talk with the proprietor. They would chat of the days when cantinas still welcomed the passer-by around the corner on North Main Street, little games going on upstairs. In those days the Mexicans hanging around the Plaza still had bits of color in their sashes and sombreros.

There was a gray wooden horse in the leather-store, fragile but full height, on which Elbert was accustomed to show bridles, saddles, blankets, and pack-gear, talking to customers a lot wiser than he felt, for he still resented life’s conspiracy which had kept him from sitting a live horse where he belonged.

In the evening he would go out and lounge in the Plaza under the dusty palms and sycamores. It was better than Heaslep’s in a way--the Mexicans had a friendly feel, and sometimes when the band played, he could imagine himself down in the City of Mexico, or in the heart of Sonora at least. One day during the dinner hour, when Elbert was alone, a calm-eyed, oldish man pushed ajar the door of the leather-store, looked slowly around and remarked in mildest tone:

‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do, is to saddle their pony.’

The voice was so gentle and leisurely, Elbert was warmed and interested at once. He was quite sure that nothing he could say about saddles would astonish such a customer, so he approached with a smile merely. The stranger had come to a halt before as fine a bit of workmanship in plain leather as the store contained.

‘It ain’t hem-stitched,’ he began reflectively. ‘Thirty-eight pounds.’

‘Would you like to see it on the model?’ Elbert inquired.

The other didn’t seem to hear. ‘Now, what would you expect me to lay out for a little tan kack like this?’ he asked.

‘Hundred-seventy-five,’ Elbert said throatily. ‘Would you like to look at it on the model?’

‘No, it might confuse me a whole lot to see it on your dappled gray. Anyway, I can see Buddy Pitcairn made her from here. I’m shore partial about him monogram when I fork leather.’

A check was written with the remark: ‘You can ship her to me, care of Mort Cotton’s ranch at San Forenso, Arizona, and take plenty of time to look up this paper, young man. I never feel sure that the bank will like it, when I write out money for myself.’

The easy, rapid writing hinted an intelligence in curious contrast to the quaint speech and big loose hands, blackened and rounded to tool handles. The name on the check was Robert Leadley, and that was but the first of several calls which this customer made at the leather-store, ostensibly for further purchases, but always lingering to talk with Elbert. The latter had never known any one so easy to be with, and one late afternoon at closing time, when Mr. Leadley, with embarrassment, invited him to go out to supper, Elbert had been on the point of asking the same thing. They stopped for a soft drink at an old brown rail in Main Street.

‘I ’member when this was a great sportin’ place,’ Mr. Leadley said. ‘I used to come in here from the mountains with gold in a little chamois sack. Had a California claim in those days. I’m back in Arizona now, not a great ways from where I began. When the time came for me to go out this last trip, I felt like coming over to L.A., just like I used to from these mountains. Why, I was in this very place one night when a man was shot. Just yonder by that plate of hard-boiled eggs, he went down, callin’ on a woman.’

‘I didn’t quite understand what you mean by “going out,”’ said Elbert, not wanting to miss anything.

‘When you’ve got a claim in the mountains and you figure on leaving, you designates it “going out.”’

‘Is it a gold mine?’

‘Well, by stretchin’ a trifle you might call her a gold mine--just a little claim by myself. Southeast a ways and high up. You go to San Forenso first. You can look back into California and down into Sonora from my diggin’s.’

‘Do you have horses up at the mine?’ Elbert asked, thinking of the Pitcairn stock-saddle.

The quaint laugh sounded. ‘Just a little vanity, young man. They do say Bob Leadley would have his saddle-hoss, if he was runnin’ a canal boat. I can’t seem to do proper without a bit of hoss-flesh handy, though Mamie sure costs me no end money and trouble, not bein’ the sort of hoss as can pick her livin’ off the north side o’ trees--’

He paused, as if pleased to recall the mare to mind in minutest detail.

‘Mamie’s father was the stake-hoss, Ganopol--one of the first ten runners, they do say, and bone and blood to go with it, if not a whole lot of hoss-sense essential. Mamie’s mother was just a cow hoss ... just a cow hoss, with a little clock workin’ between her eyes--that was Clara. Thirteen years, I had her, and we got real domesticated together, you might say. Mamie’s a five-year-old now--just about growed up--don’t resemble neither parent none, bein’ a jewel box by herself, full of her own little knick-knacks.... Yep, bred right out of the purple royalty on one hand and the black sage on the other, but approachin’ my idea of saddle-hoss, plumb satisfyin’--

‘An’ p’raps it ain’t such a chore, as I’m makin’ out, to get hay and grain up to the mine,’ Mr. Leadley added, ‘because once or twice a year, Mort Cotton sends his mule train up from San Forenso to pack down my ore. Takes just about a week’s work, three times a year, for a dozen or fourteen mules; and ’stead of the train pilin’ back uptrail with empty riggin’s, I stock up the cabin and the corral. Makes it easy, but a whole lot of times, I don’t know where to put all I got--’

‘But what do you do with your mare when you leave the mine?’ Elbert asked.

‘Leave her with Mort Cotton at his ranch in San Forenso. All hands have got to know her at Mort’s.’

After supper they strolled back to the Plaza. The band began playing ‘La Paloma.’ Elbert started to speak, but Mr. Leadley’s hand tightened on his knee for silence.

‘I’ve got reason to remember that piece,’ he said, when it was over. ‘The Mexicans never get tired of it. It’s like the Virgin speaking to them. Do you know what that word means?’

‘Dove,’ said Elbert.

‘Correct. You must have studied the language?’

‘Only the last few weeks. I’d like to know more. It would come handy in the leather-store. You know a lot about Mexico, don’t you?’

‘Not so much as I used to believe, young man, but I ain’t averse to these people. I used to think I was, but as I look back now, I ’casionally catch myself wishin’ I’d treated them as well as they have treated me. Just a curious feelin’ at times--’

It didn’t seem to be a deep matter to Mr. Leadley, his eyes were so pleasant.

‘They’re peaceful to be with, like cattle,’ he went on. ‘I lived on a farm back East when I was a boy, and my father and mother used to fight a whole lot--at supper, especially. I ’member often goin’ out in the barnyard, and how peaceful it was, after the supper table. I don’t mean Mexicans are cattle, you understand, only that they loll around and ruminate peaceful, like cattle.’