Part 3

Elbert waited for more, and what came had a world of feeling in it that he didn’t understand. It seemed the night was chillier, but the gentle tone hadn’t changed.

‘We used to call ’em greasers and shoot ’em up a lot, not thinkin’ much about it. We used to hang ’em for hoss-thieves, when a sheriff wanted to make a showin’. Thought little more of ’em than a Chinee, only diff’rent. Young punchers and miners--we thought we was the people--’

The voice stopped so suddenly Elbert felt queer.

‘You didn’t tell me, why you have reason to remember “La Paloma,”’ he said, looking across at the red lights of ‘Estella Teatro.’

‘I’ve got a boy about your size, I figure, somewhere south in Sonora--’

The words fanned to life the romantic pictures of Elbert’s private world--‘somewhere south in Sonora--’

‘He used to like that song--used to whistle and sing it at all times. A dozen years since I saw him. He was under fifteen then--that would make him about your age now. You’re pretty good size, but I think he’d show up a speck taller by this time.’

‘What’s your son doing down there?’

‘Well, I only hear from him occasionally, through the papers. Must be excitin’ work, having to do with the rurales, mostly. Some calls it politics in Mexico.... Maybe they’ll play that again--if we sit down for a spell.’

And now Elbert was hearing the story of a boy, called Bart--no mother--life in a mining camp on the Rio Brava, Arizona--a sorry sort of helpless attachment in the father.

‘The very night Bart came to town, before even the old Mexican nurse let me in, I knew my job was cut out,’ Mr. Leadley said.

Sentences like these stood out in the midst of detail:

‘I had everything mapped out for him, but he wouldn’t follow the map. That broke me, because I mapped so hard and set so much store.... Bit by bit Bart showed me he’d have his way--taking his whippings easy, looking white, but ready to laugh, and going his own way just the same afterward. I never seemed able to do the right thing by him; couldn’t let him alone; cared too much, I guess--the kind of care that hurts. Why, I’d get lonesome for him when he was right in the room, and flare up over things I’d never dream of getting sore about in any one else. Altogether, what I didn’t know in them days was so much, young man, that I’ve been fillin’ in ever since, and ain’t through yet.’

IV

‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’

AFTER they had parted, on the night of their first supper together, Elbert fell to thinking of his own relationships at home. This occupied him for an hour or two before going to bed--mixed in with memories of what he had heard about Mr. Leadley’s missing son, and old days on the Rio Brava. He saw for the first time that there were two sides to this father-and-son business; that it was just possible a man might be able to talk to another man, saying things he couldn’t tell his own son. Moreover, Elbert was able to see something of the tangle between Bart and his father with a clearness that had never come to him in regard to his own affairs.

He was a touch lonely that night, but queerly glad, for the first time, that he had never shown the knack to ‘work’ his father. All regret eased about that; better as it was.

Mr. Leadley didn’t appear to be in any hurry to get back to his mine. It seemed to do him good to talk about the old days. Elbert listened eagerly, especially about Bart as a horseman.

‘You see, he learned all we knew about hosses and all that the Mexicans know besides. He rode light, his hand quick, a sort of kidding way with him that got right into the good feelings of a hoss. I made him give up a bad one once and I had no right to do that, but I didn’t see it straight until afterward. It was an old gray outlaw he brought home from a near-by ranch--a discard, but Bart was sitting him upright and amiable. That hoss pretty near finished me. I’m limpin’ yet, on rainy days, from tryin’ to correct his misdemeanors. And because I couldn’t, it bore down on me not to let Bart ride him, who could. That was another mistake.... A hossman at ten, Bart was; had to have his six-gun before he was twelve. He could fan it, too. No use me tryin’ to keep him from it, and the fellows I worked with at the mines whisperin’ that he’d kill himself--that he wouldn’t live to be hanged. You always hear what you’re afraid of.

‘Slim, black-haired, easy smilin’ and Spanish on his tongue, Mexican spurs and reata, more interested in guitar music than gold mining, and off by himself or with the Mexicans instead of with his own kind. You know, Bart’s mother was Spanish.... Yet any one could see Bart was game and gritty--life a feather to him--take it or leave it; laughin’ but dangerous. No, they couldn’t see it, either,’ Mr. Leadley finished abruptly. ‘I’m talking from a distance, from where I am now, I didn’t see it myself then--not rightly, I didn’t. I’m shore gettin’ talkative.’

‘I like to hear about him,’ said Elbert.

‘Now as to that, I had a queer feelin’ you did from the first day I came to the leather-store. Guess that’s why I’ve kept hangin’ around--that, and your bein’ about Bart’s age and size.’

* * * * *

And yet, if it hadn’t been for the curious sensitiveness within him that registered Mr. Leadley’s feelings, Elbert would have thought that the other was merely recalling matters of pleasantness from years ago. Finally one evening, after talk touching Bart’s prolonged stay below the Border, Elbert said:

‘I’d certainly like to get somewhere down in Sonora.’

‘Don’t you ever draw a vacation at your store?’

Elbert laughed. ‘I’ve only been there a few weeks.’

‘I’d hate to cause any disaster in the leather business--’

‘How do you mean?’

The other’s voice became husky with strain. ‘I was thinkin’ as a starter, possibly, you might come over to my claim on your vacation.’

It began to appear more and more feasible as they talked. Directions opened right here at the Plaza. Elbert was told that an old friend and mining partner of Mr. Leadley’s--Mort Cotton, now a cattleman, the same to whom the saddle had been shipped--would meet him at San Forenso and drive him up as far as the road went on the way to the mine.

‘That’s at Slim Stake Camp,’ Mr. Leadley added. ‘From there you just keep on hikin’ up the canyon trail till you come to White Stone Flats, where I’ll be watchin’ for you--’

It sounded somewhat complicated to Elbert. ‘But suppose I should miss the trail?’ he said.

‘I can’t see how you could, unless you got headstrong--’

‘But how am I to know when I get to White Stone Flats?’

‘By composin’ yourself to listen a little longer. First you see two big pines less’n twenty feet apart, still alive, but showing marks of a forest fire ten or twelve years back.’

‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how a tree would look, twelve years after a forest fire--’

‘Right, you wouldn’t, but that ain’t all to go by. It is a Flats, remember, and on the Flats is a lot of big white stones, and printed on the biggest of ’em in black letters, “ARE YOU DOOMED?”’

Elbert saw himself getting there.

‘... humorist--now I wonder?’ Mr. Leadley went on. ‘Or just a pious gent coming up into Nineveh, as if sent for? “Are You Doomed?”--he paints, right on the big stone facin’ the trail, and a little ways off on a smaller stone, he fixes the answer: “JESUS SAVES.” That there handwritin’ on the rock seems to be for me, ’cause every time I go for water--there it is. But as I was sayin’, you’ll know you’re comin’ to the Flats when you get to the last water.’

‘How shall I know it’s the last water?’

‘’Cause pretty soon after that you’ll come to the Flats. Anyway, I’d be watchin’ on the day set--’

Elbert was finally able to arrange a few days off, without losing his job outright, though he felt queerly uncertain about coming back, the claim being beyond Yuma on his way East. On a morning in late March, he reached San Forenso, where he was met by Mr. Cotton, with a two-horse rig. The hand that Elbert gripped was crippled in shape, but did not lack strength, and the eyes of Mr. Leadley’s old partner peered into his with such frequency and deep intent from under their bushy white brows, that Elbert began to feel he had never before been so exhaustively appraised.

‘Has Bob started in tellin’ you about Red Ante, yet?’ Mr. Cotton asked after they had driven some time.

‘No,’ said Elbert, wondering if Red Ante were a game.

‘Now that’s funny--he never gets away from that when I see him. That’s one reason I don’t see him a whole lot more. Told you about Bart, of course--’

‘Yes.’

‘Way back in Bismo--’

‘Yes--’

‘And stopped short at Red Ante?’

‘I didn’t hear him mention--’

‘Now that’s queer--nothin’ about a man not bein’ able to wash his hands?’

‘No,’ said Elbert, more mystified.

‘Can’t be it’s dyin’ out of him,’ Mr. Cotton mused, eyes rigid on the flanks of his team, as they wound up a canyon trail. ‘But that ain’t the kind of thing as dies out,’ he added.

At Slim Stake Camp, where the road ended, Mr. Cotton excused himself to write a note to Mr. Leadley, which Elbert was asked to deliver. ‘And don’t let him fill you up none on how bad he’s treated Bart,’ was the last swift injunction. ‘I was along myself in them days and I didn’t miss all that was goin’ on.’

Elbert nodded attentively.

‘Remember what I say, when he starts tellin’ you about Red Ante!’ shouted Mr. Cotton, holding hard on his swerving team.

A while after that Elbert was alone on the steep canyon trail, his ears cracking like drying wallpaper from the altitude, and his heart windily at work. Springs saturated the earth from time to time. There positively didn’t seem to be any last water, until the trail widened in mid-afternoon and there faced him:

‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’

White Stone Flats. He found the two pines that had lived through the fire--all straight, but no Mr. Leadley to meet him. He called a little, but the raising of his voice left him queerly uneasy. There was food in his roll, and he finally spread his blankets and stretched out for the night. The idea struck him that he must soon get back to work, for it seemed like ten days already.

Mr. Leadley must have forgotten the date. Up here anything was possible. Hours after, a white glare through the eastern trees and a tardy, bulging moon showed up; then quite the most curdling wail sounded through the whitish night. It was ‘doggy’ in depth and volume, but the wauling of it was like a greatly enlarged cat. Now Elbert had an opportunity to study the stuff he was made of. He wasn’t encouraged. His heart was knocking to get out. Nothing short of a mountain lion made that noise.

There was another sound--hard to place, that welled out of the dragging hours--a queer hum, so soft that one didn’t know whether it was a mile away or in his hair. It was like a woman going insane, but not violently.

Hard to believe, but the sky began to show signs at last that another day was actually to be given to mankind. Elbert was making coffee in full daylight, when another outcry reached him--his first dawning suspicion as to the human quality of these tones. He stood up; his hand actually shook as he set down his tin cup, and his eye caught the black letters:

‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’

‘How did you know?’ he muttered--and right then, the call again--vaguely like his own name. A minute later he was running across the Flats, his ears verifying as he ran:

‘Oh, Sartwell--this wa-a-ay!’ ahead, and somewhat above.

‘Yes, I’m coming!’

On the easy slope before his eyes, he saw a trail.

‘... turn to the left at the rotted cedar!’

The voice nearer, his own steps soundless for sixty or seventy feet along the punk of fallen timber; then a bald ridge which the winds had swept clean--a hand raised from the gravel--the old man crumpled there, his lips stretched white in a pained smile.

‘A long time gettin’ to you ... couldn’t make it last night. Where’s your canteen?’

‘Back with my stuff--shall I get it?’

‘No, I guess I can wait a little longer. We’ll get to the cabin. Mebby, leaning a whole lot, I can walk a bit.’

‘What did you do? You haven’t been lying out here all night?’

‘Yes. It happened in the tunnel yesterday ’bout noon--falling rock ... too big for the small of a man’s back. Started a trickle in there, somewhere--’

Did he mean in the mine or in his back?

‘Left me uncoupled. Too bad to spoil that vacation of yours this way.... Figured I could reach you by crawlin’--but played out--couldn’t make you hear in the night. Feared you might have gone back to town.’

Mr. Leadley couldn’t stand now, even with help. Elbert shouldered him at last; a long hard pull up to the cabin. No need for directions the latter part of the way, for a horse kept up an incessant nickering--like showers of gold coins falling upon a metal surface.

‘That’s Mamie. She ain’t been fed since yesterday mornin’,’ the old man apologized. ‘She never misses bestowin’ her welcomes, though it ain’t like her to be quite so noisy. She’s a real listener, too, Mamie is.’

A cabin in the midst of a group of great yellow pines. Elbert entered the open door, gasping with his burden. The old man’s tortured mouth still smiled up at him from the bunk. The room smelled like cigar-box wood. It was stuffed with chests, cupboards and cabinets--a hand-hewn room, with massive frame and heavy cedar shakes on the outside. Elbert brought water and started to unlace the nearest boot.

A ghost of the old chuckle and the words:

‘No, nothing for me, ’til you go feed Mamie. She ain’t used to bein’ treated like this--’

Half in a dream, Elbert went out to the little corral, lifting the wooden pin that let him in. The mare played curiously about him, but mainly kept her eyes to the cabin; her ears straight out for a voice from there. He only saw a bay butterball at first--shiny satin in the bright sunlight--a lot more rounded out than the wooden horse in the leather-store, not so tall as Cal Monroid’s Chester, which had stood in Elbert’s mind up to this moment as all that a horse could be.

He was thinking of the look he had seen in Bob Leadley’s face; and of the rock, too big for the small of a man’s back, and of feeding the mare before anything could be done. He dropped a measure of grain into the manger under the shed roof, but Mamie didn’t stay with it. She kept running up and down the corral, nickering softly, listening, her head cocked toward the cabin, her ears held forward pointing to the open door. She seemed appareled in sunshine.

V

‘I, ROBERT LEADLEY--’

THAT leak wasn’t in the mine.

‘I feel a trickle inside, young man--’

Thus, every little while, through the heat of the day, the old man intimated his hurt, and how he felt himself bleeding internally. Elbert’s idea was to set out at once and in a hurry to bring help from Slim Stake Camp, but Mr. Leadley so far had persistently refused to let him go.

‘Things I’ve got to say are more important. You never can tell when I’m apt to start talkin’--don’t go yet. I’m restin’ a little first, that’s all--’

When he dozed, Elbert roamed about outside, but within call. Everything imaginable in the way of canned goods, dried fruits, preserves, were stored in a shed as commodious as the cabin; ample supplies of tobacco, quantities of unused tools. Stocked for a year, the place looked; with at least a ton of baled hay and many bags of grain in the corral-shed. All the carpenter work was made of cedar; hand-tooling everywhere--work of a man who liked to bring out the best with a sharp blade; quaint art about the cabinets and wooden insets in the fireplace.

Down trail to the right from the cabin door was the tunnel entrance to the mine, and ahead out over many tree-tops, a glimpse of the Flats, in a great pit of saffron light. Elbert kept thinking he should go for help in spite of Mr. Leadley’s protestations. A call from the cabin hurried him in shortly after noon.

Twice the injured man’s lips started, before he got words going:

‘Maybe I ain’t goin’ to die, and maybe I am. That’s all right--only there’s some things I mean to say first. It wasn’t only a vacation I brought you here for--that and somethin’ else, though I didn’t expect to be hurried like this, in unburdenin’ my mind. Yes, sir, I took to you the minute you looked so inquirin’ as to what I meant, when I came in that leather-store ... same age and all that, as Bart down in Sonora--and when you hints you’d like to get down there .... Draw up a box to write on, and bring me a little leather sack of papers in the lower cabinet by the fireplace--the key in the wallet here. You’re to write down what I say.’

Reserves of will-power were drawn upon; part of the quaint twang went out of the old man’s speech:

‘I, Robert Leadley, of the Dry Cache mine, near San Forenso, Arizona, in sound mind, so far as I know, but badly hurt from a fallen rock in the tunnel of said mine--my own fault because I knew for a long time there were spots that needed timbering--do hereby confer upon my young friend, Elbert Sartwell, who is writing this at my word, the sole right and authority to manage and administer all property I possess--’

Elbert had no chance to interrupt. The enumeration went on without a break, including the Dry Cache mine, saddle-horse, all goods stored in cabin and corral-shed, bank-books, documents and keys to a lock-box in the San Forenso Bank--amounting to about ninety thousand dollars, Mr. Leadley explaining that he had refused an offer of seventy-five thousand dollars for the mine itself.

‘Don’t sell in a hurry,’ he broke in. ‘There’s a gold tooth in her head. Mort Cotton understands. You can tell that to Bart--’

‘I tell Bart--’

‘That’s the general idea--’

‘But how do you mean, Mr. Leadley?’

‘Because Mort Cotton can’t go--I’ve talked to him--and administerin’ property isn’t his line. It’s--it’s because I took to you--that’s the main reason. Listen on--let me get it all out straight.’

Gradually it appeared that Mr. Leadley’s desire was to leave the bulk of what he possessed to his only son, Bart Leadley, now somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, at large, and Elbert’s work to find same. Elbert was to be identified by Mr. Cotton who would help him through business of bank and possible probate, and answer all questions as to why the property could not be left and arranged for in the usual way. A generous salary and expense account was provided, and on the day Bart Leadley was brought back to the States, Elbert was at liberty to assign to himself a one-fifth interest in the Dry Cache mine; a second one fifth to go to Mort Cotton, memo of which was on separate paper, and three fifths to the son, Bart Leadley.

Elbert’s eye was held to the page, after this was written, his mind so lost in what it all meant, that the voice from the bunk actually startled after a silence:

‘Well, how about it, young man--does the paper stand?’

‘But--in case your son isn’t to be found--at least, from anything I can do?’

‘All you have to do is convince Mort Cotton of the facts, and the whole business then lies between you and him. There’s nobody else.’

Elbert went to the door to breathe, more astonished than ever before in his life; astonished and hurt, too, by the reality of this friendliness, and the mystery of the smiling courage with which Mr. Leadley bore his pain. Sonora--to find Bart Leadley at large in Sonora--expenses to draw from--an interest in the mine. His eyelids narrowed as he turned from the corral, where the mare stood listening in the vivid afternoon light.

Then presently he saw, stretched from one branch of scrub-oak to another, between him and the corral gate, a shining thread that hung and waved in the sunlight. Just a spider’s suspension cable, but a deep meaning now about that connecting thread; so thin one wouldn’t see at all, if the sun hadn’t been shining just right. Mr. Leadley had trusted him, felt drawn to him, even before the accident in the shaft--mysterious threads binding people together. Why, that must have been the meaning of his taking the job in the leather-store. The voice called from behind:

‘But Bart Leadley isn’t dead! I don’t feel he’s dead,’ Mr. Leadley said, when Elbert hurried in. ‘No, you won’t be able to go for a doctor just yet--little later for that, maybe. The paper’s done, but there’s something to tell about Red Ante before you go--and, yes, about Mamie. I’m giving her to you outright, not that Bart isn’t a horseman--he’s that before everything else--but you might be a long time findin’ him, and I don’t want her to change hands too often. And then you’re the one who’ll need her in Sonora.... Don’t try to run her, young man. Just try to come to an understanding. Stand around and talk to her--she’s one more listenin’ mare. She likes to be consulted about family affairs. It won’t do you no harm. And don’t ever tie her up, when you camp in the open. She’ll graze within range and keep an eye on you besides, like her mother used to. You’ll get the hang of each other. Keep on her right side, and whistle when you want her--’

He put two fingers to his lips to show how. Elbert couldn’t make a sound that way. He thought of getting a whistle to carry.

As dusk thickened, a wind stirred across high country--sometimes the sound of a waterfall, sometimes the sound of the sea in the top branches of big timber. The mountains grew heavy on Elbert’s heart with the falling night. Meanwhile he was encouraged to bake a honey-cake for his own supper.

‘No, you don’t need salt nor sodie--all that’s in the flour--just can-milk and honey in the batter, an’ grease on the pan.... Not too near the coals, an’ keep turnin’ her round and round. You’ll have a cake yet, young man, and what you have over you can feed Mamie to-morrow. She’ll like it, if it’s good.’

* * * * *

‘Just a trickle--’

Elbert heard the words from time to time through the first half of the night. Then for a while delirium was unmistakable:

‘_You didn’t have to go, Bart--_’ the voice once said in a wistful tone, and names were uttered with dread, yet a kind of life-long familiarity as well: ‘Welton--Letchie Welton.’ ... ‘Palto’ ... ‘Mort Cotton’ ... ‘Red Ante’ and in and out through sustained incoherencies, with dreadful impressiveness, references to a blacksmith shop: and once starting up, the old man found Elbert’s eyes and spoke slowly with intolerable contrition:

‘_There are times when you can’t wash your hands, I’m sayin’. It wasn’t what I did--but what I didn’t do!_’

Toward daylight he slept, but it was only for an hour or so. Elbert, drowsing in a chair, heard the call.

‘Start some coffee for yourself, and turn in a measure of grain for Mamie; then draw your chair close. You’ll be goin’ down trail for a doctor this morning--I know it’s bearin’ heavy on you, and maybe there won’t be much talkin’ after the doctor comes.’

Altogether quiet and hasteless--so different from the delirium of the night. It was dim and cool in the cabin; the sun not yet over the ridge; fragrant firelight, coffee on to boil.

‘You can telephone Mort, too, from the lower camp. He wouldn’t like it, if I didn’t let him know, and bring your coffee here.... Yep, sit in close.’

At times it seemed as if the old man were easing a burden from his heart, as gradually Elbert began to get it all straight: The mining town of Bismo, Arizona, one morning twelve years ago; an old storekeeper, murdered in the night--young Bart hanging around, though sent back--Bart following the posse and being permitted to stay by the marshal when they were ten miles out.

Elbert had to be reminded of his coffee as the story of the three days’ chase carried on--hunger, thirst, fatigue: how one of the Mexicans split, breaking up the pursuing party also--Letchie Welton, Mort Cotton, Bob Leadley and his son Bart continuing straight south, four others turning east. Then it was that the telling took on an unprecedented intensity, though the voice was held low.