10 Classics Western Stories. Samuel Merwin

a flea-bitten gray mare that seemed to be in a perpetual doze, looked more like an Apache squaw than a boss cowboy. The old man’s clothes were even more ragged than when Hardy had seen him at Bender, his copper-riveted hat was further reinforced by a buckskin thong around the rim, and his knees were short-stirruped almost up to his elbows by the puny little boy’s saddle that he rode, but his fiery eyes were as quick and piercing as ever.

      “Shore thing,” he said, straightening up jauntily in his saddle, “that’s my way! Be’n doin’ it fer years, while you boys was killin’ horses, but it takes Jeff hyar to see the p’int. Be gentle, boys, be gentle with um––you don’t gain nawthin’ fer all yer hard ridin’.”

      He cut off a chew of tobacco and tucked it carefully away in his cheek.

      “Jeff hyar,” he continued, as the bunch of cowboys began to josh and laugh among themselves, “he comes by his savvy right––his paw was a smart man before him, and mighty clever to his friends, to boot. Many’s the time I hev took little Jeffie down the river and learned him tracks and beaver signs when he wasn’t knee-high to a grasshopper––hain’t I, Jeff? And when I tell him to be gentle with them cows he knows I’m right. I jest want you boys to take notice when you go down into the Pocket to-morrer what kin be done by kindness; and the first man that hollers or puts a rope on my gentle stock, I’ll sure make him hard to ketch.

      “You hear me, naow,” he cried, turning sharply upon Bill Lightfoot, who was getting off something about “Little Jeffie,” and then for the first time he saw the face of the new cowboy who had ridden in that afternoon. Not since the day he was drunk at Bender had Bill Johnson set eyes upon the little man to whom he had sworn off, but he recognized him instantly.

      “Hello thar, pardner!” he exclaimed, reining his mare in abruptly. “Whar’d you drop down from?”

      “Why howdy do, Mr. Johnson!” answered Hardy, shaking hands, “I’m glad to see you again. Jeff told me he was going down to your ranch to-morrow and I looked to see you then.”

      Bill Johnson allowed this polite speech to pass over his shoulder without response. Then, drawing Hardy aside, he began to talk confidentially; expounding to the full his system of gentling cattle; launching forth his invective, which was of the pioneer variety, upon the head of all sheepmen; and finally coming around with a jerk to the subject that was uppermost in his mind.

      “Say,” he said, “I want to ask you a question––are you any relation to the Captain Hardy that I served with over at Fort Apache? Seems’s if you look like ’im, only smaller.”

      His stature was a sore point with Hardy, and especially in connection with his father, but making allowance for Mr. Johnson’s ways he modestly admitted his ancestry.

      “His son, eh!” echoed the old man. “Waal––now! I tell you, boy, I knowed you––I knowed you the minute you called down that dog-robber of a barkeep––and I was half drunk, too. And so you’re the new superintendent down at the Dos S, eh? Waal, all I can say is: God help them pore sheepmen if you ever git on their trail. I used to chase Apaches with yore paw, boy!”

      It was Bill Johnson’s turn to talk that evening and like most solitaries who have not “gone into the silence,” he availed himself of a listener with enthusiasm.

      Stories of lion hunts and “b’ar fights” fell as trippingly from his lips as the words of a professional monologist, and when he had finished his account of the exploits of Captain Samuel Barrows Hardy, even the envious Lightfoot regarded Rufus with a new respect, for there is no higher honor in Arizona than to be the son of an Indian fighter. And when the last man had crawled wearily into his blankets the old hermit still sat by the dying fire poking the charred ends into the flames and holding forth to the young superintendent upon the courage of his sire.

      Hardly had the son of his father crept under the edge of Creede’s blankets and dropped to sleep before that huge mountain of energy rose up and gave the long yell. The morning was at its blackest, that murky four A. M. darkness which precedes the first glimmer of light; but the day’s work had to be done. The shivering horse-wrangler stamped on his boots and struck out down the cañon after the remuda, two or three cooks got busy about the fire which roared higher and higher as they piled on the ironwood to make coals, and before the sun had more than mounted the southern shoulder of the Four Peaks the long line of horsemen was well on the trail to Hell’s Hip Pocket.

      The frontier imagination had in no wise overleaped itself in naming this abyss. Even the tribute which Facilis Descensus Vergil paid to the local Roman hell could hardly be said of the Pocket––it is not even easy to get into it. From the top of the divide it looks like a valley submerged in a smoky haze through which the peaks and pinnacles of the lower parks rise up like cathedral spires, pointing solemnly to heaven. As the trail descends through washed-out gulches and “stone-patches,” now skating along the backbone of a ridge and now dropping as abruptly into some hollow waterway, the cliffs and pinnacles begin to loom up against the sky; then they seem to close in and block the way, and just as the cañon boxes in to nothing the trail slips into a gash in the face of the cliff where the soft sandstone has crumbled away between two harder strata, and climbs precariously along through the sombre gloom of the gorge to the bright light of the fair valley beyond.

      It is a kind of fairy land, that hidden pocket in the hills, always covered by a mystic haze, for which the Mexicans give it the name Humada. Its steep cañon comes down from the breast of the most easterly of the Four Peaks, impassable except by the one trail; it passes through the box and there widens out into a beautiful valley, where the grass lies along the hillsides like the tawny mane of a lion, and tender flowers stand untrampled in the rich bottoms. For three miles or more it spreads out between striated cliffs where hawks and eagles make their nests; then once more it closes in, the creek plunges down a narrow gorge and disappears, writhing tortuously on its way to the Salagua whose fire-blasted walls rise in huge bulwarks against the south, dwarfing the near-by cliffs into nothingness by their majestic height.

      In the presence of this unearthly beauty and grandeur old Bill Johnson––ex-trapper, ex-soldier, ex-prospector, ex-everything––had dwelt for twenty years, dating from the days when his house was his fortress, and his one desire was to stand off the Apaches until he could find the Lost Dutchman.

      Where the valley narrowed down for its final plunge into the gorge the old trapper had built his cabin, its walls laid “square with the world” by sighting on the North Star. When the sun entered the threshold of the western door it was noon, and his watch never ran down. The cabin was built of shaly rocks, squared and laid in mud, like bricks; a tremendous stone chimney stood against the north end and a corral for his burros at the south. Three hounds with bleared eyes and flapping ears, their foreheads wrinkled with age and the anxieties of the hunt, bayed forth a welcome as the cavalcade strung in across the valley; and mild-eyed cattle, standing on the ridges to catch the wind, stared down at them in surprise. Never, even at San Carlos, where the Chiricahua cattle fatten on the best feed in Arizona, had Hardy seen such mountains of beef. Old steers with six and seven rings on their horns hung about the salting places, as if there were no such things as beef drives and slaughter houses in this cruel world, and even when the cowboys spread out like a fan and brought them all in to the cutting grounds there was hardly a calf that bawled.

      As the three or four hundred head that made up his entire earthly possession drifted obediently in, the old man rode up to Creede and Hardy and waved his hand expansively.

      “Thar, boys,” he said, “thar’s the results of peace and kindness. Nary a critter thar that I heven’t scratched between the horns since the day his maw brought him down to the salt lick. I even git Jeff and the boys to brand and earmark ’em fer me, so they won’t hev no hard feelin’ fer the Old Man. D’ye see that big white-faced steer?” he asked, pointing with pride to the monarch of the herd. “Waal, how much ye think he’ll weigh?” he demanded, turning to Creede. “Fifteen hundred?”

      “Um, more ’n that,” responded Creede, squinting his eyes down judicially. “Them Herefords are awful solid when they git big. I reckon he’ll run nigh onto seventeen hundred,