The Jump-Off Creek (5 page)

Jack looked at him and then went back out without a word. Harley kept playing cards. He sat with his back close to the poor heat from the stove. He thought,
I'm not his mother
. He didn't go out after him.

In a while he heard Danny—not his horse on the soft ground crossing the bench, but the sound Danny made wheezing, as he lifted his saddle off and carried it across to the shack. He had bad lungs. He said a cow had poked a horn through one of them once, and he always had wheezed after that. He came in with his saddle and set it down and looked at Harley. Then he opened the stove and shook the wood around.

“It's cold in here,” he said.

Harley didn't look up. “Jack was here first,” he said, low. “He never got the stove going.”

Danny said, “Where is he?”

“I guess he's looking for you.” He snorted. He turned over his cards steadily by threes.

Danny went and stood in the door, holding the hide back and
looking out for Jack. Once, Harley looked out too, without getting up from his cards. He could see past Danny, Jack coming down from the scrub trees above the bench, jumping off the high rocks and carrying his rifle down toward the house. Danny stood in the door waiting for him.

“What's going on.”

Jack shrugged. “I ran into one of those friends of yours,” he said. His mouth spread out under the edge of his mustache but it wasn't a smile. He shrugged again and went by Danny, bending his head down to go in under his arm. Danny followed him. Harley, sitting over his cards, looked at both of them without saying anything.

Jack got out his pocketknife and sat in the corner in the gray darkness and started to pare his fingernails. Danny just stood and waited, looking at him, wheezing faintly. Finally Jack said, “He seen me put down one of his steers.” He was looking at the tips of his fingers, examining them carefully in the dim light and then trimming the nails one by one with the edge of his knife. “I think I lost him. Anyway he didn't follow me back. I've been sitting up there a while watching for him.”

Danny was always careful about touching his face with his hands—he was scared of the strychnine. He crooked up one shoulder now and bent his face to the scratchy sleeve of his coat, as if his eyes were itching. “Which one of them was it?” he said, in a cranky way.

“The Indian.”

“How good a look did he get?”

Jack tipped his head to one side, raised his brows. He said nothing, just that indifferent shrug.

Danny said, “They'll be along, you know. Tonight or tomorrow. They'll come along here looking for you.”

Jack folded his knife and pushed it down in a front pocket of his pants. Then he spread his fingers out on his knees and admired them. He didn't say anything.

“I don't want trouble with them,” Danny said finally. He had
used to work with those two, the Indian and Whiteaker. He liked to worry a lot, out loud, about baiting up cows of theirs. But he and Jack had been together a long time—since before the cow business went to hell, before Harley had thrown in with them. And it was a long time ago he'd worked with those other two up on the Spokane River.

Jack looked at him. “You done your share of cow killing,” he said. “Just like the rest of us.”

There was a silence. Then Danny said it again. “I don't want trouble.” He hadn't much of a temper but he was stubborn, he just didn't give ground. For a while Harley had thought Jack was the hard one. But he knew better by now. Jack had more piss, that was all. Danny waited and after a while he said, “They've been pretty much looking the other way so far. But they won't let us rub their noses in it. I know the both of them that well. And the other one, Whiteaker, he tracks pretty good. He'll follow you right on back here, don't fool yourself on that. If Blue didn't get a good look at you, it won't matter once they see what hole you run into.”

Jack didn't look at Danny. He was studying his hands, and he sat as if he was absorbed in that, indifferent. Danny just waited for him. You could hear Danny's little wheeze, as if he had run out of breath. Harley watched both of them without quite looking up from his cards. He thought of saying something. He felt, if it came down to it, the three of them were an outfit, and they ought to stand like one.
We ought not to do any backing up
, he thought of saying. But he couldn't get it to come out. He turned the cards over slowly, silently.

After a while Jack said, “A man's got to make a living, Danny.” There wasn't any sharp edge on it. He said it straight, like he thought it cleared up something, and his look at Danny was straight too, not smirking, just grave and thoughtful.

Harley looked at Danny too. Danny never did make any sort of answer to what Jack had said. Only finally, tiredly, he rubbed his itchy eyes with the knuckles of his strychnine-smelly hands.

From the hill, stopping at the fence line to let down the rails, Tim thought the house looked small and squat and dark. But it stood in a good place, with its back against the steep ridge and the front looking out on the spring, puddled up in a shallow half-moon pond, and then the long upslope of grass. They had cleared out some trees on the north side of the house too and put a shed there, and the grass had spread to fill the ground between the stumps. All the grass stood green this time of year, long and heavy-headed with narrow tracks beaten through it where the cattle walked.

There were a couple of dozen cows and their calves inside the fence, maybe two-thirds of the spring count they were hoping for after a cold winter and wolfers taking cows now and then when no better bait offered itself up. Their two sections might support seventy or eighty head over the winter, not more than that. If they wanted to do better, they'd have to give in and go to cutting hay, like Oberfield did, doling it out on the snow. They had been digging in their heels on that. Neither of them had ever run a mower or stacked hay, they had learned cowboying before the range was in fence. Hell, they had quit a job once, when the boss put them to digging a well.

Blue was there next to the shed, sliding the saddle off his long-legged roan, dragging it over under the slanted roof. He was half deaf in one ear but he could hear a cow's low bellow from a long way off and he turned and stood watching up the hill while Tim and the dog brought the three cows and the calves through. Tim,
riding down slowly toward him, saw him shrugging his shoulders as if his collarbone was hurting him again.

“He's lame,” Blue said, leaning his head at the bay horse. The horse's shank was swollen a little; he set his hoof down delicately, not quite limping.

“You and him both,” Tim said. There was a scabbed-over scrape on Blue's forehead under the shadow of the hat.

Blue pulled his shoulders up gently. “I tried, but nothing broke,” he said, letting out his slow smile.

“How about the horse,” Tim said. By now he had seen the mud in a yellowy dry smear where the roan had come down on his off side.

“Mine? He's okay. Yours is lame.”

“You said that.” Tim slid the saddle off and swung it up on the rack in the shed. He pulled out the bit, stood wiping the bay's wet coat with a scrap of sacking while Blue watched him, smoking a cigarette. Then he led the horse out through the stumps to the edge of the pond. Their coming and going had hardened several little trails in the bank, slickened now and muddy. He stood with the horse out in the pond and kneaded the shank gently in the cold brown water.

“The Buck's trail give way. He cut his shank,” he said. After a while, when Blue didn't say anything, he said, “That trail tears like paper in this kind of weather.”

Blue shrugged. “Long way around, otherwise.”

“Long way down,” Tim said, low.

Blue stood behind him and smoked his cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly. “We need to go up to Loeb's old shack and see if Turnbow is still squatting there,” he said after a silence.

Tim looked toward him.

“I jumped a cow shooter,” Blue said. “I didn't see him good, but he had a buckskin horse. One of those wolfers with Danny had a buckskin, as I remember.”

Tim went back to working the bay's shank. The leg was a little puffy along the scabby line of the cut.
Well hell.

“One of us was bound to catch them at it, sooner or later,” he said in a low voice. “Now we can't let it pass anymore. They ought to know that.”

After a while Blue said, “They know it.”

Tim walked the horse out of the water. Blue's roan was rolling in the grass, looking long-legged and big-barreled, clumsy, rubbing off the caked mud. Tim stood in the dusk in the fine rain, watching him. He held the bay by the cheek strap of the halter.
Danny won't want trouble with us. Maybe they've got smart, packed up and moved.
He didn't say it. It had been six or seven years since he and Blue had worked with Danny Turnbow up on the Spokane River, and when they'd seen him camping at Loeb's abandoned shack he'd been sporting a rifle, and a testiness that was new since those days on the Spokane.

He let the bay loose, watched him walk away across the darkening grass. The horse wasn't limping quite, but he stepped like a tired old man, or a kid used to barefoot, wearing tight new shoes. Tim's own knee ached, his feet were wet and cold. Watching the bay made him think of it.

“Have we got carbolic anywhere?”

Blue looked at him. “No. What for?”

He ducked his head. “I heard it was good for cuts.”

Blue shrugged, watching him. Then he put out the cigarette under the heel of his boot and went into the dark at the back of the shed where the wood was stacked up in leaning ricks. Tim went through the damp gray dusk to the house. The stove was dead cold. He laid a fire from the scraps of wood left in the box. There was veal off a dogie calf hanging up in the cool room, and he cut off bits close to the bone and put them in with the pot of beans that had cooked and then gone cold on the back of the stove. Blue brought in the new wood, holding it one-armed, saving his sore collarbone.

“There's a woman has taken up Angell's claim on the Jump-Off Creek,” Tim said without turning around.

Blue let the wood down. “You see her?”

He nodded.

In a moment Blue said, “That place is well gone to seed.” Tim didn't say anything. Then finally he did. “I guess she knows it.”

8 April
Lost the way on poor directions but I am here now and glad for it, tho it is bad as I knew it would be, the stove rusted clear through, the roof rotted, the logs poor fitted and mildewed, the yard where the Animals must stand all Mud and stones. I have not lost Heart, having done so in years past and no false hopes this time. There are Graces at all events, the site well chosen with the good cold Stream in front and must be trout in it when the snow is done melting and the water clears. The trees are cut down all around. There is a Window, small & unglassed, but I believe it stands to let in the low Winter Sun from the South. I am greatly sore & tired, having come all day across these dark Mountains in unending rain, but the black Mule has proved a good choice, he is steady as the old Mule, Lester, I rode on the ice when I was 12. There were old dark stains on the ticking of the Bed and Mice or others had been into the fill so I burned the bedsack and must sleep on the bare wood of the Bunk if not in Mud, suppose I ought to be glad for tiredness, I can sleep Anywhere if tired enough. Every thing I own save the poor Beasts is in a heap here in the center of this room and if I mean to keep it whole I must before I sleep cover all against the leaking, rake old tins & leavings outside the door, burn a camphor stick against vermin, set my few mouse traps along the walls. And hope for better Weather & Strength in the days coming. I have put out in the night the 2 boys I found here, they had taken up living in the empty house. Those were Troubles I could not borrow, as I am scarce likely to make my own living in this poor place and coming West I have seen idle men Everywhere about in La Grande and Boise and Missoula and in the Papers woeful news of the falling price of Wheat & Cattle both. They were polite & forebearing, for which reason I am sorry.

In the morning they went back up toward the Bear's Camp Mountain and picked up the trail of the cow shooter on the buckskin horse. He had gone quickly at first, leaving a broad track of broken stems and slurred prints in mud. But within the first half mile or so he'd seen there was nobody behind him and after that the trail came down to dim hoof marks abraded by rain, and infrequent sign in the wet brush. They scouted the faded trail slowly for the better part of five miles, until it was lost altogether, under somebody else's sloppy track. Tim walked over the ground carefully, sorting it out, while Blue stood leaning on the rump of his horse, smoking one of his thin brown cigarettes. Three or four horses had slid down the little hill from the southeast and muddied up the ravine and then gone off to the north in a straggling line.

“Loeb's old place is just up there,” Tim said. “This guy made a beeline for the shack and then all of them came back a ways along his trail to spoil his sign.”

Blue looked up the hill. Finally he let smoke out, looking sideward at Tim. “They could've packed up and gone.”

Tim didn't look toward him. “Maybe.”

They rode silently up to Loeb's. There wasn't any rain to speak of, just the trees dribbling whenever the wind came up. It was cold, though, and they both rode in a hunched way, with their necks pulled down as far as they could get them inside the collars of their coats.

Old Loeb had been a hermit, had chosen his site for its high aerie feel, the little treeless bench with the mountain shooting up steep behind it and dropping off in long timbered fells in front. The sky hung in shaggy ribbons there, low in the trees, wet. They could see the place through the drizzling gray from quite a ways downslope, could see it sitting high on that bench staring blind across the tips of the trees, with the dirtier grizzle of smoke seeping into the overcast and the horses standing tail-to-head inside a strand of rope.