Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (46 page)

“What’s that?”

I started; but it was only the Virginian behind me. “Oh, nothing. The air is getting colder up here.”

I had presently a great relief. We came to a place where again this trail mounted so abruptly that we once more got off to lead our horses. So likewise had our predecessors done; and as I watched the two different sets of bootprints, I observed something and hastened to speak of it.

“One man is much heavier than the other.”

“I was hoping I’d not have to tell you that,” said the Virginian.

“You’re always ahead of me! Well, still my education is progressing.”

“Why, yes. You’ll equal an Injun if you keep on.”

It was good to be facetious; and I smiled to myself as I trudged upward. We came off the steep place, leaving the canon beneath us, and took to horseback. And as we proceeded over the final gentle slant up to the rim of the great basin that was set among the peaks, the Virginian was jocular once more.

“Pounds has got on,” said he, “and Ounces is walking.”

I glanced over my shoulder at him, and he nodded as he fixed the weather-beaten crimson handkerchief round his neck. Then he threw a stone at a pack animal that was delaying on the trail. “Damn your buckskin hide,” he drawled. “You can view the scenery from the top.”

He was so natural, sitting loose in the saddle, and cursing in his gentle voice, that I laughed to think what visions I had been harboring. The two dead men riding one horse through the mountains vanished, and I came back to every day.

“Do you think we’ll catch up with those people?” I asked.

“Not likely. They’re traveling about the same gait we are.”

“Ounces ought to be the best walker.”

“Up hill, yes. But Pounds will go down a-foggin’.”

We gained the rim of the basin. It lay below us, a great cup of country,—rocks, woods, opens, and streams. The tall peaks rose like spires around it, magnificent and bare in the last of the sun; and we surveyed this upper world, letting our animals get breath. Our bleak, crumbled rim ran like a rampart between the towering tops, a half circle of five miles or six, very wide in some parts, and in some shrinking to a scanty foothold, as here. Here our trail crossed over it between two eroded and fantastic shapes of stone, like mushrooms, or misshapen heads on pikes. Banks of snow spread up here against the black rocks, but half an hour would see us descended to the green and the woods. I looked down, both of us looked down, but our forerunners were not there.

“They’ll be camping somewhere in this basin, though,” said the Virginian, staring at the dark pines. “They have not come this trail by accident.”

A cold little wind blew down between our stone shapes, and upward again, eddying. And round a corner upward with it came fluttering a leaf of newspaper, and caught against an edge close to me.

“What’s the latest?” inquired the Virginian from his horse. For I had dismounted, and had picked up the leaf.

“Seems to be inter-esting,” I next heard him say. “Can’t you tell a man what’s making your eyes bug out so?”

“Yes,” my voice replied to him, and it sounded like some stranger speaking lightly near by; “oh, yes! Decidedly interesting.” My voice mimicked his pronunciation. “It’s quite the latest, I imagine. You had better read it yourself.” And I handed it to him with a smile, watching his countenance, while my brain felt as if clouds were rushing through it.

I saw his eyes quietly run the headings over. “Well?” he inquired, after scanning it on both sides. “I don’t seem to catch the excitement. Fremont County is going to hold elections. I see they claim Jake—”

“It’s mine,” I cut him off. “My own paper. Those are my pencil marks.”

I do not think that a microscope could have discerned a change in his face. “Oh,” he commented, holding the paper, and fixing it with a critical eye. “You mean this is the one you lent Steve, and he wanted to give me to give back to you. And so them are your own marks.” For a moment more he held it judicially, as I have seen men hold a contract upon whose terms they were finally passing. “Well, you have got it back now, anyway.” And he handed it to me.

“Only a piece of it!” I exclaimed, always lightly. And as I took it from him his hand chanced to touch mine. It was cold as ice.

“They ain’t through readin’ the rest,” he explained easily. “Don’t you throw it away! After they’ve taken such trouble.”

“That’s true,” I answered. “I wonder if it’s Pounds or Ounces I’m indebted to.”

Thus we made further merriment as we rode down into the great basin. Before us, the horse and boot tracks showed plain in the soft slough where melted snow ran half the day.

“If it’s a paper chase,” said the Virginian, “they’ll drop no more along here.”

“Unless it gets dark,” said I.

“We’ll camp before that. Maybe we’ll see their fire.”

We did not see their fire. We descended in the chill silence, while the mushroom rocks grew far and the sombre woods approached. By a stream we got off where two banks sheltered us; for a bleak wind cut down over the crags now and then, making the pines send out a great note through the basin, like breakers in a heavy sea. But we made cosey in the tent. We pitched the tent this night, and I was glad to have it shut out the mountain peaks. They showed above the banks where we camped; and in the starlight their black shapes rose stark against the sky. They, with the pines and the wind, were a bedroom too unearthly this night. And as soon as our supper dishes were washed we went inside to our lantern and our game of cribbage.

“This is snug,” said the Virginian, as we played. “That wind don’t get down here.”

“Smoking is snug, too,” said I. And we marked our points for an hour, with no words save about the cards.

“I’ll be pretty near glad when we get out of these mountains,” said the Virginian. “They’re most too big.”

The pines had altogether ceased; but their silence was as tremendous as their roar had been.

“I don’t know, though,” he resumed. “There’s times when the plains can be awful big, too.”

Presently we finished a hand, and he said, “Let me see that paper.”

He sat reading it apparently through, while I arranged my blankets to make a warm bed. Then, since the paper continued to absorb him, I got myself ready, and slid between my blankets for the night. “You’ll need another candle soon in that lantern,” said I.

He put the paper down. “I would do it all over again,” he began. “The whole thing just the same. He knowed the customs of the country, and he played the game. No call to blame me for the customs of the country. You leave other folks’ cattle alone, or you take the consequences, and it was all known to Steve from the start. Would he have me take the Judge’s wages and give him the wink? He must have changed a heap from the Steve I knew if he expected that. I don’t believe he expected that. He knew well enough the only thing that would have let him off would have been a regular jury. For the thieves have got hold of the juries in Johnson County.
¹
I would do it all over, just the same.”

The expiring flame leaped in the lantern, and fell blue. He broke off in his words as if to arrange the light, but did not, sitting silent instead, just visible, and seeming to watch the death struggle of the flame. I could find nothing to say to him, and I believed he was now winning his way back to serenity by himself. He kept his outward man so nearly natural that I forgot about that cold touch of his hand, and never guessed how far out from reason the tide of emotion was even now whirling him. “I remember at Cheyenne onced,” he resumed. And he told me of a Thanksgiving visit to town that he had made with Steve. “We was just colts then,” he said. He dwelt on their coltish doings, their adventures sought and wrought in the perfect fellowship of youth. “For Steve and me most always hunted in couples back in them gamesome years,” he explained. And he fell into the elemental talk of sex, such talk as would be an elk’s or tiger’s; and spoken so by him, simply and naturally, as we speak of the seasons, or of death, or of any actuality, it was without offence. But it would be offence should I repeat it. Then, abruptly ending these memories of himself and Steve, he went out of the tent, and I heard him dragging a log to the fire. When it had blazed up, there on the tent wall was his shadow and that of the log where he sat with his half-broken heart. And all the while I supposed he was master of himself, and self-justified against Steve’s omission to bid him good-by.

I must have fallen asleep before he returned, for I remember nothing except waking and finding him in his blankets beside me. The fire shadow was gone, and gray, cold light was dimly on the tent. He slept restlessly, and his forehead was ploughed by lines of pain. While I looked at him he began to mutter, and suddenly started up with violence. “No!” he cried out, “no! Just the same!” and thus wakened himself, staring. “What’s the matter?” he demanded. He was slow in getting back to where we were; and full consciousness found him sitting up with his eyes fixed on mine. They were more haunted than they had been at all, and his next speech came straight from his dream. “Maybe you’d better quit me. This ain’t your trouble.”

I laughed. “Why, what is the trouble?”

His eyes still intently fixed on mine. “Do you think if we changed our trail we could lose them from us?”

I was framing a jocose reply about Ounces being a good walker, when the sound of hoofs rushing in the distance stopped me, and he ran out of the tent with his rifle. When I followed with mine he was up the bank, and all his powers alert. But nothing came out of the dimness save our three stampeded horses. They crashed over fallen timber and across the open to where their picketed comrade grazed at the end of his rope. By him they came to a stand, and told him, I suppose, what they had seen; for all four now faced in the same direction, looking away into the mysterious dawn. We likewise stood peering, and my rifle barrel felt cold in my hand. The dawn was all we saw, the inscrutable dawn, coming and coming through the black pines and the gray open of the basin. There above lifted the peaks, no sun yet on them, and behind us our stream made a little tinkling.

“A bear, I suppose,” said I, at length.

His strange look fixed me again, and then his eyes went to the horses. “They smell things we can’t smell,” said he, very slowly. “Will you prove to me they don’t see things we can’t see?”

A chill shot through me, and I could not help a frightened glance where we had been watching. But one of the horses began to graze and I had a wholesome thought. “He’s tired of whatever he sees, then,” said I, pointing.

A smile came for a moment in the Virginian’s face. “Must be a poor show,” he observed. All the horses were grazing now, and he added, “It ain’t hurt their appetites any.”

We made our own breakfast then. And what uncanny dread I may have been touched with up to this time henceforth left me in the face of a real alarm. The shock of Steve was working upon the Virginian. He was aware of it himself; he was fighting it with all his might; and he was being overcome. He was indeed like a gallant swimmer against whom both wind and tide have conspired. And in this now foreboding solitude there was only myself to throw him ropes. His strokes for safety were as bold as was the undertow that ceaselessly annulled them.

“I reckon I made a fuss in the tent?” said he, feeling his way with me.

I threw him a rope. “Yes. Nightmare—indigestion—too much newspaper before retiring.”

He caught the rope. “That’s correct! I had a hell of a foolish dream for a growed-up man. You’d not think it of me.”

“Oh, yes, I should. I’ve had them after prolonged lobster and champagne.”

“Ah,” he murmured, “prolonged! Prolonged is what does it.” He glanced behind him. “Steve came back—”

“In your lobster dream,” I put in.

But he missed this rope. “Yes,” he answered, with his eyes searching me. “And he handed me the paper—”

“By the way, where is that?” I asked.

“I built the fire with it. But when I took it from him it was a six-shooter I had hold of, and pointing at my breast. And then Steve spoke, ‘Do you think you’re fit to live?’ Steve said; and I got hot at him, and I reckon I must have told him what I thought of him. You heard me, I expect?”

“Glad I didn’t. Your language sometimes is—”

He laughed out. “Oh, I account for all this that’s happening just like you do. If we gave our explanations, they’d be pretty near twins.”

“The horses saw a bear, then?”

“Maybe a bear. Maybe”—but here the tide caught him again—“What’s your idea about dreams?”

My ropes were all out. “Liver—nerves,” was the best I could do. But now he swam strongly by himself.

“You may think I’m discreditable,” he said, “but I know I am. It ought to take more than—well, men have lost their friendships before. Feuds and wars have cloven a right smart of bonds in twain. And if my haid is going to get shook by a little old piece of newspaper—I’m ashamed I burned that. I’m ashamed to have been that weak.”

“Any man gets unstrung,” I told him. My ropes had become straws; and I strove to frame some policy for the next hours.

We now finished breakfast and set forth to catch the horses. As we drove them in I found that the Virginian was telling me a ghost story. “At half-past three in the morning she saw her runaway daughter standing with a babe in her arms; but when she moved it was all gone. Later they found it was the very same hour the young mother died in Nogales. And she sent for the child and raised it herself. I knowed them both back home. Do you believe that?”

I said nothing.

“No more do I believe it,” he asserted. “And see here! Nogales time is three hours different from Richmond. I didn’t know about that point then.”

Once out of these mountains, I knew he could right himself; but even I, who had no Steve to dream about, felt this silence of the peaks was preying on me.