The big range, p.2
The Big Range, page 2
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t. I don’t know what I’d do. Guess I just don’t have a thieving mind.”
“But somebody’s doing it,” he said. “Damned if I know what.”
And we moved along at that steady fast trot, and my roan dropped back where he liked to stay, about twenty feet behind where he could set his own rhythm without being bothered trying to match the strides of the longer-legged bay. We moved along, and I began to feel empty clear down into my shanks and I began to hunch forwards to ease the callouses on my rump. The only break all morning was a short stop for brief watering. We moved along and into the afternoon, and I could tell the roan felt exactly as I did. He and I were concentrating on just one thing, putting all we had into following twenty feet after an old iron ramrod of a man on one of the long-legged, tireless horses of his own shrewd breeding.
The trail was still stale, several days at least, and we were not watching sharp ahead, so we came on them suddenly. Rodock, being ahead and going up a rise, saw them first and was swinging to the ground and grabbing his horse’s nose when I came beside him and saw the herd, bunched, well ahead and into a small canyon that cut off to the right. I swung down and caught the roan’s nose in time to stop the nicker starting, and we hurried to lead both horses back down the rise and a good ways more and over to a clump of trees. We tied them there and went ahead again on foot, crawling the last stretch up the rise and dropping on our bellies to peer over the top. They were there all right, the whole herd, the mares grazing quietly, some of the foals lying down, the others skittering around the way they do, daring each other to flip their heels.
We studied that scene a long time, checking every square yard of it as far as we could see. There was not a man or a saddled horse in sight. Rodock plucked a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth and chewed on it.
“All right, son,” he said. “Seems we’ll have to smoke them out. They must be holed up somewhere handy waiting to see if anyone’s following. You scout around the left side of that canyon and I’ll take the right. Watch for tracks and keep an eye cocked behind you. We’ll meet way up there beyond the herd where the trees and bushes give good cover. If you’re jumped, get off a shot and I’ll be on my way over ahumping.”
“Mister Rodock,” I said, “you do the same and so will I.”
We separated, slipping off our different ways and moving slow behind any cover that showed. I went along the left rim of the canyon, crouching by rocks and checking the ground carefully each time before moving on and peering down into the canyon along the way. I came on a snake and circled it and flushed a rabbit out of some bushes, and those were the only living things or signs of them I saw except for the horses below there in the canyon. Well up beyond them, where the rock wall slanted out into a passable slope, I worked my way down and to where we were to meet. I waited, and after a while Rodock appeared, walking towards me without even trying to stay under cover.
“See anything, son?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“It’s crazier than ever,” he said. “I found their tracks where they left. Three shod horses moving straight out. Now what made them chuck and run like that? Tracks at least a day old too.”
“Somebody scared them,” I said.
“It would take a lot,” he said, “to scare men with nerve enough to make off with a bunch of my horses. Who’d be roaming around up here anyway? If it was anyone living within a hundred miles, they’d know my brand and be taking the horses in.” He stood there straight, hands on his hips, and stared down the canyon at the herd. “What’s holding them?” he said.
“Holding who?” I said.
“Those horses,” he said. “Those mares. Why haven’t they headed for home? Why aren’t they working along as they graze?”
He was right. They weren’t acting natural. They were bunched too close and hardly moving, and when any of them did move there was something wrong. We stared at them, and suddenly Rodock began to run towards them and I had trouble staying close behind him. They heard us and turned to face us and they had trouble turning, and Rodock stopped and stared at them and there was a funny moaning sound in his throat.
“My God!” he said. “Look at their front feet!”
I looked, and I could see right away what he meant. They had been roped and thrown and their front hooves rasped almost to the quick, so that they could barely put their weight on them. Each step hurt, and they couldn’t have travelled at all off the canyon grass out on the rocky ground beyond. It hurt me seeing them hurt each time they tried to move, and if it did that to me I could imagine what it did to Jeremy Rodock.
They knew him, and some of them nickered at him, and the old mare that was their leader, and was standing with head drooping, raised her head and started forward and dropped her head again and limped to us with it hanging almost to the ground. There was a heavy iron bolt tied to her forelock and hanging down between her eyes. You know how a horse moves its head as it walks. This bolt would have bobbed against her forehead with each step she took, and already it had broken through the skin and worn a big sore that was beginning to fester.
Rodock stood still and stared at her and that moaning sound clung in his throat. I had to do something. I pulled out my pocketknife and cut through the tied hair and tossed the bolt far as I could. I kicked up a piece of sod and reached down and took a handful of clean dirt and rubbed it over the sore on her forehead and then wiped it and the oozing stuff away with my neckerchief, and she stood for me and only shivered as I rubbed. I looked at Rodock and he was someone I had never seen before. He was a gaunt figure of a man, with eyes pulled back deep in their sockets and burning, and the bones of his face showing plain under the flesh.
“Mister Rodock,” I said, “are we riding out on that three-horse trail?”
I don’t think he even heard me.
“Not a thing,” he said. “Not a single solitary goddamned thing I can do. They’re travelling light and fast now. Too much of a start and too far up in the rocks for trailing. They’ve probably separated and could be heading clean out of the Territory. They’re devilish smart and they’ve done it, and there’s not a goddamned thing I can do.”
“We’ve got the mares,” I said. “And the foals.”
He noticed me, a flick of his eyes at me. “We’ve got them way up here and they can’t be moved. Not till those hooves grow out.” He turned towards me and threw words at me, and I wasn’t anyone he knew, just someone to be a target for his bitterness. “They’re devils! Three devils! Nothing worth the name of man would treat horses like that. See the devilishness of it? They run my horses way up here and cripple them. They don’t have to stay around. The horses can’t get away. They know the chances are we won’t miss the mares for weeks, and by then the trail will be overgrown and we won’t know which way they went and waste time combing the whole damn country in every direction, and maybe never get up in here. Even if someone follows them soon, like we did, they’re gone and can’t be caught. One of them can slip back every week or two to see what’s doing, and if he’s nabbed what can tie him to the run-off? He’s just a fiddlefoot riding through. By weaning-time, if nothing has happened, they can hurry in and take the colts and get off clean with a lot of unbranded horseflesh. And there’s not a thing we can do.”
“We can watch the mares,” I said, “till they’re able to travel some, then push them home by easy stages. And meantime be mighty rough on anyone comes noseying around.”
“We’ve got the mares,” he said. “They’re as well off here as anywhere now. What I want is those devils. All three of them. Together and roped and in my hands.” He put out his hands, the fingers clawed, and shook them at me. “I’ve got to get them! Do you see that? I’ve got to!” He dropped his hands limp at his sides, and his voice dropped too, dry and quiet with a coldness in it. “There’s one thing we can do. We can leave everything as it is and go home and keep our mouths shut and wait and be here when they come for the colts.” He took hold of me by the shoulders and his fingers hurt my muscles. “You see what they did to my horses. Can you keep your mouth shut?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. He let go of my shoulders and turned and went straight through the herd of crippled mares without looking at them and on down the canyon and out and over the rise where we first sighted them and on to the clump of trees where we had tied our horses.
I followed him and he was mounted and already starting off when I reached the roan and I mounted and set out after him. He was in no hurry now and let the bay walk part of the time, and the roan and I were glad of that. He never turned to look at me or seemed to notice whether I followed or not. A rabbit jumped out of the brush and I knocked it over on the second shot and picked it up and laid it on the saddle in front of me, and he paid no attention to me, not even to the shots, just steadying the bay when it started at the sharp sounds and holding it firm on the back trail.
He stopped by a stream while there was still light and dismounted, and I did the same. After we had hobbled and unsaddled the horses, he sat on the ground with his back to a rock and stared into space. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I gathered some wood and made a fire. I took my knife and gutted the rabbit and cut off the head. I found some fairly good clay and moistened it and rolled the rabbit in a ball of it and dropped this in the fire. When I thought it would be about done, I poked it out of the hot ashes and let it cool a bit. Then I pried off the baked clay and the skin came with it and the meat showed juicy and smelled fine. It was still a little raw, but anything would have tasted good then. I passed Rodock some pieces and he took them and ate the meat off the bones mechanically like his mind was far away some place. I still couldn’t think of anything to say, so I stretched out with my head on my saddle, and then it was morning and I was chilled and stiff and staring up at clear sky, and he was coming towards me leading both horses and his already saddled.
It was getting towards noon, and we were edging on to our home range when we met two of the regular hands out looking for us. They came galloping with a lot of questions and Rodock put up a palm to stop them.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I took a sudden mind to circle around and look over some of the stock that’s strayed a bit and show the boy here parts of my range he hadn’t seen before. Went farther’n I intended to and we’re some tuckered. You two cut over to the lower basin and take in a pair of four-year-olds. Hightail it straight and don’t dawdle. We’ve got that stage order to meet.”
They were maybe a mite puzzled as they rode off, but it was plain they hadn’t hit the second basin and seen the mares were missing. Rodock and I started on, and I thought of something to say and urged the roan close.
“Mister Rodock,” I said, “I don’t like that word ‘boy.’”
“That’s too damn bad,” he said, and went steadily on and I followed, and he paid no more attention to me all the rest of the way to the ranch buildings.
Things were different after that around the place. He didn’t work with the horses himself anymore. Most of the time he stayed in his sturdy frame house where he had a Mexican to cook for him and fight the summer dust, and I don’t know what he did in there. Once in a while he’d be on the porch, and he’d sit there hours staring off where the foothills started their climb towards the mountains. With him shut away like that, I was paired with Hugh Claggett. This Claggett was a good enough man, I guess. Rodock thought some of him. They had knocked around together years back, and when he had showed up needing a job sometime before I was around the place, Rodock gave him one, and he was a sort of acting foreman when Rodock was away for any reason. He knew horses, maybe as much as Rodock himself in terms of the things you could put down as fact in a book. But he didn’t have the real feel, the deep inside feel, of them that means you can sense what’s going on inside a horse’s head; walk up to a rolled-eye maverick that’s pawing the sky at the end of a rope the way Rodock could, and talk the nonsense out of him and have him standing there quivering to quiet under your hand in a matter of minutes. Claggett was a precise, practical sort of a man, and working with him was just that, working, and I took no real pleasure in it.
When Rodock did come down by the stables and working corral, he was different. He didn’t come often, and it would have been better if he hadn’t come at all. First thing I noticed was his walk. There was no bounce to it. Always before, no matter how tired he was, he walked rolling on the soles of his feet from heels to toes and coming off the toes each step with a little bouncy spring. Now he was walking flatfooted, plodding, like he was carrying more weight than just his body. And he was hard and driving in a new way, a nasty and irritable way. He’d always been one to find fault, but that had been because he was better at his business than any of us and he wanted to set us straight. He’d shrivel us down to size with a good clean tongue-whipping, then pitch in himself and show us how to do whatever it was and we’d be the better for it. Now he was plain cussed all through. He’d snap at us about anything and everything. Nothing we did was right. He’d not do a lick of work himself, just stand by and find fault, and his voice was brittle, and nasty, and he’d get personal in his remarks. And he was mighty touchy about how we treated the horses. We did the way he had taught us and the way I knew was right by how the horses handled, still he would blow red and mad and tear into us with bitter words, saying we were slapping on leather too hard or fitting bridles too snug, little things, but they added to a nagging tally as the days passed and made our work tiring and troublesome. There was a lot of grumbling going on in the bunkhouse in the evenings.
Time and again I wanted to tell the others about the mares so maybe they would understand. But I’d remember his hands stretching towards me and shaking and then biting into my shoulders and I’d keep what had happened blocked inside me. I knew what was festering in him. I’d wake at night thinking about those mares, thinking about them way up there in the hills pegged to a small space of thinning grass by hooves that hurt when weight came on them and sent stabs of pain up their legs when they hit anything hard. A good horse is a fine-looking animal. But it isn’t the appearance that gets into you and makes something in you reach out and respond to him. It’s the way he moves, the sense of movement in him even when he’s standing still, the clean-stepping speed and competence of him that’s born in him and is what he is and is his reason for being. Take that away and he’s a pitiful thing. And somewhere there were three men who had done that to those mares. I’d jump awake at night and think about them and maybe have some notion of what it cost Jeremy Rodock to stay set there at his ranch and leave his mares alone with their misery far off up in the hills.
When the stage horses were ready to be shod for the last real road tests, he nearly drove our blacksmith crazy cursing every time a hoof was trimmed or one of them flinched under the hammer. We finished them off with hard runs in squads hitched to the old coach and delivered them, and then there was nothing much to do. Not another order was waiting. Several times agents had been to see Rodock and had gone into the house and come out again and departed, looking downright peeved. I don’t know whether he simply refused any more orders or acted so mean that they wouldn’t do business with him. Anyway, it was bad all around. There was too much loafing time. Except for a small crew making hay close in, no one was sent out on the range at all. The men were dissatisfied and they had reason to be, and they took to quarrelling with each other. Some of them quit in disgust and others after arguing words with Rodock, and finally the last bunch demanded their time together and left, and Claggett and I were the only ones still there. That’s not counting the Mexican, but he was housebroke and not worth counting. Claggett and I could handle the chores for the few horses kept regularly around the place and still have time to waste. We played euchre, but I never could beat him and then got tired of trying. And Rodock sat on his porch and stared into the distance. I didn’t think he even noticed me when I figured that his bay would be getting soft and started saddling him and taking him out for exercise the same as I did the roan. One day I rode him right past the porch. Rodock fooled me on that, though. I was almost past, pretending not to see him, when his voice flicked at me. “Easy on those reins, boy. They’re just extra trimming. That horse knows what you want by the feel of your legs around him. I don’t want him spoiled.” He was right too. I found you could put that bay through a figure eight or drop him between two close-set posts just by thinking it down through your legs.
The slow days went by, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went to the house.
“Mister Rodock,” I said, “it’s near two months now. Isn’t it time we made a move?”
“Don’t be so damn young,” he said. “I’ll move when I know it’s right.”
I stood on one foot and then on the other and I couldn’t think of anything to say except what I’d said before about my age, so I went back to the bunkhouse and made Claggett teach me all the games of solitaire he knew.
Then one morning I was oiling harness to keep it limber when I looked up and Rodock was in the stable doorway.
“Saddle my bay,” he said, “and Hugh’s sorrel. I reckon that roan’ll do for you again. Pick out a good packhorse and bring them all around to the storehouse soon as you can.”
I jumped to do what he said, and when I had the horses there he and Claggett had packs filled. We loaded the extra horse, and the last thing Rodock did was hand out Henrys and we tucked these in our saddle scabbards and started out. He led the way, and from the direction he took it was plain we were not heading straight into the hills, but were going to swing around and come in from the south.
I led the packhorse and we rode in a compact bunch, not pushing for speed. It was in the afternoon that we ran into the other riders, out from the settlement and heading our way, Ben Kern, who was federal marshal for that part of the Territory, and three of the men he usually swore in as deputies when he had a need for any. We stopped and they stopped, looking us over.
