The big range, p.4
The Big Range, page 4
I prepared food and Rodock and I ate, and then we fed them, one at a time. Rodock sat watch with his Henry on his lap while I untied them and let them eat and wash up a bit and tied them again. We pegged each of them to a tree for the night, sitting on the ground with his back to the trunk and a rope around so he wouldn’t topple when he slept. I was asleep almost as soon as I stretched out, and I slept good, and I think Rodock did too.
The next day was more of the same except that we were at it a lot longer, morning and afternoon, and our pace slowed considerably as the day wore on. They were hard to get started again after a noon stop and the last hours before we stopped, they were beginning to limp badly. They weren’t thinking anymore of how to make a break. They were concentrating on finding the easiest spots on which to set each step. I figured we covered twenty miles, and I got satisfaction out of every one of them. But the best were in the morning because along late in the afternoon I began to feel tired, not tired in my muscles but tired and somehow kind of shrinking inside. When we stopped, I saw that their socks were just shredded yarn around their ankles and their feet were swelling and angry red and blistery through the dirt. With them sullen and silent and Rodock gray and grim and never wasting a word, I began to feel lonesome, and I couldn’t go to sleep right away and found myself checking and rechecking in my mind how far we had come and how many miles we still had to go.
The day after that we started late because there was rain during the night and we waited till the morning mists cleared. The dampness in the ground must have felt better to their feet for a while because they went along fairly good the first of the morning after we got under way. They were really hard to get started, though, after the noon stop. During the afternoon they went slower and slower, and Rodock had to get mean with the whip around the heels of the hardcase and the bearded man. Not the slender one. That one kept his head high and marched along and you could tell he was fighting not to wince with every step. After a while, watching him, I began to get the feel of him. He was determined not to give us the satisfaction of seeing this get to him in any serious way. I found myself watching him too much, too closely, so I dropped behind a little more, tagging along in the rear with my string, and before Rodock called the halt by another stream, I began to see the occasional small red splotches in the footprints on dusty stretches that showed the blisters on their feet were breaking. The best I could figure we had come maybe another ten miles during the day, the last few mighty slow. That made about forty altogether, and when I went over it in my mind I had to call it twelve more to go because we had curved off the most direct route some to avoid passing near a couple of line cabins of the only other ranch in that general neighborhood north of the settlement.
There weren’t many words in any of us as we went through the eating routine. I didn’t know men’s faces were capable of such intense hatred as showed plain on the hardcase and the bearded man. They gobbled their food and glared at Rodock from their night-posts against trees, and for all I know glared without stopping all night because they had the same look the next morning. It was the slender man who suddenly took to talking. The hatred he’d had at the start seemed to have burned away. What was left was a kind of hard pride that kept his eyes alive. He looked up from his food at Rodock.
“It was a good try,” he said.
“It was,” Rodock said. “But not good enough. Your mistake was hurting my horses.”
“I had to,” the man said. “That was part of it. I saw some of your horses on a stage line once. I had to have a few.”
“If you wanted some of my horses,” Rodock said, “why didn’t you come and buy them?”
“I was broke,” the man said.
“You were greedy,” Rodock said. “You had to take all in that basin. If you’d cut out a few and kept on going, you might have made it.”
“Maybe,” the man said. “Neither of us will ever know now. You planning to keep this up all the way in?”
“I am,” Rodock said.
“Then turn us over?” the man said.
“Yes,” Rodock said.
“You’re the one that’s greedy,” the man said.
He shut up and finished his food and crawled to his tree and refused to look at Rodock again. I fixed his rope and then I had trouble getting to sleep. I lay a long time before I dozed and what sleep I got wasn’t much good.
In the morning Rodock was gray and grimmer than ever before. Maybe he hadn’t slept much either. He stood off by himself and let me do everything alone. I couldn’t make the hardcase and the bearded man get on their feet, and I found my temper mighty short and was working up a real mad when the slender man, who was up and ready, stepped over and kicked them, kicked them with his own swollen feet that had the remains of his yellow socks flapping around the ankles.
“Get up!” he said. “Damn you, get up! We’re going through with this right!”
They seemed a lot more afraid of him than of me. They staggered up and they stepped along with him as Rodock came close with the whip in his hand and we got our pathetic parade started again. We couldn’t have been moving much more than a mile an hour, and even that pace slowed, dropping to about a crawl when we hit rough stretches, and more and more red began to show in the footprints. And still that slender man marched along, slow but dogged, the muscles in his neck taut as he tried to stay straight without wincing.
Rodock was mean and nasty, crowding close behind them, using the whip to raise the dust around the lagging two. I didn’t like the look of him. The skin of his face was stretched too tight and his eyes were too deep-sunk. I tried riding near him and making a few remarks to calm him, but he snapped at me like I might be a horse thief myself, so I dropped behind and stayed there.
He didn’t stop at noontime, but kept them creeping along, maybe because he was afraid he’d never get them started again. It was only a short while after that the bearded man fell down, just crumpled and went over sideways and lay still. It wasn’t exactly a faint or anything quite like that. I think he had cracked inside, had run out his score and quit trying, even trying to stay conscious. He was breathing all right, but it was plain he wouldn’t do any more walking for a spell.
Rodock sat on his horse and looked down at him. “All right, boy,” he said. “Hoist him on one of your string and tie him so he’ll stay put.” I heaved him on the first of the horses behind me and slipped a rope around the horse’s barrel to hold him. Rodock sat on his bay and looked at the other two men, not quite sure what to do, and the slender one stared back at him, contempt sharp on his face, and Rodock shook out the whip. “Get moving, you two!” he said, and we started creeping along again.
It was about another hour and maybe another mile when the hardcase began screaming. He threw himself on the ground and rolled and thrashed and kept screaming, then stretched out taut and suddenly went limp all over, wide awake and conscious, but staring up as if he couldn’t focus on anything around him.
Rodock had to stop again, chewing his lower lip and frowning. “All right, boy,” he said. “Hoist that one too.” I did, the same as the other one, and when I looked around, damned if that slender man wasn’t walking on quite a distance ahead with Rodock right behind him.
I didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t help watching that man stagger on. I think he had almost forgotten us. He was intent on the terrible task of putting one foot forward after the other and easing his weight on to it. Rodock, bunched on his bay and staring at him, was the one who cracked first. The sun was still up the sky, but he shouted a halt and when the man kept going he had to jump down and run ahead and grab him. It was a grim business making camp. The other two had straightened out some, but they had no more spirit in them than a pair of limp rabbits. I had to lift them down, and it wasn’t until they had some food in them that they began to perk up at all. They seemed grateful when I hiked a ways and brought water in a folding canvas bucket from one of the packs and let them take turns soaking their swollen bloody feet in it. Then I took a saddle blanket and ripped it in pieces and wrapped some of them around their feet. I think I did that so I wouldn’t find myself always sneaking looks at their feet. I did the same for the slender man, and all the time I was doing it he looked at me with that contempt on his face and I didn’t give a damn. I did this even though I thought Rodock might not like it, but he didn’t say a word. I noticed he wouldn’t look at me and I found I didn’t want to look at him either. I tried to keep my mind busy figuring how far we had come and made it six miles with six more still to go, and I was wishing those six would fade away and the whole thing would be over. The sleep I got that night wasn’t worth anything to me.
In the morning I didn’t want any breakfast and I wasn’t going to prepare any unless Rodock kicked me into it He was up ahead of me, standing quiet and chewing his lower lip and looking very old and very tired, and he didn’t say a word to me. I saddled the horses the way I had been every morning because that was the easiest way to tote the saddles along and tied them in the usual string. The slender man was awake, watching me, and by time I finished the other two were too. They were thoroughly beaten. They couldn’t have walked a quarter of a mile with the devil himself herding them. I thought to hell with Rodock and led the horses up close and hoisted the two, with them quick to help, into their saddles. They couldn’t put their feet in the stirrups, but they could sit the saddles and let their feet dangle. I went over to the slender man and started to take hold of him, and he glared at me and shook himself free of my hands and twisted around and strained till he was up on his feet. I stood there gaping at him and he hobbled away, heading straight for the settlement. I couldn’t move. I was sort of frozen inside watching him. He made about fifty yards and his legs buckled under him. The pain in his feet must have been stabbing up with every step and he simply couldn’t stand any longer. And then while I stared at him he started crawling on his hands and knees.
“God damn it, boy!” Rodock’s voice behind me made me jump. “Grab that man! Haul him back here!”
I ran and grabbed him and after the first grab, he didn’t fight and I hauled him back. “Hoist him on his horse,” Rodock said, and I did that. And then Rodock started cursing. He cursed that man and he cursed me and then he worked back over us both again. He wasn’t a cursing man and he didn’t know many words and he didn’t have much imagination at it, but what he did know he used over and over again and after a while he ran down and stopped and chewed his lower lip. He turned and stalked to the packhorse and took the pairs of tied boots and came along the line tossing each pair over the withers of the right horse. He went back to the packs and pulled out the weapons I’d found on the three and checked to see that the guns were empty and shook the last of the flour out of its bag and put the weapons in it with the rifle barrel sticking out the top. He tied the bag to the pommel of the slender man’s saddle.
“All right, boy,” he said. “Take off those lead ropes and untie their hands.”
When I had done this and they were rubbing their wrists, he stepped close to the slender man’s horse and spoke up at the man.
“Back to the last creek we passed yesterday,” he said, “and left along it a few miles you come to Shirttail Fussel’s shack. From what I hear for a price he’ll hide out anything and keep his mouth shut. A man with sense would fix his feet there and then keep travelling and stay away from this range the rest of his days.”
The slender man didn’t say a word. He pulled his horse around and started in the direction of the creek and the other two tagged him, and what I remember is that look of hard pride still in his eyes, plain and sharp against the pinched and strained bleakness of his face.
We watched them go and I turned to Rodock. He was old, older even than I thought he was when I first saw him, and tired with heavy circles under his eyes. At that moment I didn’t like him at all, not because he had let them go, but because of what he had put me through, and it was my turn to curse him. I did it right. I did a better job than he had done before and he never even wagged a muscle. “Shut up,” he said finally. “I need a drink.” He went to his bay and mounted and headed for the settlement. I watched him, hunched forward and old in the saddle, and I was ashamed. I took the lead rope of the packhorse and climbed on the roan and followed him. I was glad when he put the bay into a fast trot because I was fed up with sitting on a walking horse.
He bobbed along ahead of me, a tired old man who seemed too small for that big bay, and then a strange thing began to happen. He began to sit straighter in the saddle and stretch up and look younger by the minute, and when we reached the road and headed into the settlement he was Jeremy Rodock riding straight and true on a Rodock horse and riding it like it was the part of him that in a way it really was. He hit a good clip the last stretch and my roan and the packhorse were see-sawing on the lead rope trying to keep up when we reached the buildings and pulled in by a tie-rail. I swung down right after him and stepped up beside him and we went towards the saloon. We passed the front window of Kern’s office and he was inside and came popping out.
“Hey, you two,” he said. “Anything to report?”
We stopped and faced him and he looked at us kind of funny. I guess we did look queer, dirty and unshaved and worn in spots.
“Not a thing,” Rodock said. “I told you we could be taking a camp trip and that’s all I’ll say. Except that I’m not missing any stock and haven’t stretched any rope.”
We went into the saloon and to the bar and downed a stiff one apiece.
“Mister Rodock,” I said, “when you think about it, that man beat us.”
“Damned if he didn’t,” Rodock said. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it and I know I wasn’t. “Listen to me, son,” he said. “I expect I haven’t been too easy to get along with for quite a few weeks lately. I want you to know I’ve noticed how you and that roan have stuck to my heels over some mighty rough trail. Now we’ve got to get home and get a horse ranch moving again. We’ll be needing some hands. Come along with me, son, and we’ll look around. I’d like your opinion on them before hiring any.”
That was Jeremy Rodock. They don’t grow men like that around here anymore.
Miley Bennett
In the morning I saddled the gray and rode into town, not hurrying because I didn’t like what I was going to do. But I had thought this all out after the trial was over, and I couldn’t see any other answer that would let me sleep at night.
There was a chill in the air and that was good because I could be wearing my blue denim jacket and no one would think that strange. As a matter of fact, few people were stirring on the street and not a one paid attention to me at all.
I stepped on the low porch of the solid frame building that served as marshal’s office and jail. I opened the door and went through and to the railing that sliced the front room in half. Marshal Eakins sat at his rolltop desk behind it, finishing a cup of coffee from the pot topping the one-burner oil stove on a table in the right corner.
“Morning, John,” he said. “Think I’ll have another cup. Join me?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t take to drinking alone,” he said. “Not even coffee. Company tangs it better.”
I shook my head again.
“First time in here for you, John,” he said. “Bringing me business?”
“No,” I said. “I just want to go in there and talk to him.”
Eakins seemed surprised. “Funny company for you to be keeping,” he said.
“It’s a free country,” I said.
“Damned if it ain’t,” he said. “You can have five minutes. So the rules say.”
I swung the little gate and went through.
“Before you go in,” he said, “I’ll have to relieve you of this.” He lifted the jacket on my right side and slipped the gun out of the holster and laid it on his desk. “No weapons inside,” he said, unlocking the door to the back part of the building. “Except on me or a sworn deputy.”
He led to the middle of the three barred cubicles and unlocked this and let me in and locked it again after me.
“Not too particular about time,” he said. “A little hazy on how long is five minutes. Whistle if you want out sooner.”
I stood with my back to the bars until he was out in the front room again. Miley Bennett sat on a stool below the lone high little window of the back wall. He was staring at the floor and he needed a shave, looking smaller and more meagre and burnt-eyed than the day before at the trial, and he was staring at the floor.
I sat on the bunk slung by straps from the right-side bars. He was staring at the floor, his eyes following a split in one of the planks, along and back, along and back.
“There’s a new man out on the range, Miley,” I said. “He’s rounding up what’s left of them, going to drive them over to the Association’s spread near Meeteetsee where they’ll be safe. He’s treating them right.”
He wouldn’t say a word to me. You couldn’t tell he even knew I was there. I lifted the straw-stuffed burlap pillow and put the gun under it, the one I had hanging on a cord around my shoulder and under my left arm beneath the blue denim jacket. I patted the pillow and I saw his eyes flick over quickly at my hands and go back to the crack in the thick plank.
