The big range, p.6
The Big Range, page 6
Miley Bennett buried his sheep and it took him at least the two days. He buried each in a separate grave and he lugged stones quite a distance to mark them. He got three buzzards with the shotgun while he was doing it. He herded the flock into the canyon, came back and packed everything tight on the burro and led her there too, and put his new camp in the neat order he liked. Two more days and nights went by and he slept only in snatches, watching the bigness of the dark land from his spy perch on a flat rock. Along about the middle of the morning of the third day there, he saw a man in the distance riding up the valley towards him. He climbed down from the rock and stepped behind, peering over the top with the shotgun ready in his right hand. He was watching the rider approach when a voice behind told him to drop the gun and reach for a piece of sky. He whirled and another man had come slipping quietly down the rocks and was there with a handkerchief tied over his face up to the eyes and a gun in his hand pointing straight at Miley’s belt buckle. Miley was so startled that he couldn’t make a move of his own while this one yanked the shotgun out of his grasp and sent him around the rock and into the open with a hard slap on the side of the head.
The rider came close and he too now had a handkerchief over his face. Then another man, a big man on a black horse with his handkerchief over his face, rode into sight down and around from the high rocks of the canyon top leading another horse.
The three of them were quiet and businesslike. The big man rode his horse right over the little pup tent, crushing it flat and trampling it. He dismounted and the other rider with him. They tied Miley Bennett to a tree facing up the canyon towards his grazing flock. Methodically they smashed everything in sight, the shotgun and the food bags and the cans of beans, even the can of tobacco. The big man stepped close to Miley Bennett. “Watch this,” he said. “Then crawl back where you came from and tell every smelly sheep owner what happens to them in cattle country.”
All three of them pulled high-powered rifles from their saddle scabbards and started towards the sheep. The first shots took the dogs. Then the bullets began ploughing into the flock, tearing through two and three bodies at a time. The sheep screamed their terror and scattered, running their short spurts and huddling in groups, and the bullets followed and ploughed into them. The rifle barrels were hot when the last shells were used and the men came for their horses and rode after the scattered remnants, trampling them as they could, chasing the terrified sheep in among the rocks and scrub growth of the canyon edges.
And all this while Miley Bennett, tight to torture against the tree, saw what he could not avoid seeing.
The men rode back and one dismounted to loosen the rope slightly and mounted again and they rode out of the canyon and down the valley and away.
Miley Bennett’s mind climbed slowly back to consciousness out of a deep red darkness. It kept on climbing far above his surroundings, cool and detached from awareness of the immediate scene, unconcerned about his struggling body. He was alone with his dead and his wounded and his far-scattered living. The rope galls were deep in his arms and ankles and across his chest and he did not know it. Hours might have passed. It had really been perhaps twenty minutes.
His mind settled in a far niche and was quiet and a cold, clear logic flowed from it. He stopped struggling. He began to move in precise calculated lunges sidewise under the rope, edging around the tree trunk, oblivious of the rasping pull of the hemp along his body. When his fingers found the knot, his wrists bent at a grotesque upward angle, he picked slowly and steadily at it. When the rope loosened, his shoulders surged outward and the ends flipped free and he fell forward, wrenching his ankles on the lower coil that still held. When his feet were free, he crawled straight to the wrinkled, stomped canvas of the crushed pup tent.
Beneath the canvas in the sorry mess of the two blankets lay the old Hotchkiss. The stock was split with jagged splinters showing. The barrel and breech were intact. The last cartridge box was crumpled and broken, the cartridges pressed into the ground. He gathered as many as he could and cleaned them carefully and put them in his pockets. Standing up stiffly, he looked all around and whistled gently and then more loudly and saw a stirring in some far bushes. He limped there and made the snapped tether rope into a halter rein for the little burro. He pulled himself on her back and headed her out of the canyon and down the valley, holding the rope-rein in his left hand, the old Hotchkiss in his right hand.
He was no tracker and this was difficult for him. He found at last where the riders had swung off the main track through the valley and gone left through the rolling ridges and climbing foothills. The little burro plodded patiently and waited, head hanging, when he lost the trail and had to search in a circle for it. The sun was posting past noon when he topped the last rise and saw Clem Murphy’s ranch house in its flat hollow and the three horses ground-reined in the shade of a tree by the corral.
He turned back below the top of the rise and slid off the little burro and tied her to a scrub tree. Back at the top, he lay on his belly and peered over and crawled carefully from bush to bush down the slope to a stack of weathering fence posts about a hundred yards from the house. He rubbed dirt on the barrel of the old Hotchkiss to remove any lingering metal glint and lay again on his belly behind the stack, peering through the opening between two leaning posts that gave a clear view of the porch and the three horses and the ground between. He pushed the barrel of the old Hotchkiss through the opening and settled flat to the earth and waited. The sun beat on his back and the stinging buffalo flies came and he did not move and patiently waited.
Inside the house the three men finished a final round of coffee with Clem Murphy and told him to remember they had been there most of the morning. They rinsed off their dishes in the tin dishpan and in straggling order started out the door.
Miley Bennett waited until they were past the porch in the open space going towards the horses. I do not know whether he saw them as wolves or as men or as anything at all except as evil moving scars on the decent bigness of the broad land. His first bullet smashed through the side of Jeff Clayton’s head. The second tore a hole in the shoulder of one of the other two, going in clean and taking a piece of collarbone out with it and flattening him unconscious on the ground. The third kicked up dust beside the last of the three as he ducked behind the watering trough by the iron pump. The fourth crashed full into the breastbone of Clem Murphy as he ran through the doorway and on to the porch to see what was happening.
Silence dropped over the scene and the dust settled. Time passed and the sun beat down and the flies found the bodies. The man behind the watering trough saw a crack beneath it and through this studied every foot of the ground opposite him. The only cover was the stack of fence posts. At last he made out the dull deadliness of the gun barrel poking through. He waited and there was no movement. Revolver in hand, he peered cautiously over the top of the trough and fired four shots in quick aim at the small opening between the posts. He crouched low again and reloaded the revolver and waited and there was no movement and no sound.
His nerves became jumpy and he could no longer remain still. He leaped up and ran towards the horses, firing rapidly as he ran. He was on one and pulling it in a pawing semicircle when the bullet drilled into his back, snapping the bone and knocking him sidewise out of the saddle to hit a corral post and bounce in a broken heap to the ground.
Marshal Eakins found Miley Bennett late that afternoon. He found him in the little canyon. He was working doggedly with his small shovel, burying his sheep and marking the graves. He didn’t seem surprised when Eakins rode up after ordering the posse to stay behind a ways. Only he couldn’t seem to focus on anyone directly. He kept staring into space, and even while he was working he wasn’t really focusing on it. He had nothing to say except to ask Eakins whether he could finish burying the sheep. When Eakins said no, there would have to be a trial before anything else could be done, he came along quietly, pulling back just long enough to tell the burro to take care of things while he was gone and keep the buzzards away and then letting them tie him on a horse and going along without any fuss, just staring at the bigness all around.
There was talk of a lynching in town, but not very strong because everyone respected Eakins and Federal Judge Stillwell was there on temporary circuit. I don’t know what would have happened if the case had been in a State court. But Eakins said it was a Federal case because at bottom it was a controversy over Federal range and Judge Stillwell took jurisdiction.
No jury was needed because the plea was plain guilty. The trial took a little more than an hour, and Miley Bennett sat through it staring always out the window and hardly noticing what went on around him. All they got out of him beyond a few nods to direct questions was a single burst, after a question about Clem Murphy, that he didn’t mean to shoot that one and just couldn’t stop shooting and please couldn’t they understand he didn’t mean to shoot that one. The lawyer assigned to his defense argued extenuating circumstances fairly well, though his heart was not in it. Judge Stillwell cut the thing short by stating that the real extenuating circumstance was that the man had obviously lost his sanity. The Judge knew his audience and added that it was commonly known anyone who took to sheepherding was half-crazy to begin with and this made them all chuckle and held the grumbling down when he made the sentence life imprisonment. And Miley Bennett was staring out the window when they led him away to the jail where he would stay till they took him to the new Federal prison, and I knew it would take time but not too long before the whole meaning would sink home in him.
I guess that’s all. Except perhaps the visit Marshal Eakins paid me the afternoon of the day they buried Miley Bennett with a powder-burned mouth and a mass of clotted blood where the back of his head had been. Eakins rode up to where I was stringing barbed wire. He didn’t dismount. He simply reached down and handed me the gun.
“I reckon this is yours,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Can’t think of a charge,” he said. “After all, you saved the Government the expense of feeding him for maybe a passel of years.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” I said.
He nodded at me and reined the horse around and started back towards town. I watched him go, a man riding straight and steady across the big land.
Emmet Dutrow
Three days he was there on the rock ledge. I don’t think he left it once. I couldn’t be sure. I had things to do. But I could see him from my place and each time I looked he was there, a small dark-clad figure, immeasurably small against the cliff wall rising behind him.
Sometimes he was standing, head back and face up. Sometimes he was kneeling, head down and sunk into his shoulders. Sometimes he was sitting on one of the smaller stones.
Three days it was. And maybe the nights too. He was there when I went in at dusk and he was there when I came out in early morning. Once or twice I thought of going to him. But that would have accomplished nothing. I doubt whether he would even have noticed me. He was lost in an aloneness no one could penetrate. He was waiting for his God to get around to considering his case.
I guess this is another you’ll have to let me tell in my own way. And the only way I know to tell it is in pieces, the way I saw it.
Emmet Dutrow was his name. He was of Dutch blood, at least predominantly so; the hard-shell deep-burning kind. He came from Pennsylvania, all the way to our new State of Wyoming with his heavy wide-bed wagon and slow, swinging yoke of oxen. He must have been months on the road, making his twelve to twenty miles a day when the weather was good and little or none when it was bad. The wagon carried food and farm tools and a few sparse pieces of stiff furniture beneath an old canvas. He walked and must have walked the whole way close by the heads of his oxen, guiding them with a leather thong fastened to the yoke. And behind about ten paces and to the side came his woman and his son Jess.
They camped that first night across the creek from my place. I saw him picketing the oxen for grazing and the son building a fire and the woman getting her pans from where they hung under the wagon’s rear axle, and when my own chores were done and I was ready to go in for supper, I went to the creek and across on the stones in the shallows and towards their fire. He stepped out from it to confront me, blocking my way forward. He was a big man, big and broad and bulky, made more so by the queer clothes he wore. They were plain black of some rough thick material, plain black loose-fitting pants and plain black jacket like a frock-coat without any tails, and a plain black hat, shallow-crowned and stiff-brimmed. He had a square trimmed beard that covered most of his face, hiding the features, and eyes sunk far back so that you felt like peering close to see what might be in them.
Behind him the other two kept by the fire, the woman shapeless in a dark linsey-woolsey dress and pulled-forward shielding bonnet, the son dressed like his father except that he wore no hat.
I stopped. I couldn’t have gone farther without walking right into him.
“Evening, stranger,” I said.
“Good evening,” he said. His voice was deep and rumbled in his throat with the self-conscious roll some preachers have in the pulpit. “Have you business with me?”
“There’s a quarter of beef hanging in my springhouse,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d appreciate some fresh meat.”
“And the price?” he said.
“No price,” I said. “I’m offering you some.”
He stared at me. At least the shadow-holes where his eyes hid were aimed at me. “I’ll be bounden to no man,” he said.
The son had edged out from the fire to look at me. He waved an arm at my place across the creek. “Say mister,” he said. “Are those cattle of yours—”
“Jess!” The father’s voice rolled at him like a whip uncoiling. The son flinched at the sound and stepped back by the fire. The father turned his head again to me. “Have you any further business?”
“No,” I said. I swung about and went back across the creek on the stones and up the easy slope to my little frame ranch house.
The next day he pegged his claim, about a third of a mile farther up the valley where it narrowed and the spring floods of centuries ago had swept around the curve above and washed the rock formation bare, leaving a high cliff to mark where they had turned. His quarter section spanned the space from the cliff to the present-day creek. It was a fair choice on first appearances; good bottom land, well-watered with a tributary stream wandering through, and there was a stand of cottonwoods back by the cliff. I had passed it up because I knew how the drifts would pile in below the cliff in winter. I was snug in the bend in the valley and the hills behind protecting me. It was plain he didn’t know this kind of country. He was right where the winds down the valley would hit him when the cold came dropping out of the mountains.
He was a hard worker and his son too. They were started on a cabin before the first morning was over, cutting and trimming logs and hauling them with the oxen. In two days they had the framework up and the walls shoulder high, and then the rain started and the wind, one of our late spring storms that carried a lingering chill and drenched everything open with a steady lashing beat. I thought of them there, up and across the creek, with no roof yet and unable to keep a fire going in such weather, and I pulled on boots and a slicker and an old hat and went out and waded across and went up to their place. It was nearly dark, but he and the son were still at work setting another log in place. They had taken pieces of the old canvas and cut holes for their heads and pulled the pieces down over their shoulders with their heads poking through. This made using their arms slow and awkward, but they were still working. He had run the wagon along one wall of the cabin, and with this covering one side and the rest of the old canvas fastened to hang down the other, it formed a low cave-like shelter. The woman was in there, sitting on branches for a floor, her head nearly bumping the bed of the wagon above. I could hear the inside drippings, different from the outside patter, as the rain beat through the cracks of the wagon planks and the chinks of the log wall.
He stepped forward again to confront me and stop me, a big bulgy shape in his piece of canvas topped by the beard and hat with the shadow-holes of the eyes between.
“It’s a little wet,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d like to come over to my place where it’s warm and dry till this storm wears itself out. I can rig enough bunks.”
“No,” he said, rolling his tone with the organ stops out. “We shall do with what is ours.”
I started to turn away and I saw the woman peering out at me from her pathetic shelter, her face pinched and damp under the bonnet, and I turned back.
“Man alive,” I said, “forget your pride or whatever’s eating you and think of your wife and the boy.”
“I am thinking of them,” he said. “And I am the shield that shall protect them.”
I swung about and started away, and when I had taken a few steps his voice rolled after me. “Perhaps you should be thanked, neighbor. Perhaps you mean well.”
“Yes,” I said, “I did.”
I kept on going and I did not look back and I waded across the creek and went up to my house and in and turned the lamp up bright and tossed a couple more logs into the fireplace.
I tried once more, about two weeks later. He had his cabin finished then, roofed with bark slabs over close-set poles and the walls chinked tight with mud from the creek bottom. He had begun breaking ground. His oxen were handy for that. They could do what no team of horses could do, could lean into the yoke and dig their split hooves into the sod and pull a heavy ploughshare ripping through the roots of our tough buffalo grass.
