OUTLAWED
The night and the chaparral had made Garland's escape possible. In those
first moments, breaking through the thicket with the shots and shouts of
his pursuers at his back, his mind had held nothing but a frantic fear. A
thing of gaping mouth and strained eyes, he had groped and rushed, torn
between branches, splashed through streams, a menaced animal possessed by
an animal's instinct for flight.
Then a bullet, tearing the leaves above his head, had pulled his
scattered faculties together. He dropped and lay, crawled forward in a
moist darkness, rose and made a slantwise dart across the hill's face,
crouching as a bullet struck into a nearby trunk. Pausing to listen, he
could hear the voices of his pursuers flung back and forth, sound against
sound, broken, clamorous, the baying of the pack. Against the ground,
trickle of water and stir of leaves soft around him, he lay for a second,
the breaths coming in rending gasps from his lungs.
By a series of doublings and loops, he gained the summit and here rose
and looked down. The voices were fainter, the trampling among the
branches was drifting toward the right. The lights of the town showed a
central cluster with a scattering of bright, disconnected particles as if
a fiery thing had fallen and burst, sending sparks in every direction.
Some of them moved, a train of dancing dots, lanterns carried on the
run--the town was roused for the man hunt.
He went on, down from the crest and then up; the voices died and he was
alone in the vast, enmuffling dark.
For the time safe, he allowed himself a rest, flat on his back under a
pine, breathing through open mouth. It was then that he was aware of a
wet warmth on his neck, and feeling of it with clumsy fingers remembered
the shot that had followed the breaking of the door. One inch to the left
and he would have been a dead man. As it was, it was only a surface tear
through the flesh and he sopped at it with his bandanna, muttering and
wiping his fingers on the moss.
Presently he moved on again, one with the woodland creatures in their
night prowls. He could hear them, cracklings of twigs under their furtive
feet, scurrying retreats before his heavier human tread. Once he stopped
at a cry, a shriek tearing open the silence as the lightning tears the
cope of the sky. He knew it well, had heard it often by his camp fire in
his old prospecting days--the yell of a California lion in the mountains
beyond. The night was drawing toward its last deep hours when he came to
a straight uprearing of rock, a ledge, broken and heaved upward in some
ancient earth-throe. He felt along its face, glazed by water films,
close-curtained by shrubs and ferns, found an opening and crawled in.
There he stayed for a week; saw the sun rise over the sea of pines, wheel
across the sky, drop behind the rock whence its last glow painted every
tree top with a golden varnish. Then came evening, long and still, a
great rush of color to the west, birds winging their way homeward,
shadows slanting blue over the slopes, brimming purple in the hollows.
Then night with its majestic silence and its large, serene stars. He lay
in the cave mouth looking at them, his thoughts ranging far. Sometimes
they went back to the past and he remembered the deep blue nights in
Arizona, the white glare of the days. He could see the walls of his ranch
house, with the peppers in red bunches, Juana in her calico wrapper and
Pancha playing in the shade. He rose, cursing, sopped his bandanna in the
water trickling from the rock and put it on his wound. It hurt and made
him feverish, a prey to such harassing memories.
With a piece of cord he found in his pocket he made a trap--a noose
suspended from a bent sapling--and caught a rabbit. This kept him in food
for two days, then setting it again he broke the cord, and driven by
hunger went forth, revolver in hand. He saw fresh deer tracks, and was
lucky enough to find his quarry, steal close and shoot it. His hunger
made him reckless and he lit a fire, roasting the meat on planted sticks.
But the birds came and wheeled about overhead and the specks of moving
birds in the sky can be seen from afar.
His forces restored by nourishment he grew restless. The loneliness of
the place oppressed him and he wanted to hear of Knapp. Knapp had been
caught and Knapp would talk and he burned to know what Knapp would say of
him. He was sure the man knew little; he had foreseen such a catastrophe
and been as secret as the grave, but Knapp might have picked up
something. Anyway he wanted to know just how he stood. Food, his greatest
need, supplied, his next was news, someone to tell him, or a newspaper.
The people who stood in with him were scattered far. Up beyond Angels the
Garcias were his friends, and over to the left, on the bend of the river
near Pine Flat, Old Man Haley, reputed cracked and a survivor of the
great days of the lode, had been his confederate from the start. But
Haley's shack was too near Pine Flat, and now with a reward probably
offered, he feared the Garcias--greasers, father and son, not to be
trusted. The wisest course was to lie low and keep to himself, anyway
till he knew more.
So he tracked across the country from landmark to landmark, a cave, an
abandoned tunnel, the shell of a ruined cabin. He left the foothills and
went back toward the mountain spurs where ridge rises beyond ridge, and
at the bottom of ravines rivers lie like yellow threads. Nature held him
aloof, an atom leaving no mark upon it, an intruder on its musing
self-engrossment. He moved, secure and solitary, seeing no living thing
but the game he shot and the hawk hanging poised in the blue. Sometimes
he sat for hours watching its winged shadow float over the tree tops.
Finally he knew he would have to return to the settlements, for his store
of cartridges was almost exhausted. He tried to hoard them, eking out his
deer meat with roots and berries till body and nerve began to weaken.
That decided him and he started back, eating only just enough to give him
strength to get there. He was nearly spent when he found himself once
more among the chaparral's low growth, looking down on the brown and
green fields.
There was a ranch below him whose acres stretched like a patterned cloth
along the hill's slant. The house, white-painted, stood in the midst of
cultivated land which he would have to cross to reach it. But driven by
hunger he stole down, his way marked by a swaying in the close-packed
foliage. He could see the smoke rising in a blue skein from its chimney
and at night its windows break out in bright squares. He drew close
enough to watch the men go off to their work and the women move,
sunbonneted, about the yard.
The second day, faint and desperate, he ventured; it was midmorning, the
men away in the fields till noon. There was not a sound when he reached
the house, skirted the rear, and walked round to the side where a balcony
ran the length of the building. Chairs stood here and evidences of
sewing, work baskets, spools and scissors, and a tumbled heap of
material. On the step lay a newspaper and he was stretching his hand for
it when he heard the voices of women.
Through an open door he saw them--two--standing in front of a mirror, one
with her back toward him, in a blouse of pink that she was pulling into a
waistband. The other watched her, pins in her mouth, a tape measure over
her arm. Both were absorbed, the one in her reflection in the glass, the
other in the pink blouse. He trod on the step with a heavy foot and
muttered a gruff "Say, lady."
The women flashed round and he saw them to be middle-aged and young--a
mother and daughter evidently. The elder with a quick, defensive movement
walked to the doorway and stood there, blocking it. He heard the younger
exclaim, "A tramp!" and then she came forward, squeezing in beside her
mother. Hostility and apprehension were on both their faces.
"What do you want here?" said the elder sharply.
"Somethin' to eat," he answered, trying to make his hoarse tones mild; "I
bin on the tramp for days."
"No, no, go off," she cried, waving him away.
"I'm starved," he pleaded. "Any bones or scraps'll do me."
They eyed him, still apprehensive, but evidently impressed by his
appearance.
"Honest to God it's true," he said, snatching at his advantage. "Can't
you see it by the looks of me?"
The girl, thrusting her hand through her mother's arm and drawing her
back, answered,
"All right. Go round to the kitchen."
With the words she banged the door and he heard the click of the lock,
then their scurrying steps, bangs of other doors and their receding
voices. In a twinkling he grabbed the paper, thrust it into his coat
pocket, and slouched round to the kitchen door.
"Stay out there," called the mother from within. "I'll give you food, but
I don't want no tramp tracking up my kitchen."
He could see them cutting bread and chunks of meat, flurried and he knew
frightened. Leaning against a chair was a rifle, placed where he could
see it. He could have smiled at it had he not been so bound and cramped
with fear. As they cut they interchanged low-toned remarks, and once the
elder looked at him frowningly over her shoulder.
"Why ain't you workin'? A big, husky man like you?" she asked.
"I'm calcalatin' to find work at Sonora, but I have to have the strength
to git there. I've had a bad spell of ague."
The girl raised her eyes to him and compassion softened them. As she went
back to her bread-cutting he heard her murmur,
"I guess that's straight. He sure has an awful peaked look."
It was she who gave him the food, rolled in a piece of newspaper.
Standing in the doorway, she held it out to him and said, smiling,
"There, it's a good lunch. I hope it'll brace you up so you can get
to Sonora all right. I believe you're tellin' the truth and I wish
you luck."
He grunted his thanks and made off, shambling across the yard and out
into the sun-flooded fields. He had to cross them to get out of range
behind a hill spur before he turned into the woods. As he walked, feeling
their eyes boring into his back, conscious of himself as hugely
conspicuous in the untenanted landscape, he opened the paper and ate
ravenously, tearing at the bread and meat.
He was far afield before he dared to rest and look at the paper. It was
part of the Sunday edition of the _Stockton Expositor_, and in it he read
of the approaching trial of Knapp. Both Danny Leonard and Jim Bailey had
identified him by his hands and his size as the man who had wounded the
messenger, and Knapp had admitted it. The paper predicted a life sentence
for him. Then it went on to Garland, who was still at large. Various
people were sure they had seen him. A saloon keeper on the outskirts of
Placerville was ready to swear that a mounted man, who had stopped at his
place one night for a drink, was the fugitive outlaw. If this evidence
was reliable Garland was moving toward his old stamping ground, the camps
along the Feather, where it was said he had friends.
His relief was intense, for it was evident Knapp had had little to say of
him, and his hunters were on the wrong trail. Food cravings appeased, his
anxieties temporarily at rest, he was easier than he had been since the
night at Sheeps Bar. Curled under a thicket of madrone he slept like a
log and woke in the morning, his energies primed, his brain alert,
thinking of Pancha.
There were two things that had to be done--get a letter to her and
replenish his store of cartridges. If too long a time passed without news
of him, she would grow anxious, might talk, might betray suspicious facts
or draw inferences herself. A word from him, dispatched from a camp along
the lode, would quiet her. So he must gird his loins for the perilous
venture of a break into the open under the eyes of men.
Up beyond Angels, slumbering amid its rotting placers and abandoned
ditches, lies the old camp of Farleys. In times past it was a stop on the
way to the Calaveras Big Trees, but after the railroad diverted the
traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil
way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant,
self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along
which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without
exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a
letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting
notice. And even if he should be noticed, Farleys was sleepy and a good
way from anywhere. Warnings sent from there would not be acted upon too
quickly. A man could catch the eye of Farleys, wake its suspicions and
get away while it was talking things over and starting the machinery for
his arrest.
This was the place he decided on and forthwith moved toward. He had four
cartridges and if game was plentiful and his aim good he might make
Farleys and still have one or maybe two left.
But it took longer than he calculated, swollen rivers blocking his path,
luck going against him. Three of his cartridges were expended on a deer
before he brought it down and the rains came back, blinding and
torrential. Forced to make detours because of the unfordable streams he
lost his way and spent precious hours groping about in pine forests, dark
as twilight, their boughs bent to the onslaught of the storm. Crossing a
watercourse he fell and his matches were soaked, and that night, crouched
against a tree trunk, a creature less protected than the beasts who had
their shelters, he sucked the raw meat.
The next day his misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last
bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the
darkness under a mass of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less
as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was.
But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to
sleep under his saturated tent. In the morning he was on the trail with
the first light, staggering a little, squinting down the columned aisles
for open ground whence he could look out and get his bearings.
It was late in the afternoon, dusk at hand, when he saw the light of a
clearing. He hastened, staring ahead, stood for a stunned second, then
leaped behind a tree, muscles tight, the dull confusion of his brain
gone. Looming high through the gray of the twilight, balconied,
many-windowed, was a large white building. Outhouses sprawled at one
side, a weed-grown drive curved to its front steps, down the slant of its
roof the rain ran, spouting from broken gutters and lashing the shutters
that blinded its tiers of windows.
The first shock over, he stole cat-soft from trunk to trunk, studying it.
There were no lights, no smoke from the chimneys, no sign of habitation.
A loosened shutter on the ground floor banged furiously, calling out
echoes from the solitude. He circled the back of it, round by the
outbuildings, a lot of them, one like a stable--all silent. Then made his
way to the side with its deep, first-floor veranda and was creeping
toward the front when he ran into something--a circular construction
covered with a rough bark and topped by a balustrade.
One look at it and he gave a smothered exclamation and ran back among
the trees. The light was almost gone, but there was enough to show a
line of enormous shafts towering into a remote blackness. Like reddish
monoliths they reared themselves in a receding file, silence about
their feet, their crests far aloft moaning under the wind. In the
encroaching darkness they showed like the pillars of a temple reared by
some primordial race of giants, their foliage a roof that seemed to
touch the low sky. He knew where he was now--the Calaveras Big Trees.
The house was the old hotel, once a point of pilgrimage, long since
fallen from popularity and left to gradual decay. In summer a few
travelers found their way there, but at this season the spot was in as
complete a solitude as it had been when the first gringoes came and
stood in silent awe.
He broke his way in by the window with the loosened shutter and passed
through the dimness of long rooms, bare and chilly, his steps loud on the
uncarpeted floors. The place was damp and had the musty smell of a house
long unaired and unoccupied. The double doors into the dining room were
jammed and he had to wrench them open; in the pantry a windowpane was
broken and the rain had seeped in. Here, on a three-legged table, he
found a calendar and remembered hearing that the hotel had been opened
during the previous summer, but that, business being bad, the proprietor
had closed it after a few weeks.
In the kitchen he found signs of this period of habitation. On a shelf in
a cupboard, hidden by a debris of paper and empty boxes, he came upon two
cans evidently overlooked. He took them to the window, threw back the
shutter, and saw they contained tomatoes and cherries. This heartened him
to new efforts and he began a search through the dirty desolation of the
room. He was rewarded by finding a half-filled match box, a few sticks of
split wood and in the bottom of a coal bunker in the passage enough coal
to make at least one good fire.
Before he started it he closed the shutter tight, then, groping in the
dusk, filled the big range with paper and wood and set a match to it. It
flickered, caught, snapped cheerily, light flickering along the walls,
shining between the bars. He poured on the coal, opened all the draughts,
saw the iron grow slowly red and felt the grateful warmth. With his knife
he cut open the tomato can, heated its contents in a leaky saucepan, and,
taking it to the sink, spooned it up with a piece of wood. The cherries
were his dessert.
After that he peeled off his outer clothes and lay on the floor in front
of the range. It threw out a violent heat, but not too much for him; he
luxuriated, basked in it, delighting in the rosy patches that grew on the
stove's rusty surface, the bright droppings from its grate. Holding his
stiff feet out to it, he cooked himself, stretching and turning like a
cat. Finally, he lay quiet, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes
touching points that the red light played upon, and listened to the rain.
The building shook to its buffets; it swept like feeling fingers across
the windows, drummed on the low roofs of the outhouses, ran in a
spattering rush along the balcony. The sound of it soothed him like a
lullaby, and with the banging of the unfastened shutter loud in his ears
he slept the sleep of the just.
The next morning, with the daylight to help him, he extended his
search and found a few spoonfuls of tea in a glass preserve jar, a
handful of moldy potatoes in a gunny-sack and in a shed back of the
kitchen a pile of cut wood. He breakfasted royally, finishing the
remains of the cherries, built the fire up high and hot, and started
to explore the house.
It was as empty as a shell, room opening out of room, half lighted, bare
and dismal. There was nothing to be got out of it and he was back on his
way to the warmth of the kitchen when he thought of the broken-legged
table in the pantry. Propping this up against the window ledge, a drawer
fell from it, scattering sheets of paper and envelopes on the floor. He
stood staring at them, lying round his feet, fallen there as if from
heaven to supply his last and now greatest need. With an upturned box for
a seat, the stub of pencil he always carried sharpened to a pin point by
his knife, he steadied the table on the windowsill, and sat down to write
to Pancha. He wrote the word "Farleys" at the top of the sheet, as he
knew she would see the Farleys postmark, but the date he omitted:
"MY DEARY PANCHITA:
"_Farleys_
"Here's the old man writing to you from Farleys. Sort of small dead
place, but there's business moving round it, so I got washed up here for
a few days. I ain't had anything that's good yet, but there's a feller
that looks like he might nibble, and take it from me my hooks are out.
Anyways if he does I'll let you know. Plenty lot of rain, but I've been
comfortable right along. Got a good room here and swell grub. And don't
you worry about my roomatiz. All you want to know is I ain't got it. I
can't give you no address, as I'm moving on soon, Wednesday maybe. But
I'll drop you a line from somewheres as soon as I got anything to say.
You want to remember I'm all right and as happy as I ever am when I ain't
with my best girl. This leaves me in good health, which I hope it finds
you.
"YOUR BEST BEAU."
The rain lasted that day, but on the next the sun rose on a world washed
clean, woodland-scented, fresh and beautiful. The time had come for him
to dare. At nightfall he started, a young moon to guide him, followed a
road ankle high in ruts and mud, and at dawn crept into an alder thicket
for rest and sleep. It was nine, the day well started, when he walked
into Farleys.
The little town was up and about its business, windows open, housewives
sweeping front steps. The air was redolent of pine balsam, the sun
licking up the water in hollows on the sidewalks, the distances colored a
transparent blue. Outside the saloon the barkeeper was patting his dog,
women in sunbonnets with string bags on their arms were on their way to
the general store, men were bringing out chairs and placing them with
pondering calculation the right distance from the hitching bar.
He bought his stamp and posted his letter, the man inside the window
offering comments on the weather. Then he had to face the length of the
street; he had been there before and knew the hardware store was at its
other end. As he traversed it the heads of the men--already settled in
their chairs for the day--turned hopefully at the sound of his masculine
tread. It might be someone who would stand a drink, and even if it
wasn't, staring at a passerby was something to do. To run such a gauntlet
required all his fortitude, and as he walked under the battery of eyes
the sweat gathered on his face and his heart thumped in his throat.
The clerk at the hardware store was reading a paper. When he went for the
cartridges he left it on the counter and the fugitive saw the heading of
a column, "Garland still eludes justice." As he waited he read it,
turning from it to take his package and then back to it as the clerk made
change. They were hunting in the Feather country. A blacksmith beyond
Auburn swore he knew the outlaw and had seen him, mounted on a bay horse,
ride past his shop a week before at sunset. The clerk held out the
change, and Garland, reading, nodded toward the counter. He was afraid to
extend his hand, knowing that it shook, and presently, dropping the
paper, scooped up the money with a curved palm.
"Looks like Garland was goin' to give 'em the slip after all," said
the clerk.
"Um--looks that way, but I wouldn't bank on it. If he's lyin' low in one
of them camps up the Feather he's liable to be seen. There's folks there
that knows him it says here and you can't always trust your friends. Fine
weather we're havin' after the rain. So long."
When he came out into the street he was nerved for a last, desperate
venture. He went to the general store and bought a stock of provisions:
bread, sugar, bacon, coffee and tobacco. The salesman was inclined to be
friendly and asked him questions, and he explained himself as a
prospector in the hills, cut off by the recent rains. He got away from
there as quickly as he could, dropped down a side path and made for the
woods and "home."
That evening he went out and lay under the giant trees, and smoked his
first pipe for weeks. The sunset gleamed through the foliage in fiery
spots, here and there piercing it with a long ray of light which slanted
across the red trunks. From the forest recesses twilight spread in
stealthy advance, and looking up he could see bits of the sky,
scatterings of pink through the darkening green. It was intensely quiet,
not a stir of wind, not a bird note, or leaf rustle. The place was held
in that mysterious silence which broods over the Californian country and
suggests a hushed and ominous attention. It is as if nature were aware of
some impending event, imminent and portentous, and waited in tranced
expectancy. The outlaw felt it, and moved, disquieted, setting his
oppression down to loneliness.
One afternoon a week later, while standing at the kitchen window, he saw
a figure dart across an opening between the trees. It went so swiftly
that he was aware of it only as a dash of darkness, the passage of a
shadow, but It left a moving wake in the ferns and grasses. With his
heart high and smothering, he felt for his revolver and crept through the
rooms to the broken window on the veranda. If he was caught he would die
game, fight from this citadel till his last cartridge was gone. His eyes
to a crack in the shutter he looked out--no one was there. The vista of
the forest stretched back as free of human presence as in the days before
man had roamed its solemn corridors.
Then he saw it again; the tightness of his muscles relaxed, and the hand
holding the revolver dropped to his side. It was a child, a boy; there
were two of them. He watched them move, foot balanced before foot, wary
eyes on the house, emerge from behind a trunk and flee to the shelter of
the next one. They were little fellows, eight or perhaps ten, in overalls
and ragged hats, scared and yet adventurous, creeping cautiously nearer.
It was easy to guess what they were and what had brought them: ranch
children who had seen the smoke of his fire, and, knowing the hotel to be
empty, had come to discover who was there. The game was up--they might
have been round the place for hours, for days. He suddenly threw open the
shutters and roared at them, an unexpected and fearful challenge. A
moment of paralyzed terror was followed by a wild rush, the bracken
breaking under their flying feet. After they had passed from his sight he
could hear the swish and crashing of their frantic flight. Two boys, so
frightened, would not take long to reach home and gasp out their story.
He left on their heels, window and door flapping behind him, the fire red
in the range.
Two days later he found cover in a deserted tunnel back in the hills. Its
timbers sagged with the weight of the years, the yellow mound of its dump
was hidden under a mantle of green. Even its mouth, once a black hole in
the hillside verdure, was curtained by a veil of creepers. There was game
and there was water and there he stayed. At first he rested, then idle
and inert lay among the ferns on the top of the dump, staring at the
distance, squinting up at the sky, deadened with the weight of the
interminable, empty days.