Traveling Buttes is a lone stage-station on the road, largely speaking,
from Blackfoot to Boise. I do not know whether the stages take that road
now, but ten years ago they did, and the man who kept the stage-house
was a person of primitive habits and corresponding appearance named
Gilroy.
The stage-house is perhaps half a mile from the foot of the largest
butte, one of three that loom on the horizon, and appear to "travel"
from you, as you approach them from the plains. A day's ride with the
Buttes as a landmark is like a stern chase, in that you seem never to
gain upon them.
From the stage-house the plain slopes up to the foot of the Big Butte,
which rises suddenly in the form of an enormous tepee, as if Gitche
Manito, the mighty, had here descended and pitched his tent for a
council of the nations.
The country is destitute of water. To say that it is "thirsty" is to
mock with vain imagery that dead and mummied land on the borders of the
Black Lava. The people at the stage-house had located a precious spring,
four miles up, in a cleft near the top of the Big Butte; they piped the
water down to the house and they sold it to travelers on that Jericho
road at so much per horse. The man was thrown in, but the man usually
drank whisky.
Our guide commented unfavorably on this species of husbandry, which is
common enough in the arid West, and as legitimate as selling oats or
hay; but he chose to resent it in the case of Gilroy, and to look upon
it as an instance of individual and exceptional meanness.
"Any man that will jump God's water in a place like this, and sell it
the same as drinks--he'd sell water to his own father in hell!"
This was our guide's opinion of Gilroy. He was equally frank, and much
more explicit, in regard to Gilroy's sons. "But," he concluded, with a
philosopher's acceptance of existing facts, "it ain't likely that any of
that outfit will ever git into trouble, so long as Maverick is sheriff
of Lemhi County."
We were about to ask why, when we drove up to the stage-house, and
Maverick himself stepped out and took our horses.
"What the--infernal has happened to the man?" my companion, Ferris,
exclaimed; and our guide answered indifferently, as if he were speaking
of the weather,--
"Some Injuns caught him alone in an out-o'-the-way ranch, when he was a
kid, and took a notion to play with him. This is what was left when they
got through. I never see but one worse-looking man," he added, speaking
low, as Maverick passed us with the team: "him a bear wiped over the
head with its paw. 'Twas quicker over with, I expect, but he lived, and
_he_ looked worse than Maverick."
"Then I hope to the Lord I may never see him!" Ferris ejaculated; and I
noticed that he left his dinner untasted, though he had boasted of a
hunter's appetite.
We were two college friends on a hunting trip, but we had not got into
the country of game. In two days more we expected to make Jackson's
Hole, and I may mention that "hole," in this region, signifies any
small, deep valley, well hidden amidst high mountains, where moisture
is perennial, and grass abounds. In these pockets of plenty, herds of
elk gather and feed as tame as park pets; and other hunted creatures, as
wild but less innocent, often find sanctuary here, and cache their
stolen stock and other spoil of the road and the range.
We did not forget to put our question concerning Maverick, that unhappy
man, in his character of legalized protector of the Gilroy gang. What
did our free-spoken guide mean by that insinuation?
We were told that Gilroy, in his rough-handed way, had been as a father
to the lad, after the savages wreaked their pleasure on him: and his
people being dead or scattered, Maverick had made himself useful in
various humble capacities at the stage-house, and had finally become a
sort of factotum there and a member of the family. And though perfectly
square himself, and much respected on account of his personal courage
and singular misfortunes, he could never see the old man's crookedness,
nor the more than crookedness of his sons. He was like a son of the
house, himself; but most persons agreed that it was not as a brother he
felt toward Rose Gilroy. And a tough lookout it was for the girl; for
Maverick was one whom no man would lightly cross, and in her case he was
acting as "general dog around the place," as our guide called it. The
young fellows were shy of the house, notwithstanding the attraction it
held. It was likely to be Maverick or nobody for Rose.
We did not see Rose Gilroy, but we heard her step in the stage-house
kitchen, and her voice, as clear as a lark's, giving orders to the tall,
stooping, fair young Swede, who waited on us at table, and did other
work of a menial character in that singular establishment.
"How is it the watch-dog allows such a pretty sprig as that around the
place?" Ferris questioned, eying our knight of the trencher, who blushed
to feel himself remarked.
"He won't stay," our guide pronounced; "they don't none of 'em stay when
they're good-lookin'. The old man he's failin' considerable these
days,--gettin' kind o' silly,--and the boys are away the heft of the
time. Maverick pretty much runs the place. I don't justly blame the
critter. He's watched that little Rose grow up from a baby. How's he
goin' to quit being fond of her now she's a woman? I dare say he'd a
heap sooner she'd stayed a little girl. And these yere boys around here
they're a triflin' set, not half so able to take care of her as
Maverick. He's got the sense and he's got the sand; but there's that
awful head on him! I don't blame him much, lookin' the way he does, and
feelin' the same as any other man."
We left Traveling Buttes and its cruel little love-story, but we had not
gone a mile when a horseman overtook us with a message for Ferris from
his new foreman at the ranch, a summons which called him back for a day
at the least. Ferris was exceedingly annoyed: a day at the ranch meant
four days on the road; but the business was imperative. We held a brief
council, and decided that, with Ferris returning, our guide should push
on with the animals and camp outfit into a country of grass, and look up
a good camping-spot (which might not be the first place he struck) this
side of Jackson's Hole. It remained for me to choose between going with
the stuff, or staying for a longer look at the phenomenal Black Lava
fields at Arco; Arco being another name for desolation on the very edge
of that weird stone sea. This was my ostensible reason for choosing to
remain at Arco; but I will not say the reflection did not cross me that
Arco is only sixteen miles from Traveling Buttes--not an insurmountable
distance between geology and a pretty girl, when one is five and twenty,
and has not seen a pretty face for a month of Sundays.
Arco, at that time, consisted of the stage-house, a store, and one or
two cabins--a poor little seed of civilization dropped by the wayside,
between the Black Lava and the hills where Lost River comes down and
"sinks" on the edge of the lava. The station is somewhat back from the
road, with its face--a very grimy, unwashed countenance--to the lava.
Quaking asps and mountain birches follow the water, pausing a little way
up the gulch behind the house, but the eager grass tracks it all the way
till it vanishes; and the dry bed of the stream goes on and spreads in a
mass of coarse sand and gravel, beaten flat, flailed by the feet of
countless driven sheep that have gathered here. For this road is on the
great overland sheep-trail from Oregon eastward--the march of the
million mouths, and what the mouths do not devour the feet tramp down.
The staple topic of conversation at Arco was one very common in the far
west, when a tenderfoot is of the company. The poorest place can boast
of some distinction, and Arco, though hardly on the highroad of fashion
and commerce, had frequently been named in print in connection with
crime of a highly sensational and picturesque character. Scarcely
another fifty miles of stage-road could boast of so many and such
successful road-jobs; and although these affairs were of almost monthly
occurrence, and might be looked for to come off always within that noted
danger-limit, yet it was a fact that the law had never yet laid finger
on a man of the gang, nor gained the smallest clew to their hide-out. It
was a difficult country around Arco, one that lent itself to secrecy.
The road-agents came, and took, and vanished as if the hills were their
co-partners as well as the receivers of their goods. As for the lava,
which was its front dooryard, so to speak, for a hundred miles, the man
did not live who could say he had crossed it. What it held or was
capable of hiding, in life or in death, no man knew.
The day after Ferris left me I rode out upon that arrested tide--those
silent breakers which for ages have threatened, but never reached, the
shore. I tried to fancy it as it must once have been, a sluggish,
vitreous flood, filling the great valley, and stiffening as it slowly
pushed toward the bases of the hills. It climbed and spread, as dough
rises and crawls over the edge of the pan. The Black Lava is always
called a sea--that image is inevitable; yet its movement had never in
the least the character of water. "This is where hell pops," an old
plains-man feelingly described it, and the suggestion is perfect. The
colors of the rock are those produced by fire: its texture is that of
slag from a furnace. One sees how the lava hardened into a crust, which
cracked and sank in places, mingling its tumbled edges with the creeping
flood not cooled beneath. After all movement had ceased and the mass was
still, time began upon its tortured configurations, crumbled and wore
and broke, and sifted a little earth here and there, and sealed the
burnt rock with fairy print of lichens, serpent-green and orange and
rust-red. The spring rains left shallow pools which the summer dried.
Across it, a few dim trails wander a little way and give out, like the
water.
For a hundred miles to the Snake River this Plutonian gulf obliterates
the land--holds it against occupation or travel. The shoes of a marching
army would be cut from their feet before they had gone a dozen miles
across it; horses would have no feet left; and water would have to be
packed as on an ocean, or a desert, cruise.
I rode over places where the rock rang beneath my horse's hoofs like the
iron cover of a manhole. I followed the hollow ridges that mounted often
forty feet above my head, but always with that gruesome effect of
thickening movement--that sluggish, atomic crawl; and I thought how one
man pursuing another into this frozen hell might lose himself, but never
find the object of his quest. If he took the wrong furrow, he could not
cross from one blind gut into another, nor hope to meet the fugitive at
any future turning.
I don't know why the fancy of a flight and pursuit should so have
haunted me, in connection with the Black Lava; probably the desperate
and lawless character of our conversation at the stage-house gave rise
to it.
I had fallen completely under the spell of that skeleton flood. I
watched the sun sink, as it sinks at sea, beyond its utmost ragged
ridges; I sat on the borders of it, and stared across it in the gray
moonlight; I rode out upon it when the Buttes, in their delusive
nearness, were as blue as the gates of amethyst, and the morning was as
fair as one great pearl; but no peace or radiance of heaven or earth
could change its aspect more than that of a mound of skulls. When I
began to dream about it, I thought I must be getting morbid. This is
worse than Gilroy's, I said; and I promised myself I would ride up there
next day and see if by chance one might get a peep at the Rose that all
were praising, but none dared put forth a hand to pluck. Was it indeed
so hard a case for the Rose? There are women who can love a man for the
perils he has passed. Alas, Maverick! could any one get used to a face
like that?
Here, surely, was the story of Beauty and her poor Beast humbly
awaiting, in the mask of a brutish deformity, the recognition of Love
pure enough to divine the soul beneath, and unselfish enough to deliver
it. Was there such love as that at Gilroy's? However, I did not make
that ride.
* * * * *
It was the fourth night of clear, desert moonlight since Ferris had left
me: I was sleepless, and so I heard the first faint throb of a horse's
feet approaching from the east, coming on at a great pace, and making
the turn to the stage-house. I looked out, and on the trodden space in
front I saw Maverick dismounting from a badly blown horse.
"Halloo! what's up?" I called from the open window of my bedroom on the
ground-floor.
"Did two men pass here on horseback since dark?"
"Yes," I said; "about twelve o'clock: a tall man and a little short
fellow."
"Did they stop to water?"
"No, they did not; and they seemed in such a tearing hurry that I
watched them down the road"--
"I am after those men, and I want a fresh horse," he cut in. "Call up
somebody quick!"
"Shall you take one of the boys along?" I inquired, with half an eye to
myself, after I had obeyed his command.
He shook his head. "Only one horse here that's good for anything: I want
that myself."
"There is my horse," I suggested; "but I'd rather be the one who rides
her. She belongs to a friend."
"Take her, and come on, then, but understand--this ain't a Sunday-school
picnic."
"I'm with you, if you'll have me."
"I'd sooner have your horse," he remarked, shifting the quid of tobacco
in his cheek.
"You can't have her without me, unless you steal her," I said.
"Git your gun, then, and shove some grub into your pockets: I can't wait
for nobody." He swung himself into the saddle.
"What road do you take?"
"There ain't but one," he shouted, and pointed straight ahead.
I overtook him easily within the hour; he was saving his horse, for
this was his last chance to change until Champagne Station, fifty miles
away.
He gave me rather a cynical smile of recognition as I ranged alongside,
as if to say, "You'll probably get enough of this before we are
through." The horses settled down to their work, and they "humped
theirselves," as Maverick put it, in the cool hours before sunrise.
At daybreak his awful face struck me all afresh, as inscrutable in its
strange distortion as some stone god in the desert, from whose graven
hideousness a thousand years of mornings have silently drawn the veil.
"What do you want those fellows for?" I asked, as we rode. I had taken
for granted that we were hunting suspects of the road-agent persuasion.
"I want 'em on general principles," he answered shortly.
"Do you think you know them?"
"I think they'll know me. All depends on how they act when we get within
range. If they don't pay no attention to us, we'll send a shot across
their bows. But more likely they'll speak first."
He was very gloomy, and would keep silence for an hour at a time. Once
he turned on me as with a sudden misgiving.
"See here, don't you git excited; and whatever happens, don't you meddle
with the little one. If the big fellow cuts up rough, he'll take his
chances, but you leave the little one to me. I want him--I want him for
State's evidence," he finished hoarsely.
"The little one must be the Benjamin of the family," I thought--"one of
the bad young Gilroys, whose time has come at last; and sheriff Maverick
finds his duty hard."
I could not say whether I really wished the men to be overtaken, but the
spirit of the chase had undoubtedly entered into my blood. I felt as
most men do, who are not saints or cowards, when such work as this is to
be done. But I knew I had no business to be along. It was one thing for
Maverick, but the part of an amateur in a man-hunt is not one to boast
of.
The sun was now high, and the fresh tracks ahead of us were plain in the
dust. Once they left the road and strayed off into the lava,
incomprehensibly to me; but Maverick understood, and pressed forward.
"We'll strike them again further on. D---- fool!" he muttered, and I
observed that he alluded but to one, "huntin' water-holes in the lava in
the tail end of August!"
They could not have found water, for at Belgian Flat they had stopped
and dug for it in the gravel, where a little stream in freshet time
comes down the gulch from the snow-fields higher up, and sinks, as at
Arco, on the lip of the lava. They had dug, and found it, and saved us
the trouble, as Maverick remarked.
Considerable water had gathered since the flight had paused here and
lost precious time. We drank our fill, refreshed our horses, and shifted
the saddle-girths; and I managed to stow away my lunch during the next
mile or so, after offering to share it with Maverick, who refused it as
if the notion of food made him sick. He had considerable whisky aboard,
but he was, I judged, one of those men on whom drink has little effect;
else some counter-flame of excitement was fighting it in his blood.
I looked for the development of the personal complication whenever we
should come up with the chase, for the man's eye burned, and had his
branded countenance been capable of any expression that was not cruelly
travestied, he would have looked the impersonation of wild justice.
It was now high noon, and our horses were beginning to feel the steady
work; yet we had not ridden as they brought the good news from Ghent:
that is the pace of a great lyric; but it's not the pace at which
justice, or even vengeance, travels in the far West. Even the furies
take it coolly when they pursue a man over these roads, and on these
poor brutes of horses, in fifty-mile stages, with drought thrown in.
Maverick had had no mercy on the pony that brought him sixteen miles;
but this piece of horse-flesh he now bestrode must last him through at
least to Champagne Station, should we not overhaul our men before. He
knew well when to press and when to spare the pace, a species of purely
practical consideration which seemed habitual with him; he rode like an
automaton, his baleful face borne straight before him--the Gorgon's
head.
Beyond Belgian Flat--how far beyond I do not remember, for I was
beginning to feel the work, too, and the country looked all alike to me
as we made it, mile by mile--the road follows close along by the lava,
but the hills recede, and a little trail cuts across, meeting the road
again at Deadman's Flat. Here we could not trust to the track, which
from the nature of the ground was indistinct. So we divided our forces,
Maverick taking the trail,--which I was quite willing he should do, for
it had a look of most sinister invitation,--while I continued by the
longer road. Our little discussion, or some atmospheric change,--some
breath of coolness from the hills,--had brought me up out of my stupor
of weariness. I began to feel both alert and nervous; my heart was
beating fast. The still sunshine lay all around us, but where Maverick's
white horse was climbing, the shadows were turning eastward, and the
deep gulches, with their patches of aspen, were purple instead of brown.
The aspens were left shaking where he broke through them and passed out
of sight.
I kept on at a good pace, and about three o'clock I, being then as much
as half a mile away, saw the spot which I knew must be Deadman's Flat;
and there were our men, the tall one and his boyish mate, standing
quietly by their horses in broad sunlight, as if there were no one
within a hundred miles. Their horses had drunk, and were cropping the
thin grass, which had set its tooth in the gravel where, as at the other
places, a living stream had perished. I spurred forward, with my heart
thumping, but before they saw me I saw Maverick coming down the little
gulch; and from the way he came I knew that he had seen them.
The scene was awful in its treacherous peacefulness. Their shadows slept
on the broad bed of sunlight, and the gulch was as cool and still as a
lady's chamber. The great dead desert received the silence like a
secret.
Tenderfoot as I was, I knew quite well what must happen now; yet I was
not prepared--could not realize it--even when the tall one put his hand
quickly behind him and stepped ahead of his horse. There was the flash
of his pistol, and the loud crack echoing in the hill; a second shot,
and then Maverick replied deliberately, and the tall one was down, with
his face in the grass.
I heard a scream that sounded strangely like a woman's; but there were
only the three, the little one, acting wildly, and Maverick bending over
him who lay with his face in the grass. I saw him turn the body over,
and the little fellow seemed to protest, and to try to push him away. I
thought it strange he made no more of a fight, but I was not near enough
to hear what those two said to each other.
Still, the tragedy did not come home to me. It was all like a scene, and
I was without feeling in it except for that nervous trembling which I
could not control.
Maverick stood up at length, and came slowly toward me, wiping his face.
He kept his hat in his hand, and, looking down at it, said huskily:--
"I gave that man his life when I found him last spring runnin' loose
like a wild thing in the mountains, and now I've took it; and God above
knows I had no grudge ag'in' him, if he had stayed in his place. But he
would have it so."
"Maverick, I saw it all, and I can swear it was self-defense."
His face drew into the tortured grimace which was his smile. "This here
will never come before a jury," he said. "It's a family affair. Did ye
see how he acted? Steppin' up to me like he was a first-class shot, or
else a fool. He ain't nary one; he's a poor silly tool, the whip-hand of
a girl that's boltin' from her friends like they was her mortal enemies.
Go and take a look at him; then maybe you'll understand."
He paused, and uttered the name of Jesus Christ, but not as such men
often use it, with an inconsequence dreadful to hear: he was not idly
swearing, but calling that name to witness solemnly in a case that would
never come before a jury.