ON ANTELOPE BUTTE
After the departure of Bat it was a very silent little cavalcade that
made its way down the valley. Tex, with the lead-horse in tow, rode
ahead, his attention fixed on the trail, and the others followed,
single file.
Alice's eyes strayed from the backs of her two companions to the
mountains that rolled upward from the little valley, their massive
peaks and buttresses converted by the wizardry of moonlight into a
fairyland of wondrous grandeur. The cool night air was fragrant with
the breath of growing things, and the feel of her horse beneath her
caused the red blood to surge through her veins.
"Oh, it's grand!" she whispered, "the mountains, and the moonlight, and
the spring. I love it all--and yet--" She frowned at the jarring note
that crept in, to mar the fulness of her joy. "It's the most wonderful
adventure I ever had--and romantic. And it's _real_, and I ought to be
enjoying it more than I ever enjoyed anything in all my life. But, I'm
not, and it's all because--I don't see why he had to go and drink!"
The soft sound of the horses' feet in the mud changed to a series of
sharp clicks as their iron shoes encountered the bare rocks of the
floor of the canyon whose precipitous rock walls towered far above,
shutting off the flood of moonlight and plunging the trail into
darkness. The figures of the two men were hardly discernible, and the
girl started nervously as her horse splashed into the water of the
creek that foamed noisily over the canyon floor. She shivered slightly
in the wind that sucked chill through the winding passage, although
back there in the moonlight the night had been still. Gradually the
canyon widened. Its walls grew lower and slanted from the
perpendicular. Moonlight illumined the wider bends and flashed in
silver scintillations from the broken waters of the creek. The click
of the horses' feet again gave place to the softer trampling of mud,
and the valley once more spread before them, broader now, and flanked
by an endless succession of foothills.
Bat appeared mysteriously from nowhere, and after a whispered colloquy
with Tex, led off toward the west, leaving the valley behind and
winding into the maze of foothills. A few miles farther on they came
again into the valley and Alice saw that the creek had dwindled into a
succession of shallow pools between which flowed a tiny trickle of the
water. On and on they rode, following the shallow valley. Lush grass
overran the pools and clogged the feeble trickle of the creek. Farther
on, even the green patches disappeared and white alkali soil showed
between the gnarled sage bushes. Gradually the aspect of the country
changed. High, grass-covered foothills gave place to sharp pinnacles
of black lava rock, the sides of the valley once more drew together,
low, and broken into ugly cutbanks of dirty grey. Sagebrush and
prickly pears furnished the only vegetation, and the rough, broken
surface of the country took on a starved, gaunt appearance.
Alice knew instinctively that they were at the gateway of the bad
lands, and the forbidding aspect that greeted her on every side as her
eyes swept the restricted horizon caused a feeling of depression. Even
the name "bad lands" seemed to hold a foreboding of evil. She had not
noticed this when the Texan had spoken it. If she had thought of it at
all, it was impersonally--an undesirable strip of country, as one
mentions the Sahara Desert. But, now, when she herself was entering
it--was seeing with her own eyes the grey mud walls, the bare black
rocks, and the stunted sage and cactus--the name held much of sinister
portent.
From a nearby hillock came a thin weird scream--long-drawn and broken
into a series of horrible cackles. Instantly, as though it were the
signal that loosed the discordant chorus of hell, the sound was caught
up, intensified and prolonged until the demonical screams seemed to
belch from every hill and from the depths of the coulees between.
Unconsciously, the girl spurred her horse which leaped past Endicott
and Bat and drew up beside the Texan, who was riding alone in the
forefront.
The man glanced into the white frightened face: "Coyotes," he said,
gravely. "They won't bother any one."
The girl shuddered. "There must be a million of them. What makes them
howl that way?"
"Most any other way would be better, wouldn't it. But I reckon that's
the way they've learnt to, so they just keep on that way."
Alice glanced at him sharply, but in the moonlight his clean-cut
profile gave no hint of levity.
"You are making fun of me!"
He turned his head and regarded her thoughtfully. "No. I wouldn't do
that, really. I was thinkin' of somethin' else."
"You are a very disconcerting young man. You are unspeakably rude, and
I ought to be furiously angry."
The Texan appeared to consider. "No. You oughtn't to do that because
when something important comes up you ain't got anything back, an'
folks won't regard you serious. But you wouldn't have been even peeved
if you knew what I was thinkin' about."
"What was it?" The instant the question left her lips the girl wished
she could have recalled it.
There was a long pause and Alice began to hope that the man had not
heard her question. Then he turned a very grave face toward her and
his eyes met hers squarely. "I was thinkin' that maybe, sometime,
you'd get to care enough about me to marry me. Sounds kind of abrupt
an' off-hand, don't it? But it ain't. I've been thinkin' about it a
lot. You're the first woman I've seen since--well, since way back
yonder, that I'd ever marry. The only one that stacks up to the kind
of people mine are, an' that I was back there. Of course, there'd be a
lot of readjustin' but that would work out--it always does when the
right kind of folks takes holt to put anything through. I've got some
recreations an' pastimes that ain't condoned by the pious. I gamble,
an' swear, an' smoke, an' lie, an' drink. But I gamble square, swear
decent an' hearty, lie for fun, but never in earnest, an' drink to a
reasonable degree of hilarity. My word is good with every man, woman,
an' child in the cow country. I never yet went back on a friend, nor
let up on an enemy. I never took underhand advantage of man or woman,
an' I know the cow business. For the rest of it, I'll go to the old
man an' offer to take the Eagle Creek ranch off his hands an' turn
nester. It's a good ranch, an' one that rightly handled would make a
man rich--provided he was a married man an' had somethin' to get rich
for. I don't want you to tell me now, you won't, or you will. We've
got a week or so yet to get acquainted in. An', here's another thing.
I know, an' you know, down deep in your heart, that you're goin' to
marry either Win, or me. Maybe you know which. I don't. But if it is
him, you'll get a damned good man. He's square an' clean. He's got
nerve--an' there ain't no bluff about it, neither. Wise men don't fool
with a man with an eye like his. An' he wants you as bad as I do. As
I said, we've got a week or more to get acquainted. It will be a week
that may take us through some mighty tough sleddin', but that ain't
goin' to help you none in choosin', because neither one of us will
break--an' you can bet your last stack of blue ones on that."
The girl's lips were pressed very tight, and for some moments she rode
in silence.
"Do you suppose I would ever marry a man who deliberately gets so drunk
he sings and talks incessantly----"
"You'd be safer marryin' one that got drunk deliberately, than one who
done it inadvertent when he aimed to stay sober. Besides, there's
various degrees of drunkenness, the term bein' relative. But for the
sake of argument admittin' I was drunk, if you object to the singin'
and talkin', what do you recommend a man to do when he's drunk?"
"I utterly despise a man that gets drunk!" The words came with an
angry vehemence, and for many minutes the Texan rode in silence while
the bit chains clinked and the horses' hoofs thudded the ground dully.
He leaned forward and his gloved hand gently smoothed his horse's mane.
"You don't mean just exactly that," he said, with his eyes on the dim
outline of a butte that rose high in the distance. Alice noticed that
the bantering tone was gone from his voice, and that his words fell
with a peculiar softness. "I reckon, though, I know what you do mean.
An' I reckon that barrin' some little difference in viewpoint, we think
about alike. . . . Yonder's Antelope Butte. We'll be safe to camp
there till we find out which way the wind blows before we strike
across."
Deeper and deeper they pushed into the bad lands, the huge bulk of
Antelope Butte looming always before them, its outline showing
distinctly in the light of the sinking moon. As far as the eye could
see on every side the moonlight revealed only black lava-rock, deep
black shadows that marked the courses of dry coulees, and enormous
mud-cracks--and Antelope Butte.
As the girl rode beside the cowboy she noticed that the cynical smile
was gone from the clean-cut profile. For miles he did not speak.
Antelope Butte was near, now.
"I am thirsty," she said. A gauntleted hand fumbled for a moment with
the slicker behind the cantle, and extended a flask.
"It's water. I figured someone would get thirsty."
The girl drank from the flask and returned it: "If there are posses out
won't they watch the water-holes? You said there are only a few in the
bad lands."
"Yes, they'll watch the water-holes. That's why we're goin' to camp on
Antelope Butte--right up on top of it."
"But, how will we get water?"
"It's there."
"Have you been up there?" The girl glanced upward. They were already
ascending the first slope, and the huge mass of the detached mountain
towered above them in a series of unscaleable precipices.
"No. But the water's there. The top of the Butte hollows out like a
saucer, an' in the bowl there's a little sunk spring. No one much ever
goes up there. There's a little scragglin' timber, an' the trail--it's
an old game trail--is hard to find if you don't know where to look for
it. A horse-thief told me about it."
"A horse-thief! Surely, you are not risking all our lives on the word
of a horse-thief!"
"Yes. He was a pretty good fellow. They killed him, afterwards, over
near the Mission. He was runnin' off a bunch of Flourey horses."
"But a man who would steal would lie!"
"He didn't lie to me. He judged I done him a good turn once. Over on
the Marias, it was--an' he said: 'If you're ever on the run, hit for
Antelope Butte.' Then he told me about the trail, an' the spring that
you've got to dig for among the rocks. He's got a grub _cache_ there,
too. He won't be needin' it, now." The cowboy glanced toward the
west. "The moon ought to just about hold 'til we get to the top. He
said you could ride all the way up." Without an instant's hesitation
he headed his horse for a huge mass of rock fragments that lay at the
base of an almost perpendicular wall. The others followed in single
file. Bat bringing up the rear driving the pack-horse before him.
Alice kept her horse close behind the Texan's which wormed and twisted
in and out among the rock fragments that skirted the wall. For a
quarter of a mile they proceeded with scarcely a perceptible rise and
then the cowboy turned his horse into a deep fissure that slanted
upward at a most precarious angle seemingly straight into the heart of
the mountain. Just when it seemed that the trail must end in a blind
pocket, the Texan swung into a cross fissure so narrow that the
stirrups brushed either side. So dark was it between the towering rock
walls that Alice could scarcely make out the cowboy's horse, although
at no time was he more than ten or fifteen feet in advance. After
innumerable windings the fissure led once more to the face of the
mountain and Tex headed his horse out upon a ledge that had not been
discernible from below. Alice gasped, and for a moment it seemed as
though she could not go on. Spread out before her like a huge relief
map were the ridges and black coulees of the bad lands, and directly
below--hundreds of feet below--the gigantic rock fragments lay strewn
along the base of the cliff like the abandoned blocks of a child. She
closed her eyes and shuddered. A loose piece of rock on the narrow
trail, a stumble, and--she could feel herself whirling down, down,
down. It was the voice of the Texan--confident, firm, reassuring--that
brought her once more to her senses.
"It's all right. Just follow right along. Shut your eyes, or keep 'em
to the wall. We're half-way up. It ain't so steep from here on, an'
she widens toward the top. I'm dizzy-headed, too, in high places an' I
shut mine. Just give the horse a loose rein an' he'll keep the trail.
There ain't nowhere else for him to go."
With a deadly fear in her heart, the girl fastened her eyes upon the
cowboy's back and gave her horse his head. And as she rode she
wondered at this man who unhesitatingly risked his life upon the word
of a horse-thief.
Almost before she realized it the ordeal was over and her horse was
following its leader through a sparse grove of bull pine. The ascent
was still rather sharp, and the way strewn with boulders, and fallen
trees, but the awful precipice, with its sheer drop of many hundreds of
feet to the black rocks below, no longer yawned at her stirrup's edge,
and it was with a deep-drawn breath of relief that she allowed her eyes
once again to travel out over the vast sweep of waste toward the west
where the moon hung low and red above the distant rim of the bad lands.
The summit of Antelope Butte was, as the horse-thief had said, an ideal
camping place for any one who was "on the run." The edges of the
little plateau, which was roughly circular in form, rose on every side
to a height of thirty or forty feet, at some points in an easy slope,
and at others in a sheer rise of rock wall. The surface of the little
plane showed no trace of the black of the lava rock of the lower levels
but was of the character of the open bench and covered with buffalo
grass and bunch grass with here and there a sprinkling of prickly
pears. The four dismounted and, in the last light of the moon,
surveyed their surroundings.
"You make camp, Bat," ordered the Texan, "while me an' Win hunt up the
spring. He said it was on the east side where there was a lot of loose
rock along the edge of the bull pine. We'll make the camp there, too,
where the wood an' water will be handy."
Skirting the plateau, Tex led the way toward a point where a few
straggling pines showed gaunt and lean in the rapidly waning moonlight.
"It ought to be somewheres around here," he said, as he stopped to
examine the ground more closely. "He said you had to pile off the
rocks 'til you come to the water an' then mud up a catch-basin." As he
talked, the cowboy groped among the loose rocks on his hands and knees,
pausing frequently to lay his ear to the ground. "Here she is!" he
exclaimed at length. "I can hear her drip! Come on, Win, we'll build
our well."
Alice stood close beside her horse watching every move with intense
interest.
"Who would have thought to look for water there?" she exclaimed.
"I knew we'd find it just as he said," answered the Texan gravely. "He
was a good man, in his way--never run off no horses except from outfits
that could afford to lose 'em. Why, they say, he could have got plumb
away if he'd shot the posse man that run onto him over by the Mission.
But he knew the man was a nester with a wife an' two kids, so he took a
chance--an' the nester got him."
"How could he?" cried the girl, "after----"
The Texan regarded her gravely. "It was tough. An' he probably hated
to do it. But he was a sworn-in posse man, an' the other was a
horse-thief. It was just one of those things a man's got to do. Like
Jim Larkin, when he was sheriff, havin' to shoot his own brother, an'
him hardly more'n a kid that Jim had raised. But he'd gone plumb bad
an' swore never to be taken alive, so Jim killed him--an' then he
resigned. There ain't a man that knows Jim, that don't know he'd
rather a thousan' times over had the killin' happen the other way
'round. But he was a man. He had it to do--an' he done it."
Alice shuddered: "And then--what became of him, then?"
"Why, then, he went back to ranchin'. He owns the Bar X horse outfit
over on the White Mud. This here, Owen--that was his brother's
name--was just like a son to him. Jim tried to steer him straight, but
the kid was just naturally a bad egg. Feelin' it the way he does, a
lesser man might of squinted down the muzzle of his own gun, or gone
the whiskey route. But not him. To all appearances he's the same as
he always was. But some of us that know him best--we can see that he
ain't _quite_ the same as before--an' he never will be."
There were tears in the girl's eyes as the man finished.
"Oh, it's all wrong! It's cruel, and hard, and brutal, and wrong!"
"No. It ain't wrong. It's hard, an' it's cruel, maybe, an' brutal.
But it's right. It ain't a country for weaklings--the cow country
ain't. It's a country where, every now an' then, a man comes square up
against something that he's got to do. An' that something is apt as
not to be just what he don't want to do. If he does it, he's a man,
an' the cow country needs him. If he don't do it, he passes on to
where there's room for his kind--an' the cow country don't miss him. A
man earns his place here, it ain't made for him--often he earns the
name by which he's called. I reckon it's the same all over--only this
is rawer."
"Here's the water! And it is cold and sweet," called Endicott who had
been busily removing the loose rock fragments beneath which the spring
lay concealed.
The Texan's interest centred on matters at hand: "You Bat, you make a
fire when you've finished with the horses." He turned again to the
girl: "If you'll be the cook, Win an' I'll mud up a catch-basin an'
rustle some firewood while Bat makes camp. We got to do all our
cookin' at night up here. A fire won't show above the rim yonder, but
in the daytime someone might see the smoke from ten mile off."
"Of course, I'll do the cooking!" assented the girl, and began to carry
the camp utensils from the pack that the half-breed had thrown upon the
ground. "The dough-gods are all gone!" she exclaimed in dismay,
peering into a canvas bag.
"Mix up some bakin'-powder ones. There's flour an' stuff in that brown
sack."
"But--I don't know how!"
"All right. Wait 'til I get Win strung out on this job, an' I'll make
up a batch."
He watched Endicott arrange some stones: "Hey, you got to fit those
rocks in better'n that. Mud ain't goin' to hold without a good
backin'."
The cowboy washed his hands in the overflow trickle and wiped them upon
his handkerchief. "I don't know what folks does all their lives back
East," he grinned; "Win, there, ain't barbered none to speak of, an'
the Lord knows he ain't no stone-mason."
Alice did not return the smile, and the Texan noticed that her face was
grave in the pale starlight. For the first time in her life the girl
felt ashamed of her own incompetence.
"And I can't cook, and----"
"Well, that's so," drawled Tex, "but it won't be so tomorrow. No one
but a fool would blame any one for not doin' a thing they've never
learnt to do. They might wonder a little how-come they never learnt,
but they wouldn't hold it against 'em--not 'til they've had the
chance." Bat was still busy with the horses and the cowboy collected
sticks and lighted a small fire, talking, as he worked with swift
movements that accomplished much without the least show of haste. "It
generally don't take long in the cow country for folks to get their
chance. Take Win, there. Day before yesterday he was about the
greenest pilgrim that ever straddled a horse. Not only he didn't know
anything worth while knowin', but he was prejudiced. The first time I
looked at him I sized him up--almost. 'There's a specimen,' I says to
myself--while you an' Purdy was gossipin' about the handkerchief, an'
the dance, an' what a beautiful rider he was--'that's gone on gatherin'
refinement 'til it's crusted onto him so thick it's probably struck
through.' But just as I was losin' interest in him, he slanted a
glance at Purdy that made me look him over again. There he stood, just
the same as before--only different." The Texan poured some flour into
a pan and threw in a couple of liberal pinches of baking-powder.
Alice's eyes followed his every movement, and she glanced toward the
spring that Endicott had churned into a mud hole. The cowboy noted her
glance. "It would be riled too much even if we strained it," he
smiled, "so we'll just use what's left in that flask. It don't take
much water an' the spring will clear in time for the coffee."
"And some people never do learn?" Alice wanted to hear more from this
man's lips concerning the pilgrim. But the Texan mustn't know that she
wanted to hear.
"Yes, some don't learn, some only half learn, an' some learn in a way
that carries 'em along 'til it comes to a pinch--they're the worst.
But, speakin' of Win, after I caught that look, the only surprise I got
when I heard he'd killed Purdy was that he _could_ do it--not that he
_would_. Then later, under certain circumstances that come to pass in
a coulee where there was cottonwoods, him an' I got better acquainted
yet. An' then in the matter of the reservoir--but you know more about
that than I do. You see what I'm gettin' at is this: Win can saddle
his own horse, now, an' he climbs onto him from the left side. The
next time he tackles it he'll shave, an' the next time he muds up a
catch-basin he'll mud it right. Day before yesterday he was about as
useless a lookin' piece of bric-a-brac as ever draw'd breath--an' look
at him now! There ain't been any real change. The man was there all
the time, only he was so well disguised that no one ever know'd
it--himself least of all. Yesterday I saw him take a chew off Bat's
plug--an' Bat don't offer his plug promiscuous. He'll go back East,
an' the refinement will cover him up again--an' that's a damned shame.
But he won't be just the same. It won't crust over no more, because
the prejudice is gone. He's chewed the meat of the cow country--an'
he's found it good."
Later, long after the others had gone to sleep, Alice lay between her
blankets in the little shelter tent, thinking.