Cyrus Jones’s Eating Palace in Omaha, intending no compliment by the
term. Since that day many adventures and surprises shared together had
changed it to a word of familiar regard; he used it sparingly, and as a
rule only upon occasions of discomfort or mischance. “You’ll get sheep,
Professor,” he now repeated in a voice of reassurance, and went his way
to attend to the horses for the night.
The earth had dried, the plenteous stars were bright in the sky, we
needed no tent over us, and merely spread my rubber blanket and the
buffalo robes, and so beneath light covers waited for sleep to the
gurgle, sluggish and musical, of Broke Axle. Scipio’s sleep was superior
to mine, coming sooner and burying him deeper from the world of
wakefulness. Thus he did not become aware of a figure sitting by our
little fire of embers, whose presence penetrated my thinner sleep until
my eyes opened and saw it. Such things give me a shock, which, I
suppose, must be fear, but it is not at all fear of the mind. I lay
still, drawing my gun stealthily into a good position and thinking what
were best to do; but he must have heard me.
“Lemme me show you sheep.”
“What’s that?” It was Scipio starting to life and action.
“Don’t shoot Timberline,” I said. “He’s come to show us sheep.”
Scipio sat staring stupefied at the figure by the embers, and then he
slowly turned his head round to me, and I thought he was going to pour
out one of those long, corrosive streams of comment that usually burst
from him when he was enough surprised. But he was too much surprised.
“His name is Henry Hall,” he said to me very mildly. “I’ve just
remembered it.”
The patient figure by the embers rose. “There’s sheep in the Washakie
Needles. Lots and lots and lots. I seen ’em myself in the spring. I can
take you right to ’em. Don’t make me go back and be stock-tender.” He
recited all this in a sort of rising wail until the last sentence, in
which the entreaty shook his voice.
“Washakie Needles is the nearest likely place,” muttered Scipio.
“If you don’t get any, you needn’t to pay me any,” urged the boy; and he
stretched out an arm to mark his words and his prayer.
We sat in our beds and he stood waiting by the embers to hear his fate,
while nothing made a sound but Broke Axle.
“Why not?” I said. “We were talking of a third man.”
“A man,” said Scipio. “Yes.”
“I can cook, I can pack, I can cook good bread, and I can show you
sheep, and if I don’t you needn’t to pay me a cent,” entreated the boy.
“He sure means what he says,” Scipio commented. “It’s your trip.”
Thus it was I came to hire Timberline.
Dawn showed him in the same miserable rags he wore on my first sight of
him at the corral, and these proved his sole visible property of any
kind; he didn’t possess a change of anything, he hadn’t brought away
from Rongis so much as a handkerchief tied up with things inside it;
most wonderful of all, he owned not even a horse--and in that country in
those days five dollars’ worth of horse was within the means of almost
anybody.
But he was not unclean, as I had feared. He washed his one set of rags,
and his skin-and-bones body, by the light of the first sunrise on Broke
Axle, and this proved a not too rare habit with him, which made all the
more strange his neglect to throw the rags away and wear the new clothes
I bought and gave him as we passed through Lander.
“Timberline,” said Scipio the next day, “if Anthony Comstock came up in
this country he’d jail you.”
“Who’s he?” screamed Timberline, sharply.
“He lives in Noo York, and he’s agin the nood. That costume of yours is
getting close on to what they claim Venus and other immoral Greek
statuary used to wear.”
After this Timberline put on the Lander clothes, but on one of his
wash-days we discovered that he kept the rags next his skin! This
clinging to such worthless things seemed probably the result of
destitution, of having had nothing, day after day and month after month.
His poor little pay at Rongis, which we gradually learned they had
always got back from him by one trick or another, was less than half
what I now gave him for his services, and I offered to advance him some
of this at places where it could be spent; but he told me to keep it
until he had earned the whole of it.
[Illustration: _Waiting for nothing_ was stamped plain upon him from
head to foot]
Yet he did not seem a miser; his willingness to help at anything in camp
was unchanging, and a surer test of not being stingy was the
indifference he showed to losing or winning the little sums we played at
cards for after supper and before bed. The score I kept in my diary
showed him to belong to the losing class. His help in camp was real, not
merely well meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed
to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he
had said he could do, he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him,
he was somehow forever pitiful.
“Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio.
“Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never to have been born.”
“That probably applies to several million people all over this planet.”
“Sure,” assented Scipio cheerfully. He was not one of these.
“He’s so eternally silent!” I said presently.
“A man don’t ask to be born,” pursued Scipio.
“Parents can’t stop to think of that,” I returned.
“H’m,” mused Scipio. “Somebody or something has taken good care they’ll
never.”
We continued along the trail, engrossed in our several thoughts, and I
could hear Timberline, behind us with the pack horses, singing:--
If that I was where I would be,
Then should I be where I am not.
Our mode of travel had changed at Fort Washakie. There we had left the
wagon and put ourselves and our baggage upon horses, because we should
presently be in a country where wagons could not go. I suppose that more
advice is offered and less taken than of any other free commodity in the
world. Before I had settled where to go for sheep, nobody could tell me
where to go; now almost every one advised some other than the place I
had chosen. “Washakie Needles?” they would repeat unfavorably; “Union
Peak’s nearer;” or, “You go up Jakey’s Fork;” or “Red Creek’s half as
far, and twice as many sheep;” or, “Last spring I seen a ram up
Dinwiddie big as a horse.”
This discouragement, strung along our road, had small weight with me
because it was just the idle talk of those dingy loafers of the Western
cabin and saloon who never hunted, never did anything but sit still and
assume to know your own business better than you knew it yourself; it
was only once that the vigorous words of some by-passer on a horse
caused Scipio and me to discuss dropping the Washakie Needles in favor
of the country at the head of Green River. We were below Bull Lake at
the forking of the ways; none of us had ever been in the Green River
country, while Timberline evidently knew the Washakie Needles well, and
this was what finally decided us. But Timberline had been thrown into
the strangest agitation by our uncertainty. He had said nothing, but he
walked about, coming near, going away, sitting down, getting up, instead
of placidly watching his fire and cooking; until at last I told him not
to worry, that wherever we went I should keep him and pay him in any
case. Then he spoke:--
“I didn’t hire to go to Green River.”
“What have you got against Green River?”
“I hired to go to the Washakie Needles.”
His agitation left him immediately upon our turning our faces in that
direction. What had so disturbed him we could not guess; but later that
day Scipio rode up to me, bursting with a solution. He had visited a
freighter’s camp, a hundred yards off the road in the sage-brush (we
were following the Embar trail), and the freighter, upon learning our
destination, had said he supposed we were “after the reward.” It did not
get through my head at once, but when Scipio reminded me of the yellow
poster and the murder, it got through fast enough: the body had been
found on Owl Creek, and the middle fork of Owl Creek headed among the
Washakie Needles. There might be another body,--the other Eastern man
who had never been seen since,--and there was a possible third, the
confederate, the cook; many held it was the murderer’s best policy to
destroy him as well.
Owl Creek had yielded no more bodies after that one first found. Perhaps
the victims had been killed separately. Before starting on their last
journey in this world, they had let it get out somewhere down on the
railroad that they carried money; this was their awful mistake,
conducting death to them in the shape of the man who had offered himself
as their guide, and whom they had engaged without more knowledge of him
than he disclosed to them himself. Red Dog was his name in Colorado,
where he was “wanted.” The all-day sitters and drinkers in the cabins
along the road had their omniscient word as to this also: _they_ could
have told those Easterners not to hire Red Dog!
So now we had Timberline accounted for satisfactorily to ourselves; he
was “after the reward.” We never said this to him, but we worked out his
steps from the start. As stock-tender at Rongis he had seen that yellow
poster pasted up, and had read it, day after day, with its promise of
what to him was a fortune. To Owl Creek he could not go alone, having no
money to buy a horse, and being afraid, too, perhaps. If he could only
find that missing dead man--or the two of them--he might find a clew. My
sheep hunt had dropped like a Providence into his hand.
We got across the hot country where rattlesnakes were thick where
neither man lived nor water ran, and came to the first lone habitation
in this new part of the world--a new set of mountains, a new set of
creeks. A man stood at the door watching us come.
“Know him?” I asked Scipio.
“I’ve heard of him,” said Scipio. “He married a squaw.”
We were now opposite the man’s door. “You folks after the reward?” said
he.
“After mountain sheep,” I replied, somewhat angry.
We camped some ten miles beyond him, and the next day crossed a low
range, stopping near another cabin for noon. They gave us a quantity of
berries they had picked, and we gave them some potatoes.
“After the reward?” said one of them as we rode away, and I contradicted
him with temper.
“Lie to ’em,” said Scipio. “Say yes.” He developed his theory of
truthfulness; it was not real falsehood to answer as you chose questions
people had no right to ask; in fact, the only real lie was when you
denied something wrong you had done. “And I’ve told hundreds of them,
too,” he concluded pensively.
Something had begun to weigh upon our cheerfulness in this new country.
The reward dogged us, and we saw strange actions of people twice. We
came upon some hot sulphur springs[3] and camped near them, with a wide
stream between us and another camp. Those people--two men and two
women--emerged from their tent, surveyed us, nodded to us, and settled
down again. Next morning they had vanished; we could see the gleam of
empty bottles on the bank opposite where they had been. And once, riding
out of a little valley, we sighted close to us through cottonwoods a
horseman leading a pack horse out of the next little valley.
He did not nod to us, but pursued his parallel course some three hundred
yards off, until a rise in the ground hid him for a while; when this was
passed he was no longer where he should have been, abreast of us, but
far to the front, galloping away. That was our last sight of him. We
spoke of these actions a little. Did these people suspect us, or were
they afraid we suspected them?
All we ever knew was that suspicion had now gradually been wafted
through the whole air and filled it like a coming change of weather. I
could no longer look at a rock or a clump of trees without a
disagreeable thought: was something, or somebody, behind the clump of
trees and the rock? would they come out or wait until we had passed?
This influence seemed to gather even more thick and chill as we turned
up the middle fork of Owl Creek; magpies, that I had always liked to
watch and listen to, had become part of the general increasing
uncomfortableness, and their cries sounded no longer cheerful, but harsh
and unfriendly.
As we rode up the narrowing cañon of Owl Creek, the Washakie Needles,
those twin spires of naked rock, rose into view high above the clustered
mountain-tops, closing the cañon in, shutting out the setting sun. But
the nearness of my goal and my sheep hunt brought me no elation. Those
miserable questions about reward, the strange conduct of those unknown
people, dwelt in my mind. I saw in memory the floating image of that
poster; I wondered if I, in my clambering for sheep, should stumble upon
signs--evidence--an old camp--ashes--tent-pegs--or the horrible objects
that had come here alive and never gone hence. I could not drive these
fancies from me amid the austere silence of the place where _it_ had
happened.
“He _can_ talk when he wants to.”
It made me start, this remark of Scipio’s as he rode behind me.
“What has Timberline been telling you?”
“Nothing. But he’s been telling himself a heap of something.” In the
rear of our single-file party Timberline rode, and I could hear him
rambling on in a rising and falling voice. He ceased once or twice while
I listened, breaking out again as if there had been no interruption. It
was a relief to have a practical trouble threatening us; if the boy was
going off his head, we should have something real to deal with. But when
I had chosen a camp and we were unsaddling and throwing the packs on the
ground, Timberline was in his customary silence. After supper I walked
off with Scipio where our horses were.
“Do you think he’s sick?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Scipio. And that was all we said, for we liked the
subject too little to pursue it.
Next morning I was over at the creek washing before breakfast. The sun
was coming in through the open east end of our cañon, the shaking leaves
of the quaking-asp twinkled in a blithe air, and a night’s sleep had
brought me back to a much robuster mood. I had my field-glasses with me,
and far up, far up among patches of snow and green grass, I could see
sheep on both sides of the valley.
“So you sleep well?” said Scipio.
“Like a log. You?”
“Like another. Somebody in camp didn’t.”
I turned and looked at Timberline cooking over at camp.
“Looking for the horses early this morning,” pursued Scipio, “I found
his tracks up and down all over everywheres.”
“Perhaps he has found the reward.”
Scipio laughed, and I laughed. It was the only thing to do. How much had
the boy walked in the darkness?
“I think I’ll take him with us,” I then said. “I’d rather have him with
us.”
During breakfast we discussed which hill we should ascend, and, this
decided on, I was about to tell Timberline his company was expected,
when he saved me the trouble by requesting to be allowed to go himself.
His usually pale, harmless eyes were full of some sort of glitter: did
his fingers feel that they were about to clutch the reward?
That was the thirtieth of August; a quarter of a century and more has
passed; my age is double what it was; but to-day, on any thirtieth of
August, if I think of the date, the Washakie Needles stand in my
eyes,--twin spires of naked rock,--and I see what happened there.
The three of us left camp. It was warm summer in the valley by the
streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet day smelled of the pines.
We should not have taken horses, they served us so little in such a
climb as that. On the level top our legs and breathing got relief, and
far away up the next valley were sheep. This second top we reached, but
they were gone to the next beyond, where we saw them across a mile or so
of space. In the bottom below us ran the north fork of Owl Creek like a
fine white wire drawn through the distant green of the pines. Up in this
world peaks and knife-edged ridges bristled to our north away and away
beyond sight.
We now made a new descent and ascent, but had no luck, and by three
o’clock we stood upon a lofty, wet, slipping ledge that fell away on
three sides, sheer or broken, to the summer and the warmth that lay
thousands of feet below. Here it began to be very cold, and to the west
the sky now clotted into advancing lumps of thick thundercloud, black,
weaving and merging heavily and swiftly in a fierce, rising wind. We got
away from this promontory to follow a sheep trail, and as we went along
the backbone of the mountain, two or three valleys off to the right,
long, black streamers let down from the cloud. They hung and wavered
mistily close over the pines that did not grow within a thousand feet of
our high level. I gazed at the streamers, and discerned water, or
something, pouring down in them. Above our heads the day was still
serene, and we had a chance to make camp without a wetting. This I
suggested we should do, since the day’s promise of sport had failed.
“No! no!” said Timberline, hoarsely. “See there! We can get them. We’re
above them. They don’t see us!”
I saw no sheep where he pointed, but I saw him. His eyes looked red-hot.
He insisted the sheep had merely moved behind a rock, and so we went on.
The strip of clear sky narrowed, and gray bars of rain were falling
between us and the pieces of woodland that, but a moment since, had been
unblurred. Blasts of frozen wind rose about us, causing me to put on my
rubber coat before my fingers should grow too numb to button it. We
moved forward to a junction of the knife-ridges upon which a second
storm was hastening from the southwest over deep valleys that we turned
our backs upon, and kept slowly urging our horses near the Great
Washakie Needle.
We stopped at the base of its top pinnacle, glad to reach this slanting
platform of comparative safety. No sheep were anywhere, but I had ceased
to care about sheep. Jutting stones, all but their upturned points and
edges buried in the ground, made this platform a rough place to pick
one’s way over--but this was a trifle. From these jutting points a
humming sound now began to rise, a sort of droning, which at first ran
about here and there among them, with a flickering, æolian
capriciousness, then settled to a steady chord: the influence of the
electric storm had encircled us. We all looked at each other, but turned
immediately again to watch the portentous, sublime scene.
At the edge of our platform the world fell straight a thousand feet down
to a valley like the bottom of a cauldron; on the far side of the
cauldron the air, like a stroke of magic, became thick white, and
through it leaped the first lightning, a blinding violet. An arm of the
storm reached over to us, the cauldron sank from sight in a white sea,
and the hail cut my face so I bowed it down. Mixed with the hail fell
softer flakes, which, as they touched the earth, glowed for a moment
like tiny bulbs, and went out. On the ground I saw what looked like a
tangle of old, human footprints in the hard-crusted mud. These the
pellets of the swarming hail soon filled. This tempest of flying ice
struck my body, my horse, raced over the ground like spray on the crest
of breaking waves, and drove me to dismount and sit under the horse,
huddled together even as he was huddled against the fury and the biting
pain of the hail.
From under the horse’s belly I looked out upon a chaos of shooting,
hissing white, through which, in every direction, lightning flashed and
leaped, while the fearful crashes behind the curtain of the hail sounded
as if I should see a destroyed world when the curtain lifted. The place
was so flooded with electricity that I gave up the shelter of my horse,
and left my rifle on the ground and moved away from the vicinity of
these points of attraction. Of my companions I had not thought; I now
noticed them, crouching separately, much as I crouched.
So I sat--I know not how long--chilled from spine to brisket, my stiff
boots growing wet, my discarded gloves a pulp, like my hat, and melted
hail trickling from the rubber coat to my legs. At length the
hail-stones fell more gently, the near view opened, revealing white
winter on all save the steep, gray Needles; the thick, white curtain of
hail departed slowly; the hail where I was fell more scantily still.
It was slowly going away,--the great low-prowling cloud,--we should
presently be left in peace unscathed, though it was at its tricks still.
Its brimming, spilling-over electricity was now playing a new
prank--mocking my ears with crackling noises, as of a camp-fire
somewhere on earth, or in air. While I listened curiously to these, my
eye fell on Timberline. He was turning, leaning, crouching, listening
too. When he crouched, it was to peer at those old footprints I had
noticed. There was something frightful in the sight of his face, shrunk
to half its size, and I called to reassure him, and beckoned that it was
all right, that we were all right. I doubt if he saw or heard me.
Something somewhere near my head set up a delicate sound. It seemed in
my hat. I rose and began to wander, bewildered by this. The hail was now
falling very fine and gentle, when suddenly I was aware of its stinging
behind my ear more sharply than it had done at all. I turned my face in
its direction and found its blows harmless, while the stinging in my ear
grew sharper. The hissing continued close to my head whenever I walked.
It resembled the little watery escape of gas from a charged bottle whose
cork is being slowly drawn.
I was now more really disturbed than I had been during the storm’s
worst, and meeting Scipio, who was also wandering, I asked if he felt
anything. He nodded uneasily, when, suddenly--I know not why--I snatched
my hat off. The hissing was in the brim, and it died out as I looked at
the leather binding and the stitches. I expected to see some insect
there, or some visible reason for the noise. I saw nothing, but the
pricking behind my ear had also stopped. Then I knew my wet hat had been
charged like a Leyden jar with electricity. Scipio, who had watched me,
jerked his hat off also.
“Lights on steer horns are nothing to this,” I began, when a piercing
scream cut me short.
Timberline, at the other side of the stony platform, had clapped his
hands to his head.
“Take off your hat,” I shouted.
But he had fallen on his knees, and was ripping, tearing his clothes. He
plucked and dragged at the old rags next his skin. Then he flung his
hands to the sky.
“O God!” he screamed. “Oh, Jesus! Keep him off me! Oh, save me!” His
glaring face now seemed fixed on something close to him. “Leave me go! I
didn’t push you over. You know he made me push you. I meant nothing. I
knowed nothing, I was only the cook. Why, I liked you--you was kind to
me. Oh, why did I ever go! There! Take it back! There’s your money! He
give it to me when you was dead to make me hush up. There! I never spent
a cent of it!”
He tore from his rags the hush-money that had been sewed in them, and
scattered the fluttering bills in the air. Then once more he clapped his
hands to his head as he kneeled.
“Take off your hat!” I cried again.
He rose, stared wildly, and screamed: “I tell you you’ve got it all.
It’s all he gave to me!”
The next moment he plunged into the cauldron, a thousand feet below.
On the following day we found the two bodies--that second victim the
country had wondered about, and the boy. And we counted the money, the
guilty money that had for a while closed the boy’s innocent mouth: five
ten-dollar bills! Not much to hide murder for, not much to draw a
tortured soul back to the scene of another’s crime. The true murderer
was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.
V
THE GIFT HORSE
High up the mountain amid white Winter I sat, and looked far down where
still the yellow Autumn stayed, looked at Wind River shrunk to map-size,
a basking valley, a drowsy country, tawny and warm, winding
southeastward away to the tawny plain, and there dissolving with air and
earth in one deep, hazy, golden sleep. Somewhere in that slumberous haze
beyond the buttes and utmost foothills, and burrowed into the vast
unfeatured level, lay my problem, Still Hunt Spring.