all Wind River going to treat it as such a trifle? Or--could it be that
McDonough alone among white men and red hereabouts knew nothing of the
mystery and menace by which Still Hunt Spring was encircled?
Next morning my perplexity was cleared. I made an early start, tying
some food and a kettle and my “slicker” to the saddle. McDonough
watched me curiously.
“Leavin’ your wagon and truck?” he inquired.
“Why, yes, of course. I’ll be back for it. I’m going to the E-A now. Are
you a poet?” I continued. “I’ve begun a thing.” And I handed him some
unfinished lines, which I had entitled “At Gift Horse Ranch.” “You don’t
object to that?”
“Object to what?”
“Why, the title, ‘At Gift Horse Ranch.’”
He took the paper down from his eyes, and I saw that his face had
suddenly turned scarlet. He stood blinking for a moment, and then he
said:--
“I’d kind of like to hear it.”
“But that’s all there is to hear--so far!” I exclaimed, feeling somehow
puzzled.
He put the verses close to his eyes once more. Then he held them out to
me, and stood blinking in his odd, characteristic way. “Won’t y’u read
’em to me?” he at length managed to say. “I’ll not fool _you_.”
For yet one moment more I was dull, and did not understand.
“I can’t read,” he stated simply.
“Oh!” I murmured in mortification. And so I read the lines to him.
He stretched out his hand for the scribbled envelope on which I had
pencilled the fragment. “May I keep that?”
“Wait till I have it finished.”
“I’d kind of like to have the start to keep.” He took it and shoved it
awkwardly inside his coat. “I can’t read or write,” he said, more at his
ease now the truth was out. “Nobody ever taught me nothin’.”
But I was not at ease. “Well, that stuff of mine is not worth reading!”
I said. Cards had a meaning for him--kings, queens, ten-spots--these had
been the fellow’s only books! He went on, “Never had any folks, y’u
see--to know ’em, that is.--Well, so-long till you’re back.” He turned
to his cabin, and I touched my horse.
The sorrel had gone but a few steps when I looked over my shoulder, and
there stood the solitary figure, watching me from the cabin door.
Suddenly it occurred to me that, as he had not been able to read my
letter to Scipio, he knew nothing of my project. _This_ was why he had
manifested no surprise! “Do you think,” I called back, laughing, “that
your horse can take me to Still Hunt Spring?”
I am now sure that a flash of some totally different expression crossed
his face, but at the time I was not sure; he was instantly smiling.
“Take y’u anywhere,” he called. “Take y’u to Mexico, take y’u to Hell!”
“Oh, not yet!” I responded, and cantered away. So he thought I would not
dare to go alone to Still Hunt Spring! Well and good; they should all
believe it by Friday evening.
My cantering ceased soon,--it had been for dramatic effect,--and as I
had before me a long ride, it behooved me to walk the first miles. Yet I
was soon up the easy ascent from North Fork, and though my descent to
the main river from the dividing ridge was through precipitous red
bluffs, and accomplished with caution, I reached the E-A ranch (where it
used to be twenty-five years ago) in less than two hours. To leave my
note there for Scipio took but a minute, and now on the level trail down
Wind River I made good time, so that before ten o’clock I had crossed
back over it above the Blue Holes, skirted by where the Circle fence is
to-day, crossed North Fork here, gone up a gulch, and dropped down
again upon Wind River below its abrupt bend, and reached the desolate
Sand Gulch. I nooned at the spring which lies, no bigger than a hat,
about seven miles up the Sand Gulch on its north side. This was the
starting-point of the trail that old Washakie had drawn for me; here I
crossed the threshold of the mysterious and the untrodden.
The sense of this heightened the elation which my ride through the
bracing hours of dawn had brought me, and as I turned out of the Sand
Gulch it was as if some last tie of restraint had stepped from my
spirit, leaving it on wings free and rejoicing. This gleamy, unfooted
country always looked monotonous from the bluffs of Wind River, but I
found no tedium in it; its delicious loneliness was thrilled at each new
stage of the trail by recognizing the successive signs and landmarks
which Washakie had bidden me look for. The first was a great dull red
stone, carved rudely by some ancient savage hand to represent a
tortoise. Perhaps in another mood, the grim appearance of this monster
might have seemed a symbol of menace, but when I came upon the stone
just where my map indicated that it was to be expected, I hailed it with
triumph. Nor did the caked and naked earth of the region through which
I next traced my way dry up my ardor. Gullies sometimes hid all views
from me, and again from mounds and rises I could see for fifty miles.
Should this ever meet the eye of some reader familiar with Wind River,
he will know my whereabouts by learning that far off, but constantly in
plain sight to my left, were Black Mountain and Spring Mountain; that I
must have been headed toward a point about midway between where the mail
camp now is and the pass over to Embar; that I crossed Crow Creek and (I
think) Dry Creek, and that I saw both Steamboat Butte and Tea Pot Butte
at different points. Even to write these names is a pleasure, for I
loved that country so; and sometimes it seems as if I must go there and
smell the sage-brush again--or die!
After the tortoise came several guiding signs: a big gash in the soil,
cut by a cloud-burst; an old corral where I turned sharp to the left; a
pile of white buffalo bones five miles onward; until at length I passed
through a belt of low hills, bare and baked and colored, some pink, like
tooth-powder, and others magenta, and entered a more level region
covered with sparse grass and sage-brush. Great white patches of
alkali, acres in extent, lay upon this plain. There was no water
(Washakie had told me there would be none), and the gleamy waste
stretched away on all sides; endlessly in front, and right and left to
long lines of distant mountains, full of light and silence. Let the
reader who is susceptible to tone combinations listen to the following
dissonant, unresolved measures, played slowly over and over:--
[Music]
their brooding harmonies will picture or at least convey that landscape
better than any words. I think it was really a mournful landscape, grand
and grave with suggestion of ages unknown, of eras when the sea was not
where it is now, and animals never seen by man wandered over the
half-made world. Earth did not seem one’s own here, but alien, but
aloof, as if, through some sudden translation, one had lit upon another
planet, perhaps a dying one. Yet during these hours of nearing my goal
no such melancholy fancies
[Illustration: I found nothing new--the plain, the sage-brush, the dry
ground--no more]
overtook me; I rode forward like some explorer, and I tried to complete
the verses which I had begun at McDonough’s:--
Would I might prison in these words,
And so keep with me all the year
Some inch of this bright wilderness
Of freedom that I move in here.
But nothing resulted from it, unless a surprisingly swift flight of
time. I was aware all at once that day was gone, that the rose and
saffron heavens would soon be a field of stars. I had matched one by one
the signs on my map with the realities around me, and now had reached
the map’s last word; I was to stop when I found myself on a line between
a hollow dip in the mountains to the left and a circular patch of forest
high up on those to the right. On this line I was to travel to the right
“a little way,” said Washakie. This I began to do, wondering if the
twilight would last, and for the first time anxious. After “a little
way” I found nothing new--the plain, the sage-brush, the dry ground--no
more; and again a little further it was the same, while the twilight was
sinking, and disquiet grew within me. Lost I could not well be, but I
could fail; food would give out, and before this the sorrel and I must
retrace our way to water at the Sand Gulch, seven hours behind us. The
twilight deepened. Had I passed it? Should I ride in a circle? Rueful
thoughts of a “dry camp” began to assert themselves, and my demoralized
hand grew doubtful on the reins, when I gradually discovered that the
sorrel _knew where he was_. There was no mistaking the increasing
alertness that passed through him.
As this extraordinary fact became a certainty the chasm opened at my
feet; the sorrel was trotting quickly along the brink of Still Hunt
Spring! In broad day I should have seen it a moment sooner, and the
suddenness with which, in the semi-obscurity, it had leaped into my view
close beside me produced a startling effect. The success of my quest did
not bring the unmixed pleasure that I had looked for; the dying day, the
desolate shapes of the hills, the unbefriending hush of the plain, the
odd alertness of the sorrel--all this for a while flavored my triumph
with something akin to apprehension, and it seemed as if the ravine
beneath me had been lurking in a sort of ambush until I should be fully
within its power. The Indian legend was now easy to account for; indeed,
I have met often enough, among our unlettered and rustic white
population, with minds that would have believed, after such a shock as I
had just received, that they had beheld the earth open supernaturally.
The sorrel’s trot had become a canter as we continued to skirt the
brink. Looking down I discovered in shadowy form the line of tall
cottonwoods, spindled from their usual shape to the gaunt figures
described as being on stilts; then the horse turned into the entrance.
This steep and narrow trail was barred at a suitable place by a barrier
of brush, which I replaced after passing it. A haunting uneasiness
caused me to regret that I had not arrived in full daylight, but this I
presently overcame. Before we reached the bottom I saw a number of
horses grazing down among the trees, and they set up a great running
about and kicking their heels at the sight of a human visitor. There
must have been twenty or thirty.
Lassitude and satisfaction now divided my sensations as I made my way to
the spring, whose cool, sweet water fulfilled all expectation. My good
map served me to the last; with it I lighted my cooking fire, addressing
it aloud as I did so, “Burn! your work is done!” I needed no map to go
back! I had mastered the trail! In my recovered spirits I quite forgot
how much I owed to the sorrel. While picking up dry sticks I stumbled
upon what turned out to be a number of branding irons, which were quite
consistent with the presence of the horses and the barrier at the
entrance. Evidently the place sometimes served as a natural pasture and
corral for stock gathered on the round-up and far strayed from where
they belonged. Perhaps some one was camping here now. I shouted several
times; but my unanswered voice merely made the silence more profound,
and for a while the influence of the magic legend returned. With this my
fancy played not unpleasingly while the kettle--or rather the
coffee-pot--was boiling. The naturalness of building a fire, of making
camp, of preparing a meal, helped common sense to drive out and keep out
those featureless fears which had assailed me. What stories could be
made about this place by a skilful writer! The lost traveller stumbles
upon it, enters, suspects himself to be not alone, calls out, and
immediately the haunted walls close and he is shut within the bowels of
the earth. How release him? Therein would be the story. Or--the lost
traveller, well-nigh dead of thirst, hastens to the spring amid the
frolicsome gambols of the horses. No sooner has he drunk than he becomes
a horse himself, and the others neigh loud greetings to a brother
victim. Then a giant red man appears and brands him. How release all the
horses from the spell?
As I lay by my little cooking fire in the warm night, after some bacon
and several cups of good tea made in the coffee-pot, I was too contented
to do aught in the way of exploration, and I continued to recline,
hearing no sound but the grazing horses, and seeing nothing but the
nearer trees, the dark sides of the valley, and the open piece of sky
with its stars. My saddle-blanket and “slicker” served me for what bed I
needed, the saddle with my coat supplied a pillow, and the cups of tea
could not keep me from immediate and deep slumber.
I opened my eyes in sunlight, and the first object that they rested upon
was a maroon-colored straw hat. With the mental confusion that
frequently attends a traveller upon first waking in a new place, I lay
considering the hat and wondering where I was, until at a sound I turned
to see the hat’s owner stooping to the spring. Instantly Lem Speed,
cattleman and owner of a store and bank in Lander, a house in Salt
Lake, a wife in Los Angeles, and a son at Yale, was covering me with a
rifle.
“Stay still,” was his remark.
Not a suspicion that it was anything but a joke entered my head. I lay
there and I smiled. “I could not hurt you if I wished to.”
“You will never hurt me any more.”
Another voice then added: “He is not going to hurt any of us any more.”
“Stay still!” sharply reiterated Lem Speed, for at the second voice I
had half risen.
“For whom do you take me?” I asked.
“For one of the people we want.”
I continued to be amused. “I’ll be glad to know what you want me for.
I’ll be glad to know what damage I’ve done. I’ll be happy to make it
good. I came over here last night for--”
“Go on. What did you come for?”
“Nothing. Simply to see this place. I’ve wanted to see it for a year. I
wanted to see if I could find it by myself.” And I told them who I was
and where I lived.
“That’s a good one, ain’t it?” said a third man to Lem Speed.
“And so,” said he, “you, claiming you’re an Eastern tenderfoot, found
this place, first trip, all by yourself across fifty miles of country
old-timers get lost in?”
“No. Washakie gave me a map.”
“Let’s see your map.”
“I lighted my fire with it.”
Somebody laughed. There were now five or six of them standing round me.
“If some of you gentlemen will condescend to tell me what you think my
name is, and what you think I have done--”
“We don’t know what your name is, and we don’t care. As to what you’ve
done, that’s as well known to you as it is to us, and you’ve got gall to
ask, when we’ve caught you right on the spot, branding-irons and all.”
“Well, I’m beginning to understand. You think you’ve caught a cattle
thief.”
“Horse thief,” corrected one.
“Both, probably,” added another.
“I’ll not ask you to believe me any more,” I now said. “Don’t I see the
post-trader over there among those horses?”
“No.”
“Very well, take me to him at Washakie. He has known me for years. I
demand it.”
“We’ll not take you anywhere. We’re going to leave you here.”
And now the truth, the appalling, incredible truth, which my brain had
totally failed to take in, burst like a blast of heat or ice over my
whole being, penetrating the innermost recesses of my soul with a
blinding glare. They intended to put me to death at once; their minds
were as stone vaults closed against all explanation. Here in this hidden
crack of the wilderness my body would be left hanging, and far away my
family and friends would never know by what hideous outrage I had
perished. Slowly they would become anxious at getting no news of me;
there would be an inquiry, a mystery, then sorrow, and finally
acceptance of my unknown fate. Broken visions of home, incongruous
minglings of loved faces and commonplace objects, like my room with its
table and chairs, rushed upon me. Had I not been seated, I must have
fallen at the first shock of this stroke. They stood watching me.
“But,” I began, feeling that my very appearance was telling against me,
while my own voice sounded guilty to my ears, “but it’s not true.”
“What’s the use in him talking any more to us?” said a man to Lem
Speed.
Lem Speed addressed me. “You claim this: you’re an Eastern traveller.
You come here--out of curiosity. You risk getting lost in the hardest
country around here--out of curiosity. But you come all straight because
an Indian’s map guides you, only you’ve burnt it. And you’re a stranger,
ignorant that this is a _cache_ for rustlers. That’s what you claim. It
don’t sound like much against these facts: last year you and another man
that’s wanted in several places and that we’re after now--you and him
was known to be thick. You offered to pay his doctor’s bill. You come
back to the country where he’s been operating right along, and first
thing you do you come over to this _cache_ when he’s got stolen horses
right in it, and you ride a stolen horse that’s known to have been in
his possession, and that’s got on it now the brand of the outfit this
gentleman here represents--all out of curiosity.”
“We’ve just found six more of our stock in here,” said the gentleman
indicated by Speed.
I repeated my story in a raised voice--I had not yet had time to regain
composure. I accounted for each of my movements from the beginning until
now, vehemently reasserting my ignorance and innocence. But I saw that
they were not even attending to me any longer; they looked at me only
now and then, they spoke low to each other, pointing to the other end of
the valley, and turned, while I was still talking, to receive the report
of another man, who came from among the stolen horses.
Then I fell silent. I sat by my saddle, locking my hands round my knees,
and turning my eyes first upon the men, and then upon the whole place. A
strange crystal desolation descended upon me, quiet and cold. The early
sunlight showed every object in an extraordinary and delicate
distinctness; the stones high up the sides of the valley, the separate
leaves on the small high branches of the cottonwoods; the interstices on
the bark on lower trunks some distance away; the fine sand and grass of
the valley’s level bottom, with little wild rose bushes here and there;
all these things I noticed, and more, and then my eyes came back to my
little dead fire, and the blackened coffee-pot in which I had made the
tea. “Your friend McDonough,” they had said to me at Washakie, and I had
wondered what was behind their reticence when I inquired about him.
They were always ready, I bitterly reflected, to feed lies to a
tenderfoot, but a syllable of truth about McDonough’s suspected
dishonesty, which would have saved me from this, they were unwilling to
speak. It was natural, of course; everything was natural. I saw also why
McDonough had been so precise in asking which way I expected to travel.
Over on Snake River, and in Idaho, the sorrel was in no danger of
identification, and therefore I should be safe. But even with the whole
chain of evidence: the doctor’s bill, the corral, my unlucky tale of a
map which I could not prove, and the branding-irons with which they
believed I was going to alter the legitimate brands--what right had they
to deny me the chance I asked?
The last two of them now came from the horses to make their report:
“Five brands. Thirty-two head. N lazy Y, Bar Circle Zee, Goose Egg,
Pitch Fork, Seventy-Six, and V R.”
“Not one of you,” I broke out, “knows a word against me, except some
appearances which the post-trader will set right in one minute. I demand
to be taken to him.”
“Ain’t we better be getting along, Lem?” said one.
“Most eight o’clock,” said another, looking at his watch.
“Stand up,” said Lem Speed.
Upon being thus ordered, like a felon, my utterance was suddenly choked,
and it was with difficulty that I mastered the tears which welled hotly
to my eyes.
“Any message you want to write--”
“No!” I shouted.
“Then let’s be getting along,” said the first man.
“Any message I wrote you would not deliver; it would put a rope round
your neck, too. And, Mr. Lem Speed, with your store, and bank, and
house, and wife, and son, I hope you will live to see them come to ruin
and disgrace.”
I wish that I had never spoken these weak, discreditable words; but he
who has not been tested cannot know the bitterness of such a test as
this.
A horse was led to me, and I got on without aid, a man on each side of
me. Memory after this records nothing. We must have been some time--I
think we walked--in reaching the other end of the valley, yet I cannot
recall what was spoken around me, or whether or not anything was
spoken; I can recall only the sides of the valley passing, and the
warmer sense of the sun on my shoulders, and the vivid scent of the
sage-brush. What firmness or lack of firmness I might have displayed at
the very end I can never know. Before we halted at the fatal tree of
execution, and while my rage was still sustaining me, a noise of
rattling stones caused us all to look upward, and there, galloping down
the steep trail, wildly waving and shouting to us, was Scipio Le Moyne.
It reeled through me! I was saved!
He plunged into the midst of us at breakneck speed, drew up so short
that his horse slid, and burst out furiously--not to my captors, but to
me. “You need a nurse!” he cried hoarsely. “Any travelling you do should
be in a baby coach.”
Breath failed him, he sat in his saddle, bowed over and panting, hands
shaking, face dripping with sweat, shirt drenched, as was his trembling
horse. After a minute he looked at Speed. “So I’m in time, my God! I’ve
ridden all night. I’d have been here an hour sooner only I forgot about
the turn at the corral. Here. That’s the way I knowed it.”
He handed over my letter, left for him at the E-A ranch. This, with a
few words from him, cleared me. All that I had declared was verified;
they saw what they had been about to do.
“Well, now, well!” exclaimed one, grinning.
“To think of us getting fooled that way!” another remarked, grinning.
“But it’s all right now,” said a third, grinning.
“That’s so!” a fourth agreed. “No harm done. But we had a close shave,
didn’t we?” And he grinned too.
Lem Speed approached me. “No hard feelings,” he said jocularly, and he
held out his hand.
But is it a true joke--this American attempt at shirking responsibility
under a bluff of facetiousness? It masquerades as humor every day--a
pretty mongrel humor, more like true cowardice.
I turned to Scipio. “Tell this man that anything he wishes to say to me
he will say through you.”
Speed flushed darkly. Had he kept his temper, he could easily have
turned my speech to ridicule. But such a manner of meeting him was novel
to a man used to having his own brutal way wherever he went, and he was
disconcerted. He spoke loudly and with bluster:--
“You said some things about my wife and son that don’t go now.”
This delivered him into my hands. Again I addressed Scipio. “Say that I
wish his family no further misfortune; they have enough in having him
for husband and father.”
I think he would have shot me, but the others were now laughing. “He’s
called the turn on you, Lem. Leave him be. He’s been annoyed some this
morning.”
They now made ready to depart with their recovered property.
“You and your friend will come along with us?” one said to Scipio.
“Thank you,” I answered. “I have seen all that I ever wish to see of any
of you.”
And then suddenly I folded over and slid like a sack of flour from my
horse. It had lasted longer than my nerves were good for; darkness
engulfed me on the ground.
They had disappeared when I waked; Scipio and I were the only human
tenants of the valley. He sat watching me, and I nodded to him; then
silently shook my head at his question if I wanted anything. I lay
gazing at the rocks and trees, the tall trees with their leaves gently
stirring. It was a beautiful, serene spot and I regarded it with the
languid pleasure of a man recovering from a serious illness. We began to
talk presently, and I learned that they had taken away their stolen
horses, except the sorrel, which had been left at my complete disposal.
But from that party I would accept no amends; I would ride the sorrel
back to Wind River, and then I would send a check to the proper person,
as if I had hired the horse. This intention I may say at once that I
duly carried out. Scipio upbraided me with the spirit I was showing;
they had meant no harm to _me_, he argued; they were doing their best
now--but I turned upon him.
“Oh, their best! Do you think they’ll not break out in a new place,
condemn some other man who looks guilty to their almighty minds? I asked
to see the post-trader. Don’t forget that. There’s got to be lynching
where there’s no law, but--”