Somewhere South in Sonora
SOMEWHERE SOUTH
IN SONORA
_A NOVEL_
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: OLD LIGHTS OF THE RIO BRAVA 3
I. THIRTY YEARS LATE 23
II. AT HEASLEP’S RANCH 29
III. THE LEATHER-STORE 35
IV. ‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’ 44
V. ‘I, ROBERT LEADLEY--’ 54
VI. THE LISTENING MARE 64
VII. THE SOFT SIDE OF A SADDLE 71
VIII. HEASLEP’S AGAIN 78
IX. INITIATION 87
X. ‘WATER IS FOR HORSES’ 94
XI. GAS AND GUNS 101
XII. FLASHLIGHT AND FAWNSKIN 106
XIII. VALLEJO’S LINES 113
XIV. A LETTER 119
XV. TUCSON 120
XVI. THOROUGHBREDS ENTER 131
XVII. THE ART OF DYING WELL 138
XVIII. ONE SANG WITH GUITAR 146
XIX. A CORNER OF THE WALL 153
XX. THE TWO WHO HAD NOT HEARD 160
XXI. THE RIO MORENO BRIDGE 167
XXII. FRAMED IN A DOBE GATEWAY 173
XXIII. FENCELESS FOOTHILLS OF SONORA 178
XXIV. SHEATH-KNIFE 187
XXV. ELBERT LEARNS TO WAIT 196
XXVI. SILENCE 203
XXVII. WORDS 206
XXVIII. ‘LIKE THE VIRGIN SPEAKING--’ 211
XXIX. HIGH COUNTRY 218
XXX. TUCSON AGAIN 226
SOMEWHERE SOUTH IN SONORA
PROLOGUE
OLD LIGHTS OF THE RIO BRAVA
I
BOB LEADLEY moved toward the sound of guitars. The strumming came
from over the stream where the Mexicans had their own little cantina
and their dobe huts. Back from the ‘Damask Cheek,’ which was the
palpitating core of the white settlement, voices of the miners reached
him, not loud to-night, not uproarious. Things were seldom duller than
now on the Rio Brava, shrunken to a trickle at this time of year. The
eke of gold had been at its lowest for days on the placers. A hot,
still August night in Bismo, Arizona--the night that changed one white
man all around.
Mexican figures bowed to him. A woman laughingly called from a darkened
doorway: ‘Buenas noches, señor!’ Another laughed from behind her,
adding somewhat wistfully: ‘Hace un calor sofocante.’
He walked on past the dobe huts and on to the mesa. He heard the
coyotes--different from any time before. There was no moon and the
stars were indistinct, run together in the heat haze. Bob Leadley took
off his hat; drops of sweat held by the tight hatband, dropped down
on his face. He had to laugh at himself--the feelings that rolled
and tumbled over each other within. Nobody would have believed it of
him--feelings to keep a secret of. It was as if some one he had always
been waiting for, had come to town--not yet seen, a friend or enemy,
he couldn’t tell, but a life-or-death meaning to the arrival. Running
steps reached him from behind; a panting voice calling:
‘Bob! Bob!’
‘Hello, Mort,’ he answered as the other came up, the tone so quiet and
cool, it was almost whimsical.
‘What you doing away off here?’
‘She didn’t want me there.’
‘It’s a boy, Bob, only--’
‘I thought as much.’
‘It’s a boy all right, only she--they say she ain’t going to live.’
The mother was already dead, but this was Mort Cotton’s way of
softening the shock for a friend.
The same easy tone answered: ‘Guess we’d better walk back.’
‘I wouldn’t hurry, if I was you. Bob. I’ll run back if you like and get
the rest of the word.’
* * * * *
It was her doings that they called the child Bart, after some saint
of her religion. She had a lot of saints, one for every day or so--a
Spanish woman, and she hadn’t asked much, come to think of it.
The oddest thing Bob Leadley had ever done was to marry her. He never
would have thought better of it, except it made a difference in the
town. It would make more of a difference now--leaving a boy with her
blood in his veins. They wouldn’t call it ‘Spanish’ blood in Bismo.
Mexicans weren’t held high on this side of the Border.... Queer little
birdlike ways, she had--little vanities and secrets--always shrinking
farther indoors in daylight, always more alive in the night time.
She had sung and cooked and washed for him; pleasant to be with,
but he never really knew her. She was like ripe fruit that couldn’t
last--pleasant to the taste and pretty to look at, but nothing much for
real hunger. Come and gone with her curious ways, her brightenings up
in the dark--only asking one thing--that the boy be called after this
particular one of her saints, and ‘Bart’ was as good a name as any.
So there was a gray-eyed white man in Bismo, Arizona, with a black-eyed
boy in his cabin. No problem about it at all, from the standpoint of
the other miners, just scorn--only Bob Leadley had been known from away
back as cool and gamy as they made them; nothing like the squaw-man,
cholo-man type. The miners couldn’t give much play to their contempt
before those pleasant gray eyes of Bob’s, which might inquire their
meaning, and look into it. Men weren’t mind-readers in Bismo. They saw
the steady eyes, the whimsical smile, but no one knew what was going
on; not even Mort Cotton, who had punched cattle, skinned mules, and
washed for gold with Bob Leadley for ten years; not even the Mexican
woman and her daughter who brought Bart up. But it was all a matter
of how you gave advice. Bismo found out gradually that Bob wasn’t set
up very high in his idea of being a successful parent. They found he
listened attentively to comment given within a certain range of tones;
discovering this, the miners supplied it plentifully.
The social barrier in Bismo was the river itself. Mexican laborers
worked, two to one to the white men, in the placers, but the two
settlements rarely mixed outside working hours, except when waves
of drink inundated the white miners. Then they would move over to
Dobe-town to drink and ‘eat different,’ the calls ending in a row, not
infrequently in the death of a ‘greaser.’ Letchie Welton, the town
marshal, wasn’t even to be approached on a matter like this, and sounds
of mourning from one or more dobe huts seldom reached as far as the
‘Damask Cheek,’ any more than the strumming of guitars....
* * * * *
Several times in the next dozen years, Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton were
on the point of leaving Bismo, but the Rio Brava had a way of suddenly
picking up, the gold eke rising to quite a little color. There was
another thing; it was hard for Bob to make up his mind to take Bart
away from the Mexican woman and her daughter. It didn’t seem fair. The
old señora had been a friend of Bart’s mother and loved the white man’s
boy; also her daughter loved him. But Bart was growing up more Mexican
than white; talked Spanish in preference to English; was more often
seen across the stream than on this side, and running with the Mexican
boys, one Palto especially, than with the four or five white boys of
his age in town. Bart’s whole business was horses, but Mexican words
having to do with them were too easy on his tongue--hondos, latigos,
reatas, conchos, yakimas. A slim, black-haired youth, slow to rouse,
not cruel or a fool; an easy way with him; not stirred in the least
by the thought of washing gold; no idea of working hours, as being
superior to all others.
Just to see Bart leaning against the doorway--on his feet, but relaxed
in a way no white boy could stand, a guitar in his hand, perhaps--had a
way of filling his father with a revulsion that Bob had to take out to
the mesa to quiet. It was as if the man saw the face of his boy under
a high-tinted sombrero (instead of the cast-off cavalryman’s campaign
hat with a Copley peak) as if a sash of seda were thrust back over the
shoulder. Bob didn’t quite know it, but it was because he was seeing
Bart with the eyes of the other miners at these times--that he was
stung so. The town had put a secret fear on him that his boy was not
showing up white.
The father lacked one thing that parents usually have to work with.
He didn’t have the sense of being right at all times. Once or twice
he felt so sure of himself that he treated Bart to a whipping, which
the boy took without a murmur, minding pain no more than an Indian. He
never explained. The father got one of the starts of his life to find
he had whipped Bart for a thing he didn’t do, the boy not taking the
trouble to clear himself. Bob’s feeble sense of rightness was shaken
by that; it about all went out of him, and something else with it. The
deep hurt of it was that Bart held no grievance afterward.
A master at letting other men alone, Bob couldn’t keep his thoughts and
his will-power off the boy. He made up for his rare rough periods by
being lenient. All the time his actions and reactions brought advice
from his fellow townsmen. It was Letchie Welton, the town marshal, who
started the saying that Bart wouldn’t live to be hanged. All this time
Bob Leadley’s eyes were the most light-hearted anywhere.
‘As a male-parent, I’m considerable of a botch--I admit that,’ he would
say, in a way to delude anybody that he ever suffered real care, and
at the same time there was a sorrow burning at the center of him like
a red lamp. Often at work on the placer, he knew a loneliness to get
close to his boy. He might have seen Bart at breakfast, but that made
no difference. He felt lonely for him more than once, when they were in
the same room together.
II
BART was past twelve, when he was missing for a day or two, and rode
back into town on a gray rat-tailed pony that was raked from shoulder
to crupper with fresh wounds and old scars. Letchie Welton, in the
capacity of deputy sheriff, halted him at the edge of town, looking the
outfit over.
‘Where did you get that briscut?’
‘Over at the Cup Q.’
‘Did you do all that fresh hookin’ on his hide?’
‘No.’
‘Buy him?’
‘No, they didn’t want him much over at the rancho. Said I could have
him for sitting thirty seconds--’
‘And you did?’
‘Yep--more. I ain’t got off.’
Letchie Welton looked queer and rode back to the placers where he found
Bob Leadley. ‘Your kid’s just brought in a man-killer from the Cup Q--a
gray rat-tail I remember seein’ over there. If I was you, Bob, I’d put
a bullet in the head of that cayuse, and I’d leave off work and do
it now--before he kicks a hole out of Bart’s face or eats his scalp
off.’ Letchie Welton went on to recall further details of Rat-tail’s
reputation--of the fits he threw, the men he had maimed.
Bob left the placer and went to his own little corral where he found
Rat-tail unsaddled, Bart leaning in the fence shadow, looking over his
new possession.
‘I hear he’s an outlaw, Bart. I wouldn’t ride him if I was you.’
‘I rode him over from the Cup Q all right.’
‘I know. He may have been glad to get away from there--but look at
him!’ Bob took a few steps closer to the old gray head which suddenly
looked deformed. A float of baleful red appeared back of the near,
filmy eye.
‘I’ve seen that look once or twice before, Bart, and I’ll have to tell
you to stay off him.’
‘All he knew from the Cup Q was rakin’ and quirtin’, Dad.’
‘But that ain’t the look of a nice hoss.’
‘I like him.’
‘It ain’t the look of a broke hoss, Bart.’
‘I don’t want no broke hoss.’
‘You’ll have to stay off, that’s all--’
Bob saw that deep questioning look in the eyes slowly turned his
way--no anger, no hate, but separateness, a widening gulf.
‘At least, stay off him till I try him out for a few days.’
Bob was sincere in his attempt to make the rat-tail safe for his son,
but the toughest saddle-sessions he had ever known, followed in the
next ten days. Where the ordinary outlaw left off with sun-fish and
rail-fence, the old gray opened fresh spontaneities. One of the last
things he did with Bob forked, was to make a quarter-mile sprint
toward a low-hanging cottonwood limb, the idea being to rake off his
tormentor, which he carried out. Another time when Bob persisted
several seconds longer than usual, the rat-tail came out of a buckling
snap--to fling himself on the ground. The day came when Bob Leadley,
cool-eyed, a smile on his lips, would have preferred to stand up and be
shot at, than mount the gray monster again, but that’s what he did, it
being his code. That day Rat-tail plunged into a dobe wall and left
Bart’s father on the inside of a crowded chicken yard with a broken leg.
‘I should have done what Letchie told me, Bart,’ Bob said that night.
‘He ain’t a man-killer just; he’s a man-eater. You’ll have to leave him
alone from now on.’
‘You tried hookin’ him, the way they did over in the Cup Q. It makes
him crazy. He ain’t crazy natural, his mouth’s tender. He’s been driven
crazy. He needs humorin’, Dad.’
Anger flamed up in the father. He had been a horse-hand all his life.
‘I say keep off him, from now on.’
Three days later Mort Cotton came into the cabin, his bushy eyebrows
showing curiously white. ‘I hate to tell on the kid, Bob, but it’ll
get to you anyway,’ he said. ‘He’s been riding that rat-tail on a
hackamore--he’s ridin’ him now. And what I’m gettin’ at is, he ain’t
havin’ trouble.’
Bob’s face turned to the wall. He had many days to think it out while
his leg was in boards.... It was disobedience, but had he been right?
Didn’t Bart have something on the gray others hadn’t--with other
horses, too, perhaps? It wasn’t a matter of just sitting a horse.
Bob knew without vanity he could do that as well as most men. It was
something new; not to be expressed. He had seen the deformed look of
the gray’s head straighten out as Bart drew near; the red flame of the
eye die down. Bart had something on him--a new feel with a horse.
‘I belong to the old school,’ he muttered. ‘All we know is that a hoss
has to be broke; that a hoss is ruined that once gets his own way. Bart
ain’t a part of that. He makes a hoss forget his own way. He gives him
his courage back. But it’s disobedience--I dasn’t let Bart get away
with it. They’d think I was crazy--if I didn’t get rid of the rat-tail.’
Mort Cotton took the old outlaw back to the Cup Q as a led-horse.
III
FINALLY the morning, a year or two later, when old Batten, the
storekeeper at Bismo, was found murdered by Bob Leadley’s serving woman
who had gone over for a can of condensed milk. Her outcry roused the
town. The old man had been hammered over the head and pulled out from
his own back room, or else he had reached that far before they finished
him. Things were spilled. There were sticky tracks on the floor and
a winy smell in the gray of morning. A cask of apricot brandy in the
place, no one knew how old, was still dripping when Bob Leadley got
there. He recalled that Batten had never sold any of this brandy,
holding it choice and sending a little flask to any one who was sick.
What struck him queerly, too, was old Batten’s thin white hair, not
combed back as usual.
Letchie Welton came in and propped the old man up against the counter
for a better look. The marshal’s jaw got harder and whiter as he
repeated that it was a Mexican job. The town was crowding in. Bob
Leadley noted that his boy, Bart, was standing around. ‘Go on back home
and get your breakfast, Bart,’ he said.
The whole white settlement was inside or at the store doors by this
time. Mort Cotton’s voice seemed to find the strangest hush for this
sentence: ‘They needn’t have killed him. Old Batten would have given
them all that they took--at least trusted ’em for what they took--’
It sounded so innocent and mournful, but it was like blowing on
fire--the effect on the crowd. Every one was thinking something of
the same kind, and a sort of hell took hold and united them--the same
contagion that makes a mob. The cask had ceased to drip--not yet five
in the morning. No one knew how much money Batten had in the place.
‘A Mexican job,’ repeated Letchie Welton, his jaw getting harder and
whiter. ‘We’ll just go over to Dobe-town right now and see who’s
missing.’
They routed out the shacks across the river. Two Mexicans, Marguerin
and Rueda, couldn’t be accounted for; also a boy, called Palto around
the diggings, was gone. About this time Bob Leadley noticed that Bart
hadn’t done what he was told, but had come over the stream with the
rest.
‘I told you to get out of here. Go home and wait till I come.’
Now Bob recollected that Bart and Palto had been thick at times.
No work on the mines that day. The ‘Damask Cheek’ filled early. Ten men
chosen by Letchie Welton took the trail after the three Mexicans--a
trail that showed clear--three ponies headed toward the Border, six or
seven hours’ start.
All were thinking, as they rode, of that old white head; ten men and
the marshal, still keyed to that sentence which Mort Cotton had spoken.
The thoughts of the posse working together this way made the purpose
deadly. Each man grew painfully fond of old Batten, and the other side
of the fondness was rising hate for the Mexicans ahead. Every little
while some one said: ‘Poor old Batten, he wouldn’t have hurt a toad.’
They were several miles out, before Bob Leadley noticed that Bart was
overtaking them from behind. At first he thought Bart was bringing a
message from the town, but it proved he merely wanted to go.
‘You turn around and ride back, just as fast as you can, young man!’
the father said.
Those were the words which fixed it the other way.
‘Let him stick. Good chance to see what he’s made of,’ Letchie Welton
laughed, just as he would have said: ‘Send him home,’ if Bob had asked
to let him stay.... The next day the posse was pressing the three
Mexicans a lot closer. They didn’t seem more than three hours ahead.
It was desert work now, hot and grim. Toward nightfall, they came to
a fork where the fugitives had broken apart, two turning to the left,
one to the right. Letchie Welton sent four men after the lone pony to
the right, and kept on with seven after the other two. On the third
noon the two Mexicans, hard pressed, made their final split. This broke
up the pursuing party a second time; Letchie Welton, Mort Cotton, Bob
Leadley and Bart keeping on straight south, the other four turning east.
Toward sundown that third night, over a hundred miles from Bismo, only
Bart was riding light and easy; his pony with a reserve left, the other
three horses done for, and their riders as well. Canteens were empty;
desert country, here and there a big solitary cactus, rising like a
shade tree gone crazy.
‘There’s water ahead,’ Bart told his father. ‘I can tell by my pony’s
ears.’
The lower rim of the sun was out of sight when they came to the
Mexican’s horse, finished, lying at the edge of a pool of stagnant,
coated water, choked in the hollows of a dry stream bed. The man-tracks
stretched on toward a shadowy mass that proved to be the old hard-rock
diggings of Red Ante, long since abandoned by any miners, Mexican or
white. Letchie yanked up his horse’s head from the pool.
‘Our game’s ahead, men. Come on, we’ll get him and then come back to
this pea-soup!’
Now, entering that deserted town, it was as if Bob Leadley had to see
every detail. Not that he wanted to--but there seemed to be a pair
of extra clear eyes, working back of his regular eyes, though he was
partly out of his head from exhaustion. The abandoned street, between
the huts of Red Ante, impressed him as something perpetual--moment
and place. At the same time, a kind of insane anger was in his brain,
because he had to hold up the weight of his horse’s head on the
bridle-rein. The beast with dying strength, was fighting to get back to
that scummy pool; and Bob, a heap in the saddle, was needing all his
strength to keep from falling. At the same time, those deadly clear
eyes of his took in the bone-white curve of Letchie Welton’s jaw, the
big rent in Mort Cotton’s shirt under the left arm toward the back, the
skin showing wet and blistered there--and all the rest in that falling
dark: Huts partly sunken in blowing sand--wide-open door of a deserted
blacksmith shop--familiar as a lithograph that had hung in his room
for years--wide-open door, rusty anvil, sledge standing by--big rusty
bear-trap in the center of the dirt floor, with its half-inch chain
running to the base of the anvil--everything sagging and dust-covered.
Now Bob was letting himself down out of the saddle--when Letchie’s
pistol cracked, and his voice yelled:
‘There he goes. I winged him. I got the son of--’ A second pistol shot,
as Letchie dug his spurs into his horse and pressed on the dark street.
Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton staggered after him on foot, Bart keeping
with them on his pony--to the last hut.
‘It’s Palto,’ they heard the boy say.
The young Mexican was on the ground. The point dawning in Bob Leadley’s
brain was that it would have been so much better, simpler, if one
or both of Letchie’s shots had finished the job. Palto was down to
pray--kneeling on the sand-blown, half-obliterated road. Welton jerked
his horse so close, it looked as if he meant to trample the boy, before
he stepped down. With his boot he shoved the figure over on its side.
‘So it was you who did the hammering on old man Batten’s skull--’
‘Yo, no, señor!’
Not a man looking up, but the ashes of a boy--fag and fright all that
was left.
‘Weren’t even there, were you? Home in bed all night. Just started out
for a morning ride with Marguerin and Rueda--’
‘Si, señor--was there, but no kill--’
Letchie turned his thin smile to the others. ‘I guess you’ve heard
that. I guess we’ve got what we came for. I guess we’ve heard from his
own lips, he was one of the three.’
Bob Leadley wasn’t right in his own head; he knew just enough to know
that one thing. He saw his son looking down at Palto. He saw--a kind of
humor about it--that Bart hadn’t mixed in the pursuit with any sacred
idea of the law’s vengeance. Now the upshot of the whole matter from
Letchie Welton:
‘... accordin’ to law, we can’t finish him here and be done with it.
Bein’ still alive, we’ve got to fix to take him back to where a court
is. Only if he should try to escape--we could put a bullet through him;
but he won’t do that, will you, Palto?’
‘No, Señor!’ sliding away from Welton’s boot.
‘We aren’t the court and can’t hang him here, and there’s no shack in
this hole of a town that will hold him. Our horses are done for--they
won’t get back to Bismo--’
Letchie’s words died out of Bob Leadley’s ears. He was trying to find
himself. He was seeing old Batten’s white hair, not combed as usual;
he was seeing his own boy--a look in Bart’s face, different from ever
before. The hard white curve of Letchie’s jaw was before his eyes and
words again:
‘I, for one, ain’t sittin’ up on guard to-night. I’m not askin’ you
fellows to do what I won’t do myself.’
Something was crowding for utterance to Bob Leadley’s lips, but
Welton’s voice kept it from coming clear. They might be here in Red
Ante for days, while some one rode back to Bismo for fresh provisions
and horses.
‘... He ain’t worth it--no greaser is. Only one way--to fix him so he
can’t get away--’
Now Bart spoke up: ‘I’ll stand guard over him to-night. I don’t feel so
done out--’
The father was glad in a crippled sort of fashion, glad but afraid.
‘I guess not,’ said Letchie. ‘Wouldn’t look so pretty when we got back,
to have you tell ’em you sat rifle-up over the prisoner while we got
our beauty sleep back.... No, I’m figurin’ out a different way from
what I saw up yonder--just as we broke into town.’
He meant the blacksmith shop. Bob Leadley saw Mort Cotton standing in
the dark like a dirt-stained corpse. It might have been Batten himself.
‘I won’t take part in it,’ Bob thought. ‘I ain’t marshal to say what’s
what, but I won’t take no part.’
Bart was looking his way, but Bob didn’t turn to meet his son’s eyes.
‘I ain’t a man of law,’ he was thinking. At the same time he felt
Bart’s eyes turning to him persistently, but he couldn’t look. ‘I ain’t
a man of law.’
The marshal was managing it alone....
Bob had been famished riding into town, but the stuff left in his
saddle-bags tasted like worms to his tongue, and the water, as if
running out of a sore. Though he was half dead for it, there was no
sleep--with that racket from the blacksmith shop down the dirt road of
Red Ante. He didn’t meet Bart’s eyes again. It was as if he had said
good-bye to his son for life.
Bob had dragged his blankets away from the empty huts, far out on the
sand to get beyond the cries, but they were already in his soul--no
getting away. Long afterward, lying out there, he heard the sound of
a single shot from the direction of the blacksmith shop--the end of
all cries. Welton was there before him, Mort Cotton appearing from
the side. Palto’s troubles were over--Bart missing. It was not until
daybreak that the father found a note pinned to his saddle--written by
Bart before the shot had been fired.
I guess I don’t belong here, Dad. I’ll take Palto with me, if I can
get him loose. Otherwise--well, you’ll know. So long for good, BART.
I
THIRTY YEARS LATE
ARRIVING when the present century was well started, Elbert Sartwell had
now concluded that his was a most untimely birth. For instance, all
that war amounted to in his case, was the matter of wearing puttees to
school. The magic of his youth was moreover smothered in a houseful
of sisters--imprisoned in a sorority-house, he found himself--all his
aching and persistent dreams unexpressed.
But the end had come. Elbert had reached decision; so had his father on
the same point. They were at odds. It was a matter of grief to the son
that for once there could be no compromise.
Fall darkness had closed about him, as these things appeared before
Elbert’s mind with finality. He left his room, followed the long wide
hall to the door of his father’s dressing-room and knocked. It was the
last quarter of an hour before dinner, and the tone of the ‘Come in’
was not encouraging, but it didn’t occur to Elbert to wait until dinner
and tobacco had combed down his father’s tag-ends of the day.
Mr. Sartwell was standing before his mirrors and did not turn, as the
hall door opened. Elbert nodded at the reflection; also he observed in
the glass a look of fresh vexation, which reminded him that his sister
Nancy this very afternoon had smashed the fender and left front wheel
of the new phaëton. His father had probably just heard about it. The
present moment couldn’t be worse, but Elbert didn’t see how he could
back out now with his ultimatum unreported.
‘I’ve been thinking it over,’ he said, ‘and I can’t start to work in
the office, at least not now. You see, I’ve always wanted--’
‘“Always wanted”--’ broke in Mr. Sartwell, ‘“always wanted” against
my better judgment.... A houseful of “always wanteds”! How can a man
be expected to stand in the midst of six people, always wanting in
different directions?’
‘I hate to be an added trouble to you,’ Elbert said in his unruffled
way, ‘but there’s no use of my trying to go into the business, the way
I feel.’
‘What is it now?’
Still addressing the mirror, the younger man outlined with some
embarrassment that he hadn’t been able to get over his ardor to tackle
life on a cattle range. The broad back before him suddenly jerked
about. Elbert was held by the first direct look of one whose son has
proved a definite disappointment. Many words followed; some heat:
‘... pack a pair of pistols! Step along out over the real-estate
ranges and prairie sub-divisions! Why, I’m actually ashamed to have to
tell you, what any kid half your age knows--that there isn’t a West any
more, no cattle country--hasn’t been for--why, you’re only about thirty
years late--’ Also a final sentence, as Elbert withdrew, to the effect
that if he did go forth, he would have to pay his own car fare ‘out
into the fenceless spaces.’
There was present at dinner that evening one of sister Nancy’s young
men friends, who had no dreams of the West whatsoever. The Sartwell
family, diminished by recent marriages of two elder daughters, was
pulling together socially, in spite of internal trouble. Elbert’s
thoughts were mainly afar on his own problem, but after a time, he
couldn’t help noticing the art with which the gentleman-guest played up
to his father. It could be done, Elbert reflected. The two sons-in-law,
already connected up, had also gone about it this way. He felt like a
crossed stick; a spectator merely, in the home dining-room. His glance
moved from face to face in the soft creamy light that flowed down
through a thin bowl of alabaster, hanging from the ceiling. He alone,
an only son, lacked a sort of commonplace craft to smooth his ways. He
might have asked for a trip around the world before settling down to a
business career--and gotten it.
Elbert retired to his room early. The Sartwell mansion faced the West,
and sunsets had reddened his windows from as far back as he could
remember. Long ago he had stared into a crimson foam of one certain
day’s end, thinking that it was the color of Wyoming. The lure of
that crimson foam hadn’t ceased, though it had moved farther South
and farther West--Apache country, Navajo country--leading on over the
border of late into Mexico itself.
He had been given an automobile at the end of high-school days, but he
had wanted a pony. Hours at home he had spent in the garage, secretly
wishing all the time it was a corral.
Elbert turned on the lights. Over the back of the chair he was sitting
on, was a blanket of Indian red. There were framed Western drawings on
the wall, paintings of rodeo and round-up, lonely cattlemen, bison,
longhorns, desert and mountain scenes; and in among his books, pasted
in an old ledger, was his collection of Indian pictures--heads of all
the tribes, famous braves and medicine men--from cigarette, gum, candy
packages--no end to the lengths he had gone to get the lot together. He
looked back upon the time when the bronzed head of Red Cloud, of the
Nez Perces, was the noblest countenance he had ever gazed upon.
A tall, cool person, Elbert could hardly remember ever being really
tired. He was practically a stranger to all stimulants and dwelt
altogether unaware in a calm that made nervous people either envious
at once or hopeless altogether. His steady, homely hands were of that
considerable size as to appear empty most of the time, and his blue
eyes were so steady and cool that any one undertaking to go against his
will, felt a surge of fatigue and irritation at the outset.
Elbert had been pondering a good deal of late on what sort of stuff he
was made of. When he read of some hero’s exploits in a newspaper, he
asked himself could he have done that. And when he heard of some great
suffering or privation of explorers, he wondered how he would have
acted, had he been along. But it was the Southwest that perennially
and persistently called. He moved to his phonograph, and picked out a
book of records from the shelf below. The one he wanted wasn’t there;
in fact, he found it still in the machine, from a solitary performance
of last evening--a Mexican record. He set it going now and a man’s
announcement in Spanish preceded the music, something about ‘Paquita
Conesa, tonadillera española, la mas famosa en Mexico y Sudamerica--’
... His favorite record. The song was ‘La Paloma.’ It always seemed to
Elbert as if Señorita Paquita were singing in the open air. He smiled
at a secret thought that always came to him, too--that the words of the
song were carved out of starlight.
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios--’
Up from the street, at the end of the song, reached his ears the
tiresome sweep and swish of tires and carbureters, and from the
drawing-room, Nancy’s singing voice. Her young man would be standing
beside the piano at this time, his waxen hair brushed back. Elbert
smiled wistfully. ‘Thirty years late.’
II
AT HEASLEP’S RANCH
FROM Kansas City, he sent his first letter back, regretting to leave
home without talking it over further, but there didn’t seem to be any
use. Possibly there wasn’t any more West, he allowed, but he had to go
out and see. He hopped off the train at Tucson and heard of a stage
that ran south toward the Border. That sounded right, and he walked
three blocks with his bags to perceive--no jehu with long flicking
lash, but a chauffeur, the stage being a motor-bus.
Elbert couldn’t appreciate the scenery. Yes, there was a big ranch down
yonder, the driver said. Yes, there was cattle. Irrigation and alfalfa
had reclaimed this waste stuff. Some cows presently appeared wearing an
‘HCO’ brand.
‘What does that stand for?’ Elbert asked.
‘Heaslep and Company.’
No Circle X or Lazy M--but irrigation, alfalfa fields, Heaslep and
Company!
‘The HCO runs everything down here--big land grant stretching almost to
the Border,’ the stage driver said.
Elbert was let down and made his way to a group of low buildings in the
distance. At the farrier’s shop, he inquired for the foreman, and was
told to look for a door ahead, marked ‘Office.’ ‘You’ll find Frost-face
in there or somewhere about,’ the blacksmith said.
Elbert’s pulse picked up a little at the name of the foreman, but it
was certainly a business office he entered.
‘We’re not short-handed,’ snapped the little gray man, with worried
face. ‘Things dull down in winter. Nothin’ much to do right now but
keep off the hoof-and-mouth disease.’
Outside there was a succession of sick blasts from a truck--the sound
of an engine, not only decrepit, but dirty and dry. Elbert turned to
the door.
‘Wait a minute, young fellow. We might use a man on the chuck wagon--I
wonder if you could drive old Fortitude?’
‘A mule?’ said Elbert. ‘I’m sure I could learn--’
‘Mule, hell, motor truck--can’t you hear her?’
‘I’m afraid I can,’ Elbert said wearily. His father had been right.
One distinct value about Heaslep and Company, however--no women in the
establishment. Even the cooking staff was Chinese. But the rest was
hard to bear. Efficiency and trade had settled down as unromantically
as upon a tannery. Heaslep’s was a stock farm, a beef factory, anything
but the cattle ranch of dreams. This part of Arizona was sunk in
no foam of Indian red. The vast range lay on a squat mesa, partly
penciled over with irrigation ditches. Elbert’s tardy soul, longing
for the thunder of a stampede, sickened at the sight of thousands of
domesticated moos, rack-fed in winter, market-fattened from fenced
alfalfa fields, branded in chutes and railroaded as scientifically as
tinned biscuit. The only longhorns hung over the mantelpiece in the
dormitory of the cowhands. Even the imported bulls were businesslike.
Most of the ranges were deserted by this time, the cold weather
settling down. Elbert had been taken on as ‘Bert’ Sartwell, but his
first letters from home gave the real thing away. All hands relished
the discovery. Over a dozen of the men were in for his first Sunday,
the day they started him in filling up gopher holes in the environment
of the main buildings. Elbert was told that the best way was to soak
old newspapers into a pulp and poke them down into the holes with a
stick; necessary business every week or ten days during the gopher
season. This was the height of it, he was informed.
‘You see, the paper hardens down,’ Cal Monroid said.
‘And gets fire-proof,’ added Slim Gannon, his side-kick.
Elbert set about his work, a bit coldish and blank at the extent of
the job before him. He had never read of this department of ranch work,
and wondered if it meant he was to be relieved of the motor truck.
Toward midday he looked up from his poking, to find that at least ten
of the cowhands had closed in, having stalked him like an Indian band.
Their enthusiasm was high and prolonged. Elbert smiled and blushed,
but said nothing. For a day or two after that they tried to call him
‘Poke,’ but the name didn’t take hold. The men liked to say Elbert too
well. ‘Elber-r-rt,’ they would chirrup, and inquire if he had ever done
any bull-dogging.
He was not relieved from the truck. His work was to carry mails and
bring in supplies from the town of Harrisburg, eleven miles to the
north. He sometimes made two trips a day when the truck would permit,
but the tantrums of old Fortitude were a subject of conversation at
Heaslep’s only a little lower in the scale than the hoof-and-mouth
disease.
On his third or fourth Sunday, Elbert spread newspapers on the ground
and set about taking down Fortitude’s strained and creaking mechanism
part by part. His activity and absorption began to attract a Sabbath
crowd.
‘He’s gettin’ her whole plumbin’ out,’ Slim Gannon remarked. ‘I’m
layin’ four to three that we’ve heard her last belch.’
Cal Monroid considered for half a minute, noting the orderly lay-out of
tools, inwards, greases and oils, and how carefully Elbert had numbered
the parts. Cal began to fancy a vague purpose underneath it all and
casually remarked: ‘I’ll just take you on, Slim, for half a month’s
pay.’
Elbert toiled through the hours. By sundown when he took his place at
the wheel, all Heaslep’s was taut with strain. The works purred, the
car moved. ‘It’s down-grade, she’s just rollin’!’ breathed Slim. But
Elbert reversed; old Fortitude backed and curved, did a figure eight to
new music without hitting post or wall.
‘I win,’ said Cal.
‘She ain’t belched yet,’ said Slim.
The two moved off to settle the technicality.
Dreary months of trucking. Elbert’s insatiable interest in horsemanship
had been little encouraged at Heaslep’s. He was permitted to learn
the bad ones by experience, and was rapidly disconnected several
times, discovering his audience when it was too late, as on the day of
‘poking’ gopher holes. Though it was generally allowed things looked up
a little when the range grass began to grow, Elbert lost heart before
the winter was over. It seemed a long time to him since he had left
home, but it wasn’t so by the calendar. To judge by letters, the family
had its hands out beckoning, but Elbert felt neither his father nor
sisters would miss having the laugh at his expense.
Hard to leave Cal and Slim. This pair had warmed up a trifle toward the
last. It was Cal Monroid who helped Elbert up from the turf the last
time he was spurned by an HCO untameable, and Cal’s easy tones had a
soothing effect:
‘It’s about time you were sitting a real horse, Kid. Give me your
shoe--’
And Elbert was lifted up on old Chester, who had his ‘stuff’ down
so fine, you wouldn’t believe he knew anything. Chester was the
morning-star of Cal’s string, and right then Elbert began to know the
difference between an outlaw and a real man-horse. That one brief word
‘Kid,’ still sounded in his ears. It seemed to have let him into a new
world, the world of Cal Monroid and Slim Gannon, the latter said to
have taken the Tucson Bronk Cup two years straight; both men being held
as cool and fast in a pinch. This episode held the faintest possible
answer to what he had come West for, but Elbert had already decided
to depart, his plan being to go on to the coast, before starting back
East.
III
THE LEATHER-STORE
HIS first night in Los Angeles was like summer, though it was February.
In the core of the old town he found the Plaza, and strolled through
the Mexican crowd. His heart started a queer beat as the band struck up
‘La Paloma,’ his lips forming the words of the first line or two:
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios--’
A wonder took him as to what Los Angeles used to be like when there
were empty hills all around and how ‘La Paloma’ would have sounded in
those days. ‘Carved out of starlight,’ he whispered.
The next day in the window of an old leather-store near the Plaza, he
saw a cardboard sign reading: ‘Young man wanted.’ Elbert didn’t suppose
they would take on one without experience, but the impulse grew upon
him to try his luck. The thought of going East so soon hadn’t become
any easier, nor did he consider with relish the idea of asking his
father for money to stay away with. To his surprise he was given a
trial in the leather-shop, and gradually he became pleased with the
arrangement, for the store proved to have quality and background. Real
cattlemen used to swear by it, he found out, and occasionally, even
now, an old-timer would come in and talk with the proprietor. They
would chat of the days when cantinas still welcomed the passer-by
around the corner on North Main Street, little games going on upstairs.
In those days the Mexicans hanging around the Plaza still had bits of
color in their sashes and sombreros.
There was a gray wooden horse in the leather-store, fragile but full
height, on which Elbert was accustomed to show bridles, saddles,
blankets, and pack-gear, talking to customers a lot wiser than he felt,
for he still resented life’s conspiracy which had kept him from sitting
a live horse where he belonged.
In the evening he would go out and lounge in the Plaza under the
dusty palms and sycamores. It was better than Heaslep’s in a way--the
Mexicans had a friendly feel, and sometimes when the band played, he
could imagine himself down in the City of Mexico, or in the heart of
Sonora at least. One day during the dinner hour, when Elbert was alone,
a calm-eyed, oldish man pushed ajar the door of the leather-store,
looked slowly around and remarked in mildest tone:
‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do, is
to saddle their pony.’
The voice was so gentle and leisurely, Elbert was warmed and interested
at once. He was quite sure that nothing he could say about saddles
would astonish such a customer, so he approached with a smile merely.
The stranger had come to a halt before as fine a bit of workmanship in
plain leather as the store contained.
‘It ain’t hem-stitched,’ he began reflectively. ‘Thirty-eight pounds.’
‘Would you like to see it on the model?’ Elbert inquired.
The other didn’t seem to hear. ‘Now, what would you expect me to lay
out for a little tan kack like this?’ he asked.
‘Hundred-seventy-five,’ Elbert said throatily. ‘Would you like to look
at it on the model?’
‘No, it might confuse me a whole lot to see it on your dappled gray.
Anyway, I can see Buddy Pitcairn made her from here. I’m shore partial
about him monogram when I fork leather.’
A check was written with the remark: ‘You can ship her to me, care of
Mort Cotton’s ranch at San Forenso, Arizona, and take plenty of time
to look up this paper, young man. I never feel sure that the bank will
like it, when I write out money for myself.’
The easy, rapid writing hinted an intelligence in curious contrast
to the quaint speech and big loose hands, blackened and rounded to
tool handles. The name on the check was Robert Leadley, and that
was but the first of several calls which this customer made at the
leather-store, ostensibly for further purchases, but always lingering
to talk with Elbert. The latter had never known any one so easy to be
with, and one late afternoon at closing time, when Mr. Leadley, with
embarrassment, invited him to go out to supper, Elbert had been on the
point of asking the same thing. They stopped for a soft drink at an old
brown rail in Main Street.
‘I ’member when this was a great sportin’ place,’ Mr. Leadley said. ‘I
used to come in here from the mountains with gold in a little chamois
sack. Had a California claim in those days. I’m back in Arizona now,
not a great ways from where I began. When the time came for me to go
out this last trip, I felt like coming over to L.A., just like I used
to from these mountains. Why, I was in this very place one night when
a man was shot. Just yonder by that plate of hard-boiled eggs, he went
down, callin’ on a woman.’
‘I didn’t quite understand what you mean by “going out,”’ said Elbert,
not wanting to miss anything.
‘When you’ve got a claim in the mountains and you figure on leaving,
you designates it “going out.”’
‘Is it a gold mine?’
‘Well, by stretchin’ a trifle you might call her a gold mine--just a
little claim by myself. Southeast a ways and high up. You go to San
Forenso first. You can look back into California and down into Sonora
from my diggin’s.’
‘Do you have horses up at the mine?’ Elbert asked, thinking of the
Pitcairn stock-saddle.
The quaint laugh sounded. ‘Just a little vanity, young man. They do say
Bob Leadley would have his saddle-hoss, if he was runnin’ a canal boat.
I can’t seem to do proper without a bit of hoss-flesh handy, though
Mamie sure costs me no end money and trouble, not bein’ the sort of
hoss as can pick her livin’ off the north side o’ trees--’
He paused, as if pleased to recall the mare to mind in minutest detail.
‘Mamie’s father was the stake-hoss, Ganopol--one of the first ten
runners, they do say, and bone and blood to go with it, if not a whole
lot of hoss-sense essential. Mamie’s mother was just a cow hoss ...
just a cow hoss, with a little clock workin’ between her eyes--that
was Clara. Thirteen years, I had her, and we got real domesticated
together, you might say. Mamie’s a five-year-old now--just about
growed up--don’t resemble neither parent none, bein’ a jewel box by
herself, full of her own little knick-knacks.... Yep, bred right out
of the purple royalty on one hand and the black sage on the other, but
approachin’ my idea of saddle-hoss, plumb satisfyin’--
‘An’ p’raps it ain’t such a chore, as I’m makin’ out, to get hay and
grain up to the mine,’ Mr. Leadley added, ‘because once or twice a
year, Mort Cotton sends his mule train up from San Forenso to pack down
my ore. Takes just about a week’s work, three times a year, for a dozen
or fourteen mules; and ’stead of the train pilin’ back uptrail with
empty riggin’s, I stock up the cabin and the corral. Makes it easy, but
a whole lot of times, I don’t know where to put all I got--’
‘But what do you do with your mare when you leave the mine?’ Elbert
asked.
‘Leave her with Mort Cotton at his ranch in San Forenso. All hands have
got to know her at Mort’s.’
After supper they strolled back to the Plaza. The band began playing
‘La Paloma.’ Elbert started to speak, but Mr. Leadley’s hand tightened
on his knee for silence.
‘I’ve got reason to remember that piece,’ he said, when it was over.
‘The Mexicans never get tired of it. It’s like the Virgin speaking to
them. Do you know what that word means?’
‘Dove,’ said Elbert.
‘Correct. You must have studied the language?’
‘Only the last few weeks. I’d like to know more. It would come handy
in the leather-store. You know a lot about Mexico, don’t you?’
‘Not so much as I used to believe, young man, but I ain’t averse
to these people. I used to think I was, but as I look back now, I
’casionally catch myself wishin’ I’d treated them as well as they have
treated me. Just a curious feelin’ at times--’
It didn’t seem to be a deep matter to Mr. Leadley, his eyes were so
pleasant.
‘They’re peaceful to be with, like cattle,’ he went on. ‘I lived on a
farm back East when I was a boy, and my father and mother used to fight
a whole lot--at supper, especially. I ’member often goin’ out in the
barnyard, and how peaceful it was, after the supper table. I don’t mean
Mexicans are cattle, you understand, only that they loll around and
ruminate peaceful, like cattle.’
Elbert waited for more, and what came had a world of feeling in it that
he didn’t understand. It seemed the night was chillier, but the gentle
tone hadn’t changed.
‘We used to call ’em greasers and shoot ’em up a lot, not thinkin’ much
about it. We used to hang ’em for hoss-thieves, when a sheriff wanted
to make a showin’. Thought little more of ’em than a Chinee, only
diff’rent. Young punchers and miners--we thought we was the people--’
The voice stopped so suddenly Elbert felt queer.
‘You didn’t tell me, why you have reason to remember “La Paloma,”’ he
said, looking across at the red lights of ‘Estella Teatro.’
‘I’ve got a boy about your size, I figure, somewhere south in Sonora--’
The words fanned to life the romantic pictures of Elbert’s private
world--‘somewhere south in Sonora--’
‘He used to like that song--used to whistle and sing it at all times. A
dozen years since I saw him. He was under fifteen then--that would make
him about your age now. You’re pretty good size, but I think he’d show
up a speck taller by this time.’
‘What’s your son doing down there?’
‘Well, I only hear from him occasionally, through the papers. Must be
excitin’ work, having to do with the rurales, mostly. Some calls it
politics in Mexico.... Maybe they’ll play that again--if we sit down
for a spell.’
And now Elbert was hearing the story of a boy, called Bart--no
mother--life in a mining camp on the Rio Brava, Arizona--a sorry sort
of helpless attachment in the father.
‘The very night Bart came to town, before even the old Mexican nurse
let me in, I knew my job was cut out,’ Mr. Leadley said.
Sentences like these stood out in the midst of detail: