The Ox-Bow Incident (13 page)

Gabe stared back at Smith, but sat solid and appeared unmoved. He muttered something that nobody could hear.

“What’s that you said, Gabe?” Smith prodded him.

Gabe got it out. “I said I ain’t waitin’ on no nigger,” he said.

“Shut up, Smith,” Winder said, before Smith could make anything of this.

Smith got red, which was remarkable for him, since he could swallow almost any insult, but with Winder staring at him he couldn’t think of a retort.

“It’s all right, Mistah Windah,” Sparks said, “but if they is a mule at yoh place ah could borrow, ah’d be obliged. Ah can get him mahself, if thayas tahm.”

“They’re kidding you, Sparks,” Canby said from the door. He liked the nigger.

“Ah know that, Mistah Canby,” Sparks said, grinning again. “But ah think maybe Mistah Smith was accidentally right when he said ah should go.”

“You really want to go?” Winder asked him.

“Yessuh, Mistah Windah, ah do.”

Winder studied him, then shrugged and said, “There’s a horse in the shed you can use. There’s no saddle, but he’s got a head-stall on, and there’s a rope in the back stall you can use for a bridle.

“You’ll have to get him yourself, though. You know how Gabe is,” he apologized.

Gabe continued to stare heavily at Smith, but he didn’t seem to hold anything against Sparks.

“Yassuh, ah undahstand,” Sparks said, and turned to go. Winder felt he’d been too soft.

“Move along, or you’ll get left,” he said. “We’re only waiting for Mr. Bartlett and his boys.”

Sparks turned his head back, and grinned and nodded, and then went on down the street toward the stage depot, walking quickly for him. You could tell by his carriage that he was pleased in the way of a man doing what he ought to do.

Smith had missed being funny, and Sparks had given a kind of body, which the men could recognize, to an ideal which Davies’ argument hadn’t made clear and Osgood’s self-doubt had even clouded. I thought it would be a good time for Davies to tackle them again, and looked at him. He saw the chance too, but found it hard to get started in the open, with all those men, and waited too long. A rider
called out, “Here comes Ma,” and there was as much of a cheering sound as they felt presently fitting, to greet her. Here was a person could head them up.

Ma was up the street quite a ways when they hailed her, but she waved at them, a big, cheerful, unworried gesture. It made me feel good, too, just to see Ma and the way she waved. She was riding, and was dressed like a man, in jeans and a shirt and vest, with a blue bandanna around her neck and an old sombrero on her head. She had a Winchester across her saddle, and after she waved she held it up, and then held part way up, as far as the tie would let it, a coil of rope she had hitched to the flap of the saddle. There was another cheer, stronger than the first, and jokes about Ma and her power that showed how much better the men were feeling. She changed the whole attitude in two moves, and from a quarter mile off.

Jenny Grier was the name of the woman we called Ma. She was middle-aged and massive, with huge, cushiony breasts and rump, great thighs and shoulders, and long, always unkempt, gray hair. Her wide face had fine big gray eyes in it, but was fat and folded, and she always appeared soiled and greasy. She was strong as a wrestler, probably stronger than any man in the valley except Gabe, and with that and her appearance, if it hadn’t been for the loud good nature she showed most of the time, people would have been afraid of her. All the women were, anyway, and hated her too, which was all right with her. There were lively, and some pretty terrible, stories about her past, but now she kept a kind of boarding house on the cross street, and it was always in surprisingly good order, considering how dirty she was about herself. She was a peculiar mixture of hard-set ideas too. Though mostly by jokes, she’d been dead set against Osgood from the first day he came. She had no use for churches and preaching, and she’d made it hard for him by starting all kinds of little tales, like her favorite one about being surprised at how hungry she was when she woke up after the only sermon of his she ever heard, only
to find that was because he’d gone right on through and it was the second Sunday, and he hadn’t wound up his argument then, but his voice gave out. And she could imitate him too, his way of talking, his nervous habits with his hands, his Gladstone pose. She always pretended to be friendly, in a hearty way, when she saw him, and the man was afraid of her. But on the other hand she was a lot more than ordinarily set against what she thought was wrongdoing. I missed my guess if she hadn’t had a part in driving Gil’s Rose out of town. She didn’t like women, wouldn’t have one in her house, not even for one night’s sleep. In ways, I think she was crazy, and that all her hates and loves came out of thinking too much about her own past. Sometimes I even wondered if the way she mistreated her own body, with dirt and more work than she needed to do and long hunts and rides she didn’t want to make and not much rest or sleep, when about everything else she was a great joker and clean and orderly, wasn’t all part of getting even with herself, a self-imposed penance. The other side of that, I thought, was another little trait. She was fond to foolishness of mountains and snow, just of looking at them, but of going up in them too, though snow-shoeing nearly killed her with her weight. She said she’d settled in Bridger’s just to look at mountains; that they brought out what little was good in her. Most of the time, though, she was big and easy, and she had the authority of a person who knew her own mind and was past caring what anybody else thought about anything, and a way of talking to us in our own language so we’d laugh and still listen, the style Judge Tyler would like to have had.

I knew that, at least until she had seen the victims in the flesh, she’d be as much for lynching a rustler as Winder or Bartlett. The only thing that made me wonder how she’d turn was that she liked Davies quite as much as she didn’t like Osgood. She wasn’t given to thinking very far, but she did a lot of intelligent feeling.

She was greeted right and left when she joined us, and
she spoke to Gil and me with the others, calling me “boy” as she had when I’d stayed at her place, and we stood a lot better with the rest just on that. Then she started asking questions, and they told her what they knew, which she saw right off, from the different versions, wasn’t straight. She set out to straighten it. It wasn’t that she was trying to be boss. She simply wanted things in order in her mind when she had anything to do, and in putting them in order she just naturally took over. When some of them were all for starting without Bartlett she checked that. When they told her about Davies she just looked down at him standing on the walk and grinned and asked him if he wasn’t going. Davies said he was if they went right, if anybody really needed to go. Ma looked at him, not grinning now, and he explained that Risley was already down at Drew’s, and that Drew had a dozen men down there, and that he thought it would be just good sense not to go unless we were sent for, sent for by Risley, who would really know what was going on. There was muttering around him at that. I was surprised myself. So that was why he’d thought that little fact could do a lot; he believed he could use it to stop them from going at all.

Ma said, “Art, you read too many books,” to him, and began to dig into young Greene, calling him son, and acting as if what he thought was just as important as what he knew. At that she boiled it down better than anybody else had. Kinkaid had been killed way down in the southwest corner of the valley, eight miles below the ranch. They didn’t know just when, but it must have been noon or earlier, because a couple of the riders had picked up his horse clear over by the ranch road, and at about two o’clock had found Kinkaid lying on his back in the sun in a dry wash over under the mountains. Greene didn’t know if there were any more cattle gone; they hadn’t been able to distinguish the rustlers’ tracks. Too many cattle had been working over the range there, and there were still a lot of horses’ prints from the roundup. She kept him toned down except
on that one thing, that Kinkaid had been shot through the head. That was the one thing he seemed to have clear without question. He had kept on saying that to the men too. It impressed him that Kinkaid had been shot through the head, as if he could feel it more, as if he would have felt better if Kinkaid had been shot in the belly or in the back, or anywhere but in the head. When Ma asked him, he admitted that he hadn’t seen Kinkaid, but that the man who told him had. No, he hadn’t seen the sheriff down there; it must have been three o’clock before they sent him to Bridger’s and he hadn’t seen the sheriff all day.

Ma said to Davies, “I guess we’re goin’, Art; as quick as Bartlett gets here.”

Somebody said, “He’s comin’ now.”

The men who weren’t mounted climbed up, Gil and I with them. Only Davies and Osgood and Joyce were left standing on the walk, and Canby on the steps. Sparks was back too, on an old and sick-looking horse with a wheat sack for a saddle.

Davies said to Ma, “At least wait for Judge Tyler. He’s coming. I sent word for him.” He sounded stubborn and defeated now, nearly as bad as Osgood. Riders looked at him contemptuously, and some started to tell him off, but Ma made them grin at him instead.

“Art, you’re gettin’ worse every day,” she said. “First you let the reverend there give you prayin’ faith, and then you let Tyler argue you into drummin’ up business for him. It’s them books, Art, them books. You better lay off them.”

And then, “Not the reverend and you
and
Tyler. I couldn’t stand it, Art. I’m only a woman, and I’m gettin’ on toward my time.” The men laughed.

Bartlett came up at a lope, his son Carl, the blond one, with him. The other one, Nate, was dark, but that was the only difference between them. They were both tall, thin, silent and mean. I wondered if Nate had got too drunk to sit in a saddle, the way he did, and they’d had to leave him.
Carl stayed behind his father, away from the men, and after the first glance didn’t look at them.

“Carl was riding,” Bartlett explained. “We had to get him in.”

“Tetley not here?” he asked, looking around. And then, louder, “We’ll have to wait for Tetley. Nate’s gone for him.”

“What do we need with God-Almighty-Tetley,” Winder said. But he didn’t say it loudly; if I hadn’t been right next to him, I wouldn’t have heard it at all. All the men were uneasy, but not loud. They were irritated at the further delay, but they were quiet about it, nearly sullen. It was news if Tetley was coming. It would make a difference; even Ma was afraid of Tetley.

Excepting Drew, Tetley was the biggest man in the valley, and he’d been there a lot longer than Drew, the first big rancher in the valley, coming there the year after the Civil War. On the west edge of town he’d built a white, wooden mansion, with pillars like a Southern plantation home, and big grounds around it, fenced with white picket fence. The lawns were always cut, and there were shrubbery and flower beds, a stone fountain where birds drank, and benches set about under the trees. Tetley was like his house, quiet and fenced away; something we never felt natural with, but didn’t deride either. Except for the servants, he had only his son Gerald living with him now, and they didn’t get on. Tetley had been a Confederate cavalry officer, and the son of a slave owner, and he had that kind of a code, and a sharp, quiet head for management. Gerald was always half sick, kept to himself and the big library as much as his father would let him, hated the ranching life and despised yet feared the kind of men Tetley had to deal with now. Things had been better between them before Mrs. Tetley had died; she had acted as a go-between, and even as a shield for Gerald, and had been such a charming little thing herself, beautiful, intense and cheerful, yet gentle, that nothing could be very unpleasant around her.

But when she died each of them had become only more what he was. People who had been there said the house was like it never had the dustcovers off the furniture now, and Tetley, though he wouldn’t tolerate a word about the boy from anyone else, was himself ashamed of him, and a hard master. Sparks, who worked there quite often, had said once, when he was more off his guard than usual, that he had seen things between them that made him sure Tetley would have killed the boy if he hadn’t looked so much like his mother. He did, too, as much as a sullen, sick boy can look like a woman with all her spirit and knack for being happy.

It looked like Bartlett thought he had talked himself into something when he had to get Tetley. I knew that if Tetley came he’d take over. Wherever he came things always quieted down, and nothing sounded important except what Tetley had to say. Partly, I think, that was because nothing else seemed important to Tetley either. A man so sure of himself can always sound important if he isn’t a windbag, and Tetley was no windbag. He didn’t talk often, and usually it was short then. When you happened to meet him on the street, which was seldom, he would only nod, and nobody ever started a talk with him. It wasn’t that he was impolite or superior acting either. He had more real manner than any other man in the valley, or than any I’d ever met. You just couldn’t get close to him. I don’t think it would have mattered who you were.

The word that Tetley was coming gave Davies a little more time, if that could do him any good now, but it looked to me like a reprieve for a man that knew he had to swing at the end of it, anyway. Tetley wouldn’t be coming to do Bartlett a favor, and if he objected to the lynching on principle, which wasn’t likely, he still wouldn’t be coming down himself to stop it. There was only one reason that I could see for Tetley’s interest, that he wanted that lynching.

Davies must have figured the same way, but he was still
going to make a try. I saw him talking hard and quickly to Joyce again, and then Joyce, looking more frightened than ever, went off down the street at a run, and Davies went out, keeping it casual, to talk to Bartlett. Bartlett wasn’t so wild any more, just touchy, the way a man is who feels strongly about something, but is a muddy thinker. He answered a bit short, but didn’t blow off. He kept looking at his watch, a big silver turnip, and then at the sky, and only paid a fretful half-attention to Davies. Davies knew better than to argue the soul of society with Bartlett, and even held out on his notion of the men not going at all, and just stuck to legal deputation and trying to get a promise Bartlett wouldn’t act without Risley. And he stayed friendly while he made his points, always seeming to be making just suggestions, and asking Bartlett’s opinion, and Ma’s, and even Winder’s. The men let him talk because they had to wait, anyhow, though I noticed a few, close to him, seemed to be listening. Bartlett, though, wouldn’t hear more than once about bringing prisoners in. Short justice was the kind he wanted. And Ma kept taking the point out of Davies’ talk by making jokes. He hadn’t got anywhere when the Judge and Mapes appeared, the Judge, by the way his free hand was waving, still arguing it hot and heavy with Mapes, who wasn’t even answering now.