The Ox-Bow Incident (16 page)

I asked him, “Still aiming to cure us?” and he shook his head and smiled.

“I guess not,” he said.

Davies and I were riding last, and up ahead we could see the whole cavalcade strung out by ones and twos. Right ahead of us was Sparks, slowly singing something about Jordan to himself. We could hear sad bits of it now and then in the wind. He looked queer, elongated and hunched, saddleless astride that tall old mare with joints that projected like a cow’s. His pants had inched up on him and showed his brown shanks like dark bones going down without socks into big, flat shoes that bobbed of their own weight when the mare jogged.

Ahead of him young Tetley and the Mex were riding together, Tetley silent and not looking around, Amigo pleased with himself, talking a lot and illustrating with his bridle hand while he rolled a cigarette against his chaps with the other. When he had lit the cigarette he talked with the hand that held it. The smell of his heavy Mex tobacco, stronger than a cigar, was still hot when it got to us. His horse, a red and white pinto, like Gil’s but smaller and neater, had to take two steps to every one of Tetley’s horse, a long-legged, stable-bred black that picked each foot up with a flick, as if he wanted to dance.

We counted twenty-eight of us in all, with a little bunch riding separately up at the head, Tetley, Mapes, Farnley, Winder, Bartlett and Ma, with Gabe and Smith not far behind them.

Old Pete Snyder’s board shack with one window and one door, set well out by itself on a high spot among the tules, was the last place west of town. There was smoke coming out of its tin chimney with a conical cap, but Pete’s horse, with a saddle on, was baiting on the west side of the shack, and Pete himself was sitting on the step, his big, bare arms hanging over his knees, and his short pipe nestled down in his gray club beard. Pete raised a hand to us as if he didn’t care and found it a foolish effort. Pete had had a wife once, but not since he’d lived here, and he’d been alone so long he’d got to thinking differently from the rest
of us. It’s queer how clearly I remember the way Pete just sat there and let us go. To see him just sit and go on with his own thoughts, made me understand for the first time what we were really going to do, so my breath and blood came quicker for a minute.

Beyond Pete’s we opened out into a lope. The horses, after so much standing and fidgeting, were too willing, and kept straining to gallop, moving up on each other until the riders had to pull them to escape the mud and clods of soggy turf they were throwing. Blue Boy was nervy from being with all those other horses, but tired too, from roundup and two days of riding, with a lot of climbing. He kept slipping and coming out of it stiff-legged and snorting, but then wanting to lay out again. Others were having trouble too, and we pulled to the jog again, and held it, all the hoofs trampling squilch-squelch, squilch-squelch, and little clods popping gently out to the side and rolling toward the water. The blackbirds, usually noisy this time of day, were just taking short flights among the reeds, and out farther, in the meadows, the cattle weren’t feeding, but moving restlessly in small bunches, and the grass they were plowing through was flattened by the wind. I looked for a meadow lark. Usually about sunset you can see them playing, leaping up and fluttering for a moment, and then dropping again, suddenly, as if they’d been hit; then, after they’re down again, that singing will come to you, thin and sweet, chink-chink-a-link. But there was too much wind. Probably all over the big meadow they were down flat in the grass and ruffled. They could feel the storm coming too. Ahead of us the shadowy mountains, stippled all over by their sparse pelt of trees, and piebald with lingering snow, loomed up higher than they were, right against the moving sky.

“It’ll be dark before we’re out of the pass,” I said to Davies.

He looked up at the mountains and at the clouds and nodded. “Snow too,” he said. We didn’t say anything more.
That was enough to show I wasn’t unfriendly. He was thick with the same feeling of mortality I had, I guess. We were all feeling it some, out in the great spread of the valley, under the growing mountains, under the storm coming. Even Amigo wasn’t talking any more, and had quit trying to smoke in that wind.

We rode that way across half the valley until, right under a steep foothill, we came to the fork where the road bent right to go into the draw, and the west lane from Drew’s came into it.

There, while the rest of us jockeyed in a half circle, waiting and watching him, Tetley rode a ways into the lane and pulled up and sat there like he was carefully looking over a field to be fought. Mapes stopped beside him, Ma and Winder behind him. Tetley and Mapes said a few words together; then Mapes got off his horse, and drawing it on the bridle after him, went slowly down one side of the lane, looking down at the lane and at the spongy grass beside it. This lane was even less of a track than the one across the valley. On the valley side of it, perhaps fifty yards down, was the creek winding south, with willows, aspens and alders forming a screen along it; here and there a big, half-leafed cottonwood rose above this serpent of brush. On the other side, quite close in places, began the pine forest of the mountain. Through the trees, black in the shadow, showed patches of snow which hadn’t melted yet. The forest rose steeply from there, and when you could no longer see the shape of the mountain leaning away from you, you could feel it rolling on up much higher. On the east side of the valley the tops of the mountains had disappeared above the plane of cloud.

Amigo was saying, in a clear, explanatory voice, “Eet was thees branding, si. What for you theenk I have the eyes, not to know heem; like thees,” and he held up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the second finger curved out and touching the forefinger at the nail, and placed a finger of his left hand across the space between
the thumb and forefinger of the right. This made a fair figure of Drew’s joined H brand. “I theenk I not mees heem,” he said contemptuously, and spit and started to roll a cigarette to make his hands feel natural again. The mountain cut off the wind there.

“Look,” he said, pointing while he licked the cigarette, “he have made beeg track all the way, like the army.” He seemed to feel this halt was to test his word. He talked to Gil because Gil was beside him, but he didn’t care who heard.

He was right enough about the tracks; you didn’t have to ride out and scout to see them. The lane was churned with the sharp marks, fresh, the new grass crushed down into the mud still.

Mapes went about thirty or forty yards, then crossed the lane and came back up the other side in the same way. When he got back to Tetley he said something and mounted. Tetley nodded. I could guess he was smiling his I-knew-it-all-the-time smile. They rode back to us and Tetley said, “Amigo’s right. They’re fresh tracks, the first made this spring. We can’t tell how many head, of course …”

“Forty,” Amigo said, looking around at us.

“Possibly,” Tetley said. “There were three riders. They left tracks going both ways.” We nodded like that settled it.

Tetley rode around us to get ahead again. Mapes and Ma Grier and Winder followed him, and Gabe Hart. Farnley had ridden farther up the main road and waited alone, watching, below him, Tetley and Mapes playing field officers, but he let them pass him now, and turned in with the rest of us. I was nearer the middle of the bunch now, and when we strung out I was riding with young Tetley.

In the shadow under the mountain we felt hurried because of the lateness. We stepped up to the jog again until we came around the bend where the pass opened above us. There the road began to climb stiffly from the start and we had to walk. The soft lane of the meadow turned into a mountain track, hard and bouldery, with loose gravel and
deep ruts made by the water, but already dry. The horses clicked and stumbled, climbing with a clear, slow, choppy rhythm. Where, at the side of the road, it was still muddy from seepage, the mud was already stiffening for the night.

Behind us Sparks began one of his hymns; it came in lonely fragments through the sounds of the horses and the rushing of the creek below us on the right. When I first heard him, I saw too that young Tetley shivered and bent a little, drawing his shoulders together. But that might have been only the wind. It sucked rapidly and heavily down this draw.

I looked back at Sparks. No one was riding with him, and he was grasping his horse’s shoulders and gripping the barrel with his long legs to keep from sliding back off. But he didn’t know he was having so much trouble; he was thinking about something else. Behind him were Davies, the two Bartlett boys, Moore and Gil riding together, and two men I didn’t know, except that one of them had been playing poker at the back table in Canby’s. I believe I looked back to keep from looking too much at young Tetley. But I looked at him again. He was riding easily, but too slumped for a cowboy. He was a thin, very young-looking fellow. In this light his face was a pale daub with big shadows for eyes. His black hair came out over his shirt collar in the back. I’d noticed before, in better light, how heavy and shining it was, as if oiled. He looked lonely and unhappy. I knew he didn’t know me.

“Cold wind,” I began.

He looked at me as if I’d said something important.

Then he said, “It’s more than wind,” and stared ahead of him again.

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t get his drift, but if he wanted to talk, “maybe” shouldn’t stop him.

“It’s a lot more,” he said, as if I’d contradicted him. “You can’t go hunting men like coyotes after rabbits and not feel anything about it. Not without being like any other animal. The worst animal.”

“There’s a difference; we have reasons.”

“Names for the same thing,” he said sharply. “Does that make us any better? Worse, I’d say. At least coyotes don’t make excuses. We think we can see something better, but we go on doing the same things, hunt in packs like wolves; hole up in warrens like rabbits. All the dirtiest traits.”

“There’s still a difference,” I said. “We’ve got it over wolves and rabbits.”

“Power, you mean,” he said bitterly.

“Over your wolves, and bears too.”

“Oh, we’re smart,” he said, the same way. “It’s the same thing,” he cried; “all we use it for is power. Yes, we’ve got them scared all right, all of them, except the tame things we’ve taken the souls out of. We’re the cocks of the dung-heap, all right; the bullies of the globe.”

“We’re not hunting rabbits tonight,” I reminded him.

“No; our own kind. A wolf wouldn’t do that; not a mangy coyote. That’s the hunting we like now, our own kind. The rest can’t excite us any more.”

“We don’t have to hunt men often,” I told him. “Most people never have. They get along pretty well together.”

“Oh, we love each other,” he said. “We labor for each other, suffer for each other, admire each other. We have all the pack instincts, all right, and nice names for them.”

“All right,” I said, “what’s the harm in their being pack instincts, if you want to put it that way? They’re real.”

“They’re not. They’re just to keep the pack with us. We don’t dare hunt each other alone, that’s all. There’s more ways of hunting than with a gun,” he added.

He’d jumped too far for me on that one. I didn’t say anything.

“Think I’m stretching it, do you?” he asked furiously. “Well, I’m not. It’s too nice a way of putting it, if anything. All any of us really want any more is power. We’d buck the pack if we dared. We don’t, so we use it; we trick it to help us in our own little killings. We’ve mastered the horses and cattle. Now we want to master each other, make cattle of
men. Kill them to feed ourselves. The smaller the pack the more we get.”

“Most of life’s pretty simple and quiet,” I said. “You talk like we all had knives out.”

“Your simple life,” he said. “Your quiet life. All right,” he said, “take the simplest, quietest life you know. Take the things that are going on around us all the time, so we don’t notice them any more than old furniture. Take women visiting together, next-door neighbors, old friends. What do they talk about? Each other, all the time, don’t they? And what are the parts they like, the ones they remember and bring home to tell to the men?”

“I don’t know anything about women,” I said.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “You know anyway. Gossip, scandalous gossip, that’s what wakes them up, makes them talk faster and all together, or secretively, as if they were stalking enemies in their minds; something about a woman they know, something that can spoil her reputation: the way she was seen to look at a certain man, or that she can’t cook, or doesn’t keep her parlor clean, or can’t have children, or, worse, could but won’t. That’s what wakes them up. And do you know why?” He turned the white shape of his face toward me sharply.

I didn’t like the way the talk was getting to sound like a quarrel. I tried to ease it off.

“No,” I said. “Why?” as if I was really curious.

“Because it makes them feel superior; makes them feel they’re the wolves, not the rabbits. If each of them had it the way she wants it,” he said after a moment, “she’d be the only woman left in the world. They can’t manage that, so they do the best they can toward it.”

“People can be pretty mean sometimes,” I admitted, “picking on the weak ones.” It was no good.

“It’s not always the weak ones,” he said angrily. “They’re worse than wolves, I tell you. They don’t weed out the unfit, they weed out the best. They band together to keep the best down, the ones who won’t share their dirty gossip,
the ones who have more beauty or charm or independence, more anything, than they have. They did it right there in Bridger’s Wells this spring,” he blazed.

“How was that?” I asked, remembering what Canby had said about Rose Mapen.

“They drove a girl out. Made a whore of her with talk.”

“Why? what did she do?”

“Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you. You know what they had against her? You know what was her intolerable sin against the female pack?”

“How would I know?”

“She was better looking than any of them, and men liked her.”