The Ox-Bow Incident (27 page)

The Mex did have a gun. At the first shout he just worked harder on the tie, but when Farnley shot and then two more shots came from off at the side, he yanked the horse around in front of him and shot back. In the shadow you could see the red jet of the gun. I heard the bullet whack into the cabin at the left of me. Everybody broke farther to the sides to get out of the light, and nobody was crowding in very fast. Farnley tried another shot and nicked the horse, which squealed and reared so the Mex lost him. The other horses were scared and wheeled and yanked at the tie ropes, and nobody could see the Mex to shoot again. He must have given up trying to get the horse, though, and made a break for it on foot, because Farnley, who was out in the edge of the woods quit creeping and stood up and shot again. Then he came back running and took the carbine away from the guard, and plunged back into the woods, yelling something as he went. Others fanned out into the woods too.

Then it was quiet for a few minutes, those of us who had stayed behind waiting to hear it happen. Finally it began, somewhere up on the mountain and over toward the road, not too far, from the loudness of the reports. There were
three short, flat shots in quick succession, then a deeper one that got an echo from some canyon up among the trees. Then it was quiet again, and we thought it was all over, when there were two more of the flat explosions and after a moment the deeper one again. Then it stayed quiet.

We were all nervous waiting, and nobody talked, just watched around the edge of the woods to see where they’d come out. The wait seemed so long that some of the men, who weren’t on guard, began edging cautiously into the woods to see what had happened.

Then we saw the others coming down again. Two of them had the Mex between them, but he wasn’t dead; he wasn’t even out. They carried him down into the light and set him on the log Martin had been sitting on. He was sweating, but not saying anything, and not moaning.

“Tie the others up again,” Tetley ordered.

“That must have been some fine shooting,” he said to Farnley. “Where’s he hit?”

Farnley flushed. “It was good enough,” he retorted. “It was dark in there; you couldn’t even see the barrel sometimes, let alone the sights.” Then he answered, “I hit him in the leg.”

“Saving him for the rope, eh?”

“No, I wasn’t. I wanted to kill the bastard bad enough. It was the slope that done it; it’s hard to tell shooting uphill.”

They were talking like it had been a target shoot, and the Mex right there.

One of the men who had gone in after Farnley came up to Tetley and handed him something. “That’s the gun he had,” he said, nodding at the Mex. It was a long, blue-barreled Colt six-shooter with an ivory grip. “It’s empty,” the man said, “he shot ’em all out, I guess.”

Farnley was looking at the gun in Tetley’s hand. He was staring at it. After a moment, without asking, he reached out and took it away from Tetley.

“Well,” he said, after turning it over in his own hands, “I
guess we know now, don’t we? If there was ever anything to wonder about, there ain’t now.”

Tetley watched him looking at the gun and waited for his explanation.

“It’s Larry’s gun,” Farnley said. “Look,” he said to the rest of us, and pointed to the butt and gave it to us to look at. Kinkaid’s name, all of it, Laurence Liam Kinkaid, was inlaid in tiny letters of gold in the ivory of the butt.

Tetley recovered the gun and took it over and held it for the Mex to see.

“Where did you get this?” he asked. His tone proved he would take only one answer. Sweating from his wound, the Mex grinned at him savagely.

“If somebody will take this bullet out of my leg, I will tell you,” he said.

“God, he talks American,” Ma said.

“And ten other languages,” said the Mex, “but I don’t tell anything I don’t want to in any of them. My leg, please. I desire I may stand upright when you come to your pleasure.”

“What’s a slug or two to you now?” Farnley asked.

“If he wants it out, let him have it out,” Moore said, “there’s time.”

The Mex looked around at us all with that angry grin. “If somebody will lend me the knife, I will take it out myself.”

“Don’t give him no knife,” Bartlett said. “He can throw a knife better than most men can shoot.”

“Better than these men, it is true,” said the Mex. “But if you are afraid, then I solemnly give my promise I will not throw the knife. When I am done, then quietly I will give the knife back to its owner, with the handle first.”

Surprisingly, young Tetley volunteered to remove the slug. His face was white, his voice smothered when he said it, but his eyes were bright. In his own mind he was championing his cause still, in the only way left. He felt that
doing this, which would be difficult for him, must somehow count in the good score. He crossed to the Mex and knelt beside him, but when he took the knife one of the men offered him, his hand was shaking so he couldn’t even start. He put up a hand, as if to clear his eyes, and the Mex took the knife away from him. Farnley quickly turned the carbine on the Mex, but he didn’t pay any attention. He made a quick slash through his chaps from the thigh to the boot top. His leg, inside, was muscular and thick and hairless as an Indian’s. Just over the knee there was the bullet hole, ragged and dark, but small; dark tendrils of blood had dried down from it, not a great deal of blood. Young Tetley saw it close to his face, and got up drunkenly and moved away, his face bloodless. The Mex grinned after him.

“The little man is polite,” he commented, “but without the stomach for the blood, eh?”

Then he said, while he was feeling from the wound along his leg up to the thigh, “Will someone please to make the fire better? The light is not enough.”

Tetley ordered them to throw on more wood. He didn’t look to see them do it. He was watching Gerald stagger out toward the dark in the edge of the woods to be sick.

When the fire had blazed up the Mex turned to present his thigh to the light, and went to work. Everybody watched him; it’s hard not to watch a thing like that, though you don’t want to. The Mex opened the mouth of the wound so it began to bleed again, freely, but then again he traced with his fingers up his thigh. He set his jaw, and high on the thigh made a new incision. His grin froze so it looked more like showing his teeth, and the sweat beads popped out on his forehead. He rested a moment when the first cut had been made, and was bleeding worse than the other.

“That is very bad shooting,” he said. He panted from the pain.

Nonetheless, when he began to work again he hummed
a Mexican dance tune through his teeth. He halted the song only once, when something he did with the point of the knife made his leg straighten involuntarily, and made him grunt in spite of himself. After that his own hand trembled badly, but he took a breath and began to dig and sweat and hum again. It got so I couldn’t watch it either. I turned and looked for young Tetley instead, and saw him standing by a tree, leaning on it with one hand, his back to the fire. His father was watching him too.

There was a murmur, and I looked back, and the Mex had the bloody slug out and was holding it up for us to look at. When we had seen it he tossed it to Farnley.

“You should try again with that one,” he said.

Sparks brought some hot water to the Mex, and after propping the knife so the blade was in the coals, he began washing out the two wounds with a purple silk handkerchief he’d had around his neck. He took care of himself as carefully as if he still had a lifetime to go. Then, when the knife blade was hot enough, he drew it out of the fire and clapped it right against the wounds, one after the other. Each time his body stiffened, the muscles of his jaw and the veins of his neck protruded, and the sweat broke out over his face, but still he drew the knife away from the thigh wound slowly, as if it pleased him to take his time. He asked for some of the fat from the steaks, rubbed the grease over the burned cuts, and bound them with the purple kerchief and another from his pocket. Then he lit a cigarette and took it easy.

After inhaling twice, long and slow, he picked up the knife he’d used and tossed it over in front of the man who had lent it. He tossed it so it spun in the air and struck the ground point first with a chuck sound, and dug in halfway to the hilt. It struck within an inch of where the man’s boot had been, but he’d drawn off quickly when he saw it coming. The Mex grinned at him.

Martin and old Hardwick were bound again. Tetley
told them they needn’t tie the Mex, he wouldn’t go far for a while. The Mex thanked him, grinning through the smoke of his cigarette.

But when Tetley began to question him about the gun, all he’d say was that he’d found it; that it was lying right beside the road, and he’d brought it along, thinking to meet somebody he could send it back with. When Tetley called him a liar, and repeated the questions, the Mex at first just said the same thing, and then suddenly became angry and stubborn-looking, called Tetley a blind fool, lit another cigarette, and said no sabbey as he had at first. Martin told the same story about the gun, that they’d found it lying by the west lane when they came out from Drew’s place, that all the cartridges had been in it, that he’d told the Mex to leave it because it was too far back to the ranch to take, but that the Mex had thought they might meet somebody who could return it. There wasn’t anything else to be had out of either of them.

The Mexican’s courage, and even, in a way, young Martin’s pride in the matter of the letter, had won them much sympathy, and I think we all believed now that the old man was really a pitiful fool, but whatever we thought, there was an almost universal determination to finish the job now. The gun was a clincher with us.

All but Davies. Davies was trying to get other men to read the letter. He maintained stronger than ever that young Martin was innocent, that Martin was not the kind of a man who could either steal or kill. He worked on those of us who had shown some sympathy with his ideas before. He tried hard not to let Tetley notice what he was doing, to stand naturally when he talked, and not to appear too earnest to a person who couldn’t hear him. But he didn’t make much headway. Most of the men had made up their minds, or felt that the rest had and that their own sympathy was reprehensible and should be concealed. That was the way I felt. None of us would look at the letter. When he came to us, telling us to read the letter, Gil said, “I don’t
want to read the letter. It’s none of my business. You heard the kid; you ought to remember if anybody does.”

“Do you suppose it matters to his wife who sees this letter?” Davies said. “In her place which would you rather have, a live husband with some of his secrets with you revealed, or a dead husband and all your secrets still?

“I don’t like to pry any more than you do,” he insisted, “but you can’t put a life against a scruple. I tell you, if you’ll read this letter you’ll know he couldn’t have done it; not any of it. And if the letter’s a fake we have only to wait to know, don’t we?”

It wasn’t long until daylight, and the men hadn’t really settled down again, but were moving around in groups, talking and smoking. Still, I thought Tetley was watching us.

“That must be some letter,” Gil was saying.

Davies held it out to him. “Read it,” he pleaded.

“You get Martin to ask me to read it and I will,” Gil told him, grinning.

“Then you read it,” Davies said, turning to me. Gil was watching me, still grinning.

“No,” I said, “I’d rather not.” I was curious to read that letter, but I couldn’t, there, like that.

Davies stood and looked from one to the other of us, despairingly.

“Do you want that kid to hang?” he asked finally.

“You can’t change rustlin’ and murder,” Gil said.

“Never mind that,” Davies said. “Don’t think about anything but the way you really feel about it. Do you feel that you’d like to have that kid hanged; any of them, for that matter?”

“My feelings haven’t got anything to do with it,” Gil said.

Davies began to argue to show us that feelings did; that they were the real guide in a thing like this, when Tetley called out to him by name. Everyone looked at Tetley and Davies, and stopped moving around or talking.

“Don’t you know a trick when you see one, Davies?” Tetley asked him, for all of us to hear. “Or are you in on this?”

Davies retorted that he knew a trick as well as the next man, and that Tetley himself knew that this wasn’t any trick; yes, and that Tetley knew he’d had no part in any such games himself. He was defiant, and stated again, defiantly, his faith in the innocence of the three men. But he talked hurriedly, defensively, and finally stopped of his own accord at a point that was not a conclusion. Whatever else was weakening him, I believe he felt all the time that it was ugly to talk so before the men themselves, that his own defense sounded no prettier there than Tetley’s side. Then too, he had little support, and he knew it. He knew it so well that, when he had faltered to silence, and Tetley asked him, “Are you alone in this, Davies?” he said nothing.

“I think we’d better get this settled,” Tetley said. “We must act as a unit in a job like this. Then we need fear no mistaken reprisal. Are you content to abide by a majority decision, Davies?”

Davies looked him in the face, but even that seemed to be an effort. He wouldn’t say anything.

“How about the rest of you men?” Tetley asked, “Majority rule?”

There were sounds of assent. Nobody spoke out against it.

“It has to,” Ma said. “Among a bunch of pigheads like this you’d never get everybody to agree to anything.”

“We’ll vote,” Tetley said. “Everybody who is with Mr. Davies for putting this thing off and turning it over to the courts, step out here.” He pointed to a space among us on the south side of the fire.

Davies walked out there and stood. Nobody else came for a moment, and he flushed when Tetley smiled at him. Then Sparks shambled out too, but smiling apologetically. Then Gerald Tetley joined them. His fists were clenched as he felt the watching, and saw his father’s sardonic smile
disappear slowly until his face was a stern mask. There was further movement, and some muttering, as Carl Bartlett and Moore stood out with them also. No more came.