The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
WELL. You’ve got to deal cyards WELL; you’ve got to steal WELL; and if
you claim to be quick with your gun, you must be quick, for you’re a
public temptation, and some man will not resist trying to prove he is
the quicker. You must break all the Commandments WELL in this Western
country, and Shorty should have stayed in Brooklyn, for he will be a
novice his livelong days. You don’t know about him? He has told me his
circumstances. He don’t remember his father, and it was like he could
have claimed three or four. And I expect his mother was not much
interested in him before or after he was born. He ran around, and when
he was eighteen he got to be help to a grocery man. But a girl he ran
with kept taking all his pay and teasing him for more, and so one day
the grocery man caught Shorty robbing his till, and fired him. There
wasn’t no one to tell good-by to, for the girl had to go to the country
to see her aunt, she said. So Shorty hung around the store and kissed
the grocery cat good-by. He’d been used to feeding the cat, and she’d
sit in his lap and purr, he told me. He sends money back to that girl
now. This hyeh country is no country for Shorty, for he will be a
conspicuous novice all his days.”
“Perhaps he’ll prefer honesty after his narrow shave,” I said.
But the Virginian shook his head. “Trampas has got hold of him.”
The day was now all blue above, and all warm and dry beneath. We had
begun to wind in and rise among the first slopes of the foot-hills, and
we had talked ourselves into silence. At the first running water we made
a long nooning, and I slept on the bare ground. My body was lodged so
fast and deep in slumber that when the Virginian shook me awake I could
not come back to life at once; it was the clump of cottonwoods, small
and far out in the plain below us, that recalled me.
“It’ll not be watching us much longer,” said the Virginian. He made it
a sort of joke; but I knew that both of us were glad when presently we
rode into a steeper country, and among its folds and carvings lost all
sight of the plain. He had not slept, I found. His explanation was that
the packs needed better balancing, and after that he had gone up and
down the stream on the chance of trout. But his haunted eyes gave me the
real reason--they spoke of Steve, no matter what he spoke of; it was to
be no short thing with him.
XXXII. SUPERSTITION TRAIL
We did not make thirty-five miles that day, nor yet twenty-five, for
he had let me sleep. We made an early camp and tried some unsuccessful
fishing, over which he was cheerful, promising trout to-morrow when we
should be higher among the mountains. He never again touched or came
near the subject that was on his mind, but while I sat writing my diary,
he went off to his horse Monte, and I could hear that he occasionally
talked to that friend.
Next day we swung southward from what is known to many as the Conant
trail, and headed for that short cut through the Tetons which is known
to but a few. Bitch Creek was the name of the stream we now followed,
and here there was such good fishing that we idled; and the horses and
I at least enjoyed ourselves. For they found fresh pastures and shade in
the now plentiful woods; and the mountain odors and the mountain heights
were enough for me when the fish refused to rise. This road of ours now
became the road which the pursuit had taken before the capture. Going
along, I noticed the footprints of many hoofs, rain-blurred but recent,
and these were the tracks of the people I had met in the stable.
“You can notice Monte’s,” said the Virginian. “He is the only one that
has his hind feet shod. There’s several trails from this point down to
where we have come from.”
We mounted now over a long slant of rock, smooth and of wide extent.
Above us it went up easily into a little side canyon, but ahead, where
our way was, it grew so steep that we got off and led our horses.
This brought us to the next higher level of the mountain, a space of
sagebrush more open, where the rain-washed tracks appeared again in the
softer ground.
“Some one has been here since the rain,” I called to the Virginian, who
was still on the rock, walking up behind the packhorses.
“Since the rain!” he exclaimed. “That’s not two days yet.” He came and
examined the footprints. “A man and a hawss,” he said, frowning. “Going
the same way we are. How did he come to pass us, and us not see him?”
“One of the other trails,” I reminded him.
“Yes, but there’s not many that knows them. They are pretty rough
trails.”
“Worse than this one we’re taking?”
“Not much; only how does he come to know any of them? And why don’t he
take the Conant trail that’s open and easy and not much longer? One man
and a hawss. I don’t see who he is or what he wants here.”
“Probably a prospector,” I suggested.
“Only one outfit of prospectors has ever been here, and they claimed
there was no mineral-bearing rock in these parts.”
We got back into our saddles with the mystery unsolved. To the Virginian
it was a greater one, apparently, than to me; why should one have to
account for every stray traveller in the mountains?
“That’s queer, too,” said the Virginian. He was now riding in front of
me, and he stopped, looking down at the trail. “Don’t you notice?”
It did not strike me.
“Why, he keeps walking beside his hawss; he don’t get on him.”
Now we, of course, had mounted at the beginning of the better trail
after the steep rock, and that was quite half a mile back. Still, I had
a natural explanation. “He’s leading a packhorse. He’s a poor trapper,
and walks.”
“Packhorses ain’t usually shod before and behind,” said the Virginian;
and sliding to the ground he touched the footprints. “They are not four
hours old,” said he. “This bank’s in shadow by one o’clock, and the sun
has not cooked them dusty.”
We continued on our way; and although it seemed no very particular
thing to me that a man should choose to walk and lead his horse for a
while,--I often did so to limber my muscles,--nevertheless I began to
catch the Virginian’s uncertain feeling about this traveller whose steps
had appeared on our path in mid-journey, as if he had alighted from the
mid-air, and to remind myself that he had come over the great face of
rock from another trail and thus joined us, and that indigent trappers
are to be found owning but a single horse and leading him with their
belongings through the deepest solitudes of the mountains--none of this
quite brought back to me the comfort which had been mine since we left
the cottonwoods out of sight down in the plain. Hence I called out
sharply, “What’s the matter now?” when the Virginian suddenly stopped
his horse again.
He looked down at the trail, and then he very slowly turned round in his
saddle and stared back steadily at me. “There’s two of them,” he said.
“Two what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know whether it’s two horses or two men,” I said, almost
angrily.
But to this he made no answer, sitting quite still on his horse and
contemplating the ground. The silence was fastening on me like a spell,
and I spurred my horse impatiently forward to see for myself. The
footprints of two men were there in the trail.
“What do you say to that?” said the Virginian. “Kind of ridiculous,
ain’t it?”
“Very quaint,” I answered, groping for the explanation. There was no
rock here to walk over and step from into the softer trail. These second
steps came more out of the air than the first. And my brain played me
the evil trick of showing me a dead man in a gray flannel shirt.
“It’s two, you see, travelling with one hawss, and they take turns
riding him.”
“Why, of course!” I exclaimed; and we went along for a few paces.
“There you are,” said the Virginian, as the trail proved him right.
“Number one has got on. My God, what’s that?”
At a crashing in the woods very close to us we both flung round and
caught sight of a vanishing elk.
It left us confronted, smiling a little, and sounding each other with
our eyes. “Well, we didn’t need him for meat,” said the Virginian.
“A spike-horn, wasn’t it?” said I.
“Yes, just a spike-horn.”
For a while now as we rode we kept up a cheerful conversation about elk.
We wondered if we should meet many more close to the trail like this;
but it was not long before our words died away. We had come into a
veritable gulf of mountain peaks, sharp at their bare summits like
teeth, holding fields of snow lower down, and glittering still in full
day up there, while down among our pines and parks the afternoon was
growing sombre. All the while the fresh hoofprints of the horse and the
fresh footprints of the man preceded us. In the trees, and in the opens,
across the levels, and up the steeps, they were there. And so they were
not four hours old! Were they so much? Might we not, round some turn,
come upon the makers of them? I began to watch for this. And again my
brain played me an evil trick, against which I found myself actually
reasoning thus: if they took turns riding, then walking must tire them
as it did me or any man. And besides, there was a horse. With such
thoughts I combated the fancy that those footprints were being made
immediately in front of us all the while, and that they were the only
sign of any presence which our eyes could see. But my fancy overcame my
thoughts. It was shame only which held me from asking this question of
the Virginian: Had one horse served in both cases of Justice down at
the cottonwoods? I wondered about this. One horse--or had the strangling
nooses dragged two saddles empty at the same signal? Most likely; and
therefore these people up here--Was I going back to the nursery? I
brought myself up short. And I told myself to be steady; there lurked in
this brain-process which was going on beneath my reason a threat worse
than the childish apprehensions it created. I reminded myself that I was
a man grown, twenty-five years old, and that I must not merely seem like
one, but feel like one. “You’re not afraid of the dark, I suppose?” This
I uttered aloud, unwittingly.
“What’s that?”
I started; but it was only the Virginian behind me. “Oh, nothing. The
air is getting colder up here.”
I had presently a great relief. We came to a place where again this
trail mounted so abruptly that we once more got off to lead our
horses. So likewise had our predecessors done; and as I watched the two
different sets of footprints, I observed something and hastened to speak
of it.
“One man is much heavier than the other.”
“I was hoping I’d not have to tell you that,” said the Virginian.
“You’re always ahead of me! Well, still my education is progressing.”
“Why, yes. You’ll equal an Injun if you keep on.”
It was good to be facetious; and I smiled to myself as I trudged upward.
We came off the steep place, leaving the canyon beneath us, and took to
horseback. And as we proceeded over the final gentle slant up to the
rim of the great basin that was set among the peaks, the Virginian was
jocular once more.
“Pounds has got on,” said he, “and Ounces is walking.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him, and he nodded as he fixed the
weather-beaten crimson handkerchief round his neck. Then he threw
a stone at a pack animal that was delaying on the trail. “Damn your
buckskin hide,” he drawled. “You can view the scenery from the top.”
He was so natural, sitting loose in the saddle, and cursing in his
gentle voice, that I laughed to think what visions I had been harboring.
The two dead men riding one horse through the mountains vanished, and I
came back to every day.
“Do you think we’ll catch up with those people?” I asked.
“Not likely. They’re travelling about the same gait we are.”
“Ounces ought to be the best walker.”