The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
“Up hill, yes. But Pounds will go down a-foggin’.”
We gained the rim of the basin. It lay below us, a great cup of
country,--rocks, woods, opens, and streams. The tall peaks rose like
spires around it, magnificent and bare in the last of the sun; and we
surveyed this upper world, letting our animals get breath. Our bleak,
crumbled rim ran like a rampart between the towering tops, a half circle
of five miles or six, very wide in some parts, and in some shrinking to
a scanty foothold, as here. Here our trail crossed over it between two
eroded and fantastic shapes of stone, like mushrooms, or misshapen heads
on pikes. Banks of snow spread up here against the black rocks, but
half an hour would see us descended to the green and the woods. I looked
down, both of us looked down, but our forerunners were not there.
“They’ll be camping somewhere in this basin, though,” said the
Virginian, staring at the dark pines. “They have not come this trail by
accident.”
A cold little wind blew down between our stone shapes, and upward again,
eddying. And round a corner upward with it came fluttering a leaf of
newspaper, and caught against an edge close to me.
“What’s the latest?” inquired the Virginian from his horse. For I had
dismounted, and had picked up the leaf.
“Seems to be interesting,” I next heard him say. “Can’t you tell a man
what’s making your eyes bug out so?”
“Yes,” my voice replied to him, and it sounded like some stranger
speaking lightly near by; “oh, yes! Decidedly interesting.” My voice
mimicked his pronunciation. “It’s quite the latest, I imagine. You had
better read it yourself.” And I handed it to him with a smile, watching
his countenance, while my brain felt as if clouds were rushing through
it.
I saw his eyes quietly run the headings over. “Well?” he inquired,
after scanning it on both sides. “I don’t seem to catch the excitement.
Fremont County is going to hold elections. I see they claim Jake--”
“It’s mine,” I cut him off. “My own paper. Those are my pencil marks.”
I do not think that a microscope could have discerned a change in
his face. “Oh,” he commented, holding the paper, and fixing it with a
critical eye. “You mean this is the one you lent Steve, and he wanted
to give me to give back to you. And so them are your own marks.” For a
moment more he held it judicially, as I have seen men hold a contract
upon whose terms they were finally passing. “Well, you have got it back
now, anyway.” And he handed it to me.
“Only a piece of it!” I exclaimed, always lightly. And as I took it from
him his hand chanced to touch mine. It was cold as ice.
“They ain’t through readin’ the rest,” he explained easily. “Don’t you
throw it away! After they’ve taken such trouble.”
“That’s true,” I answered. “I wonder if it’s Pounds or Ounces I’m
indebted to.”
Thus we made further merriment as we rode down into the great basin.
Before us, the horse and boot tracks showed plain in the soft slough
where melted snow ran half the day.
“If it’s a paper chase,” said the Virginian, “they’ll drop no more along
here.”
“Unless it gets dark,” said I.
“We’ll camp before that. Maybe we’ll see their fire.”
We did not see their fire. We descended in the chill silence, while the
mushroom rocks grew far and the sombre woods approached. By a stream we
got off where two banks sheltered us; for a bleak wind cut down over the
crags now and then, making the pines send out a great note through the
basin, like breakers in a heavy sea. But we made cosey in the tent.
We pitched the tent this night, and I was glad to have it shut out the
mountain peaks. They showed above the banks where we camped; and in the
starlight their black shapes rose stark against the sky. They, with the
pines and the wind, were a bedroom too unearthly this night. And as soon
as our supper dishes were washed we went inside to our lantern and our
game of cribbage.
“This is snug,” said the Virginian, as we played. “That wind don’t get
down here.”
“Smoking is snug, too,” said I. And we marked our points for an hour,
with no words save about the cards.
“I’ll be pretty near glad when we get out of these mountains,” said the
Virginian. “They’re most too big.”
The pines had altogether ceased; but their silence was as tremendous as
their roar had been.
“I don’t know, though,” he resumed. “There’s times when the plains can
be awful big, too.”
Presently we finished a hand, and he said, “Let me see that paper.”
He sat reading it apparently through, while I arranged my blankets to
make a warm bed. Then, since the paper continued to absorb him, I got
myself ready, and slid between my blankets for the night. “You’ll need
another candle soon in that lantern,” said I.
He put the paper down. “I would do it all over again,” he began. “The
whole thing just the same. He knowed the customs of the country, and he
played the game. No call to blame me for the customs of the country. You
leave other folks’ cattle alone, or you take the consequences, and it
was all known to Steve from the start. Would he have me take the Judge’s
wages and give him the wink? He must have changed a heap from the Steve
I knew if he expected that. I don’t believe he expected that. He knew
well enough the only thing that would have let him off would have been
a regular jury. For the thieves have got hold of the juries in Johnson
County. I would do it all over, just the same.”
The expiring flame leaped in the lantern, and fell blue. He broke off
in his words as if to arrange the light, but did not, sitting silent
instead, just visible, and seeming to watch the death struggle of the
flame. I could find nothing to say to him, and I believed he was now
winning his way back to serenity by himself. He kept his outward man
so nearly natural that I forgot about that cold touch of his hand, and
never guessed how far out from reason the tide of emotion was even now
whirling him. “I remember at Cheyenne onced,” he resumed. And he told
me of a Thanksgiving visit to town that he had made with Steve. “We
was just colts then,” he said. He dwelt on their coltish doings, their
adventures sought and wrought in the perfect fellowship of youth. “For
Steve and me most always hunted in couples back in them gamesome years,”
he explained. And he fell into the elemental talk of sex, such talk
as would be an elk’s or tiger’s; and spoken so by him, simply and
naturally, as we speak of the seasons, or of death, or of any actuality,
it was without offense. It would be offense should I repeat it. Then,
abruptly ending these memories of himself and Steve, he went out of the
tent, and I heard him dragging a log to the fire. When it had blazed up,
there on the tent wall was his shadow and that of the log where he sat
with his half-broken heart. And all the while I supposed he was master
of himself, and self-justified against Steve’s omission to bid him
good-by.
I must have fallen asleep before he returned, for I remember nothing
except waking and finding him in his blankets beside me. The fire
shadow was gone, and gray, cold light was dimly on the tent. He slept
restlessly, and his forehead was ploughed by lines of pain. While I
looked at him he began to mutter, and suddenly started up with violence.
“No!” he cried out; “no! Just the same!” and thus wakened himself,
staring. “What’s the matter?” he demanded. He was slow in getting back
to where we were; and full consciousness found him sitting up with his
eyes fixed on mine. They were more haunted than they had been at all,
and his next speech came straight from his dream. “Maybe you’d better
quit me. This ain’t your trouble.”
I laughed. “Why, what is the trouble?”
His eyes still intently fixed on mine. “Do you think if we changed our
trail we could lose them from us?”
I was framing a jocose reply about Ounces being a good walker, when the
sound of hoofs rushing in the distance stopped me, and he ran out of the
tent with his rifle. When I followed with mine he was up the bank, and
all his powers alert. But nothing came out of the dimness save our three
stampeded horses. They crashed over fallen timber and across the open to
where their picketed comrade grazed at the end of his rope. By him they
came to a stand, and told him, I suppose, what they had seen; for all
four now faced in the same direction, looking away into the mysterious
dawn. We likewise stood peering, and my rifle barrel felt cold in my
hand. The dawn was all we saw, the inscrutable dawn, coming and coming
through the black pines and the gray open of the basin. There above
lifted the peaks, no sun yet on them, and behind us our stream made a
little tinkling.
“A bear, I suppose,” said I, at length.
His strange look fixed me again, and then his eyes went to the horses.
“They smell things we can’t smell,” said he, very slowly. “Will you
prove to me they don’t see things we can’t see?”
A chill shot through me, and I could not help a frightened glance where
we had been watching. But one of the horses began to graze and I had
a wholesome thought. “He’s tired of whatever he sees, then,” said I,
pointing.
A smile came for a moment in the Virginian’s face. “Must be a poor
show,” he observed. All the horses were grazing now, and he added, “It
ain’t hurt their appetites any.”
We made our own breakfast then. And what uncanny dread I may have been
touched with up to this time henceforth left me in the face of a real
alarm. The shock of Steve was working upon the Virginian. He was aware
of it himself; he was fighting it with all his might; and he was being
overcome. He was indeed like a gallant swimmer against whom both wind
and tide have conspired. And in this now foreboding solitude there was
only myself to throw him ropes. His strokes for safety were as bold as
was the undertow that ceaselessly annulled them.
“I reckon I made a fuss in the tent?” said he, feeling his way with me.
I threw him a rope. “Yes. Nightmare--indigestion--too much newspaper
before retiring.”
He caught the rope. “That’s correct! I had a hell of a foolish dream for
a growed-up man. You’d not think it of me.”
“Oh, yes, I should. I’ve had them after prolonged lobster and
champagne.”
“Ah,” he murmured, “prolonged! Prolonged is what does it.” He glanced
behind him. “Steve came back--”
“In your lobster dream,” I put in.
But he missed this rope. “Yes,” he answered, with his eyes searching me.
“And he handed me the paper--”
“By the way, where is that?” I asked.
“I built the fire with it. But when I took it from him it was a
six-shooter I had hold of, and pointing at my breast. And then Steve
spoke. ‘Do you think you’re fit to live?’ Steve said; and I got hot at
him, and I reckon I must have told him what I thought of him. You heard
me, I expect?”
“Glad I didn’t. Your language sometimes is--”
He laughed out. “Oh, I account for all this that’s happening just like
you do. If we gave our explanations, they’d be pretty near twins.”
“The horses saw a bear, then?”
“Maybe a bear. Maybe “--but here the tide caught him again--“What’s your
idea about dreams?”
My ropes were all out. “Liver--nerves,” was the best I could do.
But now he swam strongly by himself.
“You may think I’m discreditable,” he said, “but I know I am. It ought
to take more than--well, men have lost their friendships before. Feuds
and wars have cloven a right smart of bonds in twain. And if my haid
is going to get shook by a little old piece of newspaper--I’m ashamed I
burned that. I’m ashamed to have been that weak.”
“Any man gets unstrung,” I told him. My ropes had become straws; and I
strove to frame some policy for the next hours.
We now finished breakfast and set forth to catch the horses. As we drove
them in I found that the Virginian was telling me a ghost story. “At