The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
half-past three in the morning she saw her runaway daughter standing
with a babe in her arms; but when she moved it was all gone. Later they
found it was the very same hour the young mother died in Nogales. And
she sent for the child and raised it herself. I knowed them both back
home. Do you believe that?”
I said nothing.
“No more do I believe it,” he asserted. “And see here! Nogales time
is three hours different from Richmond. I didn’t know about that point
then.”
Once out of these mountains, I knew he could right himself; but even
I, who had no Steve to dream about, felt this silence of the peaks was
preying on me.
“Her daughter and her might have been thinkin’ mighty hard about each
other just then,” he pursued. “But Steve is dead. Finished. You cert’nly
don’t believe there’s anything more?”
“I wish I could,” I told him.
“No, I’m satisfied. Heaven didn’t never interest me much. But if there
was a world of dreams after you went--” He stopped himself and turned
his searching eyes away from mine. “There’s a heap o’ darkness wherever
you try to step,” he said, “and I thought I’d left off wasting thoughts
on the subject. You see”--he dexterously roped a horse, and once more
his splendid sanity was turned to gold by his imagination--“I expect
in many growed-up men you’d call sensible there’s a little boy
sleepin’--the little kid they onced was--that still keeps his fear
of the dark. You mentioned the dark yourself yesterday. Well, this
experience has woke up that kid in me, and blamed if I can coax the
little cuss to go to sleep again! I keep a-telling him daylight will
sure come, but he keeps a-crying and holding on to me.”
Somewhere far in the basin there was a faint sound, and we stood still.
“Hush!” he said.
But it was like our watching the dawn; nothing more followed.
“They have shot that bear,” I remarked.
He did not answer, and we put the saddles on without talk. We made no
haste, but we were not over half an hour, I suppose, in getting off with
the packs. It was not a new thing to hear a shot where wild game was in
plenty; yet as we rode that shot sounded already in my mind different
from others. Perhaps I should not believe this to-day but for what I
look back to. To make camp last night we had turned off the trail, and
now followed the stream down for a while, taking next a cut through the
wood. In this way we came upon the tracks of our horses where they had
been galloping back to the camp after their fright. They had kicked up
the damp and matted pine needles very plainly all along.
“Nothing has been here but themselves, though,” said I.
“And they ain’t showing signs of remembering any scare,” said the
Virginian.
In a little while we emerged upon an open.
“Here’s where they was grazing,” said the Virginian; and the signs were
clear enough. “Here’s where they must have got their scare,” he pursued.
“You stay with them while I circle a little.” So I stayed; and certainly
our animals were very calm at visiting this scene. When you bring a
horse back to where he has recently encountered a wild animal his ears
and his nostrils are apt to be wide awake.
The Virginian had stopped and was beckoning to me.
“Here’s your bear,” said he, as I arrived. “Two-legged, you see. And he
had a hawss of his own.” There was a stake driven down where an animal
had been picketed for the night.
“Looks like Ounces,” I said, considering the footprints.
“It’s Ounces. And Ounces wanted another hawss very bad, so him and
Pounds could travel like gentlemen should.”
“But Pounds doesn’t seem to have been with him.”
“Oh, Pounds, he was making coffee, somewheres in yonder, when this
happened. Neither of them guessed there’d be other hawsses wandering
here in the night, or they both would have come.” He turned back to our
pack animals.
“Then you’ll not hunt for this camp to make sure?”
“I prefer making sure first. We might be expected at that camp.”
He took out his rifle from beneath his leg and set it across his saddle
at half-cock. I did the same; and thus cautiously we resumed our journey
in a slightly different direction. “This ain’t all we’re going to find
out,” said the Virginian. “Ounces had a good idea; but I reckon he made
a bad mistake later.”
We had found out a good deal without any more, I thought. Ounces had
gone to bring in their single horse, and coming upon three more in the
pasture had undertaken to catch one and failed, merely driving them
where he feared to follow.
“Shorty never could rope a horse alone,” I remarked.
The Virginian grinned. “Shorty? Well, Shorty sounds as well as Ounces.
But that ain’t the mistake I’m thinking he made.”
I knew that he would not tell me, but that was just like him. For the
last twenty minutes, having something to do, he had become himself
again, had come to earth from that unsafe country of the brain where
beckoned a spectral Steve. Nothing was left but in his eyes that
question which pain had set there; and I wondered if his friend of old,
who seemed so brave and amiable, would have dealt him that hurt at the
solemn end had he known what a poisoned wound it would be.
We came out on a ridge from which we could look down. “You always want
to ride on high places when there’s folks around whose intentions ain’t
been declared,” said the Virginian. And we went along our ridge for some
distance. Then, suddenly he turned down and guided us almost at once to
the trail. “That’s it,” he said. “See.”
The track of a horse was very fresh on the trail. But it was a galloping
horse now, and no bootprints were keeping up with it any more. No boots
could have kept up with it. The rider was making time to-day. Yesterday
that horse had been ridden up into the mountains at leisure. Who was on
him? There was never to be any certain answer to that. But who was not
on him? We turned back in our journey, back into the heart of that basin
with the tall peaks all rising like teeth in the cloudless sun, and the
snow-fields shining white.
“He was afraid of us,” said the Virginian. “He did not know how many of
us had come up here. Three hawsses might mean a dozen more around.”
We followed the backward trail in among the pines, and came after a time
upon their camp. And then I understood the mistake that Shorty had made.
He had returned after his failure, and had told that other man of the
presence of new horses. He should have kept this a secret; for haste had
to be made at once, and two cannot get away quickly upon one horse. But
it was poor Shorty’s last blunder. He lay there by their extinct fire,
with his wistful, lost-dog face upward, and his thick yellow hair
unparted as it had always been. The murder had been done from behind. We
closed the eyes.
“There was no natural harm in him,” said the Virginian. “But you must do
a thing well in this country.”
There was not a trace, not a clew, of the other man; and we found a
place where we could soon cover Shorty with earth. As we lifted him we
saw the newspaper that he had been reading. He had brought it from the
clump of cottonwoods where he and the other man had made a later visit
than ours to be sure of the fate of their friends--or possibly in hopes
of another horse. Evidently, when the party were surprised, they had
been able to escape with only one. All of the newspaper was there save
the leaf I had picked up--all and more, for this had pencil writing on
it that was not mine, nor did I at first take it in. I thought it might
be a clew, and I read it aloud. “Good-by, Jeff,” it said. “I could not
have spoke to you without playing the baby.”
“Who’s Jeff?” I asked. But it came over me when I looked at the
Virginian. He was standing beside me quite motionless; and then he put
out his hand and took the paper, and stood still, looking at the words.
“Steve used to call me Jeff,” he said, “because I was Southern. I reckon
nobody else ever did.”
He slowly folded the message from the dead, brought by the dead, and
rolled it in the coat behind his saddle. For a half-minute he stood
leaning his forehead down against the saddle. After this he came back
and contemplated Shorty’s face awhile. “I wish I could thank him,” he
said. “I wish I could.”
We carried Shorty over and covered him with earth, and on that laid a
few pine branches; then we took up our journey, and by the end of the
forenoon we had gone some distance upon our trail through the Teton
Mountains. But in front of us the hoofprints ever held their stride
of haste, drawing farther from us through the hours, until by the next
afternoon somewhere we noticed they were no longer to be seen; and after
that they never came upon the trail again.
XXXIII. THE SPINSTER LOSES SOME SLEEP
Somewhere at the eastern base of the Tetons did those hoofprints
disappear into a mountain sanctuary where many crooked paths have led.
He that took another man’s possessions, or he that took another man’s
life, could always run here if the law or popular justice were too hot
at his heels. Steep ranges and forests walled him in from the world on
all four sides, almost without a break; and every entrance lay through
intricate solitudes. Snake River came into the place through canyons
and mournful pines and marshes, to the north, and went out at the south
between formidable chasms. Every tributary to this stream rose among
high peaks and ridges, and descended into the valley by well-nigh
impenetrable courses: Pacific Creek from Two Ocean Pass, Buffalo Fork
from no pass at all, Black Rock from the To-wo-ge-tee Pass--all these,
and many more, were the waters of loneliness, among whose thousand
hiding-places it was easy to be lost. Down in the bottom was a spread of
level land, broad and beautiful, with the blue and silver Tetons rising
from its chain of lakes to the west, and other heights presiding over
its other sides. And up and down and in and out of this hollow square of
mountains, where waters plentifully flowed, and game and natural pasture
abounded, there skulked a nomadic and distrustful population. This in
due time built cabins, took wives, begot children, and came to speak of
itself as “The honest settlers of Jackson’s Hole.” It is a commodious
title, and doubtless to-day more accurate than it was once.
Into this place the hoofprints disappeared. Not many cabins were yet
built there; but the unknown rider of the horse knew well that he would
find shelter and welcome among the felons of his stripe. Law and order
might guess his name correctly, but there was no next step, for lack of
evidence; and he would wait, whoever he was, until the rage of popular
justice, which had been pursuing him and his brother thieves, should
subside. Then, feeling his way gradually with prudence, he would let
himself be seen again.
And now, as mysteriously as he had melted away, rumor passed over the
country. No tongue seemed to be heard telling the first news; the news
was there, one day, a matter of whispered knowledge. On Sunk Creek and
on Bear Creek, and elsewhere far and wide, before men talked men seemed
secretly to know that Steve, and Ed, and Shorty, would never again be
seen. Riders met each other in the road and drew rein to discuss the
event, and its bearing upon the cattle interests. In town saloons men
took each other aside, and muttered over it in corners.
Thus it reached the ears of Molly Wood, beginning in a veiled and
harmless shape.
A neighbor joined her when she was out riding by herself.
“Good morning,” said he. “Don’t you find it lonesome?” And when she
answered lightly, he continued, meaning well: “You’ll be having company
again soon now. He has finished his job. Wish he’d finished it MORE!
Well, good day.”
Molly thought these words over. She could not tell why they gave her