Read Ebook: Somewhere south in Sonora by Comfort Will Levington

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Ebook has 1375 lines and 51367 words, and 28 pages

'You tried hookin' him, the way they did over in the Cup Q. It makes him crazy. He ain't crazy natural, his mouth's tender. He's been driven crazy. He needs humorin', Dad.'

Anger flamed up in the father. He had been a horse-hand all his life. 'I say keep off him, from now on.'

Three days later Mort Cotton came into the cabin, his bushy eyebrows showing curiously white. 'I hate to tell on the kid, Bob, but it'll get to you anyway,' he said. 'He's been riding that rat-tail on a hackamore--he's ridin' him now. And what I'm gettin' at is, he ain't havin' trouble.'

Bob's face turned to the wall. He had many days to think it out while his leg was in boards.... It was disobedience, but had he been right? Didn't Bart have something on the gray others hadn't--with other horses, too, perhaps? It wasn't a matter of just sitting a horse. Bob knew without vanity he could do that as well as most men. It was something new; not to be expressed. He had seen the deformed look of the gray's head straighten out as Bart drew near; the red flame of the eye die down. Bart had something on him--a new feel with a horse.

'I belong to the old school,' he muttered. 'All we know is that a hoss has to be broke; that a hoss is ruined that once gets his own way. Bart ain't a part of that. He makes a hoss forget his own way. He gives him his courage back. But it's disobedience--I dasn't let Bart get away with it. They'd think I was crazy--if I didn't get rid of the rat-tail.'

Mort Cotton took the old outlaw back to the Cup Q as a led-horse.

FINALLY the morning, a year or two later, when old Batten, the storekeeper at Bismo, was found murdered by Bob Leadley's serving woman who had gone over for a can of condensed milk. Her outcry roused the town. The old man had been hammered over the head and pulled out from his own back room, or else he had reached that far before they finished him. Things were spilled. There were sticky tracks on the floor and a winy smell in the gray of morning. A cask of apricot brandy in the place, no one knew how old, was still dripping when Bob Leadley got there. He recalled that Batten had never sold any of this brandy, holding it choice and sending a little flask to any one who was sick. What struck him queerly, too, was old Batten's thin white hair, not combed back as usual.

Letchie Welton came in and propped the old man up against the counter for a better look. The marshal's jaw got harder and whiter as he repeated that it was a Mexican job. The town was crowding in. Bob Leadley noted that his boy, Bart, was standing around. 'Go on back home and get your breakfast, Bart,' he said.

The whole white settlement was inside or at the store doors by this time. Mort Cotton's voice seemed to find the strangest hush for this sentence: 'They needn't have killed him. Old Batten would have given them all that they took--at least trusted 'em for what they took--'

It sounded so innocent and mournful, but it was like blowing on fire--the effect on the crowd. Every one was thinking something of the same kind, and a sort of hell took hold and united them--the same contagion that makes a mob. The cask had ceased to drip--not yet five in the morning. No one knew how much money Batten had in the place.

'A Mexican job,' repeated Letchie Welton, his jaw getting harder and whiter. 'We'll just go over to Dobe-town right now and see who's missing.'

They routed out the shacks across the river. Two Mexicans, Marguerin and Rueda, couldn't be accounted for; also a boy, called Palto around the diggings, was gone. About this time Bob Leadley noticed that Bart hadn't done what he was told, but had come over the stream with the rest.

'I told you to get out of here. Go home and wait till I come.'

Now Bob recollected that Bart and Palto had been thick at times.

No work on the mines that day. The 'Damask Cheek' filled early. Ten men chosen by Letchie Welton took the trail after the three Mexicans--a trail that showed clear--three ponies headed toward the Border, six or seven hours' start.

All were thinking, as they rode, of that old white head; ten men and the marshal, still keyed to that sentence which Mort Cotton had spoken. The thoughts of the posse working together this way made the purpose deadly. Each man grew painfully fond of old Batten, and the other side of the fondness was rising hate for the Mexicans ahead. Every little while some one said: 'Poor old Batten, he wouldn't have hurt a toad.'

They were several miles out, before Bob Leadley noticed that Bart was overtaking them from behind. At first he thought Bart was bringing a message from the town, but it proved he merely wanted to go.

'You turn around and ride back, just as fast as you can, young man!' the father said.

Those were the words which fixed it the other way.

'Let him stick. Good chance to see what he's made of,' Letchie Welton laughed, just as he would have said: 'Send him home,' if Bob had asked to let him stay.... The next day the posse was pressing the three Mexicans a lot closer. They didn't seem more than three hours ahead. It was desert work now, hot and grim. Toward nightfall, they came to a fork where the fugitives had broken apart, two turning to the left, one to the right. Letchie Welton sent four men after the lone pony to the right, and kept on with seven after the other two. On the third noon the two Mexicans, hard pressed, made their final split. This broke up the pursuing party a second time; Letchie Welton, Mort Cotton, Bob Leadley and Bart keeping on straight south, the other four turning east.

Toward sundown that third night, over a hundred miles from Bismo, only Bart was riding light and easy; his pony with a reserve left, the other three horses done for, and their riders as well. Canteens were empty; desert country, here and there a big solitary cactus, rising like a shade tree gone crazy.

'There's water ahead,' Bart told his father. 'I can tell by my pony's ears.'

The lower rim of the sun was out of sight when they came to the Mexican's horse, finished, lying at the edge of a pool of stagnant, coated water, choked in the hollows of a dry stream bed. The man-tracks stretched on toward a shadowy mass that proved to be the old hard-rock diggings of Red Ante, long since abandoned by any miners, Mexican or white. Letchie yanked up his horse's head from the pool.

'Our game's ahead, men. Come on, we'll get him and then come back to this pea-soup!'

Now, entering that deserted town, it was as if Bob Leadley had to see every detail. Not that he wanted to--but there seemed to be a pair of extra clear eyes, working back of his regular eyes, though he was partly out of his head from exhaustion. The abandoned street, between the huts of Red Ante, impressed him as something perpetual--moment and place. At the same time, a kind of insane anger was in his brain, because he had to hold up the weight of his horse's head on the bridle-rein. The beast with dying strength, was fighting to get back to that scummy pool; and Bob, a heap in the saddle, was needing all his strength to keep from falling. At the same time, those deadly clear eyes of his took in the bone-white curve of Letchie Welton's jaw, the big rent in Mort Cotton's shirt under the left arm toward the back, the skin showing wet and blistered there--and all the rest in that falling dark: Huts partly sunken in blowing sand--wide-open door of a deserted blacksmith shop--familiar as a lithograph that had hung in his room for years--wide-open door, rusty anvil, sledge standing by--big rusty bear-trap in the center of the dirt floor, with its half-inch chain running to the base of the anvil--everything sagging and dust-covered. Now Bob was letting himself down out of the saddle--when Letchie's pistol cracked, and his voice yelled:

'There he goes. I winged him. I got the son of--' A second pistol shot, as Letchie dug his spurs into his horse and pressed on the dark street. Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton staggered after him on foot, Bart keeping with them on his pony--to the last hut.

'It's Palto,' they heard the boy say.

The young Mexican was on the ground. The point dawning in Bob Leadley's brain was that it would have been so much better, simpler, if one or both of Letchie's shots had finished the job. Palto was down to pray--kneeling on the sand-blown, half-obliterated road. Welton jerked his horse so close, it looked as if he meant to trample the boy, before he stepped down. With his boot he shoved the figure over on its side.

'So it was you who did the hammering on old man Batten's skull--'

'Yo, no, se?or!'

Not a man looking up, but the ashes of a boy--fag and fright all that was left.

'Weren't even there, were you? Home in bed all night. Just started out for a morning ride with Marguerin and Rueda--'

'Si, se?or--was there, but no kill--'

Letchie turned his thin smile to the others. 'I guess you've heard that. I guess we've got what we came for. I guess we've heard from his own lips, he was one of the three.'

Bob Leadley wasn't right in his own head; he knew just enough to know that one thing. He saw his son looking down at Palto. He saw--a kind of humor about it--that Bart hadn't mixed in the pursuit with any sacred idea of the law's vengeance. Now the upshot of the whole matter from Letchie Welton:

'... accordin' to law, we can't finish him here and be done with it. Bein' still alive, we've got to fix to take him back to where a court is. Only if he should try to escape--we could put a bullet through him; but he won't do that, will you, Palto?'

'No, Se?or!' sliding away from Welton's boot.

'We aren't the court and can't hang him here, and there's no shack in this hole of a town that will hold him. Our horses are done for--they won't get back to Bismo--'

Letchie's words died out of Bob Leadley's ears. He was trying to find himself. He was seeing old Batten's white hair, not combed as usual; he was seeing his own boy--a look in Bart's face, different from ever before. The hard white curve of Letchie's jaw was before his eyes and words again:

'I, for one, ain't sittin' up on guard to-night. I'm not askin' you fellows to do what I won't do myself.'

Something was crowding for utterance to Bob Leadley's lips, but Welton's voice kept it from coming clear. They might be here in Red Ante for days, while some one rode back to Bismo for fresh provisions and horses.

'... He ain't worth it--no greaser is. Only one way--to fix him so he can't get away--'

Now Bart spoke up: 'I'll stand guard over him to-night. I don't feel so done out--'

The father was glad in a crippled sort of fashion, glad but afraid.

'I guess not,' said Letchie. 'Wouldn't look so pretty when we got back, to have you tell 'em you sat rifle-up over the prisoner while we got our beauty sleep back.... No, I'm figurin' out a different way from what I saw up yonder--just as we broke into town.'

He meant the blacksmith shop. Bob Leadley saw Mort Cotton standing in the dark like a dirt-stained corpse. It might have been Batten himself.

'I won't take part in it,' Bob thought. 'I ain't marshal to say what's what, but I won't take no part.'

Bart was looking his way, but Bob didn't turn to meet his son's eyes. 'I ain't a man of law,' he was thinking. At the same time he felt Bart's eyes turning to him persistently, but he couldn't look. 'I ain't a man of law.'

The marshal was managing it alone....

Bob had been famished riding into town, but the stuff left in his saddle-bags tasted like worms to his tongue, and the water, as if running out of a sore. Though he was half dead for it, there was no sleep--with that racket from the blacksmith shop down the dirt road of Red Ante. He didn't meet Bart's eyes again. It was as if he had said good-bye to his son for life.

Bob had dragged his blankets away from the empty huts, far out on the sand to get beyond the cries, but they were already in his soul--no getting away. Long afterward, lying out there, he heard the sound of a single shot from the direction of the blacksmith shop--the end of all cries. Welton was there before him, Mort Cotton appearing from the side. Palto's troubles were over--Bart missing. It was not until daybreak that the father found a note pinned to his saddle--written by Bart before the shot had been fired.

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