Bad Man's Gulch (21 page)

The mustang, too frightened now to heed his rider, was striving violently to race away from destruction, but his rider merely sat upon his back, pulling strongly upon the reins, with danger showering all around him, for the great rocks that had been picked up by the avalanche were not so easily diverted to a new course as was the more liquid mass of the remainder. Mighty boulders were tossed straight ahead, bounding past the horseman with power and size enough to blot out a whole troop of cavalry, let alone a single man and horse.

The force of a miracle still surrounded this fellow. He rode through the storm unscathed, so far as she could see, until the whole length of the slide had twisted into the gully, which it was plowing deeper and deeper as it went.

It lurched on toward the bottomlands of the valley, pouring like water across them. Not so big as formerly, it reached the river and cleft it in two, with a white leaping of foam. From bank to bank the river's chasm was filled with hundreds of thousands of tons of detritus in which massive pine trunks bristled, no larger in proportion than bristles on the back of a boar. On the nearer side of the stream toward the girl, a huge overwash of the wreckage flowed far out across the land, lodging, at last, even against the foot of her own mountain.

The course of this cruel snake was ended. That its trail would be marked for 10,000 years in the vast rent that was gouged out of the valley slope, that the river was dammed completely, and much of its upper valley probably flooded, did not matter. All that was worth heeding—was that yonder lone rider had escaped from destruction.

She stared at him, aghast. He had ridden into her innermost thoughts. For she had heard of bravery
before, but this utter contempt of life was a thing that she could not fathom.

He did not pause in his course to get down from his saddle and, upon his knees, give thanks to God for his deliverance. He simply dog-trotted the mustang along the course from which he had never turned since the beginning of this little tragedy a few minutes before.

He came to the wall of detritus across the river, and he sent the mustang across it, the wise brute working daintily, testing the tree trunks and the rocks before stepping upon them, and so making to the nearer shore again with no mishaps beyond a stagger or two.

The stranger was riding straight up the trail toward her. Louise Berenger waited on the trail, spellbound. He was a young man; she had seen that much in the glasses. But what else he might be, she had been too excited to observe, and now he was hidden under the steep face of the cliff. Presently she heard his whistle rising to her, a sweet, high-pitched whistle that seemed to flow from his lips as easily as the song of a bird. She liked that. He whistled not like a boy, but like a musician. She had never heard that song. But at least it was no cheap, foolish popular song. As he came closer, she heard him speaking to his horse.

“Steady, Rob, you old fool! If you got to have your lunch, jest you aim for the grass on the
inside
of the trail, will you? Because it makes my eyes ache a lot to be hung over the edge of nothing, like this.”

Made his eyes ache! Louise Berenger, feeling rather weak and ridiculously happy, found herself chuckling softly. No matter what sort of a fellow he might turn out to be, in appearance she was at least
certain that there was not his like in the whole world.

Then, taking her almost by surprise, he turned the next corner of the trail, and she found herself looking into a brown, handsome face and a pair of good-humored eyes equipped with a continual smile. She saw that he was a well-made man, tall, strong-shouldered. To give additional proof of his madness, he had been riding that twisting, desperate trail with his arms folded across his breast and his reins looped carelessly over the horn of the saddle, letting the horse pick his own way and take his own time.

For an example of what chances that meant, even now as the gelding sighted the stranger just before him, he flung up his head and leaped aside and backward, faltering on the very brink of the precipice, or so it seemed to Louise Berenger, who was too startled even to scream a warning.

But the stranger was not perturbed. “Rob,” he asked, “is that manners, and to a lady?”

He took off his hat, and Louise saw that his forehead was even as lofty and nobly made as the forehead of her father had been.

“Ma'am,” said the rider, “it's a lucky thing that we met here at this good passing place, ain't it?”

There
was
a good passing place on the level surface of the mountain shoulder from which she had turned her horse before, as she was fleeing from the sight of a dreadful catastrophe to the lone rider. But the present diameter of the trail seemed to her not more than wide enough for a single animal.

“If you'll rein back to the wide place and . . . ,” she began.

But it was apparent at once that he had not been sarcastic. He sent Rob straight on, along the terrible outer edge of the path.

“Wait!” cried the girl. “There's no sense in taking such a fearful chance on . . .”

She could not complete the sentence. Rob was already beside her, and, as Louise reined her own mustang closer in against the wall of the mountain, it seemed to her that the other swayed out over dizzy nothingness. Then Rob came back into the trail again.

“Will you stop one moment?” called the girl.

He turned instantly in the saddle. Rob paused and, planting his hoofs on the crumbling outer edge of the trail, strained far out toward a tuft of grass that sprouted from the face of a rock.

“Is there anything that I might be able to do for you?” asked the stranger.

“Only tell me this,” said Louise Berenger. “Why did you take that last terrible chance in passing me on this trail?”

“Was it a chance?” said the other, leaning from his saddle and looking calmly down the side of the precipice. “Well, lady, I'll tell you how it is. The way this here life is arranged, there's nothing
but
chances, all the time. And if you ain't killed by the chance of falling off a mountain trail, maybe you'll be scared to death by the chance of a bad dream at night. So what's the use of bothering?”

Of all the things in life that Louise Berenger detested, there was nothing she loathed more than braggadocio. But this was something more than bragging, as she could very easily see. This man spoke as he felt, no more, no less. She was as delighted as she was amazed. And she said, laughing: “Will you please tell me your name?”

“I will”—he grinned—“if you'll tell me why you laugh.”

“I laugh because I'm tickled,” Louise Berenger said inelegantly, “and I want to know your name so that it'll help me to remember you.”

“Thanks,” said the brown man. “Would you want to know the whole name?”

“Why, I suppose so,” she said.

“My name is Pedro Emmanuel Melendez,” he said.

She could not help laughing again; the contrast between his totally Western-American personality and his pale-blue eyes—with his intensely Latin name quite unbalanced her self-control.

“I know.” Pedro Emmanuel Melendez nodded, with his usual smile shining out of his eyes. “It
sounds like it was out of a poem in some dago language, don't it? Don't sound like a real name, at all.” He sat sidewise in the saddle, making himself at ease in much the same fashion as when he had been dog-trotting his horse away from the thundering pursuit of the landside.

“I've tried that name backwards and forwards,” said Pedro Melendez. “I've tried calling myself . . . Pedro E. And I've wrote myself down plain . . . P. E. Melendez. But it all sounds queer. Even when I worked it up fancy into P. Emmanuel Melendez, it was no good. So, generally, the folks call me Pete, and let it go at that. But why I was hitched up to a name like that, I'll tell you the reason. I was brung up by an old gent that wore that moniker of Melendez. And would I switch from his name back to my own? No, lady. I would not, though that there name has cost me more trouble in the way of avoiding fights than any other one thing.”

“Trouble in avoiding fights, exactly,” said the girl. “And how many fights that you
couldn't
avoid?”

“The fact is,” said Pedro Melendez, “that I'm very much of a peace-loving gent.” She smiled, but he insisted: “No, that's the fact. I hate fighting. I just naturally loathe having to stand up and look into the eyes of a gent that is mad at me.” He sighed and shook his head. “But I got to be getting on,” he said. “This here hoss is needing a feed before long. Ain't you, Rob?”

Rob, at the sound of his name, flattened his ears and reached back to snap at the toe of Pete's right boot; a jab of the said boot made him swing back his head with a grunt.

“Are you going for the gulch?” asked the girl.

“Yes.”

“Then I'll go along with you, if I may.”

“There ain't anything that I'd like better.”

The trail remained narrow for only a little time, and then it widened enough to allow them to ride side-by-side. She looked up out of her thoughts and found him watching her with a frank admiration and interest.

“You're in trouble about something,” he suggested, and there was something so extremely frank and open in his tone that she could not help answering:

“Yes . . . about you, just now.”

“And how come?” he queried.

“Why,” said Louise Berenger, “I have a lot of cousins. I watched them grow up. I played with them, climbed trees with them, and knew them better than I knew any girls. I got to know boys fairly well, and by the look of you, Mister Melendez, I should say that when you were their age, if they had seen you coming, they would have doubled up their fists and said . . . ‘Here's trouble coming!'”

“Well,” he admitted, “you got a pretty accurate eye, at that. When I was a boy there was nothing but fighting for me.” He sighed and shook his head, and then brought himself out of that dim haze of memory into the present again. “I was always whanging somebody and getting whanged, but, after a while, I growed up, and I lost all sorts of taste for fighting. No, ma'am,” he said, repeating his thought with a soft emphasis to himself, “when I hear voices raised up loud and high, I just back up right away, and, when you draw a line, you can bet that I don't cross it!”

She studied him. Certainly he would never be guilty of false modesty. He meant what he said.

“No,” he said, “about this fighting business . . . but I seem to be talking a lot about myself.”

“It's a long way to camp,” she said. “And I'm interested.”

“So am I,” Melendez said, with his unfailing grin, and, as they jaunted down the trail, side-by-side, he told her the story of his life with perfect simplicity, enjoying all that he remembered fully as much as any auditor could have done.

She, turning to watch him from time to time, or looking before her down the trail, heard the tale carry Melendez back to his boyhood. It was easy to summon up the picture of the handsome face of that other self in the old days. No wonder the old Mexican had chosen to adopt this striking youngster. The blue eyes of that other and younger Melendez gleamed out at her from the cool shadows beside a pool on the mountain slope beneath them. There was stamped on her mind forever pictures of Melendez in his story, and pictures of the mountains through which they were riding came home to Louise Berenger.

They had been troublesome times almost from the first, because old Melendez lost almost at once the prosperity that had induced him to adopt a son. He had taken Pedro wandering here and there, and wherever they made a new home there was, of course, a new set of boys to be fought.

“My eyes,” he said reflectively, “were always either black or purple, when along would come another fight, and I would get whacked again. And so, you see, when I grew up to be man-sized, I was sort of in the habit of having trouble come my way. Trouble is like a pet dog. It gets used to you and keeps following you around at your heels. It was that way with me. The first time that I got into a serious mess was this.” He pointed to a thin, white line that ran across his cheek. “That was Mexican style, with
knives,” he added. “And then this came, while I was still wearing bandages around my head.” He touched a place on his left arm. “And a lucky thing for me that day”—Pedro Melendez sighed—“that it was the left arm that they drilled, and that I could keep right on shooting with my other hand. But after that, it was just the same thing over and over again. There was always some part of me patched with iodine that hadn't yet scrubbed off. I got knives through my right side, and down this here shoulder, and one of 'em jammed into my neck. I got bullets through both legs a couple of times, and one right through me, finally, that laid me up for nigh onto six months, while the doctor every day said . . . ‘Maybe he will, and maybe he won't.' And the nurse, every time I looked up, had a tear in her eye. However, I pulled through, but I had a lot of time lying on the flat of my back and studying the ceiling and thinking back. By the time that I could walk, I was sure it was no use.”

“That
what
was no use?” asked the girl.

“Why, struggling and fighting your way through,” he said. “Not a bit of use at all. The way things is planned, that's the way that they'll turn out. The gent that sent the slug through the middle of me, what was he? Why, a hobo, a tramp, a no-account, yaller-livered hound that just had enough liquor in him to give him the courage to pull a gun. And there was me that had lived with weapons in my hands as long back as I could remember, and that went to bed feeling guilty if I hadn't had my hour or so of target practice that day. But when the pinch came, what happened? Why, the hobo had never hit a mark before in his whole life, I suppose. And me, my gun hung in the holster, and I just stood up and fell down again. Why didn't I die, after
lying there for three hours before help come to me? I
should've
died. Everybody admitted that. But I didn't. Because in the place where things is wrote down, it wasn't issued for me to die on that day. And there you are! Staying awake and worrying don't help none. Planning and hoping and praying don't help, either. But the things that is fated for you, those are the things that'll be sure enough to come along. So what's the use of trying to make the bucking horse carry you? No, lady, the right thing is just to drift, and you'll land lucky or unlucky, just the way that everything was wrote down for you when you was born, or maybe before that.”