Bad Man's Gulch (22 page)

It threw a keen light upon one thing, at least, and that was the manner in which he had jogged his horse down the valley in front of the avalanche behind him. Yet the thing seemed incredible.

She asked sharply: “Was that the reason that you didn't try to ride out of the path of the landslide?”

“The landslide?” he echoed with a puckered brow. Then he seemed to remember. “Why, yes. I seen that I might try to get to the high ground on one side of me or the other; but there wasn't much likelihood of arriving. The main thing was to hope that the slide would dodge me to one side or the other. What good was there in trying to guess which way it would dodge? Did you ever notice the way that smoke will follow you around a campfire when you try to get away from it?”

Although she had it from his own lips, it was still hard to believe. She could close her eyes, now, and see the rush of that giant down the slope, the leap of it as it lurched across the ridge of rocks; she could see it, chopping the river in two with foam, choking the valley with ruin.

Melendez was speaking again: “So when I got up and onto my feet, I quit trying. I put away my guns and I've never wore a shooting iron since, except when I went out hunting. The only knife I carry is one with a clasp lock on it that takes about ten seconds to get ready to use. No help at all when the danger is driving at your throat.”

“But,” cried Louise Berenger, “if they shot you down before when you were fighting in self-defense, what would they do when you had nothing to help yourself?”

“The fact is,” he said, “that mostly you don't get into trouble when you ain't all ready for it. You look over the first hundred dogs that you meet. All of the yaller-hided mongrels that don't know nothing about laying hold and keeping hold, they ain't got the mark of a tooth to show on themselves. They live fat and happy and never have to do more than bark, now and then. But when you see a fine bull terrier, made for fighting, and trained for it, with the brains to know where to grab and the nerve to hold on when he's got his grip . . . why, you'll say that other dogs would be afraid to trouble him. It would seem that way, but the fact is that the fine bull terrier has got one ear all chewed off close to his head, the other ear pulled into shreds, he limps on a hind leg, goes light on a foreleg, and he's got a scar in his throat. He's so mottled with tooth marks all over that he looks plumb mangy. He's left a whole lot of dead dogs behind him, on his way, but does that make him any happier? Does that take the ache out of his bones or the limp out of his legs, or does it piece together his ears again? No, lady, it don't! So what's the good of the life that he's lived?”

“The glorious battles that the bull terrier has fought and won!” cried Louise Berenger.

“Aye”—Melendez sighed—“the ladies is always more bloodthirsty than the men. It's always that way with 'em. But the fact is, lady, that besides that one chewed-up bull terrier, there's others of the same breed in the world, and some one of them is just as glorious or even more glorious than the first one, and sooner or later the gloriouser one will get the other fellow by the throat and choke the dog-gone glory right out of him forever! And there you are.”

“Well!” she exclaimed. “He will not be forgotten!”

Melendez looked patiently at her, not irritated, as she was, by the course of this argument, but with a smile behind his eyes. Then he pointed to a streak across the mountains. It wandered here and there, dipping from valley to valley, winding up the heights, like a great broad chalk mark, partly rubbed away by time. “Do you know what made that?” he asked.

“It's the old Indian trail, I suppose,” said the girl, “and those are the white bones of the animals that died on the way.”

“Yes,” he said, “the bones of the animals that died along the way, including the men. Plenty of men! The big husky braves that rode south follering the Mexican moon, and the brave Mexicans that rode north again to get the Indians. Why, I dunno that I can name any of those gents that was out after glory along that trail. I dunno that I know even the names of any of their great chiefs. Do you?”

She saw the point and colored a little. Although she had no ready answer at hand to use against this argument, she felt that in some place it was wrong. Her helplessness turned into a greater heat of anger.

“Ah, well,” she said at last, “every man has to live his life in his own way, I suppose. And, after all, we're not talking about dogs and Indians. We're
speaking of the way a civilized man should lead his life.”

“Sure,” said Melendez, “but the kind of a life that most of us lead . . . why, you can use a dog's life to illustrate it pretty good. Not meaning you, lady. Only speaking for myself. I say that I've been bull terrier long enough. And now I find out if I let the other boys do all of the loud talking, why, they also do all of the loud shouting. Or nearly all of it,” he added in qualification.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “But now and then you'll admit that simply being quiet isn't enough. And
then
what do you do?”

“Then I take what's coming to me,” he answered. “That's all. If a gent comes waltzing up and says I got to beg his pardon . . . why, I beg his pardon. And the fight blows away.”

She grew crimson with shame and anger. “It's very hard to believe,” she said coldly.

“I suppose it is,” he admitted.

“And after you have taken . . . after you have . . .”

“After you have taken water like that, you mean to say?”

“What do other men think of you?”

“Think that I'm a hound, of course.”

“Ah, and isn't that your answer?”

“No, their thinking don't hurt me none. Thinking of other gents don't put food in your mouth, or make you sleep better at night, or sew patches onto your old clothes.”

“And if a bully tries to take something from you . . . your horse, say . . . this same Rob?” She waited in triumph, with a flashing eye.

“Yes,” he admitted. “That's the sort of a thing that would make even a hound show his teeth, you'd say? But not me. I'll tell you that same thing
happened to me, once. Gent claimed, after I had backed down and took water from him, that the horse I was riding was really his horse, and he went out to take it.”

“And . . . and what did you do?”

“Why, I just begged the gents that was standing around to keep me from being robbed.”

She could only gasp weakly. “And didn't they despise you for begging so?”

“Oh, sure they did,” he said, “but they kept the other gent from taking my horse, and that was better than having to shoot it out with him, wasn't it?”

“How long did you stay in that town, after that?” she asked him suddenly.

“Matter of fact, I rode along that same afternoon.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Yes,” he admitted frankly. “But then, I don't mind having to move along, pretty frequent. I aim to see a considerable sight of this here country. I been riding and roving a good many years, and still there's aplenty of it that I ain't touched yet.”

“And as for the making of a home?” she said.

“Settling down, you mean?”

“Yes, or doesn't that appeal to you?”

“You are thinking me pretty black, ain't you?” he asked, nodding at her with smiling eyes. “Matter of fact, I want just what all the other folks want . . . a home and all of such. But you see, when the time comes along that it's meant for me to settle down, I'll get fixed and rotted down in the soil, and that'll happen whether I plan it or not. Planning don't do any good.”

She stared at him, quite hopeless. Yet she had seen him, on this day, demonstrate such a thoroughgoing contempt for danger as she had never dreamed was in any man. Here was the vital flaw—something,
she felt, that was even more contemptible than his courage had seemed glorious. It was a veritable philosophy of debased fatalism. There is nothing so despicable as meanness that is carefully thought out and justified in a man's heart of hearts. She tried him with one final test. “And suppose,” she said, “that the bully, instead of trying to take your horse, tried to take
you?
”

He merely chuckled. “I've had to do the odd jobs and the cooking and the dishwashing around a camp for a week at a stretch,” he admitted, and still there was no flush of shame on his face.

She turned white with disgust. “And if you are backed into a corner, with a gun under your nose?”

“Why,” he said thoughtfully, “I'm glad to say that that has never happened yet. But if it
did
happen, I'm sort of afraid that I might lose my temper.”

“I think you might . . . forget all of your careful thinking about the easiest way of living,” she said. “And then what would you do?”

“Why, ma'am,” said Melendez, “in a case like that, I'm afraid that I would kill the gent that held the gun.”

“Even when you are out of practice as a fighter?” she asked rather scornfully.

“Yes,” he said. “There is some that don't need much training to keep in shape for fighting, because they're natural-born killers.”

“And are you one of those?” she asked, flushing.

“Yes, lady,” he said, “that's exactly what I am.”

A silence, rather naturally, fell between the two as they came in sight of Slosson's Gulch. She was filled with wonder and disgust and doubt about him, and he—was aware that she was embarrassed. So he jogged Rob blithely down the road and whistled a thin, sweet tune as they went, with the dust cloud rising behind the hoofs of their horses and settling in a white powder on their backs and shoulders.

Once in Slosson's Gulch, they parted—with no questions asked. The girl rode straight on through the town, filled with questions, not only about her vanished father and the mine, but about this new man she had met. In one part, she felt, he must be false, for such anomalies could not exist within one nature. Either he was no such war-like man under restraint, as he would have led her to believe, or else he was, indeed, a rare case of a lion working within a shackle.

But Pedro Melendez sat his horse for a moment and watched her out of sight around the next corner of the street. There was a strange tug at the strings of his heart as he had the last glimpse of her. And this
was a rather new emotion with him. Girls had been to him something like cards or music—to be thought of in a careless moment and never to be taken into the life of a man, as horses and other men must be.

He knew, as he watched this girl out of sight, that she would stand in his memory, shoulder to shoulder, with the best men that had come into his life. She had a man's frankness, a man's directness, and yet there was an undiminished femininity about her.

However, he was too much inured in his calm philosophy of living to let a sentimental sorrow master him. He put up his horse at the first livery stable, and then he went through the thronging street to seek amusement, walking with a leisurely step, ever willing to give other men the right of way. In this fashion he wandered through the town of Slosson's Gulch.

Louise Berenger had ridden straight out to her lean-to beyond the fringe of the town, and there she had found trouble enough. The shack had always been small, but now it seemed to her that it was shrunk amazingly. She drew nearer, and then she made sure that the entire wing that she and her father had used as a storeroom had been removed—utterly wiped out. When she dismounted and looked through the door into the place, she found that the goods that had been in the storeroom had been piled in rude disorder in the main section of the little shack that remained standing.

It was a bewildering thing. It occurred to her, with a leap of her heart, that her father might have returned and performed this work, for some reason that she could not understand. But lumber was at a costly premium in the gulch, and if Berenger needed timbers for the mine . . .

She banished the idea from her mind almost as soon as it had entered. If her father, after his strange disappearance, was still among the living and had become free to return, he would not have wasted such time as this in such work. His first great thought would have been to get to his daughter and let her know of his welfare.

So she thought, as she stared at the confused jumble of the pack goods that had been thrown in upon the floor of the shack—not simply thrown in, either. More than one package had been opened. It was not a systematic thievery, but the careless picking and choosing of people who were not really in need.

Stepping to the door of the lean-to again, she looked vaguely about her. The six men who had started working nearby, that same day, had apparently struck pay dirt, beyond all hope and expectation in such well-prospected quarters. They had thrown up a miserable little shack of a house to shelter them and their goods. She looked in wonder at their tiny house and then at them, slaving in their growing hole. Last of all, her eyes rested upon a shining, white Panama hat.

Such hats were not altogether common, and by the pleasant, flowing lines of this one, she recognized it well enough. It was a possession of Berenger himself. With a start of rage, she knew that yonder fellows had been the ones who had taken advantage of her absence to plunder her property.

Tears of blind, helpless rage started into her eyes. She started forward, recognized the very timbers in the stolen lean-to. She knew, somewhere between tears and laughter, the crooked marks of her own sawing, and some of the crumpled nails that she herself had tried in vain to hammer home.

Now she stood on the edge of the pit that the men
were sinking. Whatever else they might be, they were great workers. They had ripped off the surface soil and they were driving their hole steadily deeper. Her feet were level with their chests as she stood there, staring down at them.