Robber's Roost (1989) (5 page)

To his right ran the crooked rim-rock, gray and yellow, with its speckled slides, its jagged peaks, its rough wildness increasing on and on. Ahead a vast rolling plain, bare in the foreground, stark and ghastly in patches, and in the distance rolling from monotonous gray to faint green. Above the horizon towered the black Henry Mountains, far away, dim and strange, with white peaks in the blue.

But it was the region to the left and south of the Henrys that fascinated Jim Wall.

Beyond the bulge of the plain, buttes stood up here and there, lofty and sentinel-like, isolated, hinting of rough country. More, toward Wall's left, the plain dropped off, allowing him to see boundlessly in that direction. A shiny, wandering line of river, bordered with green, disappeared in a chaotic wilderness of bare rock, carved and broken into every conceivable shape.

The thought came to Wall that a rider down in there would have little to fear from pursuers. He would be alone. He could sleep.

He could idle for hours, with never a need to hurry or think or watch. But how could he live? It looked formidable and forbidding.

These impressions of Wall's did not materially change as the miles passed by, except to augment. The trail grew sandy, though not dragging. Thin, bleached grass, with a little touch of green, began to show on the desert. Wall watched for some evidence of wild creatures. What a bleak, inhospitable land! Hours passed before he sighted a track, and that had been made by an antelope.

Patches of sunflower stalks, beginning to green, showed in the sandy swales. There were no birds, no lizards, no hawks, no rabbits, nothing but endless rolling plain tinged with green. But the hours did not drag. They never dragged for Wall on a ride like this, when he could forget all that he had turned his back upon and could look ahead to the calling horizons.

Toward sunset they drew down to the center of a vast swale, where the green intensified, and the eye of the range-rider could see the influence of water. Gradually the Henrys sank behind the rim of this bowl, and the zigzag wall, growing crimson, appeared to lose its lofty height. Only one of the buttes showed its blunt crown of gold and red. For the rest, all was sunset flare, a blazing sky of rose and salmon with gold clouds in the west. And the huge, circular swale was bathed in an ethereal violet light.

Hays halted for camp at a swampy sedge plot where water oozed out and grass was thick enough to hold the horses.

"Aha! Good to be out again, boys," said Hays, heartily. "Throw saddles an' packs. Turn the hosses loose. Happy, you're elected cook. Rest of us rustle somethin' to burn, which is shore one hell of a job."

Jim rambled far afield to collect an armload of dead stalks of cactus, greasewood, sunflower; and dusk was mantling the desert when he got back to camp. Happy Jack was whistling about a little fire; Hays knelt before a pan of dough, which he was kneading;

Lincoln was busy at some camp chore.

"Wal, I don't give a damn for store bread," Hays was saying. "Give me sour-dough biscuits. . . . How about you, Jim?"

"Me too. And I'd like some cake," replied Jim, dropping his load.

"Cake!--Wal, listen to our new hand. Jack, can you bake cake?"

"Sure. We got flour an' sugar an' milk. Did you fetch some eggs?"

"Haw! Haw! . . . Thet reminds me, though. We'll get eggs over at Star Ranch. None of you ever seen such a ranch. Why, fellers, Herrick's bought every durn hoss, burro, cow, steer, chicken in the whole country."

"So you said before," returned Lincoln. "I'm sure curious to see this Englisher. Must have more money than brains."

"Hell yes! He hasn't got any sense, accordin' to us Westerners.

But, Lordy! the money he's spent!"

Jim sat down to rest and listen. These riders had accepted him and they were out in the open now, where one might expect frankness.

"Rummy deal--a rich Englishman hirin' men like us to run his outfit," pondered Lincoln, in a puzzled tone. "I don't understand it."

"Wal, who does? I can't, thet's shore. But it's an honest God's fact, an' we're goin' to be so rich pronto thet we'll jest about kill each other."

"More truth than fun in thet, Hank, old boy, an' don't you forget it," rejoined Lincoln. "How do you aim to get rich?"

"Shore, I've no idee. Thet'll all come. I've got the step on Heeseman an' his pards."

"He'll be aimin' at precisely the same deal as you."

"Shore. We'll have to kill Heeseman an' Progar, sooner or later.

I'd like it sooner."

"Humph! Thet ain't goin' to be so easy, Hank."

"Wal, Brad, don't jump your ditches before you come to them," advised Hays, philosophically.

"I don't like the deal," concluded Lincoln, forcibly.

Presently they sat to their meal, and ate almost in silence.

Darkness settled down; the staccato cry of coyotes came on the night wind; the little fire burned down to red coals. Lincoln essayed to replenish it with fresh fuel, but Hays made him desist.

One by one they sought their beds, and Wall was the last. He did not lie awake long.

Dawn found them up and doing. Wall fetched in some of the horses;

Lincoln the others. By sunrise they were on the trail.

It turned out to be a windy day, cold, almost raw, with only a pale sun. Blowing dust and sand shrouded distant landmarks. About noon they passed close to one of the buttes, a huge disintegrated rock, the color of chocolate, and so weathered that it resembled a colossal pipe organ. Not long afterward another loomed up through the dust--a mound with the shape of an elephant. Thereafter outcropping ledges of rock and buttes grew increasingly more abundant, as did the washes and shallow, stony defiles.

The gray, winding wall sheered off more to the north. About mid- afternoon the trail led down through high gravel banks to a wide stream-bed, dry except in the middle of the sandy waste, where a tiny ribbon of water meandered. It was a mile across this flat to the line of green brush.

"This here's the Muddy," announced Hays, for Jim's benefit. "Bad enough when the water's up. But nothin' to the Dirty Devil.

Nothin' atall!"

"What's the Dirty Devil?" asked Jim.

"It's a river an' it's well named, you can gamble on thet. We'll cross it tomorrow sometime."

Next camp was on higher ground above the Muddy, and as it was a protected spot, in the lee of rocks, the riders were not sorry to halt. Wood was fairly plentiful, but there was an entire absence of grass and water. The horses, however, would not suffer, as they had drunk their fill at the river. They were tied up for the night and fed grain.

Hays and Lincoln renewed their argument about the Herrick ranch deal. It proved what Wall had divined--this Brad Lincoln was shrewd, cold, doubtful, and aggressive. Hays was not distinguished for any cleverness. He was merely an honest, unscrupulous robber.

These men were going to clash. That was inevitable, Jim calculated; and for that matter he had never ridden with an outfit of hunters or cowboys some of whom did not clash. It was the way of men in the open. Jim remembered a posse with which he had once ridden, in pursuit of rustlers, whose members had argued and fought so much among themselves that they failed to catch their quarry.

And certainly it was common knowledge to Westerners that gangs of robbers were continually at strife. Hank Hays was evidently a robber of some degree, though scarcely an outlaw yet. It was difficult to define an outlaw in a country where there was no law.

Early the next day Jim Wall had reason to be curious about the Dirty Devil River, for the descent into the defiles of desert to reach it was a most remarkable one. The trail, now only a few dim old hoof tracks, wound tortuously down and down into canyons of gray, yellow, brown, violet, black earth where stone appeared conspicuous for its absence.

At midday the sun poured down into this colorful hole so hotly that horses and men sweat tremendously, and suffered from thirst and choked with acrid dust. The tracks Hays was following failed and he got lost in a labyrinthine maze of deep washes impossible to climb and seemingly impossible to escape from. Their situation became serious, and they halted for a conference.

"Hell hole!" gasped Happy Jack.

"How much more of this, Hays?" asked Wall, seriously.

"I wish I was shore. If we get off down into the brakes proper it's all up with us. For this ain't nothin' to the seventy miles between here an' the canyon country. I've heared of men bein' chased down in there, an' of prospectors goin' in thet nothin' was ever known of them again."

"We've walked round and round a good many miles," said Wall.

Lincoln got off his horse and went down the canyon, evidently searching for a place to climb to the rim above. But he did not find it. Nevertheless, he returned in an assertive manner, and mounting, called for the others to follow.

"No. Thet's the wrong way," shouted Hays. "Thet's south an' if we keep on we'll never get out."

"Wal, I hear the river an' I'm makin' for it," returned Lincoln.

Jim had heard a faint, low murmur which had puzzled him, and which he had not recognized because he did not dismount. They all followed Lincoln, who halted at the mouth of every intersecting gorge to step away from his horse and listen. Eventually he led them into a narrow, high-walled canyon where ran the Dirty Devil.

The water was muddy, the current mean, the sandbar treacherous, but as it was shallow the riders, by driving the pack-animals on a rim, and plunging after themselves, forded it without more mishap than a wetting. The great trouble with the horses was that they were so thirsty they would have mired down had they not been forced on. At last a gravelly bar afforded solid enough footing for the animals to drink, and the men to fill their water-bags.

Still they were lost. There was nothing to do, however, but work up a side canyon, which fortunately did not break up into innumerable smaller canyons, as had those on the other side of the river. Eventually they got out, when Hays at once located himself and soon led them to a camp-site that never could have been expected there.

"Fellers, I'll bet you somethin'," he said, thoughtfully, before dismounting. "There's a roost down in thet country where never in Gawd's world could anybody find us."

"Ha! An' when they did it'd be only our bleached bones," scoffed Lincoln.

"Wal, mebbe you won't need such a place," returned Hays, curtly.

"Jim, what do you think?"

"I never saw such a place in all my riding. Nothing would surprise me," replied Wall. "When will we get up high where we can see?"

"Tomorrow. Just before we reach the foothills. Wonderfulest country I ever seen, an' different. Thet's what fetched the Englishman. He's plumb crazy over the view. Wal, it's grand, shore as shootin'."

"Hank, you always had the same weakness."

"Ahuh. A man has to have weaknesses, hasn't he? Yours is whisky, hard feelin', an' greediness," returned Hays, deliberately.

That sally did not set well with Lincoln, though it effectually silenced him. There never had been any love lost between these two men, Jim conjectured.

A good camp-site left the men more leisure, except Happy Jack, who evidently liked to work as well as talk and laugh. He was capable, too. After supper Jim strolled away from camp, down to where the canyon opened upon a nothingness of space and blackness and depth.

The hour hung suspended between dusk and night. He felt an overpowering sense of the immensity of this region of mountain, gorge, plain, and butte into which he was traveling.

He heard running water over rocks, a welcome, soothing sound.

Coyotes had raised their hue and cry; now and then a shrill whistle of a nighthawk rent the air; cracking of weathered rock and rustling of brush indicated the presence of nocturnal animals.

Hays had led up out of the barren network of canyons to the edge of a zone of life. The wind had a whisk, a tone, an icy touch of the mountain heights. While Jim Wall meditated there in the gathering darkness he was visited by an inexplicable reluctance to go on with this adventure. A blank, impondering fate seemed to stand up, vague, indefinable, yet more bitter than a fugitive life. He could not laugh it away. It needed daylight, and clear view of this calling wilderness, to dispel unrealities. He had had presentiments before, all of which had turned out incredibly true, but this clamped his soul somehow. He seemed to catch a glimpse of that soul, in the shape of a naked man, driven to and fro across the sand and the rock, tormented by horrors that were not physical, tortured by a spirit within.

Jim ponderingly retraced his steps. He could make but little of such a visitation, and that little had to do with his youth, his home, his sister, his mother, all of whom were but ghosts of a dim past. Every man, even these brutalized robbers, had some caverns of memory, into which sleep or unsolicited turn of consciousness thrust them momentarily. It was singular that the instant he caught sight of Hays and Lincoln lying prone on the ground, dark, still, betraying faces turned up to the starlight, this strange feeling left him. It never returned. But Jim Wall went to bed with a feeling that right then he should have found his horse and ridden off into the unknown.