Robber's Roost (1989) (6 page)

Next morning he remembered something like a distorted dream, but he could not recall details. He had smoked too much these several days, and the strong drink Hays had brought along was not conducive to quiet nerves. Jim found himself confronted by a choice of drifting on in the ways of these men or returning to the lone-wolf character which had long been his. For the time being he chose the former.

Despite the abundance of water and feed thereabouts, some of the horses had strayed. Lincoln came in with the last few and he was disgruntled. Hays cursed him roundly. They got a late start.

Nevertheless, Hays assured Jim mat they would reach Star Ranch toward evening.

The trail led up a wide, shallow, gravelly canyon full of green growths. Like a black cloud the mountains loomed ahead and above.

Jim was glad to ride up at last out of that interminable canyon into another zone--the slope of the foothills. At last the cedars!

Was there ever a rider who did not love the cedars--sight of their rich, green foliage and purple berries, their sheathed bark hanging in strips, their dead snags, their protection from wind and cold, their dry, sweet fragrance?

But upon looking back Jim forgot the foreground. Had he ridden out of that awful gulf of colors and streaks? Hays caught up with him.

"Come on, Jim. This here ain't nothin'. Wait till we get around an' up a bit. Then I'll show you somethin'."

They rode on side by side. The trail led into a wider one, coming around from the northeast. Jim did not miss fresh hoof tracks, and Hays was not far behind in discovering them.

"Woods full of riders," he muttered, curiously.

"How long have you been gone, Hays?" inquired Jim.

"From Star Ranch? Let's see. Must be a couple of weeks. Too long, by gosh! Herrick sent me to Grand Junction. An' on the way back I circled. Thet's how I happened to make Green River."

"Did you expect to meet Happy Jack and Lincoln there?"

"Shore. An' some more of my outfit. But I guess you'll more'n make up for the other fellers."

"Hope I don't disappoint you," said Jim, dryly.

"Wal, you haven't so far. Only I'd feel better, Jim, if you'd come clean with who you air an' what you air."

"Hays, I didn't ask you to take me on."

"Shore, you're right. Reckon I figgered everybody knew Hank Hays.

Why there's a town down here named after me--Hankville."

"A town? No one would think it."

"Wal, it ain't much to brag on. A few cabins, the first of which I threw up with my father years ago. In his later years he was a prospector--before thet a Mormon. I never had no Mormon in me. We lived there for years. I trapped fur up here in the mountains. In fact I got to know the whole country except thet Black Dragon Canyon, an' thet hell hole of the Dirty Devil. . . . My old man was shot by rustlers."

"I gathered you'd no use for rustlers. . . . Well then, Hays, how'd you fall into your present line of business?"

"Haw! Haw! Present line. Thet's a good one. Now, Jim, what do you reckon thet line is?"

"You seem to be versatile, Hays. But if I was to judge from our meeting with the fat Mormon at the ferry, I'd say you relieved people of surplus cash."

"Very nice put, Jim. I'd hate to be a low-down thief. . . . Jim, I was an honest man once, not so long ago. It was a woman who made me what I am today. Thet's why I'm cold on women."

"Were you ever married?" went on Jim, stirred a little by the other's crude pathos.

"Thet was the hell of it," replied Hays, and he seemed to lose desire to confide further.

Jim revolved in mind a story to tell this robber, if only to please him and establish some kind of background.

"Well, Hank, my story isn't anything to excite pity, like yours.

And sure not friendship."

"Ahuh. I had you figgered, Jim," replied Hays, wagging his head.

"Shore Jim Wall ain't your right handle. Wal, any handle will do out here. . . . Don't be afraid to tell me about yourself, now or some other time."

"Thanks, Hank. A man gets to be cautious. A rolling stone gathers no moss."

"Wal, I'd rather train with enemies than alone. I can't stand bein' alone much."

"That accounts for Lincoln. He rubs you the wrong way, Hank."

"Brad's a cross-grained cuss, but he has his good points. They don't show in times like this."

Jim had to make conjecture about the times that did bring out a desirable side of Brad Lincoln. And he had his doubts about it.

The trail narrowed into rough going, which necessitated single file, and gradual separation of the riders. The morning was bright, cool, beautiful, with air full of sweet smells of sage, which soft gray growth had come down to meet them. Blue jays squalled, mocking-birds sang melodiously; ring-tailed hawks sailed low over the slopes. Deer loped away among the cedars. As there were three riders ahead of Jim, none of whom got off to shoot, it appeared no time for him to do so, either. Star Ranch probably abounded with game. Jim wondered about this new ranch. It would not last long.

They rode into the zone of the foothills, with ever-increasing evidence of fertility. The blue, cloudy color of the still pools of water in rocky beds gave proof of melting snow. But Jim's view had been restricted for several hours, permitting only occasional glimpses up the gray-black slopes of the Henrys and none at all of the low country.

Therefore Jim was scarcely prepared to come round a corner and out into the open. Stunned by the magnificence of the scene, he would have halted Bay on the spot, but he espied Hays waiting for him ahead, while the others and the pack-animals disappeared round a gray rock-wall bend.

"Wal, pard, this here is Utah," said Hays, as Jim came up, and his voice held a note of pride. "Now let me set you straight. . . .

You see how the foothills step down to the yellow an' gray. Wal, thet green speck down there is Hankville. It's about forty miles by trail, closer as a crow flies. An' thet striped messy pot of hash beyond is the brakes of the Dirty Devil. Reckon a diameter of seventy miles across thet circle wouldn't be far wrong. Thet's the country nobody knows. My father told me of a hole in there I'd shore like to see. Wal, where the green begins to climb to them red buttes--there you're gettin' out of hell. An' beyond lays grassy plain after grassy plain, almost to Green River."

Jim's silence was eulogy enough. In fact, he could not think of adequate expression.

"Now shift an' look across the canyon country," went on Hays, stretching a long arm. "There's two hundred miles of wind an' water-worn rock. You see them windin' threads, sort of black in the gray. Wal, them's rivers. The Green runs into the Grand to make the Colorado, less'n sixty miles from where you're sittin' your hoss. An' look at the threads meetin' the Colorado. Canyons!

I've looked down into Escalante, San Juan, Noki, Piute. But thet was when I rode with my father. I couldn't take you to one of them places. We heard of great stone bridges spannin' the canyons, but only the Injuns know of them. . . . Thet round-top mountain way across there is Navajo. An' now, look, Jim. See thet high, sharp, black line thet makes a horizon, level as a floor. Thet's Wild Hoss Mesa. It's seventy-five miles long, not countin' the slant down from the Henrys. An' only a few miles across. Canyons on each side. It reaches right out into thet canyon country, which makes our Dirty Devil here look like a Mormon ranch full of irrigation ditches. Nobody knows that country, Jim. Think of thet. My father said only a few Mormons ever got on top of Wild Hoss Mesa. . . . What you think of it?"

"Grand. . . . That's all, Hank."

"Ahuh. I'm glad you ain't like Lincoln. We'll get somewhere together, Jim. . . . An' now, comin' nearer home, there's the Black Buttes, sometimes called Bears Ears, an' here's Gray Bluff-- thet wall thet dances toward us from the gray out there. . . . An' this mess of rocks across the valley is Red Rocks. An' so on, as you'll come to know. Round the corner here you can see Herrick's valley an' ranch. It's a bit of rich land thirty miles long an' half as wide, narrowin' like a wedge. Now let's ride on, Jim, an' have a look at it."

But Jim elected to stay behind, trying to realize what it was that caused him to stare blankly, to feel his temples throb. Had he ridden half across the wild West to be made to feel like this?

Jim tried to grasp the spectacle that his eyes beheld. But a moment's sight seemed greater than a thousand years of man's comprehension. It would take time and intimacy to make this Utah his own. But on the moment he trembled, as if on the verge of something from which he could never retrace his steps. His sensations were not his to control.

Across the mouth of Herrick's gray-green valley, which opened under the escarpment from which Jim gazed, extended vast level green and black lines of range, one above the other, each projecting farther out into that blue abyss, until Wild Horse Mesa, sublime and isolated in its noonday austerity, formed the last horizon. Its reach seemed incredible, unreal--its call one of exceeding allurement. Where did it point? What lay on the other side? How could its height be attained?

Nearer, and to the left, there showed a colossal space of rock cleavage, walls and cliffs, vague and dim as the blank walls of dreams, until, still closer, they began to take on reality of color, and substance of curve and point. Mesas of red stood up in the sunlight, unscalable, sentinels of that sepulcher of erosion and decay. Wavy benches and terraces, faintly colorful, speckled with black and gray, ran out into the void, to break at the dark threads of river canyons.

All that lay beyond the brakes of the Dirty Devil.

Here was a dropping away of the green-covered mountain foothills and slopes to the ragged, wild rock and clay world, beginning with scarfs of gray wash and rims of gorge and gateways of blue canyons, and augmenting to a region that showed Nature at her most awful, grim and ghastly, tortuous in line, rending in curve, twisting in upheaval, a naked spider-web of the earth, cut and washed into innumerable ridges of monotonous colors, gray, drab, brown, mauve, and intricate passageways of darker colors, mostly purple, mysterious and repelling. Down in there dwelt death for plant, animal, and man. For miles not one green speck! And then far across that havoc of the elements which led on to a boundless region of color--white jagged rents through miles of hummocky ground, and streaked by washes of gray and red and yellow, on to vast green levels, meadow-like at such a distance, which stretched away to the obstructing zigzag wall of stone, the meandering White Bluffs along the base of which Jim had ridden for many days.

"Down in there somewhere this Hank Hays will find his robbers' roost," soliloquized Jim, and turned his horse again into the trail.

Before late afternoon of that day Jim Wall had seen as many cattle dotting a verdant, grassy, watered valley as ever he had viewed in the great herds driven up from Texas to Abilene and Dodge, or on the Wind River Range of Wyoming. A rough estimate exceeded ten thousand head. He had taken Hays with a grain of salt. But here was an incomparable range and here were the cattle. No doubt, beyond the timbered bluff across the valley lay another depression like this one, and perhaps there were many extending like spokes of a wheel down from the great hub of the Henry Mountains. But where was the market for this unparalleled range?

Herrick had selected as a site for his home what was undoubtedly the most picturesque point in the valley, if not one that had the most utility for the conducting of a ranch business. Ten miles down from the apex of the valley a pine-wooded bench, almost reaching the dignity of a promontory, projected from the great slope of the mountain. Here, where the pines straggled down, stood the long, low cabin of peeled logs, yellow in the sunlight. Below, on the flat, extended the numerous barns, sheds, corrals. A stream poured off the mountain, white in exposed places, and ran along under the bench, and out to join the main brook of the valley.

Somewhat apart from both the corrals and outbuildings on the flat stood a new log cabin, hurriedly built, with chinks still unfilled.

The roof extended out on three sides over wide porches, where Wall observed three or four beds, a number of saddles, and other riders' paraphernalia. The rear of the cabin backed against the rocks.

Jim understood that Hays had thrown up this abode, rather than dwell too close to the other employees of Herrick. From the front porch one could drop a stone into the brook, or fish for trout.

The pines trooped down to the edge of the brook.

Naturally, no single place in all that valley could have been utterly devoid of the charm and beauty nature had lavished there, but this situation was ideal for riders. Hays even had a private corral. As Jim rode up to this habitation his quick eye caught sight of curious, still-eyed men on the porch. Also he observed that there was a store of cut wood stowed away under the porch.

"Wal, here we air," announced Hays. "An' if you don't like it you're shore hard to please. Finest of water, beef, lamb, venison, bear meat. Butter for our biscuits. An' milk! An' best of all-- not very much work. Haw! Haw!"

"Where do we bunk?" asked Jim, presently.

"On the porch. I took to the attic, myself."

"If you don't mind I'll keep my pack inside, but sleep out under the pines," responded Wall.