Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) Page 6

  Here they come. Right at me. I pushed a chair to one side so’s my feet wouldn’t get tangled.

  Chapter 6

  *

  WHEN HE CAME through the door, the first thing Tobin Wacker laid eyes on was me.

  He stopped right in the door, looking like he’d seen death. If ever I saw a man scared, it was him. Whatever he expected when he came in, I wasn’t any part of it. Maybe he figured me for dead. I don’t know what was in his mind, but whatever it was, he had no idea of fighting.

  “Howdy, Wacker,” I said. “You had enough or are you huntin’ some more?”

  Rightly, I should have been over there where I could nail him before he got out of that doorway, and before his partner could make it through.

  They came on into the room, and when Dick seen who was there, his face turned white. Puzzled me, what they were so scared about. From behind me, from the entrance to the hotel lobby came a low, quiet voice. “Need some help, McRaven?”

  It was Yant.

  “Thanks.” I was irritated. Was it him they was…were scared of? How long had he been there, anyway? “I can skin anything I can catch.”

  “We ain’t huntin’ trouble,” Wacker said, rubbing his big meat-hooks on his pants. “We just come for some grub.”

  Recalling my talk about cannibalism, I said kind of wryly, “What’s the matter? Didn’t Blazer last you?”

  You’d of thought I lashed them with a whip. They just turned and busted out of that door and went a-flyin’.

  Yant walked up beside me, still watching the door. “Now what was that all about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “we had trouble awhile back. I thought they’d come for more.”

  “So did I,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thanks? For what?”

  “Offering to help,” I said.

  He pulled back a chair and sat down opposite me, and for once that poker face showed something. He was puzzled and angry, but with himself, I thought. “Think nothing of it,” he muttered, and I began to wonder if that offer to help hadn’t come naturally, without him thinking of it at all. If that was true, I felt better about him, but still, why should he help me? This was a country where a man was supposed to saddle his own broncs and fight his own battles. Yet he had offered to help.

  “Have something,” I said. “I was fixing to eat.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he did order when Teresa came in. He was in what some folks call a brown study, I mean he was figuring something out and he didn’t like it. If it was true that he figured on killing me, and I surely believed it, he had missed a good chance of having it done for him. He had offered to step in when all he needed to do was stand aside and let it happen, whatever it was. I was going to barrel right into them, but I’d no idea I could whip them both, the shape I was in. My ribs still hurt me once in a while, and my nose was swole. That old Indian woman had set it best she could, and strapped up my ribs.

  “They were afraid of you, McRaven,” Yant said. “Why were they afraid? Who are you? What are you?”

  “I’m an orphan,” I said, “who herds cows when he can find the work. That’s all I am.”

  “And all you want to be?” he asked sharply.

  “Now, I never said that. Ever’body has some notion of being more than he is, I expect.”

  He stared at me out of those level, cold eyes. “Did you ever go to school?”

  “Not so’s it would count. Time or two I went for a spell. Never liked it much, though. I liked pa teaching me.”

  “He taught you?”

  “Surely did. From the time I can first recall. He’d read aloud and then we’d talk about it. I guess come graduation time in a proper school it wouldn’t count for much, but he surely taught me a lot. He taught me to shoot, to throw a knife, and how to hunt and to live off the country. Then he taken me to the cotton markets in New Orleans and Mobile and showed me how business was done there, and how it was done in stores, and where the money went that they took in.

  “We talked to cattle and wool buyers, to horse traders and steamboat men. We worked in mines, and he showed me how they operated. He used to read to me from the classics, and after he read we’d talk about them, and about people he met. He was a quiet man, but uncommon shrewd.”

  “You knew those men?” he asked. “I mean the ones you had trouble with?”

  “We went round and about awhile back. Maybe they didn’t like what they got.”

  You didn’t like it, either. I told myself. You taken a beating up yonder. But even as I thought that, I remembered they’d been up on the plateau quite awhile. There was no more grub than for a day…two at most. Yet it had been more than two weeks and they looked to be in good shape. Maybe that was why they were scared. Maybe what I’d said about Blazer hit them right where it hurt. I’d spent about ten days with those Indians, and I’d been a few days getting to where they were…that was all hazy now. Had it been two or three days? I couldn’t recall.

  “Your English is very bad,” he said to me then.

  I just looked at him. “That just ain’t none of your business,” I told him. “Besides, I can talk better if need be. Sometimes folks think you’re puttin’ on airs if you talk so highfalutin.”

  “They’ll not think that of you.”

  “Didn’t aim for them to.” I pushed back my chair and got up. I was tired of this talk, and I had some thinking to do.

  “Can you use that gun?”

  “I can.”

  “We’ll have to take a ride out of town, and you can show me.”

  Well, I just looked at him. “Like hell we will, mister. My pa taught me never to draw a gun unless I meant to use it. Showin’ off with guns is for tinhorns. If you ever see me with a gun in my hand, mister, it’ll be because I got good reason. A handgun isn’t a toy to pleasure yourself with. I carry it because I live in a rough country. I herd stock where there’s wolves and cougars, and some of the stock is mighty mean itself. I need a gun, mister.”

  With that I walked out and left him sittin’ there, and I went for my horse, mounted, and rode out of town.

  He was standin’ on the walk in front of the restaurant when I rode out, and a moment later, watching from behind some trees on the slope of a hill, I seen him cantering out the way I’d gone. When he was gone by, I rode down to the stable and put up my horse. Then I went up to my room and stretched out on my bed.

  Hour or so later I heard him ride back, and I grinned at the ceiling. He’d had him a ride and he’d missed finishing his dinner. If he was going to keep track of me, he had his work cut out for him.

  Chapter 7

  *

  CURIOUSLY, I BEGAN to look forward to those meetings with Felix Yant. He irritated me, and I was wary of him. I was sure he meant to kill me, but there was a quiet elegance about him that I envied, and his obvious assurance, which I lacked…except maybe when I was out in the wild country.

  Oddly enough, I think in his own way he liked me. Not that it would have stopped him from killing me if the chance offered, but there was something in each of us to which the other responded. He was like pa, which may have been part of it, but in some ways I was freer with him than I ever had been with pa.

  Yet I doubt if he had an ounce of human sympathy for anyone or anything. Whatever he was, he was complete in himself. He asked for nothing but to remain as he was, and if there was money involved, I believe he wanted it to give him isolation. Solitude is a hard thing to buy if one expects bodily comfort, too, and he was a man who liked to take his ease. He reminded me of a rattlesnake on a warm rock, just content to be there.

  To have the solitude he wanted demanded money, and he was not the kind of man to turn outlaw. No matter what anybody says, an outlaw’s life is a hard one. He spends most of his time dodging the law, hiding out in the hills or in shacks away from town. If he’s half-smart, he won’t flash money around to make people curious as to how he got it, and in most ways it is a rougher life than making
an honest living.

  Felix Yant would have none of that. He had a distaste for the crude, the uncomfortable, and the ignorant. He had nothing but contempt for most people, and it showed.

  “What are you going to do with yourself?” he demanded suddenly of me. “Do you expect to spend the rest of your life just looking between a horse’s ears? Haven’t you discovered that the world belongs to those who can use it?”

  “What’s wrong with me? I’m gettin’ along all right.”

  “Are you?” He eyed me coolly. “You’re just like a million others, just walking blindly through life. Why don’t you get out of the rut you’re in and get an education?”

  “You mean go back to school?”

  “Of course not. All any school can give you is the barest outline of an education. You have to fill it in yourself. Read…listen…taste. An ignorant man has such limits on his possibilities of enjoyment. He is denying himself all the richness in life. Just as with food, your taste in all things needs experience of flavor. Education is in part just learning to discriminate between ideas, tastes, flavors, sounds, colors, or whatever you wish to mention. The wider your range of taste experience, the greater your possibilities of pleasure, of enjoyment.

  “If evil and hardship come upon you at least you will be aware of what is happening, and you will have some understanding of why. It is better than falling under the axe like some dumb brute in a slaughterhouse who has no awareness of what is happening to him. A wise man can even experience the approach of death with some awareness. It may be the final experience, but it is experience.”

  There was nothing much I could say to that. Yet it ired me to be taken with such contempt. Pa had read a lot to me, and I’d read a good bit myself, when we could find the books. And there was more to be learned than just from books. There was music in the mountains, and lessons wherever grass grew, and a body who kept his eyes open could learn anywhere.

  “Why did you come west?” I asked him straight out. “You could live the way you want to back wherever you came from.”

  “That I could,” he said dryly, “and I shall soon be back there again, living as I wish. Often to attain one’s goals one has to take a few extra steps.” He looked straight at me with a kind of amused contempt. “I have one minor chore. When that is done I shall return, live the life of a country gentleman and leave the pushing and shoving to the rest of these pigs.”

  I had an idea what that minor chore was, and it made me sore to have him speak of it thataway.

  “I ain’t been east since I was a youngster,” I commented, “although pa used to talk about times when the azaleas were in bloom. He was always a man who loved fine horses, too.”

  “He sounds like a most interesting man. Did he give you that gun?”

  “He was murdered,” I said, “by some coward who was afraid to face him. Shot in the back of the head. Had he seen his murderer he would have killed him first.”

  Yant shrugged. “Then the murderer, as you call him, was wise not to be seen, was he not? Yet it sounds more like an execution than a murder.”

  “Does it? I wonder what gave you that idea? Executions are carried out by what pa used to call ‘duly constituted authority’ and in a legal manner. Anyway, pa never did anything to be executed for.”

  “Did he not? I doubt if you were with him all his life, and most men have done something for which they should be hanged.”

  “Do you speak for yourself?”

  He turned those hard, straight eyes on me. They stared unblinking, and I met his gaze. After a moment he shrugged. “You must learn to guard your tongue, boy. A man must answer for his words when he talks with men.”

  “I’ve talked with men since I was six,” I said coolly, “and am prepared to answer for anything I say or have said. Anyway, you spoke of men generally, and I merely wondered if you spoke for yourself too.”

  He did not like me and he did not like the way I replied to him, so he got up and walked away without speaking or looking back. I watched him go, suddenly conscious that Teresa was at my side. “Be careful of him,” she said. “I’m afraid of him.”

  She sat down across from me, and for a moment we looked at one another. I’d never known many girls, or how to deal with them, but with Teresa it seemed no problem. “What are you going to do?” she asked suddenly. “Are you going to stay here? There isn’t much to do, you know.”

  “I’d be gone,” I said “if it weren’t for you…and him.”

  A few people came and went, and after waiting on them she came back to sit with me. Betweentimes I thought about my father and Felix Yant. Somehow there was a connection, and I meant to know what it was.

  “If I leave suddenly,” I said, “just remember I’ll come back.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Men always say they will come back, but they rarely do.”

  “I will.”

  She was silent a minute, and then she said, “He was talking to them, to those men who came in here that day.”

  To Wacker and Dick? Now what did that mean? What could he get from them that he did not know already? Or was he going to let them do the job for him?

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “watch for me. But don’t expect me.”

  “Watch for you?”

  “So he will think I am coming.”

  I rode out quickly at sundown, back a half hour later. He watched me from behind his curtain but did not follow. Was he so sure I’d be back?

  Immediately I went to bed. I had eaten earlier, now I wanted rest, but I put my few things together first, and at four in the morning, with a cold wind blowing along the streets, I slipped out and went to the stables. Swiftly I saddled, keeping my face toward the door. Then I walked out and took a trail out of town, around the corrals and away from the street. When I passed from sight of any window in town, I started to canter.

  It was still dark, and what warned me was a sudden catch of wood smoke on the air. Just a breath of it, then it was gone, yet instantly I was alert. The wind was wrong for the town, and there were no shacks out here that I knew of.

  Instantly, I turned the roan into the deeper shadows along the edge of the forest and drew up, touching his shoulder gently with a gloved hand. Again I caught the smoke. A camp or a cabin of which I knew nothing…somebody was there…close by.

  The roan walked at my signal, hoofs crunching a bit on the hard snow. Suddenly a man loomed up before me, rising out of a creek bed, but his rifle was not up, and I had the impression he had not meant to be seen, for when we glimpsed each other he shied as if he would try to hide, but there was no place, so he stood still. It was Wacker.

  “So that’s it? He set you to spy on me?”

  He stood silent, watching me warily. “I think,” I said, “I would be very slow about going to him with news of my ride. He won’t like it when I come back into town.”

  “If you do.”

  “If I do. But wouldn’t you like it better if I did not? Where is your bread buttered, Wacker? Would you rather have me gone where I cannot get people to asking questions, or in town where you have to worry?”

  “I think he means to kill you.”

  “I have no doubt of it, Wacker, but you found that I do not die easily, and I’m tougher now. Go if you like, but if I were you, I’d let well enough alone. Go in an hour from now and tell him you saw me leave…choose whatever time you like.” I grinned at him. “By that time I may be coming back.”

  He stood there looking at me, and I was wasting time. “What is it between you? He wants you bad, I think.”

  “Ask him.”

  “I’d ask him nothing. Not that one.”

  He stepped aside and I rode on, watching back, however, and trusting him not one whit. When there was a good two hundred yards and a bend in the road between us, I spoked the roan and we took the next mile at a good run, then slowed, steam rising from us in a cloud.

  Felix Yant would be after me now. This would be his chance to kill. I had no doubt that he was a dead
shot. His kind would be. An excellent horseman, also, but his horse was a finely bred eastern gelding, not a mountain horse. I felt very sorry for that horse.

  My destination was Georgetown, but I headed west, away from it. I headed away from the high, snow-covered peaks with their passes choked with snow. I headed for the desert.

  He had told me nothing of the years he had left behind, but I doubted they were akin to mine. He had lived well, I thought, or almost well, and he wanted more of that life. Now he would find how others lived, for I knew where he was to be taken. Mine were but seventeen, almost eighteen years, but they had been lean and hungry years, with long, lonely rides. Since I was old enough to recall, I had ridden the wild country, and I knew how to live there even like the coyotes who haunt the empty desert spaces.

  Did he know the high desert in winter? Did he know those vast and empty spaces, sometimes spotted with patches of thin snow, always swept by cold and bitter winds? If he did not know, he would learn, for that was where I now went.

  The roan knew. The roan was bred in those spaces, in the wild, remote canyon country and in the high deserts to the south of there. If Felix Yant wanted my hide, he would have to buy it with suffering, cold, and every bit of toughness there was in him.

  Wild and broken was the land to the west, a land of little water and less rain, a land where the rivers ran in canyons a thousand feet deep and where the springs were hidden in hollows of rock. Where a few Indians lived and no white man except a chance prospector or a trapper whom no one had told that the great days of fur were gone.

  I rode down with the wind, down off a lofty plateau and into a canyon, then out to the lonely outpost store, where I led my horse to the stable. I had an hour, perhaps two. I went inside after watering my horse and giving him a bait of corn. Inside the store was warm, and an old man, very tall and thin with steel-rimmed spectacles, read a book by the potbellied stove. He looked over his glasses at me. “Not many ride in this weather,” he commented.