Somewhere South in Sonora

SOMEWHERE SOUTH
IN SONORA

A NOVEL
BY

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

—⬧—

Somewhere South in Sonora

PROLOGUE
OLD LIGHTS OF THE RIO BRAVA

I

Bob Leadley moved toward the sound of guitars. The strumming came from over the stream where the Mexicans had their own little cantina and their dobe huts. Back from the ‘Damask Cheek,’ which was the palpitating core of the white settlement, voices of the miners reached him, not loud to-night, not uproarious. Things were seldom duller than now on the Rio Brava, shrunken to a trickle at this time of year. The eke of gold had been at its lowest for days on the placers. A hot, still August night in Bismo, Arizona—the night that changed one white man all around.

Mexican figures bowed to him. A woman laughingly called from a darkened doorway: ‘Buenas noches, señor!’ Another laughed from behind her, adding somewhat wistfully: ‘Hace un calor sofocante.’

He walked on past the dobe huts and on to the mesa. He heard the coyotes—different from any time before. There was no moon and the stars were indistinct, run together in the heat haze. Bob Leadley took off his hat; drops of sweat held by the tight hatband, dropped down on his face. He had to laugh at himself—the feelings that rolled and tumbled over each other within. Nobody would have believed it of him—feelings to keep a secret of. It was as if some one he had always been waiting for, had come to town—not yet seen, a friend or enemy, he couldn’t tell, but a life-or-death meaning to the arrival. Running steps reached him from behind; a panting voice calling:

‘Bob! Bob!’

‘Hello, Mort,’ he answered as the other came up, the tone so quiet and cool, it was almost whimsical.

‘What you doing away off here?’

‘She didn’t want me there.’

‘It’s a boy, Bob, only—’

‘I thought as much.’

‘It’s a boy all right, only she—they say she ain’t going to live.’

The mother was already dead, but this was Mort Cotton’s way of softening the shock for a friend.

The same easy tone answered: ‘Guess we’d better walk back.’

‘I wouldn’t hurry, if I was you. Bob. I’ll run back if you like and get the rest of the word.’

It was her doings that they called the child Bart, after some saint of her religion. She had a lot of saints, one for every day or so—a Spanish woman, and she hadn’t asked much, come to think of it.

The oddest thing Bob Leadley had ever done was to marry her. He never would have thought better of it, except it made a difference in the town. It would make more of a difference now—leaving a boy with her blood in his veins. They wouldn’t call it ‘Spanish’ blood in Bismo. Mexicans weren’t held high on this side of the Border.... Queer little birdlike ways, she had—little vanities and secrets—always shrinking farther indoors in daylight, always more alive in the night time. She had sung and cooked and washed for him; pleasant to be with, but he never really knew her. She was like ripe fruit that couldn’t last—pleasant to the taste and pretty to look at, but nothing much for real hunger. Come and gone with her curious ways, her brightenings up in the dark—only asking one thing—that the boy be called after this particular one of her saints, and ‘Bart’ was as good a name as any.

So there was a gray-eyed white man in Bismo, Arizona, with a black-eyed boy in his cabin. No problem about it at all, from the standpoint of the other miners, just scorn—only Bob Leadley had been known from away back as cool and gamy as they made them; nothing like the squaw-man, cholo-man type. The miners couldn’t give much play to their contempt before those pleasant gray eyes of Bob’s, which might inquire their meaning, and look into it. Men weren’t mind-readers in Bismo. They saw the steady eyes, the whimsical smile, but no one knew what was going on; not even Mort Cotton, who had punched cattle, skinned mules, and washed for gold with Bob Leadley for ten years; not even the Mexican woman and her daughter who brought Bart up. But it was all a matter of how you gave advice. Bismo found out gradually that Bob wasn’t set up very high in his idea of being a successful parent. They found he listened attentively to comment given within a certain range of tones; discovering this, the miners supplied it plentifully.

The social barrier in Bismo was the river itself. Mexican laborers worked, two to one to the white men, in the placers, but the two settlements rarely mixed outside working hours, except when waves of drink inundated the white miners. Then they would move over to Dobe-town to drink and ‘eat different,’ the calls ending in a row, not infrequently in the death of a ‘greaser.’ Letchie Welton, the town marshal, wasn’t even to be approached on a matter like this, and sounds of mourning from one or more dobe huts seldom reached as far as the ‘Damask Cheek,’ any more than the strumming of guitars....

Several times in the next dozen years, Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton were on the point of leaving Bismo, but the Rio Brava had a way of suddenly picking up, the gold eke rising to quite a little color. There was another thing; it was hard for Bob to make up his mind to take Bart away from the Mexican woman and her daughter. It didn’t seem fair. The old señora had been a friend of Bart’s mother and loved the white man’s boy; also her daughter loved him. But Bart was growing up more Mexican than white; talked Spanish in preference to English; was more often seen across the stream than on this side, and running with the Mexican boys, one Palto especially, than with the four or five white boys of his age in town. Bart’s whole business was horses, but Mexican words having to do with them were too easy on his tongue—hondos, latigos, reatas, conchos, yakimas. A slim, black-haired youth, slow to rouse, not cruel or a fool; an easy way with him; not stirred in the least by the thought of washing gold; no idea of working hours, as being superior to all others.

Just to see Bart leaning against the doorway—on his feet, but relaxed in a way no white boy could stand, a guitar in his hand, perhaps—had a way of filling his father with a revulsion that Bob had to take out to the mesa to quiet. It was as if the man saw the face of his boy under a high-tinted sombrero (instead of the cast-off cavalryman’s campaign hat with a Copley peak) as if a sash of seda were thrust back over the shoulder. Bob didn’t quite know it, but it was because he was seeing Bart with the eyes of the other miners at these times—that he was stung so. The town had put a secret fear on him that his boy was not showing up white.

The father lacked one thing that parents usually have to work with. He didn’t have the sense of being right at all times. Once or twice he felt so sure of himself that he treated Bart to a whipping, which the boy took without a murmur, minding pain no more than an Indian. He never explained. The father got one of the starts of his life to find he had whipped Bart for a thing he didn’t do, the boy not taking the trouble to clear himself. Bob’s feeble sense of rightness was shaken by that; it about all went out of him, and something else with it. The deep hurt of it was that Bart held no grievance afterward.

A master at letting other men alone, Bob couldn’t keep his thoughts and his will-power off the boy. He made up for his rare rough periods by being lenient. All the time his actions and reactions brought advice from his fellow townsmen. It was Letchie Welton, the town marshal, who started the saying that Bart wouldn’t live to be hanged. All this time Bob Leadley’s eyes were the most light-hearted anywhere.

‘As a male-parent, I’m considerable of a botch—I admit that,’ he would say, in a way to delude anybody that he ever suffered real care, and at the same time there was a sorrow burning at the center of him like a red lamp. Often at work on the placer, he knew a loneliness to get close to his boy. He might have seen Bart at breakfast, but that made no difference. He felt lonely for him more than once, when they were in the same room together.

II

Bart was past twelve, when he was missing for a day or two, and rode back into town on a gray rat-tailed pony that was raked from shoulder to crupper with fresh wounds and old scars. Letchie Welton, in the capacity of deputy sheriff, halted him at the edge of town, looking the outfit over.

‘Where did you get that briscut?’

‘Over at the Cup Q.’

‘Did you do all that fresh hookin’ on his hide?’

‘No.’

‘Buy him?’

‘No, they didn’t want him much over at the rancho. Said I could have him for sitting thirty seconds—’

‘And you did?’

‘Yep—more. I ain’t got off.’

Letchie Welton looked queer and rode back to the placers where he found Bob Leadley. ‘Your kid’s just brought in a man-killer from the Cup Q—a gray rat-tail I remember seein’ over there. If I was you, Bob, I’d put a bullet in the head of that cayuse, and I’d leave off work and do it now—before he kicks a hole out of Bart’s face or eats his scalp off.’ Letchie Welton went on to recall further details of Rat-tail’s reputation—of the fits he threw, the men he had maimed.

Bob left the placer and went to his own little corral where he found Rat-tail unsaddled, Bart leaning in the fence shadow, looking over his new possession.

‘I hear he’s an outlaw, Bart. I wouldn’t ride him if I was you.’

‘I rode him over from the Cup Q all right.’

‘I know. He may have been glad to get away from there—but look at him!’ Bob took a few steps closer to the old gray head which suddenly looked deformed. A float of baleful red appeared back of the near, filmy eye.

‘I’ve seen that look once or twice before, Bart, and I’ll have to tell you to stay off him.’

‘All he knew from the Cup Q was rakin’ and quirtin’, Dad.’

‘But that ain’t the look of a nice hoss.’

‘I like him.’

‘It ain’t the look of a broke hoss, Bart.’

‘I don’t want no broke hoss.’

‘You’ll have to stay off, that’s all—’

Bob saw that deep questioning look in the eyes slowly turned his way—no anger, no hate, but separateness, a widening gulf.

‘At least, stay off him till I try him out for a few days.’

Bob was sincere in his attempt to make the rat-tail safe for his son, but the toughest saddle-sessions he had ever known, followed in the next ten days. Where the ordinary outlaw left off with sun-fish and rail-fence, the old gray opened fresh spontaneities. One of the last things he did with Bob forked, was to make a quarter-mile sprint toward a low-hanging cottonwood limb, the idea being to rake off his tormentor, which he carried out. Another time when Bob persisted several seconds longer than usual, the rat-tail came out of a buckling snap—to fling himself on the ground. The day came when Bob Leadley, cool-eyed, a smile on his lips, would have preferred to stand up and be shot at, than mount the gray monster again, but that’s what he did, it being his code. That day Rat-tail plunged into a dobe wall and left Bart’s father on the inside of a crowded chicken yard with a broken leg.

‘I should have done what Letchie told me, Bart,’ Bob said that night. ‘He ain’t a man-killer just; he’s a man-eater. You’ll have to leave him alone from now on.’

‘You tried hookin’ him, the way they did over in the Cup Q. It makes him crazy. He ain’t crazy natural, his mouth’s tender. He’s been driven crazy. He needs humorin’, Dad.’

Anger flamed up in the father. He had been a horse-hand all his life. ‘I say keep off him, from now on.’

Three days later Mort Cotton came into the cabin, his bushy eyebrows showing curiously white. ‘I hate to tell on the kid, Bob, but it’ll get to you anyway,’ he said. ‘He’s been riding that rat-tail on a hackamore—he’s ridin’ him now. And what I’m gettin’ at is, he ain’t havin’ trouble.’

Bob’s face turned to the wall. He had many days to think it out while his leg was in boards.... It was disobedience, but had he been right? Didn’t Bart have something on the gray others hadn’t—with other horses, too, perhaps? It wasn’t a matter of just sitting a horse. Bob knew without vanity he could do that as well as most men. It was something new; not to be expressed. He had seen the deformed look of the gray’s head straighten out as Bart drew near; the red flame of the eye die down. Bart had something on him—a new feel with a horse.

‘I belong to the old school,’ he muttered. ‘All we know is that a hoss has to be broke; that a hoss is ruined that once gets his own way. Bart ain’t a part of that. He makes a hoss forget his own way. He gives him his courage back. But it’s disobedience—I dasn’t let Bart get away with it. They’d think I was crazy—if I didn’t get rid of the rat-tail.’

Mort Cotton took the old outlaw back to the Cup Q as a led-horse.

III

Finally the morning, a year or two later, when old Batten, the storekeeper at Bismo, was found murdered by Bob Leadley’s serving woman who had gone over for a can of condensed milk. Her outcry roused the town. The old man had been hammered over the head and pulled out from his own back room, or else he had reached that far before they finished him. Things were spilled. There were sticky tracks on the floor and a winy smell in the gray of morning. A cask of apricot brandy in the place, no one knew how old, was still dripping when Bob Leadley got there. He recalled that Batten had never sold any of this brandy, holding it choice and sending a little flask to any one who was sick. What struck him queerly, too, was old Batten’s thin white hair, not combed back as usual.

Letchie Welton came in and propped the old man up against the counter for a better look. The marshal’s jaw got harder and whiter as he repeated that it was a Mexican job. The town was crowding in. Bob Leadley noted that his boy, Bart, was standing around. ‘Go on back home and get your breakfast, Bart,’ he said.

The whole white settlement was inside or at the store doors by this time. Mort Cotton’s voice seemed to find the strangest hush for this sentence: ‘They needn’t have killed him. Old Batten would have given them all that they took—at least trusted ’em for what they took—’

It sounded so innocent and mournful, but it was like blowing on fire—the effect on the crowd. Every one was thinking something of the same kind, and a sort of hell took hold and united them—the same contagion that makes a mob. The cask had ceased to drip—not yet five in the morning. No one knew how much money Batten had in the place.

‘A Mexican job,’ repeated Letchie Welton, his jaw getting harder and whiter. ‘We’ll just go over to Dobe-town right now and see who’s missing.’

They routed out the shacks across the river. Two Mexicans, Marguerin and Rueda, couldn’t be accounted for; also a boy, called Palto around the diggings, was gone. About this time Bob Leadley noticed that Bart hadn’t done what he was told, but had come over the stream with the rest.

‘I told you to get out of here. Go home and wait till I come.’

Now Bob recollected that Bart and Palto had been thick at times.

No work on the mines that day. The ‘Damask Cheek’ filled early. Ten men chosen by Letchie Welton took the trail after the three Mexicans—a trail that showed clear—three ponies headed toward the Border, six or seven hours’ start.

All were thinking, as they rode, of that old white head; ten men and the marshal, still keyed to that sentence which Mort Cotton had spoken. The thoughts of the posse working together this way made the purpose deadly. Each man grew painfully fond of old Batten, and the other side of the fondness was rising hate for the Mexicans ahead. Every little while some one said: ‘Poor old Batten, he wouldn’t have hurt a toad.’

They were several miles out, before Bob Leadley noticed that Bart was overtaking them from behind. At first he thought Bart was bringing a message from the town, but it proved he merely wanted to go.

‘You turn around and ride back, just as fast as you can, young man!’ the father said.

Those were the words which fixed it the other way.

‘Let him stick. Good chance to see what he’s made of,’ Letchie Welton laughed, just as he would have said: ‘Send him home,’ if Bob had asked to let him stay.... The next day the posse was pressing the three Mexicans a lot closer. They didn’t seem more than three hours ahead. It was desert work now, hot and grim. Toward nightfall, they came to a fork where the fugitives had broken apart, two turning to the left, one to the right. Letchie Welton sent four men after the lone pony to the right, and kept on with seven after the other two. On the third noon the two Mexicans, hard pressed, made their final split. This broke up the pursuing party a second time; Letchie Welton, Mort Cotton, Bob Leadley and Bart keeping on straight south, the other four turning east.

Toward sundown that third night, over a hundred miles from Bismo, only Bart was riding light and easy; his pony with a reserve left, the other three horses done for, and their riders as well. Canteens were empty; desert country, here and there a big solitary cactus, rising like a shade tree gone crazy.

‘There’s water ahead,’ Bart told his father. ‘I can tell by my pony’s ears.’

The lower rim of the sun was out of sight when they came to the Mexican’s horse, finished, lying at the edge of a pool of stagnant, coated water, choked in the hollows of a dry stream bed. The man-tracks stretched on toward a shadowy mass that proved to be the old hard-rock diggings of Red Ante, long since abandoned by any miners, Mexican or white. Letchie yanked up his horse’s head from the pool.

‘Our game’s ahead, men. Come on, we’ll get him and then come back to this pea-soup!’

Now, entering that deserted town, it was as if Bob Leadley had to see every detail. Not that he wanted to—but there seemed to be a pair of extra clear eyes, working back of his regular eyes, though he was partly out of his head from exhaustion. The abandoned street, between the huts of Red Ante, impressed him as something perpetual—moment and place. At the same time, a kind of insane anger was in his brain, because he had to hold up the weight of his horse’s head on the bridle-rein. The beast with dying strength, was fighting to get back to that scummy pool; and Bob, a heap in the saddle, was needing all his strength to keep from falling. At the same time, those deadly clear eyes of his took in the bone-white curve of Letchie Welton’s jaw, the big rent in Mort Cotton’s shirt under the left arm toward the back, the skin showing wet and blistered there—and all the rest in that falling dark: Huts partly sunken in blowing sand—wide-open door of a deserted blacksmith shop—familiar as a lithograph that had hung in his room for years—wide-open door, rusty anvil, sledge standing by—big rusty bear-trap in the center of the dirt floor, with its half-inch chain running to the base of the anvil—everything sagging and dust-covered. Now Bob was letting himself down out of the saddle—when Letchie’s pistol cracked, and his voice yelled:

‘There he goes. I winged him. I got the son of—’ A second pistol shot, as Letchie dug his spurs into his horse and pressed on the dark street. Bob Leadley and Mort Cotton staggered after him on foot, Bart keeping with them on his pony—to the last hut.

‘It’s Palto,’ they heard the boy say.

The young Mexican was on the ground. The point dawning in Bob Leadley’s brain was that it would have been so much better, simpler, if one or both of Letchie’s shots had finished the job. Palto was down to pray—kneeling on the sand-blown, half-obliterated road. Welton jerked his horse so close, it looked as if he meant to trample the boy, before he stepped down. With his boot he shoved the figure over on its side.

‘So it was you who did the hammering on old man Batten’s skull—’

‘Yo, no, señor!’

Not a man looking up, but the ashes of a boy—fag and fright all that was left.

‘Weren’t even there, were you? Home in bed all night. Just started out for a morning ride with Marguerin and Rueda—’

‘Si, señor—was there, but no kill—’

Letchie turned his thin smile to the others. ‘I guess you’ve heard that. I guess we’ve got what we came for. I guess we’ve heard from his own lips, he was one of the three.’

Bob Leadley wasn’t right in his own head; he knew just enough to know that one thing. He saw his son looking down at Palto. He saw—a kind of humor about it—that Bart hadn’t mixed in the pursuit with any sacred idea of the law’s vengeance. Now the upshot of the whole matter from Letchie Welton:

‘... accordin’ to law, we can’t finish him here and be done with it. Bein’ still alive, we’ve got to fix to take him back to where a court is. Only if he should try to escape—we could put a bullet through him; but he won’t do that, will you, Palto?’

‘No, Señor!’ sliding away from Welton’s boot.

‘We aren’t the court and can’t hang him here, and there’s no shack in this hole of a town that will hold him. Our horses are done for—they won’t get back to Bismo—’

Letchie’s words died out of Bob Leadley’s ears. He was trying to find himself. He was seeing old Batten’s white hair, not combed as usual; he was seeing his own boy—a look in Bart’s face, different from ever before. The hard white curve of Letchie’s jaw was before his eyes and words again:

‘I, for one, ain’t sittin’ up on guard to-night. I’m not askin’ you fellows to do what I won’t do myself.’

Something was crowding for utterance to Bob Leadley’s lips, but Welton’s voice kept it from coming clear. They might be here in Red Ante for days, while some one rode back to Bismo for fresh provisions and horses.

‘... He ain’t worth it—no greaser is. Only one way—to fix him so he can’t get away—’

Now Bart spoke up: ‘I’ll stand guard over him to-night. I don’t feel so done out—’

The father was glad in a crippled sort of fashion, glad but afraid.

‘I guess not,’ said Letchie. ‘Wouldn’t look so pretty when we got back, to have you tell ’em you sat rifle-up over the prisoner while we got our beauty sleep back.... No, I’m figurin’ out a different way from what I saw up yonder—just as we broke into town.’

He meant the blacksmith shop. Bob Leadley saw Mort Cotton standing in the dark like a dirt-stained corpse. It might have been Batten himself.

‘I won’t take part in it,’ Bob thought. ‘I ain’t marshal to say what’s what, but I won’t take no part.’

Bart was looking his way, but Bob didn’t turn to meet his son’s eyes. ‘I ain’t a man of law,’ he was thinking. At the same time he felt Bart’s eyes turning to him persistently, but he couldn’t look. ‘I ain’t a man of law.’

The marshal was managing it alone....

Bob had been famished riding into town, but the stuff left in his saddle-bags tasted like worms to his tongue, and the water, as if running out of a sore. Though he was half dead for it, there was no sleep—with that racket from the blacksmith shop down the dirt road of Red Ante. He didn’t meet Bart’s eyes again. It was as if he had said good-bye to his son for life.

Bob had dragged his blankets away from the empty huts, far out on the sand to get beyond the cries, but they were already in his soul—no getting away. Long afterward, lying out there, he heard the sound of a single shot from the direction of the blacksmith shop—the end of all cries. Welton was there before him, Mort Cotton appearing from the side. Palto’s troubles were over—Bart missing. It was not until daybreak that the father found a note pinned to his saddle—written by Bart before the shot had been fired.

I guess I don’t belong here, Dad. I’ll take Palto with me, if I can get him loose. Otherwise—well, you’ll know. So long for good, Bart.

I
THIRTY YEARS LATE

Arriving when the present century was well started, Elbert Sartwell had now concluded that his was a most untimely birth. For instance, all that war amounted to in his case, was the matter of wearing puttees to school. The magic of his youth was moreover smothered in a houseful of sisters—imprisoned in a sorority-house, he found himself—all his aching and persistent dreams unexpressed.

But the end had come. Elbert had reached decision; so had his father on the same point. They were at odds. It was a matter of grief to the son that for once there could be no compromise.

Fall darkness had closed about him, as these things appeared before Elbert’s mind with finality. He left his room, followed the long wide hall to the door of his father’s dressing-room and knocked. It was the last quarter of an hour before dinner, and the tone of the ‘Come in’ was not encouraging, but it didn’t occur to Elbert to wait until dinner and tobacco had combed down his father’s tag-ends of the day.

Mr. Sartwell was standing before his mirrors and did not turn, as the hall door opened. Elbert nodded at the reflection; also he observed in the glass a look of fresh vexation, which reminded him that his sister Nancy this very afternoon had smashed the fender and left front wheel of the new phaëton. His father had probably just heard about it. The present moment couldn’t be worse, but Elbert didn’t see how he could back out now with his ultimatum unreported.

‘I’ve been thinking it over,’ he said, ‘and I can’t start to work in the office, at least not now. You see, I’ve always wanted—’

‘“Always wanted”—’ broke in Mr. Sartwell, ‘“always wanted” against my better judgment.... A houseful of “always wanteds”! How can a man be expected to stand in the midst of six people, always wanting in different directions?’

‘I hate to be an added trouble to you,’ Elbert said in his unruffled way, ‘but there’s no use of my trying to go into the business, the way I feel.’

‘What is it now?’

Still addressing the mirror, the younger man outlined with some embarrassment that he hadn’t been able to get over his ardor to tackle life on a cattle range. The broad back before him suddenly jerked about. Elbert was held by the first direct look of one whose son has proved a definite disappointment. Many words followed; some heat:

‘... pack a pair of pistols! Step along out over the real-estate ranges and prairie sub-divisions! Why, I’m actually ashamed to have to tell you, what any kid half your age knows—that there isn’t a West any more, no cattle country—hasn’t been for—why, you’re only about thirty years late—’ Also a final sentence, as Elbert withdrew, to the effect that if he did go forth, he would have to pay his own car fare ‘out into the fenceless spaces.’

There was present at dinner that evening one of sister Nancy’s young men friends, who had no dreams of the West whatsoever. The Sartwell family, diminished by recent marriages of two elder daughters, was pulling together socially, in spite of internal trouble. Elbert’s thoughts were mainly afar on his own problem, but after a time, he couldn’t help noticing the art with which the gentleman-guest played up to his father. It could be done, Elbert reflected. The two sons-in-law, already connected up, had also gone about it this way. He felt like a crossed stick; a spectator merely, in the home dining-room. His glance moved from face to face in the soft creamy light that flowed down through a thin bowl of alabaster, hanging from the ceiling. He alone, an only son, lacked a sort of commonplace craft to smooth his ways. He might have asked for a trip around the world before settling down to a business career—and gotten it.

Elbert retired to his room early. The Sartwell mansion faced the West, and sunsets had reddened his windows from as far back as he could remember. Long ago he had stared into a crimson foam of one certain day’s end, thinking that it was the color of Wyoming. The lure of that crimson foam hadn’t ceased, though it had moved farther South and farther West—Apache country, Navajo country—leading on over the border of late into Mexico itself.

He had been given an automobile at the end of high-school days, but he had wanted a pony. Hours at home he had spent in the garage, secretly wishing all the time it was a corral.

Elbert turned on the lights. Over the back of the chair he was sitting on, was a blanket of Indian red. There were framed Western drawings on the wall, paintings of rodeo and round-up, lonely cattlemen, bison, longhorns, desert and mountain scenes; and in among his books, pasted in an old ledger, was his collection of Indian pictures—heads of all the tribes, famous braves and medicine men—from cigarette, gum, candy packages—no end to the lengths he had gone to get the lot together. He looked back upon the time when the bronzed head of Red Cloud, of the Nez Perces, was the noblest countenance he had ever gazed upon.

A tall, cool person, Elbert could hardly remember ever being really tired. He was practically a stranger to all stimulants and dwelt altogether unaware in a calm that made nervous people either envious at once or hopeless altogether. His steady, homely hands were of that considerable size as to appear empty most of the time, and his blue eyes were so steady and cool that any one undertaking to go against his will, felt a surge of fatigue and irritation at the outset.

Elbert had been pondering a good deal of late on what sort of stuff he was made of. When he read of some hero’s exploits in a newspaper, he asked himself could he have done that. And when he heard of some great suffering or privation of explorers, he wondered how he would have acted, had he been along. But it was the Southwest that perennially and persistently called. He moved to his phonograph, and picked out a book of records from the shelf below. The one he wanted wasn’t there; in fact, he found it still in the machine, from a solitary performance of last evening—a Mexican record. He set it going now and a man’s announcement in Spanish preceded the music, something about ‘Paquita Conesa, tonadillera española, la mas famosa en Mexico y Sudamerica—’

... His favorite record. The song was ‘La Paloma.’ It always seemed to Elbert as if Señorita Paquita were singing in the open air. He smiled at a secret thought that always came to him, too—that the words of the song were carved out of starlight.

‘Cuando sali de la Habana,

Valgame Dios—’

Up from the street, at the end of the song, reached his ears the tiresome sweep and swish of tires and carbureters, and from the drawing-room, Nancy’s singing voice. Her young man would be standing beside the piano at this time, his waxen hair brushed back. Elbert smiled wistfully. ‘Thirty years late.’

II
AT HEASLEP’S RANCH

From Kansas City, he sent his first letter back, regretting to leave home without talking it over further, but there didn’t seem to be any use. Possibly there wasn’t any more West, he allowed, but he had to go out and see. He hopped off the train at Tucson and heard of a stage that ran south toward the Border. That sounded right, and he walked three blocks with his bags to perceive—no jehu with long flicking lash, but a chauffeur, the stage being a motor-bus.

Elbert couldn’t appreciate the scenery. Yes, there was a big ranch down yonder, the driver said. Yes, there was cattle. Irrigation and alfalfa had reclaimed this waste stuff. Some cows presently appeared wearing an ‘HCO’ brand.

‘What does that stand for?’ Elbert asked.

‘Heaslep and Company.’

No Circle X or Lazy M—but irrigation, alfalfa fields, Heaslep and Company!

‘The HCO runs everything down here—big land grant stretching almost to the Border,’ the stage driver said.

Elbert was let down and made his way to a group of low buildings in the distance. At the farrier’s shop, he inquired for the foreman, and was told to look for a door ahead, marked ‘Office.’ ‘You’ll find Frost-face in there or somewhere about,’ the blacksmith said.

Elbert’s pulse picked up a little at the name of the foreman, but it was certainly a business office he entered.

‘We’re not short-handed,’ snapped the little gray man, with worried face. ‘Things dull down in winter. Nothin’ much to do right now but keep off the hoof-and-mouth disease.’

Outside there was a succession of sick blasts from a truck—the sound of an engine, not only decrepit, but dirty and dry. Elbert turned to the door.

‘Wait a minute, young fellow. We might use a man on the chuck wagon—I wonder if you could drive old Fortitude?’

‘A mule?’ said Elbert. ‘I’m sure I could learn—’

‘Mule, hell, motor truck—can’t you hear her?’

‘I’m afraid I can,’ Elbert said wearily. His father had been right.

One distinct value about Heaslep and Company, however—no women in the establishment. Even the cooking staff was Chinese. But the rest was hard to bear. Efficiency and trade had settled down as unromantically as upon a tannery. Heaslep’s was a stock farm, a beef factory, anything but the cattle ranch of dreams. This part of Arizona was sunk in no foam of Indian red. The vast range lay on a squat mesa, partly penciled over with irrigation ditches. Elbert’s tardy soul, longing for the thunder of a stampede, sickened at the sight of thousands of domesticated moos, rack-fed in winter, market-fattened from fenced alfalfa fields, branded in chutes and railroaded as scientifically as tinned biscuit. The only longhorns hung over the mantelpiece in the dormitory of the cowhands. Even the imported bulls were businesslike.

Most of the ranges were deserted by this time, the cold weather settling down. Elbert had been taken on as ‘Bert’ Sartwell, but his first letters from home gave the real thing away. All hands relished the discovery. Over a dozen of the men were in for his first Sunday, the day they started him in filling up gopher holes in the environment of the main buildings. Elbert was told that the best way was to soak old newspapers into a pulp and poke them down into the holes with a stick; necessary business every week or ten days during the gopher season. This was the height of it, he was informed.

‘You see, the paper hardens down,’ Cal Monroid said.

‘And gets fire-proof,’ added Slim Gannon, his side-kick.

Elbert set about his work, a bit coldish and blank at the extent of the job before him. He had never read of this department of ranch work, and wondered if it meant he was to be relieved of the motor truck. Toward midday he looked up from his poking, to find that at least ten of the cowhands had closed in, having stalked him like an Indian band. Their enthusiasm was high and prolonged. Elbert smiled and blushed, but said nothing. For a day or two after that they tried to call him ‘Poke,’ but the name didn’t take hold. The men liked to say Elbert too well. ‘Elber-r-rt,’ they would chirrup, and inquire if he had ever done any bull-dogging.

He was not relieved from the truck. His work was to carry mails and bring in supplies from the town of Harrisburg, eleven miles to the north. He sometimes made two trips a day when the truck would permit, but the tantrums of old Fortitude were a subject of conversation at Heaslep’s only a little lower in the scale than the hoof-and-mouth disease.

On his third or fourth Sunday, Elbert spread newspapers on the ground and set about taking down Fortitude’s strained and creaking mechanism part by part. His activity and absorption began to attract a Sabbath crowd.

‘He’s gettin’ her whole plumbin’ out,’ Slim Gannon remarked. ‘I’m layin’ four to three that we’ve heard her last belch.’

Cal Monroid considered for half a minute, noting the orderly lay-out of tools, inwards, greases and oils, and how carefully Elbert had numbered the parts. Cal began to fancy a vague purpose underneath it all and casually remarked: ‘I’ll just take you on, Slim, for half a month’s pay.’

Elbert toiled through the hours. By sundown when he took his place at the wheel, all Heaslep’s was taut with strain. The works purred, the car moved. ‘It’s down-grade, she’s just rollin’!’ breathed Slim. But Elbert reversed; old Fortitude backed and curved, did a figure eight to new music without hitting post or wall.

‘I win,’ said Cal.

‘She ain’t belched yet,’ said Slim.

The two moved off to settle the technicality.

Dreary months of trucking. Elbert’s insatiable interest in horsemanship had been little encouraged at Heaslep’s. He was permitted to learn the bad ones by experience, and was rapidly disconnected several times, discovering his audience when it was too late, as on the day of ‘poking’ gopher holes. Though it was generally allowed things looked up a little when the range grass began to grow, Elbert lost heart before the winter was over. It seemed a long time to him since he had left home, but it wasn’t so by the calendar. To judge by letters, the family had its hands out beckoning, but Elbert felt neither his father nor sisters would miss having the laugh at his expense.

Hard to leave Cal and Slim. This pair had warmed up a trifle toward the last. It was Cal Monroid who helped Elbert up from the turf the last time he was spurned by an HCO untameable, and Cal’s easy tones had a soothing effect:

‘It’s about time you were sitting a real horse, Kid. Give me your shoe—’

And Elbert was lifted up on old Chester, who had his ‘stuff’ down so fine, you wouldn’t believe he knew anything. Chester was the morning-star of Cal’s string, and right then Elbert began to know the difference between an outlaw and a real man-horse. That one brief word ‘Kid,’ still sounded in his ears. It seemed to have let him into a new world, the world of Cal Monroid and Slim Gannon, the latter said to have taken the Tucson Bronk Cup two years straight; both men being held as cool and fast in a pinch. This episode held the faintest possible answer to what he had come West for, but Elbert had already decided to depart, his plan being to go on to the coast, before starting back East.

III
THE LEATHER-STORE

His first night in Los Angeles was like summer, though it was February. In the core of the old town he found the Plaza, and strolled through the Mexican crowd. His heart started a queer beat as the band struck up ‘La Paloma,’ his lips forming the words of the first line or two:

‘Cuando sali de la Habana,

Valgame Dios—’

A wonder took him as to what Los Angeles used to be like when there were empty hills all around and how ‘La Paloma’ would have sounded in those days. ‘Carved out of starlight,’ he whispered.

The next day in the window of an old leather-store near the Plaza, he saw a cardboard sign reading: ‘Young man wanted.’ Elbert didn’t suppose they would take on one without experience, but the impulse grew upon him to try his luck. The thought of going East so soon hadn’t become any easier, nor did he consider with relish the idea of asking his father for money to stay away with. To his surprise he was given a trial in the leather-shop, and gradually he became pleased with the arrangement, for the store proved to have quality and background. Real cattlemen used to swear by it, he found out, and occasionally, even now, an old-timer would come in and talk with the proprietor. They would chat of the days when cantinas still welcomed the passer-by around the corner on North Main Street, little games going on upstairs. In those days the Mexicans hanging around the Plaza still had bits of color in their sashes and sombreros.

There was a gray wooden horse in the leather-store, fragile but full height, on which Elbert was accustomed to show bridles, saddles, blankets, and pack-gear, talking to customers a lot wiser than he felt, for he still resented life’s conspiracy which had kept him from sitting a live horse where he belonged.

In the evening he would go out and lounge in the Plaza under the dusty palms and sycamores. It was better than Heaslep’s in a way—the Mexicans had a friendly feel, and sometimes when the band played, he could imagine himself down in the City of Mexico, or in the heart of Sonora at least. One day during the dinner hour, when Elbert was alone, a calm-eyed, oldish man pushed ajar the door of the leather-store, looked slowly around and remarked in mildest tone:

‘The first thing cow-people does, when they don’t know what to do, is to saddle their pony.’

The voice was so gentle and leisurely, Elbert was warmed and interested at once. He was quite sure that nothing he could say about saddles would astonish such a customer, so he approached with a smile merely. The stranger had come to a halt before as fine a bit of workmanship in plain leather as the store contained.

‘It ain’t hem-stitched,’ he began reflectively. ‘Thirty-eight pounds.’

‘Would you like to see it on the model?’ Elbert inquired.

The other didn’t seem to hear. ‘Now, what would you expect me to lay out for a little tan kack like this?’ he asked.

‘Hundred-seventy-five,’ Elbert said throatily. ‘Would you like to look at it on the model?’

‘No, it might confuse me a whole lot to see it on your dappled gray. Anyway, I can see Buddy Pitcairn made her from here. I’m shore partial about him monogram when I fork leather.’

A check was written with the remark: ‘You can ship her to me, care of Mort Cotton’s ranch at San Forenso, Arizona, and take plenty of time to look up this paper, young man. I never feel sure that the bank will like it, when I write out money for myself.’

The easy, rapid writing hinted an intelligence in curious contrast to the quaint speech and big loose hands, blackened and rounded to tool handles. The name on the check was Robert Leadley, and that was but the first of several calls which this customer made at the leather-store, ostensibly for further purchases, but always lingering to talk with Elbert. The latter had never known any one so easy to be with, and one late afternoon at closing time, when Mr. Leadley, with embarrassment, invited him to go out to supper, Elbert had been on the point of asking the same thing. They stopped for a soft drink at an old brown rail in Main Street.

‘I ’member when this was a great sportin’ place,’ Mr. Leadley said. ‘I used to come in here from the mountains with gold in a little chamois sack. Had a California claim in those days. I’m back in Arizona now, not a great ways from where I began. When the time came for me to go out this last trip, I felt like coming over to L.A., just like I used to from these mountains. Why, I was in this very place one night when a man was shot. Just yonder by that plate of hard-boiled eggs, he went down, callin’ on a woman.’

‘I didn’t quite understand what you mean by “going out,”’ said Elbert, not wanting to miss anything.

‘When you’ve got a claim in the mountains and you figure on leaving, you designates it “going out.”’

‘Is it a gold mine?’

‘Well, by stretchin’ a trifle you might call her a gold mine—just a little claim by myself. Southeast a ways and high up. You go to San Forenso first. You can look back into California and down into Sonora from my diggin’s.’

‘Do you have horses up at the mine?’ Elbert asked, thinking of the Pitcairn stock-saddle.

The quaint laugh sounded. ‘Just a little vanity, young man. They do say Bob Leadley would have his saddle-hoss, if he was runnin’ a canal boat. I can’t seem to do proper without a bit of hoss-flesh handy, though Mamie sure costs me no end money and trouble, not bein’ the sort of hoss as can pick her livin’ off the north side o’ trees—’

He paused, as if pleased to recall the mare to mind in minutest detail.

‘Mamie’s father was the stake-hoss, Ganopol—one of the first ten runners, they do say, and bone and blood to go with it, if not a whole lot of hoss-sense essential. Mamie’s mother was just a cow hoss ... just a cow hoss, with a little clock workin’ between her eyes—that was Clara. Thirteen years, I had her, and we got real domesticated together, you might say. Mamie’s a five-year-old now—just about growed up—don’t resemble neither parent none, bein’ a jewel box by herself, full of her own little knick-knacks.... Yep, bred right out of the purple royalty on one hand and the black sage on the other, but approachin’ my idea of saddle-hoss, plumb satisfyin’—

‘An’ p’raps it ain’t such a chore, as I’m makin’ out, to get hay and grain up to the mine,’ Mr. Leadley added, ‘because once or twice a year, Mort Cotton sends his mule train up from San Forenso to pack down my ore. Takes just about a week’s work, three times a year, for a dozen or fourteen mules; and ’stead of the train pilin’ back uptrail with empty riggin’s, I stock up the cabin and the corral. Makes it easy, but a whole lot of times, I don’t know where to put all I got—’

‘But what do you do with your mare when you leave the mine?’ Elbert asked.

‘Leave her with Mort Cotton at his ranch in San Forenso. All hands have got to know her at Mort’s.’

After supper they strolled back to the Plaza. The band began playing ‘La Paloma.’ Elbert started to speak, but Mr. Leadley’s hand tightened on his knee for silence.

‘I’ve got reason to remember that piece,’ he said, when it was over. ‘The Mexicans never get tired of it. It’s like the Virgin speaking to them. Do you know what that word means?’

‘Dove,’ said Elbert.

‘Correct. You must have studied the language?’

‘Only the last few weeks. I’d like to know more. It would come handy in the leather-store. You know a lot about Mexico, don’t you?’

‘Not so much as I used to believe, young man, but I ain’t averse to these people. I used to think I was, but as I look back now, I ’casionally catch myself wishin’ I’d treated them as well as they have treated me. Just a curious feelin’ at times—’

It didn’t seem to be a deep matter to Mr. Leadley, his eyes were so pleasant.

‘They’re peaceful to be with, like cattle,’ he went on. ‘I lived on a farm back East when I was a boy, and my father and mother used to fight a whole lot—at supper, especially. I ’member often goin’ out in the barnyard, and how peaceful it was, after the supper table. I don’t mean Mexicans are cattle, you understand, only that they loll around and ruminate peaceful, like cattle.’

Elbert waited for more, and what came had a world of feeling in it that he didn’t understand. It seemed the night was chillier, but the gentle tone hadn’t changed.

‘We used to call ’em greasers and shoot ’em up a lot, not thinkin’ much about it. We used to hang ’em for hoss-thieves, when a sheriff wanted to make a showin’. Thought little more of ’em than a Chinee, only diff’rent. Young punchers and miners—we thought we was the people—’

The voice stopped so suddenly Elbert felt queer.

‘You didn’t tell me, why you have reason to remember “La Paloma,”’ he said, looking across at the red lights of ‘Estella Teatro.’

‘I’ve got a boy about your size, I figure, somewhere south in Sonora—’

The words fanned to life the romantic pictures of Elbert’s private world—‘somewhere south in Sonora—’

‘He used to like that song—used to whistle and sing it at all times. A dozen years since I saw him. He was under fifteen then—that would make him about your age now. You’re pretty good size, but I think he’d show up a speck taller by this time.’

‘What’s your son doing down there?’

‘Well, I only hear from him occasionally, through the papers. Must be excitin’ work, having to do with the rurales, mostly. Some calls it politics in Mexico.... Maybe they’ll play that again—if we sit down for a spell.’

And now Elbert was hearing the story of a boy, called Bart—no mother—life in a mining camp on the Rio Brava, Arizona—a sorry sort of helpless attachment in the father.

‘The very night Bart came to town, before even the old Mexican nurse let me in, I knew my job was cut out,’ Mr. Leadley said.

Sentences like these stood out in the midst of detail:

‘I had everything mapped out for him, but he wouldn’t follow the map. That broke me, because I mapped so hard and set so much store.... Bit by bit Bart showed me he’d have his way—taking his whippings easy, looking white, but ready to laugh, and going his own way just the same afterward. I never seemed able to do the right thing by him; couldn’t let him alone; cared too much, I guess—the kind of care that hurts. Why, I’d get lonesome for him when he was right in the room, and flare up over things I’d never dream of getting sore about in any one else. Altogether, what I didn’t know in them days was so much, young man, that I’ve been fillin’ in ever since, and ain’t through yet.’

IV
‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’

After they had parted, on the night of their first supper together, Elbert fell to thinking of his own relationships at home. This occupied him for an hour or two before going to bed—mixed in with memories of what he had heard about Mr. Leadley’s missing son, and old days on the Rio Brava. He saw for the first time that there were two sides to this father-and-son business; that it was just possible a man might be able to talk to another man, saying things he couldn’t tell his own son. Moreover, Elbert was able to see something of the tangle between Bart and his father with a clearness that had never come to him in regard to his own affairs.

He was a touch lonely that night, but queerly glad, for the first time, that he had never shown the knack to ‘work’ his father. All regret eased about that; better as it was.

Mr. Leadley didn’t appear to be in any hurry to get back to his mine. It seemed to do him good to talk about the old days. Elbert listened eagerly, especially about Bart as a horseman.

‘You see, he learned all we knew about hosses and all that the Mexicans know besides. He rode light, his hand quick, a sort of kidding way with him that got right into the good feelings of a hoss. I made him give up a bad one once and I had no right to do that, but I didn’t see it straight until afterward. It was an old gray outlaw he brought home from a near-by ranch—a discard, but Bart was sitting him upright and amiable. That hoss pretty near finished me. I’m limpin’ yet, on rainy days, from tryin’ to correct his misdemeanors. And because I couldn’t, it bore down on me not to let Bart ride him, who could. That was another mistake.... A hossman at ten, Bart was; had to have his six-gun before he was twelve. He could fan it, too. No use me tryin’ to keep him from it, and the fellows I worked with at the mines whisperin’ that he’d kill himself—that he wouldn’t live to be hanged. You always hear what you’re afraid of.

‘Slim, black-haired, easy smilin’ and Spanish on his tongue, Mexican spurs and reata, more interested in guitar music than gold mining, and off by himself or with the Mexicans instead of with his own kind. You know, Bart’s mother was Spanish.... Yet any one could see Bart was game and gritty—life a feather to him—take it or leave it; laughin’ but dangerous. No, they couldn’t see it, either,’ Mr. Leadley finished abruptly. ‘I’m talking from a distance, from where I am now, I didn’t see it myself then—not rightly, I didn’t. I’m shore gettin’ talkative.’

‘I like to hear about him,’ said Elbert.

‘Now as to that, I had a queer feelin’ you did from the first day I came to the leather-store. Guess that’s why I’ve kept hangin’ around—that, and your bein’ about Bart’s age and size.’

And yet, if it hadn’t been for the curious sensitiveness within him that registered Mr. Leadley’s feelings, Elbert would have thought that the other was merely recalling matters of pleasantness from years ago. Finally one evening, after talk touching Bart’s prolonged stay below the Border, Elbert said:

‘I’d certainly like to get somewhere down in Sonora.’

‘Don’t you ever draw a vacation at your store?’

Elbert laughed. ‘I’ve only been there a few weeks.’

‘I’d hate to cause any disaster in the leather business—’

‘How do you mean?’

The other’s voice became husky with strain. ‘I was thinkin’ as a starter, possibly, you might come over to my claim on your vacation.’

It began to appear more and more feasible as they talked. Directions opened right here at the Plaza. Elbert was told that an old friend and mining partner of Mr. Leadley’s—Mort Cotton, now a cattleman, the same to whom the saddle had been shipped—would meet him at San Forenso and drive him up as far as the road went on the way to the mine.

‘That’s at Slim Stake Camp,’ Mr. Leadley added. ‘From there you just keep on hikin’ up the canyon trail till you come to White Stone Flats, where I’ll be watchin’ for you—’

It sounded somewhat complicated to Elbert. ‘But suppose I should miss the trail?’ he said.

‘I can’t see how you could, unless you got headstrong—’

‘But how am I to know when I get to White Stone Flats?’

‘By composin’ yourself to listen a little longer. First you see two big pines less’n twenty feet apart, still alive, but showing marks of a forest fire ten or twelve years back.’

‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how a tree would look, twelve years after a forest fire—’

‘Right, you wouldn’t, but that ain’t all to go by. It is a Flats, remember, and on the Flats is a lot of big white stones, and printed on the biggest of ’em in black letters, “Are You Doomed?”’

Elbert saw himself getting there.

‘... humorist—now I wonder?’ Mr. Leadley went on. ‘Or just a pious gent coming up into Nineveh, as if sent for? “Are You Doomed?”—he paints, right on the big stone facin’ the trail, and a little ways off on a smaller stone, he fixes the answer: “Jesus Saves.” That there handwritin’ on the rock seems to be for me, ’cause every time I go for water—there it is. But as I was sayin’, you’ll know you’re comin’ to the Flats when you get to the last water.’

‘How shall I know it’s the last water?’

‘’Cause pretty soon after that you’ll come to the Flats. Anyway, I’d be watchin’ on the day set—’

Elbert was finally able to arrange a few days off, without losing his job outright, though he felt queerly uncertain about coming back, the claim being beyond Yuma on his way East. On a morning in late March, he reached San Forenso, where he was met by Mr. Cotton, with a two-horse rig. The hand that Elbert gripped was crippled in shape, but did not lack strength, and the eyes of Mr. Leadley’s old partner peered into his with such frequency and deep intent from under their bushy white brows, that Elbert began to feel he had never before been so exhaustively appraised.

‘Has Bob started in tellin’ you about Red Ante, yet?’ Mr. Cotton asked after they had driven some time.

‘No,’ said Elbert, wondering if Red Ante were a game.

‘Now that’s funny—he never gets away from that when I see him. That’s one reason I don’t see him a whole lot more. Told you about Bart, of course—’

‘Yes.’

‘Way back in Bismo—’

‘Yes—’

‘And stopped short at Red Ante?’

‘I didn’t hear him mention—’

‘Now that’s queer—nothin’ about a man not bein’ able to wash his hands?’

‘No,’ said Elbert, more mystified.

‘Can’t be it’s dyin’ out of him,’ Mr. Cotton mused, eyes rigid on the flanks of his team, as they wound up a canyon trail. ‘But that ain’t the kind of thing as dies out,’ he added.

At Slim Stake Camp, where the road ended, Mr. Cotton excused himself to write a note to Mr. Leadley, which Elbert was asked to deliver. ‘And don’t let him fill you up none on how bad he’s treated Bart,’ was the last swift injunction. ‘I was along myself in them days and I didn’t miss all that was goin’ on.’

Elbert nodded attentively.

‘Remember what I say, when he starts tellin’ you about Red Ante!’ shouted Mr. Cotton, holding hard on his swerving team.

A while after that Elbert was alone on the steep canyon trail, his ears cracking like drying wallpaper from the altitude, and his heart windily at work. Springs saturated the earth from time to time. There positively didn’t seem to be any last water, until the trail widened in mid-afternoon and there faced him:

‘Are You Doomed?’

White Stone Flats. He found the two pines that had lived through the fire—all straight, but no Mr. Leadley to meet him. He called a little, but the raising of his voice left him queerly uneasy. There was food in his roll, and he finally spread his blankets and stretched out for the night. The idea struck him that he must soon get back to work, for it seemed like ten days already.

Mr. Leadley must have forgotten the date. Up here anything was possible. Hours after, a white glare through the eastern trees and a tardy, bulging moon showed up; then quite the most curdling wail sounded through the whitish night. It was ‘doggy’ in depth and volume, but the wauling of it was like a greatly enlarged cat. Now Elbert had an opportunity to study the stuff he was made of. He wasn’t encouraged. His heart was knocking to get out. Nothing short of a mountain lion made that noise.

There was another sound—hard to place, that welled out of the dragging hours—a queer hum, so soft that one didn’t know whether it was a mile away or in his hair. It was like a woman going insane, but not violently.

Hard to believe, but the sky began to show signs at last that another day was actually to be given to mankind. Elbert was making coffee in full daylight, when another outcry reached him—his first dawning suspicion as to the human quality of these tones. He stood up; his hand actually shook as he set down his tin cup, and his eye caught the black letters:

‘Are You Doomed?’

‘How did you know?’ he muttered—and right then, the call again—vaguely like his own name. A minute later he was running across the Flats, his ears verifying as he ran:

‘Oh, Sartwell—this wa-a-ay!’ ahead, and somewhat above.

‘Yes, I’m coming!’

On the easy slope before his eyes, he saw a trail.

‘... turn to the left at the rotted cedar!’

The voice nearer, his own steps soundless for sixty or seventy feet along the punk of fallen timber; then a bald ridge which the winds had swept clean—a hand raised from the gravel—the old man crumpled there, his lips stretched white in a pained smile.

‘A long time gettin’ to you ... couldn’t make it last night. Where’s your canteen?’

‘Back with my stuff—shall I get it?’

‘No, I guess I can wait a little longer. We’ll get to the cabin. Mebby, leaning a whole lot, I can walk a bit.’

‘What did you do? You haven’t been lying out here all night?’

‘Yes. It happened in the tunnel yesterday ’bout noon—falling rock ... too big for the small of a man’s back. Started a trickle in there, somewhere—’

Did he mean in the mine or in his back?

‘Left me uncoupled. Too bad to spoil that vacation of yours this way.... Figured I could reach you by crawlin’—but played out—couldn’t make you hear in the night. Feared you might have gone back to town.’

Mr. Leadley couldn’t stand now, even with help. Elbert shouldered him at last; a long hard pull up to the cabin. No need for directions the latter part of the way, for a horse kept up an incessant nickering—like showers of gold coins falling upon a metal surface.

‘That’s Mamie. She ain’t been fed since yesterday mornin’,’ the old man apologized. ‘She never misses bestowin’ her welcomes, though it ain’t like her to be quite so noisy. She’s a real listener, too, Mamie is.’

A cabin in the midst of a group of great yellow pines. Elbert entered the open door, gasping with his burden. The old man’s tortured mouth still smiled up at him from the bunk. The room smelled like cigar-box wood. It was stuffed with chests, cupboards and cabinets—a hand-hewn room, with massive frame and heavy cedar shakes on the outside. Elbert brought water and started to unlace the nearest boot.

A ghost of the old chuckle and the words:

‘No, nothing for me, ’til you go feed Mamie. She ain’t used to bein’ treated like this—’

Half in a dream, Elbert went out to the little corral, lifting the wooden pin that let him in. The mare played curiously about him, but mainly kept her eyes to the cabin; her ears straight out for a voice from there. He only saw a bay butterball at first—shiny satin in the bright sunlight—a lot more rounded out than the wooden horse in the leather-store, not so tall as Cal Monroid’s Chester, which had stood in Elbert’s mind up to this moment as all that a horse could be.

He was thinking of the look he had seen in Bob Leadley’s face; and of the rock, too big for the small of a man’s back, and of feeding the mare before anything could be done. He dropped a measure of grain into the manger under the shed roof, but Mamie didn’t stay with it. She kept running up and down the corral, nickering softly, listening, her head cocked toward the cabin, her ears held forward pointing to the open door. She seemed appareled in sunshine.

V
‘I, ROBERT LEADLEY—’

That leak wasn’t in the mine.

‘I feel a trickle inside, young man—’

Thus, every little while, through the heat of the day, the old man intimated his hurt, and how he felt himself bleeding internally. Elbert’s idea was to set out at once and in a hurry to bring help from Slim Stake Camp, but Mr. Leadley so far had persistently refused to let him go.

‘Things I’ve got to say are more important. You never can tell when I’m apt to start talkin’—don’t go yet. I’m restin’ a little first, that’s all—’

When he dozed, Elbert roamed about outside, but within call. Everything imaginable in the way of canned goods, dried fruits, preserves, were stored in a shed as commodious as the cabin; ample supplies of tobacco, quantities of unused tools. Stocked for a year, the place looked; with at least a ton of baled hay and many bags of grain in the corral-shed. All the carpenter work was made of cedar; hand-tooling everywhere—work of a man who liked to bring out the best with a sharp blade; quaint art about the cabinets and wooden insets in the fireplace.

Down trail to the right from the cabin door was the tunnel entrance to the mine, and ahead out over many tree-tops, a glimpse of the Flats, in a great pit of saffron light. Elbert kept thinking he should go for help in spite of Mr. Leadley’s protestations. A call from the cabin hurried him in shortly after noon.

Twice the injured man’s lips started, before he got words going:

‘Maybe I ain’t goin’ to die, and maybe I am. That’s all right—only there’s some things I mean to say first. It wasn’t only a vacation I brought you here for—that and somethin’ else, though I didn’t expect to be hurried like this, in unburdenin’ my mind. Yes, sir, I took to you the minute you looked so inquirin’ as to what I meant, when I came in that leather-store ... same age and all that, as Bart down in Sonora—and when you hints you’d like to get down there .... Draw up a box to write on, and bring me a little leather sack of papers in the lower cabinet by the fireplace—the key in the wallet here. You’re to write down what I say.’

Reserves of will-power were drawn upon; part of the quaint twang went out of the old man’s speech:

‘I, Robert Leadley, of the Dry Cache mine, near San Forenso, Arizona, in sound mind, so far as I know, but badly hurt from a fallen rock in the tunnel of said mine—my own fault because I knew for a long time there were spots that needed timbering—do hereby confer upon my young friend, Elbert Sartwell, who is writing this at my word, the sole right and authority to manage and administer all property I possess—’