WHETSTONE, THE OUTLAW
When Taterleg roused the camp before
the east was light, Lambert noted that another man
had ridden in. This was a wiry young fellow with
a short nose and fiery face, against which his scant
eyebrows and lashes were as white as chalk.
His presence in the camp seemed to
put a restraint on the spirits of the others, some
of whom greeted him by the name Jim, others ignoring
him entirely. Among these latter was the black-haired
man who had given Lambert his title and elevated him
to the nobility of the Bad Lands. On the face
of it there was a crow to be picked between them.
Jim was belted with a pistol and heeled
with a pair of those long-roweled Mexican spurs, such
as had gone out of fashion on the western range long
before his day. He leaned on his elbow near the
fire, his legs stretched out in a way that obliged
Taterleg to walk round the spurred boots as he went
between his cooking and the supplies in the wagon,
the tailboard of which was his kitchen table.
If Taterleg resented this lordly obstruction,
he did not discover it by word or feature. He
went on humming a tune without words as he worked,
handing out biscuits and ham to the hungry crew.
Jim had eaten his breakfast already, and was smoking
a cigarette at his ease. Now and then he addressed
somebody in obscene jocularity.
Lambert saw that Jim turned his eyes
on him now and then with sneering contempt, but said
nothing. When the men had made a hasty end of
their breakfast three of them started to the corral.
The young man who had humorously enumerated the virtues
of the All-in-One, whom the others called Spence,
was of this number. He turned back, offering Lambert
his hand with a smile.
“I’m glad I met you, Duke,
and I hope you’ll do well wherever you travel,”
he said, with such evident sincerity and good feeling
that Lambert felt like he was parting from a friend.
“Thanks, old feller, and the same to you.”
Spence went on to saddle his horse,
whistling as he scuffed through the low sage.
Jim sat up.
“I’ll make you whistle
through your ribs,” he snarled after him.
It was Sunday. These men who
remained in camp were enjoying the infrequent luxury
of a day off. With the first gleam of morning
they got out their razors and shaved, and Siwash,
who seemed to be the handy man and chief counselor
of the outfit, cut everybody’s hair, with the
exception of Jim, who had just returned from somewhere
on the train, and still had the scent of the barber-shop
on him, and Taterleg, who had mastered the art of
shingling himself, and kept his hand in by constant
practice.
Lambert mended his tire, using an
old rubber boot that Taterleg found kicking around
camp to plug the big holes in his outer tube.
He was for going on then, but Siwash and the others
pressed him to stay over the day, to which invitation
he yielded without great argument.
There was nothing ahead of him but
desolation, said Taterleg, a country so rough that
it tried a horse to travel it. Ranchhouses were
farther apart as a man proceeded, and beyond that,
mountains. It looked to Taterleg as if he’d
better give it up.
That was so, according to the opinion
of Siwash. To his undoubted knowledge, covering
the history of twenty-four years, no agent ever had
penetrated that far before. Having broken this
record on a bicycle, Lambert ought to be satisfied.
If he was bound to travel, said Siwash, his advice
would be to travel back.
It seemed to Lambert that the bottom
was all out of his plans, indeed. It would be
far better to chuck the whole scheme overboard and
go to work as a cowboy if they would give him a job.
That was nearer the sphere of his intended future
activities; that was getting down to the root and
foundation of a business which had a ladder in it whose
rungs were not made of any general agent’s hot
air.
After his hot and heady way of quick
decisions and planning to completion before he even
had begun, Lambert was galloping the Bad Lands as
superintendent of somebody’s ranch, having made
the leap over all the trifling years, with their trifling
details of hardship, low wages, loneliness, and isolation
in a wink. From superintendent he galloped swiftly
on his fancy to a white ranchhouse by some calm riverside,
his herds around him, his big hat on his head, market
quotations coming to him by telegraph every day, packers
appealing to him to ship five trainloads at once to
save their government contracts.
What is the good of an imagination
if a man cannot ride it, and feel the wind in his
face as he flies over the world? Even though it
is a liar and a trickster, and a rifler of time which
a drudge of success would be stamping into gold, it
is better for a man than wine. He can return from
his wide excursions with no deeper injury than a sigh.
Lambert came back to the reality,
broaching the subject of a job. Here Jim took
notice and cut into the conversation, it being his
first word to the stranger.
“Sure you can git a job, bud,”
he said, coming over to where Lambert sat with Siwash
and Taterleg, the latter peeling potatoes for a stew,
somebody having killed a calf. “The old
man needs a couple of hands; he told me to keep my
eye open for anybody that wanted a job.”
“I’m glad to hear of it,”
said Lambert, warming up at the news, feeling that
he must have been a bit severe in his judgment of Jim,
which had not been altogether favorable.
“He’ll be over in the morning; you’d
better hang around.”
Seeing the foundation of a new fortune
taking shape, Lambert said he would “hang around.”
They all applauded his resolution, for they all appeared
to like him in spite of his appearance, which was distinctive,
indeed, among the somber colors of that sage-gray land.
Jim inquired if he had a horse, the
growing interest of a friend in his manner. Hearing
the facts of the case from Lambert before
dawn he had heard them from Taterleg he
appeared concerned almost to the point of being troubled.
“You’ll have to git you
a horse, Duke; you’ll have to ride up to the
boss when you hit him for a job. He never was
known to hire a man off the ground, and I guess if
you was to head at him on that bicycle, he’d
blow a hole through you as big as a can of salmon.
Any of you fellers got a horse you want to trade the
Duke for his bicycle?”
The inquiry brought out a round of
somewhat cloudy witticism, with proposals to Lambert
for an exchange on terms rather embarrassing to meet,
seeing that even the least preposterous was not sincere.
Taterleg winked to assure him that it was all banter,
without a bit of harm at the bottom of it, which Lambert
understood very well without the services of a commentator.
Jim brightened up presently, as if
he saw a gleam that might lead Lambert out of the
difficulty. He had an extra horse himself, not
much of a horse to look at, but as good-hearted a
horse as a man ever throwed a leg over, and that wasn’t
no lie, if you took him the right side on. But
you had to take him the right side on, and humor him,
and handle him like eggs till he got used to you.
Then you had as purty a little horse as a man ever
throwed a leg over, anywhere.
Jim said he’d offer that horse,
only he was a little bashful in the presence of strangers meaning
the horse and didn’t show up in a
style to make his owner proud of him. The trouble
with that horse was he used to belong to a one-legged
man, and got so accustomed to the feel of a one-legged
man on him that he was plumb foolish between two legs.
That horse didn’t have much
style to him, and no gait to speak of; but he was
as good a cow-horse as ever chawed a bit. If the
Duke thought he’d be able to ride him, he was
welcome to him. Taterleg winked what Lambert
interpreted as a warning at that point, and in the
faces of the others there were little gleams of humor,
which they turned their heads, or bent to study the
ground, as Siwash did, to hide.
“Well, I’m not much on a horse,”
Lambert confessed.
“You look like a man that’d
been on a horse a time or two,” said Jim, with
a knowing inflection, a shrewd flattery.
“I used to ride around a little,
but that’s been a good while ago.”
“A feller never forgits how
to ride,” Siwash put in; “and if a man
wants to work on the range, he’s got to ride
’less’n he goes and gits a job runnin’
sheep, and that’s below any man that is a man.”
Jim sat pondering the question, hands
hooked in front of his knees, a match in his mouth
beside his unlighted cigarette.
“I been thinkin’ I’d
sell that horse,” said he reflectively.
“Ain’t got no use for him much; but I
don’t know.”
He looked off over the chuck wagon,
through the tops of the scrub pines in which the camp
was set, drawing his thin, white eyebrows, considering
the case.
“Winter comin’ on and hay to buy,”
said Siwash.
“That’s what I’ve
been thinkin’ and studyin’ over. Shucks!
I don’t need that horse. I tell you what
I’ll do, Duke” turning to Lambert,
brisk as with a gush of sudden generosity “if
you can ride that old pelter, I’ll give him
to you for a present. And I bet you’ll not
git as cheap an offer of a horse as that ever in your
life ag’in.”
“I think it’s too generous I
wouldn’t want to take advantage of it,”
Lambert told him, trying to show a modesty in the matter
that he did not feel.
“I ain’t a-favorin’
you, Duke; not a dollar. If I needed that horse,
I’d hang onto him, and you wouldn’t git
him a cent under thirty-five bucks; but when a man
don’t need a horse, and it’s a expense
on him, he can afford to give it away he
can give it away and make money. That’s
what I’m a-doin’, if you want to take
me up.”
“I’ll take a look at him, Jim.”
Jim got up with eagerness, and went
to fetch a saddle and bridle from under the wagon.
The others came into the transaction with lively interest.
Only Taterleg edged round to Lambert, and whispered
with his head turned away to look like innocence:
“Watch out for him he’s a bal’-faced
hyeeny!”
They trooped off to the corral, which
was a temporary enclosure made of wire run among the
little pines. Jim brought the horse out.
It stood tamely enough to be saddled, with head drooping
indifferently, and showed no deeper interest and no
resentment over the operation of bridling, Jim talking
all the time he worked, like the faker that he was,
to draw off a too-close inspection of his wares.
“Old Whetstone ain’t much
to look at,” he said, “and as I told you,
Mister, he ain’t got no fancy gait; but he can
bust the middle out of the breeze when he lays out
a straight-ahead run. Ain’t a horse on this
range can touch his tail when old Whetstone throws
a ham into it and lets out his stren’th.”
“He looks like he might go some,”
Lambert commented in the vacuous way of a man who
felt that he must say something, even though he didn’t
know anything about it.
Whetstone was rather above the stature
of the general run of range horses, with clean legs
and a good chest. But he was a hammer-headed,
white-eyed, short-maned beast, of a pale water-color
yellow, like an old dish. He had a beaten-down,
bedraggled, and dispirited look about him, as if he
had carried men’s burdens beyond his strength
for a good while, and had no heart in him to take
the road again. He had a scoundrelly way of rolling
his eyes to watch all that went on about him without
turning his head.
Jim girthed him and cinched him, soundly
and securely, for no matter who was pitched off and
smashed up in that ride, he didn’t want the saddle
to turn and be ruined.
“Well, there he stands, Duke,
and saddle and bridle goes with him if you’re
able to ride him. I’ll be generous; I won’t
go half-way with you; I’ll be whole hog or none.
Saddle and bridle goes with Whetstone, all a free
gift, if you can ride him, Duke. I want to start
you up right.”
It was a safe offer, taking all precedent
into account, for no man ever had ridden Whetstone,
not even his owner. The beast was an outlaw of
the most pronounced type, with a repertory of tricks,
calculated to get a man off his back, so extensive
that he never seemed to repeat. He stood always
as docilely as a camel to be saddled and bridled, with
what method in this apparent docility no man versed
in horse philosophy ever had been able to reason out.
Perhaps it was that he had been born with a spite
against man, and this was his scheme for luring him
on to his discomfiture and disgrace.
It was an expectant little group that
stood by to witness this greenhorn’s rise and
fall. According to his established methods, Whetstone
would allow him to mount, still standing with that
indifferent droop to his head. But one who was
sharp would observe that he was rolling his old white
eyes back to see, tipping his sharp ear like a wildcat
to hear every scrape and creak of the leather.
Then, with the man in the saddle, nobody knew what
he would do.
That uncertainty was what made Whetstone
valuable and interesting beyond any outlaw in the
world. Men grew accustomed to the tricks of ordinary
pitching broncos, in time, and the novelty and charm
were gone. Besides, there nearly always was somebody
who could ride the worst of them. Not so Whetstone.
He had won a good deal of money for Jim, and everybody
in camp knew that thirty-five dollars wasn’t
more than a third of the value that his owner put
upon him.
There was boundless wonder among them,
then, and no little admiration, when this stranger
who had come into that unlikely place on a bicycle
leaped into the saddle so quickly that old Whetstone
was taken completely by surprise, and held him with
such a strong hand and stiff rein that his initiative
was taken from him.
The greenhorn’s next maneuver
was to swing the animal round till he lost his head,
then clap heels to him and send him off as if he had
business for the day laid out ahead of him.
It was the most amazing start that
anybody ever had been known to make on Whetstone,
and the most startling and enjoyable thing about it
was that this strange, overgrown boy, with his open
face and guileless speech, had played them all for
a bunch of suckers, and knew more about riding in
a minute than they ever had learned in their lives.
Jim Wilder stood by, swearing by all
his obscene deities that if that man hurt Whetstone,
he’d kill him for his hide. But he began
to feel better in a little while. Hope, even
certainty, picked up again. Whetstone was coming
to himself. Perhaps the old rascal had only been
elaborating his scheme a little at the start, and was
now about to show them that their faith in him was
not misplaced.
The horse had come to a sudden stop,
legs stretched so wide that it seemed as if he surely
must break in the middle. But he gathered his
feet together so quickly that the next view presented
him with his back arched like a fighting cat’s.
And there on top of him rode the Duke, his small brown
hat in place, his gay shirt ruffling in the wind.
After that there came, so quickly
that it made the mind and eye hasten to follow, all
the tricks that Whetstone ever had tried in his past
triumphs over men; and through all of them, sharp,
shrewd, unexpected, startling as some of them were,
that little brown hat rode untroubled on top.
Old Whetstone was as wet at the end of ten minutes
as if he had swum a river. He grunted with anger
as he heaved and lashed, he squealed in his resentful
passion as he swerved, lunged, pitched, and clawed
the air.
The little band of spectators cheered
the Duke, calling loudly to inform him that he was
the only man who ever had stuck that long. The
Duke waved his hat in acknowledgement, and put it
back on with deliberation and exactness, while old
Whetstone, as mad as a wet hen, tried to roll down
suddenly and crush his legs.
Nothing to be accomplished by that
old trick. The Duke pulled him up with a wrench
that made him squeal, and Whetstone, lifted off his
forelegs, attempted to complete the backward turn and
catch his tormentor under the saddle. But that
was another trick so old that the simplest horseman
knew how to meet it. The next thing he knew, Whetstone
was galloping along like a gentleman, just wind enough
in him to carry him, not an ounce to spare.
Jim Wilder was swearing himself blue.
It was a trick, an imposition, he declared. No
circus-rider could come there and abuse old Whetstone
that way and live to eat his dinner. Nobody appeared
to share his view of it. They were a unit in
declaring that the Duke beat any man handling a horse
they ever saw. If Whetstone didn’t get him
off pretty soon, he would be whipped and conquered,
his belly on the ground.
“If he hurts that horse I’ll
blow a hole in him as big as a can of salmon!”
Jim declared.
“Take your medicine like a man,
Jim,” Siwash advised. “You might know
somebody’d come along that’d ride him,
in time.”
“Yes, come along!” said Jim with
a sneer.
Whetstone had begun to collect himself
out on the flat among the sagebrush a quarter of a
mile away. The frenzy of desperation was in him.
He was resorting to the raw, low, common tricks of
the ordinary outlaw, even to biting at his rider’s
legs. That ungentlemanly behavior was costly,
as he quickly learned, at the expense of a badly cut
mouth. He never had met a rider before who had
energy to spare from his efforts to stick in the saddle
to slam him a big kick in the mouth when he doubled
himself to make that vicious snap. The sound of
that kick carried to the corral.
“I’ll fix you for that!” Jim swore.
He was breathing as hard as his horse,
sweat of anxiety running down his face. The Duke
was bringing the horse back, his spirit pretty well
broken, it appeared.
“What do you care what he does
to him? It ain’t your horse no more.”
It was Taterleg who said that, standing
near Jim, a little way behind him, as gorgeous as
a bridegroom in the bright sun.
“You fellers can’t ring
me in on no game like that and beat me out of my horse!”
said Jim, redder than ever in his passion.
“Who do you mean, rung you in,
you little, flannel-faced fiste?" Siwash demanded,
whirling round on him with blood in his eye.
Jim was standing with his legs apart,
bent a little at the knees, as if he intended to make
a jump. His right hand was near the butt of his
gun, his fingers were clasping and unclasping, as
if he limbered them for action. Taterleg slipped
up behind him on his toes, and jerked the gun from
Jim’s scabbard with quick and sure hand.
He backed away with it, presenting it with determined
mien as Jim turned on him and cursed him by all his
lurid gods.
“If you fight anybody in this
camp today, Jim, you’ll fight like a man,”
said Taterleg, “or you’ll hobble out of
it on three legs, like a wolf.”
The Duke was riding old Whetstone
like a feather, letting him have his spurts of kicking
and stiff-legged bouncing without any effort to restrain
him at all. There wasn’t much steam in the
outlaw’s antics now; any common man could
have ridden him without losing his hat.
Jim had drawn apart from the others,
resentful of the distrust that Taterleg had shown,
but more than half of his courage and bluster taken
away from him with his gun. He was swearing more
volubly than ever to cover his other deficiencies;
but he was a man to be feared only when he had his
weapon under his hand.
The Duke had brought the horse almost
back to camp when the animal was taken with an extraordinarily
vicious spasm of pitching, broken by sudden efforts
to fling himself down and roll over on his persistent
rider. The Duke let him have it his way, all but
the rolling, for a while; then he appeared to lose
patience with the stubborn beast. He headed him
into the open, laid the quirt to him, and galloped
toward the hills.
“That’s the move run the devil
out of him,” said one.
The Duke kept him going, and going
for all there was in him. Horse and rider were
dim in the dust of the heated race against the evil
passion, the untamed demon, in the savage creature’s
heart. It began to look as if Lambert never intended
to come back. Jim saw it that way. He came
over to Taterleg as hot as a hornet.
“Give me that gun I’m goin’
after him!”
“You’ll have to go without it, Jim.”
Jim blasted him to sulphurous perdition,
and split him with forked lightning from his blasphemous
tongue.
“He’ll come back; he’s just runnin’
the vinegar out of him,” said one.
“Come back hell!” said Jim.
“If he don’t come back,
that’s his business. A man can go wherever
he wants to go on his own horse, I guess.”
That was the observation of Siwash,
standing there rather glum and out of tune over Jim’s
charge that they had rung the Duke in on him to beat
him out of his animal.
“It was a put-up job! I’ll split
that feller like a hog!”
Jim left them with that declaration
of his benevolent intention, hurrying to the corral
where his horse was, his saddle on the ground by the
gate. They watched him saddle, and saw him mount
and ride after the Duke, with no comment on his actions
at all.
The Duke was out of sight in the scrub
timber at the foot of the hills, but his dust still
floated like the wake of a swift boat, showing the
way he had gone.
“Yes, you will!” said Taterleg.
Meaningless, irrelevant, as that fragmentary
ejaculation seemed, the others understood. They
grinned, and twisted wise heads, spat out their tobacco,
and went back to dinner.