Somewhere south in Sonora

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.