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.