Mavericks Page 6

  "What d'ya know," gasps Old Jake, stumbling and falling sideways to the ground but hanging on to his end of the rope. "I did it!"

  Mid-morning sunlight smiles down on a small sorrel with four white feet trotting steadily along. There are two new reins shrewdly slit-knotted to the side-bars of the bit in its mouth. These are new only to this bridle, are of ancient tough rawhide and taken from the equally ancient bridle that has been hanging in the sagging barn where they have been kept strong and supple by daily rubbings from horny old hands. Perched in the saddle, something like a scarecrow on a rail, thin legs dangling down past the stirrups, is old Jake. It has taken him quite some maneuvering with the sorrel snubbed in close to one of the remaining posts of the corral and with his old joints protesting to get up there. But he is there. He has full right to be proud of himself for being there and for staying there, but he is too busy to think about that. He is bent sideways and forward, studying the ground ahead. He is backtracking the trail the sorrel made coming to his spring.

  It is slow work at times with many pauses and circlings. The sorrel has spent most of the night wandering about cropping bunch-grass and on into the morning light before scenting the water and moving directly towards it. But out of the long long years Old Jake has become patience itself. Patiently he works around and about, old hands firm and controlling on the reins, deciphering the tale of the tracks, his keen old eyes cutting sign younger men out of today's world would miss altogether.

  He finds the place. The story it tells is an old old story, older than Old Jake, much older, reaching perhaps all the way back to the first time the first man rode the first horse. Here the sorrel has shied suddenly probably at nothing more than a jackrabbit leaping out from a bush under its nose as jackrabbits will, and the rider, caught unawares, has tumbled to the ground. Apparently this rider had the good sense to hold tight to a rein - but the rein has broken.

  Old Jake looks down at the strip of leather with jagged end lying on the ground. "I figgered somethin' like that," he says. He studies the footprints showing in a patch of soft ground nearby. Boots. Yes. But small. Boy-size. "I figgered that too," he says.

  Late morning sunlight smiles down on a small sorrel that is plodding through rough and broken country. The sorrel would like to step out and really move and get away from this stony region which is hard on a horse's feet, especially on hoofs that have been often pared for the fitting of iron shoes. The hoof-frogs are sensitive to sharppointed stones that can poke up in the middle past the protective rims of the shoes. But this horse has already learned to like the heap of old bones on its back that can talk its own language along the reins. That heap of old bones is working out some kind of a puzzle and needs cooperation.

  Old Jake is sore some in the crotch from having his feet dangling free and his old joints are protesting again, but he is not aware of that. He is intent on puzzling out from a few hints, hardly there and far apart and discernible even to his experienced old eyes only after careful study, the trail of a small booted human being lost somewhere in this back country. "Got hisself all mixed up," he mutters. "Town's over thataway. Could hit the highway anglin' south. Kupper's place ain't too far over them little hills pokin' up. An' he takes the one way that's all wrong."

  Old Jake with the sorrel helping finds a place where the small human being, frightened at something, has done some running. The toeprints, dug in, can be seen for a stretch of ten yards or more before they fade out again on hard ground. He finds the place where the small human being, probably even more confused and frightened in dropping dark, has holed up for the night in a hollow between two big rocks. He finds the trail leading c;n in the morning, erratic, wandering.

  Full prints show plain for a brief stretch in sand crossing an arroyo. "Them boots is kinda new," says old Jake. "An' he's limpin'. Blisters likely. Can't of gone much further."

  He halloos as loud as his old lungs will let him. There is no answer. Patiently he sets to work unraveling more of the sparse trail. Half an hour later he halloos again. Faintlv, from off to the left, comes an answering shout, not so much a shout as a kind of sobbing wail. He swings the sorrel and kicks with heels and bounces on the bobbing saddle as the sorrel responds with a fast lope.

  It is a small human being right enough, a boy, maybe nine, maybe ten years old, hatless now, face scratched and peeling from sunburn, shirt torn and dirty, blue jeans wrinkled and smudged, boots off and beside him, all of him crounched down under the overhanging branches of a juniper. He peers out from the shadow like a scared animal ready to take off in a hurry.

  "Mornin', son," says Old Jake perched up on the sorrel stopped about thirty feet away, making no move to go closer. "Yes sirree, son," he says, "I got me up on this hoss. Let's see if I can get me down."

  He works at it, hard, having no foot in a stirrup for leverage, and lands in a jumbled heap of protesting joints, but he has a firm hold on the reins. He untangles himself upward and walks, stifflegged, aware of twinges in knee joints and crotch, leading the sorrel, over to another juniper and knots the rein ends tight to a stout branch. He totters and almost goes down as something rams into him. The boy has come running and plastered small body to him, arms around him, face hidden against his vest above his belt. Sobs are shaking the boy's shoulders.

  "There now, son," says Old Jake, patting the tangled hair. "Easy does it. Easy. It's all right now. I ain't much anymore but I made it here."

  He peels the boy away, holding him out at arm's length. "Stop that blubberin'," he says, firm and sharp. "You got other things to be adoin' with your mouth." He unties the little canteen hanging from his belt and hands it to the boy. "Three swallows," he says. "You can have more after you chaw this." He fumbles with a bulging pocket of his greasy old vest and pulls out several pieces of jerked beef.

  Noontime sunlight smiles down on Old Jake under his wide-brimmed floppy hat and on a small boy with a faded bandanna over his head and tied under his chin and on a small sorrel that has pushed its head and shoulders into a juniper for shade. Forty feet away a fire burns moodily, dead branches underneath trying to crackle in flame and live branches on top sending up a strong signal of smoke. Old Jake is hunkered down on his heels, after all the years still a reasonably comfortable position for him. The boy is squatting on the ground, legs crossed. He has his boots on again. Old Jake has insisted on that. They have been talking together and the boy is no longer frightened. He is even beginning to feel a bit proud of himself for having survived a night alone out in this dangerous country.

  "A bear chased me yesterday," he says.

  "That wasn't no bear," says Old Jake. "That was a coyote pup. I saw his tracks. He was scareder than you was. Went scootin' off in the other direction."

  "It was getting dark," says the boy quickly. "I thought - well, I thought it was a bear."

  "Shucks, son," says old Jake. "There ain't been a bear anywheres around here since me'n Petey shot the last one about twenty year afore you was even born. You got to go way back in the mountains to find 'em nowadays." he stretches up and walks stiff-legged over by the fire and tosses several more live branches on it. He comes back and the boy has his head turned and is looking up side-ways at him.

  "I bet I know who you are," says the boy. "You're-you're-"

  "Go ahead, say it," says Old Jake.

  "You won't be mad at me?" says the boy.

  "I save my mad for grown-up men," says Old Jake. "Go ahead, say it."

  "We1-1-1-1 . . . You're - I bet you're Horse Thief Hanlon."

  Old Jake chuckles. "Mebbe I am," he says. "I reckon in a way I am. I reckon I'm near about all them things people in town say I am. Mebbe some they don't even know about. But shucks, now, son, iffen I was a honest-to-god hoss thief, workin' at it all the time that is, would I of been bringin' your hoss back to you?"

  "That's right," says the boy, surprised, thinking this over. "That's right. You did."

  "An' that's a fair good hoss you've got," says Old Jake. "Mebbe you don't know it
, but there's a lot of mustang in 'im. That's what makes 'im a good hoss."

  "Oh, he's all right, I guess," says the boy. "But I wanted a quarter-horse."

  "An' that's where you're all wrong," says Old Jake, his voice rising some. "I'd bet my last button that same hoss there'll out-perform any of them fat bulldoggy quarter-hosses any day of the year in any way that counts. Be a better friend to you too. That's one thing about mustangs. They got brains. They got feelin's. Course iffen one of 'em's run free too long, you can't do too much with 'im. Sometimes nothin' at all. But catch one young an' treat 'im right an' he'll break easier an' learn faster an' behave better'n any tame thing born an' raised in a barn. Best thing in the world for a kid to grow up along with a lil ol' mustang."

  Old Jake takes off his hat and puts it back on at a new angle and hunkers down on his heels again. "One thing about your boss," he says. "You got to know how to handle 'im. That was a fool play, lettin' 'im get clean away. He ain't been taught to ground-rein."

  "I don't know anything about that," says the boy. "But I tried. I tried to catch him."

  "Why, sure," says Old Jake. "You made tracks all around like the fool youngun you are. You was wrong on two counts. First off, you don't catch a spooked boss by runnin' after it. Just makes it run more. You got to sneak in easy an' slow an' like your mind's on somethin' else. Do nothin' to startle the critter. An' then, runnin' around the way you done, you got yourself plumb lost from that boss path out of town. Takes a outsize kind of fool to go skitterin' around country he don't know right without nailin' down landmarks. Iffen you was my kid, I'd give you a whompin' you'd remember."

  Old Jake stretches up again by slow degrees. He walks, still rather stiff-legged, to the top of a swell of ground nearby with the boy up and tagging. He swivels slowly, peering into distance.

  "Yep," he says. "I figgered they'd see it." He points. Several miles away across intervening land broken by twisting arroyos and low flat-topped mesas, seeming small and antlike, a jeep is topping a long ridge. It drops down out of sight and a moment later reappears. It is moving as straight as possible towards the tall plume of smoke.

  "Yep," says Old Jake. 'W'on't be long afore mebbe your own ol' man'll be whompin' you like you ought to be." He walks with the boy following back down by the fire and looks at it with a critical eye. "Might be you'd better put a few more things on that iffen they take a while," he says. "I got to be makin' my own tracks."

  "But," says the boy. "But - but - aren't you - „

  "Lookahere, son," says Old Jake. "Last thing I want is a passel of fool men palaverin' around." He sees the look on the boy's face. He tries a chuckle. "I'm a hoss thief, remember. They might want to string me up." He sobers. "You're all right now, son, an' I'm all right too. Way you swung around back here it's only three-four mile to my place. I'll make it back easy." He scratches at his chin, thinking. "An' another thing. Tell 'em any kind of story you want. Make it a good one. But don't you go tellin' 'em who it was come along. Tell 'em you don't know. Iffen they figger it, tell 'em I got me a shotgun at my place an' don't like anyone traipsin' around."

  He starts away and has gone about forty yards when something rams into him again. It is the boy, holding to him with one hand, holding up the bandanna with the other. "It's yours," says the boy. "I'm not a thief either."

  Old Jake peels the boy away again. "Keep it," he says. "I got me another at the house." He is suddenly sharp and stern. "An' you get back by that fire or I'll try some whompin' iffen you ain't my kid." He watches the boy, unwilling and with booted feet dragging in the dirt, trudge back towards the fire. He swings about and starts away again as fast as his old legs will let him.

  Early afternoon sun smiles down on Old Jake Hanlon limping along, steady enough in pace, but slow, very slow. He is not aware of the laboring of his thin old chest or of the aches in his stringy old muscles. He is puzzling out something again. He keeps seeing in his mind's eye a small ewe-necked cat-hipped sorrel with four white feet. Gradually he slows even more. He stops. He slaps a hand against a leg. "Last Dollar!" he says. "How come I ever let him slip my mind? Iffen only Petey was still around, I'd have me a real kick comin'."

  He moves forward again. His old feet in his worn boots are taking him along a dry arroyo that after many cut-bank twists and turns will bring him out not far from the crumbling ranch house. They are doing this on their own. In his thoughts he is a thousand miles away and he is walking along a street in the busy bustling horn-honking city of Chicago.

  He has come there aboard a cattle-train, eating in the caboose with the train crew and sleeping there too in snatches between regular rounds of the five cars carrying Triple X cattle. In those cars he has been a true cowpuncher in the original meaning of the word, punching up to their feet again with a stout pole steers that have slipped or been knocked down in any lurches of the train and with the silly resignation of their kind might lie there and be trampled by the frantic crowding of the others. He has done well by the trust Hardrock Harper has put in him. He has lost only one steer on the long way and that a poor one to begin with and he has managed to sell the carcass to a local butcher at a train stop for sausage meat. He has put the money from the sale of the cattle, even that from the sausage meat, in Hardrock Harper's account at a Chicago bank, keeping out only his own accumulated pay for the last four months.

  He is walking now along that Chicago street, thinking that he ought to be using the money in his pocket for some of the city high life that is spun into gaudy tales around campfires out on the ranges and yet somehow not feeling up to it because he is more lonesome than he has ever been before in all of his life.

  There are people everywhere about him, many of them, too many of them, all of them busy, hurrying, intent on their own private affairs. They brush by as if he does not even exist or if they do notice him, it is to snicker at him in his out-of-place worn range clothes. He is not annoyed by the snickering because turnabout is always fair play and if he only felt equal to it, he would be amused at them, at the women in their flounced shirtwaists and silly hobble skirts and piled up jokes of flowered and fruited headgear, at the men in their pipe-stem pants and sissy shoes and starched collars and ridiculous little bowler hats.

  Policemen blow shrill whistles, and they seem not to be accomplishing much with all their racket in helping the flow of tangled traffic. Streetcars clang and horns honk and the stench of exhaust fumes from early inefficient gasoline engines taint the air and people scurry about who are not really people to him but only other kinds of blank faceless machines in the shape of people. Even the few remaining horses he sees are not his kind, are big stolid stupid-looking things, heavy-muscled, hairyfetlocked, slow on their feet, heaving into harness to pull big wagons piled high with beer barrels. He is an alien out of another world, another way of life, and he feels lost and lonely. And then he sees it.

  It is standing by the curb between the shafts of a shaky leaning-wheeled wagon that is full of junk of all kinds. It stands with legs braced, sad and forlorn, drooped in utter dejection. It is stunted and thin and bony with its ribs showing and the scars of many beatings mar its dirty hide. But it is unmistakable. A mustang. A cat-hipped ewe-necked sorrel mustang with four white stockings and there, on the forehead, barely discernible under crusted dirt and the tangle of scrawny forelock, a white star.

  He moves towards it and he is muttering to himself: "Sorrel with four white feet an' a blaze, good, very very good." He stops by the drooping head and it rouses a bit and cocks a cautious eye at him.

  He reaches out to rub by the ears - and yanks the hand back as the head moves and the jaws snap. He chuckles. "So you got some of the ol' spirit left," he says. Somehow he feels younger, taller, more at peace with the world. "Why, you blankety-blank lil' ol' hunk of worthless hoss flesh," he says, "iffen you nip me, I'll larrup you from here to Christmas. I'll rip off your mangy moth-eaten hide an' tan it for a rug an' tromp on it ev'ry day of the year." The horse perks a bit and looks full at him. Out of
whatever has been its past somewhere it knows the tone and the tune of that kind of talk. He reaches again and there is no jerking of head or snapping of teeth. He scratches between the ears and under the gritty headband of the bridle and the horse sort of sighs as if it has been a long time since anyone did that. He runs a hand down the muzzle and grips in at the mouth corners and the jaws open willing for him and he looks inside. "Dogdamn it," he says. "Only seven, mebbe eight. An' you look like you was eighty."

  He pulls back a step at the sound of a voice. "G'wan! Get away from that horse!"

  A man has come out of a nearby building and thrown more junk in the wagon. The man has climbed to the driving seat and has the reins in one hand, a long whip in the other. The man jerks with the reins and lashes with the whip. The horse quivers all over at the leather striking and strains forward. The wagon groans into motion, but a wheel catches against the curb and it stops. The whip rises to lash again.

  He moves, fast. He leaps and has hold of the man by the belt. He yanks and the man tumbles from the seat. He is all over the man, shaking him, hammering him, bouncing him about the sidewalk. Two policemen arrive, swinging billy clubs. He drives a shoulder into one and sends that one reeling away. The club of the other, strong springy hickory, whams him on the head and he goes down, sitting on the sidewalk, dazed, wobbling the head.

  One policeman stands over him, club ready. The other is taking out a small notebook and a pencil. The man has staggered to his feet and is picking up his hat.

  He shakes away the dizziness, starts to get up too, sees the ready club and thinks better of it. "Hey," he says. "I want to buy that hoss."