Chapter Three

Lying back, his body all loose and easy, Warfield listened to the pleasant night, listened to his horse’s shifting, freshly shod hoofs on the hard ground as the hungry animal nibbled on graze and the none-too-nourishing cured grass. Total relaxation came to Warfield and the surrounding scents and sounds comforted him in his complete loneliness. They were familiar. They were old and pleasant, and a part of his life clear back to its earliest years.

There was simplicity to the sound of a horse moving, of its strong teeth grinding over fodder. There was an age-old reality to the smell of summertime dust in cool night air. And there was something in the timeless heavens turning purple that reached for a man’s spirit, cradled it in a gentle grip of endlessness, which was both promise and surcease.

A man was put upon this earth to be a part of dust and loneliness, to be a part of struggle and suffering. To feel with every pore of his hide the hardness of life, and to take his small pleasures during the intervening periods of relaxation—like now, lying there ten white-hot miles south of a place called Lincoln, on the way to another town the name of which he didn’t even know. Lying there under that scatter of pale stars, under that old pewter moon, surrounded by the formless night, safe and at peace.

Warfield had a smoke between his fingers. Its tangy fragrance was good. Tobacco was always good to a man who’d run out days before. It was one of those little pleasures, like a drink of cold water after a hard ten hours in the saddle on a hot day that a man relished.

But a lonely man has lonely thoughts, try as he may to close them out, so Warfield sat up finally, inhaled, exhaled, stubbed out his smoke, and put his head in his hands remembering the secret things in a woman’s glance, remembering her long silence as she gazed at him, remembering the tilt of her head in star shine and the solemn knowledge she’d shown him that last time. A solid knowledge that told him in complete silence that she knew what life was, not what it ought to be.

Something came over that bridgeless distance separating them to touch Warfield briefly, to bring a quick, squeezing pain to his heart, so he got up, dusted off, and walked over to watch the horse graze.

New shoes were fine. The bay wouldn’t go lame now. But new shoes were no substitute for an empty gut, and no matter how much of this roughage the bay ate, he’d still be tucked up in the flank and heavy on the bit when they resumed their way.

Warfield thought of Derby Hat back in that last town and his long mouth drooped unpleasantly at that recollection. Except for Derby Hat, Warfield would have spent the night back there, the bay would have gotten a decent bait of fodder, and by dawn they’d have both been on the trail again, refreshed and ready.

Down the southward night, on across the ghostly plain, lay a cluster of town lights. On a clear summertime night a man could see twenty miles. But those lights weren’t more than four, five miles away. Warfield, thinking of a bed with springs under it, pondered the wisdom of pushing along. But he didn’t ponder very long; a man’s horse was his life insurance. He had to take particular care of his bay. Another time, years back, he might have struck out for that town, but not now. The horse was all-important now. Somewhere back there was a man with graying temples astride a durable steeldust gelding with a U.S. marshal’s German-silver circlet in his pocket. Warfield had to favor his breedy bay or the steeldust would win, and he couldn’t permit that to happen. Life was good. Maybe at times it was hard and cruel, but a man never hated it, never considered voluntarily surrendering it.

Warfield went back where his saddle lay, dropped down, and closed his eyes. Sleep came quickly, as a sort of blessing, relieving Warfield of any further need for resistance to his secret thoughts. He was dog-tired and although he’d picked up a few tins of food back at Lincoln, he hadn’t bought very many of them because they constituted a dead weight, so he’d eaten, but very sparingly, and had gone to sleep on a shrunken gut that nagged a little. He felt vaguely and uneasily that somehow that town back there had been some kind of a crucial turning in his life, but he hadn’t been able to see exactly how this might be, except that his horse had been denied needed rest and food, so he’d gone to sleep with only the very faintest of troubling thoughts.

And he awakened the same way, with the moon far down and the night much cooler, that uneasy feeling still in him. But in the confusion of any troubled man’s mind lay all manner of suspicions, all manner of doubts and skepticisms, so Warfield arose concentrating only on hitting the trail without a lot of thinking that would lead him nowhere.

He rigged out his bay horse, rose up to settle over leather, and reined out, always southward. Within slightly less than an hour he was parallel with that town but off to the west so that its pre-dawn shape and silence lay on his left. There had been only one thing he’d wanted from that town—a decent place to rest—and, since he was now rested, he rode on past with pre-dawn’s silent grayness shielding him from view, if anyone over there had been looking, which they weren’t.

The southward land heaved away mile upon mile of it, seemingly endless, with always some peaks and hills standing east and west under the strengthening light of new day. He crossed a gravelly dry creekbed, skirted a land swell that curved inward slightly from south to west, passed a bosque of cottonwoods, the first he’d seen in many days, sighted a ranch dead ahead, and angled out and around it with his careful attention never resting for fear some inadvertent meeting with cowboys might come about. But it didn’t, and he left the ranch behind and for many miles afterward there was nothing.

The sun steadily climbed, turning his world a faded, brassy hue. The heat piled up, brought dark sweat out to make Warfield’s shirt cling to him, and robbed Warfield’s bay of his energy.

That browse the big leggy animal had filled up on the night before was excellent roughage, but it did not reinvigorate the horse at all, so now he plodded along mechanically, head hung and lethargic, which troubled Warfield. He could not afford to have his horse play out on him, not out here, not this close to security. He would have to go into a town, and soon, otherwise the bay’s reserves of strength would be too depleted and no matter how much rest and grain he got, there would be for him no quick recovery. If that happened, Warfield was finished.

He could buy another horse. Even rope one out of some corral or pasture in the night. But two things discouraged him in this. One was very elemental, too. If he abandoned the bay, Trent would inevitably find it and know how close he was to Warfield. The other was that this particular horse was a thoroughbred; he had never in his life been outrun, and it was this particular ability that Warfield was now relying most heavily upon. In the final showdown, that incredible speed could very easily make the difference between life and death for Troy Warfield. No horse he could buy in this southern country would have that same high-bred attribute.

Miles south of the town Warfield had by-passed, and, with the punishing sun cruelly bearing down, a deer sprang up from its bed beside a mesquite clump and rattled down into an arroyo, leaving behind the scent of alkali dust and musk. Warfield scarcely heeded. He was riding now with that strength-conserving looseness that experienced range men employed on endless rides, his hat tipped forward to shield eyes that dryly grated in their sockets, his body swinging in relaxed cadence to the steps of his mount, the drying perspiration giving him a mote of relief.

It was late afternoon before he halted, a time when the sun reddened, the sky turned steely, and the fiercest heat should have begun diminishing. But it didn’t because Warfield was now upon the edge of the desert. He stopped at a large old stone watering trough, got down, and pushed his hatless head all the way to the shoulders into the tepid water, while beside him his horse drank and sweated and drank some more.

Afterward, being cooled by that water, he made a smoke and lit it, turned slowly and gazed out and around, saw the saddled horse standing, hip-shot, under a low-limbed ancient juniper, and gradually drew up to an alert stiffness seeking the person who was also out here somewhere.

He didn’t find that person, not at once anyway, and eventually it was the other person who found Warfield. He was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, tall and straight as an arrow with a tumbling shock of unruly fair hair. He walked forward from up out of a distant arroyo with something in his arms. He’d seen Warfield. There was no hint of suspicion, of doubt in the lad’s tilted, sun-bronzed face as he walked on up. He seemed in need of something he could not himself provide, knew it, and therefore came with beseeching eyes up to the stone trough.

He had a half-grown mongrel pup in his arms. The dog was limp and dirty and covered with what appeared to be the saliva, mixed with blood, of a larger animal.

“What happened?” Warfield asked, looking long and carefully over toward that arroyo the lad had come up out of.

“Big ol’ grayback coyote tied into him. I tried to call him back but he’s just a pup, mister. The coyote went down into that arroyo, the pup jumped down after him, and before I could get over there, I heard him screamin’.”

Warfield dropped his eyes to the pup. “They’ll do that,” he observed. “You live hereabouts?”

“Two miles west. We ranch over there. Mister, can you do anything for him?”

“You alone out here, son?”

“Just me ’n’ the pup. We were rabbit huntin’. Can you help him, mister?”

Warfield bent slightly from the waist. The little dog was breathing but his eyes were cold and his nose was dry. He took him gently in both hands, turned, and immersed him up to his snout in the trough, then he went to work seeking the location of the coyote bites. As he did this, he eased down upon the trough’s stone edge and talked.

“When I was your age, I knew better’n to do what you did, son. There’s hardly a dog living that can whip a coyote, but a pup this size … he never had a chance.”

“He ran off though, mister. He acted scairt.”

“Naw,” said Warfield scornfully. “I’m surprised a feller like you doesn’t know more about coyotes. They’re smart. Smarter than foxes and sometimes smarter than men. He wasn’t running away … he was simply leading your pup, staying just far enough ahead to lure him on. Then he ducked down into that arroyo, cut back, and got set. When your pup jumped down there … crunch!”

The boy’s anguished eyes were brimful of unshed tears. “How bad off is he … will he die, mister?”

Warfield didn’t answer that for a long time. Not until he’d completed his minute examination. Then he shook his head. “He’ll live. But you’ve got to get him home. Fix up a box in the barn, somewhere it’s cool and sort of dark. Dogs need cool darkness when they don’t feel good. Feed him plenty of porridge and milk and don’t let the blowflies get to him.” Warfield threw an almost unconscious look out over the shimmering countryside. “You pa’s probably got some blue-vitriol ointment around. Put it on the wounds. Keep him quiet … and, boy, after this don’t take a pup like this hunting with you without having a gun along, too.”

The boy listened carefully, and, as Warfield passed him back his limp little furry bundle, he said: “Mister, why don’t you come along home with me?”

It was a spontaneously asked question, the kind a boy would ask a man when he had no reservations in his mind about the man. Warfield sat there on the old stone trough, gazing at the lad. Two miles west and in this empty world he could possibly find exactly what he needed—rest and provender for the bay. He idly kicked one leg back and forth.

“Your pa run cattle?” he asked.

“Yes, but he pulled out early this mornin’ bound for Daggett to fetch back supplies and rock salt for the animals. He’ll be home tomorrow sometime.”

“Just you and your ma at home now?”

“No, my sister’s there, too. But paw sent her to the upper place to check some heifers up there that’re springing.”

“You got close neighbors, son?”

The boy shook his head, shifted his hold on the little dog, and waited.

Warfield smiled. “My name’s Troy,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Will Crockett, same as my paw.”

Warfield stood up. “Lead out, Will,” he said. “My horse could use some hay and grain, and I could use some rest.”

They departed from the spring area, riding due west with dying day all around them, with shadows beginning to form thinly and with the smoke haze softening. But there still was no lessening of that punishing heat.

Young Will rode ahead, leading the way, and although he turned to look back every once in a while, he didn’t speak to Warfield unless Warfield spoke to him.

The pup whimpered shortly before they came within sight of the buildings ahead. “He hurts,” said the boy, sounding distressed.

Warfield was assessing those buildings as he answered. “Yeah, he hurts. And he’ll hurt a lot more tomorrow, too. But maybe he’ll learn. There are some things in this life it just doesn’t pay to tangle with.”

The boy nodded. He had his reins looped, his horse walking quietly along homeward bound with a horse’s solid instinctiveness. “One time my paw told me somethin’ about like that, Mister Troy. He said there are some things that even when a man beats ’em, he doesn’t really come out on top because they never forget and they always come back to try a feller again and again.”

Warfield looked queerly at the boy, rode along almost as far as the ranch yard, then he said: “Tell me, Will, how come your pa to settle ’way down here?”

Will shrugged, looked around the yard ahead as though seeking someone, and indifferently said: “I guess because he liked it.”