Chino Sandoval had a one-horse outfit up by Mescal Springs, high in the Apaches. It was a land rutted and scarred by the fires of nature till there was little left but bleak buttes and mesas and the eastern backbone of the mountains etching a purple outline against a sun-bleached sky. The springs were but a sink hollowed out of the rocks, dry as bone during the summer days, turned to viscid mud by the water that rose to the surface when night came.
It was a fifteen-mile drive from Apache Wells. Brian was sore and beaten by the ride as well as the fight long before they reached the cut-off that wound up onto the mesa commanding the springs. Here, in the feeble shade of scrawny cottonwoods, were the adobe buildings, the ratty fences of ocotillo corrals. A dozen children scampered out of the compound like scared chickens, hiding behind mud walls and in dark doorways, peering owlishly at the wagon as it pulled up before the house. Then the men began to drift in from the corrals. Pa Gillette and Asa were first in sight, stalking toward the wagon. Surprised anger dug great hollows in Pa’s gaunt cheeks.
“What call you got to bring that snake up here, Estelle?”
“It’s the only place he could come,” Estelle said defiantly. “They’ve pulled everything out from under him. The Double Bit’s wiped out. We’ve got to give him a chance, Pa.”
“Like the chance he give us?” Pa said. Asa wheeled off toward the house, and Pa glanced after him. “Asa, where you going?”
“To get my gun,” Asa said.
“You stay out here,” Sandoval called, coming up from behind them. “You promise no trouble there be.”
Asa paused, reluctantly, looking back at him. Sandoval was a small wiry man with all fat melted off his bones by the sun and grinding hardships of this arid country. His eyes were a startling blue in an almost negroid face. One of the dozen children peering around the corner of the house had blond hair. It lent a dubious credence to Sandoval’s claim that he was pure Yaqui Mayo, descended from the shipwrecked Norsemen who were supposed to have landed at the mouth of the Mayo River hundreds of years before the Spaniards came.
Estelle dropped to the ground, voice intense. “You’ve got Brian wrong, Pa. He didn’t order anybody to foreclose on us. Just a few days after the fight in town he came out to tell us we didn’t have to move, and we shot at him.”
“Shot at him!”
“Maybe you didn’t know about it,” Brian said, looking at Asa. “It was up at Skeleton Canyon.”
“Asa was with me all that day,” Pa stormed. “So was Cameron. We was moving down here. Chino can vouch for that.”
“Es verdad,” the Yaqui said. “It is the truth.”
A pair of Mexican hands had moved up behind Sandoval. Cameron Gillette was coming heavily in after them. Sheridan looked around the circle of their hostile faces.
“Somebody bushwacked me in the canyon,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for that, I’d have been out to tell you to stay on your land.”
“It was all some deal of Tarrant’s,” Estelle said. “He knew the Salt River bunch would be lost without you, Pa. The very fact that they’ve ruined Brian should be proof enough of where he stands.”
The anger still moved turgidly through Pa’s face. Asa spat disgustedly and said, “It’s some trick. I say fill him full of buckshot if he ain’t off here in two minutes.”
“Why should man his size stoop to trick?” Sandoval asked. “I knew his father. The Sheridans are no like that.”
Estelle turned toward the Yaqui. “You helped us when we needed it, Chino. Now help him. He needs it worse than we do.”
From the pouch at his belt, Sandoval pulled a bundle of hojas. He fingered one of these pieces of Indian corn husk, tapping into it a small quantity of tobacco from a small tube also contained in the pouch.
“I never thought I see the day a Sheridan to me would come for help,” he murmured. He put the hojas back into the pouch, rolling the cigarette. “Can cattle you work?”
“He’ll learn,” Estelle said.
From the pouch, Sandoval now pulled flint and steel and a red cord of tinder. He struck a spark from the flint with the steel eslabon, and it lodged in the tinder. He blew it into flame and lit his cigarette.
“At his hands look. Like lilies. Can a man so soft learn about work in one lifetime?”
“Just give him a chance,” Estelle said.
“You’ll have to work like hell. Everybody out here they have to work like hell. The land she’s like that.”
“I’ll try to pay for my keep, Chino.”
Sandoval grinned suddenly. “Then w’at you sit there for?”
Brian got stiffly out of the wagon. Over the sweaty rumps of the team, he saw Pa still staring at him. There was truculent hatred in the man’s eyes, and Sheridan realized this was far from settled.
* * * *
Brian slept that night in a bear-grass hut down by the springs with the Gillettes and the two Mexican hands. He got little sleep, tossing restlessly on the hard corn-shuck pallet, listening to the stertorous snores of the tall, thin hand called Juan. It was still dark when Sandoval came in and shook him by the shoulder.
“Drag your navel, you lazy cucurachas. Is time to roll out if we be at Canyon Moro by sunup.”
They rolled out cursing and grumbling. Estelle was with the women up by the house, serving coffee and beef and beans. Still sore and stiff from his beating, Brian almost gagged on the greasy food. With a clatter of tinware the men tossed empty plates and cups into the wreck-pan and drifted toward the corrals. When Brian reached the corral, Pancho came over with a rawhide jumper and a pair of Mexican chapareros slung over one arm.
“Here’s clothes, senor. Better get extra pair of pants from somebody too. Those thorns out on the malpais they stab like the dirk. Chino he tell me to help with your horses. That one with the lobo stripe down his back has lots of bottom.”
Brian struggled into the jumper and chaps. The man thrust a maguey rope into his hands and they moved into the mill of animals lifting a curtain of dust over the corral. Juan and Sandoval and the three Gillettes were all roping their animals out, shouting and cursing. Brian got kicked down trying to dab an awkward loop on the lobo-striped dun. Pancho finally heeled the animal and put a blind on him while he was down. Then he got a Mexican-tree saddle off the top bar of the corral and slung it on. With fumbling hands, Brian cinched it up. He was drenched with sweat and caked with dust by the time he was through. Pancho helped him rope out two more horses for his string. Then Brian stepped aboard his dun. It started pitching before he got his right leg swung over the saddle, and he went off like an empty sack. He heard Cameron laugh derisively from somewhere in the dust. Sandoval came riding up on a nervous buckskin.
“These horse got little more vinegar than ones you’re used to, no, amigo?”
Brian tried again and this time stayed on. After the bronc got rid of its morning orneriness cat-backing around the corral it settled down. And they rode.
He had no measure of time. Or of the distance they covered. When it was light enough to see, they had reached a spot where a half-dozen brush-filled canyons opened out into a sink with a cow trail leading down every wash to the water. Sandoval said they would round the cattle up while they were drinking and run them down to the flats where they’d have swing room for their ropes.
The men sat sourly in their saddles, half asleep. With the first touch of sun the cattle came, spooky, wild creatures, testing the air with their lifted snouts, shambling down to the water. Brian peered through the milky dawn at their gaunt silhouettes.
“How can you make any money off that beef?” he whispered.
“We don’t,” Sandoval said. “That’s why small we remain while big you get. Cattle don’t put on any lard in the badlands. But jack rabbits they won’t take in Alta, amigo. We do the best we can.”
Juan came threading in through a coulee from the higher land, whispering hoarsely, “That is all, señores. We can jump them now.”
With a whoop, they rushed down on the herd. The cattle jumped like scared jacks and headed at a dead run down the canyon. His nimble-footed horse took Brian in a wild scrambling run down the steep pitch of the canyon, driving the frenzied cattle into the flats. The Gillettes were waiting by the branding fires and they surrounded the cattle and put them into a mill. While they held them, the cutting and branding began.
“Cut me out that brindle with the gotch horn,” Pa shouted.
Brian put his bronc into the herd. A cow took a swipe at him and he almost got gored. He wheeled his bronc and got pinched between two milling heifers. He tore one leg off his chaps getting out of that, and by the time he pulled free the brindle was out of sight.
“Cut me out a dogie, if you can’t do any better than that,” Pa roared. “That pied one right in front of you.”
Brian saw the motherless calf ahead of him and touched his excited horse with a heel. The animal drove in behind the dogie, forcing it out into the open. The little calf tried to wheel back at the fringe of the herd and Brian cut in between it and the other cows, turning it back. The air was so thick with dust he could no longer see Pa, but he pushed the dogie hard toward the spot the man had been in. Too late, he saw the rope ahead of him. It was stretched taut from Asa’s buckskin to a downed steer. Asa had dallied his end of the line around the saddle horn and was just swinging off. The dogie hit the stretched rope first, tripping on it and going down. Brian saw Asa’s horse jerk. One foot out of the stirrup, Asa threw himself back into the saddle to keep from being pitched. Brian tried to wheel his horse away but he was going too fast. He ran into the line a second after the dogie hit.
This jerked Asa’s horse so heavily it almost lost its feet. Dancing to remain erect, it spun around into Brian’s animal as he wheeled to the right. He saw the dallied rope pull free and fall to the ground. The steer scrambled erect and disappeared in the dust, line trailing.
Asa’s horse tried to dance away from Brian’s line-back. Asa reined it back in till he was knee to knee with Brian, grabbing at his jumper.
“Damn you,” he shouted. “You did that on purpose.”
Brian tried to tear free but Asa hung on. A sudden shift of their excited horses unbalanced Brian and he pitched into Asa, carrying him out of the saddle. They hit heavily. Brian rolled groggily away from Asa. The wiry Gillette gained his feet first and jumped Brian, lashing one boot out to rowel Brian’s face with the spur.
There was the smashing detonation of a shot. Brian heard the whining ricochet of metal. He stared wide-eyed at the boot lifted above his face, seeing that the rowel was gone from the spur.
“You better put it down on the ground, Asa,” Sandoval said. “Next time your foot I shoot off.”
Asa let his boot drop back to the ground beside Brian’s face. Brian rolled over onto hands and knees. Sandoval was sitting a dancing horse right above them, a smoking Colt in his hand.
“Now back to work get, both of you,” he said. “Any more of this and the welcome of my house she’s no longer yours.”
* * * *
For two weeks the roundup continued. Days that never seemed to end. Up before dawn and in the saddle till long after dark. Sleeping in stupefied exhaustion through a night too short to give a man any real rest. The wink of branding fires in the velvet dark. The constant stench of sweat and burning hair and hot dust. Brian lost weight till his clothes hung on him and his face was raw from the burn of sun and wind and his whole body ached with the slightest movement.
A hundred times he was ready to quit. It was hard to say why he stayed. Sometimes it was Asa’s goading, making him stick in sheer bitter defiance. Sometimes it was the shy friendship of Sandoval, filling him with a warmth he had never felt with Jess Miller or the other men he had thought were close to him. Sometimes it was his own stubbornness, a stubbornness he had never known he possessed before, lengthening that long upper lip into a fighting shape and putting him back into the nightmare.
After the branding was over they cut out the young stuff and started the beef toward Alta. They had long since used up the coffee and beans Estelle had gotten at Apache Wells, and were living exclusively on their own beef. But they had no time to stop off at the ranch. Sandoval had started roundup early in the hopes of beating the big operators into Alta, and it would be touch and go from now on.
They drove west out of the Apaches and into the alkali furnace of the flats southeast of the Superstitions. At this time of year there was so little water that they worked on a dangerously close margin between sinks. They reached Denver Wells and found it dry. They pushed a herd frantic with thirst on toward Rabbit Sink, the next waterhole, the men as hollow-eyed and driven as the animals.
They topped a sandhill east of the sink near nightfall, and saw that the cattle had run up against something ahead. In the haze of wind-blown sand, all Brian could see was the dim forms of the beasts milling back and forth in the flats, as if held by an invisible wall. Sandoval and Brian put their jaded horses to a trot, rounding the herd and catching sight of Asa and Pa Gillette ahead. Then Brian saw the triple strand of barb-wire.
“This sink belongs to Sid Bouley, doesn’t it?” Asa said acidly. “I thought he was still with the Salt River bunch.”
Cameron looked at his brother, then shook his head. “Bouley was always a weak bet, Asa. Looks like he went over to Tarrant when he heard Pa was squeezed out.”
“We’ll cut the wire, damn it,” Pa said. “Juan, bring up that hatchet. These cattle will die if they don’t get this water.”
The thin Mexican galloped up, pulling a hatchet from his bedroll. The cattle were frenzied with their thirst, milling against the fence in a bawling press. Sandoval told Asa to hold the beef there till he found out if there was any water. Brian and Pa went with him through the hole Juan chopped. Three hundred yards on they came to the sloping banks of the sink. In the dusk, Sandoval was a vague shadow, dismounting.
“Is mud. The water in an hour should surface,” he turned to call. “Start them through.”
It was getting so dark Brian could not see the cattle at first. He knew they were beginning to move, for their bawling grew to a raucous crescendo. Then the ground began to tremble and the first tossing heads appeared out of the gloom. Sandoval toed his stirrup and started to swing up.
Then the gunshot came, like the crack of a giant whip. Brian’s startled horse screamed in fright and reared high. He put a rein against its neck and spurred a sweaty flank, bringing the animal back down and spinning it to keep the beast from bolting. More shots formed a crackling drumbeat in the night. Brian fought his spinning horse, staring into the darkness in a vain attempt to see where the shots came from. Sandoval’s horse had bolted while he was still only half on and he was racing away from the sink, striving to gain the saddle.
“It’s coming from those north ridges,” Pa shouted. “The cattle are stampeding—”
His voice broke off sharply, amid the drumming bursts of gunfire, and Brian saw him pitch from his saddle. The ground was shaking with the rush of cattle now and Brian knew he had but a moment to reach the man. He spurred the frightened line-back across the sandy flats, pulling it down hard where Pa’s gaunt form stirred feebly on the ground.
“Grab a stirrup, Pa,” he shouted. “I’ll have to drag you out.”
The man made a feeble attempt to lift his arm, dropped back. Brian swung down and tried to hold his frenzied horse and catch Pa under the armpits. As he heaved the man up, meaning to throw him over the saddle, more shots split the night. The line-back reared, snapping the reins from Brian’s hand, and bolted. He was left holding Pa halfway off the ground, without a horse.
The tossing heads and curving horns of the cattle seemed to be right on top of them. Brian had a dim glimpse of a rider off to one side, and heard Juan’s high voice: “Run to the left, Brian. I can’t turn them! You can make it to the left!”
Brian let Pa’s limp weight slide to the ground, his whole body jerked with the impulse to wheel and race for safety. But something held him. A thought from long ago was in his mind. And Jigger’s words: “It can’t be done. It’s just one of those stories you hear about Tiger Sheridan.” Even as it ran through him, Brian was reaching for the match in a hip pocket and wiping it against his Levis. It didn’t catch. The ground was quaking beneath him and it seemed another instant would bring the whole herd down on him. He struck the match again.
It flared, wavered. He cupped it in his hand. He held it that way, standing spraddle-legged over Pa Gillette’s body. His whole being was torn by the primitive impulse to escape the destruction of those tossing horns and cloven hoofs bearing down on him.
For that last moment he stared up at the oncoming phalanxes, and thought he was through. Jigger was right. It couldn’t be done.
Then the steer right before him reared into the air, eyes rolling wildly in animal fear of fire. The next animal veered the other way, bawling in senseless fright at that small, winking flame. The others followed suit blindly, splitting around Brian. He was an island in a sea of sweaty bodies and tossing horns. The light flickered, seemed to die. He saw a heifer racing right at him. Desperately he cupped his hands about the match. The flame flared again. The heifer threw her head back to bawl and almost lost her feet turning aside in the last instant.
If it had been a Double Bit gather, he would never have lasted it out. But the very meagerness of Sandoval’s outfit saved him. It seemed an eternity. It seemed a second. Finally they were gone, leaving him standing above Pa, unable to tell whether the earth was still trembling beneath him, or whether he was shaking in reaction. The match burned his fingers and he threw it from him. Its light winked out and left the blackness of night.