The first great novel of the Old West, and a prototype for hundreds of others over the past eighty years, was Owen Wister’s The Virginian, published in April of 1902. A bestseller for more than ten years, it led Wister (an easterner, curiously enough, educated at Harvard) to write other memorable Western adventures, among them the novel Lin McLean and numerous short stories collected under such titles as Members of the Family and When the West Was West. “Timberline,” which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on March 7, 1908, is one of his (undeservedly) lesser known stories; it is a pleasure to reprint it here.
Just as the blaze of the sun seems to cast wild birds, when, by yielding themselves they invite it, into a sort of trance, so that they sit upon the ground tilted sidewise, their heads in the air, their beaks open, their wings hanging slack, their feathers ruffled and their eyes vacantly fixed, so must the spot of yellow at which I had sat staring steadily and idly have done something like this to me—given me a spell of torpor in which all thoughts and things receded far away from me. It was a yellow poster, still wet from rain.
A terrifying thunderstorm had left all space dumb and bruised, as it were, with the heavy blows of its noise. The damp seemed to make the yellow paper yellower, the black letters blacker. A dollar sign, figures and zeros, exclamation points, and the two blackest words of all: reward and murder, were what stood out of the yellow.
Two feet from it, on the same shed, was another poster, white, concerning some stallion, his place of residence, and his pedigree. This also I had read, with equal inattention and idleness, but my eyes had been drawn to the yellow spot and held by it.
Not by its news; the news was now old, since at every cabin and station dotted along our lonely road the same poster had appeared. They had discussed it, and whether he would be caught, and how much money he had got from his victim.
The body hadn’t been found on Owl Creek for a good many weeks. Funny his friend hadn’t turned up. If they’d killed him, why wasn’t his body on Owl Creek, too? If he’d got away, why didn’t he turn up? Such comments, with many more, were they making at Lost Soldier, Bull Spring, Crook’s Gap, and Sweetwater Bridge.
I sat in the wagon waiting for Scipio Le Moyne to come out of the house; there in my nostrils was the smell of the wet sage brush and of the wet straw and manure, and there, against the gray sky, was an afterimage of the yellow poster, square, huge, and blue. It moved with my eyes as I turned them to get rid of the annoying vision, and it only slowly dissolved away over the head of the figure sitting on the corral with its back to me, the stocktender of this stage section. He sang, “If that I was where I would be, Then should I be where I am not; Here am I where I must be, And where I would be I cannot.”
I could not see the figure’s face, or that he moved. One boot was twisted between the bars of the corral to hold him steady, its trodden heel was worn to a slant; from one seat pocket a soiled rag protruded and through a hole below this a piece of his red shirt or drawers stuck out. A coat much too large for him hung from his neck rather than from his shoulders, and the damp, limp hat that he wore, with its spotted, unraveled hatband, somehow completed the suggestion that he was not alive at all, but had been tied together and stuffed and set out in joke. Certainly there were no birds, or crops to frighten birds from; the only thing man had sown the desert with at Rongis was empty bottles. These lay everywhere.
As he sat and repeated his song there came from his back and his hat and his voice an impression of loneliness, poignant and helpless. A windmill turned and turned and creaked near the corral, adding its note of forlornness to the song.
A man put his head out of the house. “Stop it,” he said, and shut the door again.
The figure obediently climbed down and went over to the windmill, where he took hold of the rope hanging from its rudder and turned the contrivance slowly out of the wind, until the wheel ceased revolving.
The man put his head out of the house, this second time speaking louder: “I didn’t say stop that. I said stop it; stop your damned singing.” He withdrew his head immediately.
The boy—the mild, new yellow hair on his face was the unshaven growth of adolescence—stood a long while looking at the door in silence, with eyes and mouth expressing futile injury. Finally he thrust his hands into bunchy pockets, and said, “I ain’t no two-bit man.”
He watched the door, as if daring it to deny this, then, as nothing happened, he slowly drew his hands from the bunchy pockets, climbed the corral at the spot nearest him, twisted the boot between the bars, and sat as before only without singing.
Thus we sat waiting, I for Scipio to come out of the house with the information he had gone in for, while the boy waited for nothing. Waiting for nothing was stamped plain upon him from head to foot. This boy’s eyebrows were insufficient, and his front was as ragged as his back. He just sat and waited.
Presently the same man put his head out of the door. “You after sheep?”
I nodded.
“I could a-showed you sheep. Rams. Horns as big as your thigh—bigger ’n your thigh. That was before tenderfeet came in and spoiled this country. Counted seven thousand on that there butte one morning before breakfast. Seven thousand and twenty-three, if you want exact figgers. Quit your staring!” This was addressed to the boy on the corral. “Why, you’re not agoing without another?” This convivial question was to Scipio, who now came out of the house and across to me with the news that he had failed on what he had went in for.
“I could a-showed you sheep—” resumed the man, but I was now attending to Scipio.
“He don’t know anything,” said Scipio, “nor any of ’em in there. But we haven’t got this country rounded up yet. He’s just come out of a week of snake fits, and, by the way it looks, he’ll enter on another about tomorrow morning. But drink can’t stop him lying.”
“Bad weather,” said the man, watching us make ready to continue our long drive. “Lot o’ lightning loose in the air right now. Kind o’ weather you’re liable to see fire on the horns of the stock some night.”
This sounded like such a good one that I encouraged him. “We have nothing like that in the East.”
“Hm. Guess you’ve not. Guess you never seen sixteen thousand steers with a light at the end of every horn in the herd.”
“Are they going to catch that man?” inquired Scipio, pointing to the yellow poster.
“Catch him? Them” No! But I could tell ’em where he’s went. He’s went to Idaho.”
“Thought the ’76 outfit had sold Auctioneer,” Scipio continued conversationally.
“That stallion? No! But I could tell ’em they’d ought to.” This was his good-bye to us; he removed himself and his alcoholic omniscience into the house.
“Wait,” I said to Scipio as he got in and took the reins from me. “I’m going to deal some magic to you. Look at that poster. No, not the stallion, the yellow one. Keep looking at it hard.” While he obeyed me I made solemn passes with my hands over his head. “Now look anywhere you please.”
Scipio looked across the corral at the gray sky. A slight stiffening of figure ensued, and he knit his brows. Then he rubbed a hand over his eyes and looked again.
“You after sheep?” It was the boy sitting on the corral. We paid him no attention.
“It’s about gone,” said Scipio, rubbing his eyes again. “Did you do that to me? Of course you didn’t! What did?”
I adopted the manner of the professor who lectured on light to me when I was nineteen. “The eye being normal in structure and focus, the color of an afterimage of the negative variety is complementary to that of the object causing it. If, for instance, a yellow disk (or lozenge in this case) be attentively observed, the yellow-perceiving elements of the retina become fatigued. Hence, when the mixed rays which constitute white light fall upon that portion of the retina which has thus been fatigued, the rays which produce the sensation of yellow will cause less effect than the other rays for which the eye has been fatigued. Therefore, white light to an eye fatigued for yellow will appear blue—blue being yellow’s complementary color. Now, shall I go on?” I asked.
“Don’t y’u!” Scipio begged. “I’d sooner believe y’u done it to me.”
“I can show you sheep.” It was the boy again. We had not noticed him come from the corral to our wagon, by which he now stood. His eyes were eagerly fixed upon me; as they looked into mine they seemed almost burning with some sort of appeal.
“Hello, Timberline!” said Scipio, not at all unkindly. “Still holding your job here? Well, you better stick to it. You’re inclined to drift some.”
He touched the horses and we left the boy standing and looking after us, lonely and baffled.
“Why Timberline?” I asked after several miles.
“Well, he came into this country the long, lanky innocent kid you saw him, and he’d always get too tall in the legs for his latest pair of pants. They’d be half up to his knees. So we called him that. Guess he’s most forgot his real name.”
“What is his real name?”
“I’ve quite forgot.”
This much talk did for us for two or three miles more.
“Do you suppose the man really did go to Idaho?” I asked then.
“They do go there—and they go everywhere else that’s convenient—Canada, San Francisco, some Indian reservation. He’ll never get found. I expect like as not he killed the confederate along with the victims—it’s claimed there was a cook along, too. He’s never showed up. It’s a bad proposition to get tangled up with a murderer.”
I sat thinking of this and that and the other.
“That was a superior lie about the lights on the steers’ horns,” I remarked next.
Scipio shoved one hand under his hat and scratched his head. “They say that’s so,” he said. “I’ve heard it. Never seen it. But—tell y’u—he ain’t got brains enough to invent a thing like that. And he’s too conceited to tell another man’s lie.”
“There’s St. Elmo’s fire,” I pondered. “That’s genuine.”
Scipio desired to know about this, and I told him of the lights that are seen at the ends of the yards and spars of ships at sea in atmospheric conditions of a certain kind. He let me also tell him of the old Breton sailor belief that these lights are the souls of dead sailor men come back to pray for the living in peril; but stopped me soon when I attempted to speak of charged thunderclouds, and the positive, and the negative, and conductors and Leyden jars.
“That’s a heap worse than the other stuff about yellow and blue,” he objected. “Here’s Broke Axle. We’ll camp here.”
SCIPIO’S SLEEP WAS superior to mine, coming sooner, burying him deeper from the world of wakefulness. Thus, he did not become aware of a figure sitting by our little fire of embers, whose presence penetrated my thinner sleep until my eyes opened and saw it. I lay still, drawing my gun stealthily into a good position and thinking what were best to do; but he must have heard me.
“Lemme show you sheep.”
“What’s that?” It was Scipio starting to life and action.
“Don’t shoot Timberline,” I said. “He’s come to show us sheep.”
Scipio sat staring stupefied at the figure by the embers, and then he slowly turned his head around to me, and I thought he was going to pour out one of those long corrosive streams of comment that usually burst from him when he was enough surprised. But he was too much surprised.
“His name is Henry Hall,” he said to me very mildly. “I’ve just remembered it.”
The patient figure by the embers rose. “There’s sheep in the Washakie Needles. Lots and lots and lots. I seen ’em myself in the spring. I can take you right to ’em. Don’t make me go back and be stocktender.” He recited all this in a sort of rising rhythm until the last sentence, in which the entreaty shook his voice.
“Washakie Needles is the nearest likely place,” muttered Scipio.
“If you don’t get any you needn’t to pay me any,” urged the boy; and he stretched out an arm to mark his words and his prayer.
We sat in our beds and he stood waiting by the embers to hear his fate, while nothing made a sound but Broke Axle.
“Why not?” I said. “We were talking a ways back of taking on a third man.”
“A man,” said Scipio. “Yes.”
“I can cook, I can pack. I can cook good bread, and I can show you sheep, and if I don’t you won’t have to pay me a cent,” stated the boy.
“He sure means what he says,” Scipio commented. “It’s your trip.”
Thus it was I came to hire Timberline.
Dawn showed him in the same miserable rags he wore on my first sight of him at the corral, and these provided his sole visible property of any kind; he didn’t possess a change of anything, he hadn’t brought away from Rongis so much as a handkerchief tied up with things inside it. Most wonderful of all, he owned not even a horse—and in that country in those days five dollars’ worth of horse was within the means of almost anybody.
But he was unclean, as I had feared. He washed his one set of rags, and his skin-and-bones body, by the light of that first sunrise on Broke Axle, and this proved a habit with him, which made all the more strange his neglect to throw the rags away and wear the new clothes I bought as we passed through Lander, and gave him.
“Timberline,” said Scipio the next day, “If Anthony Comstock came up in the country he’d jail you.”
“Who’s he?” Timberline screamed sharply.
“He lives in New York and he’s agin the nood. That costume of yours is getting close on to what they claim Venus and other Greek statuary used to wear.”
After this Timberline put on the Lander clothes, but we found that he kept the rags next to his skin. This clinging to such worthless things seemed probably the result of destitution, of having had nothing, day after day and month after month.
His help in camp was real, not merely well-meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he had said he could do he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him he was somehow forever pitiful.
“Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio.
“Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never have been born.”
We continued along the trail, engrossed in our several thoughts, and I could hear Timberline, behind us with the packhorses, singing: “If that I was where I would be. Then should I be where I am not.”
OUR MODE OF travel had changed at Fort Washakie: we had left the wagon and put ourselves and our baggage upon horses because we should presently be in a country where wagons could not go.
Once the vigorous words of some bypasser on a horse caused Scipio and me to discuss dropping the Washakie Needles for the country at the head of Green River. None of us had ever been in the Green River country, while Timberline evidently knew the Washakie Needles well, and this decided us. But Timberline had been thrown into the strangest agitation by our uncertainty. He had said nothing, but he walked about, coming near, going away, sitting down, getting up, instead of placidly watching his fire and cooking; until at last I told him not to worry, that I should keep him and pay him in any case. Then he spoke.
“I didn’t hire to go to Green River.”
“What have you got against Green River?”
“I hired to go to the Washakie Needles.”
His agitation left him immediately upon our turning our faces in that direction. What had so disturbed him we could not guess; but, later that day, Scipio rode up to me, bursting with a solution. He had visited a freighter’s camp, and the freighter, upon learning our destination, had said he supposed we were “after the reward.”
It did not get through my head at once, but when Scipio reminded me of the yellow poster and the murder, it got through fast enough; the body had been found on Owl Creek, and the middle fork of Owl Creek headed among the Washakie Needles. There might be another body—the other Eastern man who had never been seen since—and there was a possible third, the confederate, the cook; many held it was the murderer’s best policy to destroy him as well.
So now we had Timberline accounted for satisfactorily to ourselves: he was “after the reward.” We never said this to him, but we worked out his steps from the start. As stocktender at Rongis he had seen that yellow poster pasted up, and had read it, day after day, with its promise of what to him was a fortune. My sheep hunt had dropped like a providence into his hand.
We got across the hot country where rattlesnakes were thick, where neither man lived nor water ran, and came to the first lone habitation in this new part of the world—a new set of mountains, a new set of creeks. A man stood at the door, watching us come.
“Do you know him?” I asked Scipio.
“Well, I’ve heard of him,” said Scipio. “He went and married a squaw.”
We were now opposite the man’s door. “You folks after the reward?” said he.
“After mountain sheep,” I replied, somewhat angry.
We camped some ten miles beyond him, and the next day crossed a not high range, stopping near another cabin at noon. Two men were living here, cutting hay in a wild park. They gave us a quantity of berries they had picked and we gave them some potatoes.
“After the reward?” said one of them as we rode away, and I contradicted him with temper.
“Lie to ’em,” said Scipio. “Say yes.”
Something had begun to weigh upon our cheerfulness in this new country. The reward dogged us, and we met strange actions of people, twice. We came upon some hot sulphur springs and camped near them, with a wide creek between us and another camp. Those people—two men and two women—emerged from their tent, surveyed us, nodded to us, and settled down again.
Next morning they had vanished; we could see empty bottles where they had been. And once, coming out of a little valley, we sighted close to us through cottonwoods a horseman leading a packhorse coming out of the next little valley. He did not nod to us, but pursued his parallel course some three hundred yards off, until a rise in the ground hid him for a while; when this was passed he was no longer where he should have been, abreast of us, but far to the front, galloping away. That was our last sight of him.
We spoke of these actions a little. Did these people suspect us, or were they afraid we suspected them? All we ever knew was that suspicion now closed down upon all things like a change of climate.
I DROVE UP the narrowing canyon of Owl Creek, a constant prey to such ill-ease, such distaste for continuing my sheep hunt here, that shame alone prevented my giving it up and getting into another country out of sight and far away from these Washakie Needles, these twin spires of naked rock that rose in front of us now, high above the clustered mountaintops, closing the canyon in, shutting the setting sun away.
“He can talk when he wants to.” This was Scipio, riding behind me.
“What has Timberline been telling you?”
“Nothing. But he’s telling himself a heap of something.” In the rear of our single-file party Timberline rode, and I could hear him. It was a relief to have a practical trouble threatening us; if the boy was going off his head we should have something real to deal with. But when I had chosen a camp and we were unsaddling and throwing the packs on the ground, Timberline was in his customary silence.
Next morning, the three of us left camp. It was a warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet days smelled of the pines. By three o’clock we stood upon a lofty, wet, slippery ledge that fell away on three sides, sheer or broken, to the summer and the warmth thousands of feet below. Here it began to be very cold, and to the west the sky now clotted into advancing lumps of thick thunderclouds, black, weaving and merging heavily and swiftly in a fierce rising wind.
We got away from this promontory to follow a sheep trail, and as we went along the backbone of the mountain, two or three valleys off to the right long black streamers let down from the cloud. They hung and wavered mistily close over the pines that did not grow within a thousand feet of our high level. I gazed hard at the streamers and discerned water, or something pouring down in them. Above our heads the day was still serene, and we had a chance to make camp without a wetting.
“No! No!” said Timberline hoarsely. “See there! We can get them. We’re above them. They don’t see us.”
I saw no sheep where he pointed but he insisted they had merely moved behind a point, and so we went on to a junction of the knife-ridges upon which a second storm was hastening from the southwest over deep valleys that we turned our backs on to creep near the Great Washakie Needles.
Below us there was a new valley like the bottom of a cauldron; on the far side of the cauldron the air, like a stroke of magic became thick white and through it leaped the first lightning, a blinding violet. A sheet of the storm crossed over to us, the cauldron sank from sight in its white sea, and the hail cut my face, so I bowed it down. On the ground I saw what looked like a tangle of old footprints in the hard-crusted mud.
These the pellets of the swarming hail soon filled. This tempest of flying ice struck my body, my horse, raced over the ground like spray on the crest of breaking waves, and drove me to dismount and sit under the horse, huddled together even as he was huddled against the fury and the biting pain of the hail.
From under the horse’s belly I looked out upon a chaos of shooting, hissing white, through which, in every direction, lightning flashed and leaped, while the fearful crashes behind the curtain of the hail sounded as if I should see a destroyed world when the curtain lifted. The place was so flooded with electricity that I gave up the shelter of my horse, and left my rifle on the ground, and moved away from the vicinity of these points of attraction.
At length the hailstones fell more gently, the near view opened, revealing white winter on all save the steep, gray needles; the thick white curtain of hail departed slowly, the hail where I was fell more scantily still.
Something somewhere near my head set up a delicate sound. It seemed in my hat. I rose and began to wander, bewildered by this. The hail was now falling very fine and gentle, when suddenly I was aware of its stinging me behind my ear more sharply than it had done before. I turned my face in its direction and found its blows harmless, while the stinging in my ear grew sharper. The hissing continued close to my head wherever I walked. It resembled the little watery escape of gas from a charged bottle whose cork is being slowly drawn.
I was now more really disturbed than I had been during the storm’s worst, and meeting Scipio, who was also wandering, I asked if he felt anything. He nodded uneasily, when, suddenly—I know not why—I snatched my hat off. The hissing was in the brim, and it died out as I looked at the leather binding and the stitches.
I expected to see some insect there, or some visible person for the noise. I saw nothing, but the pricking behind my ear had also stopped. Then I knew my wet hat had been charged like a Leyden jar with electricity Scipio, who had watched me, jerked his hat off also.
“Lights on steer horns are nothing to this,” I began, when he cut me short with an exclamation.
Timberline, on his knees, with a frightful countenance, was tearing off his clothes. He had felt the prickling, but it caused him thought different from mine.
“Leave me go!” he screamed. “I didn’t push you over! He made me push you. I never knowed his game. I was only the cook. I wish’t I’d followed you. There! There! Take it back! There’s your money! I never spent a cent of it!”
And from those rags he had cherished he tore the bills that had been sewed in them. But this confession seemed not to stop the stinging. He rose, stared wildly, and screaming wildly, “You got it all,” plunged into the cauldron from our sight. The fluttered money—some of the victim’s, hush-money hapless Timberline had accepted from the murderer—was only five ten-dollar bills; but it had been enough load of guilt to draw him to the spot of the crime.
We found the two bodies, the old and the new, and buried them both. But the true murderer was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.