Trails to Two Moons/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
Crazy Uncle Alf was one of God's accidents, in the opinion of Big Country folks. He was deemed a bit touched, but whether by mere mortal infirmity or by some mysterious power beyond ken no man dared speculate. They said he was so all-fired uncertain. Like a sudden bitter wind of winter, he was wont to sweep in from the void of range country, blast souls afraid and pass on. Now he would be summoning Two Moons sinners to repentance; overnight he had quit the town on a borrowed horse, and the following sunset would see him calling blessings on the lonely ranch house, fifty miles away, which he had chosen to harbor and refresh him. In heat and storm Uncle Alf fared over the face of the wilderness, scourging and purging souls with the whips of Pentateuch.
The spirit of the wilderness moved him, even as the holy men of old. Big winds down from the mountains carried the voice of the Almighty. Signs and portents were spread against the canopy of the stars for his rapt eye. The play of lightning in the core of a storm answered his cry for guidance on his way. The desert's harshness tinctured the evangelist's theology. No denomination or established dogma bound him; his ordination had come direct from God, staying his hand in a moment of blood lust—for so he vaunted his conversion—and sending him on a mission of redemption. Terrible the Mosaic law and the exactions of Jehovah in Uncle Alf's interpretation, and terrible is exposition of them. He could survey a quarter section of hell in a way to bring the most hardened backslider crawling to a temporary seat on the mourners' bench.
A weird, unworldly figure. Taller than most tall men; gaunt as a hound; weathered features all sunken into swales and hummocks about his eyes of a seer; uncut hair and sweep of snowy beard mingling about his ears; thin wrists and shanks sprouting like cypress roots from the vents of his hand-me-down garments. A veritable blasted pine of a man.
There was something in the evangelist's eyes when Hilma rode close enough to see his saddle burden which showed he had set himself for a wild outburst of grief. None came. The girl looked down at the pitiful bundle; her hand strayed out to touch her father's head. Dark lights lay deep in her eyes when she raised them to Uncle Alf's.
"Where did you find him?" she asked.
"By the roadside just t'other side of Twenty Mile Crick. And right between his eyes"
"A little stone," Hilma supplied. "A little stone—yes, I knew." She turned her horse to the homeward stretch.
"The Killer!" Uncle Alf roared in his diapason thunder. "That son of Baal who kills for the cattlemen and marks his pride in blood with a stone. He lies in wait like the thief and the spoiler, and his hand is red in the dawn."
They rode a distance with no further word between them. Hilma was looking off to the mighty battlements of the mountains, warders over her great lonesomeness,—now without respite. The lanky man by her side muttered in his beard. She spoke her thoughts aloud:
"He shot dad because dad knew who he was. Dad rode to Two Moons to tell the sheriff he saw the Killer shoot Jed Monk. I reckon he—the Killer—knew dad 'd do this and wanted to put him out of the way before he could testify before a court of law."
"'Thou hast not hated blood; even blood shall pursue thee," growled Uncle Alf.
"I knew last night this would happen," Hilma continued in a flat monotone. "I saw him against the sky when it was green and he was black. I felt him moving round in the dark. So I knew to-day—I knew"
"It was the voice of God what told you to come searching to-day, daughter," the man corrected. "Even as it was His voice come to me in sleep down to Henry Withers' place, saying, 'Rise up, Alpheus; go forth in the dawn and find a murdered man, that ye may comfort the fatherless and become an avenger of blood.'"
That phrase, an avenger of blood, launched the evangelist upon one of his fanatical flights, and he dinned the inexorable law of an eye for an eye. The girl, riding with her eyes on the mountains, stole an occasional glance at the ascetic face of the preacher; his steel-bright eyes fascinated her even as the swift surge of his speech stirred a deep response of primitive passions. For Uncle Alf hurled anathema at the whole cattle clan—branded the barons of the great range and all their gentry of the cow outfits with the mark of bloodguiltiness. He compared the dominant caste to Pharaoh's hosts and made the small settlers a people in bondage, awaiting but the call of a Moses. Uncle Alf visioned himself in the role of deliverer.
"They drive my people from the water fords. They tromp down my people's lambs with their horned cattle, and their murderers lurk in the hedges to destroy the innercent. Bear witness, oh God! They think this here range was guv to them by You exclusive, like You set Adam in the Garden. Your waters and Your flowin' streams belong to no man but them. The strong grasses nussed by Your sun is for their fat steers only. But, God, I hearn You when You says to me out of a cloud, 'Alpheus, rise up and gird up your loins. Take the rifle in your hands, Alpheus,' says You to me, 'and call your people together with rifles in their hands to rise against the Egyptians and confound 'em—lay 'em low and utterly destroy the whole stiff-necked congregation!' The white head was tipped far back to bring the beard pointing at the horizon and his rapt eyes were fixed on the blinding sun. Uncle Alf shot his hands aloft in a gesture of invocation.
"All right, dear God A'mighty, it 'll be my duty an' my pleasure to follow Your directions 'long these lines."
So fared these two—and that pitiful third—through the immensity of the brown and gold desert, under aloof heavens; a world raw from the wheel of the potter. And Hilma Ring drank deep of the grim doctrine of vengeance. At first the preacher's exhortations stirred her only by the sonorousness of word and phrase; his mighty voice played upon her ear as something potent to command. Then insensibly her sluggishness of perception—inheritance from the Danish blood—fell away, and her mind began to leap and tingle to the call of a blood reckoning. All her dull hatred of the cattle clan, hitherto formless and without definite inspiration, was coals for the fiery prophet to breathe upon. She saw herself bereft of a father, not by an individual but by that collective monster of Uncle Alf's conjuring. Not because she loved her father—for Hilma could not be sure she ever had—but because she had a right to a father and this right had been invaded by the cattle clan, did she give herself to the other's promptings of bitter recompense.
Weightiest thing in the balance of the girl's growing wrath was that they, the cattlemen, through their hired agent had sealed her to the bondage of the great lonesomeness forever and ever. To live at all she must live alone, work the sheep band, grub for dollars to buy flour and bacon. Away out there where the blank sky bends to touch vacant wilderness, where nothing moves except at the stir of winds, where silence lies like a deep sea, there must she live—alone. Alone!
They came to Hilma's house on the crest above Teapot and laid Old Man Ring in his bunk.
"When shall we have the funeral?" Uncle Alf asked over bacon and beans.
"Right away, while you 're still here, Hilma answered. "I 've got to have somebody round to help. Now that Jed Monk 's dead—he was our only neighbor—there 's nobody nearer than Zang Whistler and his boys over in the Spout. I reckon it won't be much of a funeral."
She tried to smile, but found the effort somehow inept. After the meal Uncle Alf took hammer, saw and nails and went down to the shed stable to rip off precious boards and make a coffin. Hilma donned her oldest dress, carried pick and shovel to a flower-blown knoll above the creek and there chose a site for the grave. She was bare-headed; her sleeves rolled up to the shoulders gave the dazzling whiteness of her arms to the sun. Soon the sleazy dress clung to her back with a sweat of toil, and its stretched web undulated to the smooth play of muscles from shoulder to midback.
Zang Whistler found her thus at labor when he rode up. He had been skirting the crest of the opposite divide, two miles and more away, when the dazzle of sunlight on her live gold hair arrested his eye, so he crossed the Teapot to make talk. Hilma looked up at the sound of hoofs; she drew one arm across her forehead to wipe damp strands of hair out of her eyes. Zang Whistler's sweeping bow—and a fetching figure of a horseman he was—was answered by a grave nod. The visitor's careless masculine grace and bold features, a little raffish and devil-may-care, carried no sex challenge to Hilma. She counted men, especially youngish men, merely as a variant of her own species—queer creatures and a little akin to bull calves in their antics.
"Old Man Ring got you working for him again?" Zang hailed, curbing his pony near the shallow trench wherein the girl stood.
"Yes," Hilma answered, and she squared her shoulders for another pick drive.
"What you digging away up here on the hill—water hole?" the man quizzed laughingly.
"No; grave—his grave." The reply came shortly and with the sweep of the pick point down to shale. Whistler swung from the saddle in an instant and reached to take the pick handle from her. She met his questioning eyes with a curiously objective stare.
"Ole Man Ring dead? What—who did it?"
"The Killer," Hilma answered dully. "The Killer got him when he was coming back from Two Moons. Crazy Uncle Alf 's over yonder to the stable now, tinkering up something to bury him in."
Her story of the shooting was bald and brief. The leader of the Spout gang of black-balled cow-punchers and outlaws heard her through with a growing pucker of wonder in the corners of his eyes,—wonder at the calm self-possession of this radiant girl.
"Well," he ventured when she had finished, "I suppose you 'll be closing up the outfit and moving to town."
"No, I won't. I got to stick if I want to live. All Dad has is sunk in the sheep. I guess I got to live in a sheep wagon now or starve." She voiced this scope of her future with no shading of protest in her voice. Zang eyed her still more curiously.
"Good girl!" he exclaimed. "Give me that pick and you go 'long back to the house."
Hilma yielded the pick and stepped out of the trench. She sat down, drew off both her heavy shoes and shook dirt from them. Whistler stole a covert glance under his arm at the stockinged ankles, trim and shapely for all their coarse covering. Hilma saw the look, but continued unperturbed to brush bits of shale from her stocking soles. She pulled on her shoes and arose.
"A fresh inspector was here yesterday little while after you left," she said. "He ran off all those yearlin' calves of yours down to the corral and I shot at him. But I missed him,"—this admission in a knife-edged stab of bitterness. "Name 's Blunt—Bill Blunt." Zang poised the pick over his head and whistled.
"Blunt—Original Bill, eh? You say you shot at him. Lord-ee, Miss Hilma, he did n't go for to shoot at you, now?" Hilma shook her head. "Sho! I had n't oughta set Original down as a woman shooter, even if he is a range inspector. I don't mind losing four yearlin's half 's much as missing a chance to meet up with this here Original. Him and me are going to get into a mighty tight jack pot some day where we gotta shoot it out between us."
"You 'll kill him then?" The girl popped the question abruptly; a note of eagerness would not be denied. The outlaw grinned.
"Why 're you so mighty p'tickler 'bout this here Original Bill's passin' over?" he drawled.
"Because I hate him," Hilma answered, and she turned and walked to the house, leaving the man to finish her task.
They buried Old Man Ring at sundown. Uncle Alf said a prayer which flamed with the wrath of Jeremiah of the Captivity, Zang Whistler filled the grave, and that was an end to it. The three returned to the cabin. Uncle Alf saddled, gave Hilma a blessing crackling with prophetic lightnings and rode off into the purpling dark. Zang Whistler, reluctantly mounting, rode his horse to the doorway, where Hilma stood. Wine and carnelian light from the west stained her cheek, made mysterious the depths of blue irises. She was beautiful in the man's eyes, but it was a beauty matching the cold white chimney of Cloud's Rest, highest watchtower of the Broken Horns. He looked down at her and was seized by a curious suffocation, a stoppage of blood at the heart. Leaning a little toward her, he stretched down his hand. Hilma took it.
"You—you 're bound to be mighty lonely all by yourself here, Miss Hilma," he said huskily. The girl's steady eyes read him.
"Maybe so," she returned with a touch of ice in her voice. She withdrew her hand and stepped back into the door-frame. "Maybe so; but I 'm going to learn to shoot."
Zang heard the heavy door creak shut and the sliding of the bar behind it.