The Ox-Bow Incident (15 page)

We’d all been watching this business so close that we hadn’t seen Tetley coming until Farnley pulled around to look because Winder was pointing. Even then it didn’t seem to matter, except that there’d be more explaining, which we wanted to escape. We’d been pulled back and forth enough. We were already chilled with sitting in the wind; there was a storm coming on, you could feel that definitely now. All I wanted right now was a drink, a meal and a smoke. Most of us were in this mood; there were more men on the walk than mounted, and their attention to Tetley was more curious than anything else. He was so obviously ready to go somewhere. With military rigidity he was riding alone on his tall, thin-legged palomino with the shortened tail and clipped mane like those of a performing horse. He wore a Confederate field coat with the epaulets, collar braid and metal buttons removed, and a Confederate officer’s hat, but his gray trousers were tucked into an ordinary pair of cowboy’s shin boots. There was a gun belt strapped around his waist, over the coat. It had a flap holster, like a cowboy would never wear, which let show just the butt of a pearl-handled Colt. He didn’t have a stock saddle either, but a little, light McLellan.

Behind him, like aides-de-camp, almost abreast, were three riders, his son Gerald, his Mex hand called Amigo, and Nate Bartlett.

When he had drawn up, his three riders stopping behind him too, he looked us over, his small, lean, gray-looking face impassive; no, he reviewed us, and was
amused without expression. Irony was the constant expression of Tetley’s eyes, dark and maliciously ardent under his thick black eyebrows. His hair, even gray, was heavy and of senatorial length, cut off straight at his coat collar, and curling up a little. There were neat, thin sideburns of the same gray from under his campaign hat to the lower lobes of his ears, and a still thinner, gray mustache went clear to the corners of his mouth, but didn’t cover the upper lip of his mouth, which was long, thin, inflexibly controlled, but as sensitive as a woman’s. He was a small, slender man who appeared frail and as if dusted all over, except his eyes and brows, with a fine gray powder. Yet, as he sat quietly, rigidly, his double-reined bridle drawn up snugly in his left hand in a fringed buckskin glove, his right arm hanging straight down, we all sat or stood quietly too. He addressed Tyler as the man who should be in authority. “Disbanding?”

Tyler avoided the condemnation. “Davies convinced us, Major Tetley.”

“So?” Tetley said. “Of what, Mr. Davies?” he asked him.

Even Davies was confused. He began an explanation that sounded more like an excuse than a plea. Nate Bartlett cut him short, drawing up cautiously beside Tetley, and speaking to him cautiously.

“I guess they don’t know about their having gone by the pass, sir.”

Tetley nodded. Davies looked from one to the other of them uncertainly.

“You were acting on the supposition that the raiders left by the south draw, I take it, Mr. Davies?”

“Yes,” Davies said, doubtfully. He didn’t know where he stood.

“They didn’t.” Tetley smiled. “They left by the pass.”

We knew what he meant, Bridger’s Pass, which went through the mountains to the west; it was part of the stage-road to Pike’s Hole, the next grazing range over, which had a little town in it, like Bridger’s Wells. It was a high
pass, going up to about eight thousand; snow closed it in the winter, and with the first thaws the creek came down beside it like a steep river, roaring and splashing in the narrows, until it bent south in the meadows and went brimming down toward Drew’s and through the draw at the south. The west road from Drew’s came up along the foothills and joined the stage-road right at the foot of the pass. It was only a little off this west road that Greene thought Kinkaid had been found. If the rustlers had gone by the pass, it changed the whole picture. Then it was the sheriff who was off the track. If he’d gone to the draw, toward that branding camp Kinkaid had found, he’d be twenty miles off. We began to really listen.

“By the pass, from the south end,” Davies said, “that would be crazy.” He didn’t sound convinced. He sounded as if he had a lump in his throat. It wasn’t which way they’d gone that mattered to Davies.

Tetley still smiled. “Not so crazy, perhaps,” he said, “knowing how crazy it would look; or if you lived in Pike’s Hole.”

“You seem pretty sure,” Ma said. “Amigo saw them,” Tetley said.

A half a dozen of us echoed that, “Saw them?” Farnley came back in, Winder and Gabe with him.

“He was coming back from Pike’s, and had trouble getting by them in the pass.”

“Trouble?” Mapes asked importantly. The Judge was just sitting in his saddle and staring at Tetley. Osgood, I thought, was going to cry. It was hard, when it had all been won. And Davies was standing there as if somebody had hit him but not quite dropped him.

“Si,” Amigo said for himself. He was grinning, and had very white teeth in a face darker than Sparks’. He liked the attention he was getting. Tetley didn’t look around, but let him talk.

“Heem not see me, I theenk,” Amigo explained. “Eet was low down, where I can steel get out from the road. I
take my horse into the hollow place so they can get by. At first I theenk I say hello when they come; I have no to smoke left by me. Then I theenk it funny to drive the cattle then.”

“Cattle,” Moore said sharply.

“But sure,” Amigo said. He grinned at Moore. “Why you theenk I have to get out of hees road?”

“Go on,” Moore said.

“Well,” Amigo said, “when I theenk that, I be quiet. Then, when I see what marks those cattle have, I be veree quiet; veree slow I take my horse behind the bush, and we be still.” He explained his conduct. “See, I have not the gun with me.” He slapped his hip.

“What were the marks?” Mapes asked.

“What you theenk? On the throat, sweenging nice, three leetle what-you-call-heems—” He didn’t need to say any more. We all knew Drew’s dewlap mark.

“Why, the dirty rats,” Gil said. It sounded as if he half admired them. “To kill a man,” he said, “and still risk a drive.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” old Bartlett cried. “Let them get away with it a few times, I said, and there’s no limit to what they’ll try.”

Davies was looking at Amigo. “Were they all Drew’s?” he asked him.

“You can’t get around it that way,” Bartlett yelped at him. “With roundup just over they’d still be bunched, wouldn’t they? And Drew was branding down his own end; he just cut out at the main camp. Ain’t that right, Moore?”

“That’s right,” Moore said.

“How many of them?” Farnley asked Tetley.

“About forty head,” Tetley said.

“That’s what you said, isn’t it, Amigo?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Si,” said Amigo, grinning.

“No; I mean rustlers.”

“Three, eh, Amigo?”

“Si, they was three.”

“Did you know any of them?” Ma asked Amigo.

The grin disappeared from Amigo’s face. But he shook his head. “I not evair see heem before,” he said, “not any of heem.”

“Well, you can’t find a way out of this one, can you?” Farnley asked. But he didn’t look at Davies. He seemed to be asking us all. Davies was looking at the Judge, but the Judge couldn’t think of anything to say. I thought Davies was going to cry. He looked whipped. Until then I hadn’t known how hard he was taking this; I’d felt it was just a kind of contest between his ideas and our feelings. Now I saw he was feeling it too. But I knew that I, for one, wasn’t with him. I untied and mounted. Others were doing the same. Some slipped in to claim their drink from Canby, but came right out again.

Davies, without much conviction, tried Tetley. “Major Tetley,” he said, “it’s late. You can’t get them tonight.”

“If we can’t,” Tetley told him, “we can’t get them at all. It’s going to storm; snow, I think. We have time. They will move slowly with those cattle, and in the pass there is no place for them to branch off.”

“Yes,” admitted Davies, “yes, that’s true.” He ran a hand through his hair as if he was puzzled. He was smiling shakily.

“What time did Amigo see them?” Ma asked.

“About four o’clock, I believe. Wasn’t it, Amigo?”

“Si.”

“In the lower pass at four,” said Farnley. “Sure we can get ’em.”

“You were a long time bringing the word, Major,” the Judge said. I was surprised to hear him still sounding like a friend of Davies.

Tetley looked at him with that same smile. It had a different meaning every time he used it.

“I wanted my son to go along,” he said. “He was out on the range.”

Young Tetley was sitting with his bridle across the saddle horn, pulled tight between his hands. His face got red, but he gave no other signs of having heard. We all had the same notion, I guess, that young Tetley hadn’t been on the range at all. But nobody would have said so, and it didn’t matter now.

Davies made one more try. “The sheriff should be here,” he protested.

“Isn’t he?” Tetley asked. “We must do what we can, then,” he said.

“Major Tetley,” Davies pleaded, “you mustn’t let this be a lynching.”

“It’s scarcely what I choose, Davies,” Tetley said. His voice was dry and disgusted.

“You’ll bring them in for trial then?”

“I mean that I am only one of those affected. I will abide by the majority will.”

Ma grinned at Davies. “There’s your majority stuff right back at you, old man,” she said.

Davies didn’t argue that. He looked around again, but he didn’t find friends. I didn’t look at him myself. We knew what we were after now, and where, and it encouraged us to know there were only three rustlers. We’d thought, perhaps, being bold to work right in daylight on a small range, there might be twenty of them.

When Davies tried to speak again, Winder and Farnley told him to shut up.

The Judge expanded and said, “Tetley, you know what’s legal in a case like this as well as I do. Davies is only asking what any law-abiding man should choose to do without the asking. He wants the posse to act under a properly constituted officer of the law, and as a posse, not a mob.”

“Risley made me deputy,” Mapes said loudly.

The Judge went on: “This action is illegal, Major,” he blew. Tetley stared at him without any smile. “But in a measure I sympathize with it,” the Judge admitted. “Sympathize.
The circumstances make action imperative. But a lynching I cannot and will not condone.”

“No?” Tetley inquired.

“No, by God. I insist, and that’s all Davies asks too, that’s all any of us ask, that you bring these men in for a fair trial.”

“The Judge ain’t had anything bigger to deal with than a drunk and disorderly Indian since he got here, Major,” Ma said, with a sympathetic face. “You can see how he’d feel about it.”

“That attitude,” shouted the Judge, waving a hand at Ma, “that’s what I must protest, Major. Levity, levity and prejudice in a matter of life and law.”

“Regrettable,” said Tetley, smiling at Ma.

“We shall observe order and true justice, Judge,” he told him.

“Are we going, or aren’t we?” Farnley wanted to know.

Tetley looked at him. “In time,” he said.

“Mapes,” he said, turning to Butch.

“Yes, sir?”

“You said Risley had made you deputy?”

“Yes, sir,” said Butch.

“Then suppose you deputize the rest of us.”

“It’s not legal,” Tyler told him. He appeared infuriated by Tetley’s smiling, elusive talk. “No deputy has the right to deputize.”

“It’ll do for me, Butch; go head and pray,” Smith yelled.

Butch looked at Tetley. Tetley didn’t say anything or even nod. He just smiled, that thin little smile that barely moved the corners of his mouth.

“How about it, boys?” Butch asked us.

“Mapes,” Tyler bellowed at him, “it’s ineffective. You’re violating the law yourself, in such an act.”

Men called out to Mapes: “Go ahead, Butch”; “I guess it will take as well with you as any, Butch”; “Fire away, sheriff.”

“Raise your right hands,” Butch told us. We did. He recited
an oath, which he seemed to have not quite straight. “Say ‘I do,’ ” he told us. We said it together.

Farnley had already ridden out of the press. We began to swing into loose order after him. Davies was standing alone in the middle of the road with a stricken face. When the Judge bellowed after us in a sudden access of fury, “Tetley, you bring those men in alive, or, by God, as I’m justice of this county, you’ll pay for it, you and every damned man-jack of your gang,” Davies didn’t even seem to hear him. Then suddenly he ran down the road, and then was running beside Tetley’s horse, talking to him. Then he dropped back and let them go. I called to ask him if he wasn’t coming. He looked up at me, and God, I felt sorry for the man. He’d looked funny, an old man running stiffly in the road after armed men on horses who wouldn’t pay any attention to him. But now he wasn’t funny. He didn’t say anything, but nodded after a moment. When I was going to pull up to wait for him, he made a violent gesture to me to go on.

Looking back I saw him standing with Osgood in the street. The Judge had dismounted, and was talking to them, waving his hands rapidly. Canby hadn’t come down, but was watching them and us, from the door. I could see the white towel he still had in his hand.

Davies didn’t catch up with us until we had passed Tetley’s big and secret house behind its picket fence and trees and were out in the road between the meadows. The meadows were really marshes close to the road, and the road was only a kind of ranch lane, with deep wheel ruts in the mud and a high, grassy center and edges. The road had been built up, like a railroad embankment, to keep it out of the spring flood, and every few hundred yards there was a heavy plank bridge where the water flowed under from one part of the marsh to the other, and the chock of the horses in the mud, or the plop-plop on the sod, deepened into a hard, hollow thunder for a moment.

Davies was riding a neat little sorrel with white socks and small feet. His saddle was an old, dark leather which had turned cherry color and shiny. He’d put on a plaid blanket coat to keep warm, but he had no gun. He still looked hard bitten in the matter, but not the way he had in the street.