The Ox-Bow Incident (17 page)

“That can make a whore sometimes,” I said.

“She wasn’t and they knew it.”

“There must have been something.”

“There was when they got done,” he said. “Everything. But not before. They were scared of her, that’s all.”

“Why should they be?”

“Men. They’re the biggest part of a woman’s power.”

I had to grin; this kid talking about women like he’d had the testing of the whole breed. And he the kind that would fall over himself to do anything for any of them if they asked it, or just looked it.

He didn’t say anything more for a moment, and I heard the creek far down, and the horses clicking and heaving on the grade.

Then he asked, “Do you know Frena Hundel?”

“No,” I said. So far we’d kept it pretty general; anyway, no names.

“The wild-looking woman who was so afraid we wouldn’t come out and hunt down these three, the whole heroic thirty of us.”

“Yeah,” I said. “What about her?”

“You know what’s the matter with her?”

“How would I know?” I asked again. It didn’t freeze him.

“She wants those men to die.”

He’d got beyond me again, chasing his own hate.

“Before you came,” I told him, “she was wild because Larry Kinkaid had been killed. That was what she kept yelling about. I thought she was sore about Larry, maybe sweet on him.”

“Oh, yes,” he said scornfully, “now he’s dead, she’s sweet on him. She’d take any dead man as her personal grief; it makes her feel important.”

“What’s the sense in that?” I asked.

“He wasn’t anything to her before he was shot. In her heart she’s glad he’s dead.”

That still didn’t make sense to me. I waited, twisting a hand in Blue Boy’s mane and feeling his big shoulders working under it.

“Frena can’t get a man,” he explained, “so she wants to see them all die. Yes, all of them. She’s glad Kinkaid’s dead. She doesn’t know these men we’re after, doesn’t know anything about them, but she’s wild to have us kill them. And she’s wild to get the rest of us the same way, too, to push us into something that will kill our souls, if we have any; that will make us afraid to face men again, anyhow. Because she can’t get a man.”

“It’s a big project,” I said, “to kill us all because she can’t get one of us.”

“I don’t say she can. I say it’s what she wants.”

I didn’t say anything.

“If there were no men, she could do what she pleased with most women, make them her slaves. Men are the part of power she can’t get, and Frena wants power. Frena’s got a bigger appetite for power than the pack will tolerate because most of them couldn’t stand it themselves. It would tear them to pieces in a week to want anything as much as Frena wants everything.”

“You don’t think much of women, do you?” I said.

“Men are no better,” he said. “Men are worse. They’re not so sly about their murder, but they don’t have to be;
they’re stronger; they already have the upper hand of half the race, or they think so. They’re bullies instead of sneaks, and that’s worse. And they’re just as careful to keep up their cheap male virtues, their strength, their courage, their good fellowship, to keep the pack from jumping them, as the women are to keep up their modesty and their hominess. They all lie about what they think, hide what they feel, to keep from looking queer to the pack.”

“Is there anything so fine about being different?” I asked him.

“Did you ever hear a man tell another man about the dreams he’s had that have made him sweat and run his legs in the bed and wake up moaning with fear? Did you?”

“What do you want? Everybody running around telling his dreams, like a little kid?”

“Or any woman tell about the times she’s sighed and panted in her sleep for a lover she wasn’t married to?”

“For Lord’s sake,” I said.

“No,” he babbled on, “you never did and you never will.”

“It’s all right with me if I don’t.”

The white of his face was to me again. “You’re like all the rest,” he raged. “You’ve had dreams like that; you know you have. We’ve all had those dreams. In our hearts we know they’re true, truer than anything we ever tell; truer than anything we ever do, even. But nothing could make us tell them, show our weakness, have the pack at our throats.

“Even in dreams,” he said, after a bit, as if he was talking to himself, but so I could hear, “even in dreams it’s the pack that’s worst; it’s the pack that we can never quite see but always feel coming, like a cloud, like a shadow, like a fog with our death in it. It’s the spies of the pack who are always hidden behind the next pillars of the temples and palaces we dream we’re in, watching us go between them. They’re behind the trees in the black woods we dream about; they’re behind the boulders on the mountains we dream we’re
climbing, behind the windows on the square of every empty dream city we wander in. We’ve all heard them breathing; we’ve all run screaming with fear from the pack that’s coming somewhere. We’ve all waked up in the night and lain there trembling and sweating and staring at the dark for fear they’ll come again.

“But we don’t tell about it, do we?” he dared me. And said quickly, “No, no, we don’t even want to hear anybody else tell. Not because we’re afraid for him. No, we’re afraid our own eyes will give us away. We’re afraid that sitting there hearing him and looking at him we’ll let the pack know that our souls have done that too, gone barefoot and gaping with horror, scrambling in the snow of the clearing in the black woods, with the pack in the shadows behind them. That’s what makes us sick to hear fear admitted, or lust, or even anger, any of the things that would make the pack believe that we were either weak or dangerous.”

He turned his face fully toward me, furious and challenging. “That is what makes you sick now, to hear me,” he told me. “That’s what makes you so damned superior and cold and quiet.” His voice choked him so I thought he was going to cry. “You’re just hiding the truth, even from yourself,” he babbled.

My hands were twitching, but I didn’t say anything.

Then he said more quietly, “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? It always seems crazy to tell the truth. We don’t like it; we won’t admit what we are. So I’m crazy.”

I was thinking that. I don’t like to hear a man pouring out his insides without shame. And taking it for granted everyone else must be like him. You’d have thought he was God, making everyone in his own pattern. Still, he was a kid and weak and unhappy, and his own father, they said, was his enemy.

“Every man’s got a right to his own opinion,” I told him.

After a moment he said, “Yes,” low and to his saddlehorn.

Having heard myself speak I realized that queerly, weak and bad-tempered as it was, there had been something in the kid’s raving which had made the canyon seem to swell out and become immaterial until you could think the whole world, the universe, into the half-darkness around you: millions of souls swarming like fierce, tiny, pale stars, shining hard, winking about cores of minute, mean feelings, thoughts and deeds. To me his idea appeared just the opposite of Davies’. To the kid, what everybody thought was low and wicked, and their hanging together was a mere disguise of their evil. To Davies, what everybody thought became, just because everybody thought it, just and fine, and to act up to what they thought was to elevate oneself. And yet both of them gave you that feeling of thinking outside yourself, in a big place; the kid gave me that feeling even more, if anything, though he was disgusting. You could feel what he meant; you could only think what Davies meant.

I heard him talking again. “Why are we riding up here, twenty-eight of us,” he demanded, “when every one of us would rather be doing something else?”

“I thought you said we liked killing?”

“Not so directly as this,” he said. “Not so openly. Not many of us, at least. We’re doing it because we’re in the pack, because we’re afraid not to be in the pack. We don’t dare show our pack weakness; we don’t dare resist the pack.”

“What do you want us to do,” I asked him, “sit and play a harp and worry about how bad we are while some damned rustler kills a man and cleans out the country?”

“It isn’t that,” he said. “How many of us do you think are really here because there have been cattle stolen, or because Kinkaid was shot?”

“I’m not wrong about your being here, am I?” I asked him.

Then he was quiet. I felt mean. The thing that made me
sorest about this whole talk was that I knew the kid was just scared. I knew he didn’t want to quarrel; but he talked so you couldn’t do anything else.

“No,” he said finally. “I’m here, all right.” He had dug himself up by the roots to say that.

“Well?” I said, easier.

“I’m here because I’m weak,” he said, “and my father’s not.”

There wasn’t anything a guy could say to that. It made me feel as I had once listening to a man describing just how he’d got to a woman, undressing her, so to speak, right in front of us, even telling us what she’d said; a woman we all knew at that. But at least he’d been drunk.

“That doesn’t help, does it?” young Tetley was asking.

“I’m not claiming to be superior to anyone else,” he said. “I’m not. I’m not fit to be alive. I know better than to do what I do. I’ve always known better, and not done it.”

He burst out, “And that’s hell; can you understand that that’s hell?”

“You kind of take it for granted nobody else is as smart as you are, don’t you, kid?” I asked him.

He hunched over the saddle, twisting the front of his coat, I thought, with one hand. It was too dusky to be sure. After a while he answered, as if he had forgotten what I’d said, and then remembered it again.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. He sounded far away and tired; ashamed he’d said so much. It was as if he’d been on a jag, but it was over now and he was feeling sick. He couldn’t let it drop, though.

“Maybe I am crazy, in a way,” he said very quietly.

“You take it too hard, son,” I told him. “You didn’t start this.”

“But I know this,” he said, “if we get those men and hang them, I’ll kill myself. I’ll hang myself.”

Louder he said, “I tell you I won’t go on living and remembering I saw a thing like this; was part of it myself. I couldn’t. I’d go really crazy.”

Then he said, quietly again, “It’s better to kill yourself than to kill somebody else. That settles the mess anyway; really settles it.”

I’d had enough. I’d heard drunks talk like this and it was half funny, but the kid was cold sober.

“We haven’t hung anybody yet,” I told him. “You can go home and keep your own hands clean.”

“No, I can’t,” he said.

“I can’t,” he said again; “and if I could it wouldn’t matter. What do I matter?”

“You seem to think you matter a lot,” I said.

I could see the pale patch of his face turned toward me in the dusk, then away again.

“It does sound that way, doesn’t it?” he asked, as if I was wrong.

I began humming the “Buffalo Gal” to myself. He didn’t say anything more, but after a bit dropped back and rode beside Sparks. They didn’t talk, because I stopped humming and heard Sparks still singing to himself.

At the first level stretch in the road we stopped to breathe the horses. It was dark now, and really cold, not just chilly. There was frost on my blanket roll when I went to get my sheepskin out. The sheepskin was good, cutting the wind right away, and I swung my arms across my chest to get warm inside it. Others were warming themselves too. I could see them spreading and closing like dark ghosts, and hear the thump of their fists.

Gil came up alongside and peered to make sure who it was. Then he said, “Doing this in the middle of the night is crazy. Moore don’t like it much either,” he added. We sat there, listening to the horses breathe, and some of the other men talking in low voices.

Gil was still worrying about the dark. “If it hadn’t clouded up,” he said, “there would have been a full moon tonight, bright as day.” Gil knew his sky like the palm of his hand. One place and another I’d read quite a lot about the sun and moon and the constellations, but I could never remember
it. Gil had never read anything, but he always knew.

When the horses were breathing quietly again, and beginning to stamp, we started on, Gil and I riding together, which felt more natural. Except right in front of us and right behind us, we couldn’t see the riders. We could only hear small sounds of foot and saddle and voice from along the line. The sounds were short, flat and toneless, just bits coming back on the rushing of the creek. Gil was quiet, for him. He didn’t talk or hum; he didn’t change position in his saddle or play with the quirt end of his bridle. He didn’t look around. There wasn’t much to see, of course, the broken shadows of the forest against the fainter but rearing and uniform shadow that was the mountain rising across the creek; that and the patches of snow, bigger and more numerous, showing at vague distances through the trees, like huge, changing creatures standing upright and seeming to move. Even so a man will usually look around even more when it’s dark, unless he’s got saddle-sleepy and dazed. Gil wasn’t sleepy; he wasn’t sitting his horse like a sleepy man. If I knew him, he was thinking about something he didn’t like. I should have let him alone, but I didn’t.

“Still seeing those three guys reaching for the barrels, Gil?”

“No,” he said, coming out of it. “I’d forgot all about them until you mentioned it. Why should I worry about that now?”

“What’s eating you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“I thought you liked excitement,” I said. “I thought you’d be honing for something to do.”

“I’ve got nothing against hanging a rustler,” he said loudly. The riders ahead turned in their saddles and peered back at us. One of them hissed at us angrily. That made me sore on account of Gil; we were like that, fight each other a good part of the time, but be happier to pitch
in together on somebody else. Though there was a difference between us. Gil really liked to fight, liked to let his temper slip and to feel the sweat and the hitting. I just fought because Gil got so pig-headed and insulting when he wanted to fight that I had to or feel yellow.

“Why all the secret?” I said, as loud as Gil had. “Afraid the three of them will round us up?”