The Ox-Bow Incident (22 page)

We had passed the turn-off into the valley, and had to slide and scramble down a bank. Even in the wind you could hear the horses snort about it, and the slap of leather and the jangle of jerked bits. They didn’t like it in the dark. By the time I got to the slide it was a long black streak torn
down through the snow. Blue Boy smelled the rim, tossed his head two or three times, and pitched over. He descended scraping and stiff-legged, like a dog sitting down, and the wrenching made me sick to my stomach again.

When we were grouped among the cottonwoods in the hollow, Tetley gave us our marching orders. We were underneath the wind, and he didn’t have to talk very loudly. First he said maybe the stage men had been mistaken, that this was a better place for men with cattle to hide, and that anyway it was our job to make sure before we went on. He cautioned us about playing safe, and against any shooting or rough work until we were sure.

“They must have an opportunity to tell it their way,” he said. “Mapes and I will do the talking, and if there’s any shooting to do I’ll tell you. The rest of you hold your fire unless they try to break through you. We’ll divide to close in on them.

“Where is Croft?” he asked.

“Here,” I said.

“How do you feel, Croft?” he asked.

“I’m all right.”

“Good. But you stay with my group. We’ll go the most direct way.”

Farnley said, “The son-of-a-bitch that got Kinkaid is mine, Tetley. Don’t forget that.”

“He’s yours when we’re sure,” Tetley told him.

“Well, don’t forget, that’s all.”

“I won’t forget,” was all Tetley said, and that quietly.

Then, like an officer enjoying mapping out a battle plan that pleases him because the surprise element is with him, he directed our attack. But I noticed he put Farnley in his own group, and his son Gerald too. He picked Bartlett and Winder and Ma Grier to lead on the other three sides, and divided the rest among the four parties. Winder’s party was to work around through the woods and come down back of the cabin, Bartlett’s to circle clear around and come in by the far side, Ma Grier’s to come up from the valley side.
They were to fan out so they’d contact by the time they got close to the firelight and make a closed circle. He didn’t say so, but you could tell by his care that he thought either the rustlers trusted too much to the snow to stop us, or there were a lot more than three of them; others waiting up here maybe, to support them and hurry the branding.

“They’re least likely to break for the valley or the side away from this,” he continued. “The unarmed men, then, unless they’d rather wait here, had best go, one with Mr. Bartlett and one with Mrs. Grier.”

“Give them guns,” Winder said; “lots of us have a couple.”

“Will you take a gun, Davies?” Tetley asked.

Davies answered from the other side of him, “No, thanks. I’ll go with the Bartletts.”

“Just as you choose,” Tetley said. His voice was even, but the scorn was there.

“Sparks?” he asked.

“No, suh, Cun’l Tetley, thank you jus’ the same.”

“With Mrs. Grier, then.”

“Yessuh.”

“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Tetley warned us. “They may have pickets out. And if you come on the cattle ride easy, don’t disturb them.

“If any party does spring a picket,” he added, “and he gets away, shoot into the air once. All of you, if you hear the shot close in as quickly as you can, but keep spread.”

“This is no battle, you know,” Farnley said. “We’re after three rustlers, not an army.”

“We don’t know what we’re after until we see. Unnecessary risk is simply foolish,” Tetley told him, still evenly.

“And don’t fire,” he told the rest of us, “unless they fire first, except if they should break through. Then stop them any way you have to. The quicker and cleaner this job is, the less chance we’ll have anything to regret. A surprise is what we want, and no shooting if we can help it.

“All clear?” he asked, like he was getting ready to roll up the maps again.

We said it was.

“All right,” Tetley said, “my group will wait here until we judge the rest of you have had time to move into position.

“Good luck, boys,” he said.

Winder and his outfit started off, working single file into the woods. In a moment you couldn’t tell which was riders and which trees. The snow blurred everything, and blotted up sound too, into a thick, velvety quiet. Ma Grier and Bartlett led off at an angle toward the valley. They were heading for the shallows of the creek, where there weren’t any banks but an easy incline, a cross gully worn by sheep and cattle going down to drink. I’d seen deer drinking there too, but only in the early spring, and then warily. It would take time to find that crossing in this kind of a night.

Gil came alongside me.

“How you feeling now, fellow?” he asked.

“Good,” I said.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. “This still don’t have to be our picnic.”

“It looks like it was,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but it ain’t.”

He went away from me, stepping his pinto a little long to catch up with his gang.

The rest of us, in Tetley’s outfit, didn’t talk much. There was nothing to do but wait, and none of the arguing ones were left with us. Only Mapes tried a little of his cottoning-up, he-man talk on Tetley, but since Tetley didn’t want to talk, that stopped too. We weren’t a friendly gang anyway; no real friends in the lot. Tetley, I thought, was short with Mapes because he was trying to count in his mind, or some such system, to keep track of the time. Through the trees we watched the fire out by the cabin. Once it began to die down, and then a shadow went across it, and back across, and the fire darkened and flattened completely. At first we thought they had wind of us, but the fire gradually grew up again, brighter than ever. It was just somebody throwing more wood on.

The snowing relaxed for a spell, then started again with a fresh wind that whirled it around us for a minute or two, even in the woods, and veiled the fire, probably with snow scudding up from the open meadow. Then the wind died off and the snow was steady and slanting again, but thinner. It didn’t feel any longer as if it might be a real blizzard. The branches rattled around us when the wind blew. Being in the marshy end of the valley they weren’t pines, but aspens, and willow grown up as big as trees. When the horses stirred, the ground squelched under them, and you could see the dark shadow of water soaking up around their hoofs through the snow. In places, though, the slush was already getting icy, and split when it was stepped on.

Several times we heard the steers sounding off again, hollow in the wind, and sounding more distant than they could have been.

After a time Tetley led us out to the edge of the aspens to where the wind was directly on us again. We waited there, peering into the snow blowing in the valley, and the dark gulf of the valley itself, but unable to see the other riders, of course, or anything but the fire. It felt to me as if it must be one o’clock at least, but I learned early that I
couldn’t tell within four hours on a cloudy night unless I was doing some work I did every night, like riding herd in the same valley.

Finally Tetley said, as if he had been holding a watch before him all the time, and had predetermined the exact moment to start, “All right, let’s go.”

As we started Mapes asked, “Want us to spread out now?”

“No, we’ll ride in on them in a bunch, unless they get wind of us. If the fire goes out, or there’s any shooting, then spread and work toward the fire. In that case, you on the wings, don’t tangle with Mrs. Grier or Winder.”

So we went out in a group, plowing a wide track through the half-frozen sponginess. Tetley and Farnley and Mapes rode abreast ahead. They didn’t any of them want another to get there ahead of him. Young Tetley and I came behind them, and there were two other riders following us. We all watched toward the fire steadily.

But even when we came much closer there was nothing to see but the fire, beginning to die again, and the little its light revealed of the cabin wall and the trunks of the closest pines on the other side. I got to wondering if they had built the fire up as a blind and had already run out on us, or even were lying up somewhere ready to pick us off. My head came clear again and I didn’t even notice my shoulder. Only the snow annoyed me, though it was falling light and far spaced now. It made me feel that my eyes were no good. The four of us in back kept watching out to the sides, feeling that we didn’t have our side of the square covered, but the three in front continued abreast and seeming to watch only the fire and the clearing right around it, though I could tell by the way they sat that they were as wide awake as we were.

When we began to climb the little rise the cabin was on, I could see the three silhouetted clearly against the fire. Mapes reached under his arm pit and got a gun out into his hand. Farnley’s carbine moved across his saddle, and I
thought I heard the hammer click. Tetley, though, just rode right ahead.

I reached my gun out too. There was a twinge in the injured shoulder when I raised the right one, and I didn’t want to have to make a fast draw and get sick and dizzy as I had riding down the pitch. My head was clear, all right; I thought of every little thing like that. And my senses were up keen too. Without even looking around I could tell how the men behind me were getting set. I was excited, and peculiarly happy. It seemed to me that if the rustlers were concealed I could pick the trees they’d gone behind. Only young Tetley was wrong. I risked a look, and we were so close to the fire I could see his face. He was staring ahead, but blindly, and he wasn’t getting any gun out. Now I can see that he was perhaps still having a struggle with himself that he was here at all, but then it just angered me that one of us failed to be alert; then it just seemed to me that he was too scared to know what to do, and I got furious at him for a moment, the way you will when you think another man’s carelessness is risking your neck. I pulled over and jogged him, though jogging him wrenched my shoulder so my breath whistled. He turned his head and looked at me, and I could see he wasn’t blanked out. He was awake, all right, but he still didn’t look any better.

We were really into the edge of the firelight before Tetley stopped us. I had my mind made up they were laying for us, so what I saw surprised me. Between Tetley and Mapes I could see a man asleep on the ground in a blanket with a big pattern on it. His head was on his saddle and toward the fire, so his face was in the shadow, but when we looked at him he drew an arm up out of his blanket and laid it across his eyes. He had on an orange shirt and the hand and wrist lifted into the light were as dark as an old saddle. Not Indian, either; at least not thick and stubby like the hands of Washoes and Piutes I’d seen, but long and narrow and with prominent knuckles. We were so close that I could see on his middle finger a heavy silver ring with an
egg-shaped turquoise, a big one, in it; a Navajo ring. By the bulk of him he was a big man, and heavy.

There were two other men asleep also, one with his side to the fire and his head away from me, the other on the far side with his feet to the fire. I couldn’t make out anything but their shapes and that they had dark bluish-gray blankets with a black stripe near each end, the kind of blankets the Union had used during the rebellion.

I guess Tetley figured as I did, that they were strangers, at least, if nothing else, because he only waited long enough to be sure they were not playing possum, and then rode into the light, and right up to the feet of the man with the ring. We followed him, spreading around that edge of the fire as he motioned us to. After looking down at the man for a moment he said sharply and loudly, “Get up.”

The other two stirred in their blankets, and began to settle again, but the man with the ring woke immediately and completely, and when he saw us said something short to himself and twisted up out of his blanket in one continuous, smooth movement, trailing one hand into the blanket as he came up.

“Drop it,” Farnley ordered. He was holding the carbine at his thigh, the muzzle pointing at the man. The man had heavy black hair and a small black mustache. He looked like a Mex, though his hair was done up in a club at his neck, like an Indian’s, and his face was wide, with high, flat cheeks. He looked to me like a Mex playing Navajo.

He looked quickly but not nervously around at all of us, sizing us up, but didn’t move the hand which had come up behind him.

“I said drop it,” Farnley told him again, and nudged the carbine out toward him, so he wouldn’t make any mistake about what was meant.

The Mex suddenly smiled, as if he had just understood, and dropped a long-barreled, nickel-plated revolver behind him onto the blanket. He was an old hand, and still thinking.

“Now put ’em up,” Farnley told him.

The smile died off the Mex’s face, and he just stared at Farnley and shrugged his shoulders.

“Put ’em up; reach, you bastard.”

The Mex shrugged his shoulders again. “No sabbey,” he said.

Farnley grinned now. “No?” he asked. “I said reach,” he repeated, and jerked the muzzle of the carbine upward two or three times. The Mex got that, and put his hands up slowly. He was studying Farnley’s face all the time.

“That’s better,” Farnley said, still grinning, “though some ways I’d just as soon you hadn’t, you son-of-a-bitch.” He was talking as quietly as Tetley usually did, though not so easily. He seemed to be enjoying calling the man a name he couldn’t understand, and doing it in a voice like he was making an ordinary remark.

“No sabbey,” the Mex said again.

“That’s all right, brother,” Farnley told him, “you will.”

The other two were coming out of their sleep. I was covering the one on the cabin side, and Mapes the other. Mapes’ man just sat up, still in his blanket. He was still fumed with sleep; a thick, wide-faced old-timer with long, tangled gray hair and a long, droopy gray mustache. He had eyebrows so thick they made peaked shadows on his forehead. The way he was staring now he didn’t appear to be all there.

My man rose quickly enough, though tangling a little with his blanket. He started to come toward us, and I saw he’d been sleeping with his gun on and his boots off.