Lennie started toward him and he stopped her. “Gone,” he said brusquely, to cover his fear. “Leg broken. I had to kill him.” “Oh, Pa!” Tears started in her eyes. “He was such a fine horse!” “Are you crazy? That was a rattle-brained, hammer-headed broom-tail, and never an ounce of good to anybody.” He paused. “Nevertheless, we’re going to miss him.”
One horse between them now, and hundreds of miles to go, most of it desert.
“We’ll make out with one horse,” he said when they got to the top of the slide.
“You mount up.”
She squinted into the shimmering heat. She knew what was troubling her father, but there was nothing she could do. Without her, he might have had a chance. Oddly enough, although the Apaches worried him, he thought of them as a present and certain danger which he understood; what disturbed him more was the fact that Lennie needed him so badly, or needed somebody, and he did not know what to do.
Walking ahead of the horse, he plodded steadily into the hot, dead air of the afternoon desert.
CHAPTER VIII
Dave Spanyer had never known a time when he did not possess a gun, and use it when needed. The frontier where he grew up made guns a necessity, for despite what some easterners thought about the Indians, the Indian was first and last a warrior.
His standards of behavior had nothing to do with the standards of the white men who opposed him, nor was he properly understood except by a very few people—and all of them were men who had lived with and around Indians. Failure to understand Indian standards and ideas had done as much harm as had well-meaning but uninformed people, do-gooders and such, and the political appointees who were the Indian agents.
One of the basic mistakes in dealing with people of another cultural background is to attribute to them the ideas one has oneself. For instance, the white man’s standards of what constitutes mercy are strictly his own, and the American Indian had no such ideas. Battle was his joy. Battle and horse-stealing, combined with hunting, were his only means to honor and wealth, and a good horse thief was honored and respected more than a good hunter. An Indian would go miles upon miles to steal horses or get into a good fight. Dave Spanyer had never known a time when he was not in the vicinity of Indians, usually hostile ones. He understood them, often hunted with them, fought them when necessary. He knew that for an Apache the word cruelty had no meaning. Torture was amusing to him, and he felt no sympathy for a captured enemy. The Apache respected courage, fortitude, and strength, for these were qualities by which he himself survived. He also respected cunning. On the whole, Dave Spanyer had more respect for most Indians than for many of the white men he had known. He fought them, and they fought him, but each respected the other.
The Indians understood and fought each other, and their customs and occupations were much the same until the white man entered the scene with superior weapons, a different set of standards, and a persistence scarcely understood by the Indian, who fought his battles for sport, for honor, and for loot, but rarely for territory to be seized and held.
Choosing the ground for a fight was not easy to do when the Apache was the enemy, for he knew every inch of his desert land, and was a master in the use of terrain from a tactical sense. Dave Spanyer, however, knew this country south of the Gila and the Salt River Valley almost as well as did any Apache. He had no doubt they had followed every step of his progress for some time, and by now they had decided where the fight was to take place. By this time they undoubtedly knew something of him, too, for a man on a trail in Indian country soon reveals himself to a skilled observer. He reveals himself in the way he travels, in his approach to possible ambuscades, in his use of terrain for ease of travel and for concealment, in his observation of tracks and the country around.
Dave Spanyer wanted to get into a position where an attack must come … where he could get in the first shot, carefully aimed. It was easier to kill that first man … when the firing became more general, men became careful. Night was not far off. If they could find an easily defended position they might hold off the Apaches until darkness, and escape during the night. Packsaddle Mountain lay to the south, and the cave at Castle Dome was beyond reach. Then he thought of the canyon on High Lonesome. There was a lot of rocky surface there, and it was a place where they might lose their pursuers. This was farther west than the Apache usually came, for the Papogoes and Pimas to the south and east were his deadly enemies, and there were Yumas to the south and Mohaves to the north.
Spanyer glanced at the sun. Two hours, at least, until sundown.
“We’ll go to High Lonesome,” he said aloud.
“Pa?”
“Huh?”
“That Considine… is he a bad man?”
Dave Spanyer studied the question with care. His first impulse was to tell her that he was, and then, thinking of the Apaches, he decided that whatever she might have to dream on would be a help. Besides, as men go, Considine was better than most.
Spanyer knew that no man could be judged except against the background of his time. The customs and moral standards of a time were applicable only to that time, and Considine was a man who left big tracks. He was an outlaw, but so far as Spanyer knew he had been honorable, except in looting stages and, rarely, banks or trains.
“No,” he said at last, “I reckon he’s not. He’s an outlaw, but he’s got the makin’s of a mighty good man.”
And then, strangely, Lennie touched his arm with her fingers, and for a time she walked beside him for a little way, holding his arm. And Spanyer, who had known little of tenderness, and who had found only mystery in the sudden growing up of his daughter, was deeply moved.
Around them the desert changed. The dead-white and faint buff of the sands became deeper in tone, the rocks were darker, and here and there ancient fingers of lava pushed down from the mountains, thrusting their probing fingers into the sand.
Joshua trees lifted their contorted arms toward the empty skies as though caught and petrified in some agonized writhing. On their right was an inclined shelf of almost smooth rock, half a mile long and reaching upwards, unbroken for several hundred feet—a great upthrust, honed and smoothed by wind and rain and sand. He was reaching back into his memory now. Before High Lonesome Canyon there was a box canyon. That could be the trap … it was an ideal place for an attack, a place to be skirted widely.
Spanyer turned abruptly at right angles away from the mountains, and out into the tumbled forest of boulders. When well among the boulders he turned westward again.
“A man like Considine,” Spanyer said suddenly, “is apt to be heedless of discipline, and every man needs discipline. If it isn’t given to him, he had better discipline himself. Somewhere Considine took a wrong turn, and it is up to him to take a right one. But he has to do it himself.” “You did.”
“Without your Ma … well, without her maybe I’d never have done it.”
“Considine could do it.” She spoke with confidence.
“A man needs a push sometimes. He needs something outside of himself.”
“Pa … the gray’s limping.”
Dave Spanyer felt the cold hand of death touch him. He turned, almost afraid to look, and led the horse forward, watching it. The gray was limping, all right. He stopped briefly in the shade of a boulder and examined the hoof. The shoe was broken, and half of it had fallen away. He pried the other half loose, and then with his knife he pared the hoof flat.
They moved on, dipping into a forest of Joshua trees. The sun was very hot, glaring into their faces, bathing them in impossible heat. Nothing moved. Not a dust devil … not a wisp of grass … nothing. Then suddenly a rabbit plunged into the trail, saw them, and veered sharply off. Instantly, Spanyer drew his gun and moved back into the rocks. He pressed Lennie down, drew the horse, into shelter. He listened into the stillness and it gave back no sound. Bolstering his pistol, he shifted his rifle to his right hand from the saddle scabbard.
“Something up there,” he said. “A rabbit don’t jump like that in this heat unless he’s scared.”