One of them jerked up his rifle and we heard the sound of a shot. What happened to that bullet I never could say, but it came nowhere near us. Judging distance across a canyon like that, when the target is higher than you—that’s quite a stunt. Why, I’ve missed a few shots like that my own self.
Digging in my heels, I took hold of that rope. My arms ached and I was fighting for breath. Those high-up ridges surely took a man’s wind. But I got him up a couple of feet farther, beat my hands to warm them, and started at it again.
There was no time to look across the canyon. There was only time to haul away. Heave, and heave again . . . catch a breath, and heave again.
Then the toboggan brought up against something and stuck.
“Ange,” I said, straightening up, “I’m going down. When I ,clear the sled, you get as much rope around that pine as can be.”
“Tell?”
Turning around, I looked at her. She was looking right at me. “Why are you doing this? Is it because of the way I acted?”
Well, I declare! I hadn’t thought of that. “No, Ange, I never gave thought to that. No man can abide much by what a woman thinks, at times like this. He does what it’s his nature to do. That man down there … we had words one time. He was figuring to shoot me, and I was planning to beat him to it.
That there’s one thing, this here’s another. That’s a helpless man, and when I get him up here and get him safe, then maybe ‘hell come a-gunning for me. So I’ll have to shoot him.”
I started down the slope, then stopped and looked back. “Seems a lot of trouble to go to, doesn’t it?”
Well, I cleared him, and we hoisted him out on top of the ridge, using the same route I’d found on that day when I left Ange in the cave.
Down below was Cap, our log house, and our claim — down there in those trees. And up here the wind was blowing a gale, and a man could scarcely stand erect. One thing I knew: we had to get off that mountain, and fast. It was clouding up again—great banks of gray, solid cloud. That could mean more snow. That canyon could be twenty feet deep in snow before the week was out.
Camp was a half-mile as the crow flies, but a good five thousand feet down. Looking north to where I’d spotted what looked like a way down, I could still see it, despite the snow. Once into the trees, we could make it all right, although it would be work.
This ridge was about thirteen thousand feet up, and the wind was roaring along it All the gray granite was swept dean, although there were flurries of snow in the air from time to time. Leaning into the wind, we started on, towing the sled. Finally we got down over the edge of the ridge. Right away, the wind seemed to let up.
My face was raw from the wind, my hands were numb. My fingers in their gloves felt stiff, and I was afraid that the Kid, held immovable the way he was, would freeze to death.
Lowering the sled away ahead of us, we made it down. One time the wind came around a shoulder of the mountain and lifted the sled, man and all, like it was a leaf, but set it down again before the rope tore from my hands. We both heard the Kid scream when the drop jolted his broken leg.
Bracing myself on great shattered rocks, I lowered him. Climbing after, lowering Ange, I lost all sense of time, and could not remember when it ever had been warm.
Below us was a huge old tree, ripped from the rock by its roots. It sprawled like a great spider, petrified in the moment of death, legs writhing. A little below it were some wind-tortured trees, and then the forest We could see the tops of the trees and, far off below, a white, white world of snow, with here and there a faint feather of smoke rising from some house.
Hugging that wind-torn mountainside, and looking down into those treetops, I could hardly believe there was a house with a fire burning in it, or Ma a-rocking in her old rocker, or Orrin a-singing. It was a world far away from the wind, the cold, and snow that drove at your face like sand.
But, easing the sled down a little farther, we got into the trees. From there to the bottom it was mostly a matter of guiding the sled, belaying the rope around a tree here and there to ease it, and working our way through. One time Ange almost dropped, and my own knees were buckling most of the way.
By the time we reached the path I’d cut to build a little fort above the camp, I had fallen down a couple of times, and I was so numb with cold and so exhausted I could scarce think. The draw rope over my shoulder, and one arm around Ange, I started through the tall pines toward the house.
The snow was deep under the trees, but there was a slow lift of smoke from the chimney, and a light in the window. Seemed like only a short time ago it was coming daylight, and now it was night-time again.
Then I fell, face down in the snow. Seemed to me I tried to get up … seemed to get my hands under me and push. I could see that light in the window and I could hear myself talking. I hauled away and got to the door, where I couldn’t make my fingers work the latch.
The door opened of a sudden and Cap was standing there with a six-gun in his hand, looking like he was the old Cap and ready to start shooting.
“It ain’t worth the trouble, Cap. I think I’m dead already.”
Joe Rugger was there, and between them they got Kid Newton off the sled and into the house. Ange, she just sat down and started to cry, and I knelt on the floor and put my arm around her and kept telling her everything was all right.
Kid Newton caught my sleeve. “By God,” he said, “today I seen a man! I thought—”
“Get some sleep,” I said. “Joe’s going for the doctor.”
“I seen a man,” the Kid repeated. “Why, when I hung those guns on me I thought I was something, I thought—”
“Shut up,” I said. And I reached my hands toward the fire a distance off. I could feel the million tiny needles starting to dance in my fingers as the cold began to leave them.
“Speaking of men”—I looked over at Newton— “if you ever get down to Mora, I’ve got two brothers down there, Tyrel and Orrin. Now there’s a couple of men!
“Always figured to make something of myself,” I said, “but I guess I just ain’t got in me.”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I just let the heat soak into me, every muscle feeling stretched out and useless. Ange had quit her crying and dropped off to sleep there beside me, her face drawn, dark hollows under her eyes.
“You been through it,” Cap said. He looked at Newton. “What did you bring him back for?”
“I got no better sense, Cap. I brought him down off that mountain because there was nobody else to do it.”
“But he wanted to kill you!”
“Sure … he had him a notion, that was all. I reckon since then he’s had time to contemplate.” Cap Rountree took his pipe out of his teeth and dumped coffee in the pot. “Then you take time to contemplate about this,”
he said, “There’s another Bigelow down in town.
He’s asking for you.”
XV
It wasn’t in me to lie abed. Come daylight, I was on my feet, but I wasn’t up to much. What I really got up for was vittles. Seemed like I hadn’t been so hungry in years.
Ange was still sleeping in the other room, and Joe Rugger and his wife, just out from Ohio, had come out to the place.
That Bigelow worries me,” Rugger said. “He’s a man hunting trouble like you never saw.”
Those Bigelows,” I said, “they remind me of those little animals a Swede told me about one time. Called them lemmings or something like that. Seems as if all of a sudden they take out for the ocean . . . millions of them, and they run right into the ocean and drown. Those Bigelows seem bound and determined to get themselves killed just as fast as they can manage.”
“Don’t take him lightly, Tell,” Rugger warned me. “He killed a man in Denver City, and another in Tascosa. Benson Bigelow, he’s the oldest, biggest, and toughest of all of them.”