The frontiersman’s fists felt like lead weights as he forced them out defensively. The stitch in his side was making him desperately sick and he bent almost double to get relief. Chandler, recovered from his own abuse, was smiling triumphantly as he came in slowly, teeth bared through the puffy flesh of his face. The little eyes, sunken and overshadowed by the mounds of injured flesh, were vicious, like the eyes of a murderous weasel confronting a helpless victim, livid, anticipatory, and merciless.
Chandler was swearing in a husky undertone. The voice was the only sound on the high trail overlooking the gorge below. Somewhere, far ahead, the bellowing of cattle floated back to the rigid watchers. The monotonous profanity was even and regularly spaced. Caleb watched the big body coming in. He planted his feet and forced himself almost erect, catching his breath with the effort. There could be no maneuvering or side-stepping now. His legs were rubber and his lungs were bellows of tortured, out-raged flesh. Chandler was almost close enough now. Caleb forgot some of his agony in the desperation of what was ahead. Suddenly the big man lunged for-ward. The leaden fists swung methodically, one after the other. Caleb had the very rare ability of being able to hit as hard with one fist as he could with the other. Chandler rushed against the bruising knuckles. He pushed in trying to beat aside the pummeling fists, but they came through the air like the pendulum of a gigantic clock of bone and muscle. He slowed a little and still the fists slashed and jarred and thudded. He stopped altogether, a sob in his throat, swinging his own massive arms. Still the desperate, persistent knuckles smashed into him. His face was struck again and again and his head snapped back savagely with each blow. Now his mouth was open and a gorge of blood swelled out of it. Caleb took a step for-ward, still swinging with that ghastly, ashen look of the damned in his half-blind eyes. Another step for-ward and Chandler’s big arms slowed and finally fell to his sides. Caleb walked forward, flat-footed, and fired all that remained in his body, one tremendous, earth-jarring swing that would have torn the head off a lesser man. Chandler was out on his feet, but he took an instinctive step backward to escape the next blow, which could never come. It was one step too far, and his great body suddenly disappeared over the edge of the trail as Caleb went slowly down to his knees, shaking his head lollingly from one side to the other, fighting doggedly for the consciousness that was slipping from him, driven by a subconscious urging that was warning him insanely of a peril that no longer existed.
Sally and Jack Britt were drinking their second pot of coffee when Caleb opened his eyes. The red film was gone, but the side ache was a biting, searing jolt of agony with each breath.
Britt looked down at him anxiously. “How ya feel, Caleb?”
“Alive, but in small pieces.”
The grizzled old cowman sighed loudly and looked weakly over at Sally. “Alive, he says, girl.”
The deep violet eyes were big in a pale, scared face. “It was awful.” She caught the warning glare in Britt’s face and swallowed hastily. “They way you ruined those new clothes, I mean. Why, that butternut shirt is nothing but shreds and, well, I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to get all that mud out of those trousers or not.” It wouldn’t hold together. Sally’s bravery crumpled like wet paper and she went down on her knees beside the bed, burying her face in the quilts over Caleb’s bruised and aching body.
Britt cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Say, Caleb, uh, do me a favor, will ya?”
“Sure, Jack, what?”
“Dammit, the next time ya gotta fight with some-one, make it a little guy, will ya? Why, that ox out-weighed ya close to seventy pounds.” There was a brisk thump on the back door and Britt started in his tracks, dropped his hand to his holster, and swung it open with a savage frown.
Bull Bear was standing there with a brand new fringed hunting shirt. He held it out ruefully and looked at Britt’s hand on his holstered gun. “No good. Bull Bear always get almost shot when he come in here. No good.” He smiled at Caleb and tossed the handsome shirt on the bed. “Running Horse send this shirt. He said you best fighter he ever seen. Some fight, by damn!” He turned abruptly and walked away.
Jack closed the door with a sigh as Sally raised her tearstained face and looked at the Indian shirt. “No, Caleb. You’ve worn the last one of those things you’re ever going to wear. From now on you dress like Jack an’ the rest of the respectable cattlemen. The frontier is changing. You have to change with it.” She tossed the fringed shirt into a corner and looked appealingly at Britt.
He cleared his throat again. “Uh, Caleb, uh…well, Sally an’ I’ve bought you a little herd o’ cows. Uh…like I told ya once before. Scoutin’s all over, pardner. It’s goin’ to be cows from now on, not buffalo. Uh…you can buy a chunk of land an’ be a cowman. Uh…how about it?”
Caleb looked sadly at the hunting shirt, over at Sally’s wide, pleading and tearstained eyes. He nodded to Britt. “I reckon you’re right, Jack. From now on I’m a cowman.”
Feud on the Mesa
I
There was a place called Purgatoire by the early trappers who came exploring across the Rockies, and the trappers, who the Indians did not kill or who were not assimilated into the plains culture, returned back where they had originated. When the next westering wave arrived, they were Yankees, called mountain men, instead of voyageurs as those earlier explorers had been called, and the Yankees turned Purgatoire into Picketwire.
Roughly the same thing happened upon the high, vast plateau above the New Mexico northwest cattle country, except that there the matter of corruption had a better, at least a more comprehensible genesis and evolution. For example, the first Spaniards to climb to the great plateau arrived there at a time of year when some contiguous areas beyond the immense sweep of pale grass were turning a tawny shade of reddish tan after the first light frost, and they consequently called the mesa Canela, which referred to the color of those sumac bushes as being cinnamon.
Then those lean horsemen passed along, wearing their fine casques and their leather armor, and several generations later the unarmored and much less hawk-like descendants of Spanish miscegenation rode up onto Canela Mesa, and in their imperfect, Indian-Spanish, called the mesa Canana, corrupting the Spanish name into something more relevant to them; they were also soldiers and explorers, and each of them carried a canana that contained their bullets. It was a little leather box that the French called a cartouche and that the next wave of newcomers—Yankees again—called a cartridge box, unless of course they were officers, then they used the French word, cartouche, because it sounded finer.
Finally a barrel-chested, black-bearded, fierceeyed dauntless man named Amos Cane arrived on the mesa with his Shoshone wife and their string of pups ranging from panther-like youths in their teens to a baby on a travois behind a gentle, spotted-rump horse, and spent a golden summer creating a fortress-like big house of logs, an even larger log barn, outbuildings for smoking meat and storing things like salt and flour and dried wild fruit, a blacksmith shop and a bunkhouse for the half-wild youths, and the name Canana underwent another change. The high plateau became Cane’s Mesa, and it remained known as Cane’s Mesa after Amos, old and bowed with wars and labors, yielded up the doughty ghost, his tribe scattered to the four winds, and finally his klootch was also tamped down into the rich earth at his side, and the last of their off-spring, a quiet, sober-eyed, golden-skinned woman of twenty-five named Elisabeth for some foreign queen her father had admired, but called Corn-flower by her mother because of her intensely blue eyes, was all that remained of the clan on Cane’s Mesa. She was the one who had come up the tortu-ous trail out of the inferno of a New Mexico desert lashed to a travois.