Malone nodded at the man on the ground. “Not as much as it must’ve surprised this feller.” Straightening, he stepped off the boardwalk, put his leather-clad left foot in a hanging stirrup, and mounted up. The added weight only caused the man whose right foot was pinned beneath Worthless’s left front hoof to scream all the louder.
“OH GAWD, I’M DYING, LORD SAVE ME!”
Malone chucked the reins. The stallion looked back up at him.
“C’mon, you useless lump o’ coyote bait. I got to see a man about a settin’. Or a spell. Reckon it might be a bit o’ both.”
It was only when rider and mount turned away from the saloon and started up the town’s main street that the boy noticed the horse had never been tied to the saloon’s railing. As for the would-be horse thief whose foot had been trapped, he promptly clutched at his lower leg and fell to the dirt alongside his equally incapacitated companion. Both foot and boot, the youth noted with interest, had been squashed flat as a potato pancake.
The stranger’s horse had been big, and heavy—but that heavy? Why, to crush a man’s boot and foot so purely flat, it seemed to the boy that the peculiar stallion would had to have been made out of solid iron.
The town spring was located uphill and off to one side of the main street. The miners who had plumbed it had made a good job of the work, finishing it off with aged hardwood banded with iron. The life-giving rattle of running water was absent from the feeder pipe that emerged from the control cap. Eyeing the valve that normally controlled the volume, Malone wondered where the spring’s natural flow was going now that the pipe designed to convey it into town had been closed off.
Might be that the old man seated in the battered rocking chair directly in front of the currently inaccessible steel wheel would know.
He was at least as weathered as his chair. While the latter was adorned with lingering flecks of red and green paint, the oldster wore faded Levi’s and a pale plaid shirt open at the collar. A ring on one finger had been pounded out of a single nugget. His hair flowed gray around his shoulders, while his beard was as long, snake-slender, and white as that of an entire line of Amish patriarchs. The hat on his head was stained with the tears of eons. Or possibly cheap bourbon. Sometimes, Malone reflected, the two were hard to tell apart.
Dismounting, he left Worthless standing by himself and approached the spring source. The old man looked up at his approach. And up, and up, until one withered hand finally had to push back the age-worn hat to allow its owner a proper and complete viewing.
“Well now, if you ain’t the biggest pile I ever done seen—and I done seen some fairly big ones in my time.”
“I reckon you’re a bit o’ a pile yourself, denyin’ these good folks water.”
The old man chuckled. Half his teeth were gold, too. They alternated precisely with the remaining natural enameclass="underline" one gold, one white, one gold, one white.
“Business, my enormous friend, jest business.”
“I find extortion the business equivalent o’ what eventually results from a feller eatin’ a whole sack o’ unsalted beans.”
“Hmph! These drylanders send you up here to try and get my goat?” He grinned. “Or to move me, or try to reach under my chair? You kin try if you want, ox-brother, but won’t do you no good. You’ll only strain your back, and mebbe your brain.” One hand slapped down hard on a wooden arm of the chair. “When Versus Wrathwell decides to set a spell, ain’t nothin’ on Heaven or Earth moves him!”
Malone was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. “Reckon you must be right, though I expect Worthless there might shift you an inch or three. Once had him drag off a lightning-downed sequoia that were blockin’ our way. He don’t much care for pullin’, though. Says he ain’t no mule, to be hooked up to a load. So guess ain’t nobody gonna pull you off that spot, or that chair.”
“Damned right!” Wrathwell huffed. “Guess you got more sense hidin’ behind that face wire o’ yours than I first thought.” He pointed down toward the town. The boy who had witnessed the ill-fated attempt to steal the mountain man’s horse was standing in the street, looking up toward the site of the spring. Several townsfolk had joined him in staring. One well-dressed man had bent over and was talking softly to the lad.
When Malone continued to stare, the oldster made a face at him. “Well, you gonna stand there till the stink gits tired and rolls off you, or you gonna do somethin’ useful and tell them sorry-ass no-hopers to pay me what I asked?”
“Neither one, grandpa.” As Malone started toward him, the old man’s expression tensed and he gripped the arms of his chair with long, bony fingers. But Malone didn’t touch him, did not try to move him. Instead, he sat down as close as he could get to the paint-peeling piece of furniture, crossed legs the size of tree trunks, and rested his enormous, gnarled hands on his leather-clad knees.
Wrathwell’s gaze narrowed. “Jest whut d’you think you’re doin’?”
Malone shrugged. “It’s a free country. Thought I might just set a spell.”
The oldster’s eyes widened. Then he began to laugh; a raucous, otherworldly cackle that boded no good. “Right then, I gits it! You think you kin outset me! Is thet it?” When the mountain man didn’t reply, Wrathwell’s crowing subsided to mere amusement. “So be it. Set till you get tired, old sod. Set still till the sun starts to burn your brow, till the Colorado night ices your liver. Set till hunger claws at your insides like you’ve swallowed a pepper-haired cat and thirst grates your throat like a carrot peeler. Ain’t nobody ever outset Versus Wrathwell, and I kin assure you thet no iggorant bucket o’ beef escaped from a Chicago slaughterhouse will be the first!”
And so saying, he sat back in his birch chair, turned his gaze toward the distant clouds, and began to rock.
Malone sat still as the stone beneath his backside, and stared. Slightly downslope, a singular amalgamation of equine complexity observed this tableau for about five minutes before snorting loudly, turning, and trotting back into town, there to regard an empty trough before nuzzling up against the tired, thirsty mare tied beside it. In less than a minute she was rolling her eyes and looking decidedly stinkweed.
The mountain man was still there the next day, seated cross-legged beside the adamant intruder, staring fixedly at him and not moving a muscle. Occasionally Wrathwell would glance in his direction and snicker. Gathering their courage, more and more citizens emerged from their waterless abodes to ascend the slight hill from which in normal times the town spring sprang. Much conversation ensued. Unencumbered by the cares and concerns of their worried elders, children began to run around both rocker and sitter, laughing and making jokes. One stick-wielding older boy of fifteen attempted to poke the poker-faced mountain man with a long stick, only to find himself knocked to the ground by a gob of spittle the size of a hen’s egg, which slammed into his left cheek with the force of a soggy, beslimed washrag. As Malone had not moved and the spit stank of horse, suspicion eventually fell on the mountain man’s mount. Except that Worthless was hundreds of yards away, in town, standing alongside a newly destabilized mare whose recently acquired expression both puzzled and alarmed its owner.
As the end of the week drew near, word of the confrontation had spread to nearby towns, bringing curious visitors (with their welcome jugs of water) to view the standoff—or rather, the sit-off. As near as anyone could tell, while Wrathwell continued to rock, his hirsute audience had not budged. Not to eat, drink, defecate, curse, cry, sniffle, cough, or otherwise suggest he was actually formulated of anything other than the solid rock on which he sat. It was as if he had been transformed into one of those local, mysterious, human-shaped granite formations sometimes worshipped or feared by the local Ute.