The big range, p.8
The Big Range, page 8
Judge Cutler leaned forward. “Mr. Dutrow,” he said in his precise, careful manner, “there is not a one of us here today does not feel for you. But the law is the law. We cannot go into the intangibles of human responsibilities you mention. Hereabout we hold that when a man reaches his eighteenth birthday he is a capable person, responsible for his own actions. Legally your son is not a minor. He must stand up to his own judgment.”
The father towered in his dirty black coat. He raised an arm and swept it up full length. His voice fairly thundered.
“Beware, agent of man!” he said. “You would usurp the right of God Himself!”
Judge Cutler leaned forward a bit farther. His tone did not change. “Mr. Dutrow. You will watch quietly or I will have you removed from this room.”
The father stood in the silence and dwindled again within his dark clothes. He turned slowly and looked over the whole room and everyone in it. Someone in the front row moved and left a vacant seat and he went to it and sat down, and his head dropped forward until his beard was spread over his chest.
“Jess Dutrow,” Judge Cutler said, “stand up and take this straight. Have you anything to say for yourself?”
He stood up, shaky on his feet, then steadying. The whipped-colt look was a permanent part of him now. His voice cracked and climbed.
“Yes,” he said. “I did it and he can’t take that away from me! Everything’s true and I don’t give a damn! Why don’t you get this over with?”
“Very well,” Judge Cutler said. “There is no dispute as to the pertinent facts. Their logic is plain. You put yourself outside the law when you committed the thefts. While you were still outside the law you shot and killed a peace officer in the performance of his duty and wounded another. You did not do this by accident or in defense of your life. Insofar as the law can recognize, you did this by deliberate intent. By the authority vested in me as a legally sworn judge of the people of this State I sentence you to be hanged tomorrow morning at ten by this courthouse clock.”
Most of us were not looking at Jess Dutrow. We were looking at the father. He sat motionless for a few seconds after Judge Cutler finished speaking. Then he roused in the chair and rose to his feet and walked steadily to the doorway and out, his head still low with the beard fanwise on his chest and his eyes lost and unseeable in their deep shadow-holes. I passed near him on the way home about an hour later and he was the same, walking steadily along, not slow, not fast, just steady and stubborn in his face. I called to him and he did not answer, did not even raise or turn his head.
The next morning I woke early. I lay quiet a moment trying to focus on what had wakened me. Then I heard it plain, the creaking of wagon wheels. I went to the door and looked out. In the brightening, pinkish light of dawn, I saw him going by on the other side of the creek. He had yoked the oxen to the big wagon and was pushing steadily along, leading them with the leather thong. I watched him going into the distance until I shivered in the chill morning air and I went back into the house and closed the door.
It was the middle of the afternoon when he returned, leading the oxen, and behind them on the wagon was the long rectangular box. I did not watch him. I simply looked towards his place every now and then. I had things to do and I was glad I had things to do.
I saw him stop the oxen by the cabin and go inside. Later I saw him standing outside the door, both arms thrust upward. I could not be sure, but I thought his head was moving and he was shouting at the sky. And later I saw him back in the shadow of the rock ledge digging the grave. And still later I saw him there digging the second grave.
That brought me up short. I stared across the distance and there was no mistaking what he was doing. I set the pitchfork against the barn and went down to the creek and across on the stones and straight to him. I had to shout twice, close beside him, before he heard me.
He turned his head towards me and at last he saw me. His face above and beneath the beard was drawn, the flesh collapsed on the bones. He looked like a man riven by some terrible torment. But his voice was low. There was no roll in it. It was low and mild.
“Yes, neighbor?” he said.
“Damn it, man,” I said, “what are you doing?”
“This is my wife,” he said. His voice did not change, mild and matter-of-fact. “She killed herself.” He drew a long breath and added gently, very gently: “With my butchering knife.”
I stared at him and there was nothing I could say. At last: “I’ll do what I can. I’ll go into town and report it. You won’t have to bother with that.”
“If you wish,” he said. “But that is all a foolishness. Man’s justice is a mockery. But God’s will prevail. He will give me time to finish this work. Then He will deal with me in His might.”
He withdrew within himself and turned back to his digging. I tried to speak to him again and he did not hear me. I went to the cabin and looked through the doorway and went away quickly and to my place and saddled the gray and rode towards town. When I returned, the last shadows were merging into the dusk and the two graves were filled with two small wooden crosses by them and I saw him there on the ledge.
Three days he was there. And late in the night of the third day the rain began and the lightning streaked and the thunder rolled through the valley, and in the last hour before dawn I heard the deeper rolling rumble I had heard once before on a hunting trip when the whole face of a mountain moved and crashed irresistibly into a canyon below.
Standing on the porch in the first light of dawn, I saw the new broken outline of the cliff up and across the valley and the great slant jagged pile of stone and rubble below where the rock ledge had been.
We found him under the stones, lying crumpled and twisted near the big squarish rock with the wooden cross cracked and smashed beside him. What I remember is his face. The deep-sunk, sightless eyes were open and they and the whole face were peaceful. His God had not failed him. Out of the high heaven arching above had come the blast that gave him his judgment and his release.
General Pingley
The Pingleys came into our section of Wyoming to take over the claim of a cousin who made the mistake of trying to drive a buckboard over a mountain trail while tipping a bottle of whisky. This cousin had proved up on the claim and the title was clear, and the Pingleys were the closest of kin. They were ready to leave their place in Nebraska for a middling good reason. From what I heard they had left other times from other places for the same reason, one that walked on two legs, an old man, Bert Pingley’s father, old J. Clayburn Pingley.
They were a mixed lot, these Pingleys. Bert was a big mild middle-aged man, about the hardest-working and easiest-natured I’ve ever known. His wife was some years younger, a pretty woman, fluttery in her actions, and so shy that sometimes you might think she was silly in the head. There were two children, a little girl just beginning to walk and trying to hide in her mother’s skirts when strangers were near, and a boy, coming seven or eight, I’d say, fair-sized for his age and easy-natured like his father. And, of course, there was the old man, stiff-backed as a ramrod, still fighting the Civil War thirty years after the last shot had been fired.
The first time I saw him he was wearing his old gray uniform coat and campaign hat. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was in town to pick up any mail and rub elbows with other folks a bit. I saw him in Eiler’s general store. He was ordering some tobacco and complaining about the price. He had a fringe of white chin whiskers that stood out straight when he talked.
“Double damn Yankees,” he said. “Robbers. Every last one of you.”
Eiler was surprised. He leaned forward on his counter. “Easy now, pop,” he said. “I was born back in Georgia myself.”
“A renegade, eh? Lived so long among these thieving Yankees you’re the same.”
I saw this big man, Bert, hurrying over, a smile busting his face wide open.
“Don’t mind my father,” he said. “It’s one of his bad days. Can’t seem to learn the war’s over and forgotten.” He smiled at Eiler and shrugged his shoulders a little. “You see, Father hasn’t surrendered yet.”
“You’re double damned right I haven’t. I’ll keep right on telling every yellow-bellied bluecoat I find just what—”
Bert’s smile stayed the same, but his hand on the old man’s arm stopped the words. “Father, wait for me at the wagon. I’ll bring your tobacco.”
I saw him later the same afternoon in front of the old stage post where folks liked to meet and swap neighborhood news and wait for the mail coach. The three or four other men there with him must have been working on him because he was hopping mad when I came along. The chin whiskers were sticking out stiff as hog bristles.
“—never was a time,” he was saying, “any Federal troops could stand to one of our charges. I mind me once when General Pickett—”
“Choke it, whiskers,” said one of the men. “You rebs were licked before you started, only you didn’t know it. Too many crazy old goats like you.”
The old man pulled himself up even straighter. “Bert,” he shouted, looking around. Right enough, Bert was hurrying over again, smiling again at the whole world. “Bert, you heard it. You’re going to—”
“Shucks,” said Bert. “You’d want I should smack him just because you riled him into calling names?”
“My own son! A coward in my own family!”
Bert’s smile didn’t change. That was when I began to like him. As I say, he was a big man. He could have taken any two of us there and my money would have been on him.
“Shucks, Father,” he said. “You forget when we’re needing supplies we come in under a truce flag.”
The old man subsided like a sudden thunderstorm ending. “You’re right, son. So we do.” He took off his ancient campaign hat and bowed to the rest of us. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. I forgot myself. But perhaps some other time—” He marched off erect towards their wagon, and I saw it there, a white cotton handkerchief tied to a buggy whip whose butt was stuck between the sideboards.
Someone was standing close beside me. That was our marshal, Clyde Eakins. He was watching the old man.
“Stubborn old coot,” I said.
“Yes,” Eakins said. “But his kind of fun ain’t exactly enjoyable after a while. Beginning already to get some folks’ nerves ruffled.”
He was not really so bad, not at first, anyway. You find some touchy ones anywhere you go. We had our share. But most of us were willing to let him talk his war. We couldn’t be peeved at anyone who belonged to a man like Bert. I guess the old man had a right to a grudge at that. His other son, Bert’s brother, had died at Shiloh, and the shock of that, together with Federal troop occupation of the family place in Virginia, had killed his wife, Bert’s mother. Then he lost everything he owned in the early carpetbag days. There was not much left for him except to tag along when Bert struck out into the new Territories.
For quite a while people in town tolerated his talk. They liked to stir him a little and watch the chin whiskers wag. They could count on Bert to step in smiling before real sparks flew. And they had a kind of admiration for the old man’s unwavering belligerence. They began calling him the General, and he liked that. Bert didn’t. “Shucks,” Bert would say, “he wasn’t a general. He was only a sort of reserve captain. Managed a supply depot down in North Carolina and didn’t even hear a gun go off.” Bert himself had. Plenty. He had fought through the four years, starting as a green kid of seventeen and coming out a man. But he never talked about that. It was a job he had to do, and when it was done it was finished. Maybe he felt that the old man did enough talking for the whole Pingley tribe.
It was in July that the town’s temper turned. July Fourth. We always celebrated the day. A town committee would make the arrangements, and those like me who lived out a ways would be on hand to make a respectable crowd for the doings. There would be shooting matches, rifle and revolver, and things like that, and about mid-morning we would raise the flag on the town flagpole in the park space opposite the hotel and salute it with a lot of cheers and gunpowder. Then we would jam into the former storeroom we used for a courthouse and listen to the speechmaking and work up an appetite for the hot lunch some of the ladies always sold for the benefit of the volunteer fire department.
Judge Cutler usually made the main speech. He was dry and short with words on the bench, but his special orations were something to hear. This time he never got to finish. He was not much more than well unlimbered in the throat when someone standing by the door gave a shout and people turned to look where he was pointing, and there was a stampede through the doorway and across to the park space. Old J. Clayburn Pingley was standing stiff-backed by the pole. He had pulled down the flag and tossed it aside and run up an old Confederate flag instead.
People stopped in a half-circle around him and the pole gawking up at his faded old flag. And then things happened fast. Young Pard Wheeler, who had considerable celebrating under his belt, pulled his gun and aimed upwards and started shooting. I think he was only trying to cut the rope, but the bullets ripped through the flag and the rents showed plain. The old man screamed and started towards Wheeler, reaching in his side pocket and his hand came out with an old fashioned little derringer. Marshal Eakins scrambled quick and caught him and wrenched the arm, and the little weapon fell to the ground, and he broke loose from Eakins and went at Wheeler beating with his hands. Wheeler backed away trying to fend off the blows and stopped and gave the old man a push that sent him sprawling. And Bert Pingley burst out of the crowd and crashed a big fist to the side of Wheeler’s head and Wheeler went down like a steer when you poleaxe it
Two things stick in my mind when I remember that. One is the look of the old man lying on the ground. He wasn’t making any effort to get up. He was lying there, quiet now, leaning on one elbow and watching Bert, and mighty pleased about something. The other is the look of Bert Pingley standing there, big as the side of a mountain, not smiling, and disgusted with himself and ashamed.
Maybe I ought to add a third thing. Young Pard Wheeler, somehow acting for all of us, staggering a little when he got to his feet and trying to make Bert see that he understood what had happened.
The General wasn’t amusing after that, not to most of the people around. I guess they remembered his scream and the little derringer coming out of his pocket. And there were some who were shocked at his hauling down the American flag. He wasn’t a joke, a neighborhood character anymore. He was a nuisance that might cause trouble. But there wasn’t any trouble because he was hardly ever in town again. That must have been Bert’s doing. Bert was easy-natured. But he probably could be firm when he felt that he had to be.
The next I heard the old man was being sighted around the country, keeping out of people’s way and getting about in a little buggy pulled by an old horse Bert let him use. Sometimes the boy would be with him and might wave a friendly arm, but the old man would drive right along, straight on the seat, not turning his head. He drove that buggy in the damndest places, where there were no roads and not even trails, smack across open range land and up into the mountains where you wouldn’t think anything on wheels could go. When people spoke to Bert about it, Bert would just smile and shrug his shoulders. “Shucks,” Bert would say, “he ain’t worrying anybody, is he? Likes to camp out a few days at a time. Takes good care of the boy too.” Then nobody was seeing much of him at all, and nobody seemed to know what he was doing, and Bert wasn’t saying, even if he knew, and I was the first to find out what it was.
When the weather was right and no work pressing, I liked to saddle the gray and ride on up my valley and into the hills. After a few miles I’d be in the high country where the rock formations climbed and the bigness took you into itself in a comfortable quiet. Riding up there kept the horse in condition and my own mind too.
Sometime in late summer I was drifting along and came out on the wide chunk of tableland that was the far edge part of Sam Piegan’s range. During dry periods when grass was sparse near his home spread, Piegan ran some of his cattle on those high plateaux. One year he had tried wintering some there and had built a line camp on this stretch of tableland. By spring he knew better, and was lucky to have enough of the cattle still alive to pay his man’s wages. The only mark left was the abandoned log cabin. I had passed it a few times and noticed that the door was gone and the walls sagging and holes beginning to show in the roof.
When I saw it in the distance this time, it had a different look. Smoke was rising out of the stone chimney. I rode closer, and saw it had a makeshift door with pieces of old harness nailed for hinges and the walls were being chinked and new slabs of bark were on the roof. There was a pole sticking up from one corner, and flapping out from this was an old Confederate flag.
The door opened and the old man stood in the doorway. He had a battered Sharps carbine in his hands. “Ought to blast you out of that saddle,” he said. “Yankee spy. Nosing around my fort.”
“Easy, General,” I said, “you’re no bushwhacker. I didn’t know you were here.”
“You know it now. So, keep moving and don’t come back.” The chin whiskers stood out straight at me. “This is Confederate territory. By right of conquest.” He waved the gun barrel to point at the cabin wall beside the door and I saw stretched there by its paws the skin of a good-sized black bear.
I sat on the gray chuckling. I couldn’t help it. But I wasn’t chuckling after a warning bullet from his carbine sang uncomfortably close by my right ear. I swung the gray and went into retreat, about as scared as mad. I never had any fondness for bullets moving in my direction. But half-way home, I was chuckling again. When I told Sam Piegan about it, he chuckled too. “The old boy can use the place all he wants. Maybe it’ll keep him out of trouble. We’ll pass the word around so nobody’ll bother him.”
