The Winged Horse Page 3

  He stated his conviction with perfect gravity and recited his piece in the singsong of a schoolboy.

  The cowboys were delighted. Their very hearts were warmed by this exhibition of impromptu brilliance, and they waited breathlessly. Destruction lay before the stranger, but certainly he was winning the battle of words, the cannonade before the shock of the countering charges.

  The stranger had gone to the ovens again, and all men stared in wonder when they saw him heap up his plate more generously than before. It was an extra-large plate, and, even so, it was not nearly big enough to accommodate the vast appetite of this youth. Even Muldoon, famous as a trencherman, was outclassed utterly.

  This gormandizing actually made the wagon boss stare until he was agape, and he could not help saying, “Where d’you put all that stuff, kid?”

  “In cold storage,” said the boy.

  “Damn,” said Muldoon as though he had stubbed his toe. “What’s your name?”

  “I got several,” said the other. “The last one was the Medium Kid, or Kid Medium, anyway you want to put it.”

  “A great name,” Muldoon said, throwing away all attempts at clever finesse. “Ain’t you got another name?”

  “They used to call me Lonesome … the Lonesome Kid.”

  “That’s a fool name,” said Muldoon. “Got no meaning to it, either.”

  “Hasn’t it? I’ll tell you what it means. It means that I was so far off in front that I was all by myself.”

  Muldoon tried to answer, failed of words, and merely gasped like a fish. Then he shouted, “Hold on! There was a Lonesome Kid over yonder in Nevada. I used to know a Lonesome Kid, over there.”

  “Did you?” answered the other. “Oh, I dunno. I got a way of forgetting faces, and I sure don’t place you.”

  Muldoon exclaimed, “The Lonesome Kid! Why, you ain’t any more like the Lonesome Kid than you are like … How d’you get that way?” He stood up, huge, irate, and took a step forward.

  Said the Kid, “What do you want, Muldoon?”

  “I’m gonna skin you,” Muldoon said, “and see if the insides of you are more like the real Lonesome Kid than the outsides of you.”

  “Are you gonna use guns or fists?”

  “I wouldn’t waste bullets on calves.”

  “If you want a gun play,” the Kid said, as imperturbably as ever, “get out your Colt and let it talk for you. If you want fists, or rough-and-tumble, or any game there is, I’ll take you on in the morning, Muldoon, and I’ll make you look like the county of Muldoon, and the town of Muldoon, and a backyard filled with tin cans in the street of the same. But just now I’m too full of steak and comfort to stand up.”

  The people of the West are poker players par excellence, and all the wiles and the ways of the bluffer are understood. Now, these students of cards, and cows, and humans, looked earnestly upon the Kid and saw him with new eyes and read, as it were, the list of unseen notches upon the handles of his guns. They saw in that flash, that the Kid was bad, and that he was very bad, and that he was worse than poison, to put it shortly.

  Big Muldoon saw, also. He jerked his hand halfway to his holster, and there his hand paused. The Kid did not seem to look at him. Actually he was rolling a cigarette, and yet a moving point of ice wriggled down the spine of the wagon boss.

  “You and me’ll meet in the morning,” he agreed.

  And all the men of the camp looked down to the ground, flushing a little. Brave and great-hearted as their chief was, they saw that he wanted none of the gun game of this stranger. He had to fall back upon his superior weight of shoulder and hand. However, the morning was something worth waiting for.

  Chapter Five

  That autumn night was both wet and cold; the wind blew hard, with frost in its breath and anger in its roar; it was trying to bring on a sweeping victory of winter all at one blow; it wanted to paint every mountain and every valley white, but it was too forehanded, and when the voice of the cook bellowed hoarse and distant as a fog horn through the darkness, “Come and get it, or I’ll throw it out!” the men wakened to find that the snow had not yet come. There were only flying edges of sleet, streaks and incrustations of ice, here and there. The tarpaulins were hardened to boards by this process and the hair of the sleepers had alternately been drenched and frozen into tangles.

  They sat up from their damp blankets, shuddering, and clasped their sleepy bodies in their arms, wondering if they had the strength to rise, and wondering if rising were worthwhile. The next instant the wind had passed its fine sword blade through and through them and they abandoned all doubt. They began to drag on socks stiff with frost, and then the bitter pain of boots. They huddled into coats and hats, and only when both ends were clad did they rise from the huddling blankets, cinch up belts, clamber into clammy chaps. And then they galloped, like horses, toward the glare of the fire. It was as bright now as it had been the evening before. Morning appeared only on the clock, for it was dark as pitch.

  They lived like sailors rounding Cape Stiff. Under such hardships, riding twelve to twenty hours a day, stiffened with cold and beaten with wind, men marching in an army for the salvation of their country would have collapsed and died like flies. But these cowpunchers were working for pay and foolishness, and, therefore, like the sailors of the clipper days, they survived miraculously. The exceeding bitterness of their lives made the mere absence of pain a cause for happiness. And this morning the rare aroma of the coffee that steamed from the nostrils of an enormous, fire-blackened pot gave them sudden hope, more than the rising of the sun. They were wedged into a ragged circle around the fire, looking ten years older than the night before, their shoulders humped, great tin cups of coffee clasped in their hands, sipping it while it was still as hot as fire, waiting for the warmth to come to their shaking knees, and waiting in vain. Sometimes the whole circle swayed under a fiercer blast of the wind, and at the same time the light of the fire cowered and seemed about to go out entirely.

  Then they began to eat, staggering from one Dutch oven to another, groaning as they lifted the lids and stared at the familiar contents, for they ate three meals alike and every meal was as the other. Only at the first taste of the food they changed, as wolves change at the taste of flesh. Their shoulders began to straighten; they scowled into the eye of the wind; blood was beginning to run in their bodies.

  It was at about this time that the last man from his blankets approached the fire, his slicker flashing and crackling about him in the wind and in the broken firelight. He did not come staggering in sleep and agony. He walked with an alert, light step, and, instead of crowding toward the core of the fire, he went straight to the ovens and began to pick out his breakfast.

  “It’s the Lonesome Kid,” one man said. “He don’t feel nothing of all this.”

  “It’s Kid Medium,” said another. “Say, Kid, do you carry your own wool?”

  “He don’t feel no cold. He’s leather-lined … that’s why!”

  They laughed a little, and the laughter sounded like the snarling of dogs. Even if the Kid was immune to cold, something was going to happen to him this morning.

  But he felt the cold, to be sure, though no one could guess it except those who looked closely enough to see the purple shadow in his cheek. He finished his breakfast in leisurely fashion, while the other cowpunchers were resignedly leaving the fire and making for the rope corral, struggling to fashion their Bull Durham cigarettes, while the wind snatched eagerly at the dry tobacco. They lit their smokes and began to unlimber their ropes.

  Suddenly there were only three men at the fire—the cook, the wagon boss, and the Kid. The fire began to look less bright, and the mountains were rising in the horizon, and the valleys were opening to the bowels of the earth, as it seemed, all dim and dark. The wind howled still. Life seemed a pointless thing.

  Said the boss, “They’ll all be saddled before you, Kid.”


  “No, they won’t,” said the Kid.

  “You better vamoose right along after the rest,” said Muldoon. “Afterward, when we got light, you and me’ll have a little talk. Now, go git on your horse, because maybe I’ll leave you fit to ride, and ride you will, by gravy, if you have strength to sit in the saddle!”

  The Kid hesitated. Then he nodded and said with wonderful calmness, “All right.” And he left them.

  “Look at that,” Muldoon said loudly. “He don’t feel so brisk in the morning. He ain’t half so spooky as he was the night before. He’s got half of the kinks ironed out of him already, but he’s gonna be made as smooth as a starched shirt, before I get through with him!”

  The cook was a man of many talents. He had been a sailor; the tattooing on his mighty arms was proof of it. He was minus one leg below the knee, though he was wonderfully agile on the wooden peg that he used as a substitute. Since he was past fifty and had only one leg, the cook dared to speak his mind to any man. Besides, the very fact that he was cook gave him a great importance in the cow camps. Therefore, he now said to Muldoon, “Muldoon, you gotta good full arm swing and you gotta good right smash for the body. I seen it break the heart of many a man, in my time, and of course you can down pretty near anybody when you get in at him and bring your weight to bear, but now I was thinking, suppose a gent had the footwork to keep away, he’d spear you with a straight left like I’ve speared salmon. He’d leave you all adrift, Muldoon.”

  “You talk like a fool,” said Muldoon.

  “I ain’t a fool, and you know it,” the cook said. “If you want to go ahead and get your face spoiled, go and do it. I’m just talkin’ …supposin’ that you might have sense enough to understand what I mean.”

  Muldoon did not answer. He went in his turn to get his horse from the corral.

  It was a gloomy business, that roping. There was just enough light to deceive the eyes; one horse looked as much like another as twin brothers. The cowpunchers were here and there, bent over studying the silhouettes of heads and rumps and ragged tails against the gray dawn light in the east. Then a rope would be flung, lost to the eye of the dauber while still in midair, and the result of the cast hardly guessed at until the rope jerked taut in the hand. It was like casting nets for fish in the dark, except that here it would not do to catch another man’s property. Many a man dragged his capture to the gate, only to turn it loose again with bitter curses, and again advance upon that milling, snorting, biting, fighting mass of horses, for they were frenzied with the cold.

  Muldoon, shaking out his noose, observed these failures with contempt, for he was not the man to make mistakes, even in the false light of the dawn. And then he saw a tall man on his right, sauntering toward the mass of horses—and without a rope! It was the Kid. He paused, curious, to see what the next maneuver would be. He was not the only curious watcher, for yonder the men were frozen in their tracks with wonder.

  They heard a thin, piercing whistle that came from the lips of the new man. It was not repeated. Then, out of the tangle of horseflesh a slender and proud form appeared. Even in that dusk, streaked across with flying snow and daubs of rain, the beauty of the mare was apparent, as though revealed by her own light. And she came straight up to her master. He turned, and she followed him, as a dog follows at the heel.

  Muldoon, having watched, cursed with a soft violence, and his was not the only voice that was eloquent with wrath at that moment. Then they saw the mare stand like a statue, while saddle and bridle were slipped upon her. All around her, cowboys were working out their ponies, and every mustang of the lot was pitching with a savage vigor, getting the arch out of its back and supplying its frozen knees with educated bucking.

  “What you got, cowboy?” asked one, in a pause of his torment, finding himself near the stranger. “Is that a picture or a real horse?”

  “It’s a picture,” said the Kid. “They give away horses like these with every cut of chewing tobacco that you buy down yonder.”

  “Where’s yonder?” the cowboy asked, but did not stay for the answer, his pony willing otherwise.

  Then, suddenly, the sky was gray, pink-rimmed, and the whole scene rose up to meet the day.

  “There’s about light enough now,” said Muldoon, “for you to make yourself useful. If you know anything about riding and working beef, you get down there with the boys. They’ll show you which way we’re drifting the weaners.” He said this to the Kid, coming up behind him.

  The Kid turned to him, carefully shielding the burning end of his cigarette, so that the wind might not blow the fire into his face in a shower of sparks. “I don’t ride herd,” he said. “You might notice that I don’t carry any rope?”

  “Hey!” Muldoon yelled, honestly amazed. And then, oddly enough he used the same expression that had recently been tossed toward the Kid. “Are you a cowboy, or just a picture of one?”

  “I’m a model cowboy,” said the Kid, “and models … they don’t work. They just model.”

  Muldoon was silenced. He dismounted from his pony without a word. The wicked mustang jerked free and bolted. Muldoon let it go, unconcerned. “Boy,” he said, “you’ve asked for what’s a-coming to you, and you ain’t asked only once. Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “By gravy,” Muldoon said in a new note, “that’s the Lonesome Kid’s horse!” He pointed toward the mare.

  “And I’m the Kid,” said the other, unperturbed.

  “You? Now, I’ll tell you something. Unless you tell me how you got that horse from Lonesome, I’m gonna open you like an oyster.”

  The Kid was stripping off his coat, and at this tactically advantageous moment, Muldoon rushed.

  Chapter Six

  Every cowpuncher of the lot had been entirely occupied with his business. They had been drifting here and there, securing their horses, riding out the morning kinks, but when Muldoon rushed, even the cook was on hand. The farthest man was not twenty steps from the heart of the encounter.

  It looked as though the fight would end before it began, since a man is fairly helpless when his coat is slipping down over both elbows, but the Kid stepped to one side, and carefully moved his head aside as Muldoon and his smashing fist hurtled past. He shook his coat, folded it, and laid it aside, then he sidestepped Muldoon’s second plunge. The wagon boss was beginning to bellow like a bull.

  “Why don’t you stand still and fight, you yaller dog?” he asked.

  “Yellow dogs don’t stand,” said the Kid, “but they fight.”

  Suddenly he leaped in and out. A streak of crimson appeared beneath the right eye of Muldoon.

  “You …” began Muldoon.

  But the rest of his sentence was clipped short. The Kid had flashed in again, and again was out. He had stepped just inside a ponderous, reaching right, and he hammered both fists into the body of the wagon boss. Those blows sounded like hollow thumps, as though they brought out an echo from the body of the big man. Then Muldoon, charging in, stifled with his fury, slipped in the mud and came to his knees.

  “Have you got a left?” asked the cook in savage criticism and concern. “Have you got a left, or is your arm made of dough?”

  In that pause Muldoon heard the good advice and recognized its worth. He knew much about the art of fisticuffs, and the time had been when he had known much more, but of late years art had not been necessary. Men were frozen to brittle statues by the terror of his name, and with one blow he struck them to the earth. Now he looked up at the alert, calm form of his opponent, whose hands were hanging at his sides. He knew that the man was a boxer and a good one, but he told himself that there never could be enough weight in that slender, sinewy arm to hurt him seriously. Yet the cook was right. He was being speared as men spear salmon. He was adrift and befogged by the attack of this youth.

  He leaped up, driving a long left at the Kid. It was v
ery low, but Muldoon never was worried about little technicalities. In a fight he struck where he could and let the chips fall where they would.

  His long left failed. The Kid thrice bobbed the head of the wagon boss at the end of a long, straight arm. It seemed as though that head were attached to the fist by a rubber string, so that the blows could not be escaped.

  Muldoon licked his torn lips. “I’m gonna kill you!” he promised, and worked in, for the first time businesslike, his left foot preparing the way, his right foot jerking behind him, carrying his weight, leaving him poised with either fist, but chiefly prepared to hammer across his famous right hand. He felt himself now armored in his craft. He was tenfold confident, and he tasted the sweetest joy when he saw the Kid backing away, rubbing his knuckles on his hips, with a thoughtful face. Around him, he saw the faces of his men, baffled but not sorrowing, and his heart leaped with rage when he thought how they would rejoice to see him fall.

  But he would not fall. At the worst, of course, there remained his invincible might at close quarters, but still all was not lost in honest fist fighting. Lodged in the back of his brain there was a master secret. His back and arms and knuckles tingled with the knowledge of it. It was his right that men began to notice after a fight started, and it had gone hurtling a few times like an iron bolt. But his left was as strong, though less favored. And he had practiced—for how many hours—a feint at the head with the left, and as the light-footed enemy retreated, a forward gliding of the right foot, and a lightning shift that carried his whole weight with it, a dreadful and murderous blow. He had felt ribs crackle like dead wood under the weight of that shock. He told himself now that he would drive his fist clear through the lean flanks of this boy.

  The wolf leaped at him again, slashed, and was out. Well, that would only serve as the touch of a spur to a willing horse. Never had he executed that well-memorized maneuver so neatly, with such crushing dispatch. The double kick of a mule was hardly faster than the double play of his left fist, while his right foot slipped forward, and all the weight, and all the might, and all the spite in his great iron frame pitched suddenly forward with that stroke. He saw the body of the Kid before him, saw the wind flutter the new silk of his shirt, and picked out the very cheek where his knuckles would bite home.