Alcatraz

FROM THE HIP

Shorty rode for the bunkhouse instead of the corrals and tumbling out of the saddle he staggered through the door.  Inside, the cowpunchers sat about enjoying a before-dinner smoke and the coolness which the evening wash had brought to their wind-parched skins.  Shorty reeled through the midst of them to his bunk and collapsed upon it.

Not a man stirred.  Not an eye followed him.  No matter what curiosity was burning in their vitals, etiquette demanded that they ask no questions.  If in no other wise, the Indian has left his stamp on the country in the manners of the Western riders.

In the meantime, Shorty lay on his back with his arms flung out crosswise, his eyes closed, his breath expelled with a moan and drawn in with a rattle.

“Slim!” he called at length.

Slim raised his little freckled face which was supported by a neck of uncanny length, and he blinked unconcernedly at his bunkie.  He and Shorty were inseparable companions.

“Take the saddle off my horse and put ’er up,” groaned Shorty.  “I’m dead beat!”

“Maybe you been chasing Perris on foot,” observed Lew Hervey.  Direct questions were still not in order, but often a man could be taunted into speech.

“Damn Perris and damn him black,” retorted Shorty, opening his eyes with a snap and letting a glance blaze into space.  “Of all the leather-skinned, mule-muscled, wrong-headed gents I ever seen he’s the outlastingest.”

“You sure got your vocabulary all warmed up,” observed Little Joe, so-called because of two hundred pounds of iron-hard sinew and muscle.  Slim was wandering towards the door to execute his mission, but he kept his head cocked towards his prostrated friend to learn as much as possible before he left.  “Which I disremember,” went on Little Joe thoughtfully, “of you ever putting so many words together without cussing.  Perris must of give you some Bible study down to Glosterville.”

It brought Shorty up on one bulging elbow and he glared at Little Joe.

“Bible?” snorted Shorty.  “His idea of a Bible is fifty-two cards and a joker.  He does his praying with one foot on a footrail.”

“He’ll sure fit in fine here,” drawled Little Joe.  “What with a girl for our boss and a hired hoss-catcher, none of us being good enough to take the job, we-all will get a mighty fine rep around these parts.  You done yourself proud bringing him up here, Shorty.”

“Laugh, damn you,” said Shorty, heated to such a point that he half-forgot his exhaustion.  “You ain’t been through what I been through.  You ain’t man enough to of lasted.”  The imputation sobered Little Joe and he shrugged his massive shoulders significantly.  Shorty’s laugh was shrill with contempt.  “Oh, you’re big enough,” he sneered.  “But what does beef count agin a lightning flash?” He grew reminiscent.  “I seen him bluff down the Wyoming Kid, yesterday.”

A religious silence spread in the bunkhouse.  The cowpunchers sat as stiff as though in Sunday store-clothes.  Shorty took advantage of this favoring hush.

“I find him sitting in at a game of poker and I give him the girl’s letter.  He shakes it open saying:  ‘See that ten and raise you ten more.’  I look over his shoulder as he flips up his cards.  He’s got a measly pair of deuces!  Then he reads the letter and hands it back to me.  ’Is it as bad as all that?’ he says.  ’See that other five and raise you twenty.’  ‘You’re too strong for me Red,’ says the gent that was bucking him—­and lays down to that pair of deuces!  I read the letter: 

“’Dear Mr. Perris,

“’I know you don’t like to hire out.  But this is a job where you won’t have a boss.  The chestnut horse that nearly killed Manuel Cordova—­ Alcatraz—­has come to my ranch and stolen half a dozen valuable mares.  Will you come up and try to get rid of him for me?  The job seems to be too big for my men.  Name your own terms.

“’Cordially yours,

“‘Marianne Jordan.’

“I hands him back the letter while he rakes in his winnings.  ’I wouldn’t go as far as she does about the men she’s got,’ I says, ’but the hoss is sure a fast thinking, fast moving devil.’

“‘Well,’ says he, ’it sort of sounds good to me.  Soon as this game busts up we’ll start.  They’s only four of us.  Won’t you take a hand?’

“Well, that game run on forty hours.  Every time I got busted he staked me agin like a millionaire.  But finally we was both flat.

“‘All right,’ says he, ’I got a purse light enough for travel now.  Let’s start.’

“‘Without no sleep?’ says I.

“‘Have it your own way,’ says he.  ‘We’ll have a snooze and then start.’

“We didn’t have the price of another room.  He took me up to his room and makes me take the bed while he curls up on the floor.  The next minute he’s snoring while I was still arguing about not wanting to take the bed.

“Minute later I was asleep, but didn’t seem my eyes were more’n close when he gives me a shake.

“‘Five o’clock,’ says he, ‘and time to start.’

“We’d gone to bed about twelve but I wasn’t going to let him put anything over on me.  He bums a breakfast off the hotel, stalls ’em on his bill, and then we hit the road, him singing every step of the way and me near dead for sleep.  I got so mad I couldn’t talk.  That damn singing sure was riding my nerves.  I tried to take it out on a squirrel that run across the road but I missed him.

“‘Tell you what, partner,’ says Perris, ’for a quick shot, shooting from the hip is the only stuff.’

“‘Shooting from the hip at squirrels?’ says I.  ’I’ve read about that sort of stuff in a book, but it never was done out of print.’

“‘Just a matter of practice,’ says he.

“‘Huh,’ says I, ‘I’m here to see and do my talking afterwards.’

“Just then another squirrel pops across the trail dodging like a yearling trying to get back to the herd.  Quick as a wink out comes Red’s gun.  It just does a flip out of the holster and bang!  The dust jumped right under the squirrel’s belly.  Bang! goes the gat again and Mister Squirrel’s tail is chopped plumb in two and then he ducks down his hole by the side of the trail and we hear him squealing and chattering cusswords at us.

“I never see such shooting in my life.  But Perris puts up his gun and gets red as a girl when two gents ask her for the same dance.

“‘I’m plumb out of practice,’ he says.  ’Anyways, I guess I been talking too much.  You’ll have to excuse me, Shorty!’

“And he meant it.  He wasn’t talking guff.  Didn’t seem possible anybody could shoot as fast and straight as that, but Perris was all cut up because he’d missed and he didn’t do no more singing for about half an hour.  And I needed that time for a lot of thinking.  Made up my mind that if anybody wanted to make trouble for Perris they could count me out of the party.

“And he kept on singing, when he started again, all the way to the ranch and me wondering when I was going to go to sleep and fall off.  I tried to make talk.  Seen a queer looking fob he wore for his watch pocket.  Asked him where he got it.

“‘Tell you about it,’ he says.  ‘Comes from me being plumb peaceable.’  I remembered some of the things I’d heard about Red Perris in Glosterville and didn’t say nothing.  I just swallowed hard and took a squint at a cloud.  ‘Four or five years back,’ he says, ’when they was more liquor and ambition floating around these parts, I was up in a little cross-roads saloon in Utah, near Gunterville.  Saloon was pretty jammed with folks, all strangers to me.  I wasn’t packing a gun.  Never do when I’m in a crowd, if I can help it.  Well, I got into a little game of stud, and things were running pretty easy for me when a big gent across the table that had been losing hard and drinking hard ups and says he allows I sure have the cards talking.  It sort of riled me.  I tell him pretty liberal what I think of him and all like him.  I go back into the past and give him a nice little description all about his ancestors.  I aim to wind up with an invite to step outside and have it out with fists, but he don’t wait.  Right in the middle of my sermon he outs with a gat and blazes away at me.  The slug drills me in the thigh and I go down.

“’Well, this is the slug.  And I been wearing it to remind me that I particular want to meet up with that same gent before he gets too old for a gunfight!’”

Here Shorty paused and sighed, shaking his bullet-head.  And a deep murmur of appreciation passed around the room.  Shorty sank back again on the bunk and turned his broad back on the crowd.

“Don’t nobody wake me for chuck,” he warned them.  “I’ve just finished cramming a month into four days and I got a night off coming.”

Instantly his snoring began but it was some moments before anyone spoke.  Then it was Little Joe in his solemn bass voice.

“Sounds man-sized,” he declared.  “Wears a bullet for a watch-fob, busts hosses for fun, sleeps one day a week, and don’t work under a boss.  Hervey, you’ll have to put on kid gloves when you talk to that Perris, eh?  Hey, where you going?”

“He’s going out to think it over!” chuckled another.  “He needs air, and I don’t blame him.  Just as soon be foreman over a wildcat as over a gent like Perris.  There goes the gong!”