Mavericks

  Mavericks

  Jack Schaefer

  Illustrated by Lorence Bjorklund

  1

  OLD JAKE HANLON sits on the edge of the mesa and looks out over miles of southwestern plain. Mile upon mile it runs to hazy horizon, broken only by the sharp upthrusts of the few tall rocky buttes that still resist the long slow erosion of time. These rise like islands in the immensity of open space. The plain laps around their bases like an ocean of sand and adobe dust dotted with sparse scattered bunchgrass and low dagger-leaved yucca plants and wicked ground-hugging cactus.

  Old Jake Hanlon sits as still and quiet as a wrinkled lizard on a sun-warmed stone. He is ancient and craglike, weathered and withered to a thin angular shape of brittle bones and remnants of stringy muscle. His hatchet face under his wide floppy hat brim has been whittled by age to dry leathery skin stretched taut over the bone structure beneath.

  He is something like a worn rocky butte himself. He is old, so old that he has forgotten the exact total, is simply aware it is somewhere in the late nineties - though for the gawking kids of tourists in town he has been known to push it well past the century mark.

  Nowadays the town knows him no more. He has not been there for several months and he will never be there again. Many people in the town are glad that he is gone. They think of him, whenever they still think of him, as a decrepit old nuisance, a shiftless relic out of the past, a lawbreaker, a jailbird, a disgrace to a modern progressive community.

  Old Jake has left the town for good and has come out here to the abandoned headquarters of the Triple X, to the tumbledown adobe house and the almost roofless barn and the empty broken-rail corral that dwindle towards erasure into the land a quarter mile behind him from the edge of the mesa. He has come out here along the washed-out road no longer ever scraped by the county, bouncing on thee front seat of a fine big powerful car beside Henry W. Harper, grandson of the Hardrock Harper who founded the Triple X a long lifetime ago.

  There is water still from the spring back of the rambling house, not much more than a trickle now, but enough. There is food in cans on shelves in the one room whose ceiling still shuts out the sky. Once every two weeks Henry W. Harper drives his car along that parody of a road, bringing more food in cans. He is a plumpish middle-aged lowshod man, this Henry W. Harper, with soft hands and manicured nails and a fine big house in town. But he can remember when he was young Hank and wore boots during his summer vacations and Jake Hanlon taught him to sit a saddle as a man should and took him on camping trips into the mountains where the elk hid and always brought him out safe again. He will be bouncing over that forgotten road bringing food in cans and tobacco in tins as long as there is need for these.

  That will not be long now. Old Jake has come out here where some of his best years were spent in the satisfaction of sweat and dust and hard work. He has come out here to die. He is an old grizzly that knows its time has come and has retreated deep into its range to meet death in dignity alone. He is an old lobo wolf that has lived out its years and has crawled back to its den to wait for the final dissolution. He is an old pine long past growth and the renewing sap of recurrent spring, waiting now for the winds to topple it to the last merging with the land from which it came.

  Old Jake Hanlon sits on the mesa edge and puffs slowly on a crusted bowl pipe that fouls the air above it as the smoke drifts upward. Jutting from a pocket of his ragged leather vest is a new pipe, curve-stemmed, silver-banded, that came bouncing over the old road to him with the last batch of tobacco. Perhaps he will try it later today. Perhaps not. A new pipe takes time to be broken in properly. His time is running out. And his old pipe is an old friend. The bowl of it fits his stiffening right hand. The stem of it nestles snug into the niche made by a broken tooth in his left lower jaw.

  Below him on the great expanse of plain, out of distance to the east, into distance to the west, snaking between the tall buttes, runs the new highway. It is a dual highway with wide median strip, modern as the day after tomorrow. Small it seems in the vastness of plain and from his height on the mesa edge. But it is big in meaning, in the conquering of the distances, in the linking of far busy cities. Along it, both ways, in unending fluctuating progression, flows the traffic that is its reason for being. Cars and cars and more cars. Long sleek powerful cars and smaller compacts and still smaller foreign models. Cars with gas pedals to the floor, racing hot engines past the speed limit, taking businessmen to appointments that mean dollars, taking tourists to the next comfortable air-conditioned motels marked for them on their maps. Buses, big and ungainly, ripping away rubber trying to keep to impossible schedules. Huge tractor-trailer trucks with diesel exhausts snorting fumes hammering the pavement in their rush to reach the haven of distant warehouses.

  "All of 'em sure in a hell of a hurry," says Old Jake. "Tryin' to get somewhere. Ain't they ever figgered they was somewheres afore they started?"

  There below, across the seeming limitless expanse of plain, the traffic flows. Out of somewhere, into somewhere, restless, rushing, unending. A battered pick-up with two steers in the back slows on a slight rise, worn motor laboring, struggling towards the down-slope beyond. A big sealed tractor-trailer sweeps up behind and swings out to pass and it too slows on the up-slope. Cars begin to clog up behind and horns honk in impatient irritation. The sounds snap through the dry air and drift away to be lost in the spaces. The big tractor-trailer hits the down-slope and roars ahead swinging into the right lane again, and the cars stream past.

  There is a brief break in the flow, a pause in the clots of cars rushing by, and a jackrabbit starts across the highway. It reaches the median strip and hesitates, and is marooned there as new clots of cars pen it on both sides. Frantic, it dashes between two oncoming cars and is caught by a crunching front wheel of a car in the other lane. The long hind legs twitch and are still and the lifeless blob of fur and flesh and bone and blood flattens ever further under crushing wheels.

  High on the mesa edge Old Jake Hanlon sees it all. His deep-sunk old eyes are still as keen as they were when his sight along a rifle barrel and his hand on a rope were as steady as any man's. He sees it all. The new life of today sweeping past below him, encased in its mechanical armor, careless of the lesser in its way, driving inexorably forward into its endlessly new-spun hopes of the future. "Like a bunch of stampedin' steers," he says.

  Still and quiet he sits and watches. And now the pipe has gone out and he does not know that. He stares down at the flowing traffic and he does not see it. His old eyes are brighter than before and they look on the big dual highway but they do not see it. For him it has faded away into the mists of long ago and there where it snakes its way between the tall buttes is only the thin tracery of an ancient trail. That murky veiling hanging over the highway to the westward is not the gray reeking fumes of a battery of big trucks hammering the hard pavement. It is a rising cloud of clean sweet dust, golden in glancing sunlight, raised by thousands of hoofs drumming the good earth in the clean sweet beat of freedom.

  There they come, hoofs thundering, manes flying, heads tossing, with the look of eagles in their eyes!

  The wild horses, the mustangs, the broncos, the broomtails!

  Out of the west they come, in numbers past counting. Descendants of the gallant Barbs with the blood of Arabia in them brought from the plains of Cordoba in far-off Spain by the conquistadores full four centuries ago. Home again in the land where the first horses evolved eons ago in the youth of the American continents and from there spread into Asia across the Alaskan land bridge before the ocean rose and rolled between. Home again in the land where their remote ancestors came into being and then, in some cataclysmic shift of conditions as the years in their millennia swept past, dwindled into extinction. Home again in the land of their pri
mal birth, the land that was ready to receive them again when the conquistadores brought them from Spain and they escaped to run free once more.

  Smallish and thin and bony, stunted through the ears and the generations by subsistence on the scant but hardy forage of the semi-arid southwest. Much of the Barb beauty gone, the noble head, the arched neck, the straight back, the full-fleshed swelling hips. Hardly a one that, stopped and standing still, would attract a second look from an eastern horseman used to the big carefully bred carefully fed horses of racetrack and show-ring. But in motion, wild and free, eating the wind, swallowing distance, the very symbol, the concentrated essence, of the wide stripped barren land and the great open spaces.

  Smallish and stunted, grass-bellied, cat-hipped. Almost everything splendid gone - everything except the spirit and the hardihood. And the stubborn clutch on freedom. Bred by adversity to the single purpose - survival in a land where only those fitted to it can survive. Honed by summer drought and winter storm and the fangs of the wolf pack and the claws of the mountain lion to the knife-edge of ultimate endurance. Motion the very meaning of their existence. Mighty lungs in the smallish bony bodies, and strong hearts, and steel springs in the thin legs and rock-hard hoofs, and buried deep in the lean taut flanks the ability to gallop to the edge of eternity and back.

  Out of the west they come, in the bands of their groupings past counting, wise old barren mares in the leads with the younger following with foals by their sides and the lordly studs behind, stern stallions herding their harems, nipping the stragglers, shouldering the laggards, throwing their heads to trumpet defiance to envious others of their kind - all the wild ones Old Jake Hanlon has seen through the long long misty long ago when he was a boy on a seat of a wagon moving into the setting sun and when he was a wild-riding mustanger with the best of them and when he was a reckless carefree cowhand riding the farthest ranges.

  They flow past, traffic out of another era, and Old Jake nods his head as he recognizes this one and that one passing his post on the high mesa. On beyond, faint in distance, is a flush of green in a dip of the plain that marks a water hole and one of the bands swings towards it. Old Jake is still and quiet on the mesa edge, but he is no longer there. He is out near the water hole, crawling on hands and knees through the bunch-grass. And now he is a thin-shanked boy in torn shirt and patched pants too big for him, lying on the top of the slight rise swelling around the water hole, flat on his belly peering over.

  There they come, off to his left, topping the rise. They stop and the stud trots forward, a battlescarred dun in the pride of power and lordship. He stands with head high, testing the wind, looking in every direction. He whistles softly and the band moves forward, down-slope to the water hole.

  All but one. An old mare, thin and gaunted, perhaps not so old as simply thin and gaunted, lags behind. The others have left her, hurrying on down. She moves slowly and stiffly as if afraid of each forward step. Something is wrong with her, something serious. She steps forward and brushes against an upthrust cactus and flinches back and stands shuddering. Blind. Blind in both eyes.

  The others are dipping muzzles, crowding each other for position. No. Not the stud. He has trotted back up the slope to the blind mare. He nudges her to one side, away from the cactus. He nickers softly to her, coaxing her into motion, and she follows him, nose against his warm comforting battle-scarred flank. She hesitates, feeling the down-slope under her feet, and he snorts a command and she follows. His strong shoulders open a wav through the others and she pushes in beside him and dips her muzzle and drinks.

  The stud drinks only in brief dippings, raising his head often to test the wind. Suddenly he whistles, loud and shrill. He has caught the man-scent in a shift of breeze. Instantly the whole band wheels, away from the water, and leaps into motion away, following the wise old lead mare. The blind mare wheels too and strikes out, seeking to follow, but slow and hesitant. The stud is on her, pushing, nipping, shouldering, driving her into full gallop. She stretches out, shoulder to shoulder with him, and he has her up with the others. He drives her in among them and she gallops on, unhesitating now, swerving as they swerve, with the sound and the sense and the smell and the feel of them all about her. He stops and swings about, looking back. He trumpets defiance at whatever might follow and rears high, wheeling, and races after his harem.

  "Nobody won't ever believe me any more," says old Jake Hanlon. "But I seen it. I sure seen it."

  All of them are gone now, all the bands, from out of the west into the nothingness of time past. They are no longer flowing by even in the mind of Old Jake Hanlon. Once again the ancient trail is a big new modern dual highway with mechanical power pouring along it. But wait. Old Jake is not looking at the highway, is not even aware of it. He is looking over it, beyond it, into the dimming distances. That is not a dust devil whirling upward that he sees on the far horizon. It is a cloud of golden dust rising from four pounding hoofs.

  There he comes, alone all alone in the vastness of space, glowing in the glancing sunlight, white, white as the snow of the tall desert mountains in winter, with head high and long mane flying and longer tail streaming in the wind of his own matchless motion, pacing, pacing, pacing in long swinging unbroken stride!

  The White Mustang, the White Steed of the Prairies, the Ghost Horse of the Plains!

  Not a part of the whole wide wild west that has not known him. If not this one then another and all always the same. The final absolute of the wild free life. The king of the broncos. And the king dies and still it is long live the king! Always he is sighted again somewhere across the far ranges of the American west. He is indomitable, unconquerable, and he cannot ever really die because he is the stuff of which legends are made and he lives deep in the minds of men, the symbol of their own stubborn clutch on freedom. Every man must have his White Mustang, his dream to follow, the glowing white glimmer that paces ahead of his own plodding progress. Lucky the man who sees it plain in the proud days of his youth and can see it still undimmed on through the long long years of growing old.

  Nearly three hundred miles this one has run this time with scarcely a stop or a breather. Four days and the nights between and no food except a few mouthfuls of grass snatched almost in stride. No water except a few swallows scooped each time he has crossed the shallow almost-dry riverbed in the great sweeping seventy-mile circuits he has been making of this range that has been his and that he will not leave. He is too wise to take on more water and be slowed in the running.

  Those two dark dots coming into sight a third of a mile behind him are two men on horseback. They are erect in saddles on two fresh horses picked up only a few miles back. At fifteen-mile intervals around the great circuit other men wait on other fresh horses, wait for their turns in the long chase to push him, push him, push him, and run him down at last.

  Five thousand dollars pace with him. That is the sum the famous showman, P. T. Barnum, has offered for capture of the White Mustang. A big sum to the men of the southwest, big even if split many ways. Many of them have joined together to try to do what some of them have tried in vain to do before. Ten men and fifty horses are running the White Mustang!

  They have studied his habits and know his range. Four days they have been running him and the nights between because through these moonlit nights the whiteness of him can be followed almost as in the daytime. The yearling colts and the mares of his band have long since dropped away, exhausted and left behind. Still he paces on. Again and again rested men on rested horses, starting from stations along the circuit, have tried to close on him with ropes ready. Always the rhythmic beat of those four rock-hard hoofs has quickened and the swinging stride has lengthened and he has pulled away to a safe lead once more.

  Old Jake Hanlon sits on the mesa edge. He is still and quiet, but memories move in his withered old muscles. Strange, it is not stone nor sand nor clean adobe dirt beneath him on which sit his lean old buttocks. It is good leather with the sweat of miles soaked into it. He is mot
ionless as a rooted tree, yet he can feel the wind of movement fanning the taut dry skin of his face. He is no longer there on the mesa. He is one of those distant dots far out on the limitless plain. He is tall in the saddle on a rough-built rawboned sorrel he has broken to the bit himself. He is Young Jake Hanlon, tophand rider of the rough string for the Triple X, and he is running the White Mustang ...

  They hammered on, side by side in the afternoon sun, Young Jake Hanlon and Petey Corle, following the white glimmer of the ghost horse. They were grim, determined, not joshing each other as they had been only the day before. The long strain was telling on them despite the periods of rest while others took up the running. They were no longer merely following him to keep him moving with no rest and little or no food and water. They were pushing him harder now, trying to close in more often. The long strain was telling on him too. It must be. Nothing made of muscle and bone could keep on forever in that endless tiring circuit. Yes, it was telling on him. That showed in the way he let them draw closer each time and in the gradually diminishing lead he established in each new spurt.

  Young Jake felt an eagerness rising within him. He rode with eyes fixed on that white glimmer always ahead. He thought he saw a falter in the swinging stride and the eagerness swept through him. He knew the mettle of the horse under him, the power and speed in the rawboned frame that could show heels to any other horse broken to saddle in the whole of the country around. He slapped with spurs and the sorrel surged forward into full gallop.

  Closer. Closer. Young Jake could see the sweat streaks along the white flanks. He could hear the sobbing whistle as breath entered and left the laboring lungs. His rope was in his hands and a loop was forming.

  And the head of the White Mustang rose higher and turned some and Young Jake saw the redrimmed eye that placed him and the sorrel coming up. He heard the snort of defiance that seemed to him to be touched with derision too. The beat of those rock-hard hoofs that had never known shoes quickened, quickened, drumming the earth, and the stride lengthened, and the White Mustang was pulling away, faster, faster, leaving him far behind.