Haycox / Nemo 7 best short stories by Ernest Haycox

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-96858-506-2
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 163, 80 Seiten

Reihe: 7 best short stories

Ernest Haycox was an important figure in the development of the popular Western. Diligent, prolific, and ambitious, he wrote twenty-four novels, nearly three hundred short stories and serial installments, and dozens of essays. In the 1930s and 1940s, he may have been Oregon's most widely acclaimed author of magazine fiction. This book contains: - At Wolf Creek Tavern. - Blizzard Camp. - Born to Conquer. - Breed of the frontier. - Custom of the Country. - Good Marriage. - The last rodeo.

Ernest James Haycox (October 1, 1899 October 13, 1950) was an American author of Western fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Haycox, Ernest

Nemo, August

Leseproben

I
ON the third day of his confinement in the old line-riders' hut, Tom Darrah looked at the sky and decided reluctantly to chance a run for Arrowhead. The driving Easter had stopped sometime during the night and the ensuing calm was profound and brittle—not the calm following a blown-out blizzard but rather that sort of a sullen recess auguring worse to come. There was no feel in the air of the bland chinook which erases and melts the effects of the harsher winds; there was, in fact, nothing to indicate change. Two feet of dry, packed snow lay along the ridge and trimmed the pine boughs. A slate-gray sky pressed its ceiling down within a hundred yards of the ground. The footing, he knew, would be bad and the travel slow. Nevertheless, Tom Darrah decided to make the try. So he saddled, tied his tarp roll to the cantle thongs and started out. Crossing three lesser ridges, he fell into the flats of the Arrowhead and was around five miles from the cabin when the worst of his fears were realized. The snow began falling again, softly bellying down. A clap of wind rushed into the vacuum of stillness. Inside of half an hour the full tempest was upon him, howling like a thousand mongrel packs. Arrowhead was east and out of that east rose a rushing, screaming element he could not fight. There came a time when his horse, stout and willing, was able only to march in its former tracks; as for Tom Darrah, he could not face the knives of that hurling blast. For man and beast Arrowhead became an impossibility. Turning to northward, Darrah tried a tangential advance. In that direction, about three miles, an abandoned mining camp, Sumpter Gulch, butted against the hills and furnished the shelter he had to have rather soon. "An hour of this," he said casually to himself, "is about the outside limit. Sumpter Gulch better be where I think it is." It was a canny remark, for he had fought blizzards long enough to realize how greatly they increased the probabilities of error. All the landmarks were gone. Sky and horizon ceased to be. It was a world suffocated and drowned out; and there actually seemed to be no free space. The snow didn't strike the earth but ran parallel to it in ever-thickening substance, and all this while the cataclysmic wind beat the pony on its flank and drove it off the true course. Great solid clouds were ripped up by that wind and rolled against Darrah, tipping him in the saddle, smothering him. The grayness of the morning deepened, the rumble and whine and clapped-out reports increased. Now and then Darrah essayed to correct his course—deliberately setting himself little sums in arithmetic to think out, asking himself simple questions. Storms like this one did things to a man, warped the mind and dulled it; in some respects it was like the heat craze. Meanwhile he felt the inward creep of the cold. Heavy as was his buffalo coat and his ear-lapped cap, a slow paralysis struck his extremities and worked back. The bandanna raised over his mouth was quite stiff. Fringes of ice drooped from his brows and lashes. Lids three quarters closed, he had only a narrow vision of a world revolving like a wheel. "One—two—three—four—five," he said to himself. "And five and five make ten. Pony, you dam' fool, quit drifting on me." Suddenly, like some island in an empty ocean, a scrub pine loomed dead the fore. Instinctively the pony aimed at this and got on its lee side and halted behind a shelter that was no shelter at all. Tom Darrah beat his arms across his chest, rapidly calculating. "I'm sliding over to the timber, or this is the lone tree outside, of Sumpter Gulch. Or it might not be either. Maybe I'm goin' backwards. No, that can't be right. The wind's dead in the east. Sumpter should be less than a mile forward. Go on, pony." The horse, decidedly reluctant, bucked the drifts, its hoofs rising like the pads of a dog. Bent over in the saddle, Darrah saw a small dark object being kicked up by one of those hoofs. It had been at the base of the tree, but the wind took it and threw it twenty feet before it lodged in the snow again. Riding that way, Darrah bent over to the uplifted surface, got the object and held it unobserved a moment while he fought the pony into the slanting blast. When he looked down his distorted vision got only a blur and it was some moments before he could focus his vision on what he held, a woman's fur-lined gauntlet stiffly frozen. In weather such as this was there could be only one thing to surmise and only one reaction. Darrah turned the pony toward the tree, literally pushing the beast a hundred yards into the teeth of the incredibly bitter blizzard. Afterwards he wheeled and drifted on an exploring circle, finding nothing. The second time he made his circle the tree stood very dim on his right hand and presently he lost it. By now he was considerably downwind, bowled along like a piece of debris. Struggling back, he could not lift that tree again. Once more dragging the area—without luck—he discovered he could never repeat the maneuver a fourth lime. The pony refused to face the wind. It stood still, stubborn and exhausted. "If she's out here," Darrah said to himself, "she's dead and buried. May have floated miles from the tree." Hard as the thought was, he could do nothing more about it; and squaring himself at the uncertain north, he pressed on. It was the horse that discovered the abandoned camp first. Knocking along the drift with a stumbling discouragement, the beast flung up its head and whinnied and thereafter showed a surprising remnant of strength. Darrah let the reins go slack. Ten minutes later the huddled line of Sumpter's old buildings made a phantom appearance through the storm mists and he was in that camp's single street before he quite had oriented himself. The pony, surer of judgment, struggled against a head-high bank of snow and bucked a trail through it, to stop against the closed doors of a deserted stable. Darrah got immediately down, kicked open a smaller doorway beside the large ones and went in. The pony followed close at his heels, eager as a human to be out of the torture. Along the clammy darkness of the stable rose the sound of other horses stamping and shifting. "So," grunted Darrah, mildly surprised. "I'm not the only one caught in this blow." His eyes burned, his cheeks began to ache. But presently the blankness before him coagulated to shapes and silhouettes. Going along the line of stalls he found an empty space near the end. He put his pony there, unsaddled, threw the saddle blanket over the beast for whatever warmth it would afford; and then, curious about his neighbors, he casually cruised the stalls. He counted twenty-four horses, all dry enough to have been stabled a considerable time. More closely investigating, he found some of them branded Lazy JT—which caused him to wonder what Lewes DeSpain's outfit was doing so far from home. Nearby, he ran into the Circle Arrow iron and he guessed that this bunch had been out on a winter inspection. Then he brought up in front of a horse with narrowing, quickened attention. The Slash N on that rump made him whistle softly. "Nig Sommers. What kind of company have we got collected out of this blizzard?" The question was worth an answer—for Sommers and Sommers' men were notorious. Going to the door, Tom Darrah pushed his way into the stinging slash of the storm and stood three quarters buried in the drift a moment, surveying the buildings across the street. Necessity, he reflected, made strange bedfellows. Under ordinary conditions these three outfits could not be got together in the same town and it took a powerful motive to put Sommers within gun distance of any ranch crew. Directly opposite he saw light leaping through the windows of what used to be Sumpter's hotel, and without further reflection he ploughed a trail to it and went in. Sudden heat struck him; this and the smell of drying clothes. On the far side of the lobby a great fireplace was banked high with blazing wood. In front of it stood eight men, all facing him with a show of deep interest. He recognized the Circle Arrow crew and more particularly the slim and yellow-headed young foreman, Lonzo Hardesty, who confronted him with a kind of indifferent alertness. At the moment he failed to remark the oddity of this attitude. "Move over, Lonzo," said Darrah. "I damned near didn't make this camp." Lonzo Hardesty's answer was somewhat noncommittal. "Glad to see you, Tom. Don't come near this heat till you thaw out. You look nipped." Darrah stripped off his outer clothes and stepped away from the puddling water around his feet. He chafed his ears vigorously. "How long you been here, boys?" "This is our third day," grunted Lonzo Hardesty. "We were up in the hills lookin' after beaver tails when the Easter come. Don't look now like we'll ever get clear of this dam' place. Hate to think of the amount of frozen beef lyin' around this country." Darrah chuckled. "I observe you got company." "What?" said Hardesty, a little sharp with the question. Then he said, "Oh, sure. You mean Lazy JT and Nig Sommers. Ahuh. JT boys are campin' in the old jail office. Sommers—him and six other of his mugs—took to the saloon." "A friendly gatherin'," drawled Darrah. "We'll get along—apart," muttered Hardesty. "Who's in charge of the Lazy JT lads?" "Eric Bull." Darrah showed a little surprise. "Lewes DeSpain always used to ride these winter tours with his men. He ain't along this time?" "No," said Hardesty. Something about that answer brought Darrah's attention strictly back to Hardesty. It had been a barren, laconic answer and it...