"Well, then," said the riding stable man. "If he's holed up anywhere, that'd be Harper's place."
"Just came from there," said Sheriff Montoya. "Went through the whole house with Harper himself standing around laughing at me. Damned if I don't think he's proud of the old nuisance and his fool tricks."
"That is kind of an unpopular view these days," said the riding stable man. "But I'm still old-fashioned enough to have maybe a mite of leaning that way myself. When I was a kid and my dad started this stable, some of the best horses he had he got through Old Jake. Mustangs every one. And trained right."
"Don't I know," said Sheriff Montoya. "I learned to ride before I could even walk good on one of his mustangs. He knew my folks were short on cash like they always were and he let them have it for peanuts. I've got to find him before he gets himself into trouble again. The judge might not go easy on him another time. And there's people around that'd jump at any excuse to ride him out of town on a rail. He's too old to take rough treatment any more."
"He's too damned old for anything any more," said the riding stable man. "Like I told you, I haven't seen him all day. If I had, I'd of shooed him away fast. He's bad for business. He smells high half the time and that pipe of his worse and he's always trying to tell the customers how to treat horses and he'll talk their ears off given half a chance and they don't like it. How about that shack that was Corle's before he died. Nobody's living there. It's boarded up but he could have crawled in. Let's go have a look."
The sun slipped down behind the mountains to the west and slow dusk settled over the town that had been on its way to becoming a small city when the new dual interstate highway bypassed it and despite the pessimist prophecies of townboosters was still growing in the same direction. The darkness deepened and street lights obediently came on in the business and the more prosperous residential sections and all sensible folk were at home digesting well-earned dinners.
The darkness deepened more and in the hayloft of the riding stable, in a corner behind piled bales of hay, under a covering of loose hay, where he had heard all that had happened below during the afternoon, Old Jake Hanlon stirred out of a half-doze and stretched until his old joints creaked. He stood up, shedding hay, and brushed wisps of it out of his hair and from his shirt. Feeling his way in the blackness of the loft, he detoured around the piled bales and found the twin ends of the ladder sticking up. Carefully he eased himself around onto the ladder and climbed down to the ground floor.
The mingled smells of hay and feed and the warm odors of horses were pleasant in his old nostrils. The faint light from a street light through the two windows along the right side of the building gave him vision enough. He moved past the stalls lining the left side, patting the rump of each horse as he passed it, and came to the small rear door that was fastened by a rusty hasp with a piece of wood through it. He pulled out the piece of wood and let it drop and cautiously opened the door and peered out into the back alley. Quickly he slid through the doorway and closed the door and rolled a half-empty oil drum that was used for a trash can against it to hold it closed. Like a furtive old shadow he moved along the alley, holding to the deeper darkness against the walls of the buildings he passed.
There were no street lights in this thinning westward fringe of settlement just beyond the town line. The Martinez house was silent and dark, its adobe walls, pink-brown in the glow of day, now a ghostly gray in the starlight. Epitacio Martinez and his numerous family regularly retired early to be up before the first cockcrow. The ramshackle odd-shaped building that served as the Martinez goat-shed and chicken-house and barn was another dim shape nearby. Beyond this was the Martinez corral, a square outline of stout posts and sturdy high rails. In its time it had been a waitingstation for steers bought by local butchers and being held for slaughter. Right now it held the two Martinez burros and the Martinez milk cow and eleven weary worried rope-burned truck-bruised scrawny stunted mustangs.
By the gate that opened towards the road, back against the rails, stood the burly figure of Joe Simpson. He was rolling a cigarette and taking his time to roll it and lose none of the tobacco.
Fifty yards away, across the road, behind a thick clump of the tumbleweed which Maclovio Vigil never bothered to clear from what could by courtesy be called his side yard, Old Jake Hanlon lay flat on the ground, sighting through a small opening between the lower stems of two of the tangled tumbleweeds. He watched Joe Simpson light the cigarette. "Dogdamn it," he muttered. "Looks like he's agoin' to stay all night."
Time passed and Joe Simpson threw away the stub of another cigarette and bent down to fuss with something on the ground. He took hold of it and flipped it and straightened it out and smoothed it with his hands and lay down on it.
"I'll be blowed," muttered Old Jake. "He is agoin' to stay all night."
Old Jake lay still, thinking hard. After a while he wormed backwards a few yards then crawled on his hands and knees until the Vigil house was between him and the corral and pushed up to his feet and hurried away. Seven minutes later he was tapping on the rear door of a small house. He tapped again. He heard shuffling footsteps inside and the door opened and a short stocky elderly man peered out at him.
"Jake," said the man. "Jake Hanlon. I thought you'd skipped town. The sheriff's been looking for you.
"Forget 'im," said Old Jake. "He don't worry me none. But you ain't ever finished payin' me for that hoss you got five-six years ago."
Words flowed from the man, mingled apology and indignation, something about too many children and grandchildren, too many taxes, and perhaps next month or even next week.
"Quit it," said Old Jake. "All I want to know is have you got any shotgun shells."
The man stared at him a few seconds. "I might have," he said slowly. "Yes. I think I have four."
"Give 'em to me," said Old Jake, "an' we'll just call it square on the hoss."
Five hundred yards behind the three Martinez structures, past various scattered other structures along dirt lanes that might someday be streets, humped the small off-kilter shape of the shack that had once belonged to Petey Corle and now for several years in the absence of any identifiable heirs had been county property taken over for unpaid taxes. Behind it Old Jake Hanlon busily piled rubbish into a slanting heap against the cracked boards of the rear wall. There was no lack of the proper material scattered about, old pieces of newspaper blown there by the wind, empty cardboard bottlecartons, chips from long ago wood chopping, dead branches from a scraggly tree, some warped barrel staves.
When the pile was nearly three feet high, he left it and went around a corner of the shack and tugged at one of the boards fastened over what had once been a side window. This came loose so easily that he almost fell over backwards. Someone had obligingly ripped that board loose only recently and merely pushed it back in place. He took four shotgun shells from a pants pocket and reached in and tossed them to fall on the floor against the rear wall just about inside from the leaning pile outside. He came back around the corner and plucked a kitchen match from a shirt pocket and struck it on the scuffed rough side of his right boot.
In the darkness by the gate of the Martinez corral, stretched out on the flimsy bedroll he usually carried in his truck, Joe Simpson shivered a bit. It was chillier than he had expected. He lay there debating with himself whether or not to expend the energy to get up, unzip the bedroll, and crawl inside it. That could shift him to the opposite discomfort of being too warm.
Across the road Old Jake Hanlon peaked through between the two tumbleweeds. He was still puffing from his hurry swinging in a wide arc around and back to his hiding place. There was a pain in his side and his old heart beat in uneven rhythm, issuing the warning it had been giving him more often lately, but he paid no attention to that. He was looking past the Martinez structures towards the others on beyond. He began to see it, the beginnings of a reddish glow that grew rapidly as he watched.
Lights came on in one then another of the small houses over t
hat way. He heard a voice shouting. Nearly a mile away towards the center of town a siren wailed. Someone in one of those houses had a telephone and had used it.
Across the road by the corral gate Joe Simpson sat up, grabbed his hat from the ground beside him, stood up and looked around and saw the reddish glow that was beginning to light the sky. He took a few steps and stopped. As he stood there, undecided, something like a shot sounded over by the burning shack, then two more in quick succession, then a few seconds later another. He ran to the corral gate and shook it to test the fastening and turned and ran around the corner of the corral to wards the fire.
Over by the clump of tumbleweed Old Jake waited ten seconds, twenty, thirty, then he was up and running across the road to the gate. He staggered and almost fell against it and in a fumbling hurry his old fingers found what he had hoped not to find. A padlock. He fished out a match and struck it and held it close. The two heavy staples holding the hasp were out some and just the least bit loose in the wood of the post.
Desperately he hunted along the ground by the rails and found a broken piece of two-by-four jagged on one end. He forced the jagged end down behind the padlock and pulled outward with all the strength in his thin old body. There was a tiny scritch and the staples gave perhaps a sixty-fourth of an inch. Again and again he pulled, one foot braced against the post. His breath came in wheezing gasps and an unnatural sweat dripped from his face. But each time the staples were giving up more of their hold. One last yank with all the strength left in him and they ripped loose and he fell backwards with the stick flying from his hand.
Panting, wobbling, he scrambled on hands and knees to the gate and pulled himself up by it. He heaved on the sliding bar and swung the gate wide open. "Come-on," he gasped. "Come - on - you - lil ol' - broomies. Head-for-the hills!"
They had sensed the urgency in the air by the corral. They were milling about inside, heads up, snorting, sniffing. One of them saw the open gateway and dashed through and the others followed and Old Jake tottered on rubbery old legs, waving his arms, swerving them westward towards the road on out of town and onward into the great distances reaching to the far mountains.
They raced past, small rock-hard hoofs pounding, renewed strength of hope in the thin gaunted haunches, the scrawny stunted scrub last of the herds that once had roamed the Domingo flats, and there for the flick of an instant as one of them swung its head towards him, caught in reflected starlight, Old Jake saw or thought he saw a glint, a glimmer of the look of eagles in the rolling starlit eyes.
"Go - it," he gasped. "Go - it. They - ain't - goin' -to make - dogfood - out of - you."
Sheriff Montoya spun the steering wheel of his official car and obediently it turned into his driveway and rolled up beside the gabled brick house that had originally been built for some pilgrim from an eastern state back about the turn of the century and still looked out of place among its adobe neighbors. He switched off the lights and the motor, climbed out, put the key in a pocket, and walked around towards the small white-pillared front porch. He stopped. He stared. There in the dim glow of the economical twenty-watt porchlight his wife had left on for him, perched on the edge of the porch and leaning against a pillar, looking more like an ancient scarecrow than ever, looking dusty and dirty and beat and ready to collapse, but with a grin on his gaunt old face, was Old Jake Hanlon.
"'Bout time you got here," said Old Jake. "My hat's still in that jail of yours. Doc Horn's still got my vest. An' I'm almighty hungry."
In his official chambers in the venerable county building judge Alfred Fergusson leaned back in his new executive chair that treated his rump gently, that rocked soothingly, that swiveled efficiently, and had not yet developed a squeak. The door to the outer room had just been closed, effectively shutting off the busy tapping of an electric typewriter. Sunlight between the pulled-back drapes of a side window spoke of another morning and its summons to another day of trying to deal with the perennial squabbles of those cantankerous creatures called people.
Judge Fergusson chewed on a pencil and looked over his cluttered desktop at the four men facing him on ordinary hard-bottomed chairs . . . at Henry W. Harper, plumpish and well-fed and manicured, who was a regular contributor of campaign funds to the right political party and right now had a solid determined expression on his plump face that was beginning to jowl some ... at Sheriff Victorio Montoya, sleepy-eyed and stoopshouldered, who seemed to be perpetually weary of the antics of his fellowmen and was not that at all and who carried a majority of the local SpanishAmerican votes in his pocket . . . at Assistant District Attorney Philip Myers, youngish and groomed and alert, who was all brisk efficiency with hopes of a fine career ahead of him and who sometimes had difficulty concealing his impatience with his more leisurely elders .., and at that hawkfaced sharp-beaked gaunt old scarecrow of what once might have been a man, Old Jake Hanlon.
Carefully Judge Fergusson laid the pencil down on the desktop and watched it roll a few inches to stop against an ashtray. He sighed. "Mr. Harper," he said, "I understand that you have come to some kind of an agreement with Simpson that satisfies him. With Martinez too. That erases the question of damages. But do you really expect the law to overlook what actually was done?"
"All he did," said Henry W. Harper, "was pry some staples out of a post and open a gate. The horses themselves did the rest."
"An ingenious way of looking at it," said Judge Fergusson. "Making the animals the real culprits, sort of major accessories after the fact. But it won't wash. There's quite a tradition about misusing gates in this part of the country. And I rather suspect he knew exactly what those horses would do. Probably encouraged them to do it."
"You're damn tootin' right I did," said Old Jake Hanlon.
"You're damn tooting right something will have to be done about it too," said Assistant District Attorney Myers. "Over at the office we're sick and tired of you running around thinking you can do anything you feel like doing."
Judge Fergusson sighed again. "This is a problem, not a feud," he said. He glanced down at a paper on his desk. "There was a fire out that way. About the same time. Is there any connection?"
"Certainly," said Assistant District Attorney Myers. "I'm positive he set it to pull Simpson away."
"I'm positive he is quite capable of it," said Judge Fergusson. "But is there any evidence linking him with that fire?"
Sheriff Montoya shifted weight on his chair. A grim little smile touched his lips. "No," he said. He looked straight at Assistant District Attorney Myers. "It was just over the line and that puts it in my bailiwick. And I'm too blamed busy chasing juvenile bat-brains in sporty cars that think our county roads are speedways to go looking for any evidence. I'd call it a civic improvement, having that eyesore gone."
"I see," said Judge Fergusson. "So there it stands. I invited you gentlemen here this morning, hoping we might find some way to avoid the nuisance of a trial. I still recall the hullabaloo the state papers raised when Jenkins insisted on bringing him to trial the last time. They'd have a picnic with this one. But what are we going to do with him? We can't let him run loose periodically disturbing the peace of our poor defenseless community. I have the utmost respect for our sheriff here, but events have shown he is no match for the old scoundrel. And our local police always seem to look the other way where he is concerned. We can't put him on probation. He'd just thumb his nose at it. We can't salt him away in the pen. Or shouldn't anyway. Either he wouldn't last a week cooped up there or in two weeks he'd have the whole place turned upside down."
"Simple," said Assistant District Attorney Myers. "Declare him batty as he is anyway and commit him to Las Vegas. Let the psychiatrists there figure him out."
"You try that," said Henry W. Harper, sitting up straighter on his hard-bottomed chair. "You just try that and I'll fight you with everything I've got all the way up to the Supreme Court."
"Quit frettin'," said Old Jake Hanlon. "All of you. You want me out of the way, so I'll get out an' stay
out. You want me cooped up, so I'll just coop myself up. My ticker ain't what it used to be. Shucks, none of me is. I ain't got much time left an' I know it. I know certain as I ever knowed anythin' I ain't ever goin' to see the snow on them mountains again. That's all right. I've had my time. The little I've got left I'd like to spend by myself out at the ranch."
The fine big car jolted along the abandoned washed-out road no longer ever scraped by the county highway crew. Henry W. Harper, who liked to think of himself as simply Hank Harper on the rare occasions he was out in the country and off smooth pavement, had the steering wheel to grip and give him leverage against the bumps. Old Jake Hanlon could only bounce on the seat beside him.
"These high-falutin' things is sure rougher'n a good boss," he said.
Hank Harper gunned the gas and the car careened through the sand of a dry arroyo, carried across by its forward momentum and the three hundred horsepower under the hood.
"Dogdamn it, Hank," said Old Jake. "I never been much good at sayin' things right, but you sure been good to me these last years. Stood up for me ev'ry time I got me in a tight."
Hank Harper yanked on the wheel to dodge a stone. "Why not?" he said. "You helped my grandfather make the money my father made into more and I'm spending my life spending. Call it back pay long overdue. Hardrock never paid anybody more than he had to."
"He paid me in other ways," said Old Jake. "They was real men around here in them days an' he was one of 'em."
A jackrabbit soared out of chamisa on the right, angled at full speed across in front, and disappeared around a low-hung juniper. "Times have changed," said Hank Harper. "Money's the most important thing nowadays. You have some, you are somebody. I have some and I suppose that makes me somebody but I'm not always too sure. I know I'm no Hardrock, but at least I'm pretty good at signing checks."
"Which I ain't agoin' to try arguin' you out of," said Old Jake.