The Man From Nowhere

Chapter 9

Black Mountain was the northernmost sentinel of the Gila. A mile of hilly, broken ground, thick with sagebrush and piñon, lay between Yearly’s cabin and the rounded bulk of the peak.

The old man had a remuda of three horses penned up in a pole corral, a paint mustang, a rangy buckskin and a Morgan.

After breakfast each morning, he and Oates hitched the Morgan to a wagon and headed for the mountain, where they cut out red and black lava stones with a pick and shovel. The cinder blocks were stacked behind the cabin, and after three weeks of backbreaking labor were already as high as the top of a tall man’s head.

Yearly insisted that Oates take a daily bath in the creek that ran near the house and had him shave off his beard, leaving only a sweeping dragoon mustache that was then fashionable in the West.

Fed on a steady diet of venison stew, bacon and beans and elk steak, Oates put on weight and his shoulders and arms began to show muscle, even as his face thinned into hard, tanned planes.

Yearly was an affable, even-tempered host and employer with an easy way of talking and his rules were few—but for one.

At Oates’ insistence, the old man slept in the cot while he spread his blankets on the floor each night. The door to the cabin’s only bedroom remained locked at all times.

After their return from the mountain one evening, Oates asked him why. Yearly made a display of lighting his pipe, playing for time as he searched his mind for the right words. Finally he said, “That room is . . . well, it’s special to me. I don’t want anyone going in there. I don’t go in there myself.”

“Keep your treasure in there, huh, Jacob?” Oates joshed. He removed one of the oversized shoes the old man had given him and rubbed his aching foot.

“You could say that. I keep memories in there that are precious to me.”

“A woman?”

“No, not a woman.”

Oates placed a shoe on the floor, then removed the other. “That narrows it down,” he said.

Yearly said nothing. Again he made a show with his pipe as a rising night wind rustled around the eaves of the cabin, but for a while only an empty silence stretched between him and Oates.

Finally he said, “Eddie, what’s it been, a month? And already I see a difference in you as the whiskey greed has left. I think you’ve come so far because you’re still a young man and not too old for change. But you still have a ways to go, a long ways.”

The old man waved a hand toward the bedroom. “Maybe one day I’ll show you what’s behind that door, but not today. And not tomorrow or the day after that.”

Oates didn’t push it. He slipped his feet into his shoes and said, “I’ll go check on the Morgan.”

“We won’t need the Morgan tomorrow,” Yearly said.

“How come? We still have lava block to move back to the house.”

“I know, but tomorrow I’m going to teach you to shoot.”

Eddie Oates hefted the unfamiliar weight of the .44 Colt and looked out over the mesquite flats. “How about that dead cedar near the creek, Jacob?”

“Hell, boy, that’s a fair piece. If a man draws down on you from there, you got plenty of room to cut an’ run.” He stepped toward the cedar and Oates followed. When they were ten feet from the tree he stopped.

“You’ll shoot from here.” Yearly noted the puzzled look on the younger man’s face and said patiently, “Revolver fighters like Clem Halleck will come at you up close an’ real personal, especially them as makes fancy moves, skinning the iron fast like he does.

“You shoot the way I’m going to show you and you’ll kill your man every time. Don’t rush it, Eddie, and aim for the belly. Now, go to it.”

As Yearly had demonstrated, Oates took up a duelist’s stance, the inside of his left foot against his right heel, the Colt held out straight in front of him.

“Thumb back the hammer, boy, then cut ’er loose.”

The triple click of the Colt’s hammer was loud in the cool, red-tinted stillness of the morning. Oates squeezed the trigger.

The revolver roared and bucked and the bullet splintered wood dead center from the cedar’s trunk.

“Shoot her dry, boy.”

Oates did as he was told, firing until the hammer clicked on a spent cartridge. He’d fired five shots at the tree and had scored five hits.

Turning in a drifting gray cloud of gunsmoke, Oates looked at Yearly and grinned. “I’d say that was pretty good.”

“I’d say the tree wasn’t shooting back at you.”

The old man reached into the pocket of the old army greatcoat he wore on cool mornings and passed a cardboard box to Oates. “There’s fifty cartridges. It’s old stuff that’s been lying around for years and it’s a mite uncertain, but it’s fine for practice. Shoot ’em all and let me see fifty hits on the tree. Cut it down if you can because I’m sick of looking at it.”

Yearly turned on his heel and started back to the cabin. “Where you going, Jacob?”

“For coffee. You can come get yours when all the cartridges are gone.” The old man stopped and turned. “There are Apaches around this morning, Eddie, so step careful.”

Oates swallowed the lump in his throat and managed to croak, “Wha . . .”

But Yearly was already out of earshot.

Oates’ mind was not on his target practice and he turned his head constantly for any sign of Apaches. He saw nothing, though every time jays quarreled in the piñons or a jackrabbit bounded across the flat, he jumped.

Despite his unease and the poor quality of his ammunition, which produced a number of duds and fliers, he hit the cedar nearly twoscore times.

Then he lit a shuck for the cabin, his shoes, fitted to Yearly, a much bigger man, flopping and slapping on his feet.

When he ran inside, the old man was sitting in his chair by the fire, smoking his pipe, a volume by Sir Walter Scott in his hands.

“Heard the shooting,” Yearly said without looking up. “I’d say, oh, forty-five rounds. You score any hits?”

“Scored with most of them.”

“Uh-huh,” Yearly said, a comment Oates considered neither approving nor disapproving.

A silence grew between them, then Oates said, almost accusingly, “I didn’t see any Apaches, though.”

“You won’t, unless they want to be seen. But they’re here.”

“Jacob, shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“Like what?”

“Like getting ready to defend ourselves.”

“The Apaches never bothered me before.”

“Who’s to say they won’t now?”

“The Apaches, I guess.”

The old man looked up from his book. “They’re carrying their hurting dead with them. I reckon they’ve had a bellyful of war for the present.”

“I still haven’t seen them.”

“You will. Coffee’s still on the bile if’n you want some. An’ clean the Colt while you’re at it, Eddie. A dirty gun has killed more than one man. Cleaning stuff in the drawer over there.”

The long day was just giving way to evening when the Apaches began to ride past the cabin, heading into the Gila.

Under a sky streaked with ribbons of red and jade, teased by a west wind, they came singly at first, then in groups of three or four. The endurance and fortitude of the Apache were legendary, but these warriors looked like they’d been through it. Many of them wounded, they slumped on their tired ponies, taking no interest in what lay around them. They must have been routed at Alma and it showed.

Oates and Yearly stood outside the cabin in the violet night and watched them pass.

Most of the warriors led ponies burdened by dead men roped facedown across their backs. Oates counted thirty bodies, but probably more had been abandoned along the trail.

“It’s too dark to make out faces clear,” Yearly whispered, “but I haven’t seen Victorio or ol’ Nana either.”

Asking a question to which he already knew the answer, Oates said, “You reckon they got beat at Alma?”

The old man nodded. “Looks like.” He gave Oates a sidelong glance. “Thinking of going back, Eddie?”

“One day, but only to settle some scores.”

Yearly nodded. “That can drive a man.”

One by one the Apaches melted into the distance and night, leaving only the solitude and silence on the land that God intended.

A match flared as Yearly lit his pipe. Then the old man turned to Oates and said, “Go inside, Eddie. Leave me to study on things for a spell.”

A small alarm rose in Oates. “You all right, Jacob?”

“I’m fine. Sometimes a man wants to be by himself, is all.”

“Then I’ll bring your coat. There’s a chill in the air.”

Coyotes were yipping somewhere out in the darkness and the wine-dark sky was full of stars.

“I’m not cold,” Yearly said. “Now leave me. I’ll be in soon.”

Oates turned away and started to walk back to the cabin. All his life he’d been isolated, but never alone. There had always been people around, a few friendly, most not, but they were always there. Why a man would stand in the crowding dark and seek out loneliness puzzled him.

He stopped and looked first at the shadowed land, then at the sky, hoping to see what Jacob was seeing and feel what he was feeling. He listened into the night and heard the sigh of the ceaseless wind, the restless rustle of the cedars around the cabin.

Then he began to understand. . . .

The night was coming down on him like a blessing and it had the power to heal the hurt in a man. Now he knew what Jacob knew.

He stepped into the cabin, and for the first time in a long time, the whiskey hunger had completely left him.

Yearly stepped inside an hour later, bringing the memory of the night with him. “Best you spread your blankets, Eddie,” he said. “We got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow.”

“No more Apaches passing through, huh?”

“Not passing through, no.” Seeing the expression on Oates’ face, he said, “There are Apaches out there, not many, maybe just a few broncos.”

“Why would they stay around?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at the younger man. “Eddie, there are bad apples in every barrel, and that applies to Apaches as much as it does to white men.”

He crossed to his cot, then stopped. “Load the Colt, boy, an’ keep it close.”