Sheep Limit/Chapter 19
Rawlins walked around the place in a dumb, cold daze. His hat was lost, his clothing was dusty and disheveled as if he had striven for his life hand to hand. It did not come into his thoughts to inquire whether he had passed through the fight unwounded; it was enough in his dumb state that he was not conscious of any pain.
It seemed to him that a profound silence had settled over his lonely homestead; that the three men riding like thieves in all haste down the creek had snatched something away from him, neither the nature nor value of which he was fully conscious of, leaving him altogether unlike what he had been only a little while before.
How long before? How long had that battle lasted? Not a great while, scarcely more than a few minutes, he calculated, looking up for his measurement of time to the spreading morning. It was daylight when they woke him in their efforts to pull his house down; the sun was only making a far-off candle-flare on the horizon now. It would be almost an hour yet until sunrise. And he had killed a man.
It gave him a shocking start to think of it that way: the sun an hour away yet, and he had killed a man. What connection there was in the peculiarly divided thought he did not know, nor trouble to adjust. There was a great stillness over the grassy-valley, a growing fear in his breast. Could he justify the killing of that man to authority when it came to inquire? Could he justify it to himself?
There was a sickening feeling of revulsion for the whole unfortunate adventure. The pitiful things which he had there to defend were not worth the life of any man, were not worth the upbraidings of conscience, the years of regret this morning's hot-headed work would cost. It had taken this tragedy to adjust his sense of values. Before the fight he had believed his position unassailable by the most exacting moralist among mankind. Now it looked as if the whole project had been founded on a wrong conception. What was the homestead worth to him, now he had shed blood to defend it? How far would public opinion in that one-man country support him in his defence?
It was a troublesome thing, an appalling thing, to rise up and confront a man. He had reasoned, in a feeling of security—false security, specious reasoning, he feared—that the United States Government would stand behind him in the defence of his rights. Would it do so? What was the United States Government but an oligarchy of influence? The isolated individual, especially in a strange place, had no claim of kinship that he could enforce if the influential were bent on his destruction.
Rawlins withdrew a distance from the trampled scene of his dooryard, and sat down on a little rise behind the house. He was beginning to sweat and palpitate in the heat of doubt and fear that his disturbed imagination generated. The raiders had disappeared in the hills, heading for the nearest camp, he believed, to gather reinforcements and come back. It would not be their way to give it up.
In case they came back, what should he do? Would it be wiser to jump his horse when he saw them coming, and leave it to them, or stand and fight as he had begun? There was no answer to it forthcoming at that moment. He thought he'd better look around and find his hat.
As he turned to go about this errand, so trivial in the grim business of that day, Rawlins saw somebody approaching, riding hard. Edith Stone. There was no doubt about it. He knew her manner of riding, and he knew the horse. He went to meet her, running in his desire to stop her before she came in sight of the dead man lying in that stretched, straining posture, his face against the ground.
Edith arrived in a flurry of dust, leaning eagerly as she came on, to pull up beside him panting as if she had run the five miles from the ranch on foot. She was pale and frightened; there was a fearful look in her eyes.
"Oh, they didn't, they didn't!" she gasped, catching her breath with open mouth, the sound of it like a sob.
"No," said Rawlins stupidly.
He was standing with the rifle under his arm, pale, and dazed-looking as if he had fallen from a great height to a marvelous preservation.
"I saw them up there—I saw them through the field-glasses!" she shuddered.
"Yes," he seemed to agree, clogged and heavy in his understanding.
"What happened to you, Ned? Are you hurt?"
She flung out of the saddle, confronting him in fresh concern.
"No, not hurt."
"What happened, Ned? What did they do?"
"They tried to drag my house down, and I shot a man. He's up there; he's dead. I shot him."
"Oh, well," she said, looking at him curiously, "what could they expect? They came here huntin' trouble, didn't they?"
"You must not go up there," he said in terrible earnestness. "You must go back home."
"You don't want to let 'em get your nerve that way, Ned," she admonished, her own composure regained. "Come on down to the creek and wash your face—you'll feel better then."
She took him by the arm and led him down to the water's edge, her horse following. The animal sprawled its forelegs and drank gratefully from the shallow stream, while Edith took the rifle and Rawlins bent down to refresh himself according to her counsel.
"Didn't you meet them?" he asked, with a start as if the thought had frightened him, the water wasting through his cupped hands.
"They turned off into the hills. Go ahead and wash."
He obeyed in a spiritless way, as if nothing mattered, now he had killed a man. One might as well wash as do anything else under the distressing circumstances.
"You knew you might have to shoot some of them if you held your own," she said gently, yet with a little hardness of accusation or censure, as if to say he had failed in her expectations of him in not standing up under it like a man.
"It isn't so much a question of right as of values," he said, looking up gravely, water streaming from his face.
This was puzzling to her, and vexing because she did not understand. She flushed, frowning her displeasure.
"Did you know any of them? Was Hewitt there?"
"No, Hewitt wasn't with them, but I thought I recognized the man we had trouble with that day at the fence."
"Yes, he was apt to have a hand in it. Were you in the house when they came?"
"I'd been on the watch for them two, nights, outside. I must have dozed off—they were at their devilment when I first saw them."
Rawlins pulled a deep sigh, shaking his head sorrowfully, the weight of his tragedy still pressing him down, making his senses blunt.
"They came huntin' trouble," she repeated, "they got what was comin' to them. You act like you're sorry."
"It's an awful thing to kill a man over an outcast chunk of ground like this!" he said.
"I don't suppose they tried to kill you, I don't suppose they even took a quiet little shot or two at you to scare you off!"
"He was going to burn the house, he'd just struck a match when I—he'd just struck a match."
"What did you want to spoil his innocent little joke for if it's going to make you feel so sick?" she asked, out of patience with his shocked and shaken state. "Didn't they shoot at you?"
"I expect maybe they did, Edith," he replied dully.
"You expect maybe they did!" she said with scornful reproach. "Look here!"
She took hold of his shirt-sleeve, on the side towards his body, near the arm-pit, showing him a bullet hole, her manner as sternly corrective as if she had convicted him on suppressed evidence of some grave offence.
Rawlins looked at the place curiously, and tucked it under his arm to hide it, apparently ashamed to have his past peril known. He muttered something that she did not understand, holding his arm tight against his side as if to deny her any further exploration. His attitude nettled her, it seemed so sulky and petulant. It was as if he resented her producing evidence to justify him in the deed for which he had such remorseful qualms.
"Two or three inches over and it would have been your heart instead of your sleeve," she said. "And you stand there like you wanted to apologize for them! You make me sick, whinin' around here because you happened to kill a man that was tryin' to burn your house. What are you goin' to do when they come back with Hewitt to wipe you off the earth?"
There was an insolent challenge in her demand, a flaunting of open scorn.
"Come back with Hewitt?" he repeated, stretching his eyes as if the thing had an astonishing sound. His face darkened with a rush of hot blood; he stood feet wide apart, clenching his fists till he trembled in the vehemence of his sudden passion. "Damn them! I'll fight them to a finish!"
"You're all right now, honey," she said, a tremor in her voice, a dimness of tears in her eyes. She looked at him, smiling, a twisted little smile that hovered over an outbreak of downright tears.
"It's my property, it's my home, even if it don't amount to much. I'll defend it down to the last kick there is in me!"
He stepped over briskly and picked up his gun, scraping the trickling drops of his late ablution from his cheek with the rim of his hand.
"Yes, I knew you would," she said. "I'd like to stick around and help you, Ned, if you'll let me."
"You can help me more, Edith, if you'll cut across to Lost Cabin and send the sheriff and coroner over here," he said. "They had a double turn of rope around my shack—" indignantly, pounding the air in denunciation of the outrage—"with four horses hitched to it, trying to drag it down. It's there yet—the sheriff can see—right there yet!"
"If you think I'd better go, Ned," she consented.
"Somebody'll have to go, and I can't leave it to them to come back here and finish it off. Have you got anything to cut the wire?"
"I always carry something to cut the wire."
"Bring the sheriff in the short way—if he's got the nerve to come."
She nodded, starting up the bank for her horse. He caught her arm.
"Ride around the house," he said, giving her a straight, meaning look. She nodded again, going on.
Rawlins went up the creek to unsaddle Graball and turn him out in a hobble, seeing no remote exigency that would impel him to desert his homestead now. He was exhilarated by his recovery from his dazed oppression of spirits. He looked back from new altitudes at the numbed, shocked man who had usurped his proper place for a little while, thinking there was nothing to equal cold water to right a man up when staggering around from a nervous jolt like that. If he had been entirely himself, judging another in a fix like his own, he would have said that water was very good in its way, but it was nothing compared to the sharp prod of a woman's scorn.
That was a pretty decent sort of sheriff, a sheepman kind of sheriff. Whatever influence Senator Galloway had in politics generally around there, his foot must have slipped in the election of that man. So Rawlins thought that morning, when the sheriff arrived in quick time after Edith's summons, the coroner coming along more deliberately with a proper conveyance for carrying off the wreckage of the fight.
That was about all there was to it, the sheriff said, looking with keen interest at the double rope around the house, with the outrunning lariats lying as they had been cast off. If a gang of cusses came to shoot a man's home up he'd be a damn fool if he didn't shoot back. Rawlins had done a man's job, and that was about all there was to it, as far as the sheriff could see.
All of which was a great relief and cheer to Rawlins. The world expanded again, with sunshine, hope and ambition warming it, making it a desirable place.
The coroner arrived in due time, bringing with him a jury of sheepmen, being an expedient man and determined to have the case investigated and disposed of on the ground. The inquest was held over the slain man where he lay on the ground with the half-burned match beside his fingers. The whole proceeding did not occupy more than ten minutes, the jury not only finding Rawlins justified, but commending him warmly for his defence of his rights, which was, they said, in no small measure the defence of the public rights, to a long defied in the Dry Wood country.
The inquest over, these sheepmen cast their calculative eyes around the country, knowing themselves safe in their official position, taking advantage of the event to do a little locating against some future day. They spoke admiringly of Rawlins' fine location for sheep, looked at his hay, pulled handfuls of it out of the stacks and smelt it, their faces almost beatific in the satisfaction of its sweet scent.
Edith hung back out of the proceedings until they had lifted the body into the wagon and covered it with a sheep-herder's tent. Then she came over to shake hands with Rawlins, as the rest of the sheepmen had done, and do the best she could to make it appear that killing a man under the proper circumstances was nothing to worry over or remember with remorse.
The sheepmen all knew Edith, for fifty or sixty miles was a small matter between neighbors in Dry Wood in those times. It is just about the same even to-day. They talked about the drought, and kicked the ground judiciously, turning up the soil to note its qualities, and chewed pieces of hay from Rawlins' stacks, making quite a neighborly reunion out of it. The dead man in the wagon was the smallest part of their thoughts.
Not so with Rawlins after the coroner, the jurymen and the sheriff had gone back to Lost Cabin, taking the short cut across Galloway's land for the first time in their lives; and Edith had ridden away to the ranch to relieve whatever anxiety her aunt might feel over her unexplained absence. It was a grim and disturbing thing to stand before him, even with the question of justification smoothed away. It would take a long time to wear the hideous accusation from his own conscience, that upbraiding that it might have been avoided, that weighing of values in which his end of the balance seemed to rise so emptily.
An unworthy man, an outlawed man, a vicious and murderous villain. Yet he had been human, worth more at his basest evaluation than the little oblong of semi-arid land that a perverse infatuation had urged this sheep-mad stranger from afar to enter upon in peril and attempt to hold in strife.
There would not be much in that life, hiding out of a night that way like a cat, to wake soon or late with the bold challenge of fire in his eyes. This resistance, this first success, would only embitter them, lending vengeance to their other grievances, fancied or contrived.
So Rawlins reasoned as he made his bed in the buffalo wallow that night. Not in the intention of standing sentinel over his possessions again, for he was weary to the bone. Let them come when they would and do what they might if he could not wake in time to stop them. If it came to a battle again he would stick to his hole and give them the best he had. Even the sheepmen, who plainly expected much of him, could not demand more.