The Brave Cowboy Read Free Page A

tumbleweeds bounced around and around like figures in a square dance.
    The mare pawed at the sand, jerking her head nervously, and the leather gear on her back creaked and rustled—the most reassuring and satisfying of sounds, that agitation of used, worn, familiar leather. The man heard it, turned, caught up the dragging reins, put a hand on the pommel, his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. The mare was already facing the east, the river; he touched her with his spurs and she started off, breaking almost at once into a trot. He pulled back a little and kept her at a brisk walking gait, beading not for the center of the city but toward the northern tip of its elongated trunk.
    Mounted and armed, he rode for the city, the slanting blaze of the sun twinkling on the buttplate of the rifle, the silver buckle, the spurs, touching with fire the brief puffs of dust rising up from each step of the horse, glistening on the smooth hide of the mare’s shoulders, thighs, operating muscles. The man himself, in his worn dusty clothing, did not reflect much light; in the full glare of the morning sun there was something shadowy and smoke-like about him, something faded, blurred, remembered.
    He gazed straight forward as he rode, apparently indifferent to the vast sweep of desert around him, the sky singing overhead. The five volcanoes to the south, lined up like old ruined tombs, swung slowly around on his wheeling horizon. Riding into the brush of grease-wood, live oak, mesquite, he flushed a covey of quail; they rose in unison from the desert floor, shrilling and fluttering, flew ahead for a distance and dropped in unison to the ground again. When he rode up to them they rose into the air again, flew ahead and dropped into the brush, still in front of him. He ignored them, thinking of something else, his eyes under the shadow of the hat fixed intently on the vague complex of the city.
    His course brought him to an arroyo, whose sandy bed he followed for a mile or more until it veered too much to the south. Under the arroyo’s banks, on the fine drifted sand, he noted the delicate hieroglyphics of field mice, lizards, gophers, jackrabbits, quail and buzzards, but in the light of day only a few lizards appeared, swift and rubbery and insignificant, to watch the passage of man and horse.
    When the arroyo turned he rode up out of it and across the lava rock again, through scattered patches of rabbitbrush and tumbleweed, until he came eventually to a barbed-wire fence, gleaming new wire stretched with vibrant tautness between steel stakes driven into the sand and rock, reinforced between stakes with wire staves. The man looked for a gate but could see only the fence itself extended north and south to a pair of vanishing points, an unbroken thin stiff line of geometric exactitude scored with a bizarre, mechanical precision over the face of the rolling earth. He dismounted, taking a pair of fencing pliers from one of the saddlebags, and pushed his way through banked-up tumble-weeds to the fence. He cut the wire—the twisted steel resisting the bite of his pliers for a moment, then yielding with a soft sudden grunt to spring apart in coiled tension, touching the ground only lightly with its barbed points—and returned to the mare, remounted, and rodethrough the opening, followed by a few stirring tumbleweeds.
    He rode on, approaching the rim of the ancient lava flow and the glint of the river beyond it, the willows, the soft yellow-leaved cottonwoods on the banks of the river. The rider relaxed in the saddle, turning in the seat, and lifted one leg and rested it on the mare’s neck. After a while he pushed back his hat and unslung the guitar from his back and struck off a few running chords. The mare answered with a twitch of her ears and stepped forward quickly. He strummed a few more chords, tightened one of the strings, and then began to sing, very softly, addressing no one but himself and the mare.
    I made up my