The Brave Cowboy Read Free Page B

mind
…
to change my way,

And leave my crowd… that was so gay
…
    His hard, wind-honed, sun-dried face softened a little under the influence of the music, became human, almost gentle.
    To leave my love, who’d promised me her hand
,
And head down south… of the Rio Grande…
    The mare’s iron-shod hooves clinked on the black rock; a whisper of wind drifted through the brittle clicking leaves of the greasewood. Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing the fissured red cliffs, the canyons and gorges a thousand feet deep, the towers leaning out from the main wall, the foothills dry and barren as old bones, and above and behind these tumbled ruins the final barrier of granite, the great horizontal crest tilted up a mile high into the frosty blue sky, sparkling with a new fall of snow. The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervousinfluences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the secret chambers of The Factory, in the backroom of the realtor’s office during the composition of an intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul.
    It was in the year… of eighty-three,

That A. J. Stinson… hired me…
    The young man rode on, loafing in the saddle and singing to himself and the mare, but with his eyes still sighted on the northern fringe of the city where the houses turned to mud and dried out among cotton-woods and irrigation ditches on the edge of the all-surrounding desert.
    He passed within a half mile of a sheep camp: black tarpaper shack, a cardboard housetrailer resting on two flat tires, a brush corral, a flatbed truck with dismantled engine, a watertank and its windmill with motionless vanes, a great glittering heap of tincans; no men or sheep visible. Creeping toward this establishment from the north along the vague scratch of a road was a cloud of dust, moving with what at that distance seemed like agonizing deliberation; at the point of the dustcloud was a minute black object, tremulous in the shimmering light, apparently in motion, disappearing now and then, reappearing, silent and busy and persevering: a truck or car bouncing along at forty miles an hour over a washboard road. The distance and the silence, the grotesque disproportion between the small dark agitated object and its enveloping continuum of space and silence, gave its activity an absurd, pathetic air.
    Horse and rider came to another obstacle and a second halt—the black drop-off, the congealed rim of the lava flow, a jumbled mass of rock falling steeply to theplain ninety feet below. The man turned the mare to the north and followed the edge of the cliff until he came to a place where descent was possible. He dismounted then and led the mare down slowly and cautiously, squeezing between the black boulders, switching back and forth across the face of the slope.
    Above him, flowing over the dark burnt-out iron of the mesa, the sky turned deep liquid blue, vivid, burning, profound, the bottomless sea of the atmosphere. The young man stopped once and stared up at it, rubbing his jaw, and then went on. The mare followed him reluctantly, eyes rolling and knees trembling, before plunging and sliding down from one ledge to the next. The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone. Horse and man passed other signs and stigmata of life: the petroglyph of a wild turkey chiseled in the stone, a pair of tincans