The Pretender

I

JED SOUTHWICK stood on the uninhabited east shore of the Smoky Lake, before the high, bulbous castles of white tufa. It was after sunset and, in the purple haze across the lake, mountain wind was breaking into the solid heat of the day, twisting up slender whirlwinds of white dust from the shore. These columns traveled slowly northward, as if upon the face of the water. The clamor of innumerable water birds, which had amazed him in the boat at sunset, had given way to a silence so intense that his ears rang constantly. When he listened closely, the ringing deepened into a roar like that of a river in a cave. He knew this to be the roar of his own blood, an effect due to the altitude, yet was surprised at the clarity with which he heard through the roar the smallest exterior sound, like the fall of a pebble. Every sound was grossly magnified here, and seemed to be made by someone else, even when he dropped the pebble.

He was startled now by an unnatural clinking sound, and heaved himself up through the encompassing daydream state. Consciously refocusing his eyes from the deceptive distances of the lake, he saw his dog, a tall, thin, but bigchested pointer, tracing rapidly at the edge of the water, and then the Indian standing on the beach of black sand and tiny white shells. Southwick’s supplies were neatly heaped upon the beach, and beside the boat the Indian was gently touching together two silver dollars and watching Southwick, who again wondered impatiently why, when that flat Mongolian face really showed nothing, he must feel it, when turned upon him, to be humorously sardonic.

‘Four dollars, Joe-Jack?’ he asked.

The Indian smiled, showing his worn teeth. ‘Four dollar,’he said. ‘I come in the morning, four days.’

‘In the morning, four days,’ Southwick agreed.

While he could hear the motor, Southwick stood hypnotized, staring after the boat, and he could hear it for a long time. Long after it had ceased to echo on the rocks, after he could hear it constantly, freshets of wind brought back the faint put-put-put. Finally, however, there was only the wind in many tones among the rocks, and the slap of the rising water. Southwick woke then to the stimulus of his exceeding loneliness. The pointer also felt their situation, for he ceased casting about and sat near Southwick, quiet and alert.

Southwick, to relieve his own apprehension, spoke cheerfully to the dog, and began to carry his supplies up the beach and into a hollow behind one wing of the nearest castle, a place he had chosen in daylight.

When he had supper cooking, and could look about in the yellow light from the lantern, he experienced the exhilaration of something accomplished. He was almost glad that he had made the journey alone. There was a significance in even the least important experience alone — like setting up camp or carrying the kegs and staring at the stars — that was lacking in company. Company diminished one’s powers, both of attention and of retention.

Also, when he returned East, having made the trip alone, the only one of his group to have shot antelope or even seen them, he would have new confidence as a hunter. Seeing men like fat Jack Handley, or the immovable Peterson, or easygoing, confident Williams, around the fire in their Adirondack lodge made Southwick feel that he was a pretender. He usually got his buck with the others, nor did they ever openly ridicule him. Yet, remembering how he handled his rifle, how awkwardly he stalked, how at times his heart closed and his eyes danced when the buck posed in the thin, yellow woods and he could not raise his gun or feel the trigger with his finger, he always felt like a man sitting a little out of the circle. In the circle, in the light, the good hunters sat eating and drinking and talking with passive, humorous faces, and big hands that could not be unsteady. No, he had never been a hunter, but only a man tolerated by the hunters.

Down the sand, hard to tell how far off because of the echoes in the white castles, there was a loud report, and then a succession of many diminishing reports. Southwick held his breath and felt his heart pound abnormally, though outwardly he had scarcely stirred. Then, remembering the afternoon, he recognized the sound: a big bird, a pelican probably, taking off from the water. Incredibly big, these white pelicans, and looking somehow, in their wooden flight, prehistoric and reptilian. The clear reports of the take-off made him realize also that the wind had died and the water grown still.

A repetition of the sounds, accompanied by a similar but more distant outbreak just off beat, startled him less. Then he heard the jumping of a fish — a big one, by the splash of his fall. The dog also listened intently to each new sound, and sometimes stood and growled a little, but sat down again at Southwick’s command. As he began to recognize immediately the sounds coming to him, Southwick exulted again, as at his first recognition of accomplishment.

However, in spite of his new confidence, he made one concession to his old self. After extinguishing his lantern, and before crawling into his sleeping bag, he laid his rifle on the blanket within reach. Also, before he could fall asleep, he commanded the dog to lie between him and the wide opening from the rocks, which looked northward along the dark curve of the beach to two more great white rock fortifications like his own, and then, beyond, one by itself. The last things he was looking at before he fell asleep were these white citadels, gleaming monstrously in the starlight, one beyond another up the edge of the dark water against the dark hills.

II

Sometime in the night Southwick woke, not gradually, but at once, some definite impression demanding wakefulness having entered his mind. He had no recollection of the impression, not even, for a moment, any idea where he was. He lay staring at the stars and the towers of rock in bewilderment.

Then he heard the dog growl, a throaty growl, long, and reinforced at intervals, but always low, as if for his own encouragement and in the hope that nothing else would hear it. After a brief chill, which he could not explain or resist, Southwick raised himself on one elbow. At first he could not see the dog, which had been lying at the foot of the pallet. Then he discovered him, a few yards farther out, no longer lying, but standing rigidly and facing into the dark up the shore. Very quietly Southwick spoke to him.

‘What is it, big boy?’

The dog relaxed and waved his tail a few short strokes, but did not shift his attention.

Manfully Southwick said, ‘Forget it, boy; it’s nothing. Just a new place, that’s all.’

The dog seemed about to return when he was again fixed by the sound which Southwick knew at once had awakened him. It was two short, high barks, followed immediately by a thin and rising howl, terminating in a series of the staccato barks so rapid as to sound like a falsetto chuckle.

The howl and chuckle were repeated from a slightly different, point, and, sensing the rapid movement of its maker, Southwick in spite of himself shuddered, the chill only fading when it swept strongly over him again in reaction to a much closer series of yaps and a shorter howl, coming apparently from the foothills directly east. Instantly the northern voice responded, also with a shorter howl and greater number of yaps, now seeming to vary along a short scale. The nearer reply changed position also, and was entirely a high, rapid, barking one. The creatures were apparently converging; the affair in the dark was becoming purely conversational. The barking continued, with brief periods of silence and an occasional howl so short as to seem a rising inflection of somewhat hysterical laughter.

So constant was the change of position that Southwick realized, the chill renewed, that he was no longer sure of direction. The chills, which kept his body almost constantly covered with goose pimples, gave him a bodily sensation of danger which he was unable to combat as long as the shifting chuckling and howling continued to force his attention.

He was nearly certain again that the voices were converging, and that he knew where, though not how far away, when well to the south, from behind his own rock, rose another cry, more howl than chuckle. Then from the north, perhaps from beyond the farthest visible bulk of foothill, came an extremely thin and prolonged howl, after which his ears, straining for the accustomed succession, could detect no yapping at all. Unable to think because of the complex attention demanded by the widely separated chorus, Southwick realized, and now with real panic, that he was losing track of numbers as well as direction. The chorus continuing, near, far, north, south, even at times, he believed, crossing, he was no longer able to tell whether there were two or three animals ranging aimlessly and with incredible speed, or a dozen moving slowly and with a group determination brought about by their ceaseless chatter. The mountains, and even the shore, became to him an intricate lacework of swiftly casting and purposeful voices.

The dog, also worried by this complexity, had withdrawn from his outpost, and stood near the pallet, growling.

Desiring not to make a sound, Southwick inched out of his blankets, knelt upon them, and took up his rifle, though without looking away from the opening and the starlit spaces beyond, in which he believed he could see small, dark forms running, or rather gliding, soundlessly back and forth, out of his range to the right and left, then back into it again. Now he understood that only the farther animals were talking, and that the darkness between him and them was filled with the movements of others, which were silent.

Foolishly there was filmed on his inner vision, clearly and in a moment of fixity, the bony, morose face of the trader at the Arahoe post, standing behind the counter with a crimson and gray Indian blanket on the wall at his back. The trader was saying, ‘I wouldn’t go over alone, if I were you.’

Then it. came into his mind that these were coyotes, and probably harmless. But the recollection didn’t decrease his tension, for too much of him continued to insist upon the need for defense and the difficulty of determining the number, location, and intention of the marauders. Also, never having seen a coyote, he found himself forming an image completely at odds with their reputation, and had several times to diminish the beasts of his brain, only to find them suddenly grown again and taking on improbable attributes of swiftness, savagery, and cunning.

The intervals when the coyotes were silent, brought on, with a conviction of impending attack, an increase of tension and listening which made him stop breathing. When they sounded again, and still at a distance, he was greatly relieved, and drew his breath in a gasp, and then at once held it again, remembering that some of the beasts were closer, and silent. He now saw that their movements were being deliberately screened by the distant play of yapping and whining. He had lost all sense of time.

When, in one of the periods of silence, the dog suddenly barked, then growled in an unbroken crescendo and made a rush, disappearing around the right wing of the rock, Southwick jumped to his feet and ran crouching to the opposite wall. He was surprised to find himself standing there, his back to the rock and the rifle held at ready. He could not remember leaving his kneeling position.

In the outside dark he heard a flurry of barking and snapping, and then, as if in pursuit, but definitely moving away from him, the short, deeper, excited barks of the dog. He called, at first authoritatively, then frantically, but had to be quiet between calls to make sure of his own surroundings, and then heard the chase still receding. He could imagine the dog intent upon the wolf-like haunches shooting away before him, barking less often, but snarling with furious hopefulness when he touched, or seemed about to touch.

The dog did not return.

After waiting for perhaps an hour, Southwick slowly and cautiously sat down, propping his elbows on his knees to hold the gun ready. Not certainly nearer or farther, the noisy play continued. With the dog gone, Southwick had to watch and listen more intently than ever. It. went through his mind several times that he did not know whether an attacking coyote came silently, or with some warning, such as a fighting dog gives. It worried him that he could not conceive any intellectual method of discovering. You knew, or you didn’t. The problem was insoluble, yet continued to recur until it even distracted his defensive attention.

Actually Southwick was getting tired, and could no longer maintain steadily the high pitch of caut ion induced by his dread. He had lapses beyond fear, and the fear returned each time wit h a quick impact which made him shake. The thoughts which drew him into the dangerous lapses were various and isolated. They seemed to have no regular order, or even to be related save by an emotional undercurrent of helplessness which in some cases did not pertain to the thought at all. Each thought came into his mind complete, as an image or even a printed statement, and left an indelible impression, so that at. times he would see one or two or even three, or at least fragments of them, through the most recent one, much as in the movies, by superimposing, a man will be shown and behind him the scenes of which he is thinking. One was frequently repeated: —

The stage driver, a sandy man with a twisted mouth and a drawl, was driving the sand-colored touring car rapidly over the road between stone mountains and saying, but in Southwick’s voice and in the manner of an encyclopaedia, ‘The coyote is fundamentally cowardly and will not attack a man unless the man is manifestly physically helpless. Almost the only exception to this is in the case of madness. The coyote is peculiarly susceptible to rabies, which often affects him even more violently than it does the dog.’

The words that recurred most frequently, always in a voice from outside, were, ‘God, I wish Peterson was here; or Handley; or Williams. I wish Peterson and Handley and Williams were here.’ And these were accompanied only by images of the men, arising and passing at the instant of thinking their names. Sometimes, after this thought, he would say to himself, though not aloud, ‘My God, why did I ever come out here?’

In his wakeful and attentive moments he often believed that he heard the dog returning, and when this proved untrue was certain that the sound must have been made by a coyote which was very close. Also, because of his numbness of mind, he heard the coyotes’ voices more as a unit and as more continuous than they actually were, and was now certain that they expressed the malice of intelligent beings.

Sometime before dawn the barking and thin howling finally ceased, as if the creatures had gradually lost body in the night. When he was finally aware of this. Southwick was so startled as to jerk completely awake again, but with a nerveless, dark-hour feeling that convinced him that any move he made would be ineffectual, though at the same time he understood that the coyotes had not withdrawn, but were about to act.

Peering closely, he saw two of them watching, one crouched directly before him, perhaps twenty feet away, the other to the left, sitting erect before a separate white boulder. He ceased breathing, and did not notice when the cold sweat broke out suddenly on his body. He was aware only, and almost with elation, that it was the moment of trial, and that never had he been more awake or clearheaded. In the crisis he had rallied.

He held his breath to watch accurately, but neither animal moved. In the instant he was forced to gulp air, the one before him lifted and crept forward. Southwick sprang up, crying at it, ‘ Get out! Get out, damn you! ‘ and gripping his rifle by the barrel to swing it as a club at the flying skull. The beast crouched again, and Southwick partially recovered, though, without knowing it, he was breathing rapidly and hoarsely, and sometimes whimpering. He only realized, with a new surge of fear, what he was doing with t he rifle. As he turned it to fire, he obliquely saw the coyote before the boulder rise, though presenting the same silhouette as when sitting, and advance a step or two. Automatically the rifle went up and the trigger finger jerked. He heard the bullet ricochet with a high, thin scream from the rock. The animal remained standing, and the other took advantage of the shot to come forward again. Southwick swung the rifle and fired at it, but again must have missed, for the shadow remained attentive. He could not understand why he should shoot so poorly; not twenty feet, yet he had missed both.

He now shot with extreme care. Each report seemed to come from the rocks high above him, but he had no doubt, he was shooting, and expected urgently to see first one and then the other of the shadows leap and drop with finality. Neither did. They simply abandoned their tactics of alternate approach and began to inch forward together. If he were to have any chance, he had to get one of them, so that his attention should not be divided. He told himself this, aloud, and, selecting the closer one, prepared to shoot as if at a target, releasing half his breath, counting three, and concentrating upon making his trigger finger squeeze and not jerk. When his patience was nearly exhausted, the trigger finally ceased to resist, and gave quickly. There was no report, but a click.

The click seemed louder than a report, because the creatures must understand what it meant. Momentarily Southwick’s moral defenses caved. He screamed and, dropping the rifle, turned and tried to scramble up the big rock. Not only was this impossible, but he fell in the attempt. Realizing his terrible vulnerability on his hands and knees, he whirled before rising, in order at least to face the rush. His knee struck against the rifle, which he had already forgotten. He struggled to his feet at once, prepared again to swing the gun. If he could catch the nearer one on the head he could kill it, at least stun it. Against one there would be a chance.

But, even as he prepared to charge, his eye was caught by another motion. It was immediately dissolved behind the wing of rock on the right, but a glance showed many there. Motion ceased the instant he looked, but it was evident that his plan to rush would be fatal. The two boldest were not stalking him alone, but serving as decoys to draw him for the pack. This realization might have unnerved him completely, but at the same time he perceived how much time had passed since the last shot, and knew that the coyotes had not understood what the click meant, and must also have been cowed by his bold threat. It was encouraging to know that they had their weakness also. He became quite cool again, and, as a ruse, advanced a step with the rifle held like a bat. The coyotes visibly shrank, not running, but sinking and withdrawing a little. This triumph almost made Southwick act rashly, but he checked himself and began a slow retreat towards his sleeping bag. In this retreat he remained upright, with the rifle threatening. When the coyotes once more inched in, he advanced a full step, boldly, and again they froze.

The success of his courage made Southwick exultant in spite of the gravity, perhaps finality, of his predicament. It was worth it, even death, to have proved himself. But he did not let exultation make him rash again. Continuing his guarded retreat until he was beside the storage cave, he there made one more threatening gesture, which fixed the coyotes at the mouth of his shelter, then stooped swiftly, drew out a box of cartridges, and scuttled up among the boulders of the main formation. This climb was dangerous, for it exposed him to the pack behind the wing, and a rush from them might cut him off without a wall for his back. But in spite of this, and the fact that his legs several times failed him, he got to a shallow hollow in the upper wall. It was an excellent fort, for not only was it fifty feet above his camp, but the overhanging, broken dome made attack from above impossible; there was a sheer drop on the side towards the lake, and on the right an angle of the dome would force attackers into the same narrow boulder-filled route he had used.

With difficulty he reloaded his clip, inserted it, and threw the first cartridge into firing position. Only then did he feel more secure, and relax enough to realize that part of his clumsiness in loading had been due to the fact that he was whimpering almost constantly and breathing in great, tremulous sobs, though without tears. Thereafter he crouched in his fort, not as a superior being temporarily at bay, but as a mindless thing whose instinct demanded that it die squirming and gnawing.

III

The sun had been up more than two hours when Southwick, having carefully examined the sand and rocks below, ventured out of his hollow.

In camp he was cautious, eating and drinking with his back to the rock and the rifle beside him, and only after forcing himself to walk over the whole area in which his assailants had appeared. But water, food, and the peaceful clarity of every detail in the sunlight partially restored his sense of security. He compelled himself to sit still while he smoked an entire cigarette, and this normal behavior led him to wonder how great a part imagination had played in the experience of the night. When he had finished the cigarette he went to the spot where he had stood to fire at the two decoy coyotes. The sand there was covered with doglike tracks, but this told him nothing certain. His dog had moved about there a great deal. In what he believed to have been the approximate positions of the two animals when he last fired, there was a sage bush and a small white rock with an indented side towards him. And there was scattered brush where he believed he had seen the pack hovering. But the certainty that there had been motion in the night remained, and he could not be sure. Also, he could not doubt that the laughter and howling had been real.

He returned to his sleeping bag, moved it into the shade of the wing, and sat down on it. He sat for a long time, scarcely thinking or feeling anything but the increasing heat. He wanted very much to sleep. His eyes felt heavy, scorched and enlarged, and caused pain and dizziness when he looked at sunlight on the white sand and rock. But, though he nearly fell asleep several times, he put olt complete surrender. Finally he decided at least to rest, and, drawing his sleeping bag to a position in which his head and shoulders would be raised, he lay down. Shortly, in this position, he did sleep.

He was awakened at noon by the sun on his face. He had two sensations at the moment of waking, horror at his carelessness and certainty that his dog was near. He sat up quickly and looked about, but, seeing that he was still alone, realized that actually he had felt that the dog had never been absent. He made a brief reconnaissance, and, finding all secure, ate again and drank a great deal of water. But his anxiety about the dog was not fixed. He not only felt its absence more sharply, being partially refreshed, but realized that the dog was a test of the reality of the night before. If the dog was all right, everything was all right. He had to be sure about the dog.

Still he wouldn’t call for it. It was unthinkable that he should shatter that protective silence. He preferred to take his rifle and go and look for the dog, within a reasonable radius. He understood that the elevated hollow in the tufa formation had become a centre of his activity with which he must maintain spiritual contact. Beyond the point at which this contact became tenuous, he must not proceed.

But as he walked he began gradually to move with more freedom, which restored a fallacious sense of power. His first starts at the skitterings of lizards wore down to a tolerant expectation. He began to see the lizards before they stirred, and, since there was nothing else to startle him, his confidence increased.

When he actually found the dog, then, he was shocked, and at the same moment saw that it was late in the afternoon and felt forcibly that he had lost contact with his fort. The dog was lying on its side in a small dry gully, with its head back as if baying, and there were already a large number of flies working, not only on its eyes, but on its belly and extended throat, which were elaborately ripped. There was also a stream of small red ants entering the belly, and one leaving.

His return to the rock castle was nearly a flight.

He arrived at the rocks sweating heavily, but at once set to work hauling his sleeping bag, and then his stove, water kegs, canned goods, and ammunition up over the rocks and into his elevated hollow. It troubled him all during the time he worked that he must leave his rifle at one end or the other of the route, and, having elected to leave it at the base, he was sure each t ime he began to climb that he should have carried it up first and left it above, where he would finally need it.

At last, however, and while there was still a little daylight, he was secured in his fort. He was encouraged, and made coffee and cooked stew. These, and a glass of whiskey taken slowly in the position of a sitting Buddha, with the rifle across his lap, somewhat steadied him, in spite of thoughts brought back by the increasing darkness, in which, slowly, isolated rocks and bushes below him grew and the mountains became steadily nearer and higher.

Indeed, sitting thus on the soft pallet, his back supported by the cliff, he nearly dozed. But some indefinable time later, of the passage of which he was certain only because the stars had suddenly occupied the world again, any further lack of caution became impossible. A sensation of rising hair on his spine recurred in Southwick, and he drew his breath in a great, trembling sigh when he realized, because it was repeated, what had wakened him. From somewhere in the distance under the mountains, but he knew that he was not at all sure where, came faintly two short, high barks, followed immediately by a thin and rising howl terminating in a series of the staccato barks so rapid as to sound like a falsetto chuckle.

IV

Before daylight on the fourth morning, in the boat approaching the eastern shore, the morose agent was yelling at Joe-Jack above the chatter of the outboard motor, ‘You’re crazy. I’d have heard it, wouldn’t I? Over the water you could hear a rock bounce, let alone a rifle.’

The Indian in the prow did not look back, but the trader could hear him by turning his head.

‘I heard ‘em. Yesterday night, too.’

The trader was contemptuous. ‘Last night, too, eh?’

‘The other nights, too.’

‘You tellin’ me you heard shootin’ every night?’ the trader yelled.

He could see the Indian’s head jerk once in assent.

‘Maybe he was shootin’ at coyotes,’ the agent said. ‘They’re enough to drive a man crazy at night, sometimes.’

The Indian shook his head.

‘Ghosts, I suppose,’ said the agent. ‘Spooks of your blanket forefathers.’

The Indian shrugged his shoulders.

‘All night., this night, he shoot,’ he said after a moment.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said the agent.

‘All night,’ Joe-Jack said. Then he said, ‘No coyotes all night.’

The agent shook his head as if troubled by a persistent though light worry. He switched sidewards to anchor the tiller with a knee while he lit a cigarette. The flare showed his face as surly and indifferent as ever.

The white shore had appeared, a faint long line before them. The trader peered intently, swung the boat a little to the north, and stepped the motor down. The Indian was also peering from his place in the prow. The report of a rifle and the whining ricochet, both sounding very close, surprised them. They got out onto the sand.

‘What in hell’s he shootin’ at in this light?’ the agent said. ‘The guy’s cracked.’

Once more they heard the rifle.

‘On the north side,’ the trader said, and they moved up more rapidly. Before passing beyond the last bulge onto the north side, however, the trader stopped and shouted, ‘Hey!’

His voice echoed briefly, but there was silence after it.

The trader dropped his cigarette into the sand, ground it in with his heel, and stared at the indentation for a moment. Then he appeared to have come to a decision. He pointed to a piece of sagebrush, recently uprooted, lying between the rocks.

‘ Gimme that,’ he said.

Joe-Jack gave it to him. Removing his reefer, which was a heavy one of red plaid, he put it over the bush and pushed it slowly from behind the rock. The report and fountain of sand came at once. When he withdrew the coat, there was a clean hole in it, through the centre of the back. He thrust the sagebrush out by itself. The bullet snipped a central twig from it and screamed off the face of a small rock beyond.

‘God,’the trader said, ‘he’ll shoot at anything.’

The Indian pointed at the rock from which the last bullet had ricocheted and shook his head.

‘Don’t worry,’ the trader said. ‘I won’t try it again.’

He put his coat on, after fingering the hole, squatted under the shelter of the rock, and for a time pulled his lip and stared at nothing.

‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘we gotta try. One more like that, though, and he can stay here till doomsday, for all of me. What the devil was his name?’ he said, with sudden irritation. ‘If I could remember his name — ‘

‘Sudwig,’ Joe-Jack said.

‘That’s it. Southwick — Jed Southwick. Hey!’ he called.

There was only the echo again.

‘Hey, Southwick!’ he called.

He believed that again there would be only silence, but from above them a hoarse voice called with great urgency, ‘Peterson, is that you? Is that you, Pete?’ and, when the agent was unable to conceive an immediate reply, cried even more urgently, ‘Handley? Peterson? Williams? Is that you?’

The trader looked at the Indian and shook his head once, with great finality, and then shrugged his shoulders.

‘Pete!’ cried the voice above. It was terrified by the silence. ‘Is that you, Pete?’

‘Yeah,’ the trader called heartily. ‘It’s me, all right. Come on down.’

‘Oh, God,’ cried the voice above. ‘Oh, thank God.’ They could hear Southwick scrambling on the rocks, and the rifle striking against them. They could hear him also continually talking as he came down, a running, feverish, relieved chatter.

The trader’s face suddenly became very nervous and determined. ‘Look,’ he said quickly to the Indian, ‘I don’t know what Peterson looks like, but not like you, that’s a cinch. Get back under,’ he instructed, pushing the Indian against the rock. ‘And you get that gun,’ he said nervously.

He listened. The scrambling above had stopped. After a moment the voice called again, ‘Pete! Where are you, Pete?’ The man was dreadfully afraid again, and the voice was choked, as with the beginning of weeping.

The agent took a deep breath, as if about to plunge into cold water.

‘Here!’ he called. ‘Right here, Jed.’

Again the boots came slipping and sliding above. Twice the man must have fallen, for the rattling stopped, and the second time there was a moan.

‘Coming, Jed?’ the agent called.

He was coming. The babbling had begun again also, and now the agent could make out. part of it. ‘I heard you the first time, Pete,’ Southwick was weeping joyfully. ‘But I wasn’t sure. I’ve been hearing you all night. All night I’d think I heard you, and I’d listen, but you weren’t there. I kept thinking I heard you, but there wasn’t anything. I was hearing all sorts of things, I guess.’

Southwick appeared. His face, under the dirt, was blistered until the eyes were almost closed, and the lips were swollen and black. Through t he scorched skin stood a heavy stubble of beard. Even his hands, one of them holding the rifle, were red and sore-looking. There were tears running in the dirt and blisters of his face.

He did not hesitate upon seeing the agent. He kept running forward, grinning through his tears. In fact he was weak with joy and relief, nearly laughing. He dropped the rifle and took the agent’s extended hand in both his, pumping it. up and down. The eyes staring up into the agent’s were sunken, so that they appeared black above. The lids were scorched and thick, but still between them could be seen the brimming blue eyes, the great relief and joy in them.

‘God, I’m glad you got here, Pete,’ he cried. ‘You have no idea how glad I am you got here.’

He laughed, a little hysterically, because, naturally, he was tired. ‘I don’t know,’ he laughed, ‘if I could have stuck it if you hadn’t got here now. All night, this time.’

The Indian picked up the rifle, and turned towards the rocks from which Southwick had just descended.

‘Never mind, Joe,’ the trader said. ‘Another time. Nobody’ll get them here.’

Southwick’s face clouded. ‘Joe?’ he asked.

‘You remember,’ the trader risked. ‘The Indian that brought us over.’

‘Oh, yes, yes, of course,’ Southwick said cheerfully, and looked at Joe for a long time, smiling constantly, but obviously without recognition.

‘Come on,’ the agent said. ‘We’ll talk on the way over.’ He took Southwick’s arm.

The Indian followed them with the rifle. Two or three times he looked up at the rocks, where the rest of Southwick’s things were visible.

‘You must have scared them off when you came up,’ Southwick said, laughing.

‘Guess we did,’ the agent agreed. ‘Must have. We didn’t even see them.’ He had to support Southwick somewhat, with his arm.

‘Where’s Handley?’ Southwick asked. ‘And Williams?’

‘They didn’t come over,’ the agent said. He was finding the talk difficult. ‘I came over alone, with Joe.’

They worked down towards the beach in silence for a moment.

‘I lost the dog, though,’ Southwick said sadly. ‘But you know, Pete,’ he went on joyously, and gripped the agent’s arm. He hesitated, and when he spoke again it was with more restraint. ‘You know, Pete, I used to be scared sometimes. I never said anything, of course, but I was. I was always pretending. You knew it, didn’t you, Pete? ‘ he asked.

‘I guess so,’ said the agent. ‘Yes, I knew it.’

‘They all knew it, didn’t they, Pete?’

‘Yeah, I guess they all knew it.’

‘Well, you know, Pete,’ Southwick said joyfully again, ‘I’m not any more. I got over it, Pete. It’s licked. All last night, Pete, and scarcely enough light to see them by, I sat up there and kept those ugly devils off. All night, Pete, and by myself. And I wasn’t scared.’

‘That’s good,’ the trader said. ‘That’s good.’

He helped Southwick into the boat while the Indian held it up against the beach. When the agent was seated at the tiller again, Joe-Jack pushed off, getting wet to his ankles before he pulled up onto the prow and crawled in. He kept tight hold on the gun, though.

The agent finally got the motor started. When he had the boat turned and headed for the far side, he took cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

‘Have one?’ he asked Southwick.

‘Thanks.’

When they had smoked a moment, and as the boat settled into its regular chatter, Southwick said, ‘You have no idea what it’s like, Pete.’

‘What what’s like?’ the agent asked.

‘Not to be afraid any more,’ Southwick said. In spite of the blisters and dirt, it could be seen that his expression was beatific.

‘Yeh,’ said the agent.

‘Especially when you’ve been afraid as long as I have,’ Southwick said.

The agent didn’t say anything. He smoked and gave his attention to the motor, which was not running altogether smoothly.

The Indian, however, continued to watch Southwick’s back attentively.