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The Man in the Black Hat
From where the boy's wagon was parked Laramie Peak,
which from every other perspective appeared in some degree or another
triangular, had a rounded aspect suggesting the crown of a tall black
hat. The wagon stood braced on the summit of a low hill rising from a
rolling plain dotted with pale stones and dark clumps of dwarf pine
stunted by the thin soil and twisted by the unobstructed wind, with a
view extending fully 360 degrees around the distant horizon within
whose circle Old Man Redmond's cattle grazed with their heads pointing
all in the same direction. On one side of the bunk wagon was a
buckboard filled with hay to which a trailing snub rope was tied by
one end, on the other a stack of split pine and cedar wood with a
bright-edged axe leaning against it and surrounded by a ring of fresh
yellow woodchips. A path, scarcely more than a scratch on the
unimpressionable ground, wound out of nowhere from the direction of
Laramie Peak, uphill between the rocks to the door of the wagon and
past it, headed down again into a green swale where a scattering of
the brilliant tiny prairie flowers was already fading.
Iron hooves rang out in the trail as the boy rode
up to the buckboard where he dismounted, attached the snap end of the
rope to the halter, pulled down the saddle and double blankets, and
threw them into the wagon box with the hay. Then he went on to the
bunkwagon and pushed in the door, for which there was no key and
probably never had been any. He removed his soiled clay-colored
Stetson with the hawk feather stuck into the band and the two bullet
holes through the crown and dropped it on the bedroll spread on the
bunk bed extending the width of the wagon below the slot window cut
into the rear wall. Finally, he reached the whiskey bottle from the
cupboard above the bed, unscrewed the top of it, and took a long
drink. "I wish to hell I had me a dog, anyways," the boy said aloud.
He had come up short five more animals today, two cow-calf pairs and a
yearling heifer.
Over the past three and a half weeks more than a
half-dozen cattle had vanished from the herd, always so far as the boy
could ascertain overnight. The evening following the first
disappearance he'd taken his horse, bedroll, and rifle and spent the
night a couple of miles out from camp at the periphery of the herd,
riding among the silent animals until past midnight and sleeping out
on the ground with the hobbled horse close by him. Five days later,
when Old Man Redmond drove out from McFadden to resupply the camp, the
boy had told him about the missing cattle. He'd figured the rancher
would be mad as hell, but instead something strange had happened.
Redmond had gone pale under his sixty-odd-year-old tan. Then, in a
voice unlike his natural one and shaking his withered arm in the boy's
face, he'd given him a warning: "Forget about them cows now, if you
know what's good for you." Finally, he'd dumped the supplies on the
ground beside the foldaway steps at the front of the wagon and driven
away in his beat-up Model A Ford pickup without saying another word,
never stopping among the herd to have a lookaround for himself. The
boy watched the truck out of sight among the rocks and small trees.
Then he shook his head, took a pinch of chew from the tin in his
shirtpocket, and sat in the open door of the wagon, looking away
across the prairie toward the black high-crowned bulk of Laramie Peak.
"First I ever knew of a cattleman telling his rider to just forget
about the damn cows," he told the horse, standing with its eyes shut
and one hoof lifted alongside the buckboard.
Not a week later he was missing two more animals,
and when a couple of days after that the range detective hired by the
Grange rode into camp, he'd told him about it, ignoring Old Man
Redmond's order, or advice-whichever it was. The boy had done this for
two reasons. One, he felt his job demanded it. Two, Redmond was known
to be ailing from a wasting disease the doctors seemed unable to cure,
and not expected to live many years more. Aside from the shabby house
and tilting outbuildings, plus the relatively little land he held in
McFadden, the only property his daughter Andrea stood to inherit from
her widowed father was the herd of whiteface cattle the boy had made a
living herding the past two summers. Andrea Redmond was 15 years old,
a year younger than himself, and very pretty, darkhaired with a high
complexion and straight nose like an Indian though her mother had been
a white woman, green eyes with gold lights in them, and a figure like
a drawing in the Ladies' Hosiery section of the Sears & Roebuck
catalogue. Old Man Redmond, he felt, had no more use for him than he
had for anyone else-he was widely suspected of having killed a man,
some said an Indian, a dozen or so years before-but dead men aren't
consulted in their daughter's choice of a husband. Thus the boy had no
intention to let the Redmond herd waste down to nothing, along with
its owner, at the hands of the kind of two-bit rustlers that still
existed in the country. Just three nights after his conversation with
the range detective, he received the first visit from the midnight
horsebacker.
He was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of
hooves, which he took at first for the horse having untied itself from
the snubbing rope. From the position of the moon, which was
approaching the full, he judged the time at around one o'clock. The
sound persisted, and he recognized it now for the guided purposeful
gait of a horse under saddle coming along the trail toward camp, its
hooves ringing out on the hard clay. Instantly, the boy rolled in the
sleeping sack to grab the .30-30 lying on the floor beside the bunk
bed. Then he sat up on the bed, with his legs still inside the bag and
the rifle cocked, staring through the slotted window and listening as
the hoof-falls drew closer until they seemed to be just beyond the
door. "Why don't the horse nicker?" he wondered, thinking of the mare
snubbed close to the buckboard not twenty feet away. The hooves quit,
and the following silence to him was more profound than the moonlight
that seemed its visual manifestation. Then, through the window, a hat
appeared, tall, highcrowned, and very black in the moonlight, nothing
of a face apparent beneath it but just the dark shadow cast by the
forward brim. The hat vanished past the window as quickly as it
appeared there, and instantly afterward a series of sharp raps sounded
against the unlocked door of the wagon: one, two, three.
The boy brought the gun up to his shoulder and
inserted his finger inside the trigger guard. In the half-dark he
could not see to align the steel sights, but at such range-he told
himself-close aim was unnecessary. The knocking-measured, insistent,
commanding-came again and the boy thought to pull the trigger, but did
not. Instead he remained as he was, half in and half out of the
bedroll, holding the gun leveled at the door and keeping his eyes on
the little window. After an hour or more, he withdrew his legs from
the sack and, with the gun still grasped in his right hand and moving
as quietly as he could, fixed an iron crowbar against the door.
Useless as a doorbar, it would serve at least to waken him if an
intruder attempted to break in. Then the boy returned to the bunk bed
and lay in the sleeping sack with the gun across his chest until first
light showed through the windows, and he fell asleep at last.
In the morning he searched for tracks outside the
wagon and found none, except for those made by the mare whose
double-ought shoes left a faint distinctive print in the nearly
imprintable clay. The boy made himself a breakfast of coffee,
pancakes, and bacon cut thick with the bristles left in the rind,
after which he saddled up and rode out for a look at the cows, which
had drawn together in a drainage where a thread of water still ran
after the droughty spring. He didn't need to count them all to tell
the cow with the spotted rump and her calf were gone from the herd,
but he went ahead and finished anyway.
Leaving the cattle to mill along the banks of the
wash, the boy put his spurs to the mare and went loping off across
country in the opposite direction from camp. After he'd ridden ten or
twelve miles he came to a narrow canyon thickly wooden in the bottom,
where he tied up in a grove of cottonwood trees and climbed up out of
the canyon to the washboard road going to McFadden. He hitched a ride
into town with an out-of-work oilpatch roughneck from Casper, got out
in front of the saloon, and walked around to the poolhall in back.
Mike Simpson was in the middle of a game when the boy showed up, but
he apologized to his partner and racked his stick when he learned what
was wanted of him. Though two years older and a man already, Mike had
been his best friend going on three years now. The two drove together
in Mike's Chevy coup as far as the canyon, where the boy untied the
mare and rode hellbent-for-leather across country, beating the Chevy
into camp by nearly a quarter of an hour.
By the time he'd got the cattle together again it
was early evening and time for supper. The boy sliced salt pork into a
pan of beans and put the coffee pot on, while Mike looked to the
weapons. Besides the .30-30, they had Mike's twelve-gauge Remington
shotgun, plus plenty of ammunition for both guns. They ate without
finding much to say to one another and sat afterward outside the wagon
to smoke as the prairie swales filled with shadow and the stars
pointed between the gleaming crowns of thunderheads dissipating in an
ultraviolet sky. "From here, the Peak looks just exactly like
somebody's old black Stetson," Mike observed.
At around ten they set the crowbar against the
door, extinguished the kerosene lantern, and turned in, the boy on the
bunk bed, Mike taking the cot kept on hand to offer company. He lay
down with the shotgun alongside him and went out like a light, as
though expecting to sleep straight through til morning. The boy lay
for awhile after that, listening to the snoring and trying to keep
awake, before he too fell asleep.
Then he was awake, all at once and all over, gazing
at the oblong of moon-chalked sky and hearing the steady deliberate
hoofbeat in the trail. The boy slipped like a snake from the bag, took
Mike by the shoulder, and shook him gently awake, ready to cover his
mouth with his hand if need be. "He's coming!" he said in a
fierce whisper. "Don't shoot less'n he comes at us through the door!"
They sat together at the edge of the bunk bed,
holding the guns on the door and listening to the hoof-falls approach
the wagon. The sound quit suddenly and was followed by a silence
unbroken by the creak of leather at the dismount. "There it is!
Mike hissed, and in the instant the boy saw it too, the tall black hat
in silhouette against the pale sky at the horizon, pale as the face
that belonged beneath the hat but wasn't. The hat disappeared from the
window as suddenly as it had come, and right away the knocking
started: Three hard spaced raps that struck the boy as being as much
of a communication as they were a request.
Mike fired with both barrels, the muzzle flashes
illuminating the room like lightning as the Number 8 shot ripped
through the door panels, letting in tears and splinters of moonshine
from the night outside. Numbed by the crashing shots, their nostrils
pricking from the scent of cordite, the two of them sat frozen on the
bed.
"You killed him," the boy, speaking in a dull
voice, said finally.
"I never heard him holler." Mike's voice, though
stronger, was shaky.
"It ain't no way you could've missed. Better go see
how bad hurt he is."
"In the morning I will. I ain't opening that door
to Jesus Christ Himself before sunup. If he's still alive.well, we'll
just have to see, then."
In the morning, they opened the shattered door to
find nothing; no body, blood, nor tracks, human or animal. Mike
refused the boy's offer of breakfast and left at once for town in the
Chevy with his gun. The boy stayed on the range until late September,
but the man in the black hat did not visit the camp again and herd
remained intact except for several calves killed by coyotes. By fall,
Old Man Redmond's wasting disease was much worse; he died the
following January, called by the Sioux Indians the Moon of Frost in
the Lodge. Six months after his death, the boy and Andrea were married
and moved out from town with the cattle into a cabin they built at the
edge of the pine woods in the shadow of Laramie Peak. The boy told the
story of the man in the black hat to no one except for his wife but he
thought about it off and on, for years to come. After that, he didn't
think about it at all anymore. |
