“And here is some good advice that might come in handy, Howy,” Curtin said, laughing. “Don’t you get mixed up with some of those Indian dames. They are often really smart, and also awfully pretty. Lots of them are. You know that, you old rider. And don’t you come some day and tell me you’ve actually married a squaw. You know, quite a number of guys do it, and like it a lot. But don’t tell me later I didn’t warn you if anything goes wrong, you old bucker.” Curtin slapped him on the back till the old man coughed.
Still coughing, he said: “Maybe I will get me such a bronzecolored hot dame myself. I’m not so sure. They’ve got class, real class, if you know what I mean. And there’s no hustling and worrying about them. They are easy to feed and easy to entertain. No taking them every night to the goddamned pictures and bridge-parties where they lose your hard-earned money, goddamn it. And no nagging either. I’ll think it over, Curty. Maybe I am going to change my outlook on life. Well, have an easy trip, partners.”
The burros had become restless. Dobbs and Curtin went after them, and the train was on its way.
Howard watched his two partners go down the trail. When he turned to the Indians, patiently waiting for him, his eyes looked watery.
He was given a horse to ride.
Shouting joyfully, they all rode off. Howard was led in triumph into the village, where all the people, old and young, were awaiting him and cheering him as though he had returned from some victory in foreign lands for the glory of this little village.
Chapter 20
Curtin and Dobbs were not in good humor. The pass across the highest mountain range was still far off, and the trail leading to this high pass had become so difficult that the two partners became near senseless from desperation.
They no longer spoke to each other in the usual manner. They bellowed at each other, howled like wild beasts, and cursed themselves and the rest of the world for the hard job they had undertaken. And most bitterly of all they cursed the absent Howard. While they had to drive his burros, to load and unload his packs, and to take care of all his belongings, he was most probably now enjoying himself, with a pretty Indian hussy sitting on his knees and another brown wench hanging on his neck and before him a swell meal of roast turkey and a bottle of tequila. And here his two partners had to slave for him and die for him on that goddamned hell of a funking trail, put there by the Lord for no other reason than to make you suffer for all the dirty sins fifty generations of your forefathers committed.
“Why the hell did we offer to take along the packs of that son of a skunk? As if he couldn’t take them by himself, or with the help of those goddamned Indians, who, of all the people in the world, had to come to get that goddamned boy of theirs out of hell, where he was already being well cared for and where he properly belonged!”
“And isn’t it always his burros that, goddamn it, won’t march in line, and stray off and smash their packs against the trees, trying to get them off their funking backs?”
“He knew, that goddamned story-teller did, why he wanted us to take along his packs. They are the heaviest of all and the most carelessly packed. Gawd knows, his burros are the laziest that were ever born anywhere under heaven, and the most stubborn. Hell, how I wish they would break off the trail and drop down the three thousand feet of the gorge and crash their bones! What would I care? To hell with him and all he has!”
It was lucky for them that heaven was too high above to hear them and lay half a hundred broken trees across the trail and soak the narrow path with so much water that the burros would sink into the mud up to the saddles, so that for once they would learn what a really tough trail on the Sierra Madre is like when hell and heaven are against the traveler. What they encountered was in fact nothing, if you would ask a hard-boiled arriero whose business it is to bring pack_trains of mules across the Sierra Madre at any time of year.
Of course, it would have meant much to have one more man at hand on trails like this one. A pack which has come off the animal’s back can only be properly replaced by two men, and while these two are loading, another man is needed to look after the rest of the pack-burros, so that they will not break loose and stray off and enter dead trails.
No sooner did the two realize that it was ridiculous to curse the old man than they started quarreling, and yelling and shouting at each other.
The burros did not mind, because they had more sense and besides had been raised on a better philosophical system.
All of a sudden Dobbs halted, wiped the sweat from his face with an angry gesture, and said: “I stop here for the night. If you want to go on, it’s okay by me. Only leave my packs and my burros here. I am no goddamned nigger slave. Get me?”
“It’s only three o’clock. We might still make four miles more.” Curtin saw no reason for camping so early.
“No one has ordered you to camp here. If you want to march twenty miles more, what the hell do I care?” Dobbs stood before Curtin as if he were ready to spring at him.
“Ordered? You?” Curtin asked. “You don’t mean to say you are the boss of this outfit?”
“Perhaps you are. Just say it. I’m waiting.” Dobbs’s face became redder.
“All right, if you can’t do any more—”
“Can’t do any more? What do you mean by that crack?” Dobbs seemed to go mad. “Don’t make me laugh. I can do four times as much as a mug like you and kick half a dozen of your size both sides of your pants. Can’t do any more? And how is your grandmother? It’s simple; I don’t want any more, if you must know, mug.”
“What’s the good of hollering?” Curtin stayed calm enough. “We’ve started; now we have to stick it out, like it or not. All right, then, let’s camp here.”
“That’s what I said long ago. Here is water, and very good water. It’s a good place for camping, isn’t it?”
“Right you are. Not likely we’d find any water during the next three hours.”
“So what’s the arguing about?” Dobbs began to unload the burro standing next to him. Curtin came close and gave him a hand at the job.
The burros unloaded, quarreling started again. Who was to cook, who was to look for fuel, who was to care for the burros, who repair the pack-saddles? There had never been any disputing about these jobs as long as Howard had been with them. Now it seemed as if they had lost the capacity for sound and simple reasoning. They were overtired, their nerves quivering like telegraph wires in the open country. They couldn’t agree any longer on who had to do this job and who that. When the meal was finally cooked and ready, Curtin found that he had done most of the work—three times his share. He didn’t mind, and said nothing. He put up with Dobbs’s bad humor. Something during the march today, the climate, the growing altitude, a fall, the hot sun, a sting from a reptile, a bite of an insect, a scratch of a poisonous thorn, whatever it was, must, so it appeared to Curtin, be responsible for Dobbs’s strange behavior.
Eating usually conciliates people. So also here in the loneliness of the Sierra the meal Curtin and Dobbs had together softened their feelings toward each other. It calmed their nerves. They came to speak with less yelling and with more sense than they had done during the last six hours.
“I wonder what the old man is doing now,” Curtin said.
“I’m sure he’s having a swell time with these Indians,” Dobbs replied. “His meal will be better than ours, sure.”