“That’s over with.” She bristled up a little.
“You think he would have done it for you?”
“Somebody would have.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know. People help other people.”
“People kill other people too.”
“I’ve seen that.”
“You’re going to see some more.”
“If you want to say it’s my fault we’re stuck here, go ahead,” the McLaren girl said. “It might make you feel better, but it won’t change anything.”
Russell shook his head. “The thing I want to know is why you helped.”
“Because he needed help! I didn’t ask if he deserved it!”
She let her temper calm down and said, half as loud, “Like that woman needs to live. It’s not up to us to decide if she deserves it.”
“We only help her, uh?”
“Do we have another choice?”
Russell nodded. “Not help her.”
“Just let her die.” The McLaren girl kept staring at him.
“That’s up to Braden,” Russell said. “We have another thing to look at. If we don’t give him the money, he has to come get it.”
The McLaren girl almost let go of her temper then. “You’d sacrifice a human life for that money. That’s what you’re saying.”
Russell started making a cigarette, looking out the window at the crushing mill as he shaped it, then at the McLaren girl again. “Go ask that woman what she thinks of human life. Ask her what a human life is worth at San Carlos when they run out of meat.”
“That isn’t any fault of hers.”
“She said those dirty Indians eat dogs. You remember that? She couldn’t eat a dog no matter how hungry she was.” Everybody was watching him. He lit his cigarette and blew out smoke. “Go ask her if she’d eat a dog now.”
“That’s why!” the McLaren girl said, like it was all clear to her now. “She insulted the poor hungry miserable Indians and you’d let her die for that!”
Russell shook his head. “We were talking about human life.”
“Even if there was no money, nothing to be gained, you’d let her die!” All the McLaren girl’s temper was showing now, and she was just letting it come. “Because she thinks Indians are dirty and no better than animals you’d sit there and let her die!”
Russell held the cigarette close to his mouth, watching her. “It makes you angry, why talk about it?”
“I want to talk about it,” she shot back. “I would like you to ask me what I think a human life is worth…a dirty human Apache life. Go on, ask me. Ask me about the ones that took me from my home and kept me past a month. Ask me about the dirty things they did, what the women did when the men weren’t around and what the men did when we weren’t running but were hiding somewhere and there was time to waste. I dare you to ask me!”
She knelt there tensed, like she was to spring on him if he moved, though it was just she was so intent on telling him what she’d just said.
It was all out of her system then. I think everybody wasn’t so tense anymore. She sank back to a sitting position, taking her eyes off Russell, looking down at that loose sole on her shoe and fooling with it as she thought something over.
Next thing, she was saying, “I haven’t seen my folks in almost two months…or my little brother. Just he and I were home and he ran and I don’t know what happened to him, whether they caught him or what.”
She looked up at Russell again, all the softness gone out of her that quick, like it was starting all over again. “What do they think of an eight-year-old human life?” she said. “Do they just kill little boys who can’t defend themselves?”
Russell had not taken his eyes off her, still holding the cigarette up near his face. “If they don’t want them,” he said, and kept looking right at her.
That ended it. For a thin little seventeen-year-old girl she was tougher than most men and I think you know that by now. But she had to give some time. I thought she was going to cut at Russell again, but the words didn’t come. Her eyes filled up first. She sat there trying to keep her chin from quivering or crying so we’d hear her, still looking right at Russell even with her eyes wet, daring him to say something else.
Right at that time (and it was almost welcome) the Mexican started again. He yelled out, “Hey man, you hear me!” Russell turned and looked down the barrel of the Spencer. The Mexican wasn’t showing himself now and his voice sounded a little farther away. You knew he was there though.
“Come on down here,” the Mexican yelled out, “I got something for you!”
Russell had something for him too if he showed even part of his face.
“Man!” the Mexican yelled then. “We both come out-talk to each other!”
He waited.
“You bring that piece of iron you got. I bring one, uh?”
Every word he yelled echoed up canyon and came back again.
“Hey, hombre, whatever your name is-you hear me!”
After that he said some things I had better not put down here, terrible words that were embarrassing to hear with the McLaren girl in the same room. He was trying to get Russell out by insulting him, but he could have been yelling at a tree stump for all the good it did. Russell sat there waiting for the Mexican to show himself; which he never did.
Something Russell had said to the McLaren girl bothered me, so I asked him about it: about them having to come up here if they wanted the money. Why couldn’t they just outwait us? Our water would run out (there was about a quart and a half left), then what would we do?
Theirs would run out too, Russell said. But, I said, they can go get more.
All the way to Delgado’s? Russell said. Who would go, the one up behind us? The Mexican? Then who would watch us? No, Russell said. Some time they have to come up here. They know it.
I said that may be, but the Favor woman would be dead by then. Russell didn’t answer.
About two o’clock in the afternoon the Favor woman started screaming.
It could not get any hotter than it was then. There was no breeze, no clouds; the sun was bright, boiling hot and you would not even dare look up to see where it was.
The Favor woman sat down there near the bottom of the grade, no hat or anything to cover her head, no shade to crawl into. As I have said, there was a little shack near where she was, but the rope tied to her neck would not even let her stand up straight much less get over to the shack. She had given up trying to undo the rope.
For the longest time she sat hunched over, her face buried in her arm resting on her raised knees. Now she was looking up toward us, as she had done when the Mexican first put her there, and now every once in a while she would scream out to her husband, calling his name at first.
“Alex!” she would call, but drawn out and faint sounding, not sharp and loud as you would imagine a real scream.
“Alex…help me!” Sounding far away almost, like hearing only an echo of the words. She had not had water since yesterday. It was something that she could call out at all.
Dr. Favor raised up when she started and looked down at her for a while. I don’t know what he was thinking. I don’t even know if he felt sorry for her, because his expression never changed; he was just looking at something. He didn’t call back to her or say a word.
Some people can hide their feelings very well, so I had better not pass judgment on Dr. Favor. I remember picturing him and his wife alone and wondering what they ever talked about and if they had ever got along well together. (I couldn’t help having that feeling she had been just a woman to him. You know what I mean, just a woman to have around.) I tried to imagine her calling him Alex when they were alone. But it didn’t sound right. He was not the kind of man you thought of as having a first name. Especially not a name like Alex or Alexander.
There it was though, faintly, coming from out of that big open canyon, “Alex…” And he just sat there looking down at her, not moving much other than to feel his beard, to rub it gently under his chin with the back of his fingers.
Once she stood up, as far as she could, and yelled his name louder than she ever did before. “Alex!” And this time it was sharp and clear enough and with an echo coming back to give you goose pimples at the sound of it.
And then again, which I will hear every day of my life.
“Alex…please help me!” The words all alone outside, echoing and fading to nothing.
It was strange to be in a room with four people and not hear one sound. Everybody sat there holding still, waiting for the Favor woman to cry out again. Maybe a couple of minutes passed; maybe more than that, it seemed longer. It was so quiet that when the sound came-the sound of a match scraping and popping aflame-everybody looked up and right at John Russell.
He lit his cigarette, shook the match out and threw it up past his shoulder, out the window.
The McLaren girl, closer to the window where Mendez and I still were, kept staring at Russell. Do you see how his calm rubbed her? I think any of the rest of us could have lit a cigarette at that time and it would have been all right. But not Russell. Lighting that match touched it off again. Just the way she was looking at him you could see it coming, so I tried to head it off.
I said, “I’ve been thinking”-though I hadn’t, it just came to me then-“when it gets dark, why can’t a couple of us sneak down and get her? Maybe we could get her up here without them even seeing us.”
“But if they heard you-” Mendez said.
“By dark she’ll be dead,” the McLaren girl said.
“You don’t know that,” I said.
“Do you want to wait and find out?”
“I was thinking something else,” I said. “Braden’s watching her too. What if he sees it’s not working or he feels sorry for her or something and has that Mexican bring her back in?”
“You just think nice things, don’t you?” the McLaren girl said.
“It could happen.”
“The day he changes into a human being.” She looked at Russell smoking his cigarette. “Or the day he does. That’s the only thing will save her.”
Russell was watching her, but just then the Mexican yelled out from the crushing mill, and Russell’s head turned to look down the barrel of the Spencer.
“Hey, hombre!” the Mexican yelled, followed by a string of words some of which were in Spanish and were probably as obscene as the English ones mixed in. “Come on down and see me!”
Russell kept looking down the Spencer for at least a minute. When he turned to us again, he drew on his cigarette and dropped it out the window. The hand came down on the saddlebags next to him. He lifted them up, feeling the weight of them, then let them swing a little and threw them so they fell out in the middle of the floor.
“You want to save her?” Russell said. He looked at Mendez and me and then over to Dr. Favor sitting with his back to the wall a few feet from me. “Somebody want to walk down there and save her?”
Nobody answered.
“Somebody wants to, go ahead,” Russell said. “But I’ll tell you one thing first. You walk down there you won’t walk back. Leave that bag and start to take the woman and they’ll kill both of you.”
The McLaren girl was watching him, leaning forward a little. “You’re saying that so nobody will take the money and try it.”
“They’ll kill both of you,” Russell said. “That’s why I’m saying it.” He looked over at Dr. Favor before the McLaren girl could say anything else.
“That woman’s your wife,” Russell said to him. “You want to go untie her?”
Dr. Favor, his head down a little, had his eyes on Russell, but he didn’t say one word.
Russell took his time, making it awful embarrassing, so you wouldn’t dare look over at Dr. Favor. Finally Russell turned to us again.
“Mr. Mendez,” he said, “you want to save her?…Or Mr. Carl Allen, I think your name is, you want to walk down there? This man won’t. It’s his wife, but he won’t do it. He doesn’t care about his own woman, but maybe someone else does, uh? That’s what I want to know.”
He was looking right at the McLaren girl then and said, “I don’t think I know your name. We live together some, uh? But I don’t know your name.”
“Kathleen McLaren,” she said. He must have surprised her, caught her without anything else ready to say.
“All right, Kathleen McLaren,” Russell said. “How would you like to walk down there and untie her and start up again and get shot in the back? Or in the front if that one by the mill does it. In the back or in the front, but one way or the other.”
She kept looking at him but didn’t say a word.
“There it is,” Russell said, nodding to the saddlebags. “Take it. You worry more about his wife than he does. You say I’m not sure or I’m not telling the truth-all right, you go find out what happens.”
Russell did a strange thing then. He took off his Apache moccasins and threw them over to the McLaren girl.
“Wear those,” he said. “You run faster when they start shooting.”
He opened up his blanket and took out his boots and pulled them on. While he did, the McLaren girl kept staring at him; but she never spoke. And when he looked up at her again, her eyes held only for a second before looking away.
It was one thing to know a woman would die if she didn’t get help. It was another thing to say you’d die helping her.
I kept thinking of what Russell had said right to me “…do you want to walk down there?”
No, I didn’t, and I will admit that right here. I believed Braden would shoot anybody who went down there with the money. I think everybody believed it by then. Yes, even the McLaren girl.
The best thing to do, I decided, was just sit there and wait and see what happened. That sounds like a terrible thing to say when a woman’s life is at stake, Mrs. Favor’s; but I will tell you now it’s easier to think of your own life than someone else’s. I don’t care how brave a person is.
I will admit, too, that Dr. Favor being there made it easier on your conscience. If anybody should go down there it was him. He wasn’t going though; that was certain.
Some more time passed. The Mexican, who was patient and had as much time as we did, yelled out at Russell once in a while. Russell stayed with his face pressed to that Spencer longer every time the Mexican insulted him or tried to draw him out. You could see Russell was anxious to get the Mexican. After quite a while passed and the Mexican did not yell at him again, Russell turned around to lean against the wall and make a cigarette. I noticed he threw the tobacco sack away after. It was his last one. He did not light it though; not yet.
Time passed as we sat there and nobody said a word. Russell was thinking, working something out and picturing how it would be; I was sure of that.
About four o’clock the Favor woman started screaming for her husband again; the sounds coming not so loud as before, but it was an awful thing to hear. She would call his name, then say something else which was never clear but like she was pleading with him to help her.
Sitting there in the shack you heard it faintly out in the canyon, “Alex”-the name drawn out, then again maybe and the rest of the words coming like a long moan.
It was quiet when Russell stood up. He looked out the window, not long, just a minute or so, then went over and picked up the grainsack, emptying out what meat and bread and coffee were left, and brought it back to the window. He took one of the ore bags from the sill and put it in the sack. Nobody else moved, all of us watching him. That was when he lit his last cigarette. He drew on it very slowly, very carefully. We kept watching him, maybe not trusting him either, knowing he was about to do something.
“I need somebody,” Russell said, looking right at me. Not knowing what he meant I just sat there. “Right here,” he said, nodding to the window.
I went over, not in any hurry, staring at him to show I didn’t understand. But he didn’t explain until he’d motioned again and I was kneeling there with the stock of his Spencer between us. Russell put his hand on it.