hey self defeater

I was with him the night he ran into Baby and I’ll never forget it. We were riding along forty miles south of El Paso on as nice a night as I ever saw. The stars were out and it was bright. There was even a piece of moon. That was what made it so funny. We were riding along and Bill was singing,

“Beat the drums lowly and play your fifes slowly, Play the dead march as you drag me along. Take me to the graveyard ad lay a sod o’er me. For I’m a poor cowboy and I know I done wrong.”

Pecos Bill always sang that song when he was feeling extra happy.

All of a sudden he says, “That’s funny!”

“What’s funny?”

“There, on that ridge, that thunderstorm coming up.”

I looked and saw a black cloud coming up all right, but the stars and the moon were still shining.

“Never saw a thunderstorm on a star-bright night,” Bill said. “I’d call that almost a first-class miracle.”

Something flashed on the ridge and Bill said, “It’s lightning all right.” We rode on faster. Bill stopped sudden. “That’s funny!”

“What’s funny?”

“Did you hear any thunder after that lightning?”

“Nope.” I said that because I didn’t hear any thunder and we were close enough to the storm to hear it if there was any thunder. “Nope, I didn’t hear any.”

“Look! Lightning again and no thunder!” Bill shook his head. “I believe in miracles, but only one at a time. A thunderstorm so close with lightning and no thunder, that’s almost a first-class miracle.”

We rode closer and suddenly we heard a sound. I guess you’d call it laughter, but it was child’s laughter and a woman’s laughter and a waterfall’s laughter, mixed with a horse’s neigh and the noise of a tin can full of pebbles, and the roar of a lot of cowboys howling at a joke. It sounded like “Hayheehaw! Haiharhoo! Hearhoiheh!” and ended with “Huh, huh, huh!” delicate, like a skeptical baby.

“A laughing thunderstorm,” Bill said, angry, “would be a third miracle. Hell, that’s a coyote and the lightning is his eyes flashing!”

The black cloud raised a head and we could see right enough it was a coyote and the biggest one I ever saw and no one ever saw a bigger one. It was easy to tell it was a female because she walked dainty. She was so big she’d have to lie on her side and bend her neck out of shape to nibble at sagebrush. She must have heard us, for the next thing she came at us, just like a thunderstorm that got up on its heels and began chasing you. She went by in such a rush, the air around was chilly for the next half hour. Bill didn’t have a chance to draw his gun and fire. All he said was “Oh, Baby!”

That’s how Baby got her name!

“Baby!” Bill repeated.

Somewhere, off in the distance, in the next county or maybe over in New Mexico, we heard the “Hayheehaw” and so on and then the final “Huh, huh, huh!”

Bill was awful thoughtful for a while. “I’m going to hunt that baby and get her if it’s the last thing I do. Baby! There’s a coyote’s coyote!”

Me and Bill hunted Baby all that year and all the next and the year after the year after that too. Maybe there were even more years but those are all I remember. It was a long time.

Hunting Baby wasn’t hard. She was always obliging and willing to hang around and be hunted. We chased her over most of Texas. When we couldn’t find her on dark nights she’d let out that laugh of hers, particularly the “Huh, huh, huh” part, and off we’d go. Other times her eyes would flash in the distance and there we’d go again. Sometimes that fooled us – more than fifty times we saw flashes like that and went off hell for leather and found that what we were chasing on the horizon was really a thunderstorm or a twister. Of course, when it thundered, then we knew it wasn’t Baby. Half the times Baby’d have been lying low, watching us make fools of ourselves. As we turned back soaking wet we’d hear her “Huh, huh, huh!” off in the other direction. Other times we could get on her trail by waiting till she went to a water hole. She had a thirst like a desert and could drink a hole dry with the noise of a rusty pump. Some nights we thought we’d lost her, her tracks would help us. They were always deep round holes and you couldn’t miss ‘em. It’s getting off my story, but it was those tracks that helped develop West Texas – they were so deep they caught a lot of rain water and held it through dry spells and the grass grew thick around ‘em. A lot of cattlemen today still use those tracks for water holes.

It wasn’t hunting Baby that was tough, it was bagging her. In five years Pecos Bill must have had a thousand shots at her, from all distances from a hundred feet to a mile, and he shot at her with lead and iron and silver and a couple of times with a shotgun full of scrap iron. Nothing took any effect. Sometimes the stuff we fired hit Baby’s sides and bounced back at us. Once we had to hide under a mesquite thicket for an hour while it rained railroad scrap all around us. As a six-inch piece of steel rail hit Bill on the neck he said, “We just won’t try that one again. It’s like being hunted by a coyote and shot at.”

Other times when Baby was feeling frisky she didn’t bother to bounce bullets back at us. She just timed the shot so that as it came to her she leaped up in the air and the bullets went right under her. Then she’d land with a smack you could hear a long way off and sometimes the earth would crack under her. Half the arroyos, those little canyons, in West Texas is from where Baby landed after those jumps. She’d have probably started up a couple of earthquakes in any country not so tough as West Texas.

“That Baby!” Bill would say after missing her once again. He sounded awful proud. “She’s just willful! Plumb willful!”

I guess it got to be a game with Baby, because no matter what we tried to do, her laugh never changed or got angry or snarly. Some nights when Bill didn’t feel like going out after her Baby’d hang around and there was a kind of disappointment in her laugh, like a kid you promised ice cream for supper he didn’t get.

I know it got to be a game with Bill and I never saw him so happy. Of course from time to time we’d take a job to get enough money to try out some new scheme Bill had thought up for getting Baby. That was all he did think about, night after night. He figured out all kinds of baits and snares and devices, but none of ‘em worked. He figured out every kind of trap. After Baby picked up one of ‘em and heaved it in the air with her hind foot and it landed on Bill and me and kept us pinned down for five days, we gave up traps. Even that didn’t make Bill sore. He laughed and shook his head. “That Baby! She’s smart.” That was the way he was talking about her. Sometimes when he saw Baby running in the moonlight he’d say, “Look at the way that moonlight shines her gray fur! I bet you never saw anything prettier.” And when she’d run fast Bill’d say, “I bet that’s the fastest animule there is!” The way he’d talk, you might have thought Bill was raising a child to show off at the State Fair.

One idea Bill had almost did get Baby. The idea was to chase her into the middle of Randall County, which we did, and then to run barbed wire right around the boundaries of the county, which we did. We used all the barbed wire in West Texas doing it and we strung it right. When we got done, stringing it over trees and poles and houses, I never saw such a mess of barbed wire. There wasn’t a hole in it big enough for a rattlesnake to crawl through and we ran it so high that not even Baby could jump over it. There we had Baby penned up right and all we had to do now was to wait until she got too weak to move. That wouldn’t take too long because we’d been having a drought and the water holes were as dry as sun-bleached bones. And Baby was always thirsty.

We must have waited outside that barbed wire a couple of weeks and all the time Bill kept saying, “We got her this time all right, we got her! She won’t be willful no more!” And Bill would jump around excited like a colt in a loco patch. “When man matches his intelligence with animules,” Bill would say, “man must win. That’s natchural!” Every night we heard Baby crying inside there behind the wire like she was trying to find a way out and getting madder and madder. The more she cried the more Bill grinned and yelled, “We got her this time!”

Then one night when we were watching there was a new sound behind the wire, a soft “Plop, plop, plop!”

“What’s that mean?” Bill asked, nervous. “Sounds like she’s throwing mud pies.” Then he guessed it. “Baby’s digging, that’s what it is. She’s trying to dig her way out and she’s throwing up dirt!” He looked half proud as he said, “I knew she’d figure out something to do.” He looked half mad as he said, “That won’t get her nowhere. We’ll surround the fence and when her head shows we’ll wallop her.”

So Bill called out all the people from Potter, Armstrong, Swisher, and Deaf Smith counties, the ones around Randall. They were glad to stand watch because they’re always glad to take a crack at anyone or anything coming from Randall County.

Three days and three nights we waited, and the “Plop, plop, plop” continued but it got fainter and fainter as Baby dug deeper. “This time we got her sure,” Bill said. He patrolled the fence day and night with a paddle made from a wagon tongue.

About midnight we heard a new kind of noise. It began as a hiss and turned into a roar and the earth shook and half the people around the fence ran like hell. The roar got louder and right then I felt rain in my face. It felt like rain, it was wet, but when I got some on my hand it had a funny smell.

In the midst of the loud roaring we heard a funny noise. It was “Hayheehaw,” and the rest of it and then “Huh, huh, huh!” It sounded awful frightened but it wasn’t coming from back of the fence, it was coming somewhere behind us.

“That’s Baby!” Bill started to jump. “And she’s out, she’s gotten out!” I never saw a man so mad but he wasn’t so mad he couldn’t say “She’s that smart, that Baby.”

It was beginning to rain even harder. “How’d she get out?”

“Blew it,” Bill said. “That’s not rain, it’s oil. It’s got the same smell as the stuff I used to rub on my stiff joints. She dug to hit a pocket and a gusher blew her out.”

Way off in the distance, running like a breeze toward Mexico, we heard Baby. “That scared her,” Bill said rueful. “She ought to know I didn’t mean to have it happen like that. She’s scared. She won’t come back.”

His laugh was awful faint. “She must be over the Rio Grande by now.”

Bill nodded. “I didn’t think she’d take it like that.” He sounded all choked up and he went to his horse and rode off like mad toward Amarillo.

It took me four days to find him. When I caught up with him he was in Amarillo at the Unweaned Calf bar. He wasn’t alone, either. Somewhere he’d picked up a girl whose name was Kankakee Katie. I ain’t much for women myself – I never learned how to tell a good one from a bad one and I’ve never been sure there’s any real difference. Katie was a big blonde and, from the way she ws lapping up pulque, a pretty fair forager. She was comforting Bill and that was what mattered. I heard he’d been crying for three days when he got to town. Now he sat gloomy-like and all he’d say was “Baby!”

“Who’s this baby you’re muling over?” Katie asked him.

He just shook his head.

“I never heard a man make as much fuss over me,” Katie said like it annoyed her.

Bill just says “Baby,” dreamy-like.

“It’s awful bad manners,” Katie said, “to keep grieving over one lady when you’re in the company of another.”

“Baby was no lady,” Bill said.

“What was she, a hellcat?”

Bill shook his head. “A coyote!”

“That’s no way to talk about her,” Katie said, like she had to defend her sex. “What was she, blonde or brunette?”

“Gray,” Bill said, “gray like early morning. Baby!”

Katie lapped up some more pulque. “I think you’re loco but I tell you, I could go for a man who’d say ‘Katie’ the way you say ‘Baby.’”

Bill reached for the bottle and began to cry at the same time and when he cries it’s like the first freshets coming down an arroyo in spring.

“Katie,” I said, “he’s really upset about a coyote.” I told her about Baby and how Bill was afraid she was gone for good.

“He’s grieving like that over a four-footed, long-haired, howling animal?” I didn’t know whether Katie was going to laugh or upset the table. She didn’t do either. She began to cry. “I never thought I’d meet such a tenderhearted person in all my life. Bill reminds me of my mother – she was tenderhearted like that too.” And she cried as hard as Bill.

Bill blinked and smiled at me. “Pete, here’s what I need – sympathy and a chance to forget Baby.” As he pounded his fist on the table the walls of the Unweaned Calf shook and the barkeep looked scared. “Katie, if you’ll have me, I’m yours. How’s for marrying me and lighting out and we’ll get a little ranch and raise cattle?”

Katie didn’t know whether she was being kidded or not. Then she hit the table with her fist and the walls shook even harder, and down to the floor dropped a little guy who was standing at the bar but not holding on tight. “Pardner,” Katie said, “I heard about marriage and I always wanted to try it. It’s a deal!” She stopped crying and dried her eyes on her shirtwaist sleeve. “We’ll get a ranch house and we’ll paper the walls with the pages of a mail-order catalogue and make everything snug.” Then she looked worried. “Nope, it’s only a dream.”

Bill’s face got black. “When I make a promise it’s a promise.”

Katie shook her head. “What about Baby? I know men better than anything in the world except maybe women. Sooner or later you’ll get the old hankering to go after Baby and then not even a good woman’s love or a forty-foot fence could hold you.”

“I told you I was through with Baby,” Bill roared, and he made such a noise the little guy at the bar hit the floor again.

“A man’s a man and a woman’s a fool for forgetting it,” Katie said, almost ready to cry again. “I just can’t risk having my heart broken over a coyote.” She finished off the bottle of pulque. “Nope, we’ll stay friends, Bill, and I’ll be a sister to you.”

“I’ll be consternated!” Bill yelled. “I believe you’re jealous of Baby!”

“A lady has a right to her feelings, such as she feels,” Katie said, wiping her eyes on her shirtwaist sleeve. “I’ll tell you what to do, Bill. I ain’t going to have no coyote come between us. You bring me Baby’s hide and I’ll marry you.”

Bill just sat back in his chair.

“Besides, it’d be convenient to have,” Katie said. “If Baby’s as big as you say we could use the hide for a parlor rug and have some lap over in the dining room and what’s left we could stuff chinks with.”

“I can’t do that,” Bill said promptly. “I’ve been trying for years with no luck.”

“You don’t sound like you even wanted to get it,” Katie said with a pout.

“Sure I want to get it, but how?”

“You talk like you’re glad a coyote’s smarter than Pecos Bill.”

“That’s enough.” Bill banged the table and half the bottles on the bar fell down. “It’s a bargain. I’ll get it.”

“Right now?”

“Right now!”

“Then I’ll go off and hunt up a wedding dress and some shoes,” Katie said. “You bring the hide back here and we’ll have the hottest wedding there ever was in Amarillo.” She headed for the door, like a barn being carried off in a spring flood.

Bill didn’t say anything for quite a while. He picked up the pulque bottle and found it was empty. He asked, “Got any ideas, Pete?”

“About Katie?” I shook my head.

“About getting Baby. I can’t let the little woman down.”

He stood up and started to the bar. “Let’s have a drink and start thinking.”

When Bill asked the barkeep for pulque the barkeep shook his head. “You finished the last bottle. I haven’t got a drop.”

“Then gimme whisky.”

“On top of pulque?” The barkeep looked astonished and the little man beside the bar fell to the floor and lay there.

“What’s wrong with that?” Bill asked, getting hot.

“You mix my drinks like that, they’ll take the hide off you.” But the barkeep poured out the whisky. “However, it’s your hide.”

Bill swung around like he was boiling mad. “What did you say?”

“I said if you mix my drinks they’ll take the hide off you!”

“Yeep!” Bill brought a fist down on the bar and cracked the top plank. “We got it!” He slugged down the whisky. “We got it!”

I thought he was crazy. “Got what?”

He pounded me on the back and I bounced toward the front door. “Hurry out, Pete, and get two big water tanks!”

Well, I came back to the bar with the tanks, and when I got there Bill had every bottle off the shelves and he was opening them so fast the popping of corks sounded like gunfire. From somewhere he had got fifty gallons of pulque, and that went into the tanks first. Then he poured in all the whisky in the place.

He was awful enthusiastic. “We’ll mix up a drink for Baby that’ll take her hide off sure. There’s been a drought in this Dust Bowl, and we’ll pick up a good dry water hole, fill it up with this mixture, and see what Baby does.”

In the tanks went twenty gallons of rum, three cases of bourbon, seven bottles of gin, and a bottle of soda water. The barkeep came up from the cellar with another armful of bottles. One of them had a funny shape.

“What’s that?” Bill asked.

“Something called ‘Cream dess Violets.’ A salesman give it to me.”

“Put it in!”

“Here’s Liquor dess Peaches.”

“Put it in!”

In went cherry brandy, a bottle of bitters, and a gallon of Dago red. Bill didn’t look satisfied. “Got anything else in bottles?”

The barkeep, who was baldheaded, handed over a flask of hair tonic.

Bill stuck his finger in the soup and licked it. “Tastes pretty nearly right. What else you got?”

The barkeep offered a bottle of catsup and that went in.

Again Bill sampled the results. “Almost right? Got anything else in a bottle?”

“Some perfume called Eau d’Amour I was saving for my wife.”

“Put it in!”

Bill stuck his finger in once more. “That’s perfect! It ought to take the hide off a cactus!”

Three teams of horses and ten men and the biggest dray in the county drew the tanks out to the water hole that Bill had decided to use. He had to hope the odor would attract Baby, wherever she was. The mixture from one tank went into the hole with a splash and the odor it gave off knocked seven men to the ground. I felt a little dizzy myself, but Bill was too excited to notice anything. Twenty-one lizards who lived around that hole ran to it, took one small drink, and twenty of them lay on their backs with their toes turned up. The twenty-first just vanished in a small explosion.

After the men revived they started to move the second tank to the hole but Bill stopped them. “Hold it! Baby may not come here before this stuff dries up, and we’d better save the other tank for another night. We never could mix this drink again the same way.”

With the hole half filled we drove off a piece and waited. We waited a long while and we tried to keep Bill quiet but he was pretty nervous. Most of the time he said, “I hope she comes.” Sometimes he said, “This is a dirty trick to play on Baby!” Even from a mile away the water hole smelled like an old barroom on Sunday morning. Bill walked up and down saying, “I wonder if Baby is coming, I wonder if Katie is getting ready,” until he sounded all mixed up, as if he was expecting Katie to turn up at the water hole while Baby got ready for a wedding.

Every so often there would be little explosions at the water hole and Bill said, “That must be jack rabbits coming in for a drink! Boy, if only Baby’d come.”

Then we heard a funny noise off in the distance, the noise of a rush of a big wind. Bill knew what it was and he yelled, “It’s Baby! She’s sniffing!” A minute later, over the horizon, came the black shadow that was Baby, running full speed. She came so fast that she had to stop herself at the water hole by braking with her front feet and threw up a sandstorm that blacked out El Paso three days later. We were too excited to pay any attention.

We saw the shadow stand by the hole and we watched Baby lower her head. We heard one more sniff, like a tornado taking a deep breath, and then there was an explosion and a roar that knocked us flat. Bill stood up first. “That got her!” He began jumping. “That got her!” And he started to the hole with all of us running like mad.

Bill beat us all there, and when we caught up to him he said, “I’m consternated! Look at this!” There lay Baby’s hide, thick, gray, tangled, and matted, but there was nothing of Baby inside it. Bill didn’t know what to do or think. He just stood scratching his head. “I didn’t think it would work as good as that.” He shook his head. “Well, I got her at last!” His voice sounded funny. Then he said, “Load as much of the hide as you can on the wagon and drag the rest. We’ll get back to town and see Katie.”

We put a lot of the hide on the wagon and it was piled up like a hayrick. On the way back to town Bill remembered the unused tank of the mixture. “I’m going to bottle and sell it,” he said. “It’ll be a wonderful thing for knocking off warts and freckles.”

We pulled up in front of the Unweaned Calf and Bill yelled, “Hey, Katie!” He was feeling pretty good again. “Hey, Katie, come out and see what I got!”

A flock of barflies rushed out but no Katie, and Bill began to grumble. “Look at the trouble you go to, just for a woman, and then she’s off primping herself and too busy to come look.” He decided to wait for her and invited everyone for a drink. By this time fifty guys were going up and down the street boasting how they caught the coyote by putting whisky on her tail.

The barkeep had renewed his stock from somewhere and Bill ordered drinks all around. After twenty minutes he began to yell, “Hey, Katie!”

The barkeep gave him a funny look. “You mean that blonde you were talking to yesterday?”

“Yeah, what about her?”

“Last night a cowhand comes in with a couple hundred dollars and said he was going up to San Antone. Katie said she always wanted to see San Antone so she goes with him. They left about midnight!”

  Well, Bill stowed the hide and the tank of mixture away in a shed and he said, “Let’s get out of this country, Pete.” We went over to New Mexico for a time, punching cattle, but it wasn’t the same Bill. He was thoughtful and silent and he never sang no more. He never talked about Baby, either. Then we drifted back to El Paso again and got a job at the One Legged M Ranch. Bill worked hard but his heart wasn’t in his work. At night he used to leave our shack and go out and sit somewhere by himself and he got sore if I offered to go along. When he did talk he was pretty gloomy. “I’m getting old,” he’d say. “I think we ought to go out to Californy for our last days. That’s where rich Texans and poor Texi-cans go before they die. They sit in the sun, I heard, and eat oranges.”

Once he said, “I done wrong killing Baby. I shouldn’ta done it. I was so happy when she was around to chase, I didn’t know how happy I was.”

I couldn’t get him interested in roping or riding or liquor or shooting. As for women, when the sister of the owner of the One Legged M came for a visit Bill ran off and hid in the hills for a week.

He came back with a funny look on his face and he wouldn’t talk. But that night he said, “Come along with me.”

We walked a mile from the ranch buildings. Bill said mysteriously, “Hear anything?”

All I heard was a lot of crickets and maybe a lizard in the grass. I asked, “Where?”

“Over there, back of that hill.”

I listened again and I heard a cow in heat and a horse neighing. “I don’t hear nothing special.”

Bill wasn’t even listening to me. He was grinning like a kid. “I can hear her, coming nearer.” He shook his head. “She sounds mighty lonesome tonight, mighty lonesome.” He repeated, “So lonesome, that ‘Huh, huh, huh!’”

I knew who he was talking about. I just chewed on a piece of grass and said nothing.

“You sure you don’t hear nothing?” Bill asked.

“I got a cold.” I tried to hide what I was thinking about Bill. “I don’t hear nothing so good.”

The next day I found Bill in the bunkhouse packing his kit. “I’m going back to Amarillo,” he said and he wouldn’t explain why. “I just got an idea, that’s all.”

He did explain on the way back. “Baby’s still hanging around waiting for me, Pete. I know it.” He glared at me. “You think I’m crazy.”

I shook my head mighty quick. “Different people hear different things.”

“The reason we can’t see her is because she no hide,” Bill said like he’d thought it out. “Did you ever see a coyote without a hide?”

“Nope, I never did.”

“No one ever did, and that proves it. If a coyote’s going to be seen he just has to have a hide!”

We rode on quite a spell and I didn’t have a word to say.

Then Bill said, “When we get to Amarillo, I’m going after Baby.”

I almost fell off my horse, and it wasn’t the horse’s fault. “How will you do that?”

Bill didn’t say. We came into town and he went to the shed where he stored all the stuff after he got Baby’s hide. It was still there but except to pat it once, he wasn’t interested in it. He went right to the tank of mixture and pounded it.

It sounded empty as a dry well.

“It’s gone and I can’t even mix it again,” Bill said, and he sounded heartbroken. “I figured that maybe if I drank some of it, it’d put me in the same shape as Baby. Then I could have gone after her.”

I just shook my head. I couldn’t say a word.

Bill began to fuss around the tank. With the top off he lowered himself inside. Then I heard him yell, “Get a cup, Pete! There’s just a little bit left here.”

I got him a cup and he fished up one cupful and even for that he had to scrape bottom. When he came from the tank he was grinning from ear lobe to ear lob. I was pretty worried but I figured he knew what he was doing.

“You going to drink this now?”

“No sir,” Bill said with a lot of pride. “I’m going to drink it fit and proper.” And with that he began to sing

“Oh, I’m wild and woolly And full of fleas, Ain’t never been curried Below the knees!”

I tried to argue with him all the way to the Unweaned Calf, but his mind was made up. He just kept singing. He told the barkeep, “This time I brought my own liquor.”

The barkeep looked suspicious. “How about a chaser?”

“I hope I’ll never need a chaser,” Bill said with a pleasant laugh. He looked around the room and saw about twenty people. “Come on, folks, gather round and I’ll show you something you can tell your grandchildren.” He raised the cup, but I was feeling too bad to watch close.

Before he tastes it he sings

“Take me to the graveyard and lay a sod o’er me, For I’m a poor cowboy and I know I done wrong!”

When I heard that I knew he was extra happy again.

“Pete!” he said to me. “You’ve been a good friend. When you find someone like Baby, don’t treat her bad!”

Then he takes a good long swig from the cup.

There’s a sort of flash and explosion, not loud but gentle like, and when I look up, Bill’s gone. Completely gone and not a sign of him! Then, and the men who were in the Unweaned Calf at that moment will swear to it, drunk or sober, we heard a gentle fluttering sound. Down from the ceiling like falling leaves came the clothes Bill had been wearing, his shirt, his hat; his pants, his boots, and the hand-carved belt he was so proud of. For a second they stood by themselves, just as if Bill was inside ‘em, then they collapsed to the floor.

And that was the end of Pecos Bill, as far as anyone knew.

I hung around town for a couple of days but I was awful lonesome, so I went back to my job at the One Legged M, feeling like a lost calf. I worked extra hard by day so I’d be good and tired at nights, but even then I couldn’t sleep.

One night I got up and walked out to where Bill and me used to sit. I was there in the quiet and I just couldn’t forget Bill. The only noise I heard was a couple of lizards in the grass.

Now, I ain’t going to swear to this because I never heard it again, but as I was sitting there that night a wind came up sudden and it got real cold. The grass began to move or I thought it did. And right behind me I heard “Heyheehaw!” and so on and then “Huh, huh, huh!” Maybe it could have been the wind in the trees, but there weren’t any trees and anyway, where did that sudden wind come from? A minute later I swear I heard Bill’s voice as happy as a little child, laughing, “That Baby! She’s just willful!” It sounded as if he was chasing along behind, doing what he liked to do most in all this world.

But I couldn’t see a thing.

I would even think that I had dreamed it, except that the next morning Bert Simmons, who owns the One Legged M, called us outside and we followed him behind the barn. The ground there used to be as level and smooth as a piece of harness strap, but this morning there was a brand new arroyo, fifty feet deep and running for a quarter mile, just like a big crack in the earth. It was the sort of crack we used to see when Bill and me shot and Baby jumped in the air to duck and then landed hard.

Well, I’m sure that wasn’t the finish of the whole thing although I never again heard a sound like Baby or saw any traces. But I’ve been reading in the newspapers about those California earthquakes and I remember what Bill used to say about wanting to finish his days in California. No one knows what causes those earthquakes, I hear, but I got my own ideas ever since I heard that California was a sort of soft place, nowhere near as tough as West Texas and a whole lot more brittle.

WILLIAM C. WHITE was born in 1903 in Reading, Pennsylvania where his father was a Presbyterian minister. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University, in 1923, he was instructor in modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took his Master of Arts degree in 1925. He taught for several years at the Friends’ School, in Wilmington, Delaware, and was awarded the Penfield Fellowship for study abroad by the University of Pennsylvania. From 1926 to 1929 he lived in Moscow and also traveled in Siberia and the Caucasus. In 1930 he was foreign correspondent for the New York Evening Post and Public Ledger Syndicate in Berlin and Warsaw. He speaks and reads Russian, Polish, German, and French, and on his return from abroad in 1930 lectured on modern Europe for the Pond Bureau. His articles on Europe have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, Asia, New York Times, Esquire, Readers’ Digest, the New Yorker, and other magazines. Since 1936 he has been writing short stories, which have been published in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and other national magazines. He has sold stories to the movies, written scenarios for MGM, and is the author of four books and two juvenile books. More recently he was in England for the Office of War Information, for which organization he is still working.