Hombre

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.