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Sands of Sedona
Copyright 1982-2003 TrixiePixGraphics
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Sands of Sedona -- Western Fiction
Approx. 67962 Words
Chapter Three
The deputy hadn't taken the trouble to see where John went, but within the hour he knew. It was a small community, and a corrupt one. A man who had once crossed John in a business deal chanced to see him enter the stable. He told a friend and that man told someone else. By the time the local businesses were opening, most of the population knew of the arrival of John Hannal. He was known to be an unyielding man by all. By the few honest folks in town, John was known to be as straight as a pane of glass. To the crooks, he was branded an evil man, a thief, or murderer, or worse. Each tale was improved upon and embellished as it passed from shady character to shady character. In an environment such as that which persisted in the filthy town of Paydirt, the Pope himself might be labeled a rapist and run out of town, and Jack-the-Ripper might be called "misunderstood" and elected Mayor. Or Sheriff.
John awoke to soft voices nearby. He did not move or open his eyes for a moment. When he did, he noticed that Chowder's ears were alert, bent in the direction of the voices a few yards away. Two men were talking in hushed tones in the shadows as thin bands of late afternoon sunlight streamed through cracks in the barn and illuminated the dust in the air. The wind had stopped and a gentler breeze had that peculiar spring quality of partly biting, and partly balmy.
A deep voice spoke first. It sounded as though it came from a largish man. "Look," it whispered. "Look right there."
Another man spoke in a quietly exasperated tone, "Thet's a pile of saddle blankets; can't you tell that?"
There was a pause. John could sense the big man squinting through the shadows. "Yea, okay," the big man said reluctantly. "Well, I reckon he ain't even in here then." There was another pause, then John could detect a hint of nervousness in the other man's voice.
"Okay, let's git out of here. If he ain't here, it ain't no fault of ours. We'll tell Erin and let 'im take care of this his own self. It ain't worth it."
There were sounds of scuffling, then a brief silence, then a slapping sound. Chowder grunted with surprise and spooked in his stall. One of the men had slapped his rump as he went by, just to watch him spook. The two men giggled like little girls. Then there was a creak as a door opened. John was bathed in bright sunlight, almost completely in plain view for a few seconds. Then the door closed and he was in the dark shadow again.
He jumped from under his blanket and was at the door in three silent strides. He'd intended to do his best to hurt the man who slapped his horse, but before opening the door he thought better of it. He hated to be sneaky; he preferred to be out in the open and upfront no matter what, even when it wasn't particularly smart. But this time he only peered through a crack near the door so he'd recognize the two men next time he saw them. John got a good look as they walked up the mud-crusted street toward a saloon with their backs to him, and he made a mental note of the basic physical characteristics of each man. They were a rough looking pair. He thought the smaller man looked familiar. They turned into the saloon. Then John was left to his thoughts and his private speculations.
Slipping into Chowder's stall, he absentmindedly scratched the horse's butt to calm him, while he pondered the situation. Had the two men been looking for him, or just looking for a horse that was misplaced in the barn somewhere? And who was Erin? John thought it might be the name of the deputy he'd met with early that morning. A few hours later, he learned he was right.
John spent the following two nights on the grass bales he'd arranged as a bed in the dark corner of the stable. He liked being close to Chowder. He was never sure if Chowder felt the same way, but at least the horse didn't violently object.
At first John moved inoffensively about the town, watching and listening, talking to no one if he could avoid it. When he couldn't, he kept the conversation short, light and curt. After a while however, he became more intent on learning what he needed to know. Soon he was asking pointed questions about the whereabouts of certain men, and he openly inspected the brands of the horses that came and went in town. Men began to pay attention to him.
By the end of his third day in town the occasional gossip-monger was still asking him where he bunked. The question was always contrived to seem innocuous. John knew it never was. His whereabouts at night had been a topic of much speculation. He'd caught stray quips of conversation as he entered rooms unexpectedly. He tried to often enter rooms unexpectedly. It was curious, he thought, that the young Kelly, the owner of the stable and obviously well rooted in the town, had not given away his secret quarters next to his horse. Certainly she'd been asked-- maybe a dozen times.
Kelly knew John was still bunking with his bronc. He had come back to the stable early one night and watched from the shadows as the girl straightened his bed. Then she stood looking at what she'd done, apparently wondering if the gesture had been too bold. Then she rumpled the bed again. Then, seemingly disgusted with herself, she had turned abruptly and walked away, to attend to some horses at the far end of the barn. John remained silent in the shadow and had not revealed himself. John thought her behavior most curious. He had gambled a smile at her only the day before. It was an innocent kind of smile, like he might use to be civil to the barber, for she was not at all an attractive girl. John had no interest in women anyway after the loss of his wife, but Kelly had been at best cool, if not almost rude. John came away from the exchange certain he wasn't liked by Kelly.
Still, it seemed she had been trying to be pleasant in straightening his bed. John settled in to his grass bales that night and before drifting off to sleep, he entertained the fleeting notion that she hadn't been straightening his bed at all. Perhaps she was repositioning it just so.....so as to afford a clearer shot through some slit in the drafty barn. As quickly as the thought came into his head he dismissed it and cursed himself under his breath. He was, he knew, becoming entirely too suspicious, and he wished he was done with the whole damned affair.
John Hannal wasn't a man who looked for trouble. He had tried that when he was much younger, in his teens, and to his dismay he had learned one important lesson for his efforts. He learned that trouble is the only thing in life that's easy to find. Maybe, he sometimes thought, that's what the bible meant by "Ask and Ye Shall Receive".
He had asked --begged-- for many things in his life. He had begged the powers that be, any powers at all, for the life of his wife. He hadn't been answered that time.
He had prayed for a quiet, tranquil life. No Gods had answered him then.
He had begged for a pony when he was six. He hadn't been answered then either-- not exactly.
A year later, when he was almost eight, he inherited a cranky witch of a mare from an uncle who'd been hung for stealing a saddle. But that wasn't the same as asking for a nice pony and getting one right then, or at least within a reasonable time thereafter.
Ordinarily they didn't hang a man for stealing a saddle, not even in New Mexico. This saddle, however, belonged to Danny, the nine year old son of Sheriff Nathaniel Lewis. The boy was John's nemesis.
The saddle was a fine piece of work, and the Sheriff had paid dearly for it. His son loved to show off the saddle-- at least he had a proper pony.
The rumor was that John's wayward uncle Elrod had stolen the saddle just for John, though that gossip was actively dispelled in John's presence by the immediate family. John had appreciated the gesture in a backhanded kind of way. Even at age seven, John had a clearer grasp of basic morals than did his uncle, who was forty at the time.
The story was that the uncle snatched the saddle from the Sheriff's barn one night, and had made a run for it across the Sheriff's pasture in a light, foggy drizzle. The Sheriff, being a light sleeper and having a sort of sixth sense that warned him someone might try for the ornate saddle anyway, awakened just as John's uncle made the first fence next to the barn. There he stopped to fumble with the loot for a moment, trying to get the stirrups and latigos to go through the fence between the boards.
The Sheriff fired a warning shot into the air which scattered the horses in the pasture, and the uncle took that as his cue to sprint across the field with the small saddle in tow, dragging through the wet grass. The Sheriff fired a couple more shots in the general direction of the uncle, which he claimed were merely to warn the thief. One of the slugs, however, hit the Sheriff's son's pony in the rump.
The uncle escaped, only to be caught the following day, trying to hide the saddle in a patch of brush just off his own range. The scheme had been destined to failure from the start.
The Sheriff maintained in court that the uncle was trying to steal some rather expensive, if not useful horses, which were in the pasture with the pony. The uncle countered that he wasn't so stupid as to try to steal any high strung horses whilst also stealing a pony saddle-- which would not fit any of the expensive horses anyhow.
The Sheriff had been forced to concede that was probably true, but that, instead, the uncle must have been trying to steal his son's pony, which was technically a horse, and as such made the uncle still guilty of horse thievery.
The uncle countered that that would have been senseless as well, because he couldn't ride the tiny pony-- he was a somewhat largish man-- and he sure wasn't going to try and make his getaway by leading an eleven hand, spoiled little monster across fifteen miles of open desert to his own ranch, or to any other destination for that matter. Uncle Elrod had lost all his horses in a bad gambling decision years before.
To the uncle and his friends that seemed as workable a defense as the first, but the Sheriff had no more give in him. John's uncle had been something of a problem for years. --How much of a problem depended on the person who was asked. The Sheriff saw John's uncle as a significant problem. There had been some talk that the Sheriff's wife liked the uncle-- rather more than was appropriate. Nothing was ever substantiated, not that became public record. Perhaps there was a good deal to the story that only three people knew: John's uncle, the Sheriff, and the Sheriff's wife. Perhaps that's what drove the Sheriff so maniacally to see John's uncle hung for horse thievery.
It was widely accepted that the uncle hadn't been trying to steal any horses. It was also pretty much accepted that the town was better off hanging him if the opportunity arose. If the Sheriff wanted to champion the cause and handle the details, it was pretty much okay with the town.
They hung him. And John didn't get the saddle.
The Sheriff's son's pony, however, never quite healed from the gunshot to his butt. Certainly that butt-shot pony was a factor in the Sheriff's determination to hang the uncle. The Sheriff had been made to look barely competent, shooting at an unarmed, petty outlaw on his own property and hitting his own horse. Shooting an unarmed man is a hard thing to live down for a man with a large, fragile ego, as many Sheriff's have. Shooting at one and missing was worse. Shooting at one, and missing, but hitting your own horse, was unspeakable.
Shortly after the death of his uncle, John was given an old three-legged mare that was found wandering around his uncle's ranch. The plug actually had four legs, but preferred to use only three most of the time. If the uncle had stolen that horse too, no one would admit to the loss, and so it was given to John. She was a witch in every respect, but any horse, John thought at age seven, was better than no horse at all.
He had no saddle to put on her, and so learned to straddle her sharp, dinosaur back, Indian style. In that way he learned to ride properly. He rode her to school and occasionally to town, and on long make-believe Indian hunts out into the red rock labyrinths of the Navajo ranges. No matter what the circumstance or context, his mean, valueless mare still had more value than that high priced, butt-sore pony of Danny's which could hardly ever be ridden anyway.
The Sheriff's pony limped around town for nearly two years after that. A smoldering infection had settled in, and over those couple of years the finest local veterinary minds --witch doctors at best-- alternately gained, then lost ground on that hot, fat rump. Mostly ground was lost.
The insolent pony was sometimes ridden by the Sheriff's little bully of a son, and sometimes it was just led around town, because its butt was too swollen and sore to be ridden.
John had rather liked his crazy uncle Elrod, and had felt bad that he'd been hung. He felt worse that the uncle was the victim of some classless jokes in school, many of which implicated John himself.
John sometimes wondered if the hanging of his uncle was his fault. He couldn't remember ever asking the uncle for a saddle-- he didn't even have a horse, and that would have been his first request, had he chosen to ask his uncle for anything. Still, the uncle had been stealing a small child's saddle, and John was the only small child that he could think of, that his uncle knew, or might be inclined to steal a saddle for.
Still, John felt brighter about his uncle every time he saw the Sheriff's son wrestling with that cranky pony whose butt was usually so painful as to make him even more difficult and unreasonable than ponies generally are.
There was much talk in the town about whether the pony should be put down. The Sheriff maintained that the animal was of the finest bloodlines, and that it would be a crime to put him down, seeing his breeding potential and all. But the pony never sired another pony anyhow, because his butt was generally far too sore to manage the task.
John had, however, watched the little fellow mount a Thoroughbred mare in heat. She was tied to the hitching rail in front of the general store. The pony had been standing across the street eyeing the mare, and it was obvious the mare was willing. Unlike women, mares are generally obvious about their desires.
There had been the usual, cursory squealing and kicking out by the mare. The little pony blew and stamped his tiny feet and became increasingly agitated. John felt that at times like that the pony made an ass of himself. Certainly he had been led to the brink of satisfaction on a dozen occasions back at the Lewis ranch, only to have his infected rump be the ultimate cause of his unspeakable disappointment. Now, it seemed, the pony was too horny to care, and he broke away from the rail and hit the mare at a dead run, making a sprite little jump onto her back as he reached her.
John watched as the pony's short legs kicked and struggled in mid air, a yard off the ground. How he squirmed around on that mare's broad, round back! The mare was delighted at the effort if a little disappointed in the equipment, and John watched intently, somewhat taken aback at age seven, by the sheer drive and desire that pony showed.
But the pony had not been on the mare's back for eight seconds when he let out the most shocking scream. John, not being entirely naive to the ways of critters, and having watched the act between animals on many occasions, thought the pony had done his job and was showing his appreciation to the mare, albeit rather soon after mounting her. But with that one small pony scream the little brute fell off the mare and flat onto his side, on the ground.
He never got up again, but was finally put down by old red headed Bob, the Sheriff's deputy. Bob happened along to find a collection of concerned citizens crowded around the pony as it writhed in pain, white-eyed, in the red clay of the street. No one had been sure the pony should finally be put down even then. No one could ascertain just what the cause of his ailment was, but that his hind leg was facing backward was obvious, and most agreed he could never recover. Bob put him down as gracefully as could be done, there in the street, and that was that.
A while after the execution of the pony the small gathering dispersed. John had been hanging around, trying to get a close look at the bullet hole in the pony's forehead, for such things were of the keenest interest to small boys. It had been near dusk when Bob shot the pony, and now it was past dusk. The pony seemed dead enough, but occasionally, even for an hour or so after the shooting, it twitched or spasmed. John thought this quite alarming. No one could supply him a satisfactory explanation as to how the pony could keep wriggling an hour after he'd had his brains blown out by a forty-four caliber pistol. Maybe, he thought, Bob had missed the vital parts, and didn't want to waste the ammunition to shoot him some more.
By the time the crowd dispersed, however, the pony had mostly stopped jerking, and that was fine with John.
John finally got a close look at the horse. It lay there in the street with its eyes perfectly open, and it was hard to say that it was not still looking at something. Even if it was, it probably couldn't see very well, because all the people who had shuffled around the carcass had inadvertently kicked dirt into the pony's eyes. Since it was dead, it couldn't blink the dirt away, and it just stayed there, stuck to its moist eyeballs. John thought it would have been more proper to have washed the dirt out of the pony's eyes. Certainly someone should have seen to that. Just seeing the dirt in the pony's eyes made him blink and rub his own eyes.
It was upon closer examination of those dusty eyes that John became uncertain the pony was dead at all. Maybe, he thought, he was just stunned. Nothing could be dead and have eyes that looked right at you, like that. John set out to convince himself once and for all that the pony was dead, so he poked the pony in the jaw with the toe of his boot. The pony did not move-- in fact, his lip, where John's boot poked it, stuck up on his dry teeth, and that made the pony look curiously like it was smiling. Its eyes were wide open, it was lying on its side on the street with dirt mostly covering its eyes, and it was smiling an insane person's kind of smile. John found it utterly hideous and more than a little disconcerting, but at the same time unexpectedly intriguing. He had never been this close to death before. This, he thought, was an opportunity to finally get a handle on the phenomenon once and for all.
John prodded the pony a couple more times with his boot and then, still with the toe of his boot, he began to rearrange the pony's smile into different kinds of smiles. He knew it would be frowned upon if any grownups caught him, especially if the Sheriff or his kid caught him. But there was nothing else to do at the moment, and the grownups had all gone away.
John took the toe of his boot and pried the pony's mouth open a little. There had never been an opportunity to take a really good look at the inside of a horse's mouth. When they were alive and you wanted to look into their mouths, they would always throw a fit and jump around and try to get away. You could never perform an unhurried examination of the inside of a live horse's mouth, and the pony in this case didn't seem to object.
He got the mouth open a ways and stuck his boot in a little farther, to gain a better grip and a position from which to pry it open even wider. It was getting dark now, and it was getting harder to see inside the mouth.
John bent down closer to look in the pony's mouth, but found himself examining the bullet hole in the pony's forehead instead. It was perfectly round, and the hair was burned in a ragged circle close to the hole, from the black powder flame that had spit from Bob's gun. Cakes of soot were matted in the hair, mixed with a surprisingly small amount of blood. John wondered if the bullet had gone clean through and had come out the pony's throat somewhere, and was even then lying in the dirt under the pony's head. What a prize a bullet would be, that had gone clean through a pony's head! John imagined making a necklace of such a bullet and offering it to Karen MacMahon in trade for a kiss.
Just then a wave of nausea swept him. He had contemplated altogether too many grisly things in the last while. Perhaps he did not have the stomach for death that he thought he did.
He heard some other kids approaching from the boardwalk, on a deliberate heading straight for the pony. John, having seen the entire event from start to finish, felt to be somewhat of an authority on dead ponies, this one in particular. As the kids approached he cautioned them back.
"He's been floppin' for quite awhile", John advised them. "It might not be safe to get too close just yet."
"Well what about you?" The kids wanted to know. "How come you can stand there with your foot in its mouth?" They laughed, but slowed their approach.
John looked down to realize that his foot was, indeed, still stuck well into the pony's mouth, and that he had been unconsciously placing most of his weight on that foot, which caused the pony to begin to smile again. It looked even more dreadful in the gathering darkness.
John decided to take his foot out of the horse's mouth altogether, but just as he moved it, the dead pony's muscles spasmed again and the pony's mouth closed tightly over most of John's foot.
The pony bit him hard, and it hurt, and it hurt even more to realize that he was being bitten by a grisly looking pony with a bullet hole square in its forehead and with unblinking eyes that were covered with dirt and with a crazy demonic smile plastered on its face. Ponies weren't supposed to smile in the first place, nor were dead ones supposed to bite your foot half off.
John fell instantly to the ground and began to wail and to kick at the pony's nose with his other foot. The boys who'd been on their way to see the dead horse screamed in terror and ran away. That unnerved John even more. It might not have been so bad had they stuck around and taunted him and laughed at him. Now he was alone with that pony, and he could hear their screams and their boots clomping all the way down the boardwalk toward the Sheriff's office. Perhaps they were going to get the Sheriff to have him shoot that pony again. God knows, John thought, that's what he needs. --Maybe shoot him three or four more times. One bullet right into his brain hadn't done the trick at all.
When John fell to the ground he twisted his leg, and that caused the pony's head to turn somewhat upright, as though it was going to get up or come back to life entirely. From this position the pony was looking directly into John's eyes. John's jerking made the pony look as though it was doing the jerking. It looked like a dog gnawing a pant leg and playing tug-o-war. The boy nearly passed out.
John descended straight into panic and kicked that pony's nose bloody before his foot finally came out of the boot that was in the pony's mouth. When he was loose he scrambled across the dirt street on all fours, wailing unintelligible things as he went, and grunting and crying.
He had traversed about fifty feet in this fashion when he found himself suspended in mid air. There was a warm presence next to him and his initial reaction was that the pony had come completely to life and had chased him across the street. He thought it had him in its mouth, about to carry him off or eat him. John swung out at that presence like a wild animal fighting for its life, but he couldn't reach it.
Looking up, he discovered that the Sheriff, wholly unamused, had picked him up by the back of his belt, and he was swinging lightly, back and forth, about chest level with the man.
This had a calming effect on John. The Sheriff swung him upright and landed him none too politely on his feet. He gave John a disapproving look and John shuffled away, somewhat weakened by the experience. He looked back to see his boot still clenched tightly in the horse's jaws, in the middle of the street where anyone could see it.
He watched the Sheriff walk over to the corpse and look down upon it from only a foot away. That was the only time John thought of the Sheriff as being a brave man. John waited for him to draw his gun and shoot the pony some more. But he didn't. John waited a long time, watching from across the street, from around the corner of the store, in the gathering gloom. The Sheriff never did draw his gun. John couldn't understand how he could leave such a menace on the street, when all he had to do was shoot it some more.
As John limped toward home he wondered what would become of his other boot. He supposed someone would return it to him after they had finally killed the horse. But he never saw it again.
The doc cut the pony open after his unfortunate and certainly untimely demise. It was found that the infection from the bullet wound in his butt had smoldered deep inside the animal, and had decayed and rotted the bone. The stress in mounting that mare had caused the hip to shatter. Putting him down was the only possible solution. No matter how creative the jokes became about that nasty pony, he was never accused of a lack of spunk.
The frustrated mare never did foal. Some said the pony hadn't had time. Most preferred to call him impotent, as a joke on the Sheriff and his rotten kid, who was becoming rottener by the year.
That old inherited mare of John's had not been as good as the fat, friendly pony John had begged for in his dreams when he was six, but it was better than nothing. A cranky mare that could walk was better, John thought with amusement, than a cranky pony with a hole in its butt. When the pony died and the Sheriff's kid was entirely afoot, John's mare became even more valuable, to John.
In later life he reflected with some bewilderment on the fact that he had not begged God to spare his uncle from being hung in the middle of town. But he realized that he would never have begged to own the bony old mare, either.
John was never a vengeful or small-minded child. He didn't take any particular satisfaction in the events with the Sheriff's pony, even though most of the town saw it as pure entertainment. He didn't feel too badly about all that had happened just the same.
John tried to be friendly toward the Sheriff's kid. John didn't yet feel the contempt for the boy that most others did. John invited him into his club, which consisted of a number of local boys --no girls-- a donkey, a rabbit, two ferrets and a thoroughly stupid dog named Elvis. The boys had a secret camp eight miles out of town, up near the razorback. It was a hole in a red-rock overhang. It wasn't large enough to be called a cave, really, although they did call it that.
One of the boys tried to keep a pet rattlesnake in the cave, but it was felt that there was too much conflict with the ferrets, and the snake was voted out.
On a routine trek to the cave one afternoon, using a shortcut, they found a truly mysterious place.
Half a dozen local ranch kids on borrowed horses loped casually through a shallow, nondescript little draw. It was broad and open, treeless and plain, like a thousand others in the area. John glanced to the side to see one of the horses next to Danny's horse, bucking wildly. The rider went flying and the horse bolted. They found the skinny plug standing calmly two hundred yards away on the edge of that little valley, munching grass as if nothing had happened. He was a nineteen year old gelding, and no one could remember the horse ever humping up.
A diligent inspection of his tack revealed no obvious problem, so the unhurt rider mounted again and tried to ride on. Still the horse would not re-enter the valley. The kids tried every horse trick they knew short of dragging him bodily, but they finally gave in and allowed the horse to walk around the perimeter of the draw, which he did without the slightest objection. The group finished their ride and thought little more about it. Horses were just sometimes like that.
A week later they had occasion to take another group ride. On that afternoon one of the horses bolted for no apparent reason, sprinting across an open field, and then, suddenly, as if the mare had seen a monster, she turned sharply and dumped her rider. The little mustang ran another few hundred yards and stopped. Only then the kids realized that this bizarre behavior occurred in the confines of that same, mysterious little draw.
It seemed reasonable that there was an animal carcass somewhere nearby that was causing the problem. Perhaps a lion's den or a bear was in the area. They all made a mental note of the place, and thought little more about it. They would just be more careful whenever they had to ride through there, or else they would avoid it altogether and ride the long way to the cave.
Through the spring, however, the legend of "Mystery Valley" grew. Several more riders had been dumped there, and several horses had stopped abruptly in some proximity to the valley and would refuse all requests to move forward. Sometimes they wouldn't even retreat, but would stand trembling in fear, wide-eyed and terrified, until someone dropped a loop on them and dragged them out of the area.
John began to take an interest in the place, and he asked around to see if anyone else had experienced any similar troubles there. He also purposely went into the area to search out, once and for all, the cause of the problems.
He did uncover a vague and obscure tale, told haltingly by an old and weary Navajo who barely spoke English. The Navajo claimed that a long time before, an Indian had been riding through that same area. The Indian had come upon a small herd of lost and straggling buffs. He shot many of the animals, even though he had plenty of meat for the winter, as did his tribe. He already had so many hides that his family could stay warm no matter how cold it became, but he was a greedy man and he could not stop killing.
He tried to shoot one more Buffalo with an arrow. It was nearly the last in the herd. His aim was poor because he was fat and too full of buffalo meat. His arrow only wounded the bull, which became enraged and hooked him and killed his horse. That crippled the hunter for life.
The incident brought him bad luck as well. All of his meat spoiled and his skins began to stink so that it was better to be cold than to lie under them. As a result, the Indian's family was always cold, and they starved to death that winter.
The Indian was enraged and it turned him bitter. He became a mean and evil man who hurt everyone who came close to him. He lived a long time and his legend was known by all Navajos.
The Indian became even more dishonest and once again he amassed a great wealth of horses. Before he died, he gave everything he owned to a Skin Walker, and asked him to put a curse on the spot where the Buffalo had gored his horse. That was his dying wish.
The Skin Walker took the horses but he was only half evil. He cursed the spot but told the spirits to wake up and wreak their havoc on man and beast only when someone mean and small and vain passed through, and then to go back to sleep until awakened again.
John could find no other Navajo who had heard the same story. A few weeks later, when John asked the teller of the tale to repeat it for some friends, the old Indian could not remember that he had ever heard it himself.
John innocently passed the story around in school. Of course it was nonsense, but it was a curious kind of story and it got told and retold until everyone knew it.
It wasn't long before the other kids took to blaming the Sheriff's son, Danny Lewis, for reactivating the curse. It started as a joke, but somehow the hex seemed to fit the boy, and the story was used against him often, whenever he did something mean or when someone was mad at him. It seemed to John that the boy never did live down that old Indian tale. Danny blamed John for dredging the damned thing up in the first place.
During the summer of '76 the town voted to hold the Fourth of July festivities a couple of miles out on the range. There had been considerable trouble in the past with broken windows and burned buildings and such in town, and the Centennial celebrations promised to be wilder than usual. Anyhow, some of the grownups wanted to explore the mysteries of "Mystery Valley" for themselves.
The Sheriff was elected to chaperone the affair-- he accepted greedily, for it would be a fine opportunity to mingle and schmooze and secure his re-election that fall.
He and Danny, who was now thirteen, arrived on the afternoon of the third and began setting up camp. By evening the little draw was near overflowing with drunken campers and screaming kids. By the morning of The Fourth the place was pandemonium. Nearly all the town's one hundred and sixteen inhabitants had turned out for three days of gorging and drinking and telling tales. Their camps filled the broad little draw.
John rode into camp that first day to find a badly injured man, and another not so hurt. Everyone said it was the derndest thing. One of the horses just went berserk-- bucked a man off and broke his arm! The man was so astounded at the behavior of the old and faithful horse that he immediately remounted the pony, and it promptly went berserk again. This time it broke the man's leg.
A friend of the man, however, a rough and ready bronco buster, offered to ride the kinks out of the ill mannered steed, and was promptly thrown on his head for his trouble. The horse had never bogged a day in his life.
Along about noon on that same day the group decided to take a ride. Forty head or so all saddled up to go explore some nearby cliff dwellings. The group headed out as a conglomeration of cowboys, kids, women and dudes. Before they'd made it halfway across that valley and were not fifty yards from the campsite, the entire herd erupted into a frenzied fit. It was as if a bomb had been dropped in the middle of the party and horses exploded outwards in all directions. A third of the group lost their seats and it took some while to collect up all the panicked horses, and to get the camp back to a semblance of order.
It seemed the entire day was plagued with similar events. The story of the Indian curse began to circulate. Before long the notion that little Danny had been nearby during almost every catastrophe, spread through the assemblage like wildfire. Even the grownups were now, it seemed, blaming poor, rotten Danny Lewis.
It came to light that the boy had been caught two years before with a box of girl's undergarments in his room-- almost all the local girls were missing panties from their clotheslines. Other unfortunate stories were revived as well.
For the next two days riders poked and prodded and explored that valley, turning over every rock, every leaf. Some rode far upwind to try and track down the source of the disturbance, but not one real clue was brought back to camp.
Late on the morning of Thursday the Sixth, the picnic ended and the folks all went home. The Sheriff had become testy about the rumors and innuendoes. A "devil boy" his little Danny certainly was not, and he began to vigorously rebut the talk.
Over the next few years the stories and problems persisted. A horse broke its leg there, walking serenely across flat, open ground. A kindly pony threw a little girl and for no apparent reason, spun and kicked her in the chest. A young boy was bucked off and dragged by a docile old quarter horse. Still, John rode the valley often, and never suffered a mishap.
The mystery of the valley had gone unsolved for five years when John rode through it for the last time. He had come to often go out of his way to ride through the valley, just so he could report back at the ranch that he had done so, and was still alive to tell. He was beginning to feel smug that he was immune to the curse.
On that sunny afternoon John followed his usual trail up to the rim of the draw, and he trotted confidently down onto the flat grass of the valley bottom. His mare was fresh and she wanted to move out. John let her have her head and she raced across that half mile like the wind.
All at once the sage looked unfamiliar. It was as though John was about to pass out, for a peculiar tunnel vision affected him, and his breath came short and hot. The bushes and sage seemed to have Kachina faces as they streaked by. John could hear his pony's labored breathing as she poured on the speed. Her hooves pounded the red clay and smashed through the prickly pear.
They were almost to the other side but John didn't know if he could stay in the saddle. He seemed to have no will of his own; he felt as though he was dreaming. He wondered if he would feel the thud when he slipped from his horse and hit the earth.
John looked up to see that he was almost to the point where the valley began to rise up again. He still could not slow his horse, but he thought the mare might stop at the top of the hill. John looked down to his hands, wondering why he could not get them to work.
Suddenly there was a crack in the earth in front of him. His horse saw it at the same time but it was a surprise to her as well. She slowed for a second, as if she was trying to stop. Then she changed her mind. John felt her gather herself behind and she tensed for a jump. The arroyo ahead was twenty feet across and ten feet deep. He had ridden that valley a hundred times and never seen it.
The mare, realizing she couldn't possibly stop, tried to jump the chasm, but it was much too far. She was over the rim and falling.
The horse twisted in the air and hit the bottom flat on her side with John still neatly in the saddle. The impact knocked the wind out of them both, and John thought he could feel the bones crunching and grinding in his leg.
The mare lay there a long time gasping for air. John thought she was done for, but the soft, sandy clay in the bottom of the arroyo had cushioned her fall. John eventually wriggled his leg out from under her and was delighted to find that he could walk on it. He poked and prodded the mare, and bothered her to such an extent that she finally got up. He was able to ride her home, where she convalesced for a month.
The following day John met Danny in town. Danny had a gleam in his eye. John had learned that while the unhappy boy seldom got a gleam in his eye, when he did, it generally meant trouble. Danny informed John matter of factly that he had purposefully called up the great Indian spirit that made his mare go berserk. It was only a warning, Danny promised. Someday, he would make the Indian spirit do even worse than that. Danny barely concealed a confident smirk; then he turned on his heel and was gone.
John thought about Danny's threat often, even though he did not believe it. Still, he wondered how the boy knew about the wreck with his mare, and for some time thereafter the Sheriff's kid held The Whammy on John.
The tides were to change, as they always do. When John was fifteen he had ridden up to the secret cave with his girlfriend, Becky. They planned a picnic and, if they weren't disturbed, John hoped for something significantly more than a picnic, as well. He sensed that Becky was finally willing.
As they approached the camp they heard a commotion. John figured it was just rabbits or birds in the cave that had heard them coming and were scrambling to get away. Still, it was an opportunity to impress his girl, so he pulled a long, awkward, single shot ten gauge out of his scabbard and dismounted. He told Becky to be quiet-- it could be outlaws.
John crept ahead to the entrance of the cave expecting a herd of pigeons to flush out. He hadn't planned to shoot at them; that would be overkill. It hurt too much to shoot the ten gauge anyway, unless there was good reason.
To his surprise, birds didn't flush out of the cave at all; rather a young girl did. She was mostly naked and she was crying as she ran past John, scarcely taking notice of him or the shotgun he'd brought to bear on the entrance. She ran past him and had started to run past Becky too, when she heard her name called by a comforting voice. She and John's girl were friends.
Becky put a blanket around the distraught girl and held her while she sobbed. John would never forget those racking, hopeless sobs.
About that time another figure emerged from the cave; it was Danny, Sheriff Lewis's not well liked offspring. He'd been unaware of John's arrival and was just chasing down the girl. John felt something new arise inside him-- a protective instinct that had never surfaced before. He felt himself grow two inches in height, and he felt well within him, for the first time, the rage of a man.
Danny had a sardonic smile on his face; it was pointless for her to run and he saw the chase as only an irksome formality. It was obvious he'd forced her to have more than a picnic. She was bruised and one eye was bleeding. There was blood on her thighs. The boy was naked except for a pair of red dyed boots, a crisp new hat and a pair of work gloves. It seemed to John in later years that those work gloves were what sealed Danny's fate that day. The boy might have been able to explain many things, but he could never explain those gloves.
Danny was some surprised to come face to face with a cocked ten gauge. It was at that instant that John decided he hated Danny for sure. Danny decided he felt the same way about John.
John put the shotgun aside and began to thrash the boy. Danny barely offered any resistance. The shock of being confronted in such a compromising situation had left his faculties wanting, and during the fight he never recovered them. John thrashed the boy in places where a thrashing was probably not necessary or in good taste, while the two girls looked on in shock. John left Danny sprawled on the ground, while ants crawled over the crack of his naked butt.
Danny's gal rode back with Becky on John's nasty, inherited mare. John went afoot. He drove off Danny's borrowed horse before departing-- he did not want to ride the horse and be labeled a horse thief like his uncle. He heard later that the mare fell in a hole and came limping home with a broken leg and had to be put down, and that the Sheriff had been forced to pay for the horse. He wondered how Danny had explained it.
John never did hear how the naked boy got home. At the time, he hadn't cared if he ever did.
No one would ever loan the Sheriff's rotten kid a horse after that. At least, thought John, that was something.
There'd been a silent, unspoken, seething animosity between them ever since, at least until they both moved away and forgot their childhood squabbles.
Danny's father, Sheriff Lewis, was finally convicted for bothering a twelve year old girl some years later. He had arrested her pa for a trifling offense, but had agreed to let him go if the daughter would spend some time with him. He told her father she was headed for evil ways --he'd seen it before-- and that he enjoyed the opportunity of taking the wild ones and turning them around. He assured the man that he could accomplish it. If the man committed his daughter to the change, the Sheriff would consider that justice had been more properly served than if he locked the man up for a week for his transgressions.
The girl's father reluctantly agreed. He didn't want to go to jail for he was a drunkard, and he couldn't stand to be without whiskey for a week.
In court the Sheriff claimed the girl had been more than willing to bed with him; that was his only defense. It didn't make any difference to the town, which doubted the claim anyway, for the girl was quite attractive and the Sheriff had lost his looks some decades before. They sent him to prison; they were tired of such problems with the Sheriff.
He was killed in prison after serving only a month. The rumor was that his mouth had killed him-- that and the fact that he had put most of the inmates there himself. It was poor luck for the man all around.
John heard later in life that Danny had taken up the profession of bank robber, somewhere up in the Dakotas.
John's contrary mare met her end when John was sixteen. She had remained steadfastly difficult, and John was resigned to her poor temperament. She pulled every stunt a horse could pull in those nine years. John didn't fully appreciate the education she'd given him until years later.
Close to the end, during the last year, the mare had taken to pawing at a particular stretch of fence in the pasture. It was at a corner post, which was set in an "H" configuration for bracing. There was a small hole between some boards and some wire that particularly intrigued her. There were many holes in the rest of the fence; it was old and needed repair. This hole was smaller than all the rest, and led to the same place as all the other holes would have. There was no choice patch of grass on the other side of the hole.
John knew her motivation was not to escape, for the gate had been left open many times and she had not wandered off. She was stubbornly barn sour. A grass fire probably wouldn't have driven her away. Why then, was she so fascinated by this nondescript hole in the fence?
John initially racked it up to insanity. She was insane, that was all. Some horses were. But later he came to realize it was just plain stubbornness. He had caught her pawing at that hole on a couple of occasions, and he'd chased her off so that she wouldn't get a leg caught in it. Her personality was such that being chased off from something she wanted to do was not something she'd tolerate. So she came back, time and again, to paw at that hole in the fence that was probably too small for a dog to get through anyway. She did it just to show John, or so he thought. She did it to show him that she could paw at that hole if she wanted to.
Finally he gave up chasing her off. It wasn't worth the trouble to run clear across the pasture waving his arms and yelling, only to have the mare go back there in a few minutes, or the next day. He vowed to let her go ahead and get her leg caught. Maybe that would teach her.
One day he went out to get her, to ride her. He found her at that hole in the fence, on the ground, struggling. Her leg was stuck in that hole, and it was broken. She had twisted around and fought so much --out of stubbornness-- that the bone had poked through the skin. The protruding bone gouged a little trench in the dirt and packed the wound with red clay and manure. John looked upon her for less than half a minute. Then he returned to the barn and fetched a shotgun. His dad was in town, and his dad had the only pistol on the ranch. The shotgun was the only weapon available at the moment. He returned to the mare and shot her in the head, in the same place he had seen Bob the deputy shoot that pony. John was shocked by the difference in wounds that the shotgun made as opposed to the pistol Bob had used. The shotgun made a mess, and his mare had no eyes left at all with which to stare into oblivion, like the pony did.
John learned about stubbornness that day. He promised himself to never get into such a predicament as that mare had, out of stubbornness. He learned about shotguns that day too. And he learned about life. He had begged for a nice pony and gotten a nasty mare. The only pony he'd ever known was dead. Now the mare was dead too. That, he concluded, was about the best life had to offer.
John Hannal didn't beg for anything anymore. He no longer talked to God or asked him for favors. --Except, perhaps, for justice. He didn't expect his unspoken requests for justice in the world to be granted by God, however. He had learned to expect results through his own efforts only. He had asked God for justice and received only trouble. Still, he continued to ask for justice.
He had also learned that if he looked for trouble he would find it. This, he told himself as he lay on his grass bed, next to his horse in the drafty barn in the dark town of Paydirt, New Mexico, was one time when it was acceptable to look for trouble. He prayed --to God or to the Devil-- that he find it.
Next Chapter
Sands of Sedona, Chap 1
Sands of Sedona, Chap 2
Sands of Sedona, Chap 3
Sands of Sedona, Chap 4
Sands of Sedona, Chap 5
Sands of Sedona, Chap 6
Sands of Sedona, Chap 7
Sands of Sedona, Chap 8
Sands of Sedona, Chap 9
Sands of Sedona, Chap 10
Sands of Sedona, Chap 11
Sands of Sedona, Chap 12