The third rider died on a Tuesday morning with the sun not yet over the rim of the canyon and the wind out of the south carrying the smell of dust and crushed sage across the empty yard. His name had been Caleb Doyle. >> >> He had been 22 years old. He had ridden bulls in Fort Worth for two seasons and had been thrown by every kind of horse that had ever been ridden in the state of Texas.
And he had told the men of the J Bar Ranch on the night before with the careless confidence of a young man who has not yet been killed by anything >> >> that he would have the Mustang saddled broke before the breakfast bell. He had walked into the corral at first light. He had walked into it with a rope and a saddle and the slow easy stride of a man who had been doing this work since he was 13 years old and he had not walked out of it.
The Mustang had taken him on the seventh buck. The seventh buck had come straight up and to the right >> >> which was the buck the previous two riders had also failed at and Caleb Doyle had come down on his back across the upper rail of the corral and the rail had broken. And what the rail had done to the inside of him before it broke had been worse than what the ground did to him afterward.
He had lived for about a minute. >> >> He had not been able to speak. He had reached for the hand of the foreman who had climbed into the corral and had crawled to him through the dust and the foreman had held that hand until the fingers had gone loose and the foreman had then stood up and had walked to the rail and had looked at the Mustang.
And the Mustang who had stopped bucking the moment the rider was off him >> >> had looked back at the foreman with the steady level indifferent gaze of an animal that had killed a man and did not understand why everyone seemed so upset about it. That was the third rider. That was the third rider on the third Tuesday of a month that had begun with the J Bar Ranch buying a wild Mustang at the federal roundup for $80 on the recommendation of a horse trader who had said the animal had the confirmation of a stake horse and the heart of a race
horse and would be worth a thousand once he was broken. The horse trader had been right about the confirmation and the heart. He had not mentioned the third thing which was that the Mustang would kill three men in three weeks, and would have killed a fourth and a fifth if the foreman of the J Bar had not stood at the corral on the morning of the fourth Tuesday and told the assembled hands that there would be no more attempts, that the horse would be shot at sundown, and that any man who wanted to argue with him about it could come to the
office after the burying and turn in his time. And before you ride any further down this road with us, friend, do me one small favor. If you love stories of the Old West that begin with three graves and a horse no one can ride, hit that subscribe button and leave a comment telling me where you’re watching from.
Because what walks up the road to the J Bar that afternoon is the kind of thing that gets told around campfires in Texas for 100 years. He came on foot. He was alone. He was an old man, perhaps 70 years old, perhaps older. The kind of old that the country wore on a man only after the country had had a long time to work on him.
And he came up the long dirt road to the J Bar at the slow, patient, unhurried walk of a man who had been walking that same road for most of his life. And had no reason to walk it any faster now. He was tall but stooped, with shoulders that had once been wide and were now narrowed by time. And his hair was long and gray, and it was pulled back from his face with a single thin strip of leather.
And his face was the face of an Apache who had lived through the long bad years and had not been killed in any of them. Which meant that his face had the particular composed stillness of a man who had outlived everything that had once been able to frighten him. He wore a faded cotton shirt that had been blue once and was now no particular color.
And a pair of canvas trousers tied at the waist with a length of rope. And a pair of moccasins that had been resoled so many times that the original leather was no longer in them anywhere. And he carried in his left hand a small leather pouch on a long thong. And that was all he carried. And that was all he had.
The foreman saw him from the porch of the office. The foreman’s name was Calvin Bray. >> >> He had been the foreman of the J Bar for 14 years. He had buried Caleb Doyle that morning. and he had buried the two riders before him in the two Tuesdays before that. And he was a man whose patience with the world had run low, and he watched the old Apache come up the road with a particular tired anger of a man who did not have the energy left to deal with whatever was now arriving.
He stood up from the chair he had been sitting in. He set down the cup of coffee that the cook had brought him after the burying. He walked down the steps of the office. He met the old Apache in the middle of the yard, 10 ft from where Caleb Doyle had died that morning. And he said, in the flat voice of a man who had no intention of being polite, “You are on private land.
Whatever you came for, the answer is no, and the road is back the way you came.” The old Apache did not answer at once. He looked at Calvin Bre for a long moment. He had eyes that were the color of wet bark, and they were eyes that did not move quickly and did not blink often. And they took in the foreman without judgment and without expectation.
He looked past the foreman at the corral on the far side of the yard, in which the mustang stood at the far rail with his head up and his nostrils flared, watching the two men as he watched everything that moved in his line of sight. The old Apache looked at the mustang for a long time.
Then he looked back at Calvin Bre. He said, in slow careful English, >> >> the careful English of a man who had not been raised in it, but had learned it well enough to honor it, “The horse will be killed at sundown. >> >> That is what I have been told.” Calvin Bre said, “You were told right. Now go.” The old Apache said, “Do not kill the horse.
” Calvin Bre said, “I will not discuss it. The horse has killed three men. It will be shot at sundown, and the carcass will be hauled out into the brush, and the buzzards will have it. >> >> That is what is going to happen. You can stand in this yard and watch it if you want, but you cannot stop it, and you cannot ride out of here on it, because you do not look like a man who has the $80 I paid for it.
” The old Apache nodded slowly. He said, “I do not have $80. I do not have any dollars. I have come a long way on foot to ask you not to kill that horse because I knew his mother and I knew his grandmother >> >> and I knew his great-grandmother. And the line of that horse is the line of my line >> >> and to kill him would be to end a thing that I do not want ended in my lifetime.
” Calvin Bre looked at him. He looked at him for a long moment and the anger in him, which had been the simple anger of a tired man dealing with an unwelcome stranger, >> >> became a more complicated thing because Calvin Bre had been a horseman for 40 years and he had known for 40 years that there were old men in this country who could tell the line of a horse the way other men could tell the line of a family >> >> and that those old men were almost always Apache or Comanche or Mexican and that they were almost always right.
He said, >> >> in a voice that was less hard than the first one had been, “What do you want?” The old Apache said, >> >> “I want to walk into the corral. I want to touch the horse. If he lets me touch him, I want you to let me take him and I will walk him out of here on a rope and I will not bring him back and you will not see him again and you will not need to shoot him.
If he does not let me touch him, then you can shoot him at sundown the way you planned and I will not stop you and I will walk back down the road I came on and I will not have wasted any of your time except the time it takes to watch me try.” Calvin Bre said, “He has killed three men.” The old Apache said, “I know.
” Calvin Bre said, “He killed the last one this morning. The man’s blood is still in that dust.” >> >> The old Apache said, “I saw it when I came in.” Calvin Bre said, “And you want to walk into the corral with him anyway?” The old Apache said, “I want to walk into the corral with him.” Calvin Bre looked at him for a long moment.
He looked at the seven decades of weather on the old man’s face. He looked at the small leather pouch on the thong. He looked at the eyes the color of wet bark, >> >> which were not the eyes of a man who had any expectation that he would walk out of that corral if the horse decided otherwise >> >> and which were also not the eyes of a man who had decided that this would be the way he would die, but which were the eyes of a man who had decided that this was a thing he was going to do, and that whatever came of it would be what came of it.
Calvin Bre said, “I cannot let you do that.” The old Apache said, “Why?” Calvin Bre said, “Because I have buried three men this month, and I will not bury a fourth.” The old Apache said, >> >> “You will not have to bury me. If he kills me, I will lie where I fall, and the buzzards will have me, too.
You are going to give them the horse anyway. You can give them both of us. It will not cost you any more.” Calvin Bre did not answer for a long time. He looked at the old Apache. He looked at the corral. He looked at the mustang who had not moved from the far rail, who was still watching the two of them with his great dark eyes >> >> and his ears forward, the way a horse watches a thing he has not yet decided how to feel about.
Calvin Bre was a hard man and a tired man, and a man who had been broken twice in his life by horses, and had been put back together both times, and he understood, in the small quiet part of him that had not been broken either time, what the old Apache was asking for, and he understood why, and he understood also that he had no right to refuse it.
He said, “If he kills you, I will bury you. >> >> I will not leave you in the dust. I am not that kind of man.” The old Apache said, “Thank you.” Calvin Bre said, “But I am going to tell you something first. I have watched that horse for 3 weeks. He does not fight the way the other bad ones fight.
He does not fight because he is afraid. He fights because he has decided in his own mind that the men who come at him are his enemies, >> >> and that an enemy is a thing to be killed. He does not bluff. He does not warn. He goes straight from standing to killing, and there is no time between the two things in which a man can change his mind.
” The old Apache said, “I know that kind of horse.” Calvin Bre said, “Have you ridden one before?” The old Apache said, “I have known three of them in my life. The first one killed my brother. The second one killed my uncle. The third one I rode for 19 years, and he is buried in a canyon in Arizona, and I sat with him for the last night of his life, and I closed his eyes when he was gone.
” Calvin Bre looked at him for a long moment. >> >> He said, “What was your brother’s name?” The old Apache said, “I have not spoken my brother’s name in 53 years. I will not speak it now.” Calvin Bre nodded slowly. He understood. He said, “What is your name then?” The old Apache said, “I’m called Closson.
It is not the name my mother gave me. >> >> It is the name the soldiers gave me when they put me in the school. The other name I do not give to strangers, and I will not give it to you now because I do not yet know if you are a stranger or a man I have come to do business with.” Calvin Bre said, “We will see in a few minutes which one I am.
” He stepped aside. He did not walk the old Apache to the corral. He understood that a man who was about to do what the old Apache was about to do did not need to be escorted. The old Apache walked across the yard alone in the slow, patient walk he had walked up the road in, and he passed the patch of dust where Caleb Doyle had died that morning, and he did not look at it, and he reached the corral, and he climbed the rails with the careful, slow climb of an old man who had climbed a great many rails in his life and had
learned not to waste any motion on them, and he dropped down into the dust on the inside. The hands of the J Bar had begun to gather at the rails. Word had traveled from the office to the bunkhouse to the barn to the cook shack in the way that word travels on a ranch when something is about to happen, and the 11 men of the J Bar >> >> who had buried one of their own that morning and had not yet eaten the dinner the cook had laid out for them came one by one to the rails of the corral and stood there in silence with their
hats in their hands because they understood in the way that men in that work understand things they have not been told that they were about to see either a death or a thing they would tell their grandchildren about, and they did not know yet which one it would be. The old Apache walked toward the Mustang. He walked slowly.
He did not stop, and he did not hurry, and he did not raise his hands, and he did not lower his eyes, >> >> and he did not look the horse in the eye, either, because looking a horse like that one in the eye was the same thing as raising a fist at him, >> >> and the old Apache had not come to raise a fist.
He walked toward the horse the way he had walked up the road, >> >> with no expectation on his body and no intent in his hands. And the great Mustang, who had killed three men in three weeks, watched him come, and his ears were forward, and his nostrils were wide, and the muscles of his hindquarters were tense in the particular way they had been tense before each of the three killings, and the old Apache walked toward him anyway.
At 20 paces, the Mustang lowered his head. It was the lowering of the head that had preceded each of the three charges. >> >> The hands at the rail saw it. Calvin Breay, who had walked up to the gate without realizing he had done so, saw it. The cook, who had come out of the cook shack with a dishrag still in her hands, saw it.
None of them moved. None of them called out. The old Apache walked on. At 15 paces, the Mustang began to swing his hindquarters. >> >> This had been the second sign before each charge. The old Apache did not stop. He did not change his pace. He walked on. At 10 paces, the Mustang’s tail rose the way the tail of a horse rises in the half second before he commits to motion.
And Calvin Breay at the gate drew his pistol without meaning to, because some part of him had decided in that half second that he was going to put a bullet through the horse before the horse put the old man through the rail, and he understood with the same speed that the pistol would not be fast enough, and he lowered it. The Mustang did not charge.
The tail came down again. The hindquarters settled. >> >> The great dark head lifted the smallest fraction, and the ears, which had been forward and tense, came forward and relaxed. >> >> And the old Apache who had been walking at the same patient pace through all of it, came on. And at five paces, he stopped.
He stood five paces from the horse in the dust where three men had died. He did not move for a long minute. The mustang did not move either. >> >> The old Apache and the great wild mustang stood five paces apart in the round corral of the J Bar Ranch. And the hands at the rails did not breathe in any way that anyone could hear.
And the wind that had been blowing out of the south had died. >> >> And the only sound in the yard was the slow flick of the mustang’s tail at a fly. And the small irregular breathing of the cook, who was the only person in the yard who had not been trained to be silent at moments like this one. Then the old Apache raised his right hand.
He raised it the way he had walked up the road, slowly, without expectation. Palm flat, fingers spread, the small brown weathered hand of a man who had been raising hands like that for 70 years. And he held it in the air between himself and the horse. And he said in a voice that was very quiet, a single word in his own language.
A word that the hands at the rail did not understand and would not have remembered if they had. And the mustang’s great dark head came down. It came down slowly. It came down the five paces that separated them. And the long dark nose extended forward. And the soft black nostrils came down the last few inches and touched the palm of the old Apache’s hand.
>> >> And the mustang breathed on him three long slow breaths, the way a horse breathes on a thing it is deciding whether to trust. And then the great dark head turned. And the mustang laid the side of his face flat against the open palm of the old Apache. And he closed his eyes. The hands at the rails did not make a sound.
The old Apache stood there for a long moment with his palm against the side of the great wild face. He spoke again in his own language. More words this time, slow and quiet. The way a man speaks to a thing he is welcoming home. And the mustang did not open his eyes. And his great dark body, which had been tense for the entire weeks of his captivity, slowly went loose, the way the body of a creature goes loose when it has decided to stop being afraid, and the old Apache’s other hand came up, and he laid it on the Mustang’s neck,
and he stood like that for what the hands at the rails later said was the longest minute of their lives. Then he stepped back. He stepped back one pace. The Mustang opened his eyes. He looked at the old Apache. The old Apache nodded once. He turned, and he walked back across the corral, and the Mustang followed him, walking three paces behind him, the way a horse who has chosen a man walks behind that man, with the long mane shifting at the great neck, and the four dark hooves printing the dust behind the old man’s moccasin
prints. And the old Apache walked to the gate, and Calvin Bray, without speaking, opened it, and the old Apache walked out of the corral, >> >> and the great Mustang walked out behind him. Calvin Bray said in a voice that was not entirely his own, “How?” The old Apache said, >> >> “I told him my name.
” Calvin Bray said, “What?” >> >> The old Apache said, “Not the name the soldiers gave me. The other one. The one I told you I do not give to strangers. >> >> I gave it to him. His grandmother knew it. His great-grandmother knew it. I do not know if he understood the word, but he understood that the word was a word that was meant for him, and that the man who gave it to him was a man of his own line, and a horse like that one will not kill a man of his own line.
He has been waiting in this corral for 3 weeks for a man who knew the word. There was none on this ranch. There was no man like that within 200 miles of this corral. He thought he had been forgotten.” Calvin Bray was quiet for a long time. >> >> He looked at the great Mustang, who stood beside the old man with his head down at the level of the old man’s shoulder, the long dark mane falling against the faded blue cotton shirt, and he understood that what he was looking at was a thing he had not been raised to
understand, and a thing he would not understand in the years he had left, and a thing he had no business questioning. He said, “Take him. He is yours. He was always yours. I am sorry for the three men. I am sorry for the $80. >> >> Take him and go.” The old Apache said, “I will take him. I am sorry for the three men, too.
I would have come sooner if I had known. >> >> The word would have reached me only when the news of the killings reached the trading post at the agency. I came as fast as I could. >> >> I walked the whole way. It took me 11 days.” Calvin Breazeale “Walk back, too, if you have to, but the horse can carry you part of the way at least.
” The old Apache shook his head. He said, “I will not ride him for a year. He has been ill-used. He needs to walk beside a man for a year before he is asked to carry one again. That is the way a horse is brought back. I will walk to where I am going and he will walk beside me. And at the end of the year, I will sit on him and not before.
” Calvin Breazeale “Where are you going?” The old Apache said, “There is a canyon in Arizona where I buried a horse 19 years ago. There is grass there and water and no white men. I’m going to spend my last years in that canyon with this horse beside me. And when I die, he will be the last one of his line that I know about.
And after that, the line will be his to carry and not mine.” Calvin Breazeale “That is a long walk.” The old Apache said, “I have made longer ones.” Calvin Breazeale not know what else to say. He walked to the office and he came back with a folded piece of paper and a stub of pencil. And he wrote on the paper >> >> in the slow, careful hand of a man who had not been to school past the sixth grade, a statement that the bearer of the paper was the lawful owner of one wild mustang from the federal round up of that year, purchased by the J Bar
Ranch and given to him in payment of a debt the ranch owed him from earlier work. And he signed his name at the bottom. And he put the date. >> >> And he handed the paper to the old Apache. He said, “If any man stops you on the road and asks about that horse, you give him this paper. >> >> If he can read, he will leave you alone.
If he cannot read, you tell him to take it to the next town and find someone who can. >> >> I will stand behind it.” The old Apache took the paper. He folded it. He put it inside the small leather pouch on the thong around his neck. He said, “Thank you.” Calvin Bre said, “And take some food. The cook will pack you a kit.
>> >> You cannot walk to Arizona on nothing.” The old Apache said, “I will accept the food, but you will not pay me and you will not give me a horse and you will not give me money. The horse is enough, the paper is enough, the food is a kindness and I will accept the kindness, >> >> but the rest would be a debt and I have come too far in my life to take on new debts.
” >> >> Calvin Bre said, “Then we are square.” The old Apache said, “We are square.” He walked out of the yard of the J Bar with the great Mustang walking three paces behind him and the hands of the J Bar stood at the rails of the corral and watched him go and not one of them spoke and not one of them put his hat back on his head until the old Apache and the horse had passed the bend at the bottom of the long dirt road and were lost behind the rise.
The cook gave him a kit of dried beef and hardtack and a tin of coffee. He took it. He put it in a roll on the great Mustang’s back fastened with a length of soft rope because the Mustang did not have a saddle and would not have one for the year of his walking. He thanked the cook in his slow careful English.
He did not look back. He walked down the road in the same patient walk he had walked up it in and the great Mustang walked behind him and they were gone. Calvin Bre watched them go from the porch of the office. He watched until they were past the bend, then he sat down in the chair he had been sitting in when the old Apache had first come up the road and he picked up the cup of coffee the cook had brought him that morning after the burying and he found that the coffee had gone cold and he drank it anyway because some things
in a man’s day are meant to be finished even when they have gone cold and the coffee that had been brought to him after he had buried Caleb Doyle was one of those things. He never saw the old Apache again. He heard two years later from a cattle drover passing through who had been at the agency at the time that an old Apache man had walked into a small canyon in eastern Arizona with a great dark mustang at his side and had built himself a small lodge of brush and stone in the canyon and had lived there with the horse for a year
before he had been seen riding it for the first time at the edge of the canyon by a cowboy passing on a trail above and that the cowboy had said the old man rode the horse the way the old riders rode without a saddle and without a bridle and that the horse had moved beneath the old man the way water moves beneath a leaf.
He heard four years after that that the old man had died in his sleep in the small lodge and that the great mustang had stood beside the body for three days refusing food and that on the fourth day a young Apache man from the agency >> >> who was said to be the old man’s nephew had come and had spoken to the horse in the words the old man had taught him and the horse had eaten from his hand and had let himself be led down out of the canyon and had become in the years that followed the most famous saddle horse in that part of Arizona
>> >> and had sired a line of horses that were still running the last Calvin Brey had heard before he died on the open ground east of the Chiricahua Mountains. The line is still running. The grandsons of that horse are still being ridden by men whose grandfathers learned to ride from the nephew who walked into the canyon and who learned from him the words the old man had given the horse on the day in the corral of the J Bar Ranch and who passed those words now >> >> one rider to the next the way other men pass watches and
bibles and the names of children and they ride the horses with the words and the horses know them and the horses come. And in the small ranch office of the J Bar on the wall behind the desk where Calvin Brey sat for 14 more years before he died of a heart attack in the saddle on a January morning there hangs to this day a copy of the bill of sale he wrote out that afternoon on a folded piece of paper and a single dark horse hair taken from the mane of a mustang that walked out of that corral 70 years before and
pinned beneath it the single line in Calvin Brey’s careful handwriting that reads, “He told the horse his name and the horse remembered it.”
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