Читать книгу Painted Ponies - Alan Le May - Страница 7

Jake Downey now found himself in a predicament not easy to explain. He reached out a quick hand to squelch the candle; then thought better of it. The approaching steps were already in the narrow hallway, and the sudden disappearance of the gleam of candle light under the door might tell its tale. He drew his gun, cocked it; the steps were just outside. There was a rumble of voices, low-pitched, incongruously casual.

Then there was the sudden sound of a door being shaken—but it was not his door. Slide Morgan’s pursuers had tackled the room next to the one they had intended.

A voice, hard in timbre but hardly above conversational pitch, said, “Open up that door!”

A moment’s pause for response brought no result. Then Jake heard a mumbled conference, immediately followed by a terrific crash of splintering wood. The window frames rattled with the shock. He could hear the hostile party cautiously investing the narrow cubicle next to his own.

Jake’s wits now returned, and he very softly unbarred the door of his room. Then he gently eased himself down onto the edge of the bed, stretching himself out full length. There came another mumbling conference; and at last the quick shifting of many feet to his door.

It was suddenly thrust open, and Jake Downey could perceive the frantic flutter of the candle in the draft, though his eyes were to all appearances shut. Some one swore in a low growl, and rushed to the window. Mutterings, and oaths. Then a man bent over him, and shook him by the shoulder.

Downey let himself flop inertly, and emitted a drunken snore.

He was shaken more violently.

“Come out o’ that!” said a voice close to his head. He was shaken again.

“Hey,” said Downey. He vaguely tried to turn onto his face.

This time he was so shaken that the bed clattered against the wall. He opened his eyes blankly, and stared up into an angry face.

The face was at once round and singularly firm in appearance, like a circular loaf of smooth-crusted bread. Square-shaved burnsides of an indeterminate color clung close to its round borders, and small eyes gleamed hotly in the wavering candle light.

“Where is he?”

“Hello, Marve,” said Jake dully. “How’s the constable business?”

“Where’s the feller yuh brang up here?” Marve Conklin insisted fiercely.

Sleepily Jake Downey looked about him, and allowed his eye to rest speculatively upon the ruined window.

“Yuh want to know what I think?” said he noncommittally. “I think he must ’a’ jumped out.”

“This hombre knows good an’ plenty,” said a snaggle-toothed man, turning away from the window. “Didn’t we see him give away our hand? Yuh know what I said, an’ say now!”

His voice, dry and malignant, came out through a dirty, tobacco-stained gray mustache. Downey thought that he had heard it before.

“Now you look here,” said Jake, shaking off the last appearance of alcoholic drowsiness. “I’m Jake Downey. Everybody here but you”—he fixed the snag-toothed man with a malevolent eye—“knows I’m a foreman with the Box R, an’ know my business, an’ leave other people’s be. The boy I brought up here is named Ben Morgan, an’ I vouch for him. If this passel o’ ugly looks is on the shoot, I say he done well to drag his freight. Yuh don’t look like yuh was figgerin’ to make this joint any safer fer honest men!”

“Don’t get so all-fired cocky,” said Marve Conklin nastily. “You’re talkin’ to the law!”

“I put a friend to bed,” said Downey. “If yuh want to take me fer it, hop on. But if I had nothin’ but a bunch o’ meddlin’ loafers back o’ me, I wouldn’t go to work an’ pull the Box R down on my head!”

“Damn the Box R!” burst out Conklin, reddening.

“Here,” said a heavy voice from the door, a voice that seemed weighted down with rocks. “Goin’ to talk all night?”

Downey turned his eyes to a square, strong, tired face in the doorway—the face of Abner Cade.

The former express rider knew Cade for a quiet-spoken, solid man, a speculator in cattle, whose word was as good as cash in hand; this although he was known to be the son of one of the most notoriously ruthless desperadoes that ever swaggered between the Plattes. His peculiar chalky-gray eyes moved from one to another of the group with a weary contempt.

“Think this is gettin’ somewhere, do yuh?”

“Guess that’s right,” conceded Marve Conklin gruffly. “Let’s get goin’, boys.”

The round-faced constable and the others crowded out of the room; Downey could hear them cursing and grumbling in their chests as they clumped along the hall and down the narrow stair. Abner Cade let them pass, then remained leaning in the doorway, one hand resting against the door frame above his hand.

“Jake, who is this Ben Morgan?”

Downey noticed again the comparatively youthful texture of the man’s face, contrasting with its mature, burdened lines; the grayness under the tan; and the sagging lower lids of the level, assured eyes.

He said, “That’s his name, Ab. Most folks call him Slide. I’ve known him fer years. A rider, an’ a good one. Square as they come.”

“Why’d yuh railroad him out o’ here by way o’ the window, Jake?” Abner Cade’s words were measured and regular; only the fixity of his eyes indicated that he knew he was on treacherous ground.

“To save lead, Abner. When yuh gang up on a man out of a clear sky, somebody’s liable to get hurt!”

“We sashayed him six-eight mile this afternoon, before he outrun on us on that gray o’ his. Didn’t seem like he wanted to be looked into much, Jake.”

“Well, ger-reat jumpin’ Jehosaphat, Ab! I s’pose yuh rushed at him full gallop, irons wavin’! What would any man do?”

Abner Cade shrugged, and turned away from the door.

“He sure looks like somebody else,” he commented as he disappeared.

When the other had gone, Jake Downey walked downstairs to the bar and bought himself a drink. The tin piano still clattered, though less vigorously now, under wearying old hands; reeling, bear-like dancers sometimes still caromed in the space between the bars. The Happy Chance was a gay place yet, full of voices, and the comforting odor of whisky and roast beef. But an old thrill was stirring in Downey, and he felt the urge to be away from there.

Out on the Red Creek trail there would presently sound the thudding beat of racing hoofs in the dark; ahead somewhere, Slide Morgan, riding Jake’s own black gelding, would be slipping away into the night. The black, tired but game, settling into his long, hard-mouthed stride; Talky Peters, hanging back a little, fooling himself with the idea that he didn’t actually want trouble; a trading of shots, maybe; whispering lead....

In his mouth there was the taste of copper; he could almost smell burning powder, an odor full of memories with a harsh, lifting tang.

And here was Jake Downey, minute by minute growing older in the rummy clutter called Roaring River,—without a horse. He had forgot to ask Slide Morgan what the latter’s horse looked like.

Jake restlessly lifted his hat to run blunt fingers through his rusty hair. Then his hand dropped to fumble at his square, cleft chin, where the reddish stubble was already beginning to reappear. Finally he slapped his tiny whisky glass viciously onto the bar, and stalked out into the warm night.

Abner Cade had let fall the word that Morgan’s horse was gray. A hasty survey of the hitch racks revealed that at least a dozen gray geldings, only two of which he had ever seen before, were sprinkled through the horse population there assembled. Jake speculated upon the possibility of picking out Slide’s horse by deduction; but he also thought of what might happen if he took the wrong mount.

With a snort he put temptation behind him, and pushed his way back into the Happy Chance.