Читать книгу The Flying U Strikes - B.M. Bower - Страница 5

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HIS cigarette was smoked down to the stub when he heard a prodigious yawn inside. He pinched out the fire in his cigarette, ground the stub carefully under his heel and opened the door.

He was not long in the cabin. When he came out, his eyes held a bleak look they had not worn before. Opposite the window he halted again for a glance inside—and flinched at what he saw; J.G. sitting on the edge of his bunk, absently crowding fresh tobacco into his pipe, while he stared unseeingly at the wall before him, looking somehow years older than he had ten minutes ago, when he lay peacefully asleep after a hard day in the saddle.

One look and a sharp indrawn breath, and Chip turned away and walked with squared shoulders to the bunk house. Instant silence fell upon the place when he opened the door. The Happy Family, evidently deep in discussion a moment before, sat in awkward self-consciousness as he came in and pushed the door shut with a twist of his shoulder. Eyes followed him to the stove, watched him while he stood there with his back turned upon them, warming his hands. For all the sign he gave, the room might have been empty—which was the cold aloof way he had when life struck at him too harshly. And for the moment no one seemed willing to batter against that wall of silence with which he held them off.

Then Weary, combing his thick dark hair before the small mirror that made him crouch down to see himself in it, he was so tall, turned with the comb poised just over his right ear.

"Well, what'd he say, Chip?" he asked, with a complete disregard of any past disagreement. "Jar loose a little information, can't yuh? What's J.G. think about it?"

"I didn't ask him what he thought."

Cal Emmett, sure to blunder into touchy subjects, gave a constrained laugh. "Hear you've been annexin' some extra buttonholes, Chip."

Chip half turned toward him. "Yes? News travels fast in this country." His tone was tart.

"Meaning I'm too damn gabby," sighed Weary. "Sure, I told the boys about that. Keep 'em off the sky line, maybe, till we can glom the jasper that done it. Take a look at that hole, boys."

He came over to Chip, looked straight into his moody hazel eyes with his own sunny blue ones, and twitched the sheepskin-lined canvas coat open. "See that? If Chip had been setting three inches forward, that bullet would of bored plumb through his lungs and heart sideways. That's—"

"His what?" Cal Emmett chortled, to hide the shock he felt.

"Oh, he's got a heart, all right. You ask that family of silver-maned horses of hisn." Weary gave the coat an affectionate yank and let Chip go. "Mamma! A little better shooting, and I'd 'a' had to pack him all the way home against that wind. You can't," he plaintively explained, "drive a bunch of horses worth a damn when you're packin' a corpse on a led horse behind yuh."

From the corner of his eye he saw Chip grin at that oblique acknowledgment of gratitude, and a tension left Weary's mouth. "The great and burning question now is, who do we know that's as good a rifle shot as that? Three hundred yards, if it was an inch, and a high wind to allow for."

"Aw," Happy Jack croaked unbelievingly, "there ain't nobody that good a shot. I betcha he was aimin' at somep'm in the gully and shot over."

"Shep Taylor's a wiz with a rifle," Ted Culver offered. "Been sellin' beef all winter too. Yuh mind, Cal, we met him and Snuffle haulin' two four-horse loads out to the fort. That was about a month ago, when we was comin' out from Dry Lake."

Weary gave a quick shake of the head. "Wouldn't be Shep. Way I figure, it's some of them nesters that moved in last fall down along them creek bottoms. Shep Taylor's an ornery cuss to work for, but he's straight. I'd bank on that."

"Just the same, I wouldn't put it past the Hobble-O," Ted persisted. "By gosh, if I'd of known what was goin' on, I'd sure as hell clumb up and took a look in them wagons. I'll gamble there was more hind quarters than there was front."

At the washbasin Chip lathered hands and face with a cake of yellow soap and listened to the argument that ensued. Some of the others seemed to think the Hobble-O was guilty, though Weary stoutly defended the ginger-whiskered, irascible old Shep Taylor. Not once, Chip noticed, did anyone mention Butch Lewis as a possible suspect, nor any of his outfit. Their studied attempt to throw the blame elsewhere made his lip curl. They couldn't pull that sort of thing on him, he told himself. They must be crazy if they thought all this chewing the rag would make him change his mind about it.

At the time he failed to appreciate their motive as a friendly attempt to ease his feeling of responsibility. At supper he ate in silence, his eyes turned toward his plate. For one thing he had no wish to see J.G's face, with its deeper lines of worry, nor did he want to meet his boss's grave, questioning glance. What had passed between them there in the cabin stood out in Chip's consciousness as if all must see the words written in the air. Food choked him. Hungry as he had been, he was the first to push back his plate and straddle backward over the bench at the long table, and he knew that glances followed him when he left the mess house.

In his bunk, with his face turned to the wall and his blankets pulled up over his ears so that only his brown scalp lock was visible, he lay thinking miserably of many things best forgotten. It seemed to him that a curse lay on his life, though why that was so he could not understand. For himself he did not greatly care—or so he said to himself that night. He could take all the hard knocks Fate wanted to hand out to him and take them on his feet. But why must he carry trouble with him to the place that had come to be the only home he knew anywhere in the world? Why must good old J.G. suffer because he had taken in a hoodoo?

Youth touches the heights of exaltation and plumbs the depths of despair. Long after the bunk house was dark and silent, save for the snoring of weary young men asleep, Chip Bennett lay motionless under his blankets, every nerve athrob with thoughts too bitter for the boy he was, after all was said. Toward morning he slept, but he did not waken to any brighter mood, and he lay in bed until after the others had gone to breakfast.

Then he rose and dressed quickly and busied himself about his bunk. When he went at last to his breakfast, his warbag was packed, his blankets rolled in his bed tarp. The last stragglers joshed him a little and went their way, telling each other that Chip was a damn fool to fight his head over something he couldn't help. And they saddled and went off to comb the range for more saddle horses to throw in the pasture and shape up for spring round-up, planning as they rode how they would handle the beef butchers if they could have their way, and wondering what action J.G. meant to take. They speculated somewhat upon the fact that so far he had not said a word about it, even to Shorty. It was damned queer. They wondered if maybe Chip had lost his nerve after all and didn't tell the Old Man about it.

The trouble was that Chip had not lost his nerve. Jim Whitmore would have felt better if he had. He waited in his cabin, smoking and walking, restless as a caged grizzly, from window to window, pausing at each to look out into the windy, sun-drenched morning. Standing at one window, he saw Chip saddle the blue roan he liked best in his string, and ride away to the upper pasture. Moving uneasily to the opposite window, he watched until Chip came riding back to the corral leading Mike, his own private saddle horse. The others, Jeff the pack horse, Silvia and her two colts, Rummy the irrepressible two-year-old and little Silver the yearling, trotted eagerly behind and around him. They seemed to know that they were going to travel new trails. Their tossing silver manes, the way they lifted rumps at one another in sheer exuberance, told eloquently of their elation.

Jim Whitmore grunted an oath and clamped his teeth down on his pipestem. He turned away from the window—and turned back again, muttering something about a damned young fool. He watched until, saddle changed to Mike's back and the empty packsaddle cinched gauntly on Jeff, Chip stepped limberly astride Mike and trotted up to the bunk house. He waited, smoking furiously in savagely spasmodic puffs, until Chip led his horses up to his door, dropped reins and came in.

J.G. glared at him through a blue cloud. "Bound you'll act the damn fool, ay? Can't take advice from nobody, I s'pose?"

"Not in this case, I can't." Chip looked at him, a swift glance that looked away again. "There's times when a man's got to pick his own trail."

"Man!" J.G. snorted. "Better wait till you're old enough to vote! Wait till you're dry behind the ears—"

"I'm old enough to tackle any job I know is mine, J.G." Chip spoke gruffly, perhaps to hide how shaken he was. "You wouldn't have much use for a fellow that wouldn't."

Jim Whitmore yanked his pipe from his mouth, glared at it, cursed it for having burned itself out. He turned away to the blanketed table, turned back with his hand outstretched. "Well, here's your pay. Don't go actin' the fool any more'n you have to." He thrust his pipe into his pocket, took it out again, looked at it and thrust it cold between his teeth. "Well, so long. Take care of yourself—and if you—don't be any bigger fool than the good Lord made yuh."

"I'll try not to. Uh—good-by."

He picked up Mike's reins as if he were in a great hurry to be gone, swung into the saddle and trotted away down along the pasture fence and so out into the old Whoop-up Trail that wound its devious way southward to the river and across to the hills beyond.