Читать книгу Trails Meet - B.M. Bower - Страница 7

Table of Contents

AT dawn Jess awoke thinking of those revolver shots he had heard last night. He had not thought much about them before, but now it seemed of vital importance. He began counting, touching a finger tip to the blanket for every shot. "One when I opened the door to let the smoke out. That's when I ducked back inside. One more, then two—or was it three?" He shut his eyes and tried to remember exactly how that sudden fusillade had sounded. The thought persisted that there had been three quick shots, but the wind and sleet made such a whooping noise that he might have been mistaken. The shot Parsons had fired as Jess came down around the thicket he was sure of, and also the first and second. It was those quick shots in between—

"If he fired three shots, that accounts for every bullet—" He turned his head and scowled at Chuck's bunk opposite, trying to remember exactly what had happened. It was like a nightmare, the most vital factors foggy and elusive.

Last night, for instance, he remembered a distrust of Tom Ritchie, an inclination to take everything he and Bob had said with a grain of salt. They both had been pretty badly shaken by the event. Scared, if he were any judge of men's faces. He had watched them, had been guarded and suspicious. Now he decided that their own panic had impelled his attitude; that it wasn't anything except ragged nerves all around. They were all of them rattled, ready to jump at their own shadows.

Ritchie was all right and so was Bob. Probably they had been pretty edgy when they started out. Who wouldn't be, with the Senator fighting a pack of crooks out on the Coast, trusting everything at this end to Albert Parsons, and he lying down on the job? Worse, because he had been hitting the booze until it got him where he was imagining all sorts of fool things. Still—he wished he could get it out of his head that Parsons had fired six shots to call help. That couldn't be true. If he had fired one bullet into his own body, that would leave five in the gun. He surely wouldn't have thrown out that empty shell and shoved a full cartridge in its place. Not after he was shot.

He got into his clothes, started a fire in the old cookstove standing back in a corner of the room farthest from the fireplace, filled the teakettle and set it over the flame. It was still raining with a soft dismal persistency that gave no promise of clearing. Knowing Chuck, he did not expect him back while the storm lasted, and he went down and turned the work team loose in the pasture and fed his saddle horse in the corral. If it kept on raining, he might ride over home. Even his father could scarcely expect him to slop around in the woods, getting out poles in the rain.

As a rule Jess ate with the frank appetite of any other husky young fellow working in the open, but this morning food lay forgotten on his plate. The cabin oppressed him. It looked dingy, forlorn. He did not think it was because a man had died in that far corner last night; he was not particularly squeamish about death. It was something else; something evil hiding itself out of sight.

All that babbling, that wanting to tell him something—something worth money to the man who knew. Had that been sane talk—or delirium? If Parsons had known what he was saying, those broken sentences certainly put a different face on things. It must have been just a crazy notion. There was nothing like that going on at the Diamond Slash. Insane mutterings, that was all. And yet—

Jess pushed back from the table and got up. Those shots bothered him. If he had heard six, then Parsons could not have killed himself. The wound was not that fresh; even Jess could tell that. It had bled too long. Some of the stains on Al's shirt had turned almost brown. Parsons must have been shot much farther down the trail and spent some time getting up to where he had fallen in the road.

Jess went and stood in the doorway, gazing down toward the misty valley. The cabin light would show a long way off. About the only light Parsons could have seen near enough to give any hope of reaching help. Not that it mattered now. Parsons was dead. Just how or where need not concern Jess.

Yet it did concern him, kept him from leaving the place, though the reason for that was obscure even to himself. He washed his few breakfast dishes, made his bed. It was then that he discovered the stains on the floor, the smears along the side of Chuck's bunk. He gave an involuntary shiver and backed away, staring at the spots.

No wonder he had that hunch to stay. What if Chuck came home and saw that? Or his father?

As he was making his second trip from the spring with two sloshing buckets, some one came riding up behind him,—Bob Francis, leading a saddled horse that looked as if it had been out all night. Bob dismounted at the cabin corner and followed Jess inside. His face looked haggard, older than his years.

He went over to the cold fireplace and stood there, leaning an elbow on the mantel, watching Jess empty the water into a zinc tub on the stove.

"Goin' to clean house, hunh?"

Jess nodded. "Going to try, anyway."

Bob began moodily to light a cigarette. "Chuck didn't get back yet, hunh?" he asked, and drew a match sharply along the mantel edge.

"Not yet." Jess was moving things on a high shelf where he hazily recalled having seen a can of condensed lye.

Bob eyed him sidelong, speaking around the cigarette between his lips. "What time did Chuck leave yesterday, Jess?"

Jess glanced back over his shoulder. "Right after we brought down our second load of poles. About four o'clock, I think. Why?"

"A—nothing. I was just wondering. We never got a sight of him. Went to town, didn't he?"

"That," said Jess gravely, "was his ultimate destination, I believe."

Bob grunted. "Hand me over that hatchet, kid. I'll have to bust them words up and take 'em a piece at a time." But immediately he fell back into his somber aspect. "Jess, what's your idea about last night?"

Jess gave him a quick look. "Just how do you mean that?"

"You know. What do you think about the suicide theory? On the square, just between you and me and the gate post." He emptied smoke out through his nostrils. "Let's have the low-down, now we're alone."

Jess backed a step and sat down on the table, pushing back his big range hat and relaxing a little from his studied calm. His lips opened for speech, then closed and tightened. He shook his head. "What do you think about it yourself, Bob?" And he added after a breath, "You know as much as I do."

"Oh, yeah? I wasn't with him. You was."

"You know what led up to it. I don't."

Bob smoked meditatively. "You heard what Tom said."

"Yes, I heard."

"You think there was more to it than that?"

"I don't know. Was there, Bob?"

"Now," said Bob, "you're askin'." He hesitated. "It coulda been that way, all right. Al's been pickled for two weeks. That's straight. But—well, between you and me—not to go any farther, mind—did Chuck ever make any talk to you about Al?"

"Against him, you mean? Nothing in particular; why?"

"Well, nothing. I just got to wondering, is all."

Jess felt in his pocket, got his cigarettes and prepared to light one. "You know Chuck. Maybe you've heard him give a man a good word—I never have, so far." He studied Bob's profile. "Why do you think—?"

"I don't know as I do. Just got to speculating, I guess. You acted to me last night as if you didn't go so strong on that suicide business. Why?" He straightened, faced Jess squarely. "You knew it wasn't no accident—at least you booed the idea that it coulda been—and you had your doubts about the other. Now I follow your line of thinkin' and make a guess of my own, and you can't see that with a spyglass. Why? What the hell do you think?"

"I don't see that it matters what I think," Jess retorted. "You two went ahead and doped out a story to suit yourselves and you asked me to keep my nose out of it. What more do you want?"

Bob gave him a long questioning stare. "I don't know, Jess." Suddenly his voice was disarmingly rueful. "I just can't be satisfied till I know the facts. I wish I'd been here when you found him. I might of been able to do something—find out just how the damn thing happened. I—I kinda liked Al. He was pig-headed as the devil, and I guess I was about the only one in the outfit, outside the Senator, that had any use for him. But he was always fair enough to me and I'd like to have—"

"I don't see what you could have done, Bob. He was too far gone."

"Not too far gone to talk. You said so yourself."

"He could, yes. But most of the time he sounded pretty wild and I didn't take any stock in it. I don't yet."

He hesitated, looked at Bob again. "The thing that's bothering me is not so much what he said. What I'd like to be sure of is just how many shots he fired after he fell out there beyond the point of brush. And there's another thing, Bob. What was Ritchie doing with his gun when I came in with the wood?"

"Al's gun, you mean? Lookin' at it. He wanted to see how many shots had been fired. It was plumb empty. Why?"

"I don't know, Bob—somehow it seems to stick in my mind I heard six shots. If that's right, where did the bullet come from that killed him?"

Bob stared. "You sure?"

"No, I'm not. That's the worst of it. You know how the wind was blowing. It may have been five."

"Hunh!" said Bob. "Five, and it's suicide. Six, and it's liable to be murder. You never said a word about it last night." His eyes asked why.

"I didn't think of it last night. It was this morning when I began to count; or try to. It's damnable not to be sure. A suicide is one thing to cover up as an accident. Murder is something else again. I certainly wouldn't want to—what do they call it?—compound a felony." He pushed his fingers impatiently through his hair. "What were you asking about Chuck for?" he demanded bluntly. "What's your reason for thinking he may have done it?"

"No reason; only he was on the road somewhere. I was just speculating." Bob moved uneasily, changed elbows on the mantel, rubbed his cigarette ash off on the edge of a gray rock. "Al was such a damn ornery cuss, I didn't know but what he might have said something to rile Chuck."

"I wouldn't go speculating like that to outsiders," Jess warned him.

"Think I would, you're crazy! Anyway, Ritchie's called in the coroner and made his report. I don't know's there'll be an inquest, even. Tom's got this county in his pocket; or the Senator has, and that's all the same. He told 'em he'd sure appreciate it if they kept it quiet like, on account of the folks comin' back right away and the missus needin' complete rest, account of nerves." Bob heaved a sigh of admiration. "It sure takes Tom Ritchie to lay it on thick when he wants to. I betcha there won't be more'n four lines in the paper about it. It'll be what you ejucated guys call a closed incident."

"It can't be," Jess said uneasily, "if the facts point to—murder."

"That's what I been tryin' to get at. Do they or don't they? If you've got something you're holdin' up your sleeve, let's have it. Ritchie ain't the man to cover a thing like that. He just didn't want it to get out that the Senator's manager had committed suicide right at this time. Something to do with that oil war—or whatever it is—on the Coast. Maybe if we go over everything Al said, no matter how crazy it sounded at the time—"

"Well, what about somebody framing Parsons somehow? Any reason for some one at the ranch trying to double-cross him?"

"Did he say that?" Bob's stare sharpened.

"Yes, he did. And he wanted to tell me something. He said it would serve the damn fools right if he did."

"You know what it was?"

"No, I don't. I advised him to keep quiet and not talk any more than was necessary. I went after some coffee and he was dead when I looked at him again. That was just as you fellows showed up."

"Nuts," said Bob harshly. "Treacherous as a sidewinder. I always knowed it."