Читать книгу Man in the Saddle - Ernest Haycox - Страница 5

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After that first quick run out of The Wells, Merritt and Prine settled into the customary mode of travel across the Piute—walk awhile, gallop awhile, and walk again. They aimed into the black, not speaking at all during the first few minutes. Above them lay the glittering wash of stars; on the left, which was east, the low summits of the Bunchgrass Hills made a perceptible outline. There was no sound except the hoof scuffs of their ponies and saddle leather's soft squealing, and the occasional jingling of bridle chains. Wind traveled steadily in from the west, with a sharper edge to it; for though it was Indian summer and cloudless by day, the Piute lay around five thousand feet elevation and at sundown warmth soon left the earth. In this wind, too, was the aromatic blend of sage and bunchgrass cured on the stem, and the impalpable smell of water from little marsh lakes scattered here and there along the desert; and the vague scent of an enduring wildness, which was less an actual scent than some powerful influence rising from a fresh earth to stir a man's senses.

Bourke Prine was first to break the long riding silence, at once revealing his irritation. "It was a hell of a thing to happen—and you let it happen, Owen. It is none of my business, but I'd like to know why."

Owen Merritt let the silence drag until Prine thought his partner meant to refuse an answer. But then Merritt said, quite slowly, as if the words were hard in coming, "I went to her at the hotel, I asked her if she was sure she had figured it out right. She said she had. So that was all."

"No," answered Bourke Prine. "No, that wasn't all. You put a question to a woman just like you were pointin' a gun at her head. What the hell were you doin'—just stand in there? What sort of an answer you think a woman would make, asked that way? I never saw you back up before. You just quit."

"Woman's heart is one thing," said Owen Merritt. "Her mind is another. I told you this before. Sally had made up her mind. Suppose I argued her out of it? We'd both remember she once figured the other way. We'd remember it a long time."

Bourke grumbled, "I don't get it at all."

"All right," said Owen Merritt, "I'll make it plain, and then we'll say no more."

His words came slower and drier and with no emphasis at all. Bourke felt the big man was pushing his words up through bitterness. "She's an ambitious girl, Bourke. She made up her mind long ago to be somethin' better than her people. Look at them. Love Bidwell's a shiftless Southerner. Poor white trash. Her brother Starr ain't worth a damn. She saw her mother work like a horse to keep the family alive and decent. She saw her mother die—out of shame, mostly, for what the menfolks were. You know the kind of a shack they live in, and the hardscrabble outfit they've got. Sally had that burned into her. It left a mark. She made up her mind she wouldn't let any man pull her down like they had pulled her mother down. She's got a will and a lot of pride. You want to know what's back of all this? Well, here it is. She figured to do everything her dad didn't do. So here's Isham and here's Skull, and now she's got her place—the wife of the Piute's richest man, and part boss of the biggest outfit in the state. That's it."

Bourke kept still, and they rode a mile or better through the black until he had digested it. Then he said, disbelief in his voice, "A woman doesn't do a thing like that. If it was a matter of bein' poor white trash or Isham's wife, maybe yes. But it wasn't. She had another chance to get away from Broken Buttes and hardscrabble, which was you. You ain't rich but you've got a good ranch. And unless I'm a damn poor guesser, she was in love with you. You ain't tellin' all the story, kid."

"No," said Owen Merritt, in the same dust-dry monotone. "No, I ain't. The rest of it's me. Love Bidwell is a drifter and a fellow always squattin' in the sunshine. She's put up with that all her life. It burned too deep. I'm a fellow that likes to ride over the hill, too. I like to squat in the sunshine. Maybe go see where the antelope are runnin'. Maybe follow a trail into the hills just for the fun of it. She wouldn't take the chance on what I might be when I was as old as Love."

Bourke rolled his weight around the saddle. "No woman would trade off a man that way, like an old shirt for a new one. She wouldn't be much of a woman if she did. It's still out of joint, my boy. I'm not so wise, but I can smell old cheese."

"I've told you the straight of it."

But Bourke went on as if he hadn't heard that answer.

"Maybe," he grumbled, "Lee Repp wasn't so wrong."

"What's that?"

"Well, her brother Starr is no good. He's been stealin'. I know that. So maybe Isham used a little pressure on her—"

Owen Merritt hauled in, which also halted Bourke.

"Bourke," said Merritt—so softly, so deceivingly gentle—"I'll hear no more of that."

"All right—all right," said Bourke, full of irritation. "But Isham took your girl, which has made a sucker out of you before the country. It will get you in trouble soon or late. Mighty damned funny he should make it a point to drink with you in that saloon. It don't make sense—but Will Isham is no hand to do foolish things, so it means somethin'. And it is pretty queer Hugh Clagg should be in the same room with a bunch of Skull men."

He quit. The two men held their horses still, listening to the muffled run of a group of riders in the foreground. After the sound faded Bourke said, "Where'd Repp go?"

"Ahead of us somewhere."

"You goin' home?"

"I guess so."

"So-long then." Bourke pulled away. But he halted and called back, not sure of his partner, "Want me to ride on to the ranch with you?"

"No. Good night."

"Sure," murmured Brouke, and struck eastward toward his own ranch at the base of the Bunchgrass Hills.

Owen Merritt traveled on through the solid dark, giving his horse its own head. A falling star made its faint, spectacular scratch across the low heavens; and the wind threw an increasing chill against him. Far, far away the bark of a coyote lifted up—that saddest and loneliest call of the desert. Released now from the necessity of keeping a straight face to the world, Owen Merritt let his innermost feelings carry him downward until even the little light of the stars seemed to die away. This was the way it went with him, with the thought of Sally riding toward Skull burning through him and leaving its fatal scars. There had been a moment in the Palace when, confronted by Isham, he had held himself narrowly aside from an open quarrel, when the effort to keep down the actual impulse to kill had drawn sweat into his palms. Isham, he knew, had seen the shadow of that in his eyes, and this was why Isham had proposed the drink. He could have destroyed the man at the moment and Isham had been smart enough to realize it.

Sweeping over the long miles, all this kicked its violent course through him until there was nothing left, until he was physically tired. There was a growing shadow straight ahead, which would be the Broken Buttes guarding the southern margin of the Piute Desert. His own road turned left at that point and went another four miles eastward to where Stage Coach Pass separated the Broken Buttes from the Bunchgrass Hills. A single light glimmered through a window of Nan Melotte's frame cabin by the side of the isolated Christmas Creek school.

The scene in the upper hallway remained distinct. Sally, so sad with her talk and so full of a woman's gifts, had waited for him to reveal what was in his mind. He could have taken her out of that hall and cheated Isham in the end. He knew he had that power with the girl's heart and would always have it, as she had the same power over him. Yet in that moment when he knew what he could do, he kept remembering how willfully she had set her mind the other way. And so he had let his chance go by. Distantly and dimly he could admire her for the strong will which rode over her heart's desire; he could admire what she had done, and still want her as he wanted no other woman. But in him, too, was a thought that would not change. He could not take half a woman.

One more thought came to him, harder than the others: Coolly and calmly as she had made her bargain, she didn't yet know to what ends she had fully committed herself. Isham was a quiet man and a slight-figured one, but behind his composed features lay a will greater than her will. She didn't know that yet.

He said to himself, half aloud and deliberately trying to break the emptiness he felt, "I guess I better ride over to Fremont Basin and see where the antelope are running."

He had been watching the light of Nan Melotte's cabin ahead, watching it and seeing nothing. Now at once his normal senses revived, and he pulled the pony in. Somewhere before him two or three shapes cut across the beam of light and the beat of fast- traveling horses ran back, and presently a voice, muffled and quick and ridden by fear, said, "Hey-hey!" It was immediately drowned by the quick beat of gunfire.

Two or three guns—all going at once and quitting at once. He heard no more signaling from that voice as he laid his spurs along the pony's flank and ran dead into trouble. The yonder riders streamed across the light, and a horse careened vaguely forward, causing him to veer aside. When it passed by he saw the empty saddle. In the near foreground he heard a man call, "Merritt!" And before he could stop he was in the center of a suddenly renewed firing. Gun reports flattened into the enormous dark. Exploded powder pushed little fingers, of sulky light through the shadows. His horse bunched up and came off its front feet and those riders were beating toward him as he laid his own answering shots at them.

Nan Melotte's lamplight died. There was a voice calling insistently to him as he pulled his pony aside from this converging lead. "Merritt—Merritt!" Lying low in the saddle he tried another shot, ran on, and halted to listen.

They had likewise stopped, but he heard the heaving of their horses not far away, to his left; and afterward they seemed to grow uneasy and to drift along the desert, the rustle of that travel softly coming to him. He lifted his gun, aiming it at the general sound, and gathered the pony beneath him. When he opened fire he let the pony go, driving it straight for them. Muzzle light bloomed before him. He heard a man yell, long and broken- winded. Wind breathed on his face and the smell of his own shots was in his nostrils. His horse shied from something on the ground, the farther firing quit, and he pulled in once more and heard them racing toward the Broken Buttes.

He said to himself, That was Clagg. Not in anger, for he was past anger or any kind of emotion. Dismounted, he waited for the sound of their retreat to sink away, at once knowing that this affair was a consequence and a continuation of the wedding. He reached for a match, walking back a few yards and squatting near a loose shadow on the ground. He scratched the light on his boot, held it cupped a brief moment over the face of Lee Repp dead on the ground, and whipped it out. There was no more echo from Broken Buttes.

Nan Melotte's lamplight reappeared in her window. He returned to his horse, thinking. They thought I was riding ahead of Repp. They thought it was me. Nan Melotte's door came open, releasing a square-shaped glow. She was silhouetted in the doorway, one hand thrown out to touch the door's frame. He rode that way.

"Owen?"

"Yeah," he said, and got down. He saw the whiteness of her cheeks in the light; he saw the black shine of her hair. It was the strong, slow, and concerned tone of her voice that dragged him out of his own tangled thoughts. "Yeah," he said.

She said, "Come in. Come out of the light."

When he passed through the door she closed it quickly.

He turned to find her resting against it, her small, square shoulders dropped at the corners. He had the feeling that her glance ran over him, top to bottom, with a strange anxiety. Her lips softened and she murmured, "I'm glad." But her eyes were very dark and they watched him with a continuing interest. He had known her three or four years, he had occasionally ridden the desert with her, he had now and then danced with her. But there was a difference here at this moment. He felt it and could not reach it with a definition. His legs were heavy, and all the whisky he had taken in during the evening began to have its way, grabbing at his stomach and threading his nerves. He removed his hat.

She said, "Do you need a drink?"

"No," he said.

She started to speak again and didn't, her expressive shoulders shrugging away the impulse, At the moment she saw him pretty clearly for what he was—a long, loose man with a yellow, head of hair above smooth and angular features. He was, in a way, a good-looking rider who had a ready smile and seemed to take the course of his life with a complete indifference. Lazy until roused, with deep, darkly blue eyes wise in the reading of the desert's face or the shadows under the far pines. Laconic and hard to fathom. But she saw him now off guard, at a moment when he showed what he had been through, and she thought to herself, I have been mistaken. A sun-darkened skin lay tightly across his cheekbones; his flat muscles stirred beneath the cotton shirt when he turned his shoulders.

He said, "How'd you get home so soon?"

"I left town right after you did—and rode the short trail."

"Pass anybody?"

"No. But I heard those riders come around the house and stop out there."

"Repp's still there," he said. "Dead."

He was mildly interested in knowing how she would take the news, and saw no change. There was a resoluteness in the lines of this girl, a self-reliance. And still her lips were soft, and a quality in her stirred his attention.

She said, "I guess they made a mistake."

He asked, "Now how would you know that?"

"I know. Do you want me to make you some coffee?"

"No, I'll ride along."

She moved away from the door and watched him put on his hat. He opened the door and his expression changed while he listened to the yonder night; it was keener and more alert, as though this were a game he knew very well. He looked back and gave her a faint smile. "Thanks."

"Better watch the road."

"Sure," he said. They stood this way a little while, considering each other, at once strongly aware of each other. Color showed on her cheeks. She held herself still and steady, as if waiting for him to have his look, as if willing he should consider her and draw his own conclusions. He said, "Good night," and watched her lips form the words "Good night," quite conscious of the little rhythm in her voice, somehow affected by its rise and fall. Afterward he went to the horse and swung away, bound for his ranch on Christmas Creek, four miles east.

Nan Melotte moved over to close the door, and stood against it, listening to his horse strike the hard footslope of the Buttes. Her expression relaxed. It was pleasant and warm, touched with the heat of an inner dreaming. She said, so softly, I have been mistaken. Afterward that warmth and softness faded, to leave her still-checked. For she was thinking then of Sally Isham who had once owned this man. And still does, she thought. I wonder if he realizes that?