Читать книгу Trouble Shooter (Musaicum Vintage Western) - Ernest Haycox - Страница 7

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At six o'clock they rounded into Fort Sanders. Overmile was restless and wanted to be directly on the way to Laramie but they had supper in the officers' quarters before swinging out upon the muddy trail north. Archie Millard walked beside their horses to the guard gate, moody and withdrawn.

He said: "General Gibbon tells me I am at your disposal, Frank. I shall be here whenever you want me."

The morning before there had been no track here; but now the fresh yellow grade held fresh steel and a line of supply trains crept across it, Laramie bound, the engine fireboxes guttering raw crimson into the swelling dusk. All the cars held Irishmen, pleasure bent, to christen this new town.

Overmile said: "They sure do work fast."

"Millard," sald Peace, "is about ready to jump his commission. We've got to stop that, Leach."

"How do you stop the things in a man's head?" drawled Overmile. He turned in his saddle to have a long look at Peace. "You're a hard one, Frank. Give these two people some sympathy. It might happen to you."

They rode out of the darkness into the full boil of Laramie Town celebrating its birth. Lusty racket rolled down the muddy street to meet them, a street bursting into swift and brilliant and wicked flower from the raw earth. Shoulder to shoulder sat the tented saloons, the dance halls, the flimsy-framed stores, their fronts making a ragged up-and-down pattern. The hurdy-gurdy music of Campeaux's big saloon rolled up to the astonished sky. The spielers were calling their wares, and hammer and saw kept up a steady tone. This was another Cheyenne, with the high-wheeled freighters jamming the narrow way and two thousand Irishmen roaming the dark in search of excitement, and the high piles of steel and ties and material lying familiarly over by Jack Casement's portable commissary shack. There was a single coach sitting in froot of Laramie's improvised depot.

"Dodge is probably there," said Peace, and turned that way.

Overmile was chuckling in a pleased fashion, "A wild, hellraisin' night. It makes a pretty show."

They worked their way through the heavy line of wagons, aiming for the solitary passenger coach, A man stepped down from it and walked leisurely forward, and at sight of him Peace dismounted instantly. Overmile took Peace's horse and rode away toward the railroad corrals.

"General," said Peace, "I'm mighty glad to see you."

General Dodge pulled a cigar from his mouth. He looked at Peace with a gray, hard eye, and extended his arm, speaking affably. "Understood you'd be here tonight. You look well."

He was a man of medium build, this General Dodge whose word was law on the road. Still in his middle thirties, he had the calmness and the certainty of one much older. Behind him stood a wonderful army record and the thorough confidence of Grant and Sherman. A short black beard hid the play of his face. He didn't waste much talk.

"Reed's overloaded with work. It's all he can do to keep the job organized, The responsibility of keeping trouble from tying us up is yours. You've got to see that these contractors stay far enough out so that the steel don't catch up with them, I don't want to wait for unfinished bridges, and I don't want to lose time on account of tunnels that haven't been bored. As for these towns, the railroad is responsible for order. Government expects us to provide merchants with a certain amount of protection. If the crooks want another Julesburg cleanup give it to them."

He quit talking. His head turned aside from Peace and he put his cigar between his teeth. A dapper and slightly stooped little man with a Vandyke beard came forward at a rapid, nervous stride. He said, "Hello, Dodge," and offered a slender hand. The two men shook in a brief way.

Dodge drawled, "Durant, this is Frank Peace. He's Reed's assistant."

T. C. Durant, vice-president of the road, nodded impersonally at Peace. Dodge, thoroughly blunt, said immediately: "Hear you've been telling Laramie people they'd have the connection to Denver, instead of Cheyenne having it. And you sent your consulting engineer out here to change my location lines."

"Seymour didn't like your Jines," said Durant. "As for the change of division-point—"

"You'll play hell," broke in Dodge. "I told the Laramie people an hour ago they needn't expect any connection from Denver. That's Cheyenne's. And neither Seymour nor anyone else will change my lines while I'm running the job. I don't propose to have it."

Durant flicked Dodge with a veiled, skeptical glance. "May be a difference of opinion there," he said, and went on down the street at the same light and nervous stride.

Dodge turned back to Peace. "I'm staging it to Salt Lake tomorrow, Remember, the responsibility for keeping trouble down is yours. Good luck." With that he wheeled back into the car, the cigar laying a wake of smoke behind.

Overmile had put up the horses and returned. The two of them idled across the wagon-choked street, being absorbed in the restless, steady stream of construction men crowding the walk. All the windows and doorways flushed the shadows with a raw, smoky light, and the warm air gushing from these buildings had the strong blend of sweat and damp woolen clothes and, tobacco smoke and whisky and wood smoke. Caught in the human riptide boiling around the wide entrance of the Club, Peace came face to face with Phil Morgan.

Morgan grinned in his dry way. "Let's have a look."

The three of them shouldered into Campeaux's Club, the flash of the fifty-foot mirror on the saloon's back bar coming against their eyes, like an explosion. All the games were in full blast. The orchestra—changed from afternoon's brass band to evening's more decorous string instruments—sat on a far platform and hurled its melody against the rising confusion. Over there on the dance floor the white faces of women and the color of their evening dresses went around—and around in a blurred and blending pattern. The noise of this place struck Peace in every key. There was no calm, only a kind of surge that swelled more and more vitally against the canvas ceiling of the tent. The partners pushed their way to the bar and caught the eye of one of the dozen scudding barkeeps; they got their whisky and stood meditatively together, drinking.

"Going with Dodge tomorrow?" asked Morgan.

"No, we've got another job." Then Peace said: "Wait a minute."

A big-bellied Irishman with vermilion cheeks shouted, "Hello, Bucko," and slapped him on the back.

Peace grinned and pushed on toward the side of the Club where the gambling rigs were. Men kept drifting across his way; men kept hailing him. The music stopped and the whole crowd swayed toward the bar, the women on the dance floor starting the parade with their partners. Blocked momentarily by this rush, Peace heard a voice say in a swift undertone: "Mr. Peace," and he swung himself around and found Rose—the pale, obscure girl who had come from Omaha on the work-passenger train beside him. But she was neither pale nor obscure now. Dressed in a low-cut gown as attractive as fashion could make it, she made a jewel-like glow in this confused atmosphere. Her hair was dressed carefully, piled back on her head and edged with short ringlets. Her shoulders, bare and smooth, rose faintly to command his attention; she had a pink color on her cheeks—and she was smiling at him. Yet her voice was guarded.

"Be careful tonight." Then her hands came up with a little gesture of resignation, as though she had been refused, and she wheeled immediately from him and put her hand through another man's arm. She said: "To the bar, Paddy. Don't be stingy with your money."

Peace parted the crowd before him with a swing of his shoulders, coming beside Roy Lovelace who sat on a high stool and dealt the blackjack game. An eye shade on Lovelace's forehead threw a green light down across the spare and composed fatalism of his face. His long fingers dropped the cards, one by one, in front of the players; none of the rest of his figure, covered by a fine black broadcloth suit, moved at all, But he felt Peace's presence and a moment later lifted his glance, His expression didn't break out of its strict indifference. Only his voice changed, becoming even and cordial, "Hello, Frank."

A player's quick voice said, "Hit this," and Lovelace swung his attention back to the game. A tall woman stood directly behind Lovelace—Lovelace's wife who always remained behind him when he played; showing this rough and violent crowd a strange, unmoved fidelity.

Peace said: "Where are the kids, Helen?"

"In bed. Can you have supper with us tonight?"

"I won't be here. Just wanted to tell you I have a couple presents coming from Omaha, for the children—and for you."

She was like Lovelace, steeled against smiling. But a warmth reached out from her fine eyes and touched him. He felt it even as he turned back to the bar. Morgan and Overmile had vanished, apparently too restless to wait. The turgid noise of this crowded place slapped him more definitely as he pushed toward the doorway. A woman's flat and excited laughter sliced through the confusion, rasping across his nerves. Somebody prodded him in the ribs; looking down, he saw a little man struggling against the tidal pressure. The little man's lips moved. He reached up to pull at Peace's shoulder.

He said: "You lookin' for Ed Tarrant?"

"No," said Peace.

The little man said gustily: "He's up to Straight-Edge Annie's place, in trouble."

Peace said, "What—" But the current had caught the little man securely in its undertow, dragging him away.

On the street again, Peace looked around and saw neither Morgan nor Overmile. He got out his pipe and filled it, and dragged a few long breaths of smoke into his lungs, his thinking at once critically alert. The Club's orchestra was again hard at work; somewhere down the street two shots made flat, detonating echoes against the wind. Across the street an engine backed away from the station house, its bell insistently clanging. Peace let the crowd carry him toward the next corner; and here he slid out of the tide into the comparative quiet of a short side street. Down this way a few lights glowed through tent flaps and a few flashes came down from the second-story windows of a pine-boarded building sitting thirty feet further on, which was Straight-Edge Annie's place.

That way he drifted. There was a stairway leading up the outside wall of the place; he stopped at the foot of it, studying the surrounding shadows with his insistent eyes. Afterward he climbed the stairs and put his hand to the knob of the door. It let him into a hall illumined by one lamp bracketed against the boards. There was a murmuring and a burst of nervous laughter from a far room, and then that sound died completely and the uneasy stillness of the place rubbed against him like a damp fog. A little ahead of him, on the left side of the hall, he noticed a door standing ajar, through the opening of which crept a thin slice of light.

He said casually: "Straight-Edge."

Silence flowed around him. But he had the smell of something on his nostrils—the slimmest taint of powder smoke trapped in this dead air. It moved him against the door. He laid the flat of his hand against it, shoving it open. What he saw then jerked him straight.

There was a lamp on the table, its sallow glow staining the shadows of this room the color of mud. Ed Tarrant lay on his chest on the floor, his face twisted to one side. A round, dully shining pool of blood slowly gathered beneath him.

Somewhere along the hall a board squealed and, small as that sound was, it was like a dynamite explosion to Frank Peace. He wheeled in his tracks, ramming his fist into his coat pocket to grip the revolver he carried there. A doorway across the hall swung quietly back on its hinges. He saw somebody moving in the depths of that room's blackness, and immediately he swayed aside. At the same moment a round bloom of ragged light burst through the doorway. The breath of the bullet licked across his face and the whole building swelled and shook with the detonation. The slug struck into the wall behind Peace with a small, snoring report.

Peace dropped to the floor, his long, loose body flattened against the boards; the marksman across the way let out a windy sigh and began to rake the room with a rapid, plunging fire.