Читать книгу Trail Smoke (Musaicum Vintage Western) - Ernest Haycox - Страница 5

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Surratt swung into his saddle. "I'm going to have a look at this country."

Torveen murmured idly: "That's all right."

Morning swelled across the meadow in warm full waves of sunlight. Surratt's horse pitched gently around the yard, strong with the desire to travel, but Surratt was watching Nick Perrigo, who remained so still and dissenting by the bunkroom door. There was a challenge in this man, rising from some obscure purpose. And then Surratt let the pony go, lining out over a meadow still sparkling with night's dew.

The sky was flawlessly blue, and a piny smell lay thick and pleasant in this upland air. Five hundred yards beyond he reached the trees and passed into them, following the climbing curves of a broad trail. He looked back at this point to find what he had expected he might find; a rider cut away from the ranch house and trotted over the meadow at a different angle, soon disappearing.

But the morning laid its ease upon Surratt and he was smiling in a way that relieved the gray sharpness of his smoky eyes, and his glance traveled the quiet brown corridors of these hills with an eagerness long unknown to him. He passed the scar of a woodcutter's camp, thereupon falling into an ancient corduroy road. The day was turning hot, a faint drone of the forest's minute life disturbing this shadowy stillness. A bird's scarlet wings flashed out sudden brilliance across the trail. Impelled by the restless vigor of his body, he kept climbing, and two hours later came to a bald knob high on a ridge where two roads crossed and an ancient signboard pointed northward, reading: "Carson's Ford." He went on out into the clearing—and stopped.

Eastward the timber rose in continuous green folds. But elsewhere, from this high vantage point, the hill country lay clearly visible under the gold streamers of the sun. Far to the west the desert rolled on beneath its own sultry flashing—on to copper and blue horizons. Nearer, crowded against the trees, the housetops of Morgantown made a rectangular pattern against the tawny earth. He caught all this in one sweep, and turned then to look directly below him. He had climbed the southern side of the ridge and saw at his feet a valley running away from the north slope of the ridge. Narrow and summer-yellow, it lay between stiff-pitched hill walls, with fences setting off its surface in square design and one long ranch house sitting in the center of it, surrounded by outbuildings. A river cut a black-green serpentine course down the valley's middle, crossed by a bridge; on the road beside the river were the lifting dust puffs of some stray rider. He considered the picture with a definite approval, and then looked regretfully to the high east, where the Gray Bull peaks marked the boundary of some far country. There was a feeling in him to be on his way, to run with the days and leave his campfires behind him, one by one, until the rash and foot-loose mood in him turned cold. But even as he thought of it, he remembered his obligation to Sam Torveen and turned back to the trees.

A woman sat on a roan mare and waited for him, just inside the trees. When he came up to her and stopped—because she barred his way—he saw that her eyes, gray as his own, were direct and strong with interest. She wore the same clothes he had seen on her the morning before in Morgantown, a man's denim overalls stuffed into boots, a man's wool shirt loose across a firm and rounded chest. She held her hat across the saddle horn, and deep-yellow hair ran faintly lawless back from features as serene and fair as he had ever seen on a woman. Restlessness swayed her a little.

He said, "Good mornin', Miss Cameron," and lifted his stetson.

There was a smile lying behind the contour of her lips. "I wondered if you'd remember me."

"Why not?"

She said: "Well, you had your mind full of other things yesterday morning."

"My name," he told her quietly, "is Buck Surratt."

"I was about to ask you," she murmured.

He said: "What is that valley down there?"

"It belongs to my people."

"What's beyond the ridge?"

"Another valley, where the Peyrolles run." Her head turned and indicated the timbered masses in the higher east. "If you ride that way you'll run into Head country. Martin Head. Bill's father." She looked at him with a more direct interest. "Leslie Head's father also—the boy that was shot near your campfire the other night."

He said: "My campfire was out."

Her chin lifted with a certain resoluteness. Her voice at the moment had the candid directness of a man. "I came here to talk to you about that."

"How'd you know I'd be here?"

"I've been following you ever since you left Sam Torveen's place."

Admiration was strong in him. She had a poise and a serenity. Good breeding defined all the regular features of her face and made them expressive and stirring. He kept his peace, waiting for her to go on.

"Were you curious about that shot, Buck?"

He reached for his pipe and packed it and lighted it. He swept a gust of good smoke into his lungs. His mind was on the question, but he noticed the sudden gravity on her smooth cheeks. He said finally: "I did a little looking around."

"You went down to the cabin?"

"Yes."

"Inside?"

He said, "Yes," again, very slowly.

Her question was rapid and concerned: "Did you find something in that cabin, Buck? Something you put in your pocket and carried away?"

Her hands, he observed, were long and slender and supple; and she held them quietly folded on the saddle horn. A slanting beam of sunlight reached through the trees to accent the yellow luster in her hair; and that rich color deepened the ivory tints of her skin. But there was something breaking through the rough man's clothing she wore—the fire of a womanliness that touched him and fed his senses powerfully. It played tricks with him, unsettling the cool run of his thoughts, disturbing his ease. He had known many women, but not the kind of a woman this tall, graceful girl was.

She said: "Give it to me, Buck."

A slow wistfulness got into his answer. "Many people have trusted me."

She straightened. Her words came back almost impulsively—and quite direct. "I trust you, if that is what you want me to do."

"What kind of a man was this Leslie Head?"

Her face was in the bright sunlight, but her thinking cast a shadow across it. It wasn't fear he viewed there; it was the memory of a thing bitter and unpleasant. She murmured: "Speak no evil of the dead, Buck."

"He had enemies?"

"He had no friends."

The need to have things clear made him go on. "Did he live in that cabin?"

"No. Up at the Head ranch."

"What would he be doing in the cabin, then—at night?"

Her eyes remained on him, but she didn't speak and it was Surratt who broke that long stillness. He relighted his pipe. His head inclined toward the road running up to the Gray Bull peaks. His words were faintly regretting. "For a fellow like me the world is wide and all trails lead over the hill. I should be riding now, for if I stay here the answer will be the same answer as always. A man carries his fortune with him. It is like printed instructions written on his chest, for everybody to see."

She said gently: "Then why do you stay?"

He said: "Sam Torveen did me a favor."

The softness, the melody of her voice was enormously stirring. She was a woman, full of hidden riches for some man who one day would capture the fidelity that was in her and command the high loyalty of her heart. For that man, Surratt thought sadly, there would be no more trails beckoning. She was the end of that man's trail.

She said: "You pay your debts, don't you?"

"If I didn't there'd be no pride in me, and I'd be a miserable man without pride. It is a thing my kind has to have—since we have nothing else."

"I thought it was that way," she told him. "I thought so in Morgantown, when you stood against Bill Head." She lifted her arms and the round curves of her body changed. "Sam Torveen's all right. You may doubt his crew, but Sam's—" She thought about the proper word and afterwards looked at him with a small surprise. "He's like you. You are a pair, except that he keeps the world away with a smile—and you keep the world away with a poker face."

"I like him," said Surratt.

"You're a pair," she repeated softly. She scanned the green corridors of the forest with a quick glance. She dropped her voice. "Bill Head's called for a meeting of the big ranchers tonight, up at his house. Sam will want to know that."

"I'll tell him. As for the other thing—"

"I said I trusted you," she interrupted. "Let it go like that."

He nodded and pointed his horse back down the trail. But her voice came abruptly after him, turning him back. She came on until she was beside him once more. Interest was strong in her and she studied this man with a strange emotion. His high, square torso made an alert shape against the shadows of the trees; there was a tough and resilient vigor all about him, a hard physical power to his body. Discipline lay along the pressed lines of his broad nouth, but a rash and reckless will was in his eyes, struggling against the discipline. She saw it. His head, she decided, would never betray him, for it was cool and introspective. But a latent storminess, a subdued capacity for terrific gusts of feeling, made him dangerous to others and to himself. It was his heart that someday would betray him. These were the things she thought in that little interval; and she wished he might smile as Sam Torveen smiled.

She said: "I think your own eyes have warned you. But there are many things about this country you don't know. And you have made Bill Head your enemy. Bill is not a forgiving man. You ought to remember that."

"I'll remember it, Miss Cameron."

"My name," she told him quietly, "is Judith."

"Yes," he said, "I know. There was a woman in the Bible by that name. I've often thought of her."

Her glance dropped and color came strongly to her cheeks. She swung the pony with a long, graceful dip of her body and cantered down the trail. He watched her until she vanished round a lower bend, and then turned homeward.

He rode idly, the picture of her departure so vivid in his mind that some of his customary riding vigilance deserted him. When he reached the woodcutter's camp he pulled himself reluctantly from his thinking and chose another route by which to descend the slope. An increased heat lay trapped underneath these trees, and the midday's sultry stillness was a thick substance all around him. "The rights of other men," he said softly, "are not my rights. When I have paid my bill to Torveen I ride away from here." And he was wrapped in the somberness of that thought when the reaching crash of a shot threw his pony back on its haunches and whipped him forward in the saddle.

He had not been struck, but there was deep in his head the long-planned reaction to just such a contingency as this. It came to him now like a boxer's instinctive defense. Rolling on forward across the saddle horn, he capsized and fell to the soft humus soil and turned over and over until he crouched at the base of a pine. His horse stood fast. The echoes of the shot went rolling and ricocheting down the slope; it died out in little fragments and eddies.

He lay with his head turned upslope, keening the hot twilight of the trees. The sound had struck at him from his right side, and therefore his eyes went to the higher ground, across the brown roll of hummock and stump and deadfall. A mule deer came scudding along the trail, its tail lifted, and plunged on to remote shelter. Surratt's eyes focused on the fan-shaped barricade made by the root system of a capsized pine; it was two hundred yards away, on the high side of the trail. He edged away from his protection and got to his knees and made a run for another tree. Whipped behind it, he studied the slope again. When he next moved—circling and bending as before—he kept his eyes to upheaved roots. He side-stepped and reached a breast- high deadfall. He crouched and ran with it, to the margin of the trail. Paused for one long moment, he finally made one long dive across the trail and dropped behind a stump. From this spot he had a glimpse of the rear of the fallen tree's roots and saw nothing. But there was a bowl where the roots once had been, and in this bowl a man might crouch. Surratt drew his gun then and broke for the adjacent pine. When he reached it he didn't stop, but walked deliberately toward the bowl. It was a strange thing. Perrigo sat on his heels in the bottom of this depression with a rifle across his knees. He saw Surratt coming, but he didn't make a further gesture.

Surratt walked down into it, coming against Perrigo. He was breathing a little from his run and sweat had reached his face; yet the stillness of Perrigo's attention, the bright and malicious burning of the man's black eyes steadied the fresh, strong pulse of his anger and made him alert.

"You've got some bad habits, Nick," he grunted. "And this is one of them. I don't love a man that tries to get his turkey cold."

Perrigo said: "Don't make that mistake, mister. If I'd wanted to hit you I'd aimed at you."

"So maybe you're just trying to run a little scare into me?"

Perrigo got to his feet. He put the rifle butt on his toe and cupped a hand over the muzzle. His shortness made him tip his head to reach Surratt's measuring inspection; it seemed to heat the little man's wrath. He stepped backward. "I don't like strangers. I'm tellin' you."

"I understood that last night," Surratt told him dryly.

"I don't get why you rode up there and met the Cameron girl," growled Perrigo. "It didn't look like an accident to me."

"It bothers you?"

Perrigo said, with a wicked calm: "A lot of things bother me. I don't like you around. You know too much about that shot the other night." His eyes pointed on Surratt, as bitter and dangerous as the muzzles of a double-barreled shotgun. He whipped out his thin question. "What do you know about it?"

"You got an interest in the matter?" inquired Surratt.

Perrigo pressed his mouth together. His dry features betrayed a faint fear. Surratt saw that and marked it in his mind and spoke again, somewhat more agreeable. "I'd suggest we get along, for I'm staying on with Torveen awhile. But if we're not going to get along I want to know that, Nick. When a man declares open season on me I've got my own remedies. Two can play this tune."

"You smell like a Head rider to me," stated Perrigo.

"You're dead wrong. I braced him the other day, didn't I?"

"Men don't brace Bill Head like that," countered Perrigo. "They don't get away with it—not unless it's a faked scene."

"Do we get along or don't we?"

Perrigo blazed up. "The hell with you! You battered Chunk Osbrook's face out of joint and you laid your tongue on the kid. I'm warning you never to try that on me! I'm running that ranch for Torveen. I tolerate no man on the place that rides in front of me. I want that understood. If you stay, you take my orders. You get that?"

"No," said Surratt.

A quick reflex of temper sent Perrigo's arm forward with the muzzle of the gun. But he checked the impulse. Whiteness showed on his cheeks and made the blackness of his eyes more unreasoning. Violence shook him. "Then watch out for yourself!"

"I wanted it clear," Surratt murmured.

"You got it clear," cried Perrigo.

He climbed from the bowl, and Surratt watched him go up to a thick swirl of pine seedlings and pull out a horse standing there. The little man trotted to the trail and galloped away. Surratt went thoughtfully back to his own horse, following the slope down. He came upon the meadow and crossed it to the ranch house. The crew had gone, but Torveen sat in his office room, sprawled out in a chair, somehow deeply engaged with his thoughts and ruffled by them.

He said, with perceptible relief: "So you're back."

"Was there some doubt in your mind, Sam?"

Torveen shrugged his shoulders. "I couldn't blame you if you kept right on going away from here."

Surratt sought his pipe and packed it. "I am to tell you that Bill Head's called a meeting of ranchers at his place tonight."

"So you met Judith." Torveen shifted his back against the chair; he seemed at once irritable. "You get around, friend Buck. You sure do get around."

"Any objections?" asked Surratt dryly.

Torveen lifted his green and slantwise glance. He didn't like it. He showed his restless resentment. But then he got abruptly up. "Oh hell, Buck, let it ride. I'm nervous as a cat. I've no intention to rag a man like you."

Surratt smiled. "When did you have a good drink last?"

"If that helped any, I'd be drunk as a lord. So Bill's called a meeting?"

"You going?"

Something in the question reached Torveen's sense of humor. He grinned. "That wasn't why Judith sent the news along, Buck. No, we won't be there. We'll be somewhere else, tonight." He drew a long breath; he turned sober again. "I guess you'll have the chance soon enough to find out what my hole card is. Stick with me, Buck. This is going to be tough."