Читать книгу Sundown Jim - Ernest Haycox - Страница 6

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MAJORS stepped into the room. He kicked the door shut with his heel and stood against it. The blond man pulled the cigarette from his mouth. He said:—

"You had a hell of a lot of nerve walkin' into that saloon. You got away with it—but don't let it make you too proud."

Majors drawled: "You been watching the girl's room for an hour. Why?"

"It was Pete Riley. I wondered if he'd make it out of town. He didn't."

"What was he up against?"

The blond man took another drag on the cigarette. Its glow lightened the pale surfaces of his eyes and showed the ironic stretch of his lips. Silence went on a little while. Then the blond man said: "Same thing you're up against, though I may be mistaken. My name is Buff Sultan. I run a ranch down the East Fork. Me and my sister." Afterwards he added one gently hinting sentence. "Maybe I'm mistaken about you."

Majors said: "You came here to ask a question. Go ahead and ask it."

Buff Sultan's chuckle came softly out of him. "All right....You want help?"

"What kind of help?"

"Never mind. You're here for a reason. There's only two reasons: you're running away from something, or you're lookin' for somebody. You want help?"

"I don't pick my help blindfolded."

"No?" said Buff Sultan, a slow amusement in his voice. "That's something you'll learn. If you stick here you'll be glad to get help from anybody, no questions asked. Maybe we can make a trade. My help for your help."

"I'll listen," said Majors. He crossed to the window, hearing sudden sounds fill the street.

Pedee Barr was in the saddle down there, with the other men of his party swinging up. Katherine Barr came from the general store and went to her horse. The rest of the group turned to leave Reservation, but she held her horse a moment longer in its place, her glances very definitely seeking something on the street; and the impatient swing of her shoulders told Majors once more of a temper strong in all its reactions. Ben Maffitt walked from the saloon and stopped in the doorway, the light of which made a black block of his body. He did a strange thing then. He removed his hat and looked over to Katherine Barr, saying nothing and making no motion. Majors' interest whipped alive; he tipped his head nearer the window. Katherine Barr turned her horse and stared at Ben Maffitt, but though Majors watched this scene closely he saw her make no sign at all. Nothing, apparently, passed between them. A moment later she whirled the pony into the darkness, following her father. Ben Maffitt turned to watch her ride away.

Majors' voice was sudden-sharp. "What's between the Barrs and this Maffitt?"

Buff Sultan's answer crept dryly across the room. "I guess I made a mistake about you. You're quicker than I judged. You're wonderin' about the Barrs and about Maffitt. You're wonderin' about me. Listen: The longer you stay the more you'll wonder. You'll never get it untangled. If I was you I wouldn't try. Just pick your side, and let it go like that."

"Which side?" said Majors.

Buff Sultan rose from the chair. He crossed to the door, placing his feet carefully on the rickety floor. He was a vague shape over there.

He said, more cautiously than before: "I guess I found out what I came here to find. Don't trust anybody—and don't trust me, for I'm just as apt to knife you as the next man. That's the kind of a country you're in, which I think you know by now."

"It wasn't what you came to say," said Majors.

"Changed my mind," answered Buff Sultan, a touch of hurry in his voice. He opened the door a notch, watched the hall a moment, and slipped out. Majors heard him go down the unstable stairway.

Posted again at the window of this lightless room, Majors found Ben Maffitt still by the saloon, lost in thoughts which held him perfectly still. Two or three minutes afterwards, Buff Sultan came from the hotel, crossed the street to a horse racked in front of the empty building. He wheeled around, leaving town on the opposite side. Ben Maffitt's hatbrim, rose, a sign of his interest in the departing Sultan. A man came from another angle of the street, went over to Maffitt and spoke a few words. Maffitt nodded.

Majors turned from the window, not bothering to light the lamp. He propped a chair under the doorknob, hauled the bed to the room's least exposed corner—making a great racket—and turned in for the night.

At breakfast time he noticed Tony waiting on table. She put the meal before him and stood by a moment. She said, "Thanks for last night," and there was the hint of softness in the round surfaces of her lips. It mildly surprised him to discover that she was a pretty girl, all her features even and composed. Her eyes were quite dark. The tragedy of the previous night was somewhere in the background of her mind, more or less like a quality of wistfulness or of fatalism, as though she had put the episode behind her because there was nothing else she could do. But it was the way she looked at him, quietly and personally and with a faint warmth, that caught his attention.

He said, "That's all right."

She moved her shoulders gracefully. "I liked Pete. I knew his folks. I wanted to see him get away."

She made an impression, and later he watched the balanced swing of her body as she walked back to the kitchen; and he kept her in his mind while he ate.

Afterwards, on the street, eased against the hotel wall, he filled his pipe and had a better look at a Reservation flooded by the fresh and tawny light of a late fall morning.

Morning's quiet controlled the two almost empty streets. Other frame buildings and other stores, hidden by the previous night's shadows, ran back from the square, a meat market, a saddle shop, a barber shop, a print shop bearing on its false front the sign:

>UTE BASIN WEEKLY ROUNDUP.

A doctor's shingle showed itself above the doorway of a narrow little house adjoining the print shop. Up the street which led to the bridge was a larger building with grilled windows on its second floor. Now and then somebody strolled casually into view. The hotel-keeper came from the lobby and went toward the meat market, his steel hook glittering in the sun. A barkeep was swabbing out the saloon, and when Majors noted that saloon's name, he filed it away in his mind for what it might mean. The name was OLD DIXIE. Fifteen years after Lee's surrender, somebody in Reservation still nursed his unreconstructed politics.

A freshness in this whipped through him and revived a faint eagerness to be on the move. He was a man quick to feel the moods of the outer world, and quick to answer them; he was a man whose strength and weakness lay in a strong love of action, because it was action that satisfied his hungry muscles and restless nerves. He went over the square and stopped at the stable a moment, coming before a frail-seeming little hostler who wore a derby hat and a pair of striped pants held up by yellow suspenders.

Majors jiggled a fresh match across the bowl of his pipe, meeting the hostler's inquisitive glance. Majors said: "I'll be going out in a little while."

The hostler leaned on his pitchfork. "You got a nice horse." And then he put out a hopeful question: "Not a valley horse?"

"Not this valley," returned Majors.

The hostler waited for additional information that didn't come. He shrugged his small shoulders. "Ev'body in this dam' country is full of mysteriousness."

A stubby man whirled around one of the corners of the square and came on rapidly; whereupon, the hostler laid his pitchfork aside and moved into the semidarkness of the stable, catching a set of single harness off a peg as he traveled.

The stubby man reached the stable arch and stopped there, swinging a black satchel against his knees. His round cheeks were pink and shining from his morning's shave. He stared at Majors in an extraordinarily direct manner, and said: "You're the new man? Majors?"

"That's right."

The short man called down the stable,—"Hurry up, Henry,"—and swung back to Majors. He said bluntly: "That's a hell of a vile-smelling pipe you're smoking. Ever have throat trouble?"

Henry drove a buggy up to the arch. The short man tossed in his bag and climbed to the seat. "No," drawled Majors.

"Nicotine never did any man any good. Better quit while you're young." He called to Henry: "Going to the Hole. Back by noon." He drove the buggy out of the stable, made a fast, dust-ripping turn at the hotel corner, and disappeared.

"That's Doc Showers," said Henry. "A mighty good man on busted bones and gunshot troubles."

Majors grinned. "That all?"

One of Henry's suspenders slid off his sloping shoulders; he snapped it back with a thumb. "That's about all we got in this dam' country. You want I should saddle the gelding?"

"Yes," said Majors, and walked across the yellow, heavy dust toward the bridge. The building with the grilled windows put one wall to the street and one to the shallow river running along Reservation's back side. In this town it was obviously the latest addition, the newness of paint not yet dissolved by sun and wind. The date painted below the bell tower was 1877. When Majors came to the doorway he stopped a moment to light his pipe again—and from the edge of his vision he saw what he had thought he would see. A man stood at the saloon corner watching him, Henry looked on from the stable, and the hotel-keeper was a silent shape beyond the square.

Majors' smile made an intractable crease along his lips when he moved into the building and came before the soles of two boots draped up on a flat desk. Behind the desk, lying back as far as the chair would safely tilt, sat a man lean and weathered and yet clearly no older than Majors, with sand-colored hair and a pair of taciturn eyes in which watchfulness seemed permanently imbedded.

He said in the slowest, most indifferent of voices: "Wondered when you'd be getting this far down the street."

For a moment Majors said nothing. There was, in this room, something sudden and unexpected; as though he had rounded a corner and found the passage blocked. Something as definite as that. It was like a pressure placed against him; it was an antagonism silent and very strong. He could see that the man was braced against him—and had been that way for a long while. Prepared for trouble, expecting it, and waiting now for it to break...These were the quick impressions Majors received. Then he said:—

"My name is Majors."

"Already found it out. Guess you know mine."

"No," said Majors. "Not yet."

The man showed disbelief in the narrows of his amber stained eyes. "Charley Chavis," he said. There was a copper badge with four ball points on it, pinned to his vest.

"Glad to know you," Majors returned. He was absorbing this Charley Chavis with a mind that was quick and exacting and troubled by a hint of something which didn't show. There was a center to this Chavis completely covered by reserve, a hidden disposition, a state of mind guarded deliberately.

Chavis said: "So what can I do for you?"

He was waiting, he was braced against something. Majors' lips showed a lengthening smile and he shook his head; it was not possible for him to know how heavy and tough a shape he made in this room, the scar on his cheekbone like a signal of character.

He said: "Nothing. Nothing at all. I may be here a while, so I was just looking around."

"It's your custom," observed Chavis with the same heavy irony, "to waltz into strange towns and throw men out of saloons? Just for fun? Or was you tryin' to tell something to somebody in the Old Dixie?"

Majors suddenly asked: "A lot of Southerners around here?"

The marshal delayed his answer, as though weighing the question for what it might mean. Finally he said in a reluctant way: "Yes."

"The Barr family Southern?"

Charley Chavis glumly nodded.

"Where do those folks live?"

Reluctance increasingly weighted the marshal's speech. He was turning surly—and somewhat nervous. "Up the head of the Ute's south branch."

Majors followed this with a quiet-spoken question. "Why did Maffitt kill Pete Riley?"

Charley Chavis hauled his feet from the desk and got up. "Go find your own damn answers! You come here and you don't tell me anything, so why should I tell you anything? You been pryin' around here ever since you hit town! We all know that. If you got some business, I'll listen. If you ain't—don't count on me for anything."

The sludge of Majors' pipe began to fry. He tapped the bowl and refilled and lighted it, his motions easy and slow. Nothing disturbed his cheeks; but his impressions were all strong and accurate as he watched the cast of Charley Chavis' close-set eyes. This town marshal was disturbed and defiant—and using anger to cover something like fear. Here was a man he would never be able to trust. Majors was very certain about that lack of loyalty in Chavis, that guarded secrecy of motive which would never rise to daylight.

He said, gently, "Won't trouble you," and wheeled from the marshal's office, crossing directly to the sorrel gelding. After he climbed to the saddle, he paused long enough to ask the shriveled Henry a few questions which he knew would be public information the moment he left Reservation.

He pointed eastward. "What's down that way, Henry?"

"The Sultans and the Ketchums and Gray Oldroyd," said Henry—and added eagerly: "You goin' that way?...And yander in the Hole—which is the little valley beyond—you'll find Dobe Hyde's outfit."

Majors pointed southward. "What's there?"

Henry looked at him, a native shrewdness showing. "You don't know? Well, at the end of that valley, where the south branch of the Fork falls outa the mountains, you'll find the Barrs, friend. That as far as you figure to go?"

Majors said gently: "Anything beyond?"

"Well," said Henry, "there's a pretty broad trail you could take, on up into the rough country. That would be the Pocket."

"What's in the Pocket, Henry?"

Henry, talkative as he was, folded his lean lips together and turned back into the stable. Majors swung left at the square, heading toward the eastern valley. Behind him was a town that covertly watched him. He knew that much from his quick side-glances as he passed along; and he knew it from the feeling in the small of his shoulders. Reservation dwindled to a few scattered houses and a few corrals, and then he curved over beside the meandering shallows of the Ute Fork's east branch and followed the dusty road down the narrow valley's middle.

Low, pine-sloped hills, perhaps five miles apart, formed the walls of the valley; and about ten miles ahead was a low line of buttes which seemed to shut the valley off. The sun lifted in the east, red from autumn's haze, half its heat gone; cowbirds swirled in thick flights from the river willows. It was, he saw, a pretty little land locked away from the world. Cattle country strictly, though no livestock showed along the flat stretch; the beef would still be on summer graze up in the timber. A few miles from Reservation a narrower road turned to the left, crossed a bridge and struck for the northern ridge. Over there, sitting somewhat above the valley, was a house. At this junction a star route mailbox bore the name of Oldroyd.

Farther on, half down the length of the valley, another road took off to the right, marked by an arch with an elkhorn mounted on it. The mailbox here said: "Judas Ketchum." The Ketchum house was a white square at the base of the right-hand ridge. Majors rode alternately at a walk and gallop, the smell of the earth pleasantly rising to his nostrils and the sweet, half-crisp air filling his big chest. There was an ease and a rhythm in his muscles and his senses lifted to a satisfying world. This was the action he had to have, this yellow dust running beneath him and the steady jar of the sorrel's stride traveling along his solid frame. Sunlight drew his lids nearer together until faint wrinkles cut a crisscross pattern at the edge of his temples.

But if he sat slack in the saddle, his glance registered the details of this valley with an intent care, as though there was a story here he had to know. Ahead of him the river turned gradually to the south, and the valley began to pinch in and he saw the sharp break in the oncoming cliff wall where the river broke through; and down there three men sat on their horses, grouped together in some kind of parley.

It was, he told himself, a long talk or a long wait; for he covered a good mile before he reached them, to see directly that one of these men was the blond Buff Sultan. They had squared around to face him—this Sultan, and a youngster of about nineteen with a square face, and a man old enough to be the youngster's father and with the same kind of features. Jim Majors pulled up, observing the etiquette of the situation. Buff Sultan's blond cheeks showed him no recognition, which was all Majors needed for his own cue.

He said to them generally: "Good day for ridin'. Where does this road go?"

The oldest one said with a reserved courtesy, "Into Dobe Hyde's valley."

"Get to Fort Custer this way?"

"A pretty long ride. Looking for a job?"

Majors considered this older man until the other said: "You saw the road down there with the elkhorn arch?"

"Ketchum?"

"That's me. A job?"

Majors took time out to load his pipe. Ketchum slid a glance to Buff Sultan, who made the faintest of nods. They had, Majors guessed, been discussing him while he approached. This was the kind of a country it was—so tight and so self-contained that one stranger sent a definite current of disturbance to the extreme end of the valley. It told him something. Trouble had hardened them all, it had set them all into camps. He had felt it in Reservation, and he could feel it now a resistance that pushed against him, that closed tightly around him.

He said, "No, I think I'll be riding," and left them like that. He guessed it was the Sultan house he saw a quarter-mile in from the main road. Half a mile on, he reached a canyon with straight walls and width enough to let only the river and this narrow road pass through it. Semidarkness lay here for a distance of several hundred yards, or until the canyon widened and the road fell between the shoulders of a broken hill country. And at once, seeing a trail lift into that ridge he had skirted all the way from Reservation, he took it and soon found himself closed about by timber, climbing steadily.

He had spent all the years of his active life in the open, this Jim Majors; and it was a part of his long training that he could travel now with the country perfectly outlined in his head, its directions plain and the character of the land immediately clear. He had that compass sense. At noon, from a high bare knob, he could see, behind him, the round pocket which he judged to be Dobe Hyde's valley. Before him the stringers of the broken country, dark with timber, undulated like heavy sea swells westward until they rolled against the sharply climbing shoulders of the general range. Somewhere between this spot and that great mountain mass lay the meadows of the Ute Fork's south branch, where the Barrs lived. He pushed along the trail into strong shadows and into deep silence, and an hour or so later came out upon a stumpy clearing wherein sat a frame house, sagging badly at peak and flank, silvered by weather, its broken windows staring at him sightlessly.

Curiosity led him to it. He dismounted at the low front porch where grass sprouted between the warped boards. Looking into the front room he could see that stray cattle had made a shelter of this place and had scrubbed themselves against the door's edges. A stairway ran up along one side of the room. A fireplace showed the black ashes of a fairly recent flame. Without warning steps sounded in the depths of this house and then a woman, a girl in her early twenties, appeared at an inner door.

She saw him and stopped with a shocked intake of breath, and than shock completely changed the expression of her face. Astonishment gripped her so completely that for the space of a small moment she could neither speak nor move. During that interval he saw fear come freshly to her eyes.