Читать книгу Alder Gulch - Ernest Haycox - Страница 5

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DIANA CASTLE stood before Madame Bessie and watched the woman. She matched Madame Bessie's stare. She was cool and she was very thoughtful. Madame Bessie said: "You can get that hundred dollars for me, Miss Castle."

"You want to keep out of trouble, don't you?" asked the girl. "What if I were to step out on the street and start screaming? Suppose I said you had dragged me into your place? I think you'd be in the penitentiary a long while."

Madame Bessie watched her a considerable interval, not so much with anger as with a reluctant admiration. And she said finally: "All right, Miss Castle. I guess you know what you want."

"Now," added Diana Castle, "could you get him some clothes? And he needs a drink, Madame, and we are both hungry, aren't we?"

Madame opened the door and cruised through it and turned. "Miss Castle," she said, "you are too calculating for a proper lady. Wherever did you learn to be smart?" With this, she departed.

The girl walked to the open window, her back to Pierce, and placed her hands on the window's sash. Her shoulders dropped and became round at the points and then she came slowly about and he saw that her face had a shadow on it. Her confidence was momentarily broken, leaving her tired or weak or a little afraid. He liked her better for seeing it. It took the calculation and the chill out of her.

"Did you have to do that?" she asked in a small voice.

"When I made for the rail he came against me and fired a shot. I knocked him down with a belaying pin and went over the side." He shook his head; he made an odd motion with his hand. "Not to be helped."

She was watching him and he discovered that she was afraid of him for the first time. "What?" she asked in a distant voice, "would you like me to do?"

"Nothing. You'd better go out of that window now."

She let out a sigh and moved toward him. She was almost smiling, her fear vanished. "For a moment I thought I had made a mistake in you. But I have not. You are not one of those murderous Sydney ducks coming off a ship with your teeth broken in, cunning and half inhuman." She paused, not quite through with her thoughts about him, and added in a softer way, "I can still hope."

He said: "Why should you hope?"

"Because I need a man. That is why I stopped you on the street. You are to help me get out of this town. There are four thousand people in Portland. I can't appear on the street or get on the California stage, or take a boat, without being recognized, A woman traveling alone in this country is under handicaps."

"I do not know about that," he said.

She checked him in with a gesture. "You're in trouble and you know nothing of this region. You cannot take any road from Portland without being spotted in the back country. But I know how you can drop from sight."

"How?"

"Do I go with you?"

"How do you go with me?" he asked.

She drew a breath and her pleasant lips came momentarily together. She looked down at the floor and so avoided his eyes. "As your wife."

"No," he said. "Not as my wife."

She said: "There will of course be no marriage. We must make the best of it before people's eyes until we get to the place we're going. Is it so much to ask? Are you already married?"

"No," he said. He moved back to the window and he stood there watching the yellow lamplight shine in her eyes. She had a fair, smooth skin and a round face pointed by a firm chin; she had an enormous certainty in her, she had a positive will. What confused him was that light in her eyes which seemed to hold back some kind of laughter from him. In a way she liked this touch-and-go business; it had an exciting effect on her. Madame Bessie stirred heavily in the hall and time went fast on and he looked at her and made this decision. "All right," he said.

Madame Bessie came in with a suit of clothes and a pair of boots over one arm. She had a whisky bottle under the clothes, and carried a pitcher of coffee and a loaf of bread in her other hand. She threw the clothes on the bed and deposited the rest of her burden on the washstand. "There's a miner from the Owyhee dead drunk in one of my rooms," she said. "This is his suit."

"Give him mine in the morning," said Pierce, "and tell him he fell in the river."

Madame Bessie nested both fists against her ample hip line and scanned these people with her dismal experience of the world's worst side. "You're a cool lot," she said, "the both of you, and you want your way and mean to get it."

"Yes," said Diana Castle, "we mean to get it, Madame."

"Mark me," said the Madame, "you'll get something else. You will get hurt." She turned out and lifted her shaggy eyebrows in faint surprise when Diana Castle followed her into the hall and closed the door. "You start with modesty," Madame commented in her tart, disbelieving voice. "You will end with something else. You will never keep him."

"I don't want him, Madame. Not for long."

"So you think," retorted the Madame. "Cool as you are, you are still a fool. The game you play will make you cry soon or late. He will break your heart and you might break his."

"What game, Madame?"

"For a woman there's only two—money or a man. You have money, so it must be a man."

"There's still another game, Madame."

"Is there?" countered Madame Bessie. She moved her massive shoulders forward and laid her gray chilled stare on Diana Castle. "I've seen a lot of girls start as you start. You know where they are now? Up on the second floor of places like mine, waiting for trade." She put her face quite close to Diana Castle, darkly murmured, "Women are weaker than they think," and moved heavily down the hall.

Pierce removed the cheap sweater and pants that had come out of the Panama Chief's slop chest and stood stripped in the room's center, drying himself with a towel. He was lank-bodied top and bottom, with long flat muscles; his ribs showed when he lifted his arms and two bullet scars made white nipples above his left hip. He had sandy red hair and a heavy-boned face, and his eyes sat broad and deep in their sockets. His mouth was full at the center, and habitually held steady. When he had gotten into the miner's clothes—trousers and double-breasted blue shirt and high boots—he said: "You can come in," and took time to wash up at the stand.

She came in; she stood against the wall, waiting. When he turned to her she noticed that he had the bluest and darkest eyes a man could possibly own. They were penetrating and reserved rather than friendly, and he had an alertness to his body motion, as though keyed and cocked for the unexpected. He was thinner than he should be and she had not yet seen him smile. She supposed he was around twenty-eight.

He put on the miner's coat and took a water glass from the washstand. He filled it half with coffee and half with whisky; he tipped his glass to Diana Castle and waited a moment. She had that smile somewhere behind her eyes when she said: "Luck." He drank his coffee and whisky straight down.

He had been cold, and presently was warm. He broke the bread with his hands and offered her half the loaf. She shook her head and watched him eat. He had a ring on his small left-hand finger that interested her, since it seemed to be a woman's ring, but she pushed the obvious question away. He put his hands in the miner's coat and pulled out a pipe, a letter, a small bullet mold, and a buckskin pouch. The pouch, when he loosened the pucker string, held three or four ounces of coarse gold nuggets.

She watched him now with complete troubled interest. He looked down at the pouch and hefted it between his hands, and laid it on the washstand beside the other articles. "What's left of a large bust," he commented. "Madame Bessie will probably see that he never gets it." He went to his wet clothes in the corner, retrieved his two dollars and put them in the pocket of the borrowed coat. The girl released a held breath. "You're honest," she said.

"Up to thirty dollars," he answered, dryly. "What now?"

"The steamboat Carrie Ladd leaves the foot of Washington Street at five in the morning for Lewiston. A thousand miners come through here every month bound for the mines upriver. When you get there you'll be out of sight."

"Neither you nor I," he pointed out, "will walk up that boat's gangplank at five in the morning without being stopped. The police will watch it."

"I know," she said, "but we have to get on that boat."

"Where's Washington Street?"

"Two blocks south of here. Then turn left and go two blocks to Front."

"I'll go take a look."

She came toward him. She had her small purse in her hand. "As long as we're together," she said, "this is yours."

He let the purse lie in his palm, feeling its heaviness.

"Maybe my honesty doesn't go beyond thirty dollars."

"I've got to take that chance, haven't I? When I left the house tonight, I left for good. There's six hundred dollars gold in the purse."

He turned to the window and had one leg through it when a thought arrested him. He looked back to her. "You married?"

"No."

"Not that it would have made much difference," he said in the same dry way. "But I have never run off with a married woman."

"Otherwise?" she asked.

He gave her a good and sudden smile. "Or any woman," he said.

The window let him into a pitch-black alley which he pursued to a street bordered by little frame shops long since locked up for the night. He halted on the sidewalk, listening to the thinned-out voices of men drift over housetops from the waterfront; and presently crossed the mud and advanced another block and saw the flare of lights on Front. Keeping to the shadowed walls, he moved toward the river and now began to pass late-closing establishments whose lights made successive yellow pools out upon the loose mud. There had been a driving rain recently hereabouts, turning the air damp and sweet. Coming to Front he put his back to a saloon for a moment's observation.

Directly across from him stood the Pioneer Hotel, and beyond that was a dock to which a steamboat lay tied, pilothouse and single stack showing against the night sky. Men trotted from boat to dock, loading freight, and a barrel of tar burned on the dock's end, its smoky yellow light darkly dancing on the river. A line of waiting wagons bent around the corner of the Pioneer House as far as the dock.

He was in poor position here, with men moving past him, in and out of the saloon; and so he crossed through the line of wagons and took position on the shadowed side of the hotel. A runway tilted downgrade to the lower deck of the boat, and at the foot of the runway a big canvas-topped wagon stood, its driver half asleep inside a blue army overcoat.

"Hard sleeping," said Pierce.

The driver pulled himself awake. "Been here three days. Damned boat is booked solid. I'll get on tonight, though."

"Coat looks familiar."

"Third Ohio," said the driver.

"First Michigan myself," offered Pierce.

"Ah," observed the driver, "it is a hard war, and a long one. Buy your way out?"

"Wounded and discharged," said Pierce. "My wife and I are trying to get upriver. There isn't any space."

"Be lucky if you get away inside of a week."

"That would be too late," said Pierce. "It is damned serious." He came forward and stood close by the wagon. A heavy piece of machinery crashed on the deck of the Carrie Ladd and four men rounded the corner of the Pioneer and came to a stand behind Pierce. He was in the shadow cast by the wagon, with his back to them, but he recognized Sitgreaves' voice at once.

"We will watch this boat until it sails."

"Hard man to give up, ain't you?" said one of the others.

"Why yes," stated Sitgreaves in a steady voice, "I reckon I am. I will get him tonight, or in the morning, or next week, or next year. Let's try the alleys again."

The four departed. "Somebody killed," commented the driver with disinterest. "Well, I guess we seen a lot of boys killed, ain't we brother?"

"You've got a cover on your wagon," said Pierce. "If my wife and I hid inside they couldn't see us."

The driver revived himself sufficiently to pack and light his pipe. He lowered the match until he caught a clear view of Pierce's face. He laughed easily to himself. "That's one way," he said. But he gave Pierce one more sharp appraisal before he said, "Come later when some of these lights go out."

Sitgreaves and his three partners were fading into the darkness up Washington. Pierce moved back into the first available shadows beyond the saloon and took station there, watching the driver of the canvas-topped wagon with a degree of suspicion; the man's gesture with the match was on his mind. The driver settled down inside his big coat for a chilly rest and, half an hour later, Pierce made his way cross town to Madame Bessie's, let himself through the window to the lodging-house room, and found Diana Castle sound asleep on the bed.

The strain of the evening had been greater on her than she suspected. She lay curled on the bed's gray top-blanket, her arms around her chest and with both fists doubled, and her face had a softened expression, as though she dreamed of pleasant things. Pierce pulled out the edge of the blanket and brought it over her and stood back, and suddenly he was displeased both with himself and with her. She had no right to want the things she seemed to want. She was laying the false light of romance over her night's adventure, she was touching the borders of an existence meaner and harder and dirtier than she could conceive. She did not even realize her present danger, asleep and unguarded in the shabby room of an ill-reputationed rooming house, in the presence of man she knew nothing about. She had too much faith.

He took a helping from Madame Bessie's bottle and stood with his back to her, feeling the damp night air move through the window. Far past midnight, the town had fallen asleep at last. Deep silence lay on Portland, broken at long intervals by a distant voice or the hollow knock of some lone traveler's' boots on the near-by boardwalks. A plank squeaked in the upper part of the house; he heard a body shift on the dry springs of a bed. He ate the rest of the bread and drank the cold coffee and tilted himself on the room's only chair. He thought of the dead Captain with a slow pity but without regret, much as he had once thought of those butternut-clad Confederate infantry who came running out of the summer wheat fields in. Virginia and dropped at the crack of his gun. Pity was something he remembered in a far-off boyhood, never since recaptured; it was just a memory.

Long later he got up from the chair, observing that the black night's square at the window began to tremble slightly with gray, and touched the girl on the shoulder. "Time to go," he said.

She was up at once, frightened. She stared at him and her arms came up in a quick pushing gesture; and then the shock passed and relief softened her and for the first time he saw her smile. "I would have been asleep in another moment. You weren't gone long."

"You have been asleep for three hours," he said irritably.

She said in a little voice: "I don't ever mean to cause you trouble."

"You have a good home. You have people. You have friends and money and nothing much to worry about. You don't know what you're getting into. It is like leaving a warm room and going out into the rain. You'll never get dry again."

"So you have a conscience," she murmured. "But let's not argue. If you hadn't turned the corner of this house a few hours ago some other man would have. I would have taken him."

"All right," he said. "We go out through the window." He gave her a hand through the window, seized the gray blanket from the bed and followed her. It was still black in the heart of this block but overhead the stars had lost some of their electric brightness, and a thin river mist moved against them. Diana Castle took the lead, reaching back for his arm, and in this manner they reached the nearest street and went along it, their footfalls running sharply ahead.

The remnant of a tar-barrel fire guttered crimson and black on the dock—and the superstructure of the Carrie Ladd traced a skeleton shape against the night mists. The girl suddenly pulled him to a stop before a building's door. She had, be saw, a letter in her hand and now bent and slipped it beneath the door. Looking up, he noticed a sign that said: "Castle and Tipton, Wholesalers." Diana Castle faced the door, and her voice contained the first regret he had so far heard from her. "I am telling my father not to worry. I am telling him that this is my own doing."

Somewhere footsteps made a breach in the town's stillness. The girl whispered, "That will be them," and seized his hand and led him down a between-building gap. Fifty feet from the street, once more in the sightless heart of a block, be pulled her to a stop. Back of them, at the mouth of the opening, a lantern made its diamond-bright flash, and men were talking.

"There was a racket up this way."

"She'd not be walking the street at this hour, Harry. It makes no sense."

The first man's voice came back, hard-used and very tired. "None of it makes sense. I'm going to knock on the door of every house in town."

A third man added his word: "You have seen all her friends. Now I should not like to offend you, Mr. Castle, or you, Mr. Wyatt. But we must be practical about this. Was she fond of any other man?"

"If you suggest that again I'll be forced to knock you down," said the tired voice.

They moved on, their steps long echoing back from distant quarters, Light made a first thin pulse in the sky and the river mists began to show clearer. "One was the marshal," whispered Diana Castle. She had his hand again, leading him on through quarters she seemed to know well. "One was my father. I am sorry for my father."

"That leaves Mr. Wyatt," suggested Pierce.

"I'm not sorry for him," she answered. They came presently to another street along which low-burning night lights showed out of glassed shop-windows. The square edge of the Pioneer Hotel stood directly to their right, and a man lay on the boardwalk wrapped in a tarp, and the line of wagons waiting for the boat made a black curve around the hotel's corner. The girl moved over the mud to the farther walk. They passed along a building's side, thus coming to the dock at which the Carrie Ladd lay and softly groaned against the piling. A light burned in the purser's cabin.

"What do we do now?" asked the girl.

The foot of the runway was near them and the teamster who had been in the Third Ohio slept soundly on the seat of his wagon. Deep in the hull of the Carrie Ladd iron fire doors slammed and woodsmoke drifted in the heavy river air. Light appeared from a window of the Pioneer and steam curled from dew- damp housetops and back of town the Oregon fir forest began to break through, silvered by mist. There was nobody at this moment visible on Washington except the sleeping teamster. Taking the girl's arm, he moved toward the Ohio man's wagon, pulled the canvas open at the rear and gave Diana Castle a hand up. Following, he found himself sprawled on a load of sacked potatoes, with scarcely more than breathing room between the potatoes and the canvas top.

The teamster, wakened by the motion of their entrance, put his head through the front apron and withdrew it. Pierce heard the girl say, "You are resourceful," and saw her face dimly near. This situation would be uncomfortable and in some degree risky, for although the canvas lay tight-lashed against the bows, all down to the wagon box, there was an opening at the rear into which anyone might look. He thought about this, and settled himself half on his knees, shifting the potato sacks to block off that view and also to create a space in which they might better lie. He spread down Madame Bessie's gray blanket. "Yours," he said, and watched her slide into it.

It was light enough so that he now saw her face. She wasn't smiling but the effect of excitement was in her eyes, as though she had far pleasanter thoughts than she wanted to show. "Thank you," she whispered, "for being thoughtful."

"It is Mr. Wyatt I'm wondering about," he said.

The teamster left the wagon. Daylight came and the odor of coffee drifted out of some near-by door and people began to stir around the corner of the Pioneer Hotel toward the Carrie Ladd; and presently the boat's whistle sent a great warning blast bounding back through Portland. People tramped steadily along the gangplank, and a woman said, half in tears, "Write, won't you?" And over and above the growing confusion he caught a voice that belonged to Sitgreaves. "You've gone through the boat, cabin by cabin?"

"He's not on board."

"We will watch."

The girl touched Pierce's arm. She looked up and her lips moved and he saw the steady brightness of her eyes; and once more he got the idea that this was all something which pleased her in a way that no other thing could. The Ohio man stirred on the wagon seat and kicked off the brake; the wagon moved downgrade and struck the Carrie Ladd's deck. A boat's officer shouted his constant orders and all round there was the rising clash of voices on dock and on board, and other wagons groaned across the deck. "Plank's in, sir!"

"Cast off bow and spring!"

The whistle flung out a second warning and bells jingled in the Carrie Ladd's engine room. "Cast off stern!"

"All clear astern!"

The deck trembled to the thrust of the Carrie Ladd's big Pittmans. The paddles slowly threshed and the nose of the ship swayed as it turned into the channel, and out from the dock floated a woman's voice, now openly crying: "Write—write from Lewiston!" and a cheer went up from the passengers of the Carrie Ladd and the whistle let out a final long hark of farewell.

The girl's hand still rested on his arm; he felt the pressure of her fingers and he looked at her and saw she wanted to cry. She gave him a glance then he never understood, wide open and crowded with strangeness and sadness and wonder. This was the one moment when her self-control wavered, for she said: "Be tolerant of me won't you, until we reach Lewiston? It is my father I'm thinking of."

She was warm under the blanket, and the steady steaming sound of the bow cutting water soothed her. She lay with her face toward the canvas top, listening to voices on deck and to the restless march of feet round and round the deck. It would be a crowded boat, as all upriver boats had been since the discovery of gold in Idaho and Eastern Oregon. Portland, which had been a raw village crowded between the fir hills and the river, suddenly woke to find the restless men of America moving in from their mysterious origins and departing to the distant recesses of the Blue Mountains, the Salmon River gorges, to the Bitterroots. They came and had their day on Front Street and were gone, scarcely more than shadows. This man beside her was one of them.

She said: "Are you hungry?"

He didn't answer. Turning, she found him asleep, his head cushioned on an arm and his body awkwardly adjusted to the lumpy potato sacks. After his flight from the Panama Chief and his all-night wakefulness he simply dropped away from the world, giving it no more thought. He was a clean-shaven man, now with a day's stubble giving him a dark cast; but asleep he lost the guarded alertness which was so noticeable on him. His life, she guessed, had not been easy; but once he had been a boy, and somewhere he had learned what manners and morals should be. His convictions were very definite and very strong. Now he slept dreamlessly and had no care at all.

She saw nothing of the outside world, but was familiar enough with it to picture the great and high and black walls of the gorge through which the Carrie Ladd moved; five hours from Portland the boat nosed ashore and the wagon moved off to a rutty, piecemeal road. Jeff Pierce stirred and said in a half- asleep voice: "Where are we now?"

"We've left the Carrie. We're driving around the Cascade Portage to the middle river boat—the Oneonta. We'll be in The Dalles tonight."

He fell asleep again. The wagon turned down an incline and struck the middle river boat's deck; and in a little while they were under way, steaming through the great Cascade Gorge. During the afternoon sun beat on the canvas top so that she grew warm and felt the gritty dust of the potato sacks. But it didn't matter. She was away from Portland, she had made the great break of her life, and had long ago decided that whatever this new life would be she would never complain. She thought again of her father and sadness came back to her and for want of support she put out her arm and let it lie on Pierce's chest, comforted by the knowledge of his nearness. He had walked out of the night and she had stopped him and had gone with him because she would do nothing else. And then he had laid the gold pouch on the washstand and after that she had been reassured. He disapproved of her now for what she was doing, being in that respect as strait-laced as her father; and because he was that kind of man, he distrusted. He shared Madame Bessie's beliefs concerning women—Madame Bessie who placed all women in two classes. Madame Bessie was a sinful one, but she knew what goodness was; so did this man know, and in him was one streak of tenderness which had made him think of the gray blanket.

Dusk came and with it the smell of food; and darkness fell. Pierce was awake and lay silent beside her, and somewhere in the early night the Oneonta whistled and turned into The Dalles landing. The wagon moved up a long grade and town lights streaked the side of the canvas and there was music from a saloon and rough voices cheerfully calling. Then the wagon stopped and the Ohio man rapped on the canvas. Pierce moved the potato sacks and crawled out, assisting her to the ground. They were, she discovered, on a quiet back street.

The Ohio man said in a rather shrewd voice: "Both you folks seemed a little shy, so I thought I'd unload you privately."

"I am grateful," said the girl.

The teamster nodded, and gave his attention to Pierce. "I could make a good guess as to your bein' on my wagon," he said. "But army men stick together, don't they?" He got on the wagon, lifted a hand to them and rolled away.

Pierce moved to the street's corner and looked toward the heart of this river town, He said: "What's next?"

"The Umatilla House is on that corner, We are halfway to Lewiston, The upper river boat leaves in the morning."

He gave her a long, straight look. "I'll have to see about space on that boat, Meanwhile we'll need a room and something to eat. I expect we register as man and wife."

"Yes," she said. "Yes—if you don't mind."

"It is too late to mind now, isn't it?" There was no particular inflection to his words but as she took his arm and moved with him toward the Umatilla House she had an unexpectedly painful thought: His judgment of her character was unsure. She wished it were not.