Читать книгу Dark Valley - Jackson Gregory - Страница 6

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The earth smelled wet along the narrow wagon track, winding into the bottom of the ravine, like a tunnel based in rich black soil and overarched by mountain laurels. This road was a serpentine open way with dankness flanking it, with ferns encroaching, with a thickness of timber on either side like a wall of tropic greenery. Then there was the river, racing green and black water trimmed in glistening white froth, to cross over a puncheon bridge. There was the North Waterfall on the right, coming down like a mad thing from the cliffs, and spilling into a deep, dark, troubled pool; and all of a sudden there was the forest-ringed clearing with the log-and-rock houses set in its middle like a child’s clumsy toy town on a green velvet carpet. In the background the wild azaleas and dogwood, bursting with springtime, were in frolicsome blossom.

One of these Morgan houses stood boldly forth from among the others, big and square and massive, its sturdy walls green with moss, its ample porch bright and warm with the sunlight. A man, big and square and massive, as boldly self-assertive as his fitting habitation, stood leaning against one of the rough log pillars supporting the porch roof and awaited the nearer approach of the small procession.

Anyone who had ever heard of these wild Morgans must have known at the first glimpse of him that this was Duke Morgan.

Budge Morgan, high up on Daybreak, made a careless sort of gesture and rode on around the house and to the barn barely glimpsed from here through the pines; Camden and Rance with the two led horses followed him. Bolt Haveril, with Tilford at one elbow and Sid at the other, went straight on to the broad puncheon steps leading up to the porch from which, with never a word, Duke Morgan looked at him.

“Howdy, Duke,” said Bolt Haveril, leaning his carbine against the porch. “Passing by, I just dropped in to say ‘Howdy.’ ”

“Howdy,” said Duke Morgan.

Bolt Haveril had to put back his head to look up at Duke Morgan; that was because of the porch being three feet above ground and because of Duke’s towering height. One might have guessed that Haveril didn’t like looking up to any man. He went up the steps to Duke’s side.

Customarily men shook hands, Western style. Neither of these two made the first gesture toward any such thing. For a little while, with nothing further to say, they looked at each other. Neither hid his interest. Each strove with utter frankness to make what he could of the other. And Tilford and young Sid, still on the ground below them, filled their eyes with the picture the two constituted.

The shadowy hint of a frown puckered Bolt Haveril’s black brows; that was because even yet he had to look up at Duke Morgan. Bolt Haveril’s lean, hard, flat body stood better than six feet, too; but he found in this middle-aged patriarch of the Morgans one of the biggest men he had ever seen. Duke was a good two or three inches taller, a good two or three inches thicker and broader, a stalwart black-bearded giant with hands that might have served as sledges. Nor was the feeling of “bigness” about him altogether physical; big, too, in forceful character was the man, and you recognized that fact as soon as you saw how he carried himself and looked into his steady, intelligent blue eyes. To be sure, that forcefulness of character which made him leader and head man here was sprung directly from the primal fact that nature had bestowed on him a body which could literally crush any other human body he had ever encountered. He was like a man cast into a grizzly’s outer semblance.

“You’re Juan Morada,” said Duke.

“I’ll begin to think so myself, pretty soon,” said Bolt Haveril.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing much. Only everybody this morning keeps telling me who I am. And they all say the same thing. Maybe I pitched out of the saddle yesterday and landed on my head.”

“Trying to be funny?” asked Duke.

“Not half trying.”

“You’re Juan Morada. Down on the border they call you Don Diablo. You’re on the jump with a bounty on your hide.”

Bolt Haveril’s lip twitched. The little new moon shone fleetingly forth as from behind a black cloud.

“Hunting hides now for bounties?” he said in a sneering sort of way. “I must have made a mistake. You’re not Duke Morgan after all?”

“What’s the idea, Don Diablo?” demanded Duke.

Sid Morgan spoke up swiftly.

“He claims he’s not Don Diablo at all, but a Texan named Haveril—Bolt Haveril.”

“I never spent so much time before talking about who I happen to be or don’t happen to be,” said Bolt Haveril. “Now, with this settled, what the devil do you think you want with me anyhow?”

Duke Morgan all the while regarded him stonily, his blue eyes hard and bright and noncommital. Then Budge Morgan, already returning from the stable where he had left Cam and Rance with the horses, came around the corner of the house. Duke without speaking asked him his question with a sideways slash of the eyes toward Bolt Haveril and an uptilt of the square-bearded chin.

“Sure,” said Budge. “He’s the right gent all right. I had a talk with Dave Heffinger. Both Dave and old Dan Westcott tried to collect on his hide out there. Heffinger swears he’s going to get him yet and hell take the Morgans. He’s Juan Morada, the feller they call Don Diablo.”

“Why should he try to lie out of it?” demanded Duke.

“Why shouldn’t he? He don’t know us, does he? And he knows he’ll swing sky-high once they get him. Who wouldn’t lie out of it?”

Duke nodded in his ponderous way. His voice, always a profound bass, seemed now to come from some cavernous sort of place down deep in his lungs. He spoke to Bolt Haveril, saying:

“I don’t know what your game is, young feller, but I’d be seven kinds of a damn fool if I mistook you, and you’d be worse than that if you thought I’d fail to know you. There’s the description of you that has been posted on a good many ‘Wanted’ signs. There’s a scar at the corner of your mouth. And, as much as anything else, there’s that stallion that’s got a longer reaching reputation than most men’s. El Colorado, they call him. And——”

“I got that stud horse from another feller,” said Bolt Haveril. “His name’s Daybreak. Maybe I sort of look like Juan Morada; shucks, that’s nothing; lots of men look like lots of other men, when somebody just tells you about it and you don’t see ’em stood up alongside one another. As for a man having a scar on him——” He laughed softly. “If I wasn’t laughing already,” he said, “I’d ask you, don’t make me laugh.”

Duke began to look puzzled. Also the bright hardness of his eyes took on the glint of anger.

“I don’t understand what’s got into you, Morada!”

“Better call me Haveril, Bolt for short.”

“You’ve got more sense than to try to double-cross me, haven’t you?”

“Me double-cross you?” Haveril looked the part of a hurt innocent. “How could I and why should I? Since when have the two of us known each other? I never clapped my eyes on you until now, and you never saw me, and there’s no kind of business between us and——”

“I’ve said once I don’t know what the devil’s got into you,” said Duke Morgan, his deep bass rumble like distant thunder threatening an electric storm. Then for a moment he checked himself and glowered at Haveril with a new sort of expression, his chill blue eyes probing like blue steel drills. He added curtly, “If it’s just that you don’t want to talk before these other men, say so.”

Bolt Haveril didn’t say anything in reply; that was because just then young Sid ran up the steps and into the house as though in some sudden hurry, and because on Sid’s face there was such a devilishly cruel look.

“Well?” snapped Duke.

Bolt Haveril started and his gaze returned to a meeting with Duke Morgan’s.

“I was passing by,” he said imperturbably. “I had a run-in with a couple of sheriffs; I guess these boys know all about it. Maybe they can tell you old Dan Westcott ran off with his tail between his legs and a bullet in his shoulder; maybe they’ll tell you I shot Dave Heffinger’s hat off his head, coming just that close to getting him between the eyes. I’d have finished my chore with him in five minutes and been on my way, but Budge here invited me most cordially to drop in for a pleasant hour.”

“Go ahead,” said Duke. “If you talk long enough you might say something.”

“Might,” said Haveril and appeared to meditate. What he was wondering about was that sudden darting into the house by Sid; he kept his ears on the stretch for the slightest sound, and the eyes under his sleepily lowered lids were watchful. He added slowly, “If you’re so dead set on the two of us doing a lot of talking, Duke, why don’t we go somewhere and sit on a log by ourselves?”

Rance, returning from the stable the way Budge had come, called to his father:

“Hi, Duke! We opened up this hombre’s bed-roll like you said; he’s riding pretty heavy with money. Gold twenties, a lot of fives and tens, and some greenbacks. The paper money’s stained with something; might be blood.”

“And the gold twenties, some of them anyhow,” rumbled Duke questioningly, yet in the tone of one who anticipated an affirmative answer, “were earmarked, huh?”

“Sure,” said Rance. “Pretty near all of ’em have got your mark under the eagle.”

Bolt Haveril, merely listening, had not said a word. Now he spoke up quietly.

“Funny tricks you boys seem to have up here,” he said. “Do you poke through every stranger’s bundle to see if you can find a few pennies? Times must be hard up this way, or else the Morgans are going to seed.”

“And even with that money on you,” said Duke, “you’ll still say you’re not Morada?”

“Me, I’m Bolt Haveril. From Texas. That money? I got it from another fellow. The stain on the bank notes? Didn’t it look kind of like black coffee stains? And, by the way, what are you doing with it? Leaving it where you found it or trying to make off with it?”

“I’ll have a look at it,” said Duke Morgan, and started down the steps.

He said something else too, but did not finish what he started to say; he broke off in the middle of a word as certain sounds, bursting out suddenly, startled all who heard them. The sounds were a savage growling like an infuriated wolf’s, a piercing scream of terror, a man’s laugh so devilishly cruel and mocking that it could have come from no one other than Sid Morgan.

Then for an instant there was a flurry of action, of which Bolt Haveril could make little, since it took place just beyond the far end of the long porch where it was smothered in vines and small shrubbery. He saw only vaguely the blur of swift shapes as he heard the growl and the scream and the laugh; but two seconds later, as he ran down along the porch and as those shadow-shapes burst out into the clear, he got the whole story in a flash—and in that same flash Bolt Haveril came very, very close to snuffing out two lives with the gun already in his hand: the lives of a big wolfish, fang-dripping dog and of the evilly laughing Sid Morgan.

Sid, when he had run into the house and through it and out at the rear to get the dog chained there, had already seen the girl. Lady, her interest or curiosity or need be what it might, was crouching in the shrubbery at the porch’s end, eavesdropping. Sid, coming swiftly and noiselessly around the house, holding the end of the ten-foot chain, had set the gaunt, red-eyed beast on her.

Later Bolt Haveril learned that the one thing on earth that Lady most feared, and with reason, more even than she feared and hated Duke Morgan, was Sid’s watchdog Stag. And now that she leaped up from her hiding place and ran screaming, Stag lunged after her with such unexpected swiftness and power that he ripped the end of the chain out of Sid’s hand—and Sid stopped laughing then.

Stag, his great bounds carrying him high in the air and far out, overhauled the flying girl. His hurtling body catapulted against hers, throwing her off balance so that she stumbled and fell. Before she could rise, if indeed she was not paralyzed with fear beyond stirring, the bristling dog, head up, jaws slavering, stiff reddish hairs along neck and far down the backbone standing straight up, growled again and bared his teeth. Just then Bolt Haveril was about to shoot, meaning to pick off Stag first before he could tear the girl’s throat out, to drop the now rigid Sid next. But before his gun was all the way out of its holster the whole episode was as good as over, strangely yet definitely ended.

A queer, liquidly musical call, flutelike yet weirder and wilder than any flute—certainly a human note, though it was not like a man’s voice, exactly, or a woman’s or a child’s—came from no farther away than the river bank. At the first sound of that call, Stag jerked his head about, stiff at attention, and though his teeth were still bared his red eyes roved elsewhere.

Then the call came again, louder, clearer, more insistent—and the big dog began whining. Bolt Haveril, amazed at all this and wondering what sort of creature it was that could check the dog at the moment of his kill, hurried back to the steps and down to the ground. He saw, emerging from the shadows thick along the river, a queer slight figure altogether as wild looking and weird as were the fluted notes with which he had talked to Stag.

“It’s Crazy Barnaby,” muttered Budge. “Damn lucky he was on hand; damn lucky for Lady—she’d be dead now else; lucky for Sid, too; Duke would have killed him.”

Crazy Barnaby coming on, a dark, haunted-eyed boy in his latest teens, an unkempt being whose clothes were mostly rags, whose long black hair fell to his shoulders, in whose dark, stained hands was a rude staff crowned with three tiny silvery-tinkling bells, called again to the dog—more softly now. And Stag, never again glancing at the prey he had brought to earth beneath his heavy paws, whirled and whined like a pup and then made off in a straight line, jerking his jangling chain after him, to Crazy Barnaby.

Bolt Haveril, as he slowly leathered his gun, took in with the frankest of interest all that was going on about him. He saw Stag leap upon the queer slight figure coming up from the creek. The dog set both paws against Barnaby’s shoulders and licked his face, and Barnaby patted Stag and put an arm about him and fell to laughing like a child, then to whispering something in the dog’s ear. That ear came stiffly erect and Bolt Haveril was troubled for some small fragment of a second with the utterly preposterous suspicion that Crazy Barnaby was whispering secrets and that Stag, harkening so intently, understood every word!

But he forgot the thought and lost sight of the two figures as at last Lady rose and faced Sid. Her face was as white as a sheet; her eyes were still large with terror; you knew that the pained heart was all but bursting within her bosom heaving now so wildly. She did not say a word. It was, Bolt Haveril judged, because she couldn’t speak yet. But words were scarcely necessary; as the fear ebbed out of her eyes a blazing anger, riding on a full tide of hate, surged into them.

“She’d kill Sid if she had a chance,” thought Haveril, and wondered at the two of them that they could hate each other like this.

Rance Morgan was the first to speak up; he turned toward his father, saying hotly:

“Damn it, Duke, Sid ought to be shot for that. Stag came close to killing Lady; Sid wanted to have her killed——”

“Shut your mouth, Rance,” said Duke Morgan. Then he turned upon Sid, a Sid no longer laughing but beginning to look frightened. “Sid,” said Duke, “if Lady had been killed just now, I swear to God I’d have killed you by slow torture. You know I mean that, don’t you?”

Sid moistened his dry lips, and nodded.

“I didn’t know Stag would jerk away like that——”

“Shut your mouth,” said Duke. “Right now, Lady, alive and kicking, is worth more to me than you’ll ever be. Well, I’ll let you live. But——”

Had he finished he would no doubt have said something like this: “But I’m going to come so close to beating you to death right now that you’ll never make this mistake again.” He made a sudden lunge toward his youngest son, meaning to take him unaware; but the foxy Sid, with eyes never so alert, read his father’s purpose before the big body even stirred, and like a frightened rabbit Sid Morgan took to his heels, dashing around the corner of the house, vanishing in the grove.

Budge and Rance and Tilford burst into uproarious laughter. For an instant Duke stood frowning, then he too began to laugh.

“He’d better run,” he chuckled. “He’s a smart kid, is Sidney.” Still chuckling he spoke to the girl. “Well, Lady, it was a dirty trick Sid played on you, wasn’t it? At that, I’ll bet you’re half to blame. Why can’t the two of you be sweethearts, ’stead of cat-and-dogging each other?”

The girl did not answer him. She didn’t look at him or at any of the other Morgans. She walked down the mossy path through the tall ferns toward a half seen log cabin set apart from the other houses. As she departed Bolt Haveril caught one flash of her eyes as they turned upon him. Then she was gone, down there among the tall ferns and alders, and he found that the morning had brought him ample to think upon—these wild Morgans with their outside feuds and their inner hates and jealousies; an unkempt boy who looked like a witch’s son and whispered secrets in the ear of a blood-lusting dog called from its quarry; his own predicament—and, somehow as emphatic above all these dark considerations as a bright young new moon over a dark forest, the remembrance of the look on Lady’s face, first at the gate, now here, and her first words: “Tonight, late— At the bridge by the waterfall....”