Читать книгу Powder Smoke on Wandering River - Jackson Gregory - Страница 4

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Halcyon had had many names in its time: Pay Dirt, Jump Off, Hell’s Bells, Valley City. It had been very much alive during its brilliant and hectic few months of life. One of the oldest of Western mining towns, it was as dead now as a door nail. All that remained at Halcyon were a score of time-defying buildings, empty now, sturdy old structures of rock and rough-hewn timbers, with iron shutters, once green and latterly brown-streaked; grass-grown mounds where once houses had stood; what was long ago a street was now grown up in lusty young pine trees and brush and thistles. It was a place which had boldly invaded the Wilderness and which in the end had been gobbled up by that same patient but predatory Wilderness. Lost in the mountains, far from any other town, it reeked of desertion and desolation, and exuded that queer atmosphere of a haunted region which has caused it and its like to be labeled Ghost Towns. They stand queer, impressive monuments to the old West.

It clung to the past and withdrew farther year by year from the outside world of today; even the road from the lower lands had vanished, for the hard winters with their snow and ice, and the warm springs with their millions of freshets and landslides, had rutted and gouged it and made nothing of it; there had been no call to rebuild it; pines and firs and brush had found root and smothered it; it had been drawn back into the embrace of the wilderness.

So now Halcyon was a dead town reeking with desertion—and yet it was not altogether deserted. And that was the strange thing about Halcyon. True, in the winter months never a soul came near it; it belonged then to the white silence, to a hungry timber wolf or a restless old brown bear touched with insomnia. But in spring and summer and fall it was different. There were two men, old timers, who had never deserted ship and who never would. The whole countryside knew about them; and those who knew the two men personally were always speculating: How long before one of them would kill the other? And would it be Still Jeff Cody who shot Red Shirt Bill Morgan? Or would it be Red Shirt Bill who potted old Still Jeff? For it could never be a secret that the two, once friends, hated each other with a deep and still and murderous hate.

Young Jeff riding into “town,” following the crooked trail that snaked through the pines, circled about the most pretentious building Halcyon had ever known, the timeworn hull of the Pay Dirt Hotel, a place given over now to bats and small rodents, and got his broken view through the trees of what used to be the Square. On its western rim an old man sat on the porch of a moss-grown, shake-roofed cabin, a rifle resting in companionable fashion across his knees. Across the Square from him, thinly screened by scattering young timber, another old man, square-white-bearded, husky and red-shirted, sat on a very similar porch at the door of a cabin almost a twin to the other, and for companionship had a rifle standing against the wall within easy reach. He sat lounging in a creaking rocking chair; the first man, as lean as a rail and as straight as a ramrod, had deposited his lanky frame on a sway-backed bench. He scorned beards, white beards in particular, that beard across the Square most of all, but wore a mustache, fiercely impressive for all its snowy whiteness, which must have won a prize in any mustache competition.

Young Jeff Cody, spying the two at the same time, muttered for the second time that day and for something like the thousandth in his life, “Darn those two old devils, anyhow.” Then by way of greeting he called out, “Hi, Jeff! Hi, Bill!”

There was a short, swift flurry of echoes; then the silence closed in as though still, hushed Halcyon had said, “Hush! Be still!” He rode straight on, as straight as he could since there were piles of rubbish and trees and rounds of brush to turn this way and that for, until he came to the approximate middle of the Square. He stopped there and sat still a moment, making pretense of rolling a cigarette. From under his hat brim he looked at his father nursing his rifle with one hand, his mustache with the other and at Red Shirt Bill Morgan rocking back and forth.

Of a sudden Young Jeff was tempted. He thought that it might be an inspiration! He sang out:

“Say, Jeff! Say, Bill! Something’s happened and I want a talk with both of you in a hurry. How about the three of us getting together for once?”

Red Shirt Bill kept steadily on rocking and Still Jeff kept uninterruptedly on preening his abundant mustache, and neither said a word. Of course it would be like that.

Young Jeff spurred over to the cabin on the Square’s west side and slid down from the saddle to a seat on the edge of the porch.

“Jeff,” he said explosively, being overcharged with the subject, “you and old Bill are crazy! He’s a good fellow and so are you, only neither one of you has got sense enough to pound sand through a knothole. Hell’s bells, Jeff, why can’t the two of you be human—why can’t you learn some sense before it’s too late? Here you squat and there he squats, year in and year out and can’t you see—Dammit, Jeff! You’re the two best friends I’ve got; you two used to be friends; now here you are, all alone in Pay Dirt, sitting on porches and nursing rifles for twenty years and never the one of you saying damn-your-eyes to the other! Can’t you see how crazy you’re behaving? Like two kids, Jeff.”

Old Still Jeff uncrossed and recrossed his long legs. He did not cease grooming his mustache. He said mildly:

“Howdy, Jeff!”

“Oh, hell,” said Young Jeff disgustedly; Still Jeff said nothing.

After a moment or two of silence such as exists only in the hearts of wide deserts and in such rare places as Halcyon, a silence which Halcyon reveled in and which Still Jeff gave no sign of wishing to disturb, Young Jeff sighed and thereafter spoke quietly.

“I just had a couple of words with the Old Witch. Dammit, Dad, is there some sense after all in what folks say about her? That she is some sort of witch? How come that she knows about happenings which, as far as I can see, there’s no earthly way she could know about?”

He was leaning back against a post supporting the porch shed-roof, and turned an enquiring eye upon his father. Had it been dark instead of late afternoon he would have missed Still Jeff’s answer entirely, for it consisted simply in a slight quizzical up-cocking of the shaggy brows.

Well, thought Young Jeff resignedly, that was answer enough to a fool question. He fitted the post more comfortably between his shoulder blades and remarked casually, “In one thing the old lady hit the nail square enough on the head. She opines that you and old Red Shirt are the two biggest fools on earth. She allows me to show as a mild third.”

When Still Jeff had heard him out he bestirred himself enough to scratch the back of his neck, to spit over the edge of his porch into a patch of buck brush and to start polishing the barrel of his old rifle with a horny palm.

“She remarked that you two were friends once,” continued Young Jeff, “and that you allowed a dead man to come between you. It made her laugh. I’ve wondered—You never told me, and neither did Bill.”

“Someday—” began Still Jeff, goaded. He stopped there. It had been a close call; he had almost let himself go. “Halcyon could be a real nice place,” he added gently.

Young Jeff snorted. “You mean if old Red Shirt was gone? Or dead? You know damn well, Jeff, if anything happened to Bill you’d lose all interest in life; you’d just dry up and blow away—and you’d be heartbroken beside.”

But this time, though he kept a hard eye on the old man, he did not get so much as the twitch of an eyebrow for answer. And suddenly he felt ashamed of himself; he held no brief to pry into the clouded affair of the two old men, and recognized the fact. Every man had his inherent right to his own privacy, his own freedom within bounds, and certainly to date old Still Jeff and old Red Shirt Bill Morgan had never murdered each other. Young Jeff pulled reflectively at his nose and vowed to refrain from sticking it into these two likeable old devils’ darn foolishness. He said, grown businesslike, “Old Charlie Carter’s dead, Jeff. I found him up at his shack in Pocket Canyon. Somebody killed him; shot him in the back of the head with something like a forty-five or a rifle. It must have happened late last night or early this morning.”

Old Jeff pondered the news and its sundry implications. He knew Charlie Carter well; had known him twenty-thirty years. Old Charlie was not much good, but certainly no harm at all. He was a lonely sort, shiftless to be sure, who had his familiar way of hunting, specializing in mountain lions, trapping, fishing and prospecting for gold, going a few steps out of his way now and then to do a kindness, never to make trouble. Altogether rather a colorless old chap and as inoffensive as a field mouse. Nevertheless, according to Young Jeff, someone had deemed it expedient to put a bullet in him. In the back, giving him no chance.

After having ruminated at length, Still Jeff was impelled to speak.

“Old Charlie’s dogs will be homeless now, Jeff. I’d just as lieve take care of ’em.”

“Old lady Grayle knew about it,” said Jeff. “She pretended to sniff the smell of death on me. Told me I’d just visited with a murdered man up in Pocket Canyon. How the devil did she know, Jeff?”

He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. So presently he continued thoughtfully, “It’s a part of the whole picture, Jeff, and you know it as well as I do. Bart Warbuck is back of it, or anyhow Jim Ogden, and that’s the same thing, or some of Ogden’s under dogs. Charlie Carter wasn’t killed just because somebody didn’t like him. There was another reason and I know what it was. This is it.”

He pulled from his pocket half a dozen small quartz specimens and dropped them into his father’s leathery old palm. They were scrutinized by Still Jeff who pursed his lips over them and shook his head a time or two and in the end handed them back.

“I knew Charlie pretty well,” said Young Jeff. “From my ranch, headed anywhere this way, of course I always ride through Pocket Canyon. He’s talked to me of late; he talks more than you do, Jeff. He even showed me the place he keeps what few dollars he happens to have. Thinking it might be just possible he had been butchered for his money, I took a look-see. I found these in his old tobacco tin under a floor board. They’re shot pretty full of gold, huh, Jeff? Charlie must have found at last what he always swore he’d find some time.”

There was nothing to be added to that; the quartz specimens spoke for themselves and the truth was obvious. Since Still Jeff was hardly to be expected to voice what had already voiced itself he quite naturally had nothing to remark.

“I got to wondering,” said Young Jeff, “whether you or old Bill, seeing that the two of you know this country from mountain top to valley bottom, might have a notion where old Charlie found his gold.”

Still Jeff could see that there was at least a faint trace of reason in the implied question, so gave it due consideration. Thereafter he hunched up his shoulders and looked to his son to go on.

“Like I just said,” said Young Jeff, “I’m stringing all my bets that this is another job, the killing of Charlie Carter, I mean, that’s been pulled by the Warbuck crowd. That means that Warbuck knows Charlie got his pick into rich ore. So I suppose it means, too, that Warbuck knows where the gold is. Likely he’s got his claws on it already.”

Here was another statement that sounded reasonable, one a man could bend his thoughts to for a moment. Consequently, being a reasonable human being, Still Jeff occupied himself with the indicated thought-bending. He seemed to brood.

Young Jeff, who had his impatient moments, stood up.

“Thanks a lot, Jeff, for everything,” he said. “Adios.”

Then Still Jeff, having no questions to answer, stirred restlessly on his bench, made a wry face, fought his inner battle and observed very gently, “Better go slow, Jeff.”

“Thanks a lot, Jeff,” said Young Jeff a second time, and went up into his saddle. Approximately a minute later he came down out of it again, this time at the edge of Red Shirt Bill Morgan’s cabin porch.

“Hi, Bill!” he called out.

A deep, mellow rumble boomed forth from Red Shirt Bill Morgan’s vast chest.

“Well, I’m damned if here ain’t that good-for-nothing, skally-hooting hop-o’-my-thumb, Young Jeff! Hi, Kid! You’re anyhow as welcome as a wart on a man’s nose. When you get to town? And what’s wrong with you except everything?”

“Didn’t see me come into Halcyon, huh, Bill? Didn’t know I’d been across the Square chinning with Still Jeff?”

Red Shirt Bill Morgan snorted, and when he snorted even a horse like Young Jeff’s pricked up its ears and learned something.

“Shucks,” he said, hearty and bluff. “I ain’t blamin’ you for that, Jeff, same as I ain’t blamin’ you for who you are. It’s what you are that counts with me. Of course if a feller had anything to say about pickin’ out his own folks—But hell. What’s in the wind, old timer?”

Young Jeff told him all that he had told Still Jeff, and more, since Red Shirt Bill egged him on with his many sharp questions and shrewd surmises. He sprinkled his sundry interjections with oaths as hearty as old Bill himself; he damned Bart Warbuck and Jim Ogden and all their crowd uphill and down-dale; he read the Witch Woman’s title clear, employing epithets which don’t casually get themselves into print and when he had gone the limit with them added for full measure, “And if she didn’t happen to be a lady, Jeff, the damned old she-skunk, I’d call her worse than that.” Then when Young Jeff had done, Red Shirt Bill took dead Charlie Carter’s quartz specimens into his hard old hands and studied them like a scientist regarding a rare slide under his microscope. He handed them back and sat pursing a lower lip and scratching at an invisible chin lost in the depths of his big square beard.

“It’s a nut to crack, young feller; it sure is. First of all, who killed old Charlie? Some of the pestiferous Warbuck crowd is my bet, same as it’s yours; a good ten to one bet, too. But bettin’ is one thing and bein’ sure is another, and we ain’t sure. Not dead sure anyhow; not sure enough to blow Bart Warbuck and his egg-suckin’ yeller dog Jim Ogden off the good green earth. Time will tell maybe; it generally does—only sometimes too late to make much difference. Next, how’n hell did old lady Grayle know about it? That sort of stumps me; I’m goin’ to dream on it tonight. There’s times when I wonder if maybe the old sow hasn’t got second sight like most folks says about her. Number three, where did old Charlie find him his gold mine? Hard to tell, Kid. Those quartz chips might have come from most anywhere. They do sort of look to me like rock out’n Landslide Gulch, and they sort of look like they might have come from somewheres along Wolf Creek, and they might have come from one of the outcroppin’s high up Deer Valley where Alder Creek comes in. But—It’s kind of funny, Kid.”

“What’s funny, Bill?”

“It looks a hell of a lot like rock that me and—and another feller found one time right here in Pay Dirt. Only there wasn’t any Pay Dirt then, of course. The town didn’t get started until pretty near a week after that. And I’ve always said—”

“I know,” nodded Young Jeff. “That Halcyon wasn’t dead yet; that there was life in the old town; that sooner or later the lost vein would be picked up again and—”

“Maybe it’s right now,” said Red Shirt Bill.

“And maybe Bart Warbuck knows, wherever it is? While we’re just guessing?”

“Warbuck must have gone crazy!” growled Red Shirt Bill. “Just because he’s got most all the money there is, does he think he can get away with murder?”

“Well, can’t he?” said Young Jeff dryly. “Hasn’t he got away with it once or twice already that we know of?”

“You still think—”

“I know it in my bones and so do you! And so does Still Jeff and so does pretty nearly every man, woman, child and dog that knows anything of what’s going on within fifty miles from Halcyon in any direction. It’s only two months since Bob Vetch was killed—and now here’s Charlie Carter—”

“You and Bob Vetch, bein’ sort of friends,” remarked old Bill, “and havin’ talked things over a lot and comin’ to see pretty much eye-to-eye, would be pretty sure to hang his killin’ on Warbuck. And—”

“Bob was slaughtered by Warbuck, or by the spreading Warbuck interests,” said Jeff, “because he stood in Warbuck’s way and was too high-headed and stiff-necked and outright pioneer American for Warbuck or anyone like him to handle—alive. So Bob’s dead. And you’re damn right, Bill, we were sort of friends. I’m not forgetting Bob. We had a good long talk two days before they killed him.”

Bill had been staring out straight before him, perhaps at nothing, perhaps having a vague glimpse of another old man sitting on another old porch across the Square, for grown up with young pines as the Square was you could get glimpses across it. Now his eyes, as gray as the skies were turning over the southern hills, came to focus on Young Jeff’s bleak face.

“Look here, Kid,” he said gruffly, “it’s not your particular job to wind up the sun, moon and stars, and do all the plowin’ for the whole county and han’le the washin’ and ironin’ too. Why should you be stickin’ that long nose of your’n any deeper into all this mess than other folks does? Seems as though—”

“I found Charlie Carter dead,” said Jeff. “Murdered; that’s clear. That rides a man hard, Bill. And then I got to remembering Bob Vetch. His ranch adjoined mine, you know. When they killed him they sort of invaded my territory—in more ways than one. Warbuck’s crowd will be wanting to talk to me someday; talk, maybe, the same language they talked to Bob and old Charlie. There’s evidently no limit to Warbuck’s ambitions; he’d grab my ranch if he could, like a tomcat swallowing an oyster.”

“Look here, Kid, dammit! You’re either a rancher, making a go of it and raisin’ horses, or you ain’t. If you’re of a mind to go out of your way, looking for trouble and workin’ for dead men—”

“I’m working for me, Bill; I haven’t got anybody else to work for.” Young Jeff stood up, pulled his rolled coat from its saddle-string anchorage behind the cantle and slipped into it. “It’ll be sundown before you know it; so long, Bill.”

“Which way, Kid?” asked Bill as Young Jeff went up into the saddle.

“I’ll have time to think about that as I drift along,” said Jeff. “There’s a dance tonight at Pioneer City; there’s apt to be a poker game worth a man’s while at the Silver Bar; and then too it’s not much of a ride from here to Bart Warbuck’s. There are quite a few spots a man might mosey along to. So long, old timer.”

“Ride happy, Kid,” said Red Shirt Bill. “Only, if I was you, I’d sort of think things over as I rode, and I’d sort of go slow startin’ anything.”

He watched young Jeff Cody swoop away and out of sight, and sighed and muttered under his breath, “Like hell, I would!”