Читать книгу Powder Smoke on Wandering River - Jackson Gregory - Страница 7

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Dan Hasbrook was down in a corner. He had pulled a poker table over with him and crouched behind it, using it as a barricade. There was a vivid red line above his shaggy eyebrows, and from it the blood kept running down into his eyes. But he dashed his eyes clear with the back of his left forearm and hand, and kept blazing away.

The Wandering River men, bursting like stampeding cattle into the Stage Stop, already had their guns in their hands. They saw what was up: A crowd of Warbuck men were burning Hasbrook down, and the whole wonder of it was that he wasn’t already stilled for all time. There was Rick Voorhees, cursing and crouching and firing as fast as he could pull trigger, sending white pine splinters flying from the overturned poker table. There was Jim Ogden nearer the bar, firing more methodically, his shots coolly spaced. There were the other Long Valley men lending a hand. All the target they had was the table itself or Dan Hasbrook’s forehead or his hand holding his smoking gun.

At the sound of running feet on the outside sidewalk, at the snapping open of the swing doors, the Long Valley men whirled about, not to be taken in the rear, and for a split second it was intensely still there in the Stage Stop.

Young Jeff’s eyes and Jim Ogden’s clashed, but then there were many hard, angry eyes on Jeff’s and on Ogden’s.

It was one of those palpitant instants when fingers crooked to triggers are as still as death and as deadly. Save for something in the order of what happened next there could have been but the one outcome of many men shot to death. But hardly had the Wandering River men entered, Young Jeff Cody a leap in advance of all others, when another man came running in, and his voice, roaring through the short silence like a thunderclap on a still summer’s day, shouted:

“Stop it! Hold it, you damn fools!”

It was a voice which once heard was never to be forgotten, the full resonant voice of Bart Warbuck when Bart Warbuck was as strongly moved as now. Every Warbuck man there froze to attention, and even the Wandering River men were momentarily under that voice’s spell.

One man heeded it not at all. That was Dan Hasbrook. They had seen the gash over his brows, but none of them knew, as Dan knew, of the other bullet holes in his body. He thought that he was dying, and he did not mean to die without taking company along with him.

“You, Voorhees!” he shouted, his voice ringing clear. He lumbered to his feet, shoving the table out of his way. “This is between you and me. You—”

He and Rick Voorhees then fired together. Dan Hasbrook, steadying his hand, shot Rick Voorhees clean through the heart. As Voorhees, all his evil swagger wiped out of him for all time, dropped dead, Dan Hasbrook toppled and spun crazily and went down. There was a queer crooked grin on his face; again he was sure he was dying, but he was surer still that Rick Voorhees was already dead.

Warbuck shouted again, but his shout was unneeded. The fight was over. Men began shoving their guns back into their holsters.

“What the hell?” said Warbuck.

Young Jeff shoved him out of the way, hastening to Dan Hasbrook. After Jeff came his friends. Warbuck glared about him, picked out Jim Ogden with a sultry eye and hurriedly drew him aside. Their low toned conference did not reach the men bending over the fallen sheriff.

“He’s all shot up from hell to glory,” said Spurlock. “They’ve killed him, damn ’em.”

Jeff was feeling for Dan’s heart.

“It’s beating yet,” he said through his teeth. “Help me get him into the back room. One of you boys streak for the doctor.”

Bart Warbuck came hurrying forward.

He was a man who dominated most situations. He meant to dominate this one. A big man and swarthy, barrel-chested, with heavy black hair and with the same heavy black hair on the backs of his hands and wrists, big-nosed, large-jawed, he reeked with the power of arrogant masculinity. Among most men he was what a stallion is among geldings, a machine to stamp under foot anything and everything weaker than himself, a dictator among the uncertain, a mailed fist in the face of most.

“Back up and get out of this, Warbuck,” said Ed Spurlock, “or I’ll split your face open with a string of bullets.”

Bart Warbuck paid him not the least attention. He got down on his knees over Hasbrook, alongside Jeff Cody. He shoved his hand in, along with Jeff’s, to feel for Dan Hasbrook’s heart.

“Hell,” he said, and squatted back on his heels. “He’s set to make the grade. Takes more than a slap in the face to kill Dan Hasbrook.”

They carried the unconscious man into the back room where, besides table and chairs, there was an old sofa. Only when Hasbrook had been deposited on the sofa did Young Jeff realize that it had been Bart Warbuck who had helped him carry the lax burden. He stood back, looked at his sticky hands, wiped them on the bandana handkerchief he pulled from his neck for the purpose, then looked at Warbuck.

“He’ll be all right, Cody,” said Warbuck. “I’ll make it my business that he is. Let’s get out of here. I want to talk to you.”

“Yes?” said Jeff, and straightened up and got the kinks out of his back.

“Yes. I don’t know what the row was all about; I do know that it was mostly between Hasbrook and that young hellsprout, Rick Voorhees. Well, Rick’s dead and Dan’s alive, and that’s all there is to it. Now there are other things to think about.”

“Like what?” said Jeff.

“We can’t talk here. Come over to the hotel.”

Jeff thought, “I ought to kill this man right now, while I’ve got the chance and hot blood’s still running. It would be like shooting a wolf; no closed seasons on timber wolves.”

“Well?” said Warbuck crisply.

“Sure,” said Jeff. “Sure. Let’s talk.”

There was nothing more he could do here; Doc Jones would come rushing with his old black bag and Dan Hasbrook would die or wouldn’t die. Sure, he’d go with Warbuck.

* * * *

At the hotel there were two rooms always kept in readiness for Warbuck, one a bedroom, the other with a long table, a sofa and a dozen chairs. Bart Warbuck made sure that both doors were locked; he sat back balanced on the hind legs of his chair, his boots on the table. He smoked cigars and was smoking one now.

“Drink, Jeff?”

“No. What’s on your mind?”

“Considerable.” Warbuck inspected him as though he had never seen him before. “What’s your price, Kid?”

Jeff sat back, leaning against the wall. He didn’t say anything.

“Yes, price is what I said,” said Warbuck. “I’m out in the market, buying right and left. I’m buying you, horns, hoof and hide. I want you to kick in with me. Name your price.”

“What makes you think you can do business with me, Warbuck?”

“I can do business with any man if I pay him enough.”

“Think so?”

“Know so.”

“Like hell you can! Go out then and buy Still Jeff. Or old Red Shirt Bill Morgan!”

“Live men, I’m talking about. They’ve been dead twenty years.”

“Dead along with Halcyon?”

“Dead along with Halcyon. As dead as that.”

Jeff remembered the quartz specimens he had found at Charlie Carter’s cabin, quartz shot full of gold; he remembered what Red Shirt Bill had said of it. He said thoughtfully, “Only maybe Halcyon isn’t dead after all. Warbuck. Just sleeping maybe? Maybe it’s about due to wake up and come alive like it used to be?”

Warbuck hunched up his thick shoulders.

“Let’s ride one trail at the time, Kid,” he said. “I want to put you on my pay roll.”

Jeff thought about the mortgage at the Pioneer City Bank. Warbuck owned that now and was in a position to squeeze.

“What’s in it, Warbuck?”

“We’ll start by tearing up your mortgage. That’s pretty close to eleven thousand dollar now, isn’t it, with back interests?”

“What would be my job?”

“You’d be taking orders from me.”

“I’d do everything you said?”

“Everything.” He rolled his cigar. “Anything.”

“Hired killer, maybe?”

“I’ve got killers enough. They don’t come that high, either.”

He was toying with a box of matches. Jeff watched the big brutal fingers.

“Anyhow you’re not afraid of speaking what’s in your mind, are you?” he said.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” said Warbuck.

“What if I told you what I’m of a mind to tell you? What if I said ‘You can go to hell, Warbuck’?”

Warbuck’s hairy fingers snapped a match, snapped it as though it were a live thing, as though he were breaking its back.

“That’s the answer,” he said, and tossed the broken bits over his shoulder.

Jeff rolled a cigarette, then stood up. “I’ll be on my way,” he said tonelessly.

“Fair enough,” said Warbuck. “Take your time, Kid, to think it over. If you’re with me, drop in at the ranch and we’ll chin.” He flipped his match box across the table. “Match, Kid?” he asked.

“No thanks,” said Jeff. He went to the door, unlocked it and went out. Though he did not turn to look back he was keenly aware of Warbuck’s eyes boring into him.

Warbuck’s rooms were on the ground floor, at the back. Jeff went along the semi-dark hall and out on the front porch where, except for the dimly lit pathway out from the door, it was quite dark. Down the street he made out vague, shadowy forms; they materialized into men only when they came in front of the Silver Bar and turned to go in. He heard the music going like mad over at the dance hall; it was a square dance and the rollicking voice of Eddie Pepper was calling the figures: “Grand right and left!—Gentlemen forward and back!—Ladies forward and back!—All sashay!” With all the merrymaking there they hadn’t heard the shooting down at the Stage Stop Saloon.

He stood brooding, seeing Pioneer City darkly, listening to it, feeling far away from it, his forgotten cigarette coming apart and beginning to dribble its fine grains of tobacco. He thought of all manner of things: of little Chrystine, fluffy and frothy and yet somehow shrewd; of Arlene whom the years had changed so, who had become a Warbuck through and through; of Charlie Carter, dead up at his Pocket Canyon cabin with a bullet in the back of his head; of Bud King swinging from an oak in Long Valley; of Dan Hasbrook down in the corner and of Rick Voorhees shot through the heart; of Bart Warbuck with the hair on his hands and his cigar and his air of a dictator; of Jim Ogden’s way with Arlene, with Chrystine Ward; of Sadie King, waiting for Bud to come home and instead hearing some other man ride into the yard, bringing her word of what had happened; of the old woman in Witch Woman’s Hollow, cackling of evil, knowing already of Charlie Carter’s murder—A slight, hurrying figure caught his moody eyes, a girl with a big shawl thrown over her head, crossing the street swiftly, headed toward the hotel. He glimpsed her white party dress, delicately lifted from the dust in the road, and pale blue shoes and stockings looking white in the faint light. She was some girl, of course, who had slipped away from the dance for a moment; all unescorted as she was, and at this early hour, she could scarcely be leaving for good.

She ran up the steps, brushing by him without noting his lean dark form there among the shadows, and he saw that it was Chrystine Ward. She hurried down the hall and after the quick soft patter of her slippered feet had stopped he heard her light rapping, scarcely more than the brushing of soft knuckles against a door. He heard a door open; he heard Warbuck say angrily, “You damn little fool!” Then the door slammed. But Chrystine did not come hurrying back. She was with Warbuck now.

Jeff stood there waiting, not quite knowing why he waited, five minutes, ten minutes. The girl did not come out. He couldn’t make sense out of it. Bart Warbuck didn’t have the name of a man who liked to play around with little blonde flirts. Tonight Warbuck had his head and his hands filled with other, sterner matters. But how the devil did Chrystine know he had rooms here? And that he would be in them tonight? And just where they were?

“Every man’s got a soft spot in him somewhere,” he decided. “Every man makes a fool of himself sooner or later—or lets some woman do the job for him. I guess Warbuck’s no stronger than Samson was.”

He returned to the Stage Stop to see how Dan Hasbrook was making out. Hasbrook was no longer there; the doctor had given him a hasty once-over, had ordered him carried home, only half a dozen blocks away. The Wandering River boys had picked up the sofa with Dan on it and had carried the sheriff to his own place.

“Has he got a chance to make the grade, Doc?” asked Jeff.

“Hell, yes,” snapped Doc Jones. “If it wasn’t that he bled like a stuck hog I wouldn’t worry over him a bit; I’ve seen Dan shot up before. He’s got a good chance, better than fifty-fifty. There’s only one thing against him.”

“What is it?” asked Jeff.

“It’s his doctor,” snorted old Doc Jones. “I’ve killed better men than Dan Hasbrook. And now you boys can get the hell out of here.”

As they went out Ed Spurlock fell in step with Jeff.

“Where you going, Cody?” he asked.

“Home,” said Jeff, and Spurlock said, “Me, too. I’ll ride along with you.”

They went down a dark back street to the stable, passing the rear of the hotel. Shades were down but Jeff saw dim lines of light cast by Warbuck’s lamp. He wondered whether Chrystine were still there; most of all he wondered again what brought her visiting Bart Warbuck like this.

The two men saddled and rode out into the dark starry night; the dark was so heavy that the stars seemed smothered in it, just countless tiny points like distant cold diamonds.

“I want to ride by the back of the hotel again,” said Jeff. “Keep on the grass at the side of the road so we won’t make any noise.”

He led the way, Spurlock following without asking the question which must have arisen in his mind. Opposite Warbuck’s windows Jeff stopped and Spurlock came up with him. There was nothing to be seen except the black bulk of the building and those faint lines, nothing to be heard except, from afar, the dance music.

Spurlock saw Jeff swing his arm up and seem to be throwing something. There was the sound of splintering glass and a startled scream.

“I’m damned,” said a mightily mystified Spurlock. “Old Warbuck’s got a girl in there with him!”

“Let’s ride, Ed,” said Jeff, and he led the way, hurrying now but still keeping to the grassy roadside. Five minutes later little Pioneer City with its music and love-making, its newly shed blood and intrigue, lay behind them.

“What did you chuck into Warbuck’s window?” demanded Spurlock. “And what for?”

“It was a piece of quartz, heavy with gold,” said Jeff. “I found it up at Charlie Carter’s place in Pocket Canyon. Warbuck maybe will know it when he sees it, but he’ll have to do some tall guessing about who broke his window with it.”

“What’s all this about, Jeff? I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I, Ed. I’m just wondering; wondering about a lot of things. Charlie Carter found him his gold at last—so they killed him. Then they killed Bud King. Why, Ed? They said that Bud had killed Carter—maybe they talked too much that time. It’s as good as saying that Bud King somehow tied in with Carter and his gold, huh?”

“Jim Ogden’s getting to be a pretty big gun,” said Spurlock, very thoughtful, frankly puzzled, groping. “He’s been with Warbuck seven years and has had plenty chances to feather his own nest. He’s got ambitions; you can see it in his eye. Maybe all this was just Jim Ogden’s play; maybe Warbuck didn’t have anything to do with it. Huh?” They struck north, taking a short-cut trail, crossing the head of Long Valley, riding up into the hills, splashing across the upper reaches of Wandering River where it slid across a bit of open benchland before it shot down precipitously into Deer Valley.

“I’m stopping at the King ranch,” said Spurlock. “Dan Hasbrook asked me to break the news to Bud’s old lady. It’s going to be tough. Come with me, Jeff.”

“No,” said Jeff. “I don’t want any part of it. There’s nothing I can do—”

“You saw the damned thing happen—it’s by rights more your job than mine. You’ve got to come along, Jeff.”

The King dogs started barking at the first sound of hoofs. Through the pines a sudden pale light came on bespeaking a lamp hastily lighted. A bright rectangle of light resulted from a window shade going up. A woman’s voice called out:

“That you, Bud?”

The two men rode closer without answering. As they dismounted at the front porch of the old ranch house the pack of growling dogs closed in about them; there was a moment of sniffing in which familiar friends were recognized, then a flurry of wagging tails and silence.

“Who is it?” called Mrs. King. Carrying her lamp, some sort of dark wrap thrown about the pale glimmer of her nightgown, she opened the door and stood peering out at them.

“It’s me, Mrs. King,” said Spurlock. “Ed Spurlock and Jeff Cody.”

Perhaps the very quality of his hushed voice told her. She didn’t say a word for a long moment and did not stir. They saw her put her hand up to her mouth, then raise it nervously to brush a graying strand of hair from her cheek, then step back for them to enter.

“Come in, boys,” she said.

They looked at each other, only their eyes turning in their still heads, then pulled their hats off and went in.

She led the way directly into the living room, a plain place of bare walls and bare floors save for a couple of black bearskin rugs.

“It’s kind of chilly,” she said, and moved to the fireplace. Both men hurried forward, both eager to be doing something for her, to find paper and kindling, to pile the wood on.

A sleepy voice called from a nearby room, “What is it, Mom? Is that Bud?”

“Better get up, Aggie,” said Sadie-King. “You and May both. Something’s happened to Bud.”

The two young women came hurrying, both barefooted, May with a colorful crazy quilt thrown about her, Aggie wriggling into an old overcoat of Bud’s, both large-framed, strong-faced country girls, neither of them partaking of their mother’s still dainty prettiness. They should have been boys; they were more like their father, now dead, than the girl who, at their age, had implanted herself so deeply in Dan Hasbrook’s heart. May was now about twenty-five, Agatha two years older.

“Is he dead?” asked Sadie King.

Yes, of course it was tough, as Ed Spurlock had said it would be. Tough to listen to the outcries, the sobs of Bud’s two sisters, toughest of all to see Sadie King sitting so still, her face frozen, her heart frozen, her hands never moving, her eyes never going wet, her lips never trembling. She didn’t ask a single question; maybe she would later. The girls asked everything; Spurlock, doing most of the talking, answered. Sadie King looked at Young Jeff. He swallowed a time or two, got his cigarette made and said like a man talking about the weather:

“I told Dan Hasbrook. He sent Ed out to tell you. Dan himself is in pretty bad shape. A Long Valley crowd, led by Jim Ogden and Rick Voorhees gang-jumped him. He killed Voorhees. Doc Jones says Dan’s got a fifty-fifty chance to live.”

He didn’t want to talk about Bud swinging at the end of a rope; he thought that maybe if he could split the sorrow in her, could make her think of Dan, too—“You girls go get dressed,” said Mrs. King. “The boys will hitch old Mary and Pat to the buckboard. We’re going down to Pioneer. Bud’s there and I don’t want him to be alone. Maybe we can lend a hand nursing Mr. Hasbrook too.”

The girls, not always given to obedience but without even thinking for themselves now, went to their room. Mrs. King’s eyes went back to Jeff.

“I want to know all about it, Jeff,” she said.

So Jeff, having to set his teeth hard at times, feeling a damned weakling because of the way emotion grabbed him by the throat while she sat so outwardly calm, told her the whole thing. Now she asked a question or two, and before he had done she knew as much as he: of his finding of Charlie Carter, of his talks with the old Witch Woman and Still Jeff and Bill Morgan, of the end of all things earthly for her son under the old oak trimmed in tiny tender green leaves in Long Valley.

Ed Spurlock in the kitchen had made a fire and had concocted a devil’s own brew of black coffee. Also he had found Bud’s half bottle of bourbon and had drunk half of it. All the while he was swearing through his teeth and wiping his eyes on the backs of his hands. He came in with the coffee. Sadie King smiled at him and squeezed his hand and drank what he brought her.

“Is this thing to go on eternally?” she asked quietly.

“No,” said Jeff. “We’re going to stop it. Somehow—sometime.”

“Poor dear old Charlie Carter came by here late last night,” she said. “He wanted to see Bud. Bud wasn’t home yet. Charlie said, ‘Tell him I want to see him right off. Tell him to come over soon’s he can.’ I told Bud this morning, as soon as I woke; about daybreak. He went straight over to Charlie’s.”

“What did Charlie want with him?” Jeff asked. “Do you know?”

“Charlie didn’t say. Neither did Bud. But—Well, now I know.” She put her coffee cup down; no one could see the least tremble of her thin white fingers, but the cup did rattle in its saucer. “You see, Bud has been grubstaking Charlie the last six months. Charlie was sure he was going to find gold; Bud got sure of it, too. He would laugh and—and sort of hug me and say, ‘Well, Mom, it won’t be long now; we’ll be half owners in a gold mine with good old Charlie; then we’ll step down to San Francisco or even New York, and buy us the town.’ I guess Charlie wanted to tell Bud first of all.”

“This morning early,” said Jeff, “Bud went over to see Charlie.” He was thinking, “This morning early, or late last night, they killed old Charlie. Early this morning, most likely. And Bud showed up just in time to see it all—and there was just Bud alone, against their crowd, and he had sense enough to know he had no chance against them—and he was pulling back when they saw him—They followed him all day, ran him down and shut his mouth the only way it could be shut for good.”

He voiced never a word of all this, but when he looked up there were those harshly dry eyes of Sadie King fixed on his, there was Sadie King nodding her head with slow emphasis.

“Yes, Jeff,” she said. “That’s what happened. That’s why they killed Bud and said that he had killed old Charlie.”

Aggie and May came in, all bundled up. Mrs. King had to go and dress. Jeff and Ed Spurlock lighted a lantern and went out to hitch up old Mary and Pat to the buckboard.

“You know, Ed,” said Jeff, slamming the harness over Pat’s collar, “they must have hunted Bud all day. It’s close to thirty miles from Pocket Canyon to that oak down in Long Valley. Bud must have got the jump on them; they must have lost him and found him again. Now he wouldn’t make as long a run as that without seeing somebody on the way, would he? He’d have dodged in at some ranch house, he’d have run into somebody in the hills. And he would maybe have said what it was all about. He might have told somebody what had happened, what he had seen, why the Warbuck crowd was trailing him. He was on his way to Pioneer, likely to spill the beans to Dan Hasbrook They figured that; they cut him down. But did he talk to somebody before they closed in on him?”

“We’re going to find out,” said Spurlock.

The three women came out and got into the buck board.

“You drive, May,” said Sadie King. “Remember ole Mary and Pat ain’t as young as they used to be.”

Jeff, helping her up to the seat, discovered that she was carrying Bud’s double-barreled shotgun. An impulse urged him to take it away from her. Well, why should he? Anything that Sadie King did was going to be all right. She’d have hours to think things over before she got to Pioneer City. If she elected to shoot up the town no one who knew her—no one who had known her and Bud—would lift an eyebrow.

“You boys have been good,” she said. May slapped the reins and said “Git up,” and the buckboard went out of the yard with the horses at a lively trot.

Young Jeff and Ed Spurlock swung up into their saddle; and jogged along together another mile; there their trail: split.

“See you manana, Jeff,” said Spurlock, and “Sure,” said Jeff and each headed homeward.

Jeff drifted along through the pines, his thoughts clouded. Arriving at his own place he unsaddled at the barn, watered Ranger and put him in his stall, gave him a once over in the way of a rub down, fed him and went on to the ranch house. It was a dark, long, squatty blot among the trees, an old Spanish adobe which had been home to him now for a dozen years, a place which he loved. The old Hernando place, some still called it, close to a hundred years old and as mellow as an old pipe. There was a quaint old-world patio, with the starlight glinting on scraggly shrubbery; a whisper ran through the still night, the faint rustling of a little wind through the pines blending with the sound of dripping water.

He entered immediately the big friendly living room and went unerringly to the silver-plated kerosene lamp on the long Spanish oak table. An amber light pulled the room out of the deeper darkness. He looked about him, at an old familiar scene with new eyes. He was thinking of Bart Warbuck’s taking over the Pioneer City Bank, all mortgages with it. Sentiment in a man, over a place like this, could get downright sentimental. That old carved mantel over the enormous fireplace—that set of tall candlesticks—the worn leather couch, even the grooves and scratches in the scantily rugged floor—There was a crash, a splintering of glass, and Young Jeff Cody leaped nimbly into a shadowy corner, his gun getting into his hand without his knowing it. Then he heard outside the hammering of a horse’s flying hoofs. The hoof-beats fled swiftly away into silence.

Startled, his first thought was that someone had shot at him. But there had been no sound of a shot. Briefly a heavy silence shut down; then there was a light patter of bare feet, and old Ah Wong, slant eyes brilliant, popped in.

“H’lo, Bossee Jeff’son,” he grunted. “What you do? Go clazy, smash window? Gittee dlunk, mebbeso? Oo-na-mah! Wha’ for?”

Jeff saw at last what it was that had broken his window and had rocketed into the room. He picked it up and stood staring at it. Old Ah Wong snatched it out of his hand. The narrow Oriental eyes gleamed.

“Somebody bling you heap nice pleasent, Bossee Jeff’son! Heap plenty gol’!—Wha’ for?”

“It’s a present I gave Bart Warbuck,” said Jeff. “And already he has sent it back. What for, Wong? Me no heap savvy.”