Читать книгу Dark Valley - Jackson Gregory - Страница 5

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Budge Morgan put a key into the padlock, opened the gate and went swinging along long-stridedly, a big, black-bearded ruffianly looking man, to a meeting with the sheriff of Juarez County. Bolt Haveril stood up; his own peculiar brand of satisfied smile brought the white crescent of a scar out into the clear like its prototype escaping from under a black cloud.

This time that sudden flashing out of the little new moon might have been construed a romantic omen. He heard a voice, one that had never rung its charges in his ear before, close behind him; and, instantly, if for only an instant, forgetting both Morgan and the sheriff, he whirled about. It was a hushed voice, a girl’s, faltering and faint in his hearing yet disturbingly musical.

“I—I don’t know who or what you are,” she said hurriedly scarcely above a whisper. “There’s no time for me to ask, for you to answer, for me to tell you anything. The others are coming—I know they won’t let you go away without taking you to Duke. If you are in the valley tonight—try to meet me, late, at the bridge below the waterfall——”

It was a plea and a command. He got scarcely more than a fleeting glimpse of the girl, so swift was her withdrawal, but his senses were very alert at that moment and registered details sharply. The outstanding impression was one of a new kind of endearing beauty all enwrapped in the mysterious folds of contradictions. Just as at one time she both begged and dictated, so did she somehow convey to his understanding that she was desperate yet courageous, in despair yet striving to weave despair itself into the texture of hope, that it was in her to be as haughty as a lovely sylvan princess and as soft and yielding as the princess’s milkmaid. Then those “others” of whom she spoke, more men from the Morgans’ valley, came around a bend of the dark, steep, winding road under the laurels, and he lost sight of her. Lost thought of her, too, as he turned to confront the three stalwart, massive-shouldered young fellows—Morgans all, he judged them, from their build and carriage, from the coarse black hair and dark skin, from the not unhandsome features, from the savage blue eyes. They were demanding of him all at once:

“What’s up— What’s going on here?— Who the hell are you?”

He sighted down along his nose at them; all were inches shorter than himself and also he stood on higher ground with the road coming up from the shadowy ravine so steeply to the gate. They were armed and looked truculent; he had his gun in his hand and merely looked dangerous. He answered, not in the least hastening, tending rather to linger on his few words almost with an insolent drawl:

“Me, I’m Bolt Haveril, from Texas. Right up there in the bushes is the sheriff of Juarez County. He mistook me for some old compañero of his and cut loose on me. A man you might know—calls himself Budge Morgan—has stepped up there to chat it out with him.” While speaking he showed them how a man could roll a cigarette with one hand, a lovely, lost, and all but forgotten art. “Got a match, one of you boys?” he asked.

Then he saw the girl where she stood partly screened by the leaves of the laurel tree on the roadside bank; her face remained a disturbing mystery under the wide droopy brim of her straw hat. One of the newcomers at the gate saw her an instant first; it was his words to her that drew Bolt Haveril’s eyes her way.

“Oh, hello Lady,” said one of the three. “You here? Come along with Budge?”

“Yes, Tilford,” said Lady. “We heard the shots and hurried.”

Another of the three asked swiftly:

“This man here, who is he?”

“I don’t know, Camden,” she answered. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“We’ll know a lot pronto,” said Camden Morgan.

The third man spoke up sharply; he was the youngest of the lot but so much like them that Haveril made sure the three were brothers. This one said suddenly:

“Budge, he’s up there having it out with that slinking damn sheriff. I’m going up there. What’s he saying to Dave Heffinger anyhow? Budge is getting too big for his britches; if he thinks——”

“Keep your shirt on, Rance,” said Tilford Morgan, and clapped a big hand restrainingly yet in no unfriendly fashion on his brother’s shoulder. “We’ve all got orders right now to take orders off Budge; it might come in handy to remember that, Kid.”

“Hell with orders and with Budge too, and with you, Til, if you try to tell me where to head in!”

He jerked away but, as Tilford only laughed at him, stood where he was. Orders in Dark Valley came straight from Duke Morgan and meant something. So Rance stood glowering and appearing to hesitate, yet not really hesitating at all because he was not yet the man, and perhaps never would be, to clash with the valley’s dictator, his father, Duke Morgan.

Bolt Haveril had regarded the trio interestedly all this while, though now and then sparing a glance to the girl who had not stirred from her place under the laurels. Now, however, his attention was drawn from these to yet another man coming up along the overshadowed roadway, appearing around the bend in the road about which the others had come. From this man’s appearance he judged that here at last was a man who was not a Morgan.

He was younger even than Rance Morgan, darker than any of them, unlike them in build, too, being very slender, with slenderness’s catlike grace. He wore his dark hair long; his face was fine and narrow, an acetic face if a face can be that and frankly evil. There was a sort of sleek, sneering elegance about him; his boots were of carved reddish-brown leather, oiled and polished and kept free of dust; his belt was heavy with silver conchas; his gun was pearl-gripped; the big white silk scarf about his lean dark throat was knotted with foppish care.

Yet a Morgan he was, though those other Morgan men chose to consider him only a half-Morgan; that was because, though Duke sired the lot of them, the youngest, Sid Morgan, was by another mother. She, when twenty years ago Duke Morgan had stolen her from her border home, bringing her into his valley to become his second consort, had been one of those startlingly lovely little animals of mixed Mexican-Indian blood who at wide-eyed fifteen are like little mystified dark angels. Sid Morgan, though as much Morgan as any of them, was also the son of the Southern Teresita.

He appeared to see the girl first of all, half hidden as she was in the laurels’ shade. He greeted her with an odd taunting sort of gayety as vicious as the swish of a whiplash, having the trick of speaking his words laughingly yet nonetheless with a sting in them, calling to her in a voice as musically soft as ever sang sentimental ditties to a Mexican guitar:

“Oho, my little Cousin Lady is here already too! To be in at the kill? To see the dogs pull the gallant stag down? Or why, Lady? Maybe to make pretty eyes at some new and handsome stranger?”

As Lady stiffened, to regard him through narrowed, darkening eyes, there was nothing of the soft yieldingness of the milkmaid about her. Her lips, berry-red from youth and health and vigor and the outdoor life she led, opened for a swift retort, but she checked herself, lowered the dusky fringes of her lashes like one drawing down the window shades against an unwelcome sight, and thus did her best to eliminate Sid Morgan from her scheme of things.

He stood a moment chuckling and regarding her as though she amused him mightily, then lounged on upgrade and to the gate.

“Is this the hombre all the shooting was about?” he asked, turning the impertinent scrutiny of his now lazy and always mocking eyes on Bolt Haveril.

No one answered. Bolt Haveril, as watchful as a cat, not to miss so much as the flick of an eyelid of any of them, saw in a flash that all was not loving harmony in this mountain fastness of the Morgans. This languidly swaggering boy hated the girl with all the passionate hate of his badly mixed bloods. She loathed him. And, now that he spoke to the trio at the gate and none answered, Haveril saw that between them and the dark, slenderly devilish Sid Morgan there was a bristling resentment like a high, spiked wall.

Under Sid Morgan’s almost paper-thin nostrils was the sketch of a tiny black mustache; it looked like a brief line drawn by a heavy-leaded pencil. He fingered it thoughtfully, was contented with a moment’s silence, then spoke again. This time he addressed one man in particular, singling out Tilford Morgan, saying quietly:

“Tell me, Til. Is this the man all the shooting was about a couple of hours ago, and again just now?”

“Seems like it,” answered Tilford, as curt with Sid as he had been genial with Rance.

“Who was shooting it out with him the first time?” Sid asked. “Old Dan Westcott?”

“You know as much as I do about that, Sid,” said Tilford.

“And just now?”

“He says it’s Dave Heffinger.”

“Where’s Heffinger now?”

“Up there in the brush somewhere, I guess.”

“Where’s Budge?”

“With Heffinger. Talking to him.”

“Dave Heffinger’s got his nerve,” observed Sid Morgan, still fingering his thin black line of down, still thoughtful. “You’d think by this time he’d know better than to stick his nose into goings-on this close to the Valley.”

This was no direct question and Tilford let it go without remark. Sid turned his attention to Bolt Haveril.

“Who is this hombre?”

“He says he’s Bolt Haveril, from Texas.”

Sid addressed Bolt Haveril then, speaking swiftly and in Spanish. What he said was, “You’re Don Diablo, that’s who you are, my fine friend; and right now, on the jump to save your hide, you are between the sheriff of Rincon and the sheriff of Juarez, like a nut that’s going to crack wide open in the jaws of a nutcracker.”

“Talking to me?” returned Bolt Haveril coolly. “Put it in English and maybe I can understand you.”

Sid had, as one would know to look at him, a peculiarly nasty, sneering sort of quiet laugh.

“Don’t understand Spanish, huh? Not a Durango Mexican to begin with, lately a border bandit?”

“Me? American, Texan. A rancher down on the Rio Grande.”

Sid could be smilingly thoughtful.

“You look like a Mexican, all right.”

Bolt Haveril shook his head and seemed as thoughtful as Sid had ever been.

“You get fooled by the looks sometimes,” he said gravely. “Me, I’ve seen a thing that looked like a cross between a skunk and a snake, but it had two legs and a fuzz that looked like some day it might grow up to be a mustache, so maybe the thing was some kind of a human.”

“If you want to get killed,” cried Sid hotly, “if you want to start anything——”

“You came mighty close calling me a liar just now,” said Bolt Haveril. “Most places, a man does that just to start a fight, so I got the notion that might be what you’re craving. Me, I’m peaceable by nature, likewise accommodating. Whatever you say, Sid, goes with me and goes fine.”

“You’re crazy! With the four of us here——”

“Shucks!” That revealing grin of Bolt Haveril’s showed itself fleetingly. “Why, man, I’m betting you ten to one, and you name the money, that not a one of these boys would interfere—not, anyhow, until they allowed plenty of time and chance to see you wiped out!”

A dark flush came into the boy’s face; his right hand was nervous and restless and perhaps tempted and eager and hesitant, all at once. Finally he lifted it, fingering his upper lip.

“Even if you had the luck to kill me, you fool,” he snapped angrily, “do you think they’d let you go? You’d be dragged before my father, Duke Morgan—you’d be better off dead before that! I am his favorite son——”

“You’re a liar, Sid!” cried Camden Morgan. “And if that is a fighting word and you want to take it up, grab your gun and I’ll shoot six holes through your rotten heart!”

“Cam, damn you, shut up!” roared Tilford, and glared at him, then turned to glare at Sid. “You, too, Sid. What’s eating you, anyhow?” Then he added, his gust of rage blown away: “Cam, you and Rance poke along up there where Budge is. Ask shall we head back with this man that calls himself Bolt Haveril——”

“From Texas,” Bolt Haveril reminded him.

“Or will we wait here?” continued Tilford. “Ask him too about Haveril’s horses. There were three of them.”

Camden and Rance went out through the gate and up the wheel track, soon vanishing in a brushy cleft on the mountainside near the spot whence the sheriff of Juarez County had discharged buckshot and anathema. Bolt Haveril leaned idly against a gate post, tracing patterns in the dirt with the toe of his boot and wiping them out again, while Tilford Morgan and Sid regarded him curiously or stared off toward the place where Budge, then Camden and Rance had gone. Once when Bolt Haveril glanced up from under the sheltering brim of his hat, toward the laurels, he made out that the girl—“Lady,” they called her—had stolen away.

Then at last returned the three Morgans who had passed out through the gate, Budge riding the stallion Daybreak and already aware that he bestrode a devil-horse always alert for the chance to throw a man and savage him, Cam and Rance leading the sorrel and the smoky roan. When they reached the gate, Bolt Haveril moved to intercept the first of them, Budge on Daybreak.

“I can’t remember that I asked you to break in on my little argument with the sheriff,” he said as his eyes and Budge Morgan’s came to a studiedly expressionless meeting. “But I can say I’m grateful to you and the other boys for rounding up my scattered ponies for me. And now if you’ll light down, I’ll fork and be on my way.”

“Shucks, you couldn’t do that,” said Budge, sounding affable yet with no softening of rigid features, no glint of geniality in his eyes. “Not without dropping in on us long enough to say ‘Howdy’ anyhow. Come along with us; Duke will be glad to see you, Don Diablo.”

“Me? I’m Bolt Haveril——”

“From Texas!” put in Tilford, and laughed.

“Sure,” said Budge. “Sure. Come ahead, Haveril. I’ve invited you to drop in on us. You don’t figure we’re not good enough for you, do you?”

“I’m sort of in a hurry——”

Budge laughed this time.

“Shucks,” he said, more affable than ever. “If you’re in a hurry you’ll make time by going slow a little while—long enough, say, to let Dave Heffinger clear out of your way. You don’t want to make us mad, do you? After, like you say, we went to all the trouble of surrounding your stock, you wouldn’t want to make us sore, would you, Haveril? Besides, Duke would be disappointed——”

“If you don’t keep a pretty tight rein on Daybreak he’s apt to jerk around and bite a leg off for you,” said Bolt Haveril.

“Seems to me I’ve heard about this horse,” said Budge. “Or a horse a hell of a lot like him, only they didn’t call him Daybreak. Colorado, that’s what his name was. Funny name for a horse; means Red Color, don’t it, Sid?”

“You better not keep Duke waiting all day,” said Sid.

“Sure, that’s right,” nodded Budge. “Come ahead, Haveril, and say ‘Howdy’ to Duke.”

“I’ve heard about Duke Morgan,” said Bolt Haveril. He retrieved his carbine from a patch of brush. “Sure, I’d like to say ‘Howdy.’ ”

Budge rode ahead down the steep winding road on the horse that was called Daybreak—or Colorado—and after him walked Bolt Haveril with a Morgan at each elbow, with Cam and Rance following with the led horses.

Tilford had not forgotten to close the gate, replace the heavy chain and snap the padlock back into place.