Читать книгу Troubled Waters - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 10
ОглавлениеFATE FLINGS OPEN A CLOSED DOOR
ROWAN McCOY drove his new car—it was a flivver, though they did not call it that in those days—with the meticulous care of one who still distrusts the intentions of the brute and his own skill at circumventing them.
As he skidded to a halt in front of the store with brakes set hard a woman came out to the porch and nodded to him. She waited until the noise of the engine had died before she spoke:
“Going down to Wagon Wheel, Mac?”
“If I can stay with this gasoline bronc that far. Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Stovall?”
The woman hesitated, her thin lips pressed tight in an habitual expression of dry irony. She moved closer.
“That houn’ Joe Tait has been a-beatin’ up Norma again. She phoned up she wanted to get down to the train. I’ve a fool notion she’s quittin’ him for good.”
The cattleman waited in silence. It was not a habit of his to waste words.
“Wanted I should find someone to take her and her traps to Wagon Wheel. But seems like everybody’s right busy all of a sudden.” A light sarcasm filtered through the thin, cool voice of the postmistress. “Folks just hate to be onneighbourly, but their team has done gone lame or the wife’s sick or the wagon broke a wheel. O’ course it ain’t that any of them’s afraid to mad that crazy gunman, Tait. Nothin’ like that.”
McCoy looked across at the blue-ribbed mountains. Mrs. Stovall noticed that the muscles stood out like ropes on the brown cheeks of his close-gripped jaw. She did not need to ask the reason. Everybody in the Hill Creek country knew the story of Norma Davis and Rowan.
“I’m not asking you to take her, Mac,” the woman ran on sharply. “You got more right to have a flat tire than Pete Henderson has to have——”
“Where is she?” interrupted the man.
“You’ll find her the yon side of the creek.”
Mrs. Stovall knew when she had said enough. Silently she watched him crank the car and drive away. As he disappeared at the rim of the park a faint, grim smile of triumph touched her sunken mouth.
“I ’most knew he’d take her,” she said aloud to herself. “Course there’ll be a rookus between him and Joe Tait, but I reckon that’s his business.”
At intervals during the morning that sardonic smile lit the wrinkled face. It was an odd swing of the pendulum, she thought, that had reversed the situation. Years ago Norma had run away from her lover with good-for-nothing Joe Tait. Now she was escaping from Tait with McCoy by her side. How far would fate carry the ironic jest? Mrs. Stovall was no Puritan. If Norma could unravel some scattered threads of happiness from the tangled skein of her wretched life, Martha Stovall cared little whether she kept within the code or not. No woman was ever more entitled to a divorce than the abused wife of the sheepman.
A woman came out from the cottonwoods beyond the ford to meet McCoy. She was dressed in a cheap gown hopelessly out of date, and she carried a telescope valise with two broken straps.
If any of the bitterness McCoy had felt toward her when his wound was fresh survived the years it must have died now. Life had dealt harshly with her. There had been a time when she was the belle of all this ranch country, when she had bloomed with health and spirits, had been as full of fire as an unbroken bronco. Now her step dragged. The spark of frolicsome deviltry had long been quenched from her eye. Her pride had been dragged in the dust, her courage brutally derided. Even the good looks with which she had queened it were marred. She was on the way to become that unattractive creature, the household drudge. Yet on her latest birthday she had reached only the age of twenty-six.
At recognition of the man in the car she gave a startled little cry:
“You—Rowan!”
It was the first time they had been alone together in seven years, the first time she had directly addressed him since the hour of their quarrel. At the unexpectedness of the meeting emotion welled up in her throat and registered there like the quicksilver in a thermometer.
He tossed her grip into the back of the car, along with his own, and turned to help her to the seat beside the driver. For just an instant she hesitated, then with a bitter, choking little laugh gave way. What else could she do? It was merely another ironic blow of fate that the lover she had discarded should be the man to help her fly from the destiny her wilfulness had invited.
In silence they sat knee to knee while the car rolled the miles. The distant hills and valleys which slid indistinguishably into each other detached themselves as they approached, took on individuality, vanished in the dusty rear.
Neither of them welcomed the chance that had thrown them together again. It shocked the pride of the woman, put her under an obligation to the man against whom she had nursed resentment for years. His presence stressed the degradation into which she seemed to herself to have fallen. For him, too, the meeting was untimely. To-day of all days he wanted to forget the past, to turn over a page that was to begin the story of a new record. Deliberately he had shut the door on the story of his unhappy love for Norma Davis, and with an impish grin fate had flung it open again.
The heady wilfulness of the girl had given place to the tight-lipped self-repression of a suffering woman. Not once in all the years had she complained to an outsider. But her flight was a confession. The stress of her feeling overflowed into words bitter and stinging.
“You’ve got your revenge, Rowan McCoy. If I treated you shabbily you can say ‘I told you so’ now. They used to say I was too proud. Maybe I was. Well, I’ve been paid for it a thousand times. I’ve got mighty little to be proud of to-day.”
“Norma!” he pleaded in a low voice.
With the instinct of one who bites on an ulcerated tooth to accent the pain, she drew up a loose sleeve and showed him blue-and-yellow bruises.
“Look!” she ordered in an ecstasy of self-contempt. “I’ve hidden this sort of thing for years—and worse—a hundred times worse.”
“The hound!” His strong, clenched teeth smothered the word.
Instantly the mood of the woman changed. She would have none of his sympathy.
“I’m a fool,” she snapped. “I’ve made my bed. I’ll lie in it. This world wasn’t built for women, anyhow. Why should I complain?”
Never a talkative man, McCoy said nothing now.
They had reached the Fryingpan, and the road wound down beside the little river as it tumbled toward the plains over bowlders and around them. The trout were feeding, and occasionally one leaped for a fly, a flash of silver in the sunlight. Both of them recalled vividly the time they had last gone fishing here. They had taken a picnic lunch, and it had been on the way home that a quarrel had flashed between them about the attentions of Joe Tait to her. That night she had eloped.
The woman noticed that McCoy was not wearing to-day the broad-rimmed white felt hat and the wrinkled corduroys that were so much an expression of his personality. He was in a new, dark suit, new shoes, and an up-to-date straw hat. The suitcase that jostled her shabby telescope valise would have done credit to a Chicago travelling salesman.
“You’re going to take the train,” she suggested.
“To Cheyenne,” he answered.
“Why, I’m going to Laramie, if——”
She cut her sentence short. It was not to be presumed that he cared where she was going. Moreover, she could not finish without telling more than she wanted to. But McCoy guessed the condition. She would go if she could borrow at Wagon Wheel the money for a ticket.
They drove into the county seat long before train time.
“Where shall I take you?” he asked.
“To Moody’s, if you will.”
He helped her from the car and carried the valise into the store. Moody was in the cubby-hole that had been cut off from the store for an office. Rowan hailed him cheerfully.
“Look here, Trent. What’s the best price you can give me for those hides?” He walked toward the storekeeper and bargained with him audibly, but he found time to slip in an undertone: “If Mrs. Tait wants any money, give it to her. I’ll be responsible. But don’t tell her I said so.”
Moody grinned dubiously. He was a little embarrassed and not a little curious. “All right, Mac. Whatever you say.”
As Rowan went out of the office Norma timidly entered. Moody was a tight, hard little man, and she did not expect him to let her have the money. If he refused she did not know what she would do.
McCoy strolled down to the station to inquire about the lower he had reserved in the Pullman.
“You’re in luck, Mac,” the station agent told him. “Travel is heavy. There isn’t another berth left—not even an upper. You got the last.”
“Then I’m out of luck, Tim,” smiled the cattleman. “A lady from our part of the country is going to Laramie. Give her my berth, but don’t let her know I had reserved it. The lady is Mrs. Tait.”
A quarter of an hour later Norma Tait, not yet fully recovered from her surprise at the ease with which she had acquired the small roll of bills now in her pocketbook, learned from the station agent that there was one sleeper berth left. She exchanged three dollars for the ticket, and sat down to wait until the Limited arrived. It was a nervous hour she spent before her train drew in, for at any moment her husband might arrive to make trouble. That she saw nothing more of Rowan McCoy before the Limited reached Wagon Wheel was a relief. Tait had always been jealous of him, and would, she knew, jump to the wrong conclusion if he saw them ready to leave together. At the first chance she vanished into the Pullman.
Just as the conductor shouted his “All aboard!” a big, rawboned man galloped up to the station and flung himself from the saddle. He caught sight of McCoy standing by the last sleeper.
“What have you done with my wife?” he roared.
The train began to move. McCoy climbed to the step and looked down contemptuously at the furious man. “Try not to be a fool, Tait,” he advised.
The man running beside the train answered the spirit of the words rather than the letter. “You’re a liar. She’s in that car. You’re running away with her. You sneak, I’m going in to see.”
He caught at the railing to swing himself up.
The cattleman wasted no words. His left fist doubled, shot forward a scant six inches, collided with the heavy chin of Tait. The big sheepman’s head snapped back, and he went down heavily like a sack of meal.
