Spanish Crossing

by Alan Lemay

  She was certainly the last party 1 was expecting to see, way up here, practically in the dead of night, and it sort of took me off balance, so that I didn't say anything for a minute, but just stood gawking. She didn't say anything, either, but just gave me one slow look, and walked past me into the cabin.

  "Come in and set, Lyn," I said, some late.

  "I have," she said.

  I set out a cup of coffee, and took one myself. "The last of that bear meat has just freshly spoiled on me," 1 told her, "but 1 can fix you up with chili beans and sow flooring."

  "Nothing, thanks."

  I set down and filled my pipe. Lynda Clayton was a biscuit shooter at Old Man Hepmeyer's eating house, down in McTarnahan. Let me tell you something. Ninety per cent of the girls who wait on table out in this neck of the woods are real people - good, game girls, not afraid to strike out on their own, nor afraid of their luck. This is more than can be said for a lot that stay home.

  Even so, Lynda Clayton was considerably out of the common run. She was not as tall as most cowboys, but taller than most girls, and she was thin as a wintered pony, but with good bone, and strong. But the special thing about her was that something had put hate into that girl, and she was strong enough to carry it calm and quiet. She had sulky, rebellious, scornful eyes, and she looked at you with her chin dropped, kind of as if you didn't count for much except as a likely unpleasantness, while, meantime, she was just biding her time, without much hope, but waiting for the breaks.

  But underneath all that she was maybe the prettiest girl I ever saw. Especially now. There was a kind of a live, fighting look in her eyes tonight, like a spark, that I had never seen there before. And her hair was down to her shoulders in waves and tangles like a sand-colored mane - maybe on account of no hat, but anyway the effect of that was like something you might see a picture of sometime, but wouldn't ever expect to run across yourself.

  "Are your dogs any good?" she asked by and by.

  "It's owing to what standpoint you take," 1 told her. "Why?"

  "Tommy Beckwith has killed Lije Evers."

  There you had it! I knew something had bust. "Well," 1 told her, "it was a sightly choice. Lije ain't been much good."

  Lyn Clayton went ahead with her story. Lije Evers and Salt River Smith were partners in a pretty good thing called the Blackcap Stope, up near the head of the little Vermilion. Beckwith had got hold of a string of ten, eleven mules and had put in the fall packing the Blackcap high-grade down to the McTarnahan stamp.

  Just lately, a fine top-fire quarrel had busted out between Lije and Beckwith, the main event coming off in Hepmeyer's eating house. Salt River was there. Lije had been pretty drunk, but Tommy Beckwith knocked him down anyway, at the same time mentioning that he reckoned he'd kill Lije if ever he caught him sober.

  "Tommy said Lije short carded him in a two-handed poker game," Lyn explained it.

  "He's lying," 1 came out flat. "You can't any more have a two-handed poker game in McTarnahan than you can have a two-fly molasses barrel."

  "1 know," she admitted. "Next day, or maybe the day following, Tommy went up to the Blackcap Stope to bring down his mules. The Blackcap was fixing to close down for the winter, and Lije and Salt River tried to get Tommy to make just one more pack. But Beckwith said to hell with them, and set off down the trail.

  "He got down as far as Soldier Gorge, and come dark he off saddled in a little side canon called the Fourth Recess. Then, while he was cooking, he heard a horse coming, and he sat listening while it came on downtrail and turned into the cut where he was.

  "About a hundred yards off the horse pulled up behind the brush, and all of a sudden a gun opened up from where the rider sat. Wham! and Beckwith's cook fire exploded where the bullet hit. The rider fired twice more, and Beckwith threw himself flat, jerked his gun, and fired once in answer.

  "As soon as Beckwith fired, the horse lit out and went crashing back across the Little Vermilion. Then Tommy walked out to see if by any chance he had shot himself anything. There lay Lije Evers, shot through the head."

  Lyn stopped, having become kind of shaky in the voice.

  "1 can't see anything irregular about that," I told her. "Lije come for it, and he got it, that's all there is to that."

  "It isn't all," said Lyn, her voice lower yet.

  Beckwith moved on down to McTarnahan, getting in about daylight, and turned himself in to the sheriff. Some later in the day Salt River pulled in, leading Lije Evers's horse. He give out that he had gone fishing after Beckwith left, and, when he got back from fishing, Lije was gone. Later Lije's horse had come back to the Blackcap corral, and Salt River figured something might have happened to Lije. And that was all he knew about it.

  So far, so good, nobody yet having questioned but what Tom Beckwith done rightly. But now Sheriff Pete Crabtree took a couple deputies and went up to the Fourth Recess.

  "1 borrowed a pony," Lyn said, "and I went along."

  "You went along?" 1 sat up. "What did you want to go up there for?"

  "Want to? Good God!" It was the first time 1 ever heard her cuss like ordinary folks, and it give me a turn. Then I saw she had turned white as a boiled shirt. "1 had a hunch," she said. "Pete Crabtree hates Tom Beckwith."

  Ace that one, will you? Many a time 1 had seen Tom Beckwith sit drinking coffee he didn't want till he was like to bust, and all the time following Lyn Clayton with his eyes, but she was waiting on him as casual as you would feed stock, hardly ever answering him when he spoke. And now she just casually tells me that she let herself in for a twelve-hour ride, just on a lame hunch in his favor! Well, none of us can foresee everything.

  What Sheriff Crabtree found out at the Fourth Recess didn't check in with Tom Beckwith's story, no, not any. Lije Evers had been gunned in the back of the head, just below the hat line, from so close that there were powder burns in his hair. And his gun was in his holster, clean and unfired.

  "Panic," 1 said, mournful. "I would have thought better of Beckwith. He should have told the truth in the first place."

  "He did!" She seemed sure of that.

  "But Lije Evers' gun...?" 1 began.

  "Somebody cleaned that gun, and reloaded it."

  "And the powder burns...?"

  "Faked," she declared, "with a blank cartridge!"

  1 sat back, feeling sad. Why, 1 could see what had happened in the Fourth Recess just as well as if 1 had been there - Beckwith walking out to meet Lije; Tommy's temper coming up till he jerked his gun, probably grabbing Lije's gun arm with his other hand; Lije, in the saddle, trying to duck out of the way, so he caught it pointblank in the back of the head. Common murder, was what it come to.

  "So you come for Old Man Coffee," I said.

  "Mister Coffee, 1 want you to take your dogs up there."

  "Dogs? Which, these lion hounds? Take 'em where?"

  "1 want you to take them to the Fourth Recess," she said. "What I'm hoping is that Pete Crabtree reloaded that gun right there on the spot. I didn't see him do it, but it could have been done. Maybe your dogs can find the empty shells."

  After all, it was kind of touching. 1 suppose 1 never heard as silly a suggestion as that one was, nor one so far off from what lion hounds can and can't do, even was it useful to begin with. And the plumb foolishness of it somehow kind of went to show how awful serious and kind of desperate she was in her mind.

  "All right," 1 said, "I'll go."

  "Thanks," she said quietly.

  Of course, all that was open for me to do was to make a lot of false motions, just to satisfy the girl. So I went back to McTarnahan with her, and next morning I looked over Lije Evers's gun and saddle and one thing and another that they had got together. And I rode on up to the Fourth Recess with fourteen hound dogs cruising in front, and pretty near a dozen kid cowboys, out of work since the fall roundup, trailing along behind to see what 1 was up to.

  There had been a fall of rain up in the Soldier Gorge country, and the man don't live that could have trai
led a chuck wagon through the Fourth Recess, all trampled up and rained out like it was. But seeing that the cowboys was along, 1 looked wise, and set the hounds to milling, and 1 went over the place foot by foot.

  A hound pup by the name of Gumboots set up a bawl, and I went and looked at what he found, which was a porcupine track, and said: "Uh-huh." And 1 cut a short stick out of some innocent bystanding buck brush, and saved it, and said - "Aha." - and 1 measured off the distance between a stale cow track and a sugar pine and said - "Oho." And finally I took two pebbles out of the Little Vermilion and wrapped them up careful, and said: "Well; I'll be damned!" The cowboys didn't have a real tracker among them, and it was pretty near worth the ride up there to see their faces. 1 don't know when anything has done me so much good.

  After that, 1 went on up to the Blackcap Stope. Naturally there wasn't anything to be found out up there, either, but I went over it careful just the same. About all I done up there was cut a six-inch piece of board out of a pine table while the cowboys was out gorging their horses on Salt River's oats. That last, coming on top of the rest of the hocus-pocus, was too much for them, and they owned up they was beat.

  When 1 got back to McTarnahan next day, I looked over Lije Evers's stuff again, and no one was more surprised than me when all of a sudden a kind of funny idea come to me. I went and hunted up Pete Crabtree.

  "Pete," said 1, "how come you let yourself in for this fix?"

  "What fix?" he asked.

  "Getting yourself elected sheriff," 1 said.

  "You voted for me, didn't you?" he said, real salty.

  "It was right mean," 1 admitted. "Howsoever, 1 apologize, because now 1 want to ask you something. Where," 1 asked, "is Lije Evers's hat?"

  Pete kind of shifted on his feet, and looked disgusted, and bothered, too. "Hat?" he said finally. "There ain't no hat."

  It lifted me right off the heels of my boots. "No hat?" 1 yelped at him. "Hey, you! You can't just lightly say...'There ain't no hat.' There's got to be a hat!"

  "Well, anyway, there ain't," he said, kind of sulky.

  "You're sure you didn't lose it on the way down?"

  He riled up again. "Don't never ask me...'am 1 sure' ...unless you're joking," he told me.

  "This thing has gone beyond a joke," 1 said. "You and me better talk to the prisoner, Pete."

  Tommy Beckwith looked almighty competent and well put together, sitting there with his head down in the little oneroom jail. Only, when he looked up at us, he looked like a young kid.

  "Son," 1 said, "where is Lije Evers's hat?"

  "Don't you...'son'...me, you old Gila lizard!" he jumped me. "Just because I'm in the jug don't mean I'm free to be insulted."

  "Nevertheless and notwithstanding," said Pete, "it ain't going to hurt you none to answer his question. It may seem like a fool question, but Old Man Coffee sets store by it, and 1....,,

  "1 never seen any hat," said Tommy Beckwith. "What would 1 want with his damn' hat?"

  I went off and sat on the top rail of the Bonanza corral and give myself over to thought, and the more 1 thought, the more 1 was dead certain 1 had jumped an almighty wellconcealed truth. Maybe you think that made me feel smart, and successful - but it didn't. Instead, it give me a real humble, sickly sort of feeling, for 1 already had a hunch that all hell was going to have a hard time roping Tommy out of the hole he was bogged down in. I went and found Pete Crabtree again, and hauled him off where we could talk it over.

  "Pete," 1 said, "it's too bad we can't find that hat. Because if we could find it, that hat would hang a man."

  He looked at me very squint eyed and thoughtful.

  "That hat," I said, "is lost in the rapids of the Little Vermilion, somewhere between the Blackcap and the Fourth Recess."

  Pete Crabtree sat quiet. "What then?" he said at last.

  "Lije Evers wore his hat jammed down so hard on his head that sometimes he pretty near had to take a bootjack to it. That hat never went sailing off his head as he was just riding along. Pete, you look here.. .the night Lije Evers was killed, he traveled to the Fourth Recess, hanging head down... crosswise over a saddle horn."

  Pete sat looking out across the flats for a little while, and 1 knew that he had thought the same as 1 did, all along.

  "Seems like to me, Coffee," he said at last, "you aren't going to prove nothing just on the strength of no missing hat."

  "If you found just one good bear track," I asked him, "would you say there had been a bear?"

  He looked at me sort of ugly. "Name your bear," he said, "if you're so sure."

  "I will," I said. "Salt River Smith killed Lije Evers."

  He didn't say anything, nor look surprised.

  "After that," 1 went on, "he took Lije across the saddle horn of Lije's horse and rode down to the Fourth Recess, where he knew darn' well Tommy was camped. There he fired out of the dark, and, when Tommy's gun answered, Salt River dropped Lije and rode back to the Blackcap Stope."

  "All that," said Pete, scornful, "just built up on one lost hat! You ain't even got a motive for Salt River."

  "Yet, right now as you sit there," 1 told him, "you know Salt River done it."

  He didn't deny it. "There's been a sight too many unsolved killings around here since I've been sheriff," he said. "1 can get a conviction on Tommy Beckwith in a minute. Salt River ...I'11 never hang anything on him."

  "But, good God, man...you wouldn't hang an innocent man just to get a notch in your stick?"

  "it ain't up to me to say who's guilty and who's innocent," Pete said, kind of vague and stubborn. "That's up to the court."

  1'd known Pete a long time, and he wasn't a bad sort of feller, either. It just went to show up the human race, the way he could switch right and wrong, and then find a way to let himself out.

  "You haven't got any real motive on Tom Beckwith," I told him. "That fool story about a two-handed poker game...."

  "There wasn't any poker game."

  "What was it, then?" So long as 1 was horning in, I figured 1'd better at least know as much about it as the rest.

  Pete come out with it, easy enough. It seems that this Lije Evers had been another hombre that was gone on Lyn Clayton, even worse gone than the rest of them. The more she stood him off, the crazier he got on the subject, until Lije wasn't really in his right mind where Lyn Clayton was concerned.

  Finally one night he came into Hepmeyer's eating house tighter than a New Yorker, and threw it in her teeth that she wasn't any good, anyway, and that, when he had first known her, she was living in Steamboat Springs with a man that was no kin to her, by marriage or otherwise.

  That last hadn't any more than got out of his mouth than Tommy Beckwith caught Lije with a full swing alongside the head, laying him flat. Salt River was going to swear that Beckwith threatened to kill Lije when he caught him sober. Probably Old Man Hepmeyer would swear to it, too, he having been listening from the kitchen.

  This time it was me that got mad. "In the first place," 1 told him, "I'm ready to say flat that Lije Evers lied. The least hair on Lyn Clayton's head is worth forty carload of such skunks as Lije Evers."

  Pete Crabtree began to look ugly again. "In the first place," he said, "it appears you don't know nothing about law, because under the law a murder is a murder. And in the second place, you don't know nothing about women, and when it comes to putting the petty annoyances of some knock-about biscuit shooter ahead of a man's life...."

  I shouted him down. "Maybe I don't know women, or men, either! But, by God, I've handled enough dogs to know about guts. And I'll say to your face, of all the jug-headed, brass-bound guts I ever see...."

  "I've got a good mind to take a poke at you," he said.

  "Who's holding you down?" 1 asked him. And 1 walked out.

  The preliminary hearing was the next day, before Judge Rumbaugh. It's been a good many years since Rumbaugh last hesitated to stretch a point of law in order to get justice, and I judged that, if there was any bright spot in this darn' business
, he was it.

  I gathered four, five old billy goats like myself around me, and explained the situation. Some of them had brains and others had less, but none of them could see an out this time. Rollie Marshall took a bunch of riders up the Little Vermilion and all but sieved the waters fishing for the lost hat, but they come back without it, and in the end 1 hadn't accomplished a dog-gone thing.

  Lyn Clayton come to me just before the court was opened up for the hearing.

  "Mister Coffee," she said, "is there any hope at all?"

  1 started to tell her - "No." - but 1 wasn't equal to it. So 1 hauled off and lied, one time more. "They haven't got any case against Tom Beckwith," I told her.

  After she had moved off, I stood cussing myself. And then, all of a sudden, a kind of an idea come to me at last, and I called her back.

  "What time did the questioning attorney get into town?" I asked. This prosecutor we had, he had to come over from Lordstown to try these district court cases on circuit, and on a preliminary hearing like this he very often didn't get here in time to work up his case so very much.

  "He didn't come," she told me. "He's tied up with a federal water case in Phoenix."

  1 broke and run, and loped upstairs over the store to where Judge Rumbaugh was holding court. It was in a small room, plenty jammed with people, and with more filling the hall, but I managed to get them four, five friends of mine outside where we could talk.

  Old Rollie Marshall was cussing a blue streak. "He should have got him a lawyer to begin with," he stated, "but he was so darn stubborn and so darn sure he was right...."

  It was some minutes before I could get them quieted down to where 1 could start hammering in on them what I wanted. Even after that it took some little time to make them see the wherefores, so that, by the time 1 judged they were all primed, we had to hurry to get back into court before it was over.

  We jammed our way back into the courtroom by main strength. Salt River Smith was almost finished telling about his angle of it.