The Third Western Novel

by Noel Loomis

  Holt said, “I’m glad it’s come…”

  “Call in the boys.”

  For a moment, as if there had been an Indian magic in the old man’s words, a deep stirring eagerness came into Hughes to know who “they” were, who had come against the Buckhorn water twice before, and twice been turned back; it was as if for a moment, he, like these old men, caught the scent of an approaching battle. Over the waiting Lazy M hung a sense of grim fatalism; everyone there seemed moving warily under the threat which hung over the Buckhorn, awaiting the impact.

  And now there were drifting through Clay Hughes’ head the names of old feuds, savage, bitter wars of the range which had taken heavy toll of men who could never give in until the last of their factions were dead. Tonto Basin—Lincoln County—Black Plains—Doghead Flats… Each of those names had its bloody history; some of them men spoke of only circumspectly, as if the embers of those hatreds might not yet be entirely dead. A somber history can lend thunder to a once commonplace and unconsidered name. Buckhorn Valley—what would that name mean tomorrow, next year?

  But there was a more immediate necessity pressing upon him now. He was haunted by the face of Sally Major. He was seeing it in profile against stars as she sat, head leaned back against the adobe, in the recessed window of the dark gun room. There was gallantry in that girl, and stamina; but also something else indefinable that got to him, called out to him, as no one else ever had. And he blamed himself unreasonably for her present position. Once more he took up his stubborn effort to get possession of the key to the padlocked door.

  “And now,” he said, “if you’ll just ask Canfield to give me the key to my stuff—”

  The cowboys of the Lazy M were trailing into the room now, quiet, stiffly unhurried, their hats in their hands. “Give Hughes the key to the old gun room, Harry,” said Oliver Major. “From here out, Hughes is hired on for as long as he wants to stay. And while we’re on that, I want to say this: we didn’t have call to ride herd on him, nor to lift his guns. He gets his guns back, and he’s got free run. Give him his key. What’s the matter, Harry? Ain’t you got it?”

  “Yes, but,” said Canfield, embarrassed, “leave me say somethin?, will you?”

  “Well?”

  “Something kind of funny come up, just since you’ve been back and talking in here. We all thought that we’d go and take a look at the bullet hole in the wall of that room, to see if we could make out just where the shot come from; and—”

  “I thought I said you all was to stay in the chuck hall,” Major growled at him.

  Canfield looked confused. “Why, Mr. Major, we reckoned you just meant you wanted us on hand, in case there was call for us.”

  “All right.”

  “So we went and unlocked that door—” Canfield hesitated, and Hughes held his breath—“but—darn it, this sounds funny—”

  “Well, well, come out with it!” Major snapped impatiently.

  “Well—we couldn’t get in.”

  “How couldn’t get in?”

  “Mr. Major,” said Canfield with conviction, “that door is barred from the inside.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” grunted Major.

  “That door,” Hughes put in, “has been locked ever since they let me out of there.”

  “It sure has,” Canfield admitted. “But all the same, that door’s barred!”

  “You act like a lot of kids,” growled old Major. “What’s the matter with you fellers? You shy like a bunch of near-sighted fuzztails. That door’s swelled and jammed, is what’s the matter with that. Go on, take your key, Hughes, and if the door sticks, I hope you’ll have the sense to kick it in!”

  “I ain’t so sure—” began Dusty Rivers.

  Major turned his eyes to Dusty sharply. “You too, Dusty? What’s eating you, boy?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, but I thought—it just seemed like to me for a minute while we was letting Hughes out of there—oh, well—”

  “Spit it out, man!”

  “Well,” said Dusty sheepishly, “I thought I heard talking in there.”

  “I’m sick of this nonsense,” Major exploded. “Are you going to pass over that key? You, Art, go along and get Hughes his guns. We shouldn’t never have disarmed him to begin with.”

  Tom Ireland allowed himself a humorless chuckle. “He kind of fooled us, at that, I guess. Seems like he held a gun out on us after all.”

  “He sure did,” French grinned. With good-natured impudence Art French jerked up the corner of Clay Hughes’ vest, so that for a moment all eyes saw the black butt of the gun that Sally Major had given him. It was the first time that Hughes had actually seen the gun himself, and now, glancing downward, he saw that its black butt was marked by a white star the size of a dime, apparently inlaid in bone: the sort of nonsense a cowboy works on sometimes, during the long winter layups.

  And now as he looked up he saw that the faces of the men in that room had changed. Art French had drawn back his hand, but some of them still looked at the line of Hughes’ belt as if they could not believe that they had seen there, a moment before, the star-marked black butt of the gun; and he read in the eyes of one or two that they found what they had seen impossible to believe.

  He shifted his eyes to Oliver Major’s face and for a moment he thought that of them all, old Oliver Major was the only one who had not seen or, at least, had found no special significance in the white star upon the black butt; but as he watched he saw the old man’s face slowly change. The light went out of it, leaving it as harsh and ugly as cold lava slag, with only the eyes, which somehow now seemed deeper set in the rugged old head, burning with the light of a slow, dark fire behind. Hughes had never seen a man looking into the face of black ruin, but as he watched the transformation of Oliver Major’s face it seemed to him that the old man was looking through him and beyond into dark vistas of irrevocable disaster.

  Harry Canfield had been moving around behind the other cowboys, bringing the key to Clay Hughes as Major had directed him. He, with two or three others in the background, had failed to glimpse the momentarily revealed mark of the star upon the gun which Hughes wore. Close behind him Hughes heard Can-field whisper, “What’s up?” and Walk Ross turned to answer from the corner of his mouth, “Dick Major’s gun!”

  “Canfield,” said Oliver Major, slowly, without seeming to move his eyes from the thing they were seeing far beyond the walls, “I’ll take that key myself.”

  Obediently, Harry Canfield gave the long disputed key into the old man’s hands, and Oliver Major arose, stiff and slow.

  Bart Holt said, “Ollie, what you aim to do?”

  And Major answered, “I’m going to open that door.”

  The room was motionless, silent, while Oliver Major moved slowly across it. Then Bart Holt called out to Major in a queer voice, “You sure you want to do that, Ollie?”

  For just a moment the lord of the Buckhorn water hesitated. Hughes, looking about him, thought that while all seemed to feel that something extraordinary had happened, something mysterious and strange, only Bart Holt and old Oliver Major seemed to think that they knew both the question and the answer.

  “Yes,” said Oliver Major at last, in an almost soundless voice; and he moved toward the door. “I’ve never hid anything yet. I’m too old to start it now.” He turned down the hallway toward the courtyard, his slow stride uneven. Here and there, in the room he had left, cowboys looked at each other; then, one by one, moved to follow.

  “Stay back,” Bart Holt snarled at them.

  “Let them come,” said old Major in the contemptuous voice of a man to whom small things no longer matter.

  Half furtively, yet apparently drawn by an irresistible curiosity, the cowboys of the Lazy M began to trail after old Oliver Major and Bart Holt, their boot-heels unaccustomedly quiet upon the tiles.

  Chapter Five

  That was a strangely silent procession which followed at the spurred heels of old Oliver Major and Bart Holt. The dozen cowboys who
trailed down the unlighted hallway seemed abruptly subdued, so that even the click of their high heels sounded lightly, slow and uncertain, upon the tiles. All of them had seen in those strained moments in Major’s office that the black butt of the gun Clay Hughes wore was marked with an inlaid star. But if any of them understood why this discovery should knock the wind out of Oliver Major as definitely as if a horse had been shot from under him, he kept it to himself.

  And Clay Hughes, who wore the marked gun, knew least of all the significance of what had happened. He had seen black ruin come into the face of Oliver Major at the sight of the inlaid star; but Hughes himself knew nothing about the history of the weapon. It had been pressed into his hands by Sally Major, in place of the guns which had been taken from him. In Major’s office Hughes had heard someone behind him whisper that this was Dick Major’s gun, a fact which hinted at much; how much he could not tell in the sparse state of his present knowledge.

  Nor did he have any time on his hands now to figure it out. Above all else, now, he wanted to postpone the opening of the gun room door. Various futile means occurred to him. He could turn upon Art French, whose casual hand had revealed to Major and the rest the star-marked butt of the gun, and, in an explosion of belated resentment, smash the man down. But he knew that when this diversion was over, old Oliver Major would once more turn his implacable attention to the padlocked door of the old gun room; and nothing would have been accomplished except that Major would have the definite knowledge that Hughes had attempted a desperate concealment. All Hughes could do, he decided, was to wait, casual and cool, for the developments which the next few moments would bring forth.

  They crossed the corner of the patio, the brilliant moonlight of the desert country striking cold sparks from the polished steel of Bart Holt’s spurs; and turned into the dimly lit hallway from which the old gun room opened. Old Major was in front of the gun room door at last, and a long moment seemed to pass while his unsteady hands fumbled at padlock and key. Dusty Rivers said in a low voice, “Shall I get something to smash the door?” and Major answered, his voice lower still, “We’ll try it, first. By God, it’ll open for me—I think.”

  Then abruptly the door swung back. Once more a tall shaft of yellow light from the hallway was flooding into the narrow room; and Oliver Major went in with the slow, grim step of a man who leans against the steel. Bart Holt planted himself in the doorway, facing the rest, as if he would bar them out. This was unnecessary, for the Lazy M hands, burning with curiosity as they obviously were, were yet holding aloof now, unwilling to intrude too far upon these old men. Clay Hughes, who was nearest, turned away his eyes. Fruitless as his efforts had been to obtain the key, they had yet been the best that he could do; and he did not wish to see the accusing glance of the girl as she faced at last that grim old man.

  There was silence when Oliver Major had entered the old gun room; a silence that held them all in a curiously motionless grip. For there was mystery here, and the shadow of bitter defeat, which they had seen in the face of old Oliver Major, had given it immediacy and unknown weight. As moment after moment that silence continued, the sense of strain increased until something in the air was taut as winter wire. Hughes, without moving his head, turned his eyes to the face of Art French, and saw that a dew of perspiration had come to the man’s forehead. French’s eyes were fixed upon distances beyond the wall, and, as once before, Hughes knew that French was listening, listening.…

  Oliver Major’s voice, coming very low from within, must have startled them all as sharply as the sound of a shot would have done. “Bring a light.” Something in that voice was hair-raising and very cold.

  A curious terror swept Clay Hughes. What had happened in this room since he had been released from it, and the door had been locked again behind him? That that room was not empty he alone knew best of all; yet, the long silence, ended finally by the request for a light—

  It was Tom Ireland who, straining his gigantic height, unhooked the lantern from the beams above and handed it to Bart Holt. In the sudden darkness of the hallway the silent men watched the bar of light from the doorway of the old gun room waver and shift, casting Bart Holt’s shadow as a strange, swaying grotesque upon the opposite wall. Then at last Oliver Major came out, his face puzzled, and looking unfamiliar in the up-striking light of the lantern in his hand.

  “Bart—Tom Ireland—was there ever another key made to this lock?”

  “Mr. Major,” said Ireland slowly, “I’m dead certain there never was.”

  There was a short silence before the voice of Bob Macumber said, “Just the same, if ever a door was barred, that door was, as I threw my weight against it tonight!”

  “And yet you claim the door has been shut all the time?” Major said.

  “That padlock,” said Tom Ireland, “has been closed every minute since Hughes came out—except when we was trying to force it, and it held.”

  “Well, it’s empty now. I think you’re a bunch of fools,” said Major, without conviction. He tossed the key aside so that it rang upon the dies, and, leaving the door of the gun room wide open behind him, took a couple of long strides forward, as if he would walk through them all, unseeing.

  Hughes had never been more mystified in his life. But before he could muster his wits to an explanation, Oliver Major suddenly turned upon him, his voice exploding. “Where did you get that gun?”

  “I—”

  He had started to say that he had borrowed it, or that he had stolen it, or that it was none of the old man’s business. He never knew exactly what his answer would have been, for it remained unfinished.

  Sally Major’s voice came from the patio end of the hallway, startling them all. “I gave it to him,” she said.

  Everyone’s eyes jumped to the slender figure—she was wearing a white dress now—which had stepped into the hallway from the moonlight of the patio. The cowboys moved closer to the wall, so that a lane was opened between father and daughter, down which they faced each other for a long moment. Hughes saw that Sally Major’s face looked very white, even in the yellow light of the lantern; and her slim figure was very straight and uncompromising—defiant almost. Oliver Major’s face he could not read.

  Old Major spoke at last. “Go hit your blankets, all of you,” he told the cowboys wearily. “Get some sleep while you can. For all I know we may be out of here long before sun-up. I haven’t decided yet.” For a moment or two nobody moved; and Major’s voice rose in anger. “Go on! Turn in, I said!”

  Those were not men accustomed to jump when they were spoken to. But now they began to drift slowly out into the night, sidling past old Major, who stood aside to let them go.

  “Macumber—Hughes,” said old Major, “you two stay back a minute. I want to talk to you. No, Bart, you get some sleep with the rest.”

  When the rest were gone, Major moved slowly down the hallway toward the patio, followed by Hughes and Macumber. “You too, Sally,” he said, as he passed the waiting girl at the end of the hall. Thumbs in belt, he led the way toward his office again, his boots slow and heavy upon the tile.

  Hughes, trailing behind, found that Sally Major was walking beside him, seeming light-footed and ephemeral in the moonlight of the patio. He turned toward her, but though the moonlight shimmered in the fine mist of her hair, he could not see her face. Then as they entered the shadows of the great hallway, her fingers closed upon his hand and she leaned close to whisper in his ear.

  “I take back everything I said: I don’t want you to leave! I want you to stay and help me—help us, here.” Hughes drew a deep breath. Perhaps until now he had remained a factor in the Lazy M situation less by necessity than by his own stubbornness.

  Now all matter of decision on that score was over with. He knew that whatever might follow, he was in this game to stay.

  “Count on it,” he answered.

  * * * *

  “Sally—” Oliver Major turned from the deep recessed window at which he liked to stand looking out
at nothing—“bring Dick here.”

  Hughes did not miss Macumber’s start of surprise at this first open acknowledgment that Dick Major was anywhere on the place. Macumber had told Hughes that Dick Major was riding long circle, and Clay had neither noticed nor heard anything to the contrary. For a moment Sally Major hesitated, a slim, cool, poised figure, with vivid eyes that met her father’s squarely; then she acquiesced and went out. Major turned upon Clay Hughes.

  “How many of the boys did you talk to about this business up at Gunsight?” he demanded.

  “None of them, to amount to anything.”

  “How many of them asked you if Donnan had said anything before he died?”

  “Not one,” said Hughes. “We didn’t get to talking together much.”

  Major turned upon Macumber. “Bob, nobody but you and me and Bart Holt knew that Hughes wasn’t telling all he knew. Yet, somebody tried to kill this man tonight while he was unarmed and shut up, here in my own house!”

  Macumber’s shoulders dropped, as if something had suddenly crumpled inside of him. The mild eyes were troubled in his blunt, hatchet-chopped face. “I reckon it’s my fault, Mr. Major. I told Tom Ireland when we was talking it over. Naturally we all thought Tom—”

  “What’s that got to do with it? Did you tell anybody else?”

  “Tom told Art French, I think, when he picked Art to ride herd on Clay. I don’t know who-all Art’s told.”

  “And there you are,” said Major. “There’s not a man on the ranch tonight that don’t know all about it!”

  “I know, I expect so. If Clay had been killed, it would have been nobody’s fault but my own.” That was a man who forever blamed himself for everything that went wrong. He never passed the buck, nor let himself off of anything in his life. There was a massive self-accusation in the set of his shoulders now.

  Major sighed. “That’s all, Bob.” He turned to the empty window again.

  “Clay, I’m sorry,” said Macumber. “If you get it in the neck you can blame me.”

  Hughes smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t have it any different, Bob.” He could say no more than that; he couldn’t tell the chunky foreman that the strength of his position—if it had any strength—rested entirely upon just such spreading of the news as Macumber had begun. He watched Macumber affectionately as the foreman wandered drearily to the door and let himself out.