by Noel Loomis
“It’ll come out in the course of time, I expect,” said Hughes, “and you sure are going to be disappointed when you hear what it was. All I’ve got to say is that it was the damnedest fool thing you can imagine, and nobody was more surprised than I was when it worked. But the old man is making a bad mistake in sending me back to the ranch. And it’s pretty plain that he’s sent you with me to see that I don’t jump the range or something.”
“I know,” admitted Macumber, disconsolately. “You ought to realize that as long as you hold back what Donnan said, everybody’s going to handle you like you was dynamite. I’m beginning to think you don’t know what you’re doing very good, Clay.”
“You don’t realize how close to the truth that is,” said Hughes.
“What you aim to do, Clay?”
“I aim to go to sleep.” He pulled his hat over his eyes and settled himself in the seat.
“Hold out on me if you want to,” said Macumber at last. “I’m going to keep on thinking you’re on the up and up, no matter what the others say.”
A gentle snore answered him from under Clay’s disreputable hat.
Back at the Lazy M Hughes found that he was not so much in need of sleep as he had supposed. He had fully expected to sleep until the following day; but the morning was hardly gone when he found himself broad awake again, cool and clearheaded.
Grasshopper Tanner had come and gone while Clay slept. Hughes remembered dimly having half waked to listen to the mouthing and wailing of Tanner’s dogs, that curiously stirring noise of casual voicings which forever follows a lion pack. Clay wished now that he had roused to talk to the old hunter, but Grasshopper had left for the Crazy Mule almost as abruptly as he had come, and as yet Hughes had not seen the old man at all.
As the afternoon wore on, and no word came from Adobe Wells, Hughes began to chafe at the turn of the luck which seemed to have shunted him out of the center of action. Then as he prowled the premises he came upon an ancient banjo, forgotten in a dusty corner, and he appropriated it lovingly. It had been a long time since he had had a banjo in his hands; but he found that his fingers were still practiced and sure as he tuned the slack strings.
His first instinct was to seek a lonely spot on the top rail of a corral behind some barn. Then a speculative smile crossed his lips as an alternative occurred to him. He turned back, and sought a shadowed bench in the patio of the house itself. Slowly, at first, but with sure, unhesitant rhythm, his fingers sought out the old familiar chords; and presently he began to croon to the beat of the strings.
His voice was husky and low, but deep and sure in its tone, as he drifted into the lilting, swaying strains of romantic Mexican versos.
“—Que toda la vida es sueño
Y los sueños sueño son...”
He was singing in the manner of the vaqueros, the dark, reckless-riding cowboys who sometimes drifted into the northern ranges from old Mexico. To the Spanish a place with no song in it is a place with no soul. Those Spanish-Indian vaqueros were mostly horse killers, and Hughes did not think much of their work; but they knew how to strum and sing. The passion of old Spain, sometimes flamboyant, sometimes melancholy, was tempered in those songs by the vast emptiness of long prairies and the implacable hush of night skies. Under swaggering mockery could sometimes be heard an echo of all the yearning loneliness the world has ever known.
Only the vaqueros could sing with just that combination of plaintive effect, and Clay Hughes had got some of the trick of it from them.
“Ya se va, para donde ira,
Voy a buscar un fino amor—”
He was singing to Sally Major, whom he knew to be somewhere in the roomy ramifications of that great sprawling adobe. The syncopating plunk of the strings was gentle and his voice low; yet he was certain that she was listening somewhere within those cool adobe walls. Thus he boldly made love to her by broad daylight in the very heart of the layout which held him a virtual prisoner.
The fact that she was a daughter of wealth and power, as that country understood it, bothered him not at all. Hughes came from a line of men schooled to think that one man was as good as another, if not a damn sight better, and that no one knew what changes the turn of a year might make in the relative fortunes of men. In the west the wheel of fortune had always been on the spin; it was turning yet. Old Pony Hughes and the men before him—as far back as word of mouth history could reach—each made his fortune and each had lost it again: some of them not once, but many times. And as for Hughes himself, he had plans which—
From the Spanish songs Hughes drifted to others, cowboy songs that many a weary rider had sung through the long hours of night circle, quieting bedded herds. Mostly they were songs that hinted at stories, and the words were simple, bordering upon nonsense sometimes: the words of long-riding men who didn’t know how to express themselves very well. But they were the heart of the west, unmistakable for anything else, and Hughes and his banjo knew how to make those songs their own. He had an instinct for putting blue harmonies into plain old tunes that had originally grown out of the creak of saddle leather and the jog of hoofs. The musical lilt of the Spanish melodies was not in them, but in their own way they had all the meaning that the versos of the vaqueros had, and something else too that the Spanish never understood.
He played for a long time, absorbed in the banjo which he had not fingered for so long. Then as he let the last chords of “Twenty Miles From Carson” die away, he became aware of a sense of incompleteness. He had been kind of half hoping, he admitted to himself, that Sally Major would come into the patio, and that he would get a chance to talk to her again. She had not come, and this fact gave the singing business futility, as if he couldn’t play the banjo after all. No one seemed to be moving anywhere in the layout. From the dry cottonwoods a locust droned metallically, like a coffee mill; and when this noise had ticked off into silence the place was as still as if it had been abandoned completely. Hughes snapped his thumb across the banjo in a discordant crash, and got up.
“Where are you going?” said Sally Major’s voice, unexpectedly close behind him. He turned to find her sitting upon the inner ledge of one of those deep recessed windows, almost immediately behind his bench.
“How long have you been there?”
“About half an hour. Go ahead with the serenade. If you want to know what I think of it, I think it’s pretty good.”
“Of course it’s good,” said Hughes, sitting down on the outer ledge of the window. “If I’d known you were there it might have been even better.”
She studied him enigmatically. “I’ve been talking to Bob Macumber.”
“Yes? He told you what happened at Adobe Wells?”
“His version of it.”
She waited, and he knew that she was inviting him to tell her his side of the affair. He was not, however, accustomed to explaining himself to people, and he resented the circumstances which had seemed constantly to demand explanation from him ever since he had crossed Gunsight Pass. “I couldn’t improve on what Bob would tell you, I guess,” he said slowly.
“According to him,” said Sally Major, “it was the strangest thing. By Bob’s story, nobody was ever closer to a shoot-out than you people were. And then, he said, you wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to Earl Shaw, and Shaw folded right up.”
“Well—the main drift sounds something like what happened,” he admitted.
“So now you’ve gone and got yourself in trouble again?” said Sally.
“Have I ever been out of it?” Hughes grinned.
“Not since you’ve been here. And now Bob says Dad is all heated up. Very naturally, Dad would like to know what was in that note.”
“Yes,” said Hughes, “I expect he would.” He tried to change the subject. “I’ve been wondering a couple of things myself. For instance, who ever let you out of that room I left you in last night?”
“Nobody.”
“I’m surprised to hear it,” he said. “In that ca
se you must be in there yet.”
“Not exactly. That room is the one Dad used to lock Dick up in when he was a boy. Those two are just exactly alike, but they’ve never understood each other, and Dad has always been awfully hard-boiled with Dick. Dick was just as rebellious and hard to handle as Dad was, and when Dick was a youngster, Dad used to punish him by locking him up, sometimes for a couple of days at a stretch. I always sided in with Dick a little bit; and we found a way to work loose a couple of those oak bars, so that a couple of them slide out of place. That was how Dick used to get out and in; and that was the way I got out last night.”
“I sure worried about it for a while,” he told her.
“You were sweet to worry; but I can usually take care of myself.”
They were silent for a moment. He was thinking that, in the difficult and complicated position in which he found himself, she was the only one in the Buckhorn who met him frankly and openly, seeming to assume that he was a friend and to be trusted as such. Not even Bob Macumber was sure of what to believe any more. Yet, this girl apparently wanted to believe in him, and was ready to give him credit for playing a square game, no matter how curious things might look. The directness of her next question took him unawares.
“Don’t you think,” she said, “you’d better tell me what was in the note you wrote Earl Shaw?” There was no least note of appeal in her voice; as she spoke it, it was a simple question, raising a question of expediency, nothing more.
He hesitated. “That was a funny thing,” he said. “I was just trying to carry out your orders in a way.”
“My orders?”
“Didn’t you tell me to keep things from coming to a shootout, if I could?”
“Yes, I did that.”
“I suppose you realize that an order like that puts me in a kind of bad place? Like as if I was afraid of the shoot-out itself.”
“It might look that way,” she admitted, “to people who don’t know the difference between a hard way and an easy one when they see it.”
“I guess maybe,” he told her, “you didn’t expect me to take what you wanted as seriously as I did.”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
He looked at her curiously before he went on. “I couldn’t think of any good way to do just that thing. I had to take a long chance, which took in the possibility of getting myself plenty misunderstood.”
“Of course, it looks kind of funny to Dad as long as he doesn’t know what was in that note,” she suggested.
“Did you ever happen to think,” he asked her slowly, “that it might look a whole lot funnier to him—to everybody—if they did know what was in that note? Sometimes it’s better for things to look awfully queer for a man, rather than to have people dead certain of something else—something that isn’t so.”
“If a thing isn’t so, you ought not to be afraid of it,” she said, “at least—”
She left the sentence unfinished, and Hughes, letting his fingers wander idly upon the banjo’s strings, tried to figure out what the rest of the sentence would have been. After a moment he thought he had it. “At least, with you,” he guessed aloud.
She did not deny that his guess was right. For some obscure reason this girl believed in him, and expected him to believe in her. Suddenly he felt again that unaccustomed sense of humbleness to which she sometimes reduced him. He stuck a thumb and forefinger into the pocket of his vest and drew out the little scraps of paper which had been his note to Earl Shaw: insignificant pencil marked scraps—but they had prevented a shoot-out and caused the unexpected surrender, in his own stronghold, of the Bar S boss.
“Here,” he said, handing them to her. “It can be pieced together easy enough, I guess.”
She held the scraps in her open palm, studying him. He said, “Try to remember this: I was trying to do what you asked me to—and the means at hand were few and poor.” He turned back to the banjo.
“What’s the matter?” She was still looking at him across the fragments in her hand.
“Nothing.”
“I think you don’t want me to read this,” she said.
“No,” he answered, “I expect I don’t.”
She hesitated, puzzled. Then, “Here—take them back.” She pressed the scraps into his hand.
He looked at her, but she had dropped her eyes. There was silence for a long moment. Then, “Thanks,” he said, and slowly put the scraps of paper back in his pocket. He was acutely aware that he did not understand this girl as well as he had supposed. He stared at her wonderingly, but since she did not meet his eyes, he was unable to read her quiet face. He wanted to tell her that he was grateful, and that in returning to him, unread, the fragments of his note to Earl Shaw she had done more than he had expected or asked. He thought that developments would justify him, in the end. But just now he angrily resented the circumstances which urged him to withhold anything from Sally. He felt suddenly lonely, as if there had been a new gulf struck between himself and this girl, just as they were beginning to draw near.
The unnatural strain upon the Lazy M distorted every relationship. What was happening in Adobe Wells—in Walkerton, the county seat? By what means had old Major chosen to carry the fight, and how was the scrap going? As they sat there, now, in this very hour, the fortune of the Buckhorn water might be swaying in the balance of finality. Whatever was happening today affected them all, yet they had no news, no means of communication. For all they knew the guns might be speaking in Adobe Wells by now. They could only wait, each with his own special hopes and doubts. It could not last long: when word next came from down-country they knew that it would be definite, at once significant and prophetic.
“It won’t always be this way,” he told her. “Pretty quick, now, all this stuff will be sifted down and shaken out, and everybody will stand out plain for just what they are.”
She did not answer him. Momentarily at a loss for words with which to accomplish the impossible, he turned again to the sounding strings. The banjo spoke softly, its cadences true and sure; and in a moment or two he began to sing to her, his voice hardly more than a whisper above the gentle minor thrum of the chords:
“De la Sierra Moreno,
Cielito Lindo, vienen bajando...”
He was looking at her as he sang. He and the banjo were talking to her as plainly as if he had found the words which had eluded him. “There are you and here am I, and that is all that matters,” the throb of the banjo said. No vaquero had ever sung that sadly lilting song with a deeper appeal, nor with a plainer meaning to one listener alone; and there was the history of the world in the pulsation of the strings.
Looking up, Clay Hughes saw that Sally Major had covered her face with her hands. She faced him immediately, however, and he was rocked backwards as he saw that her face, lovely still, was perfectly expressionless, and her eyes, as they met his, were as cool and hard as grey eyes may be. He had not realized that for a little while her eyes had been gentle—tender almost—until he saw them once more unyielding and aloof.
“Look here,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind again.”
“You mean you—”
“I want you to get out and stay out: saddle and ride, and get out of this valley, and as far from it as you can; and if anyone follows to bring you back here—see that he doesn’t succeed!”
“But—”
“It’s Bob Macumber they’ve set to watch you now. I’ll handle Macumber.”
“Why?” said Hughes.
“Because I say so. I think you’ll find out that that’s reason enough!”
She turned abruptly to leave the window, but he caught her wrist. Someone was coming into the patio, but he was unwilling to let her go without one word more. “I suppose you know,” he said, “that I won’t do anything of the kind?”
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do exactly what I say.”
The slow click of heels upon the patio tiles was very close upon them now. Reluctantly, Hughes released her wrist, and
instantly she disappeared into the inner shadows.
He turned to face Bob Macumber.
Chapter Nine
“Singing! For gosh sakes!” said Bob Macumber. “Singing! What have you got to sing about?”
Hughes struck a final dissonant chord and laid the banjo down. “Maybe not so much as I thought,” he answered. “What’s the matter now?”
“I been looking all over the place for you. Didn’t you hear the old man’s car drive up?”
“Yes, I heard it.”
“That was him come in the front of the house a little bit ago. He wants to see you.”
“All right.”
As Hughes turned away, Macumber gripped his arm with a heavy hand. “Listen,” he said. “Listen! Use your head. I’m going to help you. I don’t care what comes of it, I’m going to help you. I’ll get out your horse for you, and I’ll give you one of my own. I’ll give you the lay of the land—how you can get out of here without being followed very good. I’ll fake it out here some way so as to give you all the start I can. I don’t know what’s going on here—not even as well as you do I guess—but you and me have ridden together some awful long trails, and I’m not going back on you now. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get out, and get out quick! I’ll—”
“To hell with that,” said Hughes.
“You won’t clear out?” Bob demanded, nonplussed. Hughes shook his head. “I think,” said Macumber, “you must be crazy.”
“If you bet on it,” said Hughes, “try to get odds. Is the old man in his office?”
Macumber nodded. “What am I going to say to the old fire-eater when he wants to know why I let you keep your gun?”
“I’ll handle that,” Hughes said. Again he found himself in familiar circumstances—one man in a wilderness, with no one to depend upon but himself. He went striding off toward the hallway that led to the front of the house and the old man’s office. Once more his disreputable hat was jerked over one eye, and that saddle-bound swagger was in his walk. Macumber, a disconsolate figure in the dusk, stood motionless, watching him go.
