by Noel Loomis
“No! By God, I’m going out!”
The tumbling arguments of Doc Hodges checked themselves as Hughes fought furiously in his weakness to get up. Abruptly Hodges gave it up and helped Hughes to his feet. “You’ll pay for this,” Hodges was insisting, “as sure as—”
“I’ve got to get out there!”
Stephen Sessions was trailing behind them as if drawn against his will, as they came out into the first rays of the early sun. Shaw and Major had drawn a few paces away. They were speaking together, but the others could not hear what was said. In the offing a little group of those slim swaggering kids that made up the National Guard Unit turned to watch curiously, unaware of what was happening, but sensing that something was queer.
What arrangement was made between Major and Shaw the watchers could not know. Hughes, half supported by Doc Hodges, was within a few paces of the two old men as they separated and walked away from each other, not in opposite directions, but divergently, as along the arms of a Y. Oliver Major’s strides were clean and sure; Earl Shaw’s steady, but very slow.
Behind him, Hughes heard Stephen Sessions say in an incredulous, almost silly voice, as if he could scarcely conceive of what was happening, “Why, they’re going to shoot it out! Why, there’s a man going to be killed!”
“Shut up, you fool,” said Hughes.
What happened then only Hughes apparently understood in time. At what point the two old men had agreed to stop and face each other, the watchers did not know, nor by what signal they had agreed to draw and fire. But as the two walked their divergent ways there was a moment in which the back of Oliver Major was turned to his lagging enemy.
Perhaps something broke within Earl Shaw with the strain of a personal war that was older than the trees under which they stood, so that the nursed hatred of the years suddenly became too much. Or perhaps the man who all his life had worked in shadows learned suddenly that to face death in open sunlight was to discover fear. Hughes saw Earl Shaw check his stride, and turn suddenly tense as a cat, tall and stiff on his toes. Shaw’s right hand whipped to the hidden holster where he carried his gun.
Sometimes in the split second flash of necessity a man can make a decision instantaneously, without thought, making a choice which later proves the only possible choice which could have been made. If Hughes had shouted to Oliver Major the warning would have come too late. Instead he shouted with all his strength the one word, “Shaw!” and with his left hand snatched for Hodges’ gun.
The very overkeyed tensity of Earl Shaw saved Oliver Major then. In the instant of drawing his gun, Shaw whirled, and his gun swung upon Clay Hughes at a range of twenty feet.
To the watchers it seemed that both guns spoke together—Shaw’s weapon and the gun Hughes had snatched from the holster of Doc Hodges. Actually, Earl Shaw’s gun must have come a split second late. Dust jumped at Clay’s feet and the ricochet snarled past his knees. Earl Shaw toppled forward and fell heavily, limp to the finger-tips, face down in the dust.
It hardly seemed that the watchers needed the word of Doc Hodges, who left Hughes to rush forward to the fallen man, to tell them that Earl Shaw was dead.
For a few moments there were shoutings back and forth, and hurried inquiries, and running O. D. clad figures, coming up from all portions of the Lazy M. Perhaps twenty had gathered there, almost before the smoke of the guns had drifted down the breeze. Yet, perhaps, no one there but Clay Hughes remembered the story of the Buckhorn water well enough to understand the single comment of Oliver Major. It was a long time since Sol Major, Oliver’s brother, had been a living force in Buckhorn Valley.
Oliver Major spoke low and quietly, as if to some one unseen, close by his side. “It’s finished, Sol,” he said; then turned and walked away.
Hughes stood swaying on his one good leg, trying to keep the weight off the one that was stiff and bound. “Mr. Major,” he called out, “are you all right?”
“He’s all right, and he’s walked away. Can’t you see that?”
“Not very good,” said Hughes. “I’m sleepy, I guess.” They saw him raise one hand to his eyes, then turn and walk stiffly toward the house. Sessions and Hodges hurried forward to assist him. At first he tried to push them away; but a moment later he was glad of their support, as he realized that otherwise he would not have made the house on his own legs.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was hard for Hughes to believe that anything could put him entirely out of commission, holding him down in a bed which he quickly learned to hate. But as his wounds stiffened and bound, he was forced to admit that time must pass before he could get up and ride. The days had dragged into weeks before he sat in the patio again, one of his arms still stiff and ineffectual as he tried to haze the old rhythms from the banjo.
“De la Sierra Moreno,
Cielito Lindo, vienen bajando...”
A number of things had changed while he had been held down. Even Dusty Rivers was far along the road to recovery by then. Except for Walk Ross, the others had mended rapidly. Walk’s great effort, in which he had struggled up to fire a single shot that got his man, had been too much for him. For a few days he held on, seeming to rally; then one night, unexpectedly, he had turned his face to the wall and died.
With Earl Shaw dead, the Adobe Wells organization had blown apart like a started covey of partridges. Smoky Walters and Frank Muldoon, ace gunfighters of the Bar S, were dead; Dutch Pete was in Mexico; Judge Greer, the heart of the Walkerton branch of the organization, had sailed for the Orient for unclear reasons best known to himself, with no definite date set for his return. Theron Replogle, his political throne tottering in the blast of furious opinion that had arisen from cattlemen throughout the state, promptly steadied himself by throwing the collapsed Silverado project to the wolves; soon no one would hear anything more about the ambitious steal which had threatened the Buckhorn. And already the state’s official investigation of the Lazy M’s armed stand against the law was, under the guidance of Sessions and Replogle, drifting off into obscure vague channels, becoming neglected and forgotten by the daily press.
Almost from the moment in which Clay Hughes had stumbled into the cavalry camp with the message from Stephen Sessions which lifted the pump house siege, the luck of the Lazy M had changed. The last battering which adversity owed the fortunes of Oliver Major seemed to have spent itself; soon, apparently, only the bullet-splashed adobe walls would bear visible witness to the war which had threatened to reduce the Buckhorn itself to a waste.
Yet, there was verity in the mournful note of the song which the crippled banjo accompanied:
“Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Canta y no llores...”
It was the fifth day in which he had been allowed on his feet. Today, for the first time, he had saddled a quiet, well-worked-out horse, and begun to work himself into saddle shape again. He had been surprised and angry to find that the saddle had turned into an instrument of torture. It seemed a long time since he had struck out at a high lope, his disreputable hat jerked any old way on his head, one foot swinging free of its stirrup, rolling a cigarette as he rode any old pace, any old ground. But all that would come back.
One thing, though, seemed lost. Since he had shot his way out of the pump house siege Sally had changed.
It seemed to him that she seldom met his eyes, and even when she did he found he could no longer see into their depths. Somehow, without reason or explanation, she had retreated beyond the gulf, and he seemed unable to call her back.
Just at first, while for a day or two he had been too weak to lift a hand, she had nursed him constantly and tenderly. It was when he had begun to mend a little that he noticed the change. He had tried to hold her hand then, no more; and she had drawn away.
He jerked bolt upright, startled by the unexpected. The fever blazed in his head, dizzying him so that her beloved face swam hazily before his eyes. He reached out to her with the one hand he could move. “Here—look here—you can’t do that—look here�
��”
His whole soul was making love to her, but the words were not in his head. They seemed to have been shot out of him, like his songs, like his strength. His hand dropped limp upon the blanket as he suddenly realized that the emotion which swept her face was alarm. For a moment he had stared at her dizzily, shocked by an overwhelming sense of loss.
She forced him to lie down again. He tried to resist her, but the strength was out of him, as if his muscles would not obey his will. He heard her say, “You mustn’t do that. Be quiet. Don’t you want to get on your feet again, ever?”
Perhaps her voice was gentle, but his anger at his own weakness deafened him to everything but the general drift of her words. He turned his face to the wall, fighting the savagery of his resentment. That night the fever came back into him, and the next day when he broke all rules by getting up, hunting out his clothes, and trying to dress himself, he collapsed upon the tiles. After that everything seemed out of step. He fumed and fretted, delaying his recovery. Once he grasped Sally’s arm as she brought him a glass of water, and pulled her close. “What is it, Sally? What’s the matter?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought we understood each other,” he tried to explain. His mind was skip-stopping on him again. “Now something’s wrong; something’s changed.”
“Nothing’s changed, Clay.”
“In the pump house I took you in my arms. You were different then. I thought—”
He saw the red flush come into her tanned face, the face that he was always seeing wherever he looked, awake or in his dreams. “Oh, that,” she said. “I don’t think we’d better talk about that now.”
He stared at her for a moment, and the treacherous fever rushed into his head again. Dark anger smothered him, and as he raised himself on his elbow that mysterious weakness which he was unable to accept or understand was dragging back upon his shoulders, bringing a touch of madness. The combination was suddenly unendurable, and he burst out at her furiously.
“You’re like everybody else,” he raved senselessly. “When I was one more gun to the defense of the brand, I was all right, wasn’t I? Oh, sure, I was a good boy then, a top hand! But now the shooting’s over, and my gun isn’t needed, it’s different, isn’t it?”
Suddenly his eyes had cleared, and he saw that she was watching him wide-eyed. Instantly he was swept with remorse. “I’m sorry,” he said brokenly, “I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
She made him lie down again. “It’s all right,” she said. “It makes no difference.”
“No difference—no difference.” The words kept repeating themselves to him after she had gone.
He decided that he must make love to her no more until he was on his feet again, and could see how things stood. This self-imposed restraint made him cool and short of speech. When she was away from him he remembered her as more desirable than everything else in life put together; but when he saw her again, he realized that he had forgotten how essential to him she had become. The wave of her hair and the curve of her throat, the quick glance of her eyes, made the distance between them intolerable; and the least touch of her fingers was cool flame.
This was torture. More than once when she was with him, he turned away his face.
Now, as he tried to make the banjo speak as it used to, he was realizing that it was past time for him to leave. The old call of the trail that had drawn him all up and down the west was in his ears again, but this time in a new way. The trail no longer beckoned with any point or meaning. He thought of the endless wandering horse trails with weariness, for he no longer believed in any mysterious benefit at the end of any of them.
There was a smell of early frost in the air, forecasting the bleak rigidity of winter upon the barren granite of the high divide; and the end of all trails seemed emptiness, an emptiness haunted by the remembered face of a girl. It seemed to him that he would never again hear the wind in the timber without imagining that he heard her voice; and he would be seeing her eyes—not aloof as they had lately been, but warm and deep, speaking to his own—when he broke his soogans on the long prairies.
It was time to move on.
He bent over the banjo, and with an impact of effort ended the fumbling of the strings. The wrench of pain that twisted his lamed arm went unregarded as the banjo woke to life again, singing once more in the old syncopating way. A beat like that of loping hoofs came back into the strings, and to it he crooned his song very low, singing only to the banjo, to himself, and to the girl whom he knew was not listening. And low and quiet though the song was, he had never sung it as he sung it now, with all his heart in it, and all the accumulated passion of the long trails.
“Pues qué he de hacer, si yo say el abandonado?
Pues qué he de hacer, será por el amor de Dios...”
The last chord blundered into disorder, as the lame arm refused to go on. He laid the banjo aside and wearily covered his face with his hands, as once more there crept through him, fainter now, but very real, the sickening physical weakness that was his temporary heritage from the guns. Yet he recognized that it was now less definite than before. In a little while it would return no more, and he would know himself again.
Then, somehow, he became aware that Sally Major had come across the patio and was standing in front of him, and he raised his face.
She was wearing the white lawn dress which was the first dress he had ever seen her wear. From behind her the treacherous desert sunlight struck through the light lawn as if it were thinly frosted glass, revealing the clean slim curves of her body so clearly that Clay caught his breath. There was no beauty in the world like the half-hidden, half-revealed beauty of Sally Major; in it lay a power that could destroy a man, a magic urgent and impelling: irresistible as the world thrust that had built the rim, more subtle than the war lust that ran hidden in the Buck-horn water. Hughes wished to look away, but could not.
“Come here,” he said unsteadily. “Come here and sit down.”
She obeyed him, but he saw that she was faintly hesitant, uncertain. He regarded her with the beginnings of a new comprehension, and the loneliness of trails was forgotten. She returned his gaze; and it seemed to him for a brief moment that her eyes were warm and deep, and answered his, as he remembered them in the time before the Bar S guns had brought him down. Then she dropped her eyes.
He said, “That’s better.”
“What’s better? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you?” Suddenly there went out of him all that unaccustomed sense of uncertainty which his wounds had left him. The old buoyant vitality came back into him with a rush, so he knew that his trail held for him what he demanded of it, no more—and no less. Sally no longer seemed distant, but very near.
“For a while around here,” he said, “it seemed like you were a million miles away; sometimes I thought you weren’t going to get back at all.”
“Away?” she said, puzzled. But she was looking at him curiously as if just becoming aware that he too had returned from a far place.
“Maybe it was because I wasn’t seeing very good,” he said. “I don’t know what’s been the matter with me the last couple of weeks.”
“You don’t know what’s been the matter with you? Why, silly, do you think you’re a grizzly bear? An ordinary man would have been rubbed out by the gunning you took!”
“Oh, shush,” he said. “Anyway, it seemed to me that you’d changed considerable, in ways I hadn’t allowed for.”
Her face was averted, but she answered him deliberately. “Because of that day when you wanted to hold my hand?”
“Things like that.”
“Did you think,” she said queerly, looking at him squarely, “that after I’d kissed you, I didn’t want you to so much as hold my hand?”
“I guess maybe it seemed like that, right then.”
“They said that you were to be kept quiet; that you were not to be excited in the least, in any way. Lat
er it seemed like—” her voice was an even drawl—“maybe I’d flattered myself.”
“Flattered yourself?”
“By thinking,” she said, still in that soft drawl, “that maybe I was exciting to you. So often, when I went into your room—you—turned away your face.”
“Good lord,” he said. He moved closer to her, and commandeered both her hands. She sat motionless, watching him with unreadable eyes. “Listen,” he said. “In a few days, I’m heading up into the Nevadas. Up there—”
“But I thought—” she exclaimed. “Why, didn’t Dad tell you that you’re welcome here always, as long as the Lazy M runs beef? I thought—”
“Listen,” he commanded. “Some people I know up there run a mine. It’s in a bad place, and the ore has to be packed out with mules. In winter time it’s mighty hard to get packers to contract the work. I can have that contract if I want. It’s hard, mean work, but it pays high. You see, I couldn’t very well hang on around here as a worthless hand that was owed something for some gun fighting once. I can make my stake, and I will make it, and when it’s made, maybe sometime I can come back and throw in with the Lazy M again, in a small way. But now—”
She suddenly sprang up, white-faced and defiant, and tried to free her hands, prisoned in his grip. “Let me go! What do I care where you go, or when? Go saddle and ride, and don’t come back!”
“I thought you’d be right interested in what place I had in mind,” he said.
“Why should I?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re going with me.”
She stared at him a long moment, as if uncomprehending. Then she said in a small voice, “What makes you think I will? If you’re asking me—”
“Asking you?” he repeated. “No, I’m not asking you. I’m telling you, child.”
“Well, I won’t—” Her voice faltered, and she suddenly sat down on the bench, her face away from him. He gathered her into his arms, gently, coaxingly; and after a moment she hid her eyes as she had hidden them once before, in the curve of his throat.
