The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

  “Who is it?” The demand came quick and sharp, hardly more than a tight whisper.

  He didn’t move. “Joy!”

  “Lew!” The door swung back. She made a small dark figure rushing toward him.

  He caught her and her arms went around him and clung with something desperate and almost fierce in their grip. “Lew!” she said again. And then, “I can’t believe it!”

  She held herself back from him a little, and in the turbulence of his own feeling in this moment he did a thing he had not intended to do. He bent his head. Her mouth pressed warm and sweet against his own.

  Holding her, all the month-long ache was swept from his body. His tiredness was gone. It was like hunger satisfied. She moved first, drawing away, and he asked, “Joy, what’s happened?”

  “I don’t know!” The fear he had quieted broke into her quickened voice again. “Our grass stacks were burned late this afternoon, and a little while ago Clay rode in and said something to Dad. I didn’t hear. But all the men went with him.”

  “Where?”

  “Down the valley. Our trail herd’s been gathered there on the flats.”

  He took her hands.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “No. Owl-Head’s here.”

  “Then I’ve got to go. I can help.”

  She gripped him. “But I haven’t even seen you! Wait, Lew. Wait a little—” A sudden burst of gunfire rattled in the distance. A rumble like far-off thunder trembled up from the valley mouth.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Three Young Apaches Together

  In the first moments of running his horse beyond the ranch buildings he couldn’t place the direction of that low rumble. It vibrated in the air all around him, louder now, coming close. Then he was out of the shadowy growth of the valley bottom, and against the barren plain he could see a black flood of longhorns pouring east across that open land.

  He veered off to cut in at the head of the stampede, drawing his gun. A dust fog rolled out to meet him; the clack of horns and hoofs and the heavy breathing of perhaps four thousand animals swept aside every other sound. They were still in a closely packed formation but beginning to string out, wedge-shaped, with a small bunch of leaders at the point. Coming abreast of these, he threw his horse against their hard-ribbed bodies, firing his gun close to the long, gaunt faces.

  They were running like frightened jack rabbits. But they edged away from his blazing gun. That broke their galloping stride for a moment. He crowded them again, saw that he had turned these leaders, with the rest following behind. He could hear nothing above the clacking tumult, yet along the dark line other guns were making quick flashes of light. They closed up toward him; a rider charged past, yelling something he could not catch.

  Slowly the black wedge began to curve, until in time the point was bent in and joined to the base. The cattle were still running, but in an endless merry-go-round now, getting nowhere. Their run slackened. Under the pressure of men closing in they made at last a solid, milling pool.

  He continued to circle around the edge, while, like a great river eddy, spending itself upon the shallows of a sand bar, the pool turned more and more slowly and came to a stop. There was left only the panting breath of the animals, rising and falling in waves of sound. He turned his horse off to one side where a little group of riders had halted.

  In the dust and dark he had recognized no one and had not been recognized himself. Then their talk began to reach him.

  Someone said, “We’re lucky, that’s all. They didn’t get a good start.”

  “Wasn’t luck either,” another put in. “Who was it got up to the point so fast?” That was Tom Arnold’s rough low voice.

  They were aware of his horse then coming out of the dark, and their talk broke off. He rode in, grinning. “Hello, Tom,” he said.

  “Lew?” Arnold’s low voice lifted. “Boys, it’s Lew Burnet!”

  The group moved and they were suddenly around him, their horses crowding his legs, and he was shaking hands and grinning in the warmth of friendly faces—Tom Arnold and Joe Wheat and old “Rebel John” Quarternight, who had taught him all he knew about cattle.

  He was aware, afterward, of one rider who had remained apart from these others, and he called out, “Hello, Clay.”

  Clay Manning brought his horse around. “How are you, Lew?” His big shape leaned across the saddle horn, with all expression on a wide mouth closely guarded. He was a high, square-built man, young and blond and strikingly good-looking; one who could be forgiven, Lew often thought, for watching his shadow on the ground. But always there seemed to be some impatience driving him. It could throw him at times into reckless good humor or plunge him again into violently irritable moods.

  There had been some reason for his wait off there in the dark, but now, casually enough, he said, “Guess you got here just in time. How’d you come?”

  “Down the valley,” Lew said and added, “from Dripping Spring today.”

  At that he saw the brief, direct stare Clay gave him; yet in the faint light he could read nothing more.

  One by one at spaced intervals the guard riders had come past, and as their dim figures loomed out of the dark Tom Arnold had kept close watch. He swung back now, asking suddenly, “Clay, where’s Steve? You were together.”

  “I’ll look.” Clay said and started off.

  Near him Joe Wheat straightened up his thin slat frame, offering, “Better take someone. I’ll go with you.”

  But Clay refused with a quick impatience. “Stay with the guard. Nothing’s happened. Tom, you going back to the house? We’ll get no more trouble now. There’s too many of us. Someone ought to be with Joy—”

  “I’m going,” Arnold said. “Send Steve in when you find him. Lew, come on with me.”

  They loped into the black valley mouth side by side, but aware of Tom Arnold’s strict silence he held down the questions that crowded his mind.

  The drumming of their horses’ hoofs echoed back as they drew close to the house, and the front door opened again slightly. Then the man stepped down from his saddle ahead of him, and he noticed a thing that had not been apparent before.

  Tom Arnold was not large. But there had always been a vital force in him that gave a feeling of size. There had been a robust power in his voice and decisive strength even in the way he walked. Something had happened. For he climbed the three gallery steps slowly and heavily, like a tired old man. His thin shoulders drooped; he looked small; and following him, Lew asked with troubled wonder what could bring that change in a single year.

  Joy had come out toward them. “Lew,” she said, “your room’s all ready. No one else has used it. The mule came in and we put your war bag inside.” But he saw that her eyes were watching her father in a darkly anxious look.

  “All right,” he said and turned away, seeing her put one hand on Tom’s arm. “I’ll get some of this prairie scrubbed off my face.”

  Deeply puzzled, he went along the gallery to a jutting wing divided into three rooms. It couldn’t be age. Sixty was still young for a man of Tom Arnold’s hardy kind.

  A lamp had been lighted in the wing’s second room, and inside he surveyed its small neatness with a sudden memory of things that seemed now so long ago. The white sheets turned back beneath a shaggy buffalo robe made him smile. He hadn’t slept in a bed like that for a year.

  In this room was all of his boyhood, in the only home he had ever known. The same brindle cowhide was on the plank floor as when he had first come here to live; the huge pink-flowered china pitcher full of warm water stood in its bowl on the marble-topped commode. Even his prized and secretly puzzling boyhood possession—a colored whisky advertisement of a beautiful lady wrapped in a veil—still hung against the white plastered wall.

  He had only to close his eyes to feel himself back in that time again; he could hear Jo
y’s shrill voice shrieking at him as she went to bed in the next room on one side and Steve shouting from the other, a wild release of high spirits that would rise into owl hoots and the quavering bark of coyotes, until they were all exhausted and instantly asleep.

  Pouring water into the china basin, he thought that childhood was gone too soon. All at once in this country you were a boy one day and a man the next. They had been Three Little Apaches together, and then suddenly Joy was to be married, and he was on the trail to Wyoming, and Steve was riding his young rebellious way, perhaps the only one of them who had not grown up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Some Strange Meaning

  With the day’s dust scrubbed from his face and his long hair watered back slick he went out into the hall and turned to the Cross T’s family dining-room. Beyond an open doorway he saw Tom Arnold sitting in a chair at the front room’s fireplace. Joy stood near him, an arm across his shoulders.

  Owl-Head Jackson, the cook, came into the dining-room from the kitchen carrying a heaped platter of food. “Lew!” He grinned. “You broom-tailed maverick, it’s good to see that ugly face of yours again!”

  He put the platter down and reached out one of his gnarled, misshapen hands and stood there with the wrinkles of his grin covering all of his brown, bald face. The only hair he had rose in two pointed gray tufts above his ears, like those of a horned prairie owl.

  From the front room Joy called, “Pour a cup of coffee for me, Owl-Head,” and came on back.

  Lew pulled out a chair for her, and afterward, when he had taken his own seat across the round table, she sat there smiling at him, yet didn’t speak.

  They could only look at each other, as if now, suddenly, they could not find their old familiar words of talk. She had changed. He had known her as a leggy, half-wild kid with a boyish frankness and a way of deviling the life out of him one moment and mothering him the next. She was a woman now, with the frankness gone and a woman’s knowledge in her faint smile and a woman’s fullness shaping her softly in this year.

  A lamp on a tall crystal pedestal stood between them, and the light through a ruby globe shed its warm color on her dark skin. She still had the appeal of smallness for him, and her eyes and hair, almost black, made him think again the names he used to call her—papoose and squaw. Yet her hair was no longer in a single squaw braid down her back but was parted and drawn smoothly around her head with a soft roll at the nape of her neck. That was part of the grown-up change. And the dress she had on tonight made the change complete, a red-plaid calico, with a row of white buttons from her waist to her throat, pulling the cloth tightly over the mature roundness of her body.

  Her smile brightened. “Eat your supper, Lew!”

  That made him grin, for that came out of their old times together, Joy mothering him again.

  “You must be starved,” she said.

  “Now that I think of it,” he admitted, “I am.”

  He picked up his fork, and she sat for a moment stirring her coffee slowly, her eyes lowered to the cup.

  Owl-Head Jackson had spread out a home-coming meal: sliced beef heart mixed with browned flour gravy, stewed corn and mashed potatoes, a pudding of rice and raisins boiled in molasses, and half of a dried-apple pie with sugared crust. It was holiday fare after his month on the trail with nothing but wild game.

  He shook his head over the heaped dishes. “Now I’m home!”

  She let him eat for a little while and then laid her arms on the table and leaned forward under the lamp’s ruddy glow. A quick and strange excitement had come into her eyes.

  “Tell me about Wyoming!”

  “That’s a lot of country,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything! What it’s like and what you do there.”

  “Well, I lived in a dugout,” he said, “in the bank of a creek and spent most of my time fighting rats.”

  “No”—she laughed—“I don’t mean that. Aren’t there some mountains?”

  “Oh, sure; mountains, high ones. Some of them with snow all the year. In summer the streams don’t go dry there. I guess it’s sort of a pretty place,” he admitted. “I liked the pines.”

  “Then it’s beautiful. I’m going to love it. I know I will!”

  That stopped him. He put down his fork. “Joy, what do you mean?”

  Her cheeks were flushed; the suppressed excitement had turned her breathless. “I wanted to be the first to tell you. I asked Dad to let me. You don’t know, do you?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t know anything.”

  It burst from her then wildly. “I’m going north! We’re all going. We’re moving up there for good.”

  “You don’t mean with the herd.”

  “Yes!”

  He could only stare at her. There had been nothing of this in Tom’s letter either; no more than that he was sending his longhorns on a drive north. Yet it wasn’t his thought of the long trail up which few women had ever gone that held him silent, but the three of them, Clay and Joy and himself, riding that trail together.

  His silence brought a little scowl across her dark eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  “Joy,” he asked, “when are you and Clay getting married?”

  Her lips parted and closed; the high color drained from her cheeks. When she spoke her voice was very quiet.

  “I don’t know, Lew. Why?” She paused and looked away from him and then didn’t wait for his answer. “He’s been wanting it before we started. But I can’t, and perhaps I’m not being fair. I’m just afraid, I guess.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  She brought her eyes back to his face, and he could feel them trace the crescent mark on his forehead and the curved scar along his cheek, lingering there.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve waited too long. Too many things have happened now. Whether I’m married or not doesn’t seem so important any more.”

  “I’m sorry, Joy.” He reached across the table and took her two folded hands in his big fist, pressed them and let them go. That was his first feeling, regret that anything at all could make her unhappy. But then, thinking of Clay Manning, a dull rage filled him. This was like Clay, to throw all he had into getting something and afterward, sure of it, make little effort. A man in love with a girl could do better than that.

  She seemed to read his thought and outraged feeling, for she said gently, “No, don’t blame Clay. It’s nothing he’s done.” She pushed back her chair a little. “Now finish your supper, Lew. Dad’s waiting to talk.”

  * * * *

  In front of the big rock fireplace, leaning forward at times to push the fragrant juniper logs together or sitting with his head tipped against the high cowhide back of his chair, Tom Arnold had done more than wait. He could hear the familiar sound of Lew Burnet’s talk in the dining-room, a slow and easy sound, and something restful and grateful had come over him with this knowledge that Lew was back.

  Firelight has a way of drawing time and space together, focusing many things before a man’s eyes there in the leaping flame. That and the familiar voice carried Tom Arnold far off across these years in which he had watched Lew grow up. He could not remember why he had taken the boy in, except that he had looked pinched and hungry and was alone, coming to the ranch one winter morning asking for a job. There had been no special promise in him then. And it still seemed unbelievable to be counting on that homeless boy now, where he could not count on his own son.

  Thinking of Steve, Tom Arnold sat wholly still, held by a dead, heavy feeling compounded of loneliness and a father’s defeat. It was his own fault, he guessed. For he knew himself for what he was—strict and unsparing, with a single-minded belief that a man was born into this rich new land to make the best use of his time. That was the code he had tried to force upon a youngster who had rebelled against it from the first. But that he woul
d go on trying, he knew also; he had lived too long in his own way successfully to change it now.

  The talk in the dining-room ended. He heard the chairs scrape back and thought of another ambition he’d had once and watched die. Then the two figures were pacing toward him, Joy with her hand in Lew Burnet’s arm, looking small and so much alive beside his straight high shape. Her cheeks were flushed. And he understood what it was in the man that could make him watch her in an amused but intently steady way, and the old hope he’d had once rose in him again.

  He smiled. “You get filled up, boy?”

  “I did.” Lew grinned. “It’s worth a month’s riding to get one of Owl-Head’s meals!”

  Joy released his arm and sat down on a halved log stool at her father’s knee. He ranged himself beside the fireplace, its blaze warming him and a sense of comfort sweeping over him powerfully. This was home. Here in this room was the peace of family life for more than forty years.

  He remembered the unspoken rule that around this hearthstone no man brought his troubles. It was a part of the Cross T isolated from all the rest, a sheltered cove untouched by storm. But he knew that rule would not hold tonight.

  He drew out his pipe and poured tobacco in it, and packing the bowl carefully with his blunt thumb, he let his eyes lift and go once around the massive adobe walls, three feet thick and plastered on this inside with white lime. Tom Arnold’s hand was everywhere here. These high beams he had dragged himself from the cedar brakes of the Little Comanche, hewed them, and fastened them into place with strips of green cowhide. Nails were worth their weight in gold then, freighted two hundred miles by ox team. But the green leather had dried into the hardness of iron bands, secure and immovable even now.

  All of the furniture was of that same solid hand construction. Two settees, ten feet long, flanked the side walls like wings out from the fireplace. Their cedar wood was aged smooth and dark, the hair worn to bald spots on the hide bottoms by the parade of men who had lounged in the companionship of winter evenings. He could see those men, cowboys and outlaws, plains trappers in greasy fringed buckskin and army officers in a glitter of braid and sabers, all equally welcome so long as they were inside this house. And it seemed suddenly unthinkable to him that Tom Arnold could be planning to leave a place where his life was so deeply rooted.