The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

  With his pipe going he looked down and said, “Well, Tom, here I am. There’s one thing I’d like to know first. Joy says you’re moving north. I thought it was only a trail herd.”

  Arnold nodded. “She’s right. We’re leaving here for good.”

  His dark eyes under their jutting gray brows were centered into the fire; his brown, rope-scarred hands were flat upon his knees. He sat that way for a moment, saying no more, and then whatever it was he had silently considered gave him strength. His head lifted sharply in an old challenging fling of his gray hair.

  He said, “You needn’t look so confounded, Lew! A man has moved before. And I don’t own the Cross T any longer. The cattle are mine, yes, but not this.” He waved into the room. “Nor the land.”

  “Sold out?”

  “No.” Arnold turned his head a little. “Joy, I’d like to talk with Lew alone.”

  “Dad!” She sprang up and threw her arm across his shoulders. She shook him. “You can’t go on keeping things back from me! What’s the use? I’m not a little girl any more!”

  He looked at her, hesitating, and then one of his hands reached up and patted hers. And in that moment, watching them, Lew thought whatever trouble had come here had done one good thing. There had been little show of affection in this family. Tom Arnold was too sternly disciplined a man to draw out any soft emotion. It wasn’t in him. He was kindly in his way, yet did even a kind thing with a gruffness and bluntness or in grim silence. With those traits he had built a barrier between himself and his children, especially Steve. Lew could remember Steve’s first Christmas saddle, his father’s gift, a beautiful thing, hand-stamped and silver mounted, that had brought happy tears to the small boy’s eyes. Tom couldn’t stand that. Angrily he had growled, “What the hell you blubberin’ about?”

  Even with Joy he had done little better; but the scene they made now, his hand patting hers on his shoulder, was close in a way they had never been before.

  “Well, all right,” he said to her. “You know most of what’s happened. You might as well hear the rest.”

  She sat down again on the log stool and watched his face.

  “We had a bank robbery a month ago, Lew,” he said. “At a bad time. Trail buyers had been here making up their herds for the north. The money they paid to a dozen Ox Bow cattlemen was on deposit in my vaults.”

  It was characteristic of Lew Burnet not to tell that he already knew this. He waited.

  Arnold’s eyes centered themselves into the smoldering juniper logs. He said quietly, “I took the blame. It’s my bank and these cattlemen are my friends. They’ve got only small outfits, and if they lose their money now it’ll break them. I know by law I don’t have to make it up. But I’m going to. I’ve already turned the ranch in for assets, appointed a new president, and I’m out.”

  “You pay a big price for your peace of mind, Tom.”

  “It’s all a man’s got worth keeping,” Arnold said. He sat back in his chair. “I’m making a new start in the north. That’s the only reason, as far as anyone should know, why I’m leaving the Little Comanche.”

  “But there’s another?”

  The gray head nodded. “Steve. A man was killed in town the night of the robbery—Rayburn, our sheriff. Nobody knows who pulled the bank job or killed Rayburn, but some talk about Steve has reached my ears. I don’t believe it. If I did I’d hang his hide on a fence! I do know he was off somewhere all that night. He came back late the next day, drunk.”

  On her low seat Joy had made no sound, but something brought Lew’s gaze down to her and he saw the tight lines of fear and horror in her face. She looked only at her father, and then Tom Arnold’s voice dropped all the way to an old man’s deep bitterness.

  “I’ve done all I can to help that boy. I still won’t admit his wildness has taken him as far as this talk says. But it brings home to me that he’s gone out of my hands. There’s only one more thing I can do: get him out of this country, away from the friends he’s made here. The trail north is one job he can’t shift out of. It’ll make a man of him or break him, I’m pretty sure.”

  “It will,” Lew agreed. “I’ve seen it work both ways.”

  “And then in Wyoming,” Arnold said, “it’s Steve that can make a new start, I hope. Not me. I’m too old now.”

  “Dad, you aren’t,” Joy murmured. “What a thing to say!”

  In a little silent time, while Lew crouched down with his back to the blaze and watched a cricket peer from a deep space between the hearthstones, wave a signal with its long feelers and dart in again, he thought there was a thing Tom Arnold had failed to understand, good cattleman though he was.

  His way of helping Steve had always been to force him. Yet Steve was like any other Texas longhorn.

  Crowd a longhorn and he’s mean; he’ll fight you. But just let him drift, hardly knowing you’re guiding him, and he’ll go where you want him to. That was the way of the trail. It was the way with most men and animals anywhere. Old Tom hadn’t seen it with his son.

  Using a sliver of wood he explored the hearthstone crack for the cricket again, didn’t find him, and looked up to say, “There wasn’t much in your letter, Tom. And I know less since I got here. Like that stampede tonight. I’ve been wondering what was behind it.”

  “My beef contract,” Arnold said. “You know what’s happened to the price of longhorns up north?”

  “I do. Six hundred thousand head came up the trail last year. There’ll be a million on the march this spring. That’s too many. Unless trail troubles thin it out a whole lot a man won’t get more than ten dollars at the end. What does your contract call for?”

  “Three thousand head at thirty. I deliver the Indian beef at Ogallala on the first of September. It’s my own stuff I’m taking on to Wyoming.”

  “Ninety thousand dollars,” Lew figured. “That’s a jack pot for you! You’re lucky, Tom.”

  But Arnold shook his head. “I would be if my contract was direct with the government. It isn’t. The Indian Supply Company got a blanket award for the northern reservations this year, and I had to take a subcontract delivering to them. You can see the joker in that. They handle all the money and pay me only when and if I reach Ogallala on September first.

  “They signed with me five months ago. Now they want to back out. A couple of their men came down here offering five thousand dollars to cancel my deal. I refused and they started making up a herd of their own. Buying at the cheap price now, they’ll save fifty thousand dollars if they get to Ogallala with that herd—and I don’t with mine.”

  “Sure,” Lew said, “sure,” and a sudden restless impatience goaded him up onto his long legs. “But that’s a game two can play, Tom! What’s the matter here anyway? If a stampede is their deal give ’em one back. You’ve come up through enough trouble to know all the tricks.”

  Unaroused, Arnold said quietly, “I’ve let Clay handle this.”

  Lew’s glance sharpened on him. That wasn’t like this man who had built a great ranch on a raw frontier by the sheer strength of his own iron hand.

  “If trouble’s bound to come,” he said, “I’d rather settle it now than on the trail. There’ll be grief enough later. Does Clay know I’m to trail-boss for you?”

  “Not yet.” Arnold’s dark eyes lifted. He smiled. “I’m glad to know you’ve still got an edge on you! That’s what I’ve been counting on, that and a proposition I’m going to make.” His gruff bluntness returned. “Now don’t get it into your fool head that this is a gift. I’ve got my own good and selfish reasons.”

  Looking down past the man, Lew saw the breathless way in which Joy was watching him, her lips parted, all of her body held very still.

  And Tom was saying, “I want you to take a share in this Cross T herd. A trade. You’ve got that land in Wyoming. I’ve got cattle and no place to range them. I’m adding a thousand head o
f shes and yearlings to the beef contract. That thousand head will make a start on the new ranch—half for Joy and Steve, half for you.”

  It was a generous offer, more than generous, all that he would need, but with a price that neither of these two understood. Silenced by that knowledge, he stared down into the firelight so long that behind him, almost in anger, Arnold’s gruff voice burst out, “Well? What’s the trouble now?”

  “Tom,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ll boss your herd north, and you can use my range in Wyoming. But I can’t tie myself as a Cross T partner.” He saw a sharp breath drawn between the girl’s parted lips and the old man’s sudden blank amazement. “You forget Clay Manning,” he said. “That makes a fourth one in this deal after a while. There wouldn’t be room.”

  He was aware of Joy’s deeper quietness and of the fixed stare of her eyes upon him, and then in that moment’s silence an abrupt rhythm of riders pounded across the ranch yard.

  * * * *

  It was Clay Manning’s shout that sailed in to them, and then the thud of his boots hit the gallery outside, swinging down from saddle to floor edge as he always did, with his horse hardly at a stop.

  The door burst open and he came in like a gust of prairie wind, filling the room with that charged and vital force. You could never ignore Clay Manning, Lew admitted, in any gathering of men. His size and laughter and striking blond, blue-eyed good looks would make him noticed. But it was the lusty, beefy life in him that made his presence felt so strongly.

  He saw a thing stir in Joy’s face that Clay never failed to bring there: a heightening of color in her dark skin, a look of wonder and a little amusement and rapt anticipation. Clay could do that to most women.

  In the doorway he turned his head and called back outside, “It’s all right, kid,” and then came on in to Joy. He put one arm all the way around her in intimate possession, hugged her hard; and at the same time, while he made that show, he was grinning and saying, “Glad to see the old home ranch again, Lew?”

  “Sure,” he said, “sure,” and looked past him at Steve coming in now, wondering what Clay’s call, It’s all right, kid, had meant.

  Halfway across the room Steve asked, almost with a small boy’s truculence, “What did you want me for, Dad?”

  “Wondered where you were,” Arnold said. “What happened?”

  “Good lord! That all? Nothing happened! Only got separated from the bunch.” It was not until then that he faced around with a casual greeting. “How’s Wyoming?”

  “Fine, Steve,” Lew said. “Fine if you dodge the Sioux. Didn’t get my hair lifted yet!”

  He grinned, but a cool disappointment ran through him as Steve slouched back against the fireplace mantel, saying no more, as if they had parted only yesterday. He often thought that Tom Arnold’s children must have traded features and dispositions before they were born. Steve was twenty-one now, Joy twenty. But there had been an earlier maturity in the girl, a responsibility in managing her father’s house and a mothering way over its men, so that she had always seemed the older of the two. And they had traded looks surely.

  In repose, without any animation bringing her lively spirit to the surface, she might be called a plain girl with straight black hair. While Steve, tall and slim and small-boned, with light curly hair, a straight nose and full-lipped mouth and skin that never took more than a blushing tan, was almost girlishly handsome. There was nothing of Tom Arnold in him; and Lew thought again of the mother, whom he had never seen, feeling that he saw her now before the firelight, high-blooded and appealing and irresponsible, for all that was in this boy, so opposite and antagonistic to Tom’s stern self-discipline.

  There had been a little awkward wait. With sudden nervous unrest Steve flung himself from the fireplace mantel. He spoke to his father.

  “If that’s all you wanted—” And then, “Come on, Clay. Let’s go!” He started across the room.

  Arnold had risen. “Clay, I’ve got something to talk over.”

  In Lew’s memory there had never been a time when a Cross T man refused even the mildest request of Tom Arnold. And it showed him how far things were out of his grip here when Clay said, “Ought to get back on guard, Tom. Shouldn’t stop now.” He went to Joy’s low seat and leaned over her, saying, “Good night, honey,” and would have kissed her in front of all of them if she had not twisted her mouth away.

  There was an instant when Clay’s quick temper blazed in his ruddy cheeks. He took her face in both his hands and turned it up to him and stared directly into it.

  Then he laughed. “Never mind!” he said and let her go. In the doorway he gripped Steve’s arm and they pushed out into the night together, paired off in some close companionship. They had not been like that last year.

  The rush of their horses’ hoofs died from the ranch yard and the night’s deep silence came again. Tom Arnold moved from the fireplace. He looked suddenly old and tired. “I’m going to bed.”

  He turned into the hallway leading to his lonely quarters at the rear of the house, so unlike the large front corner bedroom that he had shared once and did not use any more. In this room which he had taken, Lew remembered, there was only a single bunk, a desk, a wood stove, the plain unplastered adobe walls hung with guns and ropes and bridles—the tools of a man’s trade.

  When the distant door had closed he faced Joy’s small figure standing dark against the red embers of the fire.

  “Joy,” he asked, “what’s happened? I mean to your father.”

  “I didn’t know myself,” she said, “until tonight. It’s Steve. They’ve had terrible times this year. And yet Steve means everything to him. You know that. You remember when he was a little boy and had diphtheria and we thought he was going to die? Remember how Dad hardly left the house all that time and it looked as if it would kill him, too? It’s like that now, I think. He sees Steve throwing his life away and it takes his own life right out of him.” She looked up gravely. “Lew, you could have helped more than you did.”

  “How?”

  “By accepting Dad’s offer. Steve admires you; you’ve always been able to handle him. Dad knows that. You’re really like an older brother.”

  “It looked that way tonight, didn’t it?”

  “No,” she admitted. “He’s in one of his high-headed rebellions. But it won’t last. On the trail you’ll be with him. And in the north you’ve got to be with him, too. Please!” Her hands gripped his arms, shaking them. “Promise me. For my sake. I’d feel so much better about that trip if I knew there was something settled for us at the end.”

  Something settled! He took his eyes from her to shut out the soft, sweet pleading of her lips. They stirred things in him too close to the thin edge of his control.

  Staring off into the room’s darkness, he said, “I’ll go up the trail, but that’s all. I can’t promise about the ranch.”

  “Lew.” Her hands slid down to his wrists. “Why, Lew?” Her voice was low and hushed. “Tell me. Why not?”

  He turned his head and looked down at her then; she was a woman with all of a woman’s understanding and yet must hear a man say what was already plain enough. He saw the fullness and roundness beneath the tight red cloth of her dress giving her no longer the innocence of a little girl, and there was that breathless wait in her eyes.

  That controlled moment suddenly left him. He caught her and pulled her up hard in his arms. Once before tonight he had kissed her; yet that for both of them was a kiss of meeting. He drew her up now with a violent urge to stir in her what was so mad inside himself. For an instant she was rigid, and then she was clinging to him with a turbulent strength.

  He let her go as suddenly as he caught her and stood back, shaken and staring.

  Her voice choked. “Lew, I didn’t know.” She leaned against the mantel edge.

  “You know now.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him, p
ain and despair coming into her dark eyes.

  “And that’s why I can’t promise,” he said, “about the north. You’ll be married to Clay Manning then.” He started to turn away. Her hand stopped him.

  “Good night—” On tiptoe she kissed him again, lightly, her mothering kiss. And it seemed to him afterward, alone in his room, there was some strange meaning in the way that her lips had touched the ugly scar on his cheek.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Where There’s Smoke

  He awoke in the morning with the green streak of dawn beyond his window, and the tempest of last night’s feeling with Joy was gone. He could see his way clearly again. It was like a stormy tide that had risen and flung itself against the rocks and fallen back to a surface calm. There had been a release of some kind in that moment of holding her in his arms and letting her know.

  What he saw now was work to center himself upon. It had saved him before and could save him again. In this job was more of a challenge than in any he’d ever had. There was the work of preparing four thousand longhorns for the trail and the long trail itself, and there was Steve.

  He got up and dressed in the pale light, feeling the strength of a man in complete control of himself once more.

  It was a comforting mood. It lasted that morning not quite until noon.

  All through the dark hours he had been vaguely aware of riders thudding across the ranch yard, of the intermittent tramp of boots in the kitchen and the rattle of dishes there, the night guard, he knew, coming in by pairs to eat and sleep awhile and ride again. Even now as he dressed there was a rumble of voices out in the kitchen, a quiet tone and another pitched to the sharpness of argument.

  That talk stopped when he opened his door into the hallway, and then in the warm, steamy room he found Tom Arnold and Clay Manning with a third man who was a stranger to him. Entering, he only nodded and went directly to the big range and poured himself a cup of coffee. He drank it standing there and poured another.