He ran up the steps and took her hand.
“I told you I’d be back for supper,” he said, “and I’m starving.”
“You’ll get pork and beans,” she smiled.
But her smile was something that came quickly, just for the moment of greeting him, and then lost its spontaneity as quickly as it had found it. Her eyes left his face, and seemed to search the background behind him.
“I’ll bring it out,” she said, and turned back towards the kitchen.
Simon Templar strolled over to the table that was already set up on the verandah, and tossed his hat over a pair of stag horns nailed to one of the rafters. He pulled out a chair and sat down and tilted the chair back, opening a new pack of cigarettes and tapping one out on the stretched denim over his left knee. As definitely as if a bell had rung, he realised that the interlude was already over.
A little way along the porch, Hank Reefe gazed at him steadily from the rocking chair where he sat with his gun belt across his knees, and said, “You come back alone?”
“Yes. I dropped Papa off where the station wagon was ditched yesterday. He was going to change the wheel and bring it in.”
“You didn’t see him after that?”
Little electric needles stitched a ghostly seam up the Saint’s spine.
“No. The station wagon wasn’t there when I came by just now. I thought he’d be back here.”
“He hasn’t been back.”
Jean Morland came through the kitchen door and set bowls on the table.
“We’d better go ahead and eat,” she said. “Hank must be starving too.”
The foreman came over silently and sat down on the other side of her. He sat looking at Jean, and the Saint looked at her too. Her eyes went to one of them after the other, and she smiled again, rather quickly and nervously. Reefe stretched out his big hand and took hold of her arm gently.
He said, “You might be worrying about nothing, Jean. He could’ve remembered something he forgot to buy, and gone back into town for it. Or maybe he thought he’d have another try at getting hold of the sheriff or somebody.”
“I know,” she said mechanically.
“Let’s face it,” said the Saint evenly. “The question is whether anything could have happened to him.”
His bluntness hit her with a kind of chilling shock that only lasted for a fraction of a second. And then it was as if a light had been turned on in a haunted room. Whatever had to be faced could be seen and estimated, and no matter how it looked it could never be worse than the creation of imagination feeding upon fear. She had had many thoughts about the Saint already, but never before had she sensed the quality of power that gave life to every other impression that could be caught from him. All at once, with a curiously calm relaxation, she had a ridiculous feeling that he was a man who could never fail, because he would never know when to be afraid of failure.
He smiled at her as he crushed out his cigarette.
“I’m going to eat, anyway,” he said. “It won’t do your father any good for us to starve ourselves, and we won’t be able to do nearly as much to help him with our stomachs sticking to our spines like punctured balloons.”
He ate thoughtfully for a while, without talking, as if nothing could disturb his appetite or his enjoyment of the food, but his face was intent, and his brain was coldly sorting one speculation after another, as dispassionately as though they were moves in a casual chess game. Yet he avoided looking at Jean Morland while he was thinking, because he was not certain whether the fine edge of his detachment would stand up to that.
Presently he said, “We can start working from this: Don Morland hasn’t been killed, and won’t be—barring accidents. But for that matter he could always fall down in a bath tub and break his neck. The Ungodly certainly wouldn’t encourage that.”
Jean said, “But they’re trying to get the ranch—”
“How would that get it for them? They aren’t his nearest relatives. The odds are that if anything drastic happened to him, you’d inherit it. If they used…various persuasions to force him to sign a new will before he had an accident, you’d probably contest it and the estate would be tied up for years before they got anything, if they ever did. And there’d also be a lot more publicity than they want.”
“They might think Jean’d be easier to deal with than the old man,” said Reefe.
“Then it would’ve been much more practical to kidnap her. Look, this way, the old man first has to die, and then either they’ve made him sign a new will leaving the ranch to them, which could be fought through every court in the country, or Jean inherits it and they have to start all over again working on her. Either way, the deal would be held up till there were whiskers on it that you could weave into blankets. They don’t want that. They want quick results. See their ultimatum. Any plot of that kind is much too complicated—it takes too long to work out, and it could spring leaks in too many places. Therefore they certainly wouldn’t kill Don Morland.”
The girl bit her lip.
“But if they just…tortured him and tried to make him sell—”
“Why go to all that trouble when there’s an easier way? Maybe they could break him—almost anybody can be broken if he doesn’t die on you first—but they’d have to kill him afterwards so he couldn’t tell about it. And that still wouldn’t keep the rest of us quiet. These people aren’t amateurs. If they’d wanted to work that angle they’d have tried to take Jean; then they could have had anything they wanted from her father, and the rest of us wouldn’t have dared to say a word.”
Reefe studied the Saint unexpressively over his spoon.
“You kept on saying ‘they,’ ” he observed. “You figure there’s somebody else in on this with Valmon?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I figured you were,” the Texan said placidly, “from the way you talk. You seem to know quite a bit about them. You know they aren’t amateurs. You know they’re pretty clever. You knew this man Julius who was here this afternoon, Jean told me. An’ he seemed to know something about you. If we knew some of these things ourselves maybe we could’ve done quite a bit of figurin’ ourselves.”
His tone was reserved and sensible, exactly the same as he might have used to call a hand of poker. There was no belligerence or animosity in it. He was inquisitive and he could be wrong, but he had a right to find out what was sitting across the table, in a polite and impersonal way.
Simon Templar gazed back at him appreciatively, but still with flakes of steel resting in his eyes to match the challenge that was almost imperceptible in the foreman’s courteous simplicity.
“Yes, I know quite a bit about them,” he said. “I know that they don’t want any more commotion than they’ve got to have—which is why Valmon’s performance last night, when I made him mad enough to be stupid, must have been worrying Comrade Julius no little. I know why Comrade Julius must be even more worried since he was here this afternoon, I know that they may be able to make a small county sheriff play ball, but that there are other departments that they couldn’t even begin to talk to—which is why they’d much rather not get involved with kidnappings and killings.”
“All right,” said Reefe. “Then wouldn’t it help if we all knew?”
Simon pushed away his plate and took out a cigarette.
“Maybe it would,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t have told you any sooner because it’s kind of dangerous to know. But by this time they’re liable to think I’ve told you anyhow. So just for fun you could start worrying about this—”
He got no further, because at that moment they were all aware of quickened footsteps scuffling up the hill from the lower mesa where the other ranch buildings were.
The girl stiffened and checked her breath. Hank Reefe, with a different instinctive reaction, turned and began to stretch out a long arm towards the chair where he had shed his gun belt. The Saint crossed his legs and dragged quietly and deeply on his cigarette; Don Morland’s footsteps co
uldn’t have had that weight, and the Ungodly would have been much stealthier.
The dark shape of a man loomed into the aura of lamplight beyond the porch, and his upturned face showed as a suddenly lighter patch picked out of the night.
“What is it, Elmer?”
Jean Morland said it. She was already at the porch rail as Simon got to his feet.
The cowboy came to a stop, catching his voice after the haste of his climb.
“It’s Smoky, miss,” he said. “He stayed out to watch the cows tonight so we wouldn’t have to round ’em up again in the mornin’. His horse just come home alone—an’ there’s blood on the saddle!”
6
It seemed like a crazy thing to attempt—to set out to look for a man’s body at night, in wild broken country, with several square miles of it to cover. But they did it.
They belted on guns and picked up flashlights and rode out in a reckless cavalcade. But it was possible only because the moon was bright and clear, brilliant enough to throw hard black shadows against the ground that it washed with luminous grey, so bright that for any ordinary observation the flashlights were less than unnecessary. It was one of those amazing subtropical desert moonlights which are unknown to any other parts of the earth, which seem to have been designed expressly and solely for soft music and romance, and the Saint rode beside Jean Morland and reflected that this sort of thing always seemed to be happening to a lot of good moments in his life. Perhaps it was part of the price you paid for living that way: the same trail of adventure that led towards romance just as inevitably had to lead on and lead away again…
They headed for the canyon where they had had lunch, and found Smoky’s camp fire still burning; his bed-roll was opened beside it, but hadn’t been slept in. There was no sign of any disturbance. Apparently he had just mounted his horse and gone on a late patrol, or gone to investigate something that had aroused his attention or his suspicion.
They broke up and spread out from there; after arranging their signals Simon took the spoke of the fan that pointed most directly towards the hill from which he had reconnoitred Valmon’s territory that morning, and it was he who found Smoky, with surprising quickness, lying out on an open slope only a few yards from the boundary. He looked at the crumpled figure very briefly, and then fired one shot in the air and swung his flashlight round and round in a vertical circle for a while until he had received five answering twinkles from different directions.
Jean and Hank reached him first, and they looked at the sprawled heap that had been Smoky while Jim and Nails and Elmer rode up one by one and clumped stiffly into the circle.
Nails said it first.
“The same way as Frank Morland. His haws musta throwed him an’ then trod on him.”
It looked just like that; there was the clear print of a horseshoe on the side of Smoky’s pulped face, and others, just as clear, in the bloody mess where his chest had been crushed in.
The Saint lighted a cigarette.
“I just don’t know very much,” he remarked diffidently. “I’ve seen a few trick horses in my time, but Smoky’s must be something to tell Ripley about. Maybe you could sell him to a circus.”
Hank Reefe stared at him levelly, but it was Jim who growled, “What for?”
“There was blood on the saddle, wasn’t there?” said the Saint. “It must be a pretty acrobatic horse if it could have done this to him while he was still on top.”
“I’ve knowed a hawss to r’ar up an’ fall back on a man so’s he got the horn in his chest,” Nails said slowly. “I’ve seen hawss an’ man fall together an’ the hawss roll over on him.”
“The blood wasn’t on the horn,” answered the Saint, “and the saddle hadn’t been rolled on. It was quite a new saddle, and there wasn’t a scar on it.”
It was a strangely dramatic scene, all of them standing silently there around Smoky’s body with the silver moonlight carving out shadows as sharp and flat as a woodcut and drawing a kindly vagueness over the ugly details of death. So the moon would never mean soft music and romance to Smoky anymore, and its light on his broken body was only the same light that it had shed on hundreds and thousands of other broken bodies in European cities where soft music was also only the memory of a dream. But it seemed to Simon Templar that even in the timeless hush of those Arizona hills he could hear the grinding mutter of the mad machinery of destruction that had reached half-way around the world to lay a simple cowboy on the same altar with the peasants of Poland and the villagers of Greece.
Hank Reefe was nodding quietly.
“Sounds right enough,” he said. “So it could’ve been the same way with Frank Morland.”
“It’s been done before. Makes it look like a good accident. But they muffed Smoky a bit, or the saddle wouldn’t have given it away. He must have been shot or stabbed first, before they went to work with the big mallet with horseshoes nailed to it.”
“But why?” demanded the girl.
Simon shrugged grimly.
“Probably he saw something he shouldn’t have seen. Probably your Uncle Frank did the same. They won’t tell us.”
The foreman hooked his thumbs in his belt.
“Well, what now?”
It was purely an invitation, but it was curious how inevitable it sounded. Now that a leader was plainly called for, there was not a moment’s question about who it was to be. The leadership was offered and accepted with such unconscious naturalness that perhaps nobody even realised at the time that it had happened at all.
“Somebody’d better take Smoky back to the house,” said the Saint. “Nails, you do it. Jim and Elmer—you stick around here. You might see some more of what Smoky saw, and if it means trouble you can help to look after each other. Jean, you go back with Nails. Hank, you can go with her. Take a car and drive over to Valmon’s. Raise hell. Talk a lot. Demand to see the foreman and the boss and everyone else. Tell ’em about Smoky. Say that you’re sure there’s dirty work going on, and you’re going to know more about it, or else you’re going to shoot up the place or roust out the sheriff or anything else you can think of. I’ll leave the dialogue to you. The one thing is to cause plenty of commotion and make it last as long as possible and keep as many of them occupied as you can.”
“While you’re havin’ a look round?”
“Exactly. The more you can distract their attention, the more I may be able to do. So try and keep ’em bothered without actually letting it go into a free-for-all. But when the time comes—and it’ll probably be my time too—come out shooting.”
“I’ll do that.”
Simon turned and handed his reins to Nails.
“You can put Smoky on my horse—I’ll be walking from here on.”
Then, as he must have expected, Jean Morland was the only one who had to be answered. She came and took his arm while the men were picking Smoky up and mounting him for his last meaningless ride, and the Saint was finishing his cigarette and staring over the shadowy terrain of the J-Bar-B.
“You’ve got quite a way of taking charge, haven’t you, cowboy?”
“Everybody knows what has to be done,” he tried to tell her. “Somebody just has to say it.”
“I suppose that usually turns out to be you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re really the boss, when your father’s away. But you haven’t been here so long, and—well, you could have too much on your mind.”
“That’s just it,” she said, and this was not what he had expected at all. “I have got too much on my mind. And I wouldn’t be any good. And I know I ought to be left out. I don’t want to be the stupid wench in the story who gets heroic and keeps dashing in where she doesn’t belong and messing everything up. I know you wouldn’t have any use for that. I just wish I knew why I was so sure that you know so much.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and faced her.
“I think Hank will tell you about that one day.”
“Couldn’t I want you to tell me
?”
“There isn’t time now.”
“But something.”
He drew a breath and held it for the slightest pause.
“Do you happen to remember that there’s a war on, Jean?” he asked quietly. “Well, this is part of it. Even here. Just a little frontier skirmish that the history books will never write about. But one day thousands of men will be killed and cities will be blasted with what there is on this ranch. I’m trying to make sure that they’re the right men and the right cities.”
She was standing quite still, and the moonlight glossed out all the subtleties of expression so that he couldn’t be sure how much she understood or whether she understood anything.
She said in that clear steady voice of hers, “Just be careful, Simon. So you can tell me the rest.”
She took a step closer, and for an instant he felt her lips cool and tremorless against his. Then she turned away, and he turned back with her to the others and saw that Smoky’s body was already wrapped in a blanket and tied over his saddle. Jim and Elmer stepped back, and Nails led the palomino over to his own horse and bridged his stirrups. Jean Morland mounted without another word, and Hank Reefe turned to the Saint with his reins in his hand.
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 5
