Play a Lone Hand

by Short, Luke;

  Defiantly Welling caught the eye of the bartender, called, “Whiskey please,” and then sat back in his chair and waited for the bottle and glasses to be brought. Giff toed a chair out and sat down.

  Welling had his drink, probably the morning’s first because he shuddered a little, then folded his hands on the table, pursed his lips, and settled his stern glance on Giff.

  “You made a holy show out of yourself this morning, didn’t you?”

  Giff only shrugged indifferently.

  “Who gave you authority to speak up with that cock and bull story?”

  Giff raised his hand and touched his bruised face. “This.”

  Welling said angrily, “I would like to remind you again that you were hired as a packer and guide only.”

  “Was I hired to get kicked silly in a dark alley?”

  “That was bad luck, but it doesn’t change what I said.”

  “You say too much and you say it in the wrong places,” Giff said flatly. “You were here yesterday afternoon bragging about breaking open this case as soon as you had seen a man. All right. Albers is dead.”

  “You’re talking without knowing any facts of the case,” Welling said stiffly.

  “I know all the facts. Fiske told me.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Look,” he said flatly. “What did you haul me in here for—to spank me or to fire me? Which is it?”

  “To fire you,” Welling said levelly.

  “Have you talked with Fiske?” Giff asked slowly.

  “What about? Firing you? No, that’s my own decision.”

  Giff looked at him wonderingly. Apparently, Fiske had not told him of his resignation. There was something laughable in Welling’s pomposity, but also there was something strange in his words. Why was Welling so anxious to get rid of him?

  He asked bluntly, “Tell me something, Welling. Answer it straight. Do you want to prove this land swindle against Sebree and Deyo?”

  Welling’s florid face darkened. “If there is a swindle, yes.”

  “You don’t believe there is?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a dignified way of going about finding out. It has nothing to do with lying under oath and calling names carelessly and baiting influential people, though.”

  “That’s too rough?” Giff asked.

  “For a representative of the government, yes. That’s why I think it’s better for you to find some other work. I’ll pay Burton for the saddle you took. I think that ought to square accounts and more between us, don’t you?”

  Giff heard the saloon door open behind him. He was aware that someone was approaching behind him, and he turned. Gus Traff stood beside him. There was no sleepy malice in Traff’s eyes now. He didn’t bother to look at Welling, who remained seated, but he regarded Giff with a cold and savage calm.

  “I think you’re a Sunday man,” Traff said coldly. “I don’t think you’ve got the guts to say to my face what you said at the hearing.”

  Giff’s anger was swift and immediate. He rose, reached out, grabbed Welling’s bottle of whiskey by its neck, and in a sweeping backhanded motion picked it up from the table and clouted Traff on the side of the jaw. Traff did not even stagger, he simply fell into the adjoining table and made no effort to catch himself as the table legs buckled and caved under him. He rolled over on his side and lay motionless, unconscious.

  Welling rose with such haste that his chair tipped over backward. For a brief moment, fright was plain on his loose face. Then he said, “You damn fool! You’ve probably killed him.”

  “I meant to.”

  Giff wheeled and walked out of the saloon, crossed the plankwalk, ducked under the tie rail and headed across the street toward the livery. He knew now that by hitting Traff he had pushed himself toward a final, irrevocable decision.

  At the livery office Cass Murray was seated at his desk. He had one foot atop it tying the lace of his farmer’s shoe. At sight of Giff, he shook his head in mute wonder. “Well, after that speech to Arnold you won’t be needing any horses, will you?”

  “I’ll need something else first,” Giff said. “Have you got a gun?”

  Cass lowered his leg, never taking his glance from Giff’s face. “Traff or Welling?”

  “If it was Welling I would have asked for a stable broom,” Giff said.

  Cass did not smile. “If it’s Traff, you’ve made a mistake.”

  “It’s my own.”

  Cass regarded him a silent moment, then said, “You got any Indian in you?”

  “About the gun,” Giff reminded him.

  “Yeah, I got one.” Cass reached down and pulled out the lower drawer from which he took an ancient Colt’s .44 holstered in a scuffed and scarred shell belt. He laid it on the desk top and asked, “Still working for Welling?”

  “He says not,” Giff said. He belted on the gun, nodded his thanks, then started for the door. Suddenly, he halted and turned to Cass, his dark face sober. “What’s a Sunday man, Cass?”

  “He’s a man that’s a real man only one day of the week, on Sunday. The rest of the week he isn’t any man at all. Why?”

  The slow smile that came to Dixon’s face was not pleasant. He looked thoughtfully at Cass, said, “No reason,” and walked out.

  Cass sat a moment after Giff had gone, then, curiosity prodding him, he rose and went out to the street and looked up it. He saw Dixon mount the hotel steps, then vanish. What’s eating him? Cass wondered.

  His attention was attracted to a pair of men hurrying toward the Plains Bar. A third man came out of it on the run, heading for the hotel. It took Cass a few seconds to connect Dixon’s strange request for a gun with the saloon across the street; when he did, he moved out into the street and headed unhurriedly for the Plains Bar.

  Immediately he entered he saw the crowd of men collected around a figure on the floor. Cass elbowed his way inside the circle and saw Gus Traff stretched out amid the wreckage of a broken table and a smashed chair. Traff was unconscious, and kneeling beside him was a Torreon rider who now looked up in bafflement at another Torreon rider beside him. “It could be broke,” the kneeling man said.

  Cass felt a solid pleasure at the sight of Traff in this condition and he asked his neighbor, “What happened to him?”

  “He got belted with a full bottle of whiskey by that-there packer for the special agent.”

  Bravo, Cass thought, and then he sighed. Not to Traff and not that way, he amended glumly. The bartender broke through the circle, now holding a glass pitcher filled with water. Phlegmatically he poured it on Traff’s face and chest. When Traff did not move, the bartender said, “Sure he ain’t dead?”

  The kneeling puncher said sharply, “Hell, can’t you see his chest move? He’s breathing.” Again the puncher felt gingerly along Traff’s right jaw, which was already swollen and beginning to flush.

  The beginning of an idea crept into Cass’s mind as he watched the puncher. The idea took only seconds to seem really good and then Cass said scornfully to the puncher, “Go ahead and poke his jaw. Every time you touch it, you’re likely mashing bones.”

  The puncher glanced truculently at him, and Cass continued, “Hasn’t anyone here thought of Doc Miller?”

  The two Torreon punchers glanced at each other. The services of a doctor for the bruises of a barroom brawl were seldom required in the circles in which they moved. The idea appeared to seem daring, but worth some thought.

  Cass prodded, “Well, have you?”

  The first puncher looked worriedly down at Traff and said tentatively, “Maybe we ought to.”

  This was what Cass was waiting for. He said, “I’ll get him,” and turned to elbow his way out through the crowd.

  On the street, Cass really hurried now. Dr. Miller’s office was around the corner two doors, and up a flight of stairs. When Cass burst into the waiting room, Dr. Miller, seated in a straight chair with his feet propped up on an adjoining one, was in idle conversation with a rancher from the Short Hills. Cass said, “Doc, I�
�ve got to talk to you.”

  Dr. Miller was a young man, barely thirty, with short cut hair, a long, aggressive face, and a tail, well-fleshed indolent body. He came to his feet lazily and the rancher arose too, saying, “Well, so long, Doc.”

  Dr. Miller said to Cass, “Will this do or do you want to see me in the office?”

  Cass said, “This’ll do,” and waited until the rancher closed the door of the office. Dr. Miller had already assumed his former position and he eyed Cass curiously as Cass crossed the room.

  “Do you know Gus Traff?” Cass asked and because he was certain Dr. Miller did, he went on, “Well, your friend Dixon just belted him across the face with a bottle of whiskey. He’s sleeping on the Plains Bar floor.”

  Dr. Miller said wryly, “The country wouldn’t be lucky enough to have him die.” The dislike in his voice seemed heartfelt to Cass, and Cass asked irrelevantly, “Doc, how honest are you?”

  Dr. Miller said warily, “Reasonably. Why?”

  “Too honest to pretend a patient’s got something that he hasn’t got?”

  “Certainly.”

  “How do you fix a broke jaw?” Cass asked, again irrelevantly. He was in a hurry and impatient.

  “That’s a foolish question. Where’s it broke? How could I tell how I’d fix it unless I saw it?”

  “Does it hurt to fix it?”

  “It hurts to get it; it hurts to fix it; it hurts to have it,” Dr. Miller said. Suddenly an alertness came into his eyes and he straightened up. “I see,” he said slowly and he gave Cass a brief searching glance, then grinned. “Are you sure it isn’t broken?”

  “No.”

  “I think I’ll find that it is,” Dr. Miller said. He took his coat off the back of his chair, shrugged into it, got his bag from the office and followed Cass down the stairway.

  On the plankwalk, he said, “You’d better stay clear of this, Cass.”

  “Can’t I even watch?”

  “Part of it.” Then he added grimly, “The whole town can watch the rest of it.”

  At the Plains Bar the crowd of men around Traff gave way for Dr. Miller. He knelt beside the still unconscious Traff, sought for the pulse in his wrist, found it, then gently probed along the bruises on Traff’s jaw.

  Cass saw him shake his head in discouragement and a slow delight came to Cass. Don’t overdo it, Doc, Cass thought.

  “Is it broke, Doc?” one of the Torreon punchers asked.

  “How do I know, man?” Dr. Miller retorted irritably. He looked up at the puncher who had spoken, “Isn’t there some place we can take him where I can get to work?”

  The puncher addressed looked at the second Torreon rider who said, “What about the hotel?”

  Dr. Miller rose, said decisively, “Good. Lend a hand, you men.”

  Remembering the Doctor’s admonition to stay out of this, Cass did not volunteer his help, but he trailed the crowd over to the hotel and watched the five volunteers stagger up the steps under Traff’s inert hulk and vanish abovestairs.

  He bought a cigar and settled down in a lobby chair to wait. The more he reflected on what he and Dr. Miller plotted, the more the idea delighted him. He hoped passionately that Dr. Miller would crucify Traff, for in some manner Traff had come to symbolize everything Cass and the whole country hated in Torreon. Sebree was too smooth, too remote, too bloodless to nourish real hate; while Traff, the open executor of Sebree’s dirty schemes, was a tough, cool bully. Cass had occasion to remember just how tough he was.

  The galling memory of that day had been with Cass for five years. Even now he could smell the bitter smoke of his burning stand of wheat that Traff and the Torreon crew had set afire. He remembered how he had run from his shed to the house for a gun and how Traff had ridden him down, his horse knocking him, sprawling, against the cabin. He could even remember the color of the horse Traff rode that day. That wasn’t remarkable, for while he had lain in the dust of that hot August day, his arms and legs tied with Traff’s lariat, he had time to watch it all—the cabin go up in flames, the sod barn pulled down, his barbed wire fence uprooted, his field ablaze and his homestead wrecked. He hoped Doc Miller would make it long and painful.

  When the first of the five men who had remained upstairs to assist Doc came down, Cass prudently left the lobby and went back to the livery office. He had been there only a few minutes when Dr. Miller stepped in the doorway, black bag in hand.

  “Was it broken?” Cass asked.

  Dr. Miller said solemnly, “There’s no sure way of telling. Still a doctor can’t afford to assume that it isn’t, can he?” He winked, but his sober expression remained. “I managed to get a wire loop around the base of seven of his teeth. The wire must be very tight in order to hold the bones in place—if they are broken, that is! It’s extremely uncomfortable,” he paused. “The word ‘uncomfortable’ is a medical understatement for ‘painful.’”

  “Poor man!” Cass said. “Will he have to wear them long?”

  “I believe he will,” Dr. Miller said. They looked at each other in what might have been called mutual admiration; then Dr. Miller stepped out.

  The five o’clock dimness of the hotel corridor was no help to Fiske in fitting his key into the door. After seconds of fumbling, he found the lock, opened the door, stepped into the room and halted.

  Giff Dixon was seated in the armchair across the room, his feet propped up on the window sill. His hat lay on the floor beside him, and the expression with which he looked at Fiske held a certain disappointment.

  “Welling with you?” Giff asked.

  “No. Come for your money?” Fiske walked across to the table and threw his hat on it, eyeing Dixon quizzically. How did he get in a locked room? he wondered, and thought he ought to ask. But there was a kind of quiet balefulness in Dixon’s face that checked his question. The young man came to his feet and stared thoughtfully out the window. Either he had not heard Fiske’s question or did not intend to answer it.

  From under his arm, Fiske took a copy of that day’s Free Press and threw it on the table. “Seen the paper?”

  Dixon half turned to look at him and shook his head.

  “The reward notice got in,” Fiske said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. “I never thought it could be done.”

  Dixon wheeled and came slowly across to the table. He put both fisted hands on it and looked levelly at Fiske. “What good will it do, even if you get the April seventeenth copy?”

  “Why, I thought you understood that. I thought—”

  “What good will it do if it’s up to Welling to use it?” Giff demanded insistently.

  Fiske understood him then; he only shrugged, but he felt a sardonic appreciation of the younger man’s question. “That’s not for you to decide.”

  “Look,” Giff said levelly. “You’ve been the tough uncle to me long enough. If I won’t decide, will Welling?”

  “He’s the Special Agent.”

  “Is he?” Dixon eyed him coldly. “Or is he scared? Or is he waiting for a bribe from Sebree to call off his investigation? You heard him at the hearing. You heard him crawl, and you heard him turn on me. Now you tell me what he is.”

  Fiske said wryly, “A man can be a coward and still be reasonably honest.”

  Dixon shook his head slowly. “Make it plainer than that.”

  “All right.” Fiske thought a moment, reaching for the words to frame his own hard judgment of Welling. “There’s more than meets the eye in this, son. Did you know a United States senator is a Torreon stockholder?”

  Dixon was listening carefully, and Fiske went on with a fierce distaste in his voice, “Stealing public land is fashionable in the West. There’s a lot of land, and the big boys have organized to get their share of it, and more. There are a lot of men who go to church, love their wives and don’t cheat at cards who think it’s right and proper to cheat the government.” He grimaced. “Welling knows that. He knows if he steps on Sebree’s toes, it’ll be the senator’s head that howls. He doe
sn’t like this job. It’s too big, and the people are too important. He’d be happy to find a minor error or two in Deyo’s records, write a sharp report about the carelessness of land office clerks and go home.”

  “Then why was he bragging about turning up a big swindle as soon as he saw Albers?”

  Fiske grinned. “When you were ten, didn’t you whistle when you passed a graveyard at night?”

  Dixon straightened up, and gave Fiske a long and searching look. “There’s been a murder.”

  “Welling knows that, and he’s preparing to ignore it. That’s why he disclaimed responsibility for your talk at the hearing.”

  Fiske watched Dixon accept that; it took him ten long seconds, and Fiske saw the flaming resentment rise and then fade away in his dark eyes.

  “Who gets Sebree? Do you?”

  “I’m a surveyor.”

  “Not Welling, then?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then who?”

  Fiske shrugged, and suddenly he could not hold Dixon’s hot glance.

  Giff turned then, and walked slowly over to his chair, stooped down and picked up his hat from the carpet. He stood there looking at the hat in his hand, then his glance lifted swiftly to Fiske. “It’s a funny thing,” he said musingly, “I never earned more than a trail hand’s wages in my life. I’m no surveyor, either. But I’m not scared of Traff. Sebree is like any other crook. Deyo is a soft-bellied counterjumper.” He paused. “And right is right, and wrong is wrong to me. I wonder what’s the matter with me?”

  Fiske had no ready answer, and before he could think of one, the door swung open and Welling stepped inside the room. When he saw Dixon, he halted abruptly—too abruptly, for he swayed slightly. He had been at the Plains Bar all afternoon, Fiske knew.

  Welling said in a bluff, slurred voice, “What are you doing in here?”

  Dixon didn’t answer him, only watched him quietly.

  “I thought I made it plain that you quit working for me several hours ago. What do you want—money?”

  Dixon only shook his head slowly, and Fiske could see the cold contempt for Welling in his somber face.