by Paul Lederer
‘Yes,’ Ned said dully. That was what he had been paid for. He wondered what he had done with the money. He wondered if he – in his normal, resourceful state of mind – would have grinned, produced a cunning scheme, a plan of action against which Lyle Colbert and his river rats would have no answer. Just now he, Ned Browning, had not even the vaguest idea of how to go about this piece of work. Just now he had trouble even focusing his eyes on the narrowly built old man standing before him: Orson Bright who had entrusted all of his savings to ‘Ned’ and waited anxiously for a solution to his woes.
‘I’ll start looking around tomorrow,’ Ned told Bright. ‘I’m still feeling poorly. I shouldn’t have been so eager to climb out of that bed.’
‘I understand, son,’ Bright said. ‘You’re no good to us if you’re not feeling at full strength. You get your rest. I’ll have Tess bring you another tray of food.’
Ned nodded his appreciation. Starting toward the door, Orson paused and said, ‘Ned, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss the particulars of our agreement with Tess. Let the girl think that your coming here was nothing more than an accident. She doesn’t need to know, or to carry extra worries with her.’
‘Mr Bright … what is my real name?’ Ned Browning asked.
‘Why, it’s Lavender, Frank Lavender,’ Orson replied. He had chosen the name of a well-known gunfighter at random. Frank Lavender was a bad man; Frank Lavender had also been hung two months earlier. It seemed to satisfy the wounded man who shrugged and said:
‘I guess it’s best if we keep calling me Ned Browning … for the girl’s sake. Besides, no one else needs to know I am here.’
‘You’re right, Frank … Ned,’ Orson Bright agreed. He closed the door softly behind him and smiled, congratulating himself on his fortune. Orson had actually considered hiring a gunfighter to help him in his battle with Lyle Colbert, but he was cash poor and the idea had seemed chancy at best anyway. Now he had a man willing to fight for him and, more, one who would not ask for money to do the work! Orson Bright considered himself both fortunate and ingeniously clever at that moment. He whistled tunelessly as he went out onto the front porch of his small cabin, stretched and thought: Welcome, Frank Lavender. He chuckled and went out into the yard to feed his horses.
Ned was still feeling very weak the following morning. He walked out to breakfast with the Bright family, dizzy and feeling fragile. He eased himself onto a plank bench next to Orson, across from Tess. Andy, bullish and rough-looking for a man so young, had his sleeves rolled up as if for clearance as he dug into his hotcakes. Ned waved Mother Rose’s offer of food aside and contented himself with a cup of dark, strong coffee. Andy threw his napkin onto the table and spoke up, ‘You’d better start eating if you mean to keep your strength up.’
Ned didn’t reply. Orson Bright told his son: ‘It’s hard to eat when you got no appetite, Andy. Soon as he’s well, he’ll eat like a horse.’
‘When’s that going to be?’ Andy Bright demanded. ‘We need him now!’
Tess stared blankly first at her brother then at Ned Browning. Need Ned for what?
‘He’ll be ready,’ Orson said soothingly as he sipped at his own coffee. ‘Won’t you … Ned?’
What was going on here, Tess continued to wonder, even after Orson and Andy had gone off to the timberlands to check on the work crew and Mother Rose to scrub down the kitchen. Ned sat on a rickety chair on the front porch of the cabin, letting the warmth of the sun soothe his wounded arm. The pleasant morning did nothing to ease the confusion the blow to his head had caused. Tess emerged from the house and sat on the steps of the porch, her arms looped around her knees, watching the sun slant through the trees and the distant silver glitter of the river. A group of crows had taken up a position in the high branches of a deep blue-green lodgepole pine and they watched the strutting, complaining birds for a time in silence.
‘What do they want you to do?’ Tess finally asked without turning her head.
‘It’s not real clear,’ Ned said with a hint of a smile.
‘Fight?’
‘That was the idea I got,’ Ned Browning answered. Now Tess did turn her eyes on him. She shifted her palms to the porch as if she were about to rise.
‘You can’t do that,’ she said in a very low voice strained with concern. ‘You’re not well.’
‘I’m healing.’
‘Then heal. Just don’t get well enough to get yourself killed.’
‘Who’s going to kill me?’ Ned asked.
‘You don’t know Lyle Colbert. If you get in his way, he’ll surely kill you. Why would you want to get involved in our troubles anyway?’
‘I don’t want to,’ Ned told the girl. ‘It’s a matter of obligation.’ He hesitated. ‘I owe your family.’
‘For what? Fishing you out of the river?’ Tess asked hotly. She did rise now to stand before him, her hands on her hips. Since apparently Orson had told his daughter nothing about the bargain he had made with Frank Lavender, he did not elaborate.
‘It’s just something I have to do.’
‘Why!’ Tess asked pleadingly. She spread her hands in frustration. ‘Why do you men have to traipse around trying to get yourselves killed? What is the matter with you? Why?’
‘I already told you – I have an obligation. That means a lot to me. Why would I back out now?’
‘Because …’ her words stammered from her lips, ‘because I don’t want you to! I don’t want to see you hurt again.’
With that, Tess swept off the porch toward the deep forest, holding her blue skirt high. Ned Browning sighed and sat there in deep thought for a while before re-entering the house. Mother Rose only glanced at him as he sat at the table and began disassembling a Colt revolver – it had been Dan Bright’s weapon – that Orson had left for him.
That morning before departing Andy Bright had asked Ned Browning, ‘Are you going to file the action down? I heard a lot of you … a lot of men like to have a hair-trigger on their pistols.’
‘I don’t see the use in that,’ Ned had answered. ‘It just raises the risk of you shooting yourself in the foot before you have even cleared leather.’
How Ned had come by that piece of knowledge, he could not have answered. Any more than he could explain how he knew every piece of the pistol, how to disassemble, reassemble, clean with the brass brush and oil the Colt so that its action was silky and sure.
Of course, in his previous life as Frank Lavender, he must certainly have been familiar with weapons. He supposed there are some things a man doesn’t forget even when most of his past is a complete blank.
Tess had returned. He glanced up at her and smiled. She paid as much attention to him as she would have to a piece of furniture. Beyond the open door, the crows rose in unison and flew away. Ned Browning sat at the table with his head in both hands, wanting, needing to remember.
‘All right, boys,’ Orson Bright was saying to his two-man logging crew, ‘we start rolling the timber downslope and work it up onto the barge.’
‘What’s the point?’ Amos Shockley, the larger of the two, asked, looking up from his end of the long, sharp-toothed saw. ‘We can’t get anything downriver past Colbert’s chain.’
‘The point is that I told you to do it,’ Orson said with a show of temper. ‘Unless you don’t want to get paid.’
‘It’s August and we ain’t been paid since June,’ the other man, the wiry Bert Smart said, standing up from the two-man saw to mop his perspiring brow. ‘Of course we want to get paid, but what guarantee is there that we ever will?’
‘You will,’ Orson promised. ‘We’re getting downriver to Hoyt’s Camp this time.’
‘Just how are we going to do that?’ Amos Shockley asked in a mocking tone. The bearded man was challenging on this morning, and Orson understood that not being paid had stuck in the craws of these, the last two men of his original five-man logging crew.
‘We’ve got help,’ young Andy Bright said, pushing his horse’s head
aside as he stepped belligerently toward Shockley who stood his ground.
‘Help?’ Shockley said looking around the empty forest where one out of every dozen trees had been reduced to a stump as a result of their summer’s labor. ‘Mind telling me where they are?’
‘You can believe me,’ Orson Bright said mildly, not wanting the discussion to go further. Andy had clenched his fists, looking ready to fight.
Shockley smiled at Andy, studied his aggressive stance and spat. ‘You’re a big pup, Andy, I’ll give you that. But you’re only a pup.’
‘Hold on, both of you,’ Orson pleaded. ‘Just trust me. We’ve found help.’
‘I asked you to show me,’ Amos Shockley said. Now Bert Smart stepped beside his bulkier friend and took his elbow, trying to calm the big man.
‘We’ll show you, all right!’ young Andy Bright said triumphantly playing his trump card. ‘Or haven’t you ever heard of Frank Lavender?’ Orson winced. He had not wanted the kid to blurt out the name like that, had hoped to reassure his unpaid loggers without invoking the legendary gunfighter’s name.
‘Are you saying that Frank Lavender is here?’ Bert Smart asked with disbelief.
‘That’s what I said,’ Andy replied with heat.
‘Why would a man like that get involved in our fight?’ big Amos Shockley asked. ‘How could you meet his price when you can’t even afford our wages?’
‘It’s a private matter,’ Orson replied. ‘The man owes me a favor.’
‘This does change matters, Amos,’ the narrow Bert Smart said.
‘If it’s so.’ Amos Shockley was dubious. The two of them had been about ready to give notice and hit the road looking for work that paid actual money. But if Frank Lavender was actually in the mix – well, that did change things.
‘It’s my sister,’ Andy said, embellishing the situation. ‘Frank’s crazy for her. He offered to help us out.’
‘Frank Lavender?’ Amos scoffed. ‘When could he have ever met Tess? She’s hardly ever even been off the property.’
‘Well, she goes into Hoyt’s Camp for supplies,’ Andy said, continuing to lie, quite proud of his powers of invention. ‘That’s where he met her. Just now he’s down in our cabin, greasing up his guns.’
‘I heard that Lavender was dead,’ Bert Smart said. Andy sneered at the narrow logger.
‘Yes? You want to go down there and say that to him? He’s alive, all right, and Lyle Colbert hasn’t got enough guns or the nerve to stop Frank Lavender. Now let’s get started loading those logs on the barge. We’re going downriver.’
FOUR
Ned Browning awoke early from a series of troubled dreams. The sun was still only a chill orange glow through the ranks of the pine and cedar trees, glinting off the small window of his bedroom when he started awake and sat up in bed so rapidly that it caused his injured shoulder to flare with pain.
The dreams. In them he was surrounded by men wearing badges, men without faces, in what seemed to be a jailhouse … and then they were gone, disappearing like smoke, and he was riding alone out on a far land without form or substance, pursued by ghosts. He fell then, twisting and rolling through a long dark tunnel.…
There was no more that he could remember. Rising uneasily he walked to the window and peered out at the new morning. There were cottontail rabbits nibbling at the young grass, mockingbirds and sparrows flitting around aimlessly, the flock of brooding black crows in the heights of the single tree they seemed to prefer.
Ned sagged back onto the bed. He sat there trying to make some sense of the dream, to relate it to his present reality. It seemed to him that Orson Bright must have been correct. He must have been the outlaw Frank Lavender, arrested for some crime. Then, perhaps, he had somehow broken free only to be shot down in the escape attempt. It fit the pieces of the dream puzzle together, but it did not feel like the truth. That is, he did not feel himself to be a gunman, an outlaw, a killer. He touched the back of his skull where the painful knot still bulged, blocking his memory.
Slowly, carefully, he began to dress himself. He liked none of what Orson Bright had in mind for him, yet if he had given his word, taken the timberman’s money … he strapped on the holstered belt Orson had given him and slipped the newly oiled Colt from it, feeling its weight in his hand, the balance of the weapon. It was not an unfamiliar instrument, he recognized with a frown. Returning it to the holster, he looked at himself in the mirror and drew the weapon as rapidly as possible. Before a man could have blinked, the pistol was leveled, the hammer of the gun drawn back. Perhaps that should have been a comforting experiment, but it depressed Ned Browning.
Yes, he was a man born to the gun, skilled in its use. That much was obvious, but it was far from heartening. It was only another mark on the dark side of the ledger, one more indication that he was indeed a man who hired out to kill for other men.
Frank Lavender.
No one was yet at the table for breakfast when he walked out, passed directly through to the front door and stepped outside into the predawn. The pine trees were richly fragrant. He could smell the river, hear it as it boiled past. A pair of squirrels leaped among the branches of a cedar tree, chattering as they played. Ned found no pleasure in watching them, nor in the bite of the cool morning air, the sight of the long wooded slopes.
He did not belong here, in a situation like this. How he knew that he could not have said, but he felt that he did not. Yet where was he to go? If it was true that he was a wanted man on the run, a man who could not tell his friends from his enemies and had no idea where safe ground lay, what was the use in fleeing?
‘You’re up early.’
Ned turned to find Tess behind him, a small bundle of wood in her arms. Her blue eyes sparkled mysteriously in the early morning light. Her blond hair was loose across her shoulders. She seemed ready to smile, but held the expression back.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Ned answered. ‘Let me help you with that wood.’
He took the small bundle from her arms. Standing that near to her he could smell the lye soap on her and a more distant, softer fragrance like lilac. She watched him with those intent blue eyes. Tess’s mouth moved again, as if to ask a question, but like her smile, she managed to repress the words.
‘I like to get the stove fire started before Mother Rose gets up. She has enough work to do cooking for us all.’
They tramped up onto the cabin porch as the first golden rays of dawn light struck the tips of the tall trees. Inside the cabin it was still cool and dark. ‘What can I do?’ Ned asked after dumping the firewood into the iron cradle provided for it.
‘Nothing, I don’t suppose,’ Tess said. Now her eyes seemed to settle on his hip, as if only now had she become aware that he was wearing a sidearm. Her look was not disapproving, but anxious. ‘Are you well enough to go out?’ she asked.
‘To go out?’
‘Yes. To … well … what would you call it? Go to work?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ned Browning said, seating himself on a wooden chair which he turned toward the stove to watch Tess at her task. ‘I feel pretty useless just lying around in bed, though. I thought I could at least go out and look things over. I’d like to see how Lyle Colbert is set up, maybe take a look at Hoyt’s Camp.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Tess said, keeping her back to him as she struck a second match, trying to start the tinder in the iron stove.
‘You?’
‘I have to take the buckboard into Hoyt’s Camp today to purchase some necessities – if our credit is still any good at the general store.’ The last words were tightly expelled between grimly set lips. Things could not have been easy out here with no market for the Brights’ timber. ‘If only you had come sooner,’ Tess said, turning to face him now, her arms folded beneath her breasts, her back propped against the zinc tub beside the stove. The fire had begun to flicker to life. A few golden sparks escaped into the room and Tess closed the door to the stove.
‘If I had come sooner?’ Ned s
aid curiously.
‘You know, when you were supposed to arrive, before Lyle Colbert had gathered those rough men of his and laid the chain across the Snake.’
‘You know, then,’ Ned said. ‘Why I am here, I mean.’
‘I heard Father and Andy talking. I know who you are now. Frank Lavender, isn’t that right?’
‘So they tell me,’ Ned could only answer. He smiled when he said it, but there was not much humor behind the admission. The small girl walked two paces from the stove and stood looking down at him. Her eyes seemed troubled now. Her lip trembled slightly before she spoke.
‘I am going to continue to call you Ned. Is that all right? It is the name I christened you with, and I like it much better than Frank Lavender.’
The team had been hitched to the buckboard, Tess in her blue dress, assisted up onto the bench seat when a sulky Andy Bright rode through the pines to rein up roughly beside them.
‘You going to Hoyt’s Camp?’ he demanded.
‘That’s right,’ Tess told her bull-necked brother.
‘I’m going with you. You can’t be riding off alone with a man.’
‘Did Dad tell you to ride along?’ Tess demanded, pulling on her driving gloves.
‘That doesn’t matter!’ Andy Bright said. ‘I’m going to town with you.’
‘You’re not needed … or wanted,’ Tess said, unwinding the reins from the brake handle.
Ned Browning spoke up, ‘It doesn’t matter, does it, Tess? Andy might be of some help to me.’
‘If you say so,’ Tess said sharply. She loosed the brake, snapped the reins against the rumps of the two-horse team and guided them forward along the mountain trail, followed by her surly brother on his shaggy buckskin horse. ‘I didn’t want him to come along,’ she said to Ned Browning after a silent half-mile of driving.
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But there’s no sense in squabbling over it.’
‘I love Andy, he’s my brother. It’s just that sometimes I get so tired of seeing him around.’
‘It’s always like that between brothers and sisters or brothers and brothers,’ Ned commented as they passed through the depths of the forest, cool and dark where they traveled, sun-bright in the upper reaches of the trees.
