High Desert

by Wayne D. Overholser

  “It wasn’t that,” Morgan protested. “No one knew.”

  They rounded the Silver Spur and went on across the street.

  “Let’s have supper in the hotel, Murdo,” Peg said as if she had only then thought of it. “Royce hasn’t been home for a long time and I’m tired of eating alone.”

  “All right,” Morgan grunted, not wanting to because he hadn’t seen Jewell, and he didn’t want to meet her with Peg on his arm. But if Peg felt his lack of enthusiasm, she gave no indication of it.

  “Royce and Blazer are hanging around to kill you,” she said, “if you turned up alive. Cole will be here for the drawing. I wanted to tell you about him the last time, but I couldn’t. You thought he was your friend.”

  “I know. He saw Broad Clancy. Jewell told me what he was trying to do.”

  “Jewell told you!” She bit her lip, not letting her sudden flare of anger show. “What are you going to do when he comes back?”

  They reached the hotel and went in. “I don’t know,” Morgan said.

  He had known it was a situation he would have to face. Cole would come back to see if Murdo Morgan had been destroyed, and Morgan honestly didn’t know what would happen then. He shrank, even in his thoughts, from killing this man he had called friend.

  “It’s good to see you on your feet, Murdo.”

  It was Jewell, coming down the stairs beyond the desk. She was wearing a blue bombazine dress with long sleeves. Morgan had not seen her in that dress before, and his eyes, taking in her small figure, showed his appreciation. He lifted his hat.

  “It’s good to be on my feet,” he told her.

  Jewell nodded to Peg. “How are you, Peg?”

  For an instant Peg had no answer. She stood tall and straight beside Morgan, her hand still possessively on his arm, her head high, as she fought for self-control. Morgan, turning his gaze to her, saw the pulse beat in her throat, the quiver of her lips. She had, he guessed, sought this meeting, and now that it was here, she couldn’t bring it off the way she had planned.

  “I’m fine, Jewell,” Peg murmured. “We’re having supper. Won’t you come with us?”

  “Thank you, but I’ve had supper.”

  “Gardner said he’d told you girls I’d ask you to help with the drawing,” Morgan said bluntly. “That isn’t right, knowing how your folks feel.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” Peg said quickly.

  Jewell hesitated, and she was the one about whom Morgan was most concerned. Pete Royce was no good. Everybody in the valley knew that. Peg hated him, and she would help with the drawing to spite him, if for no other reason. Broad Clancy was something else. Morgan knew Jewell didn’t agree with him, but she didn’t hate him.

  “Broad won’t like it,” he said.

  “She’ll do it, Murdo,” Peg breathed. “It’s the least she can do. Gardner said it would be a big help to you, because everybody would know it was an honest draw.”

  A smile touched Jewell’s lips. “Of course, I’ll help, Murdo.”

  Peg’s answering smile was quick and lip-deep. “I thought you would.”

  Morgan looking from one to the other, did not fully understand. He only knew they were women, facing each other, fighting with claw instead of fist, one tall and dark and full-bodied, the other small and slim, with wheat-gold hair afire now, with a slanted ray of sunlight falling across her head. There was this moment of tension, spark-filled. It was steel pressed against a whirling emery wheel, and Morgan, striving desperately to find something to say to break the tension, could do no better than say: “Doc says it healed up fine.”

  Jewell brought her eyes to Morgan. “I’ve worried about you. You were so weak when I left you.”

  Morgan felt Peg stiffen.

  “You were with him when he was shot?” she asked coldly.

  “No, but I found him afterward. I guessed Flint would head for the lava flow and Doc and I were close enough to them to hear the shots. I stayed with Murdo until after his fever broke.”

  “And you left him when he was still weak?”

  “Doc thought I should. Dad was looking for him, and we thought that if I came back and said I couldn’t find him, Dad would pull in his men, thinking that if I couldn’t find him, he was really gone. It did work that way.”

  Peg’s breath was a long sigh. “If I had been taking care of him,” she whispered, “I’d have stayed until he was well.”

  “He should have sent for you,” Jewell said.

  “I was all right,” Morgan cut in.

  A sob came out of Peg, startlingly sudden. “You wouldn’t send for me, would you, Murdo? You couldn’t trust me like you could her.”

  Whirling, she ran out of the lobby and on through the dust of the street to her horse. Mounting, she quit town at a wild, reckless pace.

  “I’m sorry,” Jewell said contritely. “I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know why I did.”

  Still Morgan did not fully understand it. He only knew that women clash in a different way than men, that Jewell had struck back in self-defense. He turned toward the dining room, then swung back to say: “I don’t want to bust you and your father up.”

  “You won’t. I’ve already left home. Now go get your supper....”

  XVII

  Gardner had figured the uncertain element of time as accurately as a man could. His office crew came north on the stage from Alturas, fast wagons bringing their equipment. Empty water wagons creaked across the desert to make the long haul from the creeks around Clancy Mountain, where the water ran clear and cold in a swift lacy pattern. Lumbering freighters, starting earlier, brought food supplies, blankets, a heavy stove for the restaurant, tents, and, from Lakeview, lumber for the platform in the big tent, and tables and benches for the dining room.

  Morgan, watching idly because there was nothing for him to do at the moment, marveled at the military precision with which Gardner’s men worked. Saws bit through pine. The ring of hammer on nail was a constant racketing noise. Canvas was stretched, stakes pounded deep into the earth, ropes tightened. Within a matter of hours, Irish Bend had reached out across the flat to triple in size.

  Gardner, flushing with pride, slapped Morgan on the back.

  “We’re ready. Let ’em come!” He grinned in sudden embarrassment. “You know, Morgan, I’ve kicked myself for not taking a partnership in this deal. I misjudged the land and I misjudged you. I thought the valley was too far from a railroad, and I didn’t believe you could take care of yourself against the opposition you’d have.”

  “We’re a long way from a railroad,” Morgan admitted, “and there’s still plenty of opposition.”

  “Steel will come,” Gardner said confidently. “And as for the opposition, Cole hasn’t showed his face, Blazer and Royce have stayed out of town since you called their bluff, and it looks like Clancy is convinced we mean business.”

  Gardner might be right about the railroad, Morgan agreed, but he was dead wrong about the opposition. Morgan’s mind turned to Clancy’s beef agreement as it had continually during his waking hours since he had heard about it. The deal had been made. There was nothing to do but let time bring Clancy into the open.

  “I couldn’t have put this over if you hadn’t given me a hand,” Morgan said. “I didn’t have any idea there would be this whoopdeedoo when I bought the grant.”

  Gardner showed his pleasure. “Glad to do it, Morgan. Fact is, I’ll be a partner when I get the ditch system in. Funny about me. Some men get pleasure out of whiskey or women. Bringing farmers onto good land where they can own their home is mine.” He chuckled. “Only this time somebody else is taking the risk. If the sale doesn’t go off, you’ll lose your shirt. If it does, you’ll be a rich man.”

  “If it doesn’t go off,” Morgan said grimly, “you’ll be digging into your pocket, because my shirt won’t pay for all this.”

>   Gardner took a fresh grip on his cigar. “Guess we’d better see it goes over.” He squinted up at the bright sky. “If the good weather holds like it has, we won’t need to worry. Let them come. We’ve taken care of everything but the weather, which is one thing you just have to leave for Providence.”

  XVIII

  They did come. By stage. By horseback. By buggies. By buckboards. And in covered wagons loaded with household goods, ready to stay through the winter, echoes of their passage singing across the sage and bunchgrass. All roads led to Irish Bend. There the trail ended, the human tide piled up, and chaos had to be hammered into order.

  It was the same drama that had been enacted and reënacted through the centuries, the drama that had made America. Explorers driven on by the deathless urge to see beyond the skyline, to see where the rivers were born.

  Missionaries, men of God, their Bibles under their arms, risking their scalps to tell the howling, blood-lusting, brown skins of another world and their soul’s salvation. Mountain men, buckskin-clad, fringe a-sway, Indian wives and half-breed children, taking the savages’ way of life, driven into the empty land of the great silence because a neighbor had built within sight of them, the smoke from his chimney corrupting the horizon.

  Miners and prospectors, haunting the bars and gulches, urged on by an inner hunger for the yellow metal, building boom town after boom town, climbing above timberline where ten times out of nine, they said, you’d find silver. Cattlemen, land pirates, harking back to the feudal days of chivalry with the chivalry so often missing, hiring the knights of horse and rope and gun, an aristocracy taking what it wanted without a by-your-leave of anyone, holding to what they claimed by any means they had, surrendering only to death or the tidal wave of those whose best weapon was the plow.

  Every wave also brought the others. Hangers-on. Tradesmen. Lawyers and doctors, preachers and teachers, blacksmiths and carpenters. Women, the virtuous and the tinseled; those who followed their men because theirs was a love and devotion that went beyond human analysis; those who merely followed men, accepting their sordid profession through choice or perhaps driven to it by the exigencies of life.

  Bad men and good, outlaws and law-abiding, the strong who shaped life and the weak who were shaped by that life. Bunco artists. Grifters. Con men.

  All of them were here in Irish Bend, and Abel Purdy grew with the needs of the day.

  Three men tried to hold-up the Stockmen’s Bank. Purdy caught them from one side, Morgan from the other, and the three of them died in the deep dust of Irish Bend’s street while gunfire racketed between the paintless false fronts.

  A shell game operator set up his board in front of the Silver Spur. Purdy invited him to leave. The invitation was accepted. A drunk accosted Jewell Clancy on the street. Morgan rammed his way through the crowd and knocked the man down. He spat out a tooth, wiped blood from his mouth, and bawled,

  “You own the town, maybe, but you don’t own the women!”

  Morgan hauled him to his feet, knocked another tooth lose, and told him to leave town. Invitation again accepted.

  It was rough and tough and turbulent, but Abel Purdy and Murdo Morgan held down the lid, and some of the turbulence died. Good men, these farmers. Driven by land hunger and a dream. Freckle-faced kids. Sunbonneted women. Weather-darkened men with hands curled to fit the handles of their plows. Kansans and Nebraskans, and east to the Appalachians.

  “Good men,” Gardner said. “That’s why I’m aiming to build your irrigation system.”

  Good men, Morgan knew. Men with enough money to buy their land and still have some left for the hard years ahead. The raggle-taggle, the visionary, the seekers of something for nothing would come later, to settle on free government land. Maybe they would prove up. Maybe not. But these men were different. They would give the land a fair trial. If it beat them, they would lose the stake they had spent half a lifetime making. If they lost, they would move on and start again.

  Jewell’s hotel and Gardner’s tent with its hay beds were filled. The store sold out and left the owner cursing because he had lacked faith and failed to build up his stock. The hotel dining room never had an empty table and the tent restaurant was always full as well.

  At night campfires were stars stretching across the flat south of town. The haystacks the Carricks had built melted like snowdrifts before a burning sun. Kansas men gathered together. Nebraska men. Iowa. Missouri. Illinois. Visited and dreamed and stared at Clancy Mountain and allowed there might be deer up there.

  In every group, leaders lifted their heads above the others, were listened to and toadied to, and grew deep-chested with attention. Clay Dalton, from the Nebraska sandhills, shook Morgan’s hand with respect. He turned his head and spat a brown ribbon that plopped into the wheel- and hoof-churned dust of the street.

  “Never seen a purtier valley, Mister Morgan. Had some misgivin’s, comin’ so far on the big gab of men you sent out to sell your land. Figured it might be just another rush, aimin’ to take the bark off our backs, but I reckon if you give us a fair sale next week, we’ll be mighty well satisfied.”

  Good men. Excited a little by the crowd and a new land. Everything new. Talked to the old settlers, like Jim Carrick. Asking him this and that. What were the winters like? Were the summers always this cool? What could you raise? Would fruit grow here? Satisfied, solid men riding out over the valley, scratching shoe toes through the dirt, picking up a handful and letting it dribble between their fingers, finding the spots they hoped to draw.

  Overnight, sleepy old Irish Bend, the cow town, was gone. A new Irish Bend throbbing with boom-town life, more canvas than wood, mushroomed among the clumps of sage and rabbitbrush. The old inhabitants scratched their heads and rubbed their eyes, and could not believe this thing they saw.

  Some cursed Murdo Morgan. Some looked at him with new interest and admitted that maybe Broad Clancy was finished. He hadn’t showed up. He hadn’t turned a hair. By this time, he knew that Murdo Morgan was alive and in Irish Bend. It wasn’t like Broad Clancy, and nobody understood. Not even Jewell. Not even Murdo Morgan.

  Then Ed Cole rode the stage in from Prineville.

  Morgan was in his office, visiting with Clay Dalton and some of his Nebraska friends, when his door opened.

  “Ed Cole’s here,” Gardner said.

  Morgan rose, a pressure on his chest making it hard for him to breathe. “I’ll go see what he wants,” he said. “Don’t reckon I’ll be long.”

  He stepped into the main office, the clattering typewriters annoying him. He strode into Gardner’s office, gritting his teeth against the clamor that drove a shivering spasm down his spine. Ed Cole was standing at the corner of Gardner’s desk, an easy smile on his lips, his blue eyes as guileless as they had been the day he had sat in his San Francisco office and told Morgan he would see about the loan.

  “How are you, friend Murdo?” Cole said in a soft courteous voice. He held out his hand. “I came to watch the drawing. Looks like it’ll be quite a show.”

  Gardner stepped in behind Morgan, closing the door after him. Morgan ignored Cole’s hand. His breathing sawed into the quiet, air coming from the bottom of his lungs as he fought his anger.

  “That isn’t the reason you’re here,” he said, dropping his hand, the mask of courtesy stripped from his face.

  “This is a fine way to greet a friend,” Cole said harshly.

  “Friend?” Morgan turned to Gardner. “Wonder what he’d say an enemy was?”

  Cole slipped his hands into his coat pockets. There might be a gun there. Morgan wasn’t sure.

  “Let’s have it, Morgan,” Cole said. “We’ve known each other a long time. You wouldn’t be where you are now if I hadn’t negotiated your loan for you.”

  “I’m not so sure of that, but what you said about knowing each other is right. I’m remembering the time a bunch of miners had you cornere
d in Ouray. They claimed you’d crooked them in a poker game. I didn’t believe it then, but I do now. You were mighty glad I was around.”

  Cole licked dry lips. “Sure, Murdo. You saved my life. I returned the favor by helping you get a loan. Now why...?”

  “No use in lying about it, Ed. You got me that loan because you thought I was a cinch to lose out in this land sale and your bank would get the wagon road grant for the price of the loan you’d made me. A blasted steal, which makes you a robber same as if you’d held a gun on me.”

  Color bloomed in Cole’s cheeks. He chewed a lip, eyes not so guileless now as they whipped to Gardner and back to the raging Morgan. Suddenly he was afraid. Morgan remembered the way he had looked that night in Ouray. He saw the man now as he was, handsome and smooth-mannered, but with neither love nor respect for anything or anybody but himself. He was like a tree covered by sound bark, but utterly rotten inside.

  “Who’s been lying to you?” Cole asked in a vain attempt to bluff it through.

  “Nobody. Jewell Clancy told me about you being out there to see Broad. You made a deal with him. If something went wrong so your back-shooting gundogs didn’t get me, Broad was supposed to do the job and you were going to deed him the land he needed when your bank got the road grant. You never intended to keep that bargain, did you, Ed?”

  “You’ve been lied to!” Cole screamed.

  “Then why did you come to the valley after I got here?” Morgan demanded. “If you were on the level, why didn’t you come see me? You’re doing the lying, Ed. You put Blazer and Royce on my tail. Then you tried to make it a sure thing by seeing Clancy. Peg Royce said....”

  “Peg wouldn’t say anything. She took my money....” Cole caught himself. It was admission enough. Dull red crept over Cole’s face and on around to the back of his neck. There was this moment of struggle within him before he made a futile effort to keep his self-respect.

  “I’m not going to stand here and be called a liar!” Cole raged, and started for the door.