by Bower, B M
"It's Johnny Croft!" she gasped just above her breath. "How—did it happen, Lite?"
"I don't know," said Lite slowly, looking down and still patting her hand. "Your father and I have both been gone all day. I just got back a few minutes ago and found out about it." His tone, his manner and his words impressed upon Jean the point he wanted her to get,—that her father had not yet returned, and so knew nothing of the crime.
He led her back to where Pard stood, and told her to get on. Without asking him why, Jean obeyed him, with a shudder when her wide eyes strayed fascinated to the open door and to what lay just within. Lite went up and pulled the door shut, and then, walking beside her with an arm over Pard's neck, he led the way down to the stable, and mounted Ranger.
"You can't stay here," he explained, when she looked at him inquiringly. "Do you want to go over and stay at Carl's, or would you rather go back to town?" He rode down toward the gate, and Jean kept beside him.
"I'm going to stay with dad," she told him shakily. "If he stays, I'll—I'll stay."
"You'll not stay," he contradicted her bluntly. "You can't. It wouldn't be right." And he added self-reproachfully: "I never thought of your cutting across the bench and riding down the trail back of the house. I meant to head you off—"
"It's shorter," said Jean briefly. "I—if I can't stay, I'd rather go to town, Lite. I don't like to stay over at Uncle Carl's."
Therefore, when they reached the mouth of the coulee, Lite turned into the trail that led to town. All down the coulee the trail had been dug deep with the hoofprints of a galloping horse; and now, on the town trail, they were as plain as a primer to one schooled in the open. But Jean was too upset to notice them, and for that Lite was thankful. They did not talk much, beyond the commonplace speculations which tragedy always brings to the lips of the bystanders. Comments that were perfectly obvious they made, it is true. Jean said it was perfectly awful, and Lite agreed with her. Jean wondered how it could have happened, and Lite said he didn't know. Neither of them said anything about the effect it would have upon their future; I don't suppose that Jean, at least, could remotely guess at the effect. It is certain that Lite preferred not to do so.
They were no more than half way to town when they met a group of galloping horsemen, their coming heralded for a mile by the dust they kicked out of the trail.
In the midst rode Jean's father. Alongside him rode the coroner, and behind him rode the sheriff. The rest of the company was made up of men who had heard the news and were coming to look upon the tragedy. Lite drew a long breath of relief. Aleck Douglas, then, had not been running away.
CHAPTER II
CONCERNING LITE AND A FEW FOOTPRINTS
"Lucky you was with me all day, up to four o'clock, Lite," Jim said. "That lets you out slick and clean, seeing the doctor claims he'd been dead six hours when he seen him last night. Crofty—why, Crofty was laying in there dead when I was talking about him to you! Kinda gives a man the creeps to think of it. Who do you reckon done it, Lite?"
"How'n hell do I know?" Lite retorted irritably. "I didn't see it done."
Jim studied awhile, an ear cocked for the signal that the coroner was ready to begin the inquest. "Say," he leaned over and whispered in Lite's ear, "where was Aleck at, all day yesterday?"
"Riding over in the bend, looking for black-leg signs," said Lite promptly. "Packed a lunch, same as I did."
The answer seemed to satisfy Jim and to eliminate from his mind any slight suspicion he may have held, but Lite had a sudden impulse to improve upon his statement.
"I saw Aleck ride into the ranch as I was coming home," he said. As he spoke, his face lightened as with a weight lifted from his mind.
Later, when the coroner questioned him about his movements and the movements of Aleck, Lite repeated the lie as casually as possible. It might have carried more weight with the jury if Aleck Douglas himself had not testified, just before then, that he had returned about three o'clock to the ranch and pottered around the corral with the mare and colt, and unsaddled his horse before going into the house at all. It was only when he had discovered Johnny Croft's horse at the haystack, he said, that he began to wonder where the rider could be. He had gone to the house—and found him on the kitchen floor.
Lite had not heard this statement, for the simple reason that, being a closely interested person, he had been invited to remain outside while Aleck Douglas testified. He wondered why the jury,—men whom he knew and had known for years, most of them,—looked at one another so queerly when he declared that he had seen Aleck ride home. The coroner also had given him a queer look, but he had not made any comment. Aleck, too, had turned his head and stared at Lite in a way which Lite preferred to think he had not understood.
Beyond that one statement which had produced such a curious effect, Lite did not have anything to say that shed the faintest light upon the matter. He told where he had been, and that he had discovered the body just before Jean arrived, and that he had immediately started with her to town. The coroner did not cross-question him. Counting from four o'clock, which Jim had already named as the time of their separation, Lite would have had just about time to do the things he testified to doing. The only thing he claimed to have done and could not possibly have done, was to see Aleck Douglas riding into the coulee. Aleck himself had branded that a lie before Lite had ever uttered it.
The result was just what was to be expected. Aleck Douglas was placed under arrest, and as a prisoner he rode back to town alongside the sheriff,—an old friend of his, by the way,—to where Jean waited impatiently for news.
It was Lite who told her. "It'll come out all right," he said, in his calm way that might hide a good deal of emotion beneath it. "It's just to have something to work from,—don't mean anything in particular. It's a funny way the law has got," he explained, "of arresting the last man that saw a fellow alive, or the first one that sees him dead."
Jean studied this explanation dolefully. "They ought to find out the last one that saw him alive," she said resentfully, "and arrest him, then,—and leave dad out of it. There's no sense in the law, if that's the way it works."
"Well, I didn't make the law," Lite observed, in a tone that made Jean look up curiously into his face.
"Why don't they find out who saw him last?" she repeated. "Somebody did. Somebody must have gone there with him. Lite, do you know that Art Osgood came into town with his horse all in a lather of sweat, and took the afternoon train yesterday? I saw him. I met him square in the middle of the street, and he didn't even look at me. He was in a frightful hurry, and he looked all upset. If I was the law, I'd leave dad alone and get after Art Osgood. He acted to me," she added viciously, "exactly as if he were running away!"
"He wasn't, though. Jim told me Art was going to leave yesterday; that was in the forenoon. He's going to Alaska,—been planning it all spring. And Carl said he was with Art till Art left to catch the train. Somebody else from town here had seen him take the train, and asked about him. No, it wasn't Art."
"Well, who was it, then?"
Never before had Lite failed to tell Jean just what she wanted to know. He failed now, and he went away as though he was glad to put distance between them. He did not know what to think. He did not want to think. Certainly he did not want to talk, to Jean especially. For lies never came easily to the tongue of Lite Avery. It was all very well to tell Jean that he didn't know who it was; he did tell her so, and made his escape before she could read in his face the fear that he did know. It was not so easy to guard his fear from the keen eyes of his fellows, with whom he must mingle and discuss the murder, or else pay the penalty of having them suspect that he knew a great deal more about it than he admitted.
Several men tried to stop him and talk about it, but he put them off. He was due at the ranch, he said, to look after the stock. He didn't know a thing about it, anyway.
Lazy A coulee, when he rode into it, seemed to wear already an air of depression, foretaste of what was to com
e. The trail was filled with hoofprints, and cut deep with the wagon that had borne the dead man to town and to an unwept burial. At the gate he met Carl Douglas, riding with his head sunk deep on his chest. Lite would have avoided that meeting if he could have done so unobtrusively, but as it was, he pulled up and waited while Carl opened the wire gate and dragged it to one side. From the look of his face, Carl also would have avoided the meeting, if he could have done so. He glanced up as Lite passed through.
"Hell of a verdict," Lite made brief comment when he met Carl's eyes.
Carl stopped, leaning against his horse with one hand thrown up to the saddle-horn. He was a small man, not at all like Aleck in size or in features. He looked haggard now and white.
"What do you make of it?" he asked Lite. "Do you believe—?"
"Of course I don't! Great question for a brother to ask," Lite retorted sharply. "It's not in Aleck to do a thing like that."
"What made you say you saw him ride home? You didn't, did you?"
"You heard what I said; take it or leave it." Lite scowled down at Carl. "What was there queer about it? Why—"
"If you'd been inside ten minutes before then," Carl told him bluntly, "you'd have heard Aleck say he came home a full hour or more before you say you saw him ride in. That's what's queer. What made you do that? It won't help Aleck none."
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" Lite slouched miserably in the saddle, and eyed the other without really seeing him at all. "They can't prove anything on Aleck," he added with faint hope.
"I don't see myself how they can." Carl brightened perceptibly. "His being alone all day is bad; he can't furnish the alibi you can furnish. But they can't prove anything. They'll turn him loose, the grand jury will; they'll have to. They can't indict him on the evidence. They haven't got any evidence,—not any more than just the fact that he rode in with the news. No need to worry; he'll be turned loose in a few days." He picked up the gate, dragged it after him as he went through, and fumbled the wire loop into place over the post. "I wish," he said when he had mounted with the gate between them, "you hadn't been so particular to say you saw him ride home about the same time you did. That looks bad, Lite."
"Bad for who?" Lite turned in the saddle aggressively.
"Looks bad all around. I don't see what made you do that;—not when you knew Jim and Aleck had both testified before you did."
Lite rode slowly down the road to the stable, and cursed the impulse that had made him blunder so. He had no compunctions for the lie, if only it had done any good. It had done harm; he could see now that it had. But he could not believe that it would make any material difference in Aleck's case. As the story had been repeated to Lite by half a dozen men, who had heard him tell it, Aleck's own testimony had been responsible for the verdict.
Men had told Lite plainly that Aleck was a fool not to plead self-defense, even in face of the fact that Johnny Croft had not drawn any weapon. Jim had declared that Aleck could have sworn that Johnny reached for his gun. Others admitted voluntarily that while it would be a pretty weak defense, it would beat the story Aleck had told.
Lite turned the mare and colt into a shed for the night. He milked the two cows without giving any thought to what he was doing, and carried the milk to the kitchen door before he realized that it would be wasted, sitting in pans when the house would be empty. Still, it occurred to him that he might as well go on with the routine of the place until they knew to a certainty what the grand jury would do. So he went in and put away the milk.
After that, Lite let other work wait while he cleaned the kitchen and tried to wash out that brown stain on the floor. His face was moody, his eyes dull with trouble. Like a treadmill, his mind went over and over the meager knowledge he had of the tragedy. He could not bring himself to believe Aleck Douglas guilty of the murder; yet he could not believe anything else.
Johnny Croft, it had been proven at the inquest, rode out from town alone, bent on mischief, if vague, half-drunken threats meant anything. He had told more than one that he was going to the Lazy A, but it was certain that no one had followed him from town. His threats had been for the most part directed against Carl, it is true; but if he had meant to quarrel with Carl, he would have gone to the Bar Nothing instead of the Lazy A. Probably he had meant to see both Carl and Aleck, and had come here first, since it was the nearest to town.
As to enemies, no one had particularly liked Johnny. He was not a likeable sort; he was too "mouthy" according to his associates. He had quarreled with a good many for slight cause, but since he was so notoriously blatant and argumentative, no one had taken him seriously enough to nurse any grudge that would be likely to breed assassination. It was inconceivable to Lite that any man had trailed Johnny Croft to the Lazy A and shot him down in the kitchen while he was calmly helping himself to Jean's gingerbread. Still, he must take that for granted or else believe what he steadfastly refused to confess even to himself that he believed.
It was nearly dark when he threw out the last pail of water and stood looking down dissatisfied at the result of his labor, while he dried his hands. The stain was still there, in spite of him, just as the memory of the murder would cling always to the place. He went out and watered Jean's poppies and sweet peas and pansies, still going over and over the evidence and trying to fill in the gaps.
He had blundered with his lie that had meant to help. The lie had proven to every man who heard him utter it that his faith in Aleck's innocence was not strong; it had proven that he did not trust the facts. That hurt Lite, and made it seem more than ever his task to clear up the matter, if he could. If he could not, then he would make amends in whatever way he might.
Almost as if he were guarding that gruesome room which was empty now and silent,—since the clock had not been wound and had run down,—he sat long upon the narrow platform before the kitchen door and smoked and stared straight before him. Once he thought he saw a man move cautiously from the corner of the shed where the youngest calf slept beside its mother, He had been thinking so deeply of other things that he was not sure, but he went down there, his cigarette glowing in the gloom, and stood looking and listening.
He neither saw nor heard anything, and presently he went back to the house; but his abstraction was broken by the fancy, so that he did not sit down again to smoke and think. He had thought until his brain felt heavy and stupid; and the last cigarette he lighted; he threw away, for he had smoked until his tongue was sore. He went in and went to bed.
For a long time he lay awake. Finally he dropped into a sleep so heavy that it was nearer to a torpor, and it was the sunlight that awoke him; sunlight that was warm in the room and proved how late the morning was. He swore in his astonishment and got up hastily, a great deal more optimistic than when he had lain down, and hurried out to feed the stock before he boiled coffee and fried eggs for himself.
It was when he went in to cook his belated breakfast that Lite noticed something which had no logical explanation. There were footprints on the kitchen floor that he had scrubbed so diligently. He stood looking at them, much as he had looked at the stain that would not come out, no matter how hard he scrubbed. He had not gone in the room after he had pulled the door shut and gone off to water Jean's dowers. He was positive upon that point; and even if he had gone in, his tracks would scarcely have led straight across the room to the cupboard where the table dishes were kept.
The tracks led to the cupboard, and were muddled confusedly there, as though the maker had stood there for some minutes. Lite could not see any sense in that. They were very distinct, just as footprints always show plainly on clean boards. The floor had evidently been moist still,—Lite had scrubbed man-fashion, with a broom, and had not been very particular about drying the floor afterwards. Also he had thrown the water straight out from the door, and the fellow must have stepped on the moist sand that clung to his boots. In the dark he could not notice that, or see that he had left tracks on the floor.
Lite went to the cu
pboard and looked inside it, wondering what the man could have wanted there. It was one of those old-fashioned "safes" such as our grandmothers considered indispensable in the furnishing of a kitchen. It held the table dishes neatly piled: dinner plates at the end of the middle shelf, smaller plates next, then a stack of saucers,—the arrangement stereotyped, unvarying since first Lite Avery had taken dishtowel in hand to dry the dishes for Jean when she was ten and stood upon a footstool so that her elbows would be higher than the rim of the dishpan. The cherry-blossom dinner set that had come from the mail-order house long ago was chipped now and incomplete, but the familiar rows gave Lite an odd sense of the unreality of the tragedy that had so lately taken place in that room.
Clearly there was nothing there to tempt a thief, and there was nothing disturbed. Lite straightened up and looked down thoughtfully upon the top of the cupboard, where Jean had stacked out-of-date newspapers and magazines, and where Aleck had laid a pair of extra gloves. He pulled out the two small drawers just under the cupboard top and looked within them. The first held pipes and sacks of tobacco and books of cigarette papers; Lite knew well enough the contents of that drawer. He appraised the supply of tobacco, remembered how much had been there on the morning of the murder, and decided that none had been taken. He helped himself to a fresh ten-cent sack of tobacco and inspected the other drawer.
Here were merchants' bills, a few letters of no consequence, a couple of writing tablets, two lead pencils, and a steel pen and a squat bottle of ink. This was called the writing-drawer, and had been since Lite first came to the ranch. Here Lite believed the confusion was recent. Jean had been very domestic since her return from school, and all disorder had been frowned upon. Lately the letters had been stacked in a corner, whereas now they were scattered. But they were of no consequence, once they had been read, and there was nothing else to merit attention from any one.
Lite looked down at the tracks and saw that they led into another room, which was Aleck's bedroom. He went in there, but he could not find any reason for a night-prowler's visit. Aleck's desk was always open. There was never anything there which he wanted to hide away. His account books and his business correspondence, such as it was, lay accessible to the curious. There was nothing intricate or secret about the running of the Lazy A ranch; nothing that should interest any one save the owner.
