by Alan Lemay
"He sure did," said Lee Bishop. "Boy, that bronc unwound!"
"He made two or three pitches," Billy said, "and then he took and run wild with me for two, three hundred yards; I pulled his fool head right back in my lap, but he just run loco, star gazing. I got him turned around I don't know where I was exactly when all of a sudden he somersaulted. I forget what I was trying to do right then."
"He was charging back into 'em," grunted Lee Bishop, "that's what he was trying to do."
"Paul Martinez had come up by then, and he was shouting at the other fellers. We threw a few shots back and forth, but I was behind the horse then. Paul Martinez rode over towards where Jim Humphreys fell; I pasted a couple at him, and he went off with the rest. This this leg sure feels like something happened to it"
They lifted Billy Petersen off his horse and car ried him into the one-room log bunk house which, with two good sized corrals and a barn, constituted the Bake Pan camp of the Bar Hook. Kentucky hastily built a fire while Lee Bishop cut off Billy Petersen's boot. "Catch hold of the top of the bunk, Billy," he said at last. A strangling cry broke from Petersen's throat as Lee Bishop seized the injured ankle and suddenly jerked backward with all his weight. "The poor guy fainted," he told Kentucky. "I don't guess I'll bandage this here till we get some hot water."
"I've got water heating on the stove."
"Give me the makings. Say-where did Jean go?"
Kentucky told him briefly what he had done.
"You sure took things on yourself," said Lee Bishop, eyeing him.
"What did you want done different?" asked Kentucky.
"I don't know as I'd have done anything different. I guess you done all right. The old man sure can't keep from fighting now. From here out it's pile into them and pile into them, and pile in again. All I ask is, save me Bill McCord!"
"What do you want to do with Jim Humphreys?"
"Lay the poor guy out in the stable, I guess."
"Jean Ragland is coming down here with three more horses. I better go on back and meet her on the trail. She'll break her neck sure, rounding those horses down that trail in the dark."
"Get going then. When you get back to the house phone to Waterman for the Doc to come out and reset this leg tomorrow."
"O.K."
ENTUCKY met Jean Ragland near the top of the trail. She had cast loose the leads of her two extra horses at the rim of the descent, and was pushing them ahead of her. They stopped and stood waiting in a tangle on the trail as Kentucky came up. "Don't push that stocking-foot black too close," she called to him; "he'll go cutting up the switch-back."
"Let him," said Kentucky; "we won't need the horses now."
Kentucky never forgot the reluctance of that meeting. He could still feel the dead ungainly weight of Jim Humphreys in his arms, and the news that he had to give Jean burdened him heavily. The abrupt, precipitous descent falling away behind him into thickening dark, and the black loom of the driven horses between himself and Jean filling the trail above him, seeming enormously tall with their haunches grotesquely higher than their heads these things seemed parts of a nightmare.
"How badly are they hurt?" she asked him.
"Jim Humphreys is dead."
She put a hand to her face and he thought that she swayed in the saddle. He dropped from his horse and went to her, shouldering between the driven ponies. Reaching her stirrup, he took her hand to steady her; for though he could not see her very well in the closing dark, it seemed to him that she had suddenly turned weak and sick. Her hand gripped his and clung; and even through their heavy gloves he detected the tremor of her fingers.
"Is Billy all right?" she asked, her voice faint.
"He broke his ankle when his horse faded; we'll have to get somebody out from Waterman to set it."
Jean drew a deep shuddering breath. "Why do people have to go smashing around, destroying each other?"
"It's bad," he agreed; "nobody likes it any less than I do. But we'll have to go on with it a little way more."
"The sheriff ought to be able to"
"Billy says himself that Jim Humphreys fired the first shot. Range shootings always come in as self defense. The fight will have to go on. I didn't get anywhere with Bob Elliot today. I told him what I was going to do, and he said come ahead with it; and we left it there."
Jean freed her hand. Her voice was steadier now. "The house was searched again," she told him. "Nothing much is gone."
"Nothing at all?"
"All that seems to be missing is an old .45; it hasn't been out of its holster for two or three years, to my positive knowledge. Haven't you any theory yet, about who keeps ransacking the house?"
"It's mighty hard," he admitted, "not to put a theory to that. But I'm still following Old Man Coffee's way. If one theory is worse than another, it's a theory that covers just part of a case."
He mounted, and they made their way single file up the trail in silence. The loose horses turned and followed them.
He brought his horse abreast of hers as they gained the level footing of the Bench and she turned to him vaguely. "I don't know if I can stand this, Kentucky, if it goes on much longer. Anything is better than this terrible waiting, and mystery, and nobody understanding each other."
"We'll see the beginning of action tomorrow!"
"Kentucky,"-her voice was faint with reluctance - "I'm awfully afraid that we won't."
"What do you mean? With those boys that we sent Harry Wilson for," he assured her, "I could stampede half the cattle in the rimrock back where they belong. You'll see us"
"The boys you wanted aren't coming, Kentucky."
"Didn't you send Harry Wilson to"
"I sent him; I told him exactly what you told me to tell him, and he went ripping down that crooked road fit to kill himself."
"Then"
"My father was there, Kentucky. I didn't even know he was there until I had routed Harry Wilson out of the bunk house and started him to town. He came running out when he heard Harry drive out. I told him what had happened down on the Bake Pan. Kentucky, his face lit up as if it had been what he was waiting for. It was the strangest thing. You could see how terrible it was to him; yet it was as if he came back to himself again, all in a moment. He started to turn and go to his horse that was still standing saddled near the door."
"But if he means to take up the fight"
"No, Kentucky; all of a sudden he seemed to remember what he had started to ask in the first place - where Harry Wilson was going in the car. Then I told him what I had done, that you told me to do. He stood there, and he seemed to think. And all that hard terrible light went out of his face again. And in the end it all simmered down to just a kind of a show of mean temper. I never saw him go into moods anything like that before Mason died. This terrible thing has done something to us all."
"You mean he didn't want us to send to Water man for more"
"He was furious, Kentucky in a kind of ugly, discouraged way. He wanted to know who you thought you were, sending for men to hire onto his outfit. Of course I hadn't told him yet about selling you my share of the outfit."
"What did you say to him?"
"Kentucky, I kind of lost my temper for a moment," Jean said. "I told him this was the time to fight, if ever he meant to. Kentucky, as I sat on the rim and heard the guns and saw Jim Humphreys keel out of his saddle,-oh, I was plenty sick. But something way down inside of me wants to hang onto the range and won't let go. If they fight - I can see we've got to stand our ground."
"You told him that?"
"Not all that but other things. It was enough. I guess it was too much."
"What did he do?"
"He told me to get in the house and stay there. He said it plenty forceful! I'd give anything in the world to know what's got into him."
Once more Kentucky was forced to think steadily of the reputation for infallibility which Old Man Coffee had earned as he said by his theory of having no theories. One theory in particular that was not pretty to l
ook at was trying to force its way into his mind. But once more he put theory down.
"Campo convinced himself," Jean was continuing, "that it would be an irreparable hurt if Waterman-and the rimrock-got the idea that we meant to make gunfight. The upshot of it was that Dad finally jumped into the other car and went ripping down the road to Waterman after Harry Wilson, to countermand your call for men."
"He sure must have worried about that angle of it considerably," said Kentucky, "to be more heated up over that than about what had happened to Billy and Jim."
"Oh, I think he took what had happened to the boys hard enough, too; but he seemed to think that you and Lee Bishop could do everything that anybody could do. He didn't see any need for me to bring more horses down there; I guess he was afraid to have me on that tough rimrock trail at night."
"But you came," Kentucky said.
"I told you I would and I hadn't told him I wouldn't."
There was a light in the bunk house as they came into the Bar Hook layout, and Kentucky looked at Jean questioningly.
"I guess Joe St. Marie has come in," Jean said. "He wasn't here when I started out with the horses. Do you feel like explaining what's happened down on the Bake Pan all over again, to him?"
"No," said Kentucky.
"Neither do I," said Jean. "Let's let him stay where he is. I don't understand that boy anyway, very well."
"Does anyone?"
"I doubt it."
Together they rebuilt the fire in the stove, and warmed up something to eat. In the press of events neither one of them took sufficient interest in food to remember afterwards what they had had. After they had eaten, Kentucky supposed that Jean would leave him to his own devices, or to turn in; but she lingered in the kitchen, reluctant to be alone. The night was very still; the occasional cracking of the big timbers in the frost sounded like pistol shots. When that house was full of people, light, and warmth, no house could be more friendly, however the rimrock blizzards might howl beyond the sturdy walls. But tonight the house seemed very big, and very empty, to be inhabited by just one slim girl, all alone.
"I don't know but what I'll sleep in the lean-to tonight, here off the kitchen," Kentucky suggested.
"Yes, do," she said instantly. "I don't know what's the matter with me. The night seems so still, and so empty, and so cold..."
Jean sat down upon a low blanketed settee that stood between the stove and the corner wall, and Kentucky came and sat beside her. There were circles under Jean Ragland's eyes; she was beginning at last to show the effects of the strain which the last ten days had placed upon her. But as she turned to look into his face, he learned again that her blue eyes could be deep and unreadable. Jean Ragland's eyes could pull the heart out of a man, without seeming to intend appeal, or to desire it. He wondered what lay deep down within those eyes which could look so silently, so secretively wise.
"Tell me the truth, Kentucky," she said. "You still don't have any theory?"
He slowly shook his head. "It's hard to follow Old Man Coffee's way," he told her, "It's hard not to have many and many a theory before you have any chance of knowing what a thing is about. But I'm still following Old Man Coffee."
"You still think that if you stay here you will find out?"
"Jean," he said, "do you want me to find out who killed Mason?"
She shot him a curious but untranslatable glance. He thought that she was not going to answer him; but after a moment she said, "Yes."
For no reason that he could name, he wondered instantly if she had lied. "The facts are beginning to add up a little bit now," he said.
"What are you waiting for?" she said. "What's keeping the answer from you?"
He hesitated. She looked so pitifully tired that he could hardly bring himself to bear down upon her now. Yet he knew that he would be unlikely to have as good a chance again to persuade her to tell him what she knew. Already he knew that Lee Bishop was in danger, that Bill McCord had tried to draw Bishop into a fight that would almost certainly have ended Bishop's life; and he was sure that Jim Humphreys had been killed because he had posed as boss and hence was perhaps taken for Bishop. He had a durable hunch that others were in immediate danger as an aftermath to the killing of Mason. And he sincerely believed that he had no more right to turn away from the trail than a hound dog has the right to swerve or break ground, once he has put down his nose.
"What is holding me up?" he repeated. "You, Jean."
"I?" she said sharply.
He was silent while he got out his tobacco sack and papers, and began the making of a cigarette. "Don't you think," he said, "that it's about time for you to tell me what you know?"
She stared at the stove, but without seeing the stove. "What makes you think I know anything, Kentucky?"
"Because you once had a theory of your own. You didn't take the bullet at the inquest without having a definite reason, a definite theory of this crime."
She said almost inaudibly, "Yes; that's true. But that blew up when Zack Sanders was found dead. I swear to you, Kentucky-my theory is dead utterly impossible now."
"That isn't the point," he insisted. "The point is that you did have a theory. That theory was based on something. Something that you saw? Or maybe something that you heard, or knew. Now I want you to tell me what that thing was."
She turned toward him, but defensively; and as she met his eyes her own were tormented "You I"
His keen grey gaze fixed her unwaveringly. "I'm not going to let you evade me any more," he said.
Suddenly some resistance within Jean Ragland seemed to break. She swayed against him, and turning, hid her face against his shoulder. She was breathing in long quavering drags; not sobbing, but as if very close to sobs.
For a moment Kentucky Jones sat motionless. Then he flicked his unlighted cigarette into the kindling box and took the girl into his arms, gently, as if she were a weary child.
Her hands clung to him as he drew her into his arms. She said in a small voice, "Hold me tight, Kentucky. The night is so still, so cold. I keep thinking of how Jim Humphreys is lying tonight, down on the Pan." Presently she turned her face upward to him, with closed eyes, and he kissed her. For a moment with her face turned inward toward his shoulder, she pressed her cheek hard against his; so that when she hid her eyes in the hollow of his shoulder again, there was visible upon her cheek a faint color where the unshaved bristle of his jaw had pressed.
They sat there for some time, there in the corner beyond the stove, in silence except for the soft crackling of the embers of the fire. As he sat with the girl in his arms the coldness and the bleak sense of disaster seemed to go out of the night, and the quiet lost its hostility. That brief hour in which he felt against his body the faint beating of her heart seemed illimitably precious; as if he were here serving as a utility for a little while in a destiny immeasurably beyond and above his own.
Yet he had no illusions concerning the part he was playing here. He believed, as definitely as he had ever believed anything in his life, that she had put herself in his arms as a last resort-silencing his questions in this way when she could no longer otherwise evade him. But some grim factor within him humbly bowed its head, waiting for a different day.
Jean stirred at last, and freed herself lazily from his arms. She smiled at him faintly, her eyes dreamy, misty with sleepiness. "I'm dead for sleep," she told him; "I think I can sleep now- better than I have been, these nights."
He let her go, and when she was gone he smoked his postponed cigarette in a curiously mixed mood, half softened, half grimly ironic. Presently he went to Zack Sanders' bunk, and lying down without taking off his clothes, was almost immediately asleep.
OT more than half an hour could have passed when he was jerked broad awake by a fluttering knock upon his door. Before he could answer it, the door opened half hurriedly, half in stealth, and Jean's whisper came to him through the dark "Kentucky, are you there?"
"Here, Jean." He jerked a match out of his pocket and stru
ck it into flame with his thumb nail.
As he stood up she came close to him, her eyes very big and dark in her pale face. She was wrapped in a brushed wool robe of a red and white Navajo pattern, so much too big for her that it was more like a blanket than a garment. Its ill-fitting folds lay open at her neck, revealing white shoulders and flimsy silk. And about her shoulders bushed the magnificent mass of her fine-spun hair, its color a smoky red-gold in the flare of the match. She was wearing moccasins, and without the high heels of her riding boots she looked less tall than he was accustomed to think of her, and somehow infinitely softer and more easily hurt.
"Jean what is it?"
"Kentucky somebody is walking all around us -just as quietly as-one of Joe St. Marie's ghosts."
The hurried phrasing gave him a queer turn for a moment as if she could see things that he could not. "All around us? What do you mean?"
"I mean around the layout here-near the house."
"How many of them?"
"I only saw one. He was prowling through the shadows - I saw him plainly, not more than ten horse jumps away. I couldn't hear a sound he made, even in all this quiet."
"Did it look like anybody you know?"
"I couldn't tell. He was carrying something on his shoulders. Then I thought I heard a walking horse."
"Where did you see this?"
"From the window of my room. I couldn't stand it alone there any more. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy."
"Let's have a look." Kentucky picked up his gun belt.
"Be quiet," she cautioned him. "Whoever it is doesn't want to be seen that's certain. If we're going to find out who it is, he mustn't know that he's been seen."
"O. K."
She groped for his hand and led the way through the cold dark of the long ranch house.
Jean's room was a small square one in the farther corner, somehow not as big nor as commodious as he had expected. It had two windows, one of which was wide open, so that the room was as frostily cold as the outdoors. At this window she knelt, peering out into the snow-reflected starlight, and he dropped to one knee beside her.
