by Alan Lemay
"I first saw him from my bed," she whispered. "He went behind that dwarfed spruce. For a while he stood there behind it-as if he was watching the house. Then he went on, walking as quietly as-as nothing human. As he went out of sight I got up and came to the window; and I watched him until I couldn't see him any more. He went toward the pump house, and out of sight."
"I don't see any sign of him now."
Jean seized his arm, and he heard her breath in her teeth. "What's that? There, close in the shadow of the pump house?"
Kentucky looked hard where she pointed. He could not at once be sure whether he saw anything or not; but as he stared, straining his eyes against the bad light, he presently began to believe that he could make out the crouching figure of a man.
It produces a queer sensation to study a shadow in the semblance of a man who crouches, watching, for an unknown purpose in the dark. For half a minute, as he stared trying to make certain of that halfseen figure, Kentucky forgot the girl at his side altogether; but he remembered her abruptly as he realized that she was shivering with uncertainty and the cold. "Get into your bed," he whispered. "I'll watch here."
She shook her head. Her eyes were fixed with a frozen fascination upon the shadow which seemed to conceal the figure of a watcher. Kentucky put an arm about her, and as he drew her against his side he could feel the cold tremors that ran the whole length of her body.
For what seemed a long time they knelt there, their eyes fixed upon the shadow against the pump house. Once Kentucky was certain that he not only perceived the whole outline of the crouched figure, but had seen it move; and his hand moved toward his gun. But the shadow blurred and lost outline again, and he waited, unsure.
When the telephone broke into abrupt outcry in the house behind them the sudden burst of sound struck across their tense nerves like the crack of a whip against fiddle strings. Jean jerked violently; then, pulling herself together, whispered, "Damn!" The telephone continued to ring.
Kentucky whispered, "One of us will have to answer that. I think you'd better go. Ml stay and watch the shadow here. If it's for me, please take the message."
Jean Ragland hesitated, then silently obeyed. With his eyes riveted upon their mark, Kentucky listened for what seemed a long time to the low murmur of Jean's voice, two rooms away.
Presently, alone, and with his eyes accustomed to their work, he saw the secret of the mysterious shadow dissolve, so that he finally recognized it for what it was -a bush, a wagon spring, and a broken buckboard wheel. Whomever Jean had seen prowl the layout, and wherever he might be now, he was no longer in the shadow of the pump house and had not been, since they had watched that shadow together.
Disgusted, Kentucky rose, straightening his cramped knees. One long step from the window stood Jean Ragland's bed. He could see almost as much of the terrain from its edge as he could from the sill, and he now sat down upon it, careful to avoid a creaking of the springs.
Her bed was still warm to his hand, where Jean had lain and tried to sleep; and for a moment he marveled that the toss of circumstances should have brought him so near to this girl, even for so little time. Then he noticed something else.
Something was wrong with the mattress upon which he sat. Unmistakably, there was something within that mattress that had nothing to do with sleep. Suddenly Kentucky dropped to one knee beside the bed and thrust: his hand between the mattress and the sheet
Buried in the mattress his fingers found the polished wood of a rifle stock; and beside it, dismounted, the cool smooth steel of the barrel. For a moment his hand rested on these while something turned over in the pit of his stomach and refused to go back into place. He withdrew his hand, and sat down limply on the edge of the bed. He was not ready to say what the discovery meant; but he knew instantly that Jean was more deeply involved than he had supposed perhaps far more deeply. "Dear God," he whispered, "what have we here? What have we here?"
The murmur of Jean's voice within the house had ceased; and though he did not hear her moccasins, he heard the faint stir of the door as she came into the room. He stood up, overwhelmed with such pity for this ill-situationed girl that he was the victim of an unaccustomed timidity. She came close to him and her hand touched his arm.
"That shadow was a misdeal," he whispered "There isn't anybody in that shadow. I don't believe there's anybody out there any more." She said, "Oh."
He felt infinitely gentle toward her, and compassionate. Presently he knew that he would have to ask her why that gun was concealed in her mattress. He was unable to ask her yet. "What was the phone call?" he asked.
"That was for you," she told him. "I've always heard that that insane old man didn't know night from day; but wouldn't you think he'd have enough sense not to"
"Who was it?"
"It was Mark Ferris, that gunsmith at Waterman. He's still trying to trace Zack Sanders' gun for you."
"Yes? Quick! What did he say?"
"He said-" Jean was shivering so violently that she could hardly control the chattering of her teeth.
"Wait a minute." Kentucky picked her up, sweeping her off her feet with an arm under her knees, and laid her on the open bed; then pulled the blankets over her, and pressed the edges close about her throat. "Now go on," he said.
"He said that he got to thinking that maybe you'd made a mistake in reading the number you wanted traced. He started looking through his records again on the idea that you might have mistaken an 8 for a 3. He thinks now that that is what you did; because he has a record of such a gun, except that the serial number begins with 8. He's sure that this is the gun you meant. He sold it secondhand about a year ago."
"In God's name, woman, who did he sell it to?"
"To Joe St. Marie."
For perhaps half a moment Kentucky Jones was completely still. Then he sucked in a deep breath and began to swear through his teeth with the vicious intonation of a man who puts his whole heart into it. He had suddenly become aware that he had perhaps put off the formation of one theory for a little bit too long.
Suddenly he whirled to the window, crouched low to avoid the sash, and vaulted the sill. He heard Jean speak his name behind him, but he was racing for the bunk house. A match was already in his hand as he thrust open the door; he struck it on the logs and with quick efficient motions lighted one of the hanging lamps.
"St. Marie "he said aloud.
Joe St. Marie's bunk was empty. The bronc rider's bed roll was gone, and the slenderly made, silver-mounted bridle of Indian workmanship which he had always kept hanging at the head of his bunk. Kentucky swore again, blew out the light, and left the bunk house on the dead run. He headed now for the corral nearest the pump house, and sprang half way up the corral fence.
The half dozen horses in the corral were huddled together near the empty feed box. The ponies moved and shifted, but by the time he had counted them Kentucky knew which horse was gone. This information only verified, however, what Kentucky had already guessed. Joe St. Marie, leaving stealthily, as Kentucky now knew Jean had seen him leave, was certain to take the best-conditioned horse upon the place, in this case a raw-boned claybank. There were doubtless other horses under the Bar Hook brand which would out-travel the big claybank, but assuredly none of them were in the corrals that night. Kentucky leaned against the fence and pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He was picturing to himself the lay of the country, and the probable intricacies of Joe St. Marie's mind. Immediately he came to a conclusion which he had no reason to be certain was sound, but which was the best he could form from what information he had.
Once more he drove through the clogging snow at a run, this time to the house; here he got his hat and his coat, his gloves and his spurs. After that he went to the stable for his saddle and rope, and without hesitation put a loop upon the pony which he believed would come the nearest to matching the claybank's performance tonight - a wiry, almost under-sized steel-dust pony, strong with the markings of Indian blood. The pony was salty with the
cold, and nervous with the haste of Kentucky's movements; but Kentucky already had the blanket on and was swinging his fifty-pound saddle aboard by the horn as Jean, coming out from the house, reached his side,
"What where are you going? What's happened?"
A sudden crazy anger came into Kentucky, like a stroke of white lightning. At its impact all the compassion, all the tenderness he had felt for this girl seemed to vanish, as if she had held him under a hypnosis, the spell of which had snapped. He turned on her furiously.
"What is it to you where I go or what I do? Men put their hands in the lion's mouth for you, and you tell them nothing not even enough so that they can take care of their own lives!"
She stared at him a moment in utter bewilderment, and one hand went to her throat. "Why, Kentucky why, Kentucky-I've told you more more than"
He said, "You trust no one, you work with no one; everyone trusts you, and you let us all ride blind."
He turned furiously to his horse and drew the latigo up with a snap that jerked a grunt out of the animal. And he set his teeth in his lip lest he utter the belief which had overwhelmed him: that Jim Humphreys had died because of the reticence of this slim girl, now standing beside him in the snow.
"But but-" Jean Ragland's eyes looked enormous in her white face. The loose mass of her hair, lifted sideways by the frozen wind off the Maricopas, seemed to quiver as it yielded to the stir of the air. She shivered; the untrampled snow beyond the corral poles was no whiter than her blue-veined ankles, or her knuckles as she held the robe close at her throat. And though she was a tall girl, Kentucky Jones loomed above her like a tree, so that even then in his anger he saw that she was a pitiful and deso lated figure. Yet he was seeing Jim Humphreys' face as he had seen it last, staring with unseeing eyes at the first stars; and, believing that Jim Humphreys' death could have been prevented, had Kentucky known what this girl must know, he could not forgive her. His low, uncompromising voice cut hers down.
"I've been taken for a fool and used as a fool," he said. "But I tell you this: I'm going to ride this thing out. I'm going to ride this thing clear through to the end, regardless of what the end is. You tear me? And when that's done I'm through."
Jean Ragland's face contorted tragically, exactly as if he had cut her with his quirt. One of her hands faltered to her mouth, and her teeth closed on a knuckle. She managed to say, "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to try to cut off St. Marie at Hightman's Gap. If I don't get him there, I may or may not go on. I haven't decided yet."
"You think you think he"
"The man who put the gun into Zack's hand is the man responsible for his death, just as surely as if he shot Zack himself and that gun was St Marie's. I'm going to have me that man. When I've got him, I'm going to turn and get me the man that killed Mason. And I don't care who it is, or how close to home, or if it splits the rimrock wide open when he's caught"
It had been on his tongue to tell her that she might shield whom she wanted to, lie to whom she wanted to, conceal what evidence she wanted to, but he would see the killer of Mason hung in the end; but he bit this back. Still jerky and explosive with his anger, he vaulted into the saddle.
The pony was cold and stiff, and should have been warmed up gradually; but Kentucky Jones was not thinking about the care of ponies. He poured in quirt and spur with savage disregard, and at the corral gate jumped the pony over the two lower bars, which he had not stopped to throw down.
He did not look back; but as he slammed out of the Bar Hook layout, he somehow knew that she was still standing there in the snow, stopping her mouth with her knuckles as she watched him as far as he could be seen. And he wondered if it was impossible for this girl to go to pieces, like other women, and lose herself in tears.
S THE buildings of the Bar Hook dropped behind him, presently becoming no more than a dark irregularity on the vast sweep of the Bench, the anger went out of him; and with the anger the heart seemed to go out of him also, leaving him weak, and entirely reckless of what might happen next. His horse was already blowing hard from the cold start he had given it. He pulled it down to a shuffling trot and pointed up-country across long broken reaches of snow.
For four miles he held steadily northward, then turned and swung a broad circle, seeking to cut a trail which would verify the supposed direction of St. Marie. Four times he crossed promising trails, but each, when he dismounted to examine it, proved to be old. He was far to the eastward when he at last cut a straight-drawn trad: made within the hour. He judged that the bronc rider was pushing northeast at a cat-trot, trying as Jones had guessed for Hightman's Gap.
He knew that St. Marie, once aware that he was followed, would never permit himself to be overtaken from behind. Kentucky was only half familiar with the Wolf Bench terrain, but he concluded that he would have to try to come upon Hightman's Gap by a different way, even at the risk of not coming upon it at all. He turned north, leaving St. Marie's trail, and pressed up-country at a hammering trot.
The trail he was making looped across Wolf Bench at a long slant, first over long reaches of the faintly rising and falling open country of the Bench, then more deeply into a country of boulders and thin-scattered timber. Sometimes the deep impassable gashes that laced the Bench outguessed him so that he had to go a long way around; and when this happened he had to push his horse harder than he had allowed for, to make up for the distance and time he had lost. But the steel-dust pony was a good mountain animal, a horse bred to the rimrock; it adjusted itself to the treachery of the unseen footing under the snow with almost the surety of the daintyfooted, cat-climbing mules of the Maricopa pack trails.
The hours passed and the pony tired, and it seemed to Kentucky Jones that that ride was perhaps the longest and loneliest he had ever made in his life. He could not keep Jean Ragland out of his mind. Over and over she returned to him with a reality more sharp and inescapable than as if she had been riding at his side.
He remembered the strong sharp pressure of her fingers, and the touch of her cheek, and the pliant, yielded curve of her body in his arms; he could see the stir and drift of her loose hair as they had stood in the corral, and the impelling, unnamed emotion in her eyes as she had stood staring at him with her knuckle between her teeth; and he could smell the clean touch of frost upon brushed wool. This girl had become the center of all living, as a waterhole is the center of a ranges, or a fire the center of a camp. He had never been called upon to admit this to himself, until suddenly circumstances had asked him to accept also the certainty that she had betrayed them all.
For he could not avoid recognition that Jean's concealment of the rifle had a different meaning than had that extraordinary feat of hers at the inquest, when she had lifted the bullet that killed Mason from under the very nose of the sheriff. Her concern with the bullet had told him that she was shielding someone if not the killer, then at least someone who might otherwise have been open to an unfair suspicion. Although, in the case of the bullet, she had availed herself of his help, he had been able to understand that he remained an outsider here, who could not expect to be told in what sort of thing he had assisted her. But in spite of Old Man Coffee he had assumed that she was at least cooperating with the interest of her father and her father's brand.
But the discovery of the hidden rifle told him at once that she was cooperating with no one; that, in credibly, she was playing an utterly lone hand at least, he reflected bitterly, as far as the Bar Hook was concerned. For certainly no man had had anything to do with hiding a rifle in a bed. A man, and particularly a cowman, who sought to hide something would hide it by means of distance and inaccessibility; the bottom of a waterhole in some far cienega would have been the ultimate resting place of the undesirable rifle. In this vast broken country only a woman would select a cache so close under the light.
She was acting, then, without cooperation with her father, or any other of the Bar Hook personnel. The association of this fact with the circumstances of Jean's rend
ezvous with her father's enemy was unavoidable.
To this unhappy situation the revelation of St. Marie's connection added a sharp immediacy. He believed now that the materials for solution had been under their hands; and were now perhaps lost to them because Jean had concealed the very signs that would have shown the trail. Because of her concealment of evidence, the Bar Hook had moved uncertainly, helpless in the dark; and the result was that a good tall boy was dead, and others would perhaps join him before it was through.
In his present state of disillusionment and the dregs of anger, he was supported by no particle of faith. He could not put her out of his mind. But she seemed to him to be like a mirage, which lures all the sanity out of a thirsty man, yet contains nothing of honesty, nor sincerity, nor faithfulness, when finally it is reached.
He pushed on steadily, counting upon the toughness of his pony. By the stars he knew that his general direction was true; but he had made so many detours that he no longer had any idea of how far he had come, or whether he could reach the trail into Hightman's Gap that night or not. His hope that he would be able to make it before St. Marie was very like a prayer. Until now the smash of six-guns had never been associated in his mind with anything more desirable than the raw, sickly smell of blood. But now, for once in his life, he had a stubborn ugly urge to throw bullets into something alive, and blow it off the face of the earth. He hoped fervently not only that he would head Joe St. Marie, but that St. Marie would fight.
Then, unexpectedly, he found that he was in country that he knew; and in three hundred yards more he recognized the trail into Hightman's Gap. A faint persistent whisper of wind in the scrub oak and juniper concealed from him the sound of any movement upon the trail. He approached with caution, stopped his horse and swung deep out of the saddle, not daring to set foot to the ground. There had been riders through that gap since the snow, perhaps half a dozen in either direction: carefully, with ungloved hand, he explored a section of the trail inch by inch, until he was satisfied that no man had passed this way before him in the last twentyfour hours.
