The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  With half an eye Gary could see that Hugh Ludlow was dangerously angry at him, for some unknown reason. And the swart Siwash, his slit eyes glinting, was silently whetting a long-bladed skinning knife on his palm—a tacit and sinister threat that daunted Gary.

  “Well,” Gary said, trying to ignore Hugh’s hostility, “I don’t seem to be doing much of anything. I thought I was washing out some dust, but I didn’t cut much mustard, I guess.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Hugh snapped. “I mean”—he jerked a thumb at the cabin up slope—“what the hell d’you think you’re doing up there?”

  His arrogant tones angered Gary. Yesterday, and now at this second encounter, he had the impression that Hugh Ludlow was a spoiled and vicious boy, not yet grown up to know there were other people in the world besides himself.

  “I’m staying up there with old Higgens,” he said, playing poker till he found out the cause of Hugh’s ugly temper. Defenseless and weaponless, he took a quick glance at the shovel near the tom-rocker, meaning to jump for it if these three tried to gang him and beat him up.

  For a moment or two Hugh stared at him silently, his scowl deepening. Then: “Didn’t it occur to you,” he demanded, “that you’re putting Leda Barton on the spot by living at that cabin? What d’you suppose people will be saying about her? Or don’t you give a damn?”

  “We talked about that angle last evening,” Gary answered. “I offered to clear out, but Leda said, and old Nat, too, that those mud-daubers in Saghelia couldn’t say anything worse about her than they’ve said already. So I stayed.”

  “What if those two did ask you to stay? You should have been man enough to clear out anyhow. You’re a fine specimen—dynamiting a girl’s reputation just so’s you can hang around that old coot’s cabin and have things easy.”

  For a moment Gary believed that Hugh was using Leda merely as an excuse, to veil the real reason of his hostility. Maybe Hugh was feverishly covetous of that cache of gold and afraid that someone else might find it.

  Hugh’s next words set him right. Stepping closer, face to face, Hugh delivered his ultimatum: “You do as I say and there’ll be no trouble. I’ll give you a fair-square chance, and you’d better listen. Here’s your ticket. You’re not staying up there at that cabin. You’re getting out of Little Saghelia. I don’t intend to have this whole country talking about Leda Barton on account of you. They’ve talked about her enough now. Too damned much!”

  Gary was fairly staggered. Not by the ultimatum, but because the reason of Hugh’s ugly temper toward him suddenly stood revealed, as by a lightning flash. He knew jealousy when he saw it, passion when he saw it; and he knew he was surely seeing both, now. Hugh’s anger at the lies about Leda, his proprietary air toward her, his very tones when he spoke her name—all this betrayed, more forcefully than any words, that the man was fiercely in love with Leda Barton.

  “Lord above me!” Gary breathed. Hugh Ludlow, proud, overweening, heir to half this country—in love with Leda Barton, outcast, defamed and slandered! The irony of it nearly bowled him over.

  In the light of this crashing discovery a dozen little puzzles of the last twenty hours cleared up instantly: why Hugh Ludlow had treated Mona Casper so brusquely; why Leda had looked up so quickly at mention of Hugh’s name; why she had spoken a warning about Hugh Ludlow.

  And that sphinx-like smile from Sergeant Rhodes—he saw still deeper into that, now. Small wonder that Rhodes, knowing young Ludlow’s jealous and domineering nature, had smiled prophetically at the thought of a strange man living at the cabin up Little Saghelia!

  “Well, say something!” Hugh commanded. “Don’t stand there tongue-tied. I’m not going to eat you. You understand what you’re to do, don’t you?”

  “I ought to; you made it clear enough,” Gary answered evasively. Alone against three men, one of them toting a vicious knife, and Ludlow probably armed with a pocket gun, he was in no position to refuse point-blank. And yet he would not promise to go.

  “All right, then,” Hugh said, plainly believing that he had driven the fear of the Lord into his enemy. “I thought you’d take warning. Your cake’s all dough, fellow, and I’m glad you see it.”

  He motioned at the ’breed and Indian, and they started back down the trail. He himself stayed for a final word.

  “When you get in town, you’ll find a ticket for you at the railroad station. Out to the Grand Trunk. Take it and use it. If you don’t, if you’re still up there tomorrow morning”—he paused, to emphasize his words—“you may not get out of this alley at all.”

  With a nod that was half contempt and half satisfaction over the result of his visit, he whirled on his heel, joined the other two; and the three of them disappeared, down valley.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You seem sorta quiet, Gary,” old Nat remarked, over the noon meal in the cabin. “Is something a-troublin’ you?”

  “Not a thing, Dad,” Gary denied. He had said nothing to Leda or old Nat about Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum. It was not their worry but his.

  He could not make up his mind whether to stay and fight Hugh Ludlow, or to take up his flight again. The odds against him here were pretty hopeless. Against his lone self stood six or seven men and all the power of Hugh Ludlow’s money. If he stayed he likely would get a rifle bullet from ambush or a knife stab in the back. The best he could possibly hope for was to be waylaid, ganged, beaten half to death, and then “escorted” out of the valley.

  And he would not dare to go to the law against those men. Whatever they did to him, however viciously and criminally they hounded him, he would have to take it and keep quiet.

  But he winced at the thought of leaving Little Saghelia; and he was thinking not only of himself but of Leda. Hugh Ludlow’s proprietary air toward her made him angry, and a bit uneasy. The man had staked Leda out. His emotion toward her was not an unselfish love but a fierce and dangerous passion. She needed someone, some capable and loyal friend, to watch after and protect her.

  When he thought of Hugh’s ultimatum and the man’s domineering nature, a slow deep anger burned in him, and he wanted to stay. Wanted to keep Leda from harm, and smash that overweening young egoist.

  “Damned if you’ll push me around that way,” he thought. “You won’t ride rough-shod over me or over Leda either.”

  He wished he could have a talk with Leda, in his few hours of grace this afternoon, before definitely deciding what to do. Undoubtedly there were angles to this situation here on Little Saghelia which he still knew nothing about. If Leda would tell him the whole set-up, that might help him make up his mind.

  Old Nat pushed back his empty plate and glanced through the door at the bright cloudless sky.

  “It’ll be hiyu hot this afternoon along that rim-rock, Leedy. Somehow the heat sorta gits me worse’n it usta.”

  “You stay home, Dads. I can hunt that little stretch we were thinking about.”

  “I don’t like the idee of you bein’ ’way up valley by yourself, girl. Bears with cubs are nasty, this time of year; and ’sides, on this rock work a person can’t ever tell when he’ll fall an’ break a limb. If you’re plumb set on goin’, mebbe Gary might like to go ’long with you.”

  Gary could have hugged old Nat for the suggestion. All through the meal he had been wondering how he could get in a talk with Leda. Besides wanting to see what this cave-hunting business was like, he could imagine nothing finer than a whole afternoon with her, getting closer acquainted and shaking off the blue devils which had hounded him since Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum.

  Old Nat’s suggestion startled Leda a little. She looked up and glanced dubiously at Gary, as though uncertain whether she wanted him to go or not.

  Wisely Gary clamped down on himself and appeared totally uninterested. His deliberate policy of casualness toward her as a girl had already drawn her out of her shyness and made her less on guard agai
nst him.

  Presently, when he said nothing, she asked hesitantly, “Maybe you had other plans for this afternoon?”

  With studied indifference Gary answered: “Oh, I hadn’t anything special on. I don’t mind going.” Leda batted her eye at that. Gary could almost see her thinking: “Why, gee, he doesn’t seem to have any interest in me at all! He must have a girlfriend where he came from, or—or something.”

  In a moment she invited, “I—I’d like to have you, that is, if you really want to go.”

  “Okay,” Gary agreed. “I don’t guarantee to lick any bears, but if one gets after you I’ll try to slow him down till you get up a tree.”

  A few minutes later, with a pocket flash, a roll of trout line and Nat’s heavy old horse-pistol, they left the cabin and headed up the mountain. As they side-gouged up a steep slope above the meadow, Leda pointed at the whitish rim-rock which extended, as a bold imposing cliff, all the way around Little Saghelia Valley.

  “That’s a soft chalky limestone, and it’s got all sorts and sizes of caves in it. The other rocks in Little Saghelia are mostly granites and gneisses, and they don’t have any caves except overhangs. So Dads and I’ve been concentrating on this rim-rock. There are some ideal caves along it for a band of men to live in.”

  “I wish I could share your faith about finding this gold, Lee,” he commented. That “Lee” sounded rather partnerly and somewhat like a man’s name. “Frankly, this cache looks to me like a million-to-one-shot.”

  “But it’s here, and think of what you’d have if you found it. Five hundred thousand dollars! Doesn’t that excite you?”

  “Oh, some. But half a million, when and if found, is no key to the golden gates, Lee. Where I came from, lots of people with that much jump out of hotel windows.”

  “Give me that much and I’d jump higher than a hotel window!”

  “What would you do with it if you had it, Lee?”

  “I’d give Dads half, and then I’d use the other quarter-million to buy a one-way ticket away from Saghelia!”

  Gary doubted this. It seemed to him that secretly she longed for the good opinion of the little city yonder, or she would have gone long since. Saghelia was her home and its esteem was something that she cherished feverishly, valuing it as one always values a prize desperately fought for and never attained.

  They reached the foot of the rim-rock and sat down on a plaque of moss to rest. Down the long mountain slope the cabin under the balsams looked small as a wren house, and Jinny was only a lazy gray ant on the tiny flower-bright meadow. From their timberline height they could follow the winding silver thread of Big Saghelia River for half a hundred miles into the northeast, till the master stream split into its headwater creeks and vanished.

  To the north, over the Little Saghelia watershed, a towering giant lifted its naked pinnacle rocks nearly three miles into the sky, its white névés flashing cold fires in the sun, its lower reaches hidden by clouds and a swirling snowstorm.

  The blue-hazy distances, the bracing air, the majesty of that mountain panorama, brought a strange exhilaration to Gary. Human affairs, including his own troubles, seemed a little dwarfed, a little less important and crushing. As he gazed down at the beautiful valley, he experienced a renewal of his confidence and steadiness, as though the mountains in some intangible way were giving him of their largeness.

  The prospect of fighting Hugh Ludlow and those slinkers did not seem so hopeless as it had an hour ago. After all, he had outwitted scores of Police and Provincials and had run a two-thousand-mile gantlet through the fury of a manhunt storm. Hugh Ludlow couldn’t have done that. Hugh Ludlow, for all his money and hired bush-sneaks, wasn’t invincible. The man might be outsmarted and fought to a standstill.

  For himself he wanted to stay and fight, but he refused to decide. There were other people besides himself to think about. Plainly this situation here had high explosive in it, and he did not care to draw destruction upon Leda and kindly old Nat.

  He wondered just how things stood between Leda and Hugh Ludlow. Considering how lonely and friendless she was, why hadn’t Hugh won any liking from her? The circumstances had been extraordinarily favorable. But plainly she disliked the man. Evidently she saw through him, and knew better than to pin any faith or trust to a person so thoroughly unscrupulous.

  Whatever Hugh’s ultimate intentions were, he clearly had hopes of swinging her around. He did not seem even to believe that she disliked him. To his overweening mind it was probably inconceivable that she would turn him down flatly, or that with her, unlike everything else in his life, he was not to have his way.

  “I’ll have to find out what happened between her and Hugh,” he told himself, “before I can make any intelligent decision. If I don’t rush things this afternoon, if I can work up a confidential talk and lead around gradually, she’ll tell me, all right. And I’ll find out what the rest of this set-up is. It’ll be an eye opener, I’m betting.”

  As he glanced at Leda he saw that she was nervously snapping the flashlight on and off and that her cheeks were tinged with color. He had a premonition of what was coming.

  Presently: “Gary, did old Nat tell you anything about—about… Did he say why I’m staying up here with him, and why I hate that town down there?”

  “Yes, he did,” Gary stated frankly, believing it wise to be matter-of-fact. “I asked him, and he told me.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “Well, I thought that you weren’t the first person to be victimized by small-town talk. And last night when I stopped and looked in—I mean, last night I thought that you and I both, Lee, are reaping something that we didn’t sow ourselves. We’re reaping somebody else’s harvest.”

  “I don’t get that.”

  Gary hesitated a moment before taking the fateful step. But only a moment. His instinctive judgment told him that with Leda Barton a confidence was entirely safe. She was honest, and keen as a whiplash; and she had been through trouble enough herself to know what hard lines meant. Besides, her familiarity with this country and its people might be of vital help to him, if he stayed.

  “Well,” he said, “you and I are in pretty much the same boat, Lee. Outcasts, I mean. If you want to make a nice little stack of money in a hurry, go down there to Saghelia and tell Sergeant Rhodes that you know where Gary Frazier is.”

  The flashlight dropped from Leda’s hand. “W-h-a-t? No! I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s true. I’m wanted. That’s why I grabbed at the chance to get back into these mountains, away from towns and people. So, I say, we’re in the same boat. The only difference is that you get slandered whereas if I’m caught, I’ll get hanged!”

  Leda turned pale. “Is it—really—that bad?”

  Gary nodded. “There’s a murder charge against me. It’s air-tight. If I’m taken, I’ll swing.”

  “Murder?” Leda gasped. She stared at him incredulously. “You—you killed some person?”

  “Two people,” Gary stated, in even tones. “A robbery.”

  For moments Leda gazed at him searchingly. At last, slowly, she began shaking her head in disbelief.

  “No. You didn’t. You didn’t do any such thing. You might kill a person in self-defense or accidentally, but you’d never murder two people in a robbery. You’re not that interested in money. Why, you aren’t much interested even in this half-million dollars. I don’t know what you did—but you didn’t do it! Does Sergeant Rhodes know or suspect who you are?”

  Gary shook his head in a baffled way. “I swear he’s got me guessing, Lee. He may not have the faintest idea. Again, he may have spotted me right off. If he does know, I’m done for.”

  “What name are you going by?”

  “Nobody has asked, and I haven’t said. Everything seems to be ‘partner’ in this country.”

  “We ought to get together on a name for you
in case somebody does ask.”

  “That’s so,” Gary agreed, though he fancied that he might be leaving Saghelia before any one became curious about his name. He smiled. “Suppose you dub me, Lee.”

  She thought a moment. “Dawson, Gary Dawson—that sounds pretty, and it’s quite natural.”

  “Okay. Dawson it is, if and when. Gosh, Lee, when a person is dodging the noose like this, he has to drop his identity and sink his whole past… It’s demoralizing as the dickens. You’ve no idea how good it is to be talking to you this way. To have a friend again, I mean.”

  Leda reached out and touched his hand in sympathy. “I’m awfully glad you told me this, Gary. My own trouble doesn’t seem so important, in comparison.” She added: “It’s a good thing we believe in each other. Nobody else seems to believe in us.”

  “That’s about right, too. If I can and do hang on here, we ought to partner up and take these things to a licking.”

  Leda’s eyes flashed. “That’s a bargain!” she said, in her impetuous fashion. “I’m tired of being tramped on, and you must be too. We’ll team up and lick everybody and everything!”

  * * * *

  The game trail along the cliff foot was level easygoing, and they could have made good time; but Gary, meeting something new and fascinating at every step, kept poking into this and that and stopping repeatedly.

  He glanced into the mysterious caves they passed, tossed a stone back in, or listened to the ghostly echo of his voice from the dark depths. On that sun-drenched slope the berries, especially the wild strawberries, were vastly sweeter than in the valley woods, and he sampled every patch. The dry rock dust under the overhangs displayed a bewildering assortment of animal tracks, ranging all the way from the dainty prints of grasshopper mice to the huge claw-fringed pads of grizzlies; and he made Leda identify them all for him.

  The limestone cliff itself, formerly the bed of an ancient Cretaceous sea but now seven thousand feet in air and a hundred miles inland, was studded like a plum pudding with irresistible fossils of all sorts—shark teeth, fearsome-looking fish jaws, the bones of pelagic dinosaurs, and the actual unaltered shells, tinted as in life, of arks and clams and scallops. He pried out specimens till his knapsack and pockets were bulging.