The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  “Gary may be a cheechako,” Leda asserted, her eyes akindle with pride at the thought of Gary’s magnificent battle on the ledge, “but when it comes to brains and courage, he’s worth a dozen…” She broke off there, at a sudden gesture of silence from Nottingham.

  “What’s the matter, Uncle Lafe?”

  “Talking about the devil!” he said, sotto voce. “Look.”

  Leda turned, glanced through the screen door at the street. An outfit of four pack horses, the ’breed Eutrope afoot, and Hugh Ludlow on a chestnut mare, had stopped in front of the store.

  “Hugh dismounted, strode across the sidewalk and came in. “Hullo,” he greeted, catching sight of Leda. “Saw the burro outside and thought you’d be in here.” He stepped up to her. “Busy?” he asked. He tried to talk brusquely but his eyes clung to her, and her mere presence made him nervous and taut.

  “Yes, I’m busy,” Leda said curtly. She shrank back from him, despising him for hiring that Siwash to murder Gary.

  “But couldn’t you squeeze out a few minutes? I’d like to have a little talk with you.” He motioned to a confectionery across the street. “We could step over there and discuss this thing over a soda.”

  “I believe I told you last week, when you came up to the diggings, that I didn’t care to talk to you,” Leda refused. “If you’ve got anything to say, you can say it right here.”

  Hugh colored violently, his face a queer study of anger and passion. With an effort he got hold of himself and managed to speak in casual tones.

  “Oh, it wasn’t much,” he remarked, trying to be offhand. “I merely wanted to admit that I made a big mistake about your—about this fellow up at old Higgens’s cabin. He’s got more goods than I ever imagined he had.”

  Leda kept silent, wondering suspiciously what Hugh’s game was. His hollow flattery of the man whom he wished dead made her instantly wary and on guard.

  “Anybody,” Hugh went on, watching her closely, “who can meet Skunk-Bear in the bush and bump that Siwash off—well, he’s good! I’ll take my hat off to him. But I still believe it must have been part accident.”

  In a flash Leda saw through Hugh’s game. He was fishing for some hint or clue to Skunk-Bear’s mysterious disappearance. He believed Gary had killed the Siwash, but he was completely in the dark about the actual circumstances. With no shred of proof, he was trying to trap her into admitting that Gary was involved in the death. If he had the slightest evidence to go on, he would run yapping to the law, and Gary would be dragged into an arrest and trial. Gary might even be railroaded on the perjured testimony of those six or seven men of Hugh’s.

  As she met his eyes she knew that he had already gone to Sergeant Rhodes and tried to make the officer act. There was the reason why Rhodes had doubted her explanation of the “accident”! As plain as day Hugh had been prying around and trying to hang something onto Gary.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said coolly, scorning his amateurish trap. “And whatever it is, I don’t care to hear it.” She turned her back on him. “If you came in here to talk to me, please get out!”

  For several moments, silent throbbing moments, she could feel Hugh’s eyes upon her and his passionate jealousy beating against her. But she said nothing more, refused to look at him again; and with an oath Hugh finally whirled and strode out, slamming the door as he brushed through it.

  A little pale from the encounter, Leda gathered up her purchases. She was frightened all through. Not at the threat of any physical danger; she felt confident that she and Gary could take care of themselves against Hugh’s whole pack. But this effort to get Gary arrested was a deadly move. And this probing around in Gary’s past was worse still. If Hugh ever guessed that Gary was wanted, he could annihilate Gary with one word…

  After saying good-bye to Lafe Nottingham, she left the store, so harassed by this sinister shadow over Gary that she forgot her own troubles.

  She was speedily reminded of them, as she buckled the mantle on Jinny’s pack. Across the street the group of young idlers who had jeered her half an hour ago, began catcalling at her, as though they had been waiting for her to come out and had stored up their witticisms.

  “Hey, sister, which way are you goin’ home?”…“Say, you ain’t got room for another feller up at that cabin, have you?”…“Tell the big boyfriend that we’re goin’ to gang him for takin’ you out of circulation!”

  The remarks burned Leda’s ears, and she was torn with the impulse to turn around and get out of Saghelia. The Miranda sign, three blocks up the street, looked three miles away—an endless avenue of staring faces, insulting glances, jeering words.

  But she wanted those new clothes desperately, after two weeks of hungering and working for them; and she started on up the sidewalk, trying bravely to see and hear nothing.

  She did not get far. Scarcely a dozen steps from the Nottingham store her little expedition to town came to a sudden and explosive end.

  At the telephone pole where Gary’s picture was tacked up, she ran into her worst enemy in all the town, a cub reporter on the Saghelia Star. She had known and detested him in school; had incurred his spite by scorning his advances; and a friend of her father’s had once given him a public thrashing for something he had said about her. His venomous little tidbits in his weekly “Through-the-Keyhole” column had done more to poison her reputation than all the back-fence gossip in Saghelia.

  “Well, well, well!” he greeted, planting himself squarely in front of her. “If it isn’t our long-lost Red! How’s the gold-digging in the hills, Red—any better than in town?”

  Leda tried to ignore him and go on. From a barber shop awning near-by several loiterers, scenting a bit of excitement, were starting to edge closer; and out of the corner of her eye she saw the little group on the opposite curb watching sharply, ready to come surging across. She felt she would die of shame if she got dragged into a street brawl with this malicious enemy; and she stepped off the sidewalk to get around him.

  He stopped her, seizing Jinny’s halter. “Not so fast, Red. What’s the personal items? Come on, now—you’ve got lots of ’em—in three months’ time.”

  “Let me go,” Leda begged. “Please.”

  “Can’t. Got to have the items first. Tell me all about the new boyfriend and—”

  Smack—Leda drew back her hand and slapped him, so hard that he staggered backwards and his glasses fell to the sidewalk. Goaded beyond endurance, she forgot self-control, forgot the crowd edging up, forgot everything save the leering face in front of her, symbolic of the whole senseless hue and cry which had hounded her all her girlhood years.

  In a blind fury she tore the reporter’s notebook away from him, backed him against the telephone pole and beat at him with her small fists. So scared that he was white and trembling, the reporter tried to get away from her, snarling: “Why, you—you thing, you—striking me like that! I’ll have you arrest—”

  “You will, hein?” a booming voice cut him short. Through the jostling crowd big Alec Bergelot, the broad-shouldered half-breed whom Gary had met that first day, elbowed his way and planted himself between Leda and her enemy. “So you’ll give dis girl insults and den have her arrest’, hein? You glass-eye’ carcajou, I t’ink I wipe op dis sidewalk wit’ you, I t’ink I will.”

  He reached out with one huge hand, seized the reporter by the scruff of the neck, shook him till his teeth rattled and his eyes bulged, and then flung him contemptuously against the telephone pole.

  “Dere! Nex’ tarn you peeck on a girl lak dis, I use you for fresh bait!” He turned to Leda, brushing his hands; and only then did Leda, blinded with tears of shame and fury, recognize him as big Alec. “W’ere you going, Leda? I go ’long and see dat you get dere, by damn; and if any of dese banty roosters lets out wan peep, I’ll put my foot on hees neck and take hold on hees legs and pull! Come on, le’s go!”
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  Leda shook her head, in a kind of daze. The Miranda no longer beckoned to her. She no longer wanted the dress and slippers and all, for which she had planned and worked. They seemed like a bitter mockery; like her aching hope that Saghelia might prove kindly, after her exile. She wanted only to escape this crowd of faces, escape the town and get back to Gary. Saghelia had given her its answer, with the bang of finality. Her summer of isolation had not changed the town’s opinion one jot. She was still “Mamie Barton’s girl.”

  With big Alec Bergelot striding along behind her, she turned away and went back down the sidewalk.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I guess we’d better knock off for today, Lee,” Gary suggested. “It’ll be dark by the time we catch some trout for supper and get home.”

  “For all we’ll ever find that gold, we might as well knock off for good,” Lee answered. She made a little gesture of despair. “I’m not going to hunt anymore! This is my last trip!”

  “Don’t talk like that, Lee. You sold me on this cache business, and now you mustn’t lose faith yourself.” He leached out and patted her arm encouragingly. “That old cache is around here, and we’re going to find it!”

  “All the gold we’ll ever find will be down there at the tom-rocker, with our buckets and shovels!”

  At the mouth of a cave which they had just searched, at the upper end of Little Saghelia, they sat together on a mossy boulder in the slant afternoon sun, tired from an all-day hunt and completely disheartened by failure.

  Down across the treetops in front of them the mountain valley, fresh and glistening from a heavy shower an hour ago, lay shimmering in the golden light. The rain-sweet air was heavy with flower odor and the warm rich smell of woods earth. Two hundred yards to their right the main overfalls, plunging over a seventy-foot cliff into a big caldron pool, gave a faint quivering tremble to the rock they sat on, and filled the whole upper valley with its rumble.

  Though he hid his pessimism from Leda, Gary himself was badly discouraged about their hunt. In the past twelve days, searching from early morning till the hush of evening, he and Leda had combed the upper end of the valley thoroughly; but not one trace of the cache, not one faintest sign of the old Rusk camp, had they found.

  He had pinned a great deal of faith to his theory that the Rusk rendezvous had been somewhere in this overfalls region. Now his theory seemed to have fallen down, and nothing remained but to go back to the old hit-or-miss hunting. And that was utterly hopeless.

  If the cache was in this valley—and from his long talks with old Nat, he believed implicitly that it was—it seemed to be hidden beyond human finding.

  In spite of his disappointment, he did not consider this failure the disaster that Leda thought it. Possibly because she had been a penniless little waif all through her teens, she seemed to think that the cache would be a magic key to happiness, an enchanted wand that would touch all their troubles to nothingness. While he did not exactly sniff at half a million dollars, there were many things more precious in his eyes than that overstuffed fortune in dust and nuggets; and several of those things he was actually having now.

  One of them was this rugged outdoor life and his buoyant health—a zest of mind and body that went far deeper than the merely physical. After bouncing back from his sickness, he had surged on to a hard-bitten health such as he had once envied in Hugh Ludlow. What with climbing rocks and loping mountains and hawking float in odd hours, he felt as hard as a lean range wolf and as keen as a gust from the snow-fields.

  For another thing, it seemed to him that in discovering this elemental world of the outdoors, of mountains, winds and clouds, of waters, forestry and wild creatures, he had come into his own at last, after twenty-four years of deep wordless dissatisfaction. As the sea to some and the city to others, this way of life was his birthright, unknown, unsuspected, till his outlawry had tossed him into it.

  Whatever the veiled future held for him, he knew that he would never go back to the city now. It would be prison.

  As he and Leda sat there on the sun-warmed rock, he wondered what on earth had plunged his girl partner into so deep a despondency. A person of tremendous ups and downs, she seemed as variable as mountain weather—happy as sunshine one hour and all clouded over the next. For several days her sky had been overcast most of the time; and chasing the glooms away had been one of his chief jobs. But this blue mood, the worst he had ever seen in her, was beyond his fathoming. All day she had been silent, dejected, and for once he could not buoy her up.

  Across on the west slope a pair of moosebirds began quarreling at something in a tangle of windfall and thick balsams. Suspicious, Gary watched the tangle uneasily, fancying that one of Hugh Ludlow’s bush-sneaks might be over there.

  In their twelve days of searching the valley head, he and Leda had been shadowed and spied on constantly. Several times when they happened to retrace their steps, they had seen fresh tracks, in sphagnum or leaves, where some man had been skulking along behind; and twice on their way home they had caught a flitting glimpse of an enemy following them in the owl-dusk. But so far there had been no attempt to ambush or molest them at all.

  What this calm meant he did not know. Whether Skunk-Bear’s disappearance had thrown a scare into Hugh’s outfit; whether Hugh was having them shadowed and deliberately letting them go on searching so that if they did find the cache he could snake it away from them; whether he was trying to dig up court-sure evidence of how the Siwash had met death—to all these questions Gary had no answer. But this calm looked ominous to him, like the ominous quiet when Skunk-Bear had been stalking out along the ledge to push him over.

  In a minute or two, as he watched the windfall across the valley, he detected a blurred movement behind some crisscross logs. Presently a man-figure, all but hidden by the bush and trees, backed out of the tangle, crept unto a thicket of deerbush, slipped south along the slope, and vanished into a deep rocky couloir.

  “Heading for camp with the day’s report,” Gary thought, saying nothing to Leda. “Why, damn you, fellow! If you’d shoot at me, or something like that, I could understand it; but this dogging us and then sneaking off… A person can’t ever tell what’s around the next corner.”

  He stood up, gave Leda his hand to rise, and picked up her rifle.

  “Let’s try that overfalls pool for our trout, Lee,” he suggested. “If we get ’em there, we won’t have to look up a fishing hole down the valley, and we can go past our tarn on the way home. Is that all right with you?”

  “I don’t care what.”

  “Don’t be so discouraged, partner. We’re not licked yet. Why, we’ve just begun to hunt! We’ll come back here and give this place another going over. We may have missed something. Personally I’m still banking on this overfalls section. For all you know, we may stumble onto that stuff right tomorrow.”

  “I tell you, I’m not going to hunt anymore!” Leda retorted. “I’m done. And stop calling me ‘partner.’ It makes me feel like some tobacco-chewing prospector or a trapper out of the willows!”

  Her anger astonished and bewildered Gary. Plainly she was not only despondent over the hunt but angry at him. What under heaven had he done? He certainly seemed to have done something. All afternoon she had been so touchy that he was almost afraid to talk to her.

  As they walked out along the rim-rock, he cut a pliant twelve-foot aspen, trimmed it, dug a fishline out of his knapsack and rigged up a pole. Farther on, in a little open of saw-grass and “mountain lettuce,” he bashed a handful of grasshoppers, using a pine branch, and stuck them into his jacket pocket.

  “Our tackle is sort of primitive, Lee,” he remarked, thinking of Hugh Ludlow’s bamboo poles and assorted lures and preserved salmon eggs. “But at that I’ll bet we catch as many trout as Hugh does; and what’s more, we eat ’em!”

  Near the overfalls they climbed down a steep bank and crossed a strip of pol
ished boulders to the big caldron pool.

  “You flip ’em out,” he bade Leda, offering her the pole. Usually she loved to fish; and catching half a dozen of these high-charged cutthroats might cheer her up. “I’ll stand by to take ’em off and bait hooks.”

  Leda shook her head. “I don’t care to. You do it.” She leaned against a boulder and stared at the plunging waters.

  Gary stepped across the spray-wet rocks to the pool edge and hooked a grasshopper. He saw no fish jumping, no sinuous dark mottles in the foamy swirls and boils, but the place certainly looked good. The wide thin apron of water pouring over the cliff churned the pool to white froth and swift deep eddies—a natural haunt for big cutthroats.

  He flipped the grasshopper out as far as he could and dropped it upon a patch of foam. As it sank into the green water beneath, the line suddenly straightened out, went taut with a violent yank, and then, as suddenly, fell slack. Gary pulled up, stared at the six feet of turned to Leda.

  “Say! Did you see that? Hook and lead and ’hopper and everything at one yank. Are we going to let ’em get by with that kind of rough stuff? Come on, partner, and give me a hand here. You’re better at this than I am.”

  “Fish closer in, where they aren’t so large,” Leda suggested, above the overfalls rumble. “And stop calling me ‘partner’!”

  With a piece of their guide cord, Gary rigged up another line and started fishing again, in the shallower swirls. But Leda’s dejection took all the edge off his enthusiasm. He could not enjoy himself when she was so miserable.

  While he fished he kept glancing at her, trying to puzzle out the cause of her despondency. The disastrous Saghelia trip had taken her a hard jolt, but that trip was two weeks past and could scarcely explain this mood. Whatever her trouble, it had been growing on her for nearly a week, till she could stand it no longer.