The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  “But then I read that paper. I read how the bomb had been tossed at that mail truck, how the truck plunged over the railroad embankment, how the driver and clerk were shot down as they were crawling out of the wreck, and how the car was then plundered. I read how I’d been positively identified by the rail-crossing flagman as the person who murdered those two men, and how my hat and those other things were found on the spot.

  “When I finished reading that newspaper account, I didn’t have any more notions about going back and giving myself up. I saw that whoever had framed me had done a thorough job and I’d swing while he was enjoying that twenty-two thousand.

  “I hid in a culvert all day, and at dusk I caught a fast rattler to Saskatoon. From there I headed on west. Over in the mountains I got leery about the Coast towns, so I dodged north and landed in Saghelia, and that’s all.”

  For long moments Rhodes sat silent, regarding Gary through the smoke of his cigarette, without the slightest betrayal of whether he believed the story or not. A Mounted constable came in the door, but Rhodes motioned him away. The telephone jingled, but he merely lifted the receiver and said, “Sorry, busy,” and hung up.

  The silence grew unbearable to Gary; and he burst out: “Do you believe me? Have I got a chance?”

  Instead of answering him, Rhodes tapped the brown envelope. “You were positively identified, Frazier,” he stated, “by this flagman. On two occasions you had talked to the man, and he knew you well. He felt friendly toward you. Yet he swears that he saw you follow the truck over the embankment and saw you actually shoot those men. I should like you to explain that.”

  “I can’t,” Gary confessed. “I noticed in the newspaper accounts that he mentioned my slicker. It was an old brown thing with a black belt—a rather odd-looking raincoat. I had it on that afternoon when I last talked to him. My only guess is that the person who did the job was wearing my slicker, and this flagman jumped to conclusions.”

  “A jury would consider your explanation a bit thin, I’m afraid,” Rhodes commented. “How about your hat and the straw suitcase with your name on it?”

  “Those things were planted, Rhodes. They were taken out of the tin shack while I was asleep, and were planted on the job. They didn’t get there by themselves.”

  “Hmmph. Your argument, then, is that somebody framed you to draw suspicion from himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you blame this Greenie person, I gather.”

  “I won’t say positively that he’s the man. I know what it feels like to be charged with a crime when you’re innocent. But I do suspect Greenie. He knew about my things in the shack, and he hated me.”

  “What did you and Greenie quarrel about?”

  “We had several quarrels. The day before this crime, I caught him talking around with the other three fellows and sounding them out about sticking up a gas station. Those three were young and impressionable and broke, and I told him to can that stick-up talk or I’d sock him. The next evening he stole a quarter out of my jacket pocket. That’s what the fight was about.”

  “I see. How much of a fight was it?”

  “Well, it was short but pretty hot,” Gary said, wondering at the question. “He was big and could hit. I heard that he’d once been a bouncer at some dance hall.”

  Rhodes merely nodded. The reason of that query dawned on Gary. In a shrewdly indirect way Rhodes was fishing around to find out how big this Greenie was and whether the man might be taken, on a rainy dark night, for Gary Frazier, especially if he was wearing the latter’s slicker.

  “Why, gosh,” Gary thought, and his hopes went soaring, “that looks as though he’s believing me!”

  Rhodes’ next question brought him to earth again. “In my opinion,” the officer stated in cold even tones, “an innocent person doesn’t skip the country and make an outlaw of himself. And in all my personal experience, no innocent person has ever resisted arrest. Yet you, Frazier, in the shack that evening, you sprang right up out of sleep and started slugging. Why?”

  As best he could, Gary explained his bewilderment when the flashlight glare woke him, his fright when he saw the officers and the glittering handcuffs, his panic when the cop spoke of those two murdered men, his blind instinctive dread of the unknown trap closing upon him…

  At the end of a solid hour of grilling, of sharp shrewd questioning that seemed to Gary like the flash and play of a rapier seeking to puncture his story, Rhodes abruptly pushed back his chair, walked over to the window and stood looking out, into the rainy grayness.

  The minutes lengthened. In a cold sweat Gary waited, his face haggard and white from the ordeal. It seemed to him that if only he could get past this hour of his life, all other troubles would be of no consequence.

  After an eternity Rhodes finally turned around.

  “Frazier,” he said, without preamble, “I can’t believe you’re guilty of killing. I’m backing your story as the truth.”

  Gary slumped down in the wicker chair. He wanted to go across and shake Rhodes’ hand and thank him, but he could think of no words to express his wild rush of gratitude and joy. The let-down was so sudden that he felt weak.

  Rhodes saw his haggard face. “Sorry I kept you dangling. But I didn’t care to rouse any hopes till I saw my way a little more clearly.”

  “It’s—s’all right,” Gary said jerkily. “It was—was worth waiting for.” He looked up. “What are you—what step—how are you going about this, Rhodes?”

  “I’m going on the assumption that this Greenie person, with or without help from those other three, committed the crime. I intend to get in touch with Winnipeg headquarters and tell them these facts which you’ve told me.”

  “Will they know that I’m here?”

  “I must report that.”

  Gary’s joy ebbed a little. “What if they order you to ship me back East? You’d have to do it. And what if they can’t pin anything on Greenie? They may never even find him. He’s gone, he’s faded. He’d hit across the Border.”

  Rhodes nodded. “I guess so, too. You may have waited too long to come to me. The trail’s cold, and those other men have probably disappeared also. If headquarters orders me to arrest you and send you East, I’ll have to do it. But—I’m going to get in touch with a personal friend of mine at Winnipeg and ask him to work on this case. He’s a sergeant on the Secret Squad. If anybody can help you, Spencer can. I’ll phone him at once.”

  “Shall I stay—I mean, d’you want me here, in jail? Can’t I go back to—to old Nat’s and wait? I’ll be there, Rhodes, when you want me. I won’t let you down.”

  With his hand on the telephone receiver, Rhodes hesitated a moment, debating. Then, once again, he jerked a thumb at Little Saghelia, and spoke those two words:

  “Go ahead.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Mebbe you two’d better stay home today,” old Nat suggested, as he and Leda and Gary sat at breakfast the next morning. The sky was overcast, and from the western ranges came the distant hollow rumble of heavy thunder. “The ole potato wagon is a-rollin’ in the west, and looks to me like a hiyu bad storm is brewin’.”

  “We want to do some more searching in that overfalls stretch,” Gary said, “while we still can. We’re banking on that place. If a storm does come up, there’s no end of caves to dodge into.”

  Leda glanced up and nodded, and as Gary met her eyes he knew she was thinking the same thought as he. Between their feud with Hugh Ludlow and their knowledge that Sergeant Rhodes might come for Gary at any hour, they realized that their days together on Little Saghelia were numbered. This trip or any trip might be their last.

  “If you two haul off and find that cache,” old Nat complained, “it’ll leave me in an awful bad row of stumps. I declare I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Why, Dads,” Leda remonstrated, “surely you don’t think w
e wouldn’t split with you?”

  “’Course you would, Leedy. Tain’t that. But if you find ole Chilcote’s cave, I wouldn’t have no call to go on a-stayin’ here on Little Saghelia. And if I had scads of money, I’d have to go down to town and live in a hotel, and have a herd of people around, and—wear a necktie.”

  Leda and Gary smiled at each other. Leda patted old Nat’s wrinkled and work-gnarled hand.

  “Don’t worry, Dads. That cache is safe, all right.”

  Through the open door Gary glanced across the little meadow at the trail leading down to Saghelia. Half expecting to see Sergeant Rhodes come walking up that trail with a peremptory order from headquarters, he was impatient to get away so that he and Leda might have at least this day of grace.

  When they were finishing breakfast, Jinny came tearing out of the woods beyond the meadow, and streaked for the cabin at break-neck speed. As she skidded to a stop at the cabin door, Gary caught a glimpse of a big grizzly over at the edge of the gloomy woods. Old Nat went out to soothe the burro and shoot off the horse-pistol at the silvertip.

  “You know, Lee,” Gary remarked, “sometimes I think Dad would be happier here just by himself. He likes you and me, of course, but he seems to be getting restless. After all, two people are a tremendous lot of company for him.”

  “I’ve been thinking that same thing, Gary. If your trouble is straightened out, we ought to go away.”

  “Where would we go, Lee?”

  Leda touched his arm. “Would it matter where?”

  Gary tried to vision himself and Leda going away together, shaking the bitter dust of Saghelia from their feet and facing new horizons as wide as the world itself. But between that picture and his eyes hung a gallows shadow, closer to him now than it had ever been. His visit yesterday had really altered nothing. Rhodes was his friend, true, and at faraway Winnipeg a sergeant of the Secret Squad was reworking the case. But now the law knew where he was, and it did not believe in him, as Rhodes did. The odds were ten to one that before today was over, Rhodes would be coming up to the cabin with tragic news…

  When they reached their little tarn, an hour later, a phalanx of inky-black thunderheads had reared up from behind old Sentinel, and a queer yellowish twilight lay over the valley. In spite of the storm threat they paused beside the dark still pool.

  Looking down into the mirror-quiet water, Gary stared at Leda’s reflection, so clear, so astonishingly lifelike, that she seemed gazing up at him from those dark depths like some dryad of the beautiful tarn. Or like some bewitching and illusive creature wholly of his imagining—a shadowy partner for a few brief weeks of his life, and after that only a poignant and haunting memory.

  The thought jolted him, because it seemed so prophetic of what was to come; and he put his arm around the real girl beside him to banish that feeling of her insubstantiality. As he smoothed back Leda’s hair and kissed her, he saw her dash away a big tear and felt her arm tighten about him as though she too was thinking of that hovering black shadow and fighting to keep him with her.

  When they reached the valley head at nine o’clock, the storm, which had been massing its strength slowly all that morning, was about to break in fury on Little Saghelia. The valley was hushed; not a whisper of air was stirring; the aspen leaves, peculiarly tense and rigid, were slanted straight up and down.

  The big overfalls itself was unusually quiet, and the apron of water pouring over it was perceptibly thinner and narrower than Gary had ever seen it. For several days the weather had been rainy, and the mountain creek was at an exceptionally low stage. Its waters came chiefly from melting glaciers and snow-fields, and so it was highest and most turbulent in dry hot spells.

  Leda glanced up at the thunderheads above old Sentinel. In the black cloud-masses, lightning flashes were darting around like quick white snakes; and clashing winds were tearing the lower woolpack to shreds and flinging it down the gale like fluttering ribbons.

  “This storm is going to be a howler when it does break,” she remarked. “Little Saghelia is a kind of vortex for high winds, and it always catches the worst of things when these ranges get mad. If you’ve never seen a mountain storm, Gary, you’ve got something coming.”

  “The worse the better, Lee. If any of Hugh’s two-legged carcajous shadowed us away from the cabin this morning, he probably has knocked off and is hunting a dry hole to crawl into. If it rains all day, we’ll let the cache hunting go.”

  At the rim-rock foot they went into a small cave just east of the overfalls, and gave it another searching—looking for side tunnels and rock cracks which they might have missed on their hunt two days ago.

  When they came back out to the mouth, the rainstorm was charging down the long western slope of Little Saghelia. A grayish-white wall, it was sweeping in their direction like a galloping obliteration, engulfing and hiding the timber belts and mountainside torrents as it rolled nearer.

  A slight wind moaned in the pines. A terrific crack of lightning smacked into a towering Douglas fir down the creek, and echoed away in bellowing thunder. A few drops of rain splattered into the dust where Gary and Leda stood.

  Then the treetops began pitching and tossing, though the wind was scarcely discernible. The charging wall of grayish-white swept down into the valley bottom and up toward their cave, in liaison with the flash and boom of a lightning barrage. A little vanguard blast of wind smote them with spume and cold invisible mist. And then, with a rip and a howl—like a mixture of hurricane and cataract deluge and cannon-play all rolled into one—the storm broke.

  Half smothered and gasping for breath, they backed farther inside the cave, to escape the lash of the wind and spray, and stood looking out, awed by the might and fury of the forces being unleashed. In the blind raging turmoil beyond the cave mouth they could see barely twenty paces. The world outside seemed a chaos of water and howling wind, of flying branches and whipping trees, all churned up together and lit to a livid silver by the flashes of lightning.

  Gary took Leda within the shelter of his jacket. “Lord above us, Lee,” he marveled, “these mountains really can do things when they try! Did you ever see a howler like that?”

  “It’s a bang-up rain even for this country,” Leda agreed. In the dim light of the cave the lightning glow made her face pale and ethereal; and the flashes touched her wet auburn hair to a magic spangle.

  “A rain, you say?” Gary snorted. “Don’t call that thing a rain! And it’s no cloud-burst, either. That’s a part of the Pacific Ocean out there, Lee! This storm scooped up a hunk of the Pacific and whizzed it across the mountains and dumped it on us. I’d bet my watch against a turnip that when this slackens and we go outside, we’ll find fifty-pound salmon lying around and maybe a few walrus to boot.”

  In half an hour the worst of the lightning had passed, and the rain had settled to a heavy downpour. Though the wind was as strong as ever, it was not so club-like and changeable; and they ventured out under the overhang where they could gaze down across Little Saghelia and watch the storm.

  In the fury of the wind the trees were pitching and writhing, branches were tearing off and whirling away like straws, and occasionally a tree went crashing to the ground.

  For a time, as he gazed at the strange spectacle, Gary wondered how any forest, especially the vigorous and beautiful woods of Little Saghelia, could thrive in a valley and country subject to such ravaging storms as this. But then, watching with observant eyes, he saw that the storm was giving this timber a needed testing—bowling over the poorly rooted trees, combing out dead wood and weaker branches, snapping trunks that could not stand the strain, trying each tree for its fitness to live, and toning up the whole woods.

  He wished, musingly, that some wind like this could blow across humanity. Storms did come, indeed, but they were the evil winds of war, destroying the best instead of the worst. By those evil winds the unfit and weak were spared while the
young and the select were sorted out for destruction.

  A sudden cry from Leda broke into his thoughts.

  “Gary! Oh-hh! Look!”

  Gary’s first thought was that she had glimpsed one of their enemies, stalking up for a point-blank shot; and he grabbed for the rifle. Leda stopped him.

  “No! Not that! The overfalls! Do you see what I see?”

  He whirled, looked, saw nothing, and glanced again at Leda. “What’s over there?” he demanded, all puzzled by her excitement. She was staring wide-eyed and gripping his arm till her fingers were white. “Lee!—what is it? You look as though you’re seeing a ghost!”

  “It’s more than a ghost!” She pointed at the overfalls, at the thin apron of water. “Watch! Don’t you see it?”

  Gary looked along her outstretched arm. The storm was buffeting the sheet of water back and forth, slapping it against the rock, swaying it like a white tapestry in a wind; and the big caldron pool beneath had been whipped to froth.

  But he saw nothing extraordinary about all that.

  “Watch it!” she cried. “It’s gone now but it’ll be back.”

  As Gary watched, a heavy blast of wind smashed the sheet of water against the seventy-foot cliff; and for an instant the falls ceased to flow. In that instant, through the swirling spindrift, he caught one dim glimpse of a dark cavernous opening in the rock, low down, near the caldron pool, and squarely in the middle of the cascade.

  In the next moment the plunging waters hid it from him.

  “It’s a cave!” Leda breathed. “Look. You can’t see a thing now. But it’s a cave! I saw it plain!”

  “So’d I! It’s a cave, all right!” Another blast of wind gave him a second glimpse of the yawning black hole behind the cascade. “Lord, what a hiding place, Lee!”

  “It’s the cave! The water hides it. That’s why it’s never been found! It’s the old Rusk hangout!”

  “We’d better not build castles till we know for sure.”

  “We’ll never know for sure by standing here!” She tugged at his arm. “Let’s go and search it. I know it’s the place! Back there behind that water—no human on earth could ever find it just by looking for it! Every other cave in this valley has been found and ransacked, but this one.”