Flint

by Louis L'Amour

  Flint watched Nancy. He knew what this meant to her. This home was her life, her memories, all she had.

  “We will have to take Flynn,” she said, “and Lee Thomas.”

  Thomas, the wounded rider, grinned at Flint. “Hell, you get me on a horse, that’s all I ask. I rode twenty miles through a blizzard one time with a broke leg.”

  When they were alone, Nancy turned to him. “Jim, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

  At her quick glance, he added, “At a time like this.”

  He walked outside. The sun was a ball of fire over the Continental Divide.

  “You’ll make a fool of yourself,” he said aloud, “if you aren’t careful.”

  Chapter 9

  LOTTIE KETTLEMAN stood rigidly before the bank window. “I do not understand you,” she protested. She was very pale. Inwardly she seethed with anger. “I …”

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Kettleman.” The cashier’s manner was polite, but shaded with coolness. “Mr. Kettleman closed his account several weeks ago.”

  He hesitated, ashamed of his feeling of satisfaction. This woman had always been arrogant, imperious, difficult. “It was just before Mr. Kettleman left for Virginia.”

  She turned quickly and left. She was filled with vindictive anger, but she was also frightened. Only this morning, using the key her father secretly had had made for her, she had opened the safe at home. It was empty.

  She got into a hansom cab and raged at its slowness until she reached Burroughs’ office. She was shown in at once.

  “He left an allowance for you.” Burroughs carefully kept all expression from his face. “You are to be paid one hundred dollars a month for twelve months.”

  “What?” She fought to keep her poise. “But where is he? What does this mean?”

  Burroughs shuffled papers on his desk. “Mr. Kettleman never confided in anyone, but it has been apparent for several weeks that he was arranging his affairs for an extended absence. It may be” — Burroughs kept his expression bland — “that he suspects a plot against his life. It seems there was an incident at Saratoga where a man tried to kill him.”

  “That’s absurd! It was just a gambling argument.”

  “As I have said, he did not confide in me, but I happen to know he retained the Pinkertons for an investigation. That was unusual, to say the least for, as you were no doubt aware, Mr. Kettleman maintained his own private organization.”

  She had known nothing of the kind. Her throat tightened, and she thought back swiftly. There were no letters. Meetings, yes. And with Baldwin — but how could he learn of that?

  “How does he expect me to live on one hundred dollars a month?” she protested.

  “Many families do,” Burroughs replied, remembering he had been married on considerably less. “You have a beautiful home, and there is always” — he cleared his throat — “your father.”

  Lottie Kettleman shot him an angry glance. Was he being sarcastic?

  “You have no idea where he is?”

  “No, I have not.”

  Lottie Kettleman arrived home frightened and furious. For the first time she began to think seriously about the man she had married.

  Kettleman, her father assured her, was a lonely man without family ties. He had never known a home, and would be easy pickings for a clever girl. Once married to him she would have access to his private papers, the confidences that were natural between husband and wife, and she could supply tips to her father and his associates by which they could make millions.

  It was not the first time she had assisted her father in his schemes, and this seemed more practical than most of them. Moreover, Kettleman was handsome, distinguished-looking, as well as both feared and respected in financial circles.

  It was only after they were married that she discovered he never discussed business at home and kept his affairs in his head. The few notations she could find were in some private code known only to him.

  Her father had taken an impression of the key to the safe and they had one made for it. Together they opened the safe and found in it only a few stacks of carefully specified bills. It was the way of James T. Kettleman to keep his cash so. Neatly piled with the number of bills and amount atop it. The only other objects in the safe were a worn gun belt and a Navy Colt.

  When she opened the safe that morning to find the money gone, the gun and gun belt were gone too. She assumed the gun was one he would want when he went hunting, and gave it no thought.

  Kettleman had been attentive and thoughtful, but she had never loved him and he soon discovered it. He also learned that he had mistaken his own desire for a home and family for love of her. They lived in the same house but there had been only politeness between them. After the shooting at Saratoga he had returned to the house only occasionally, and rarely stayed long.

  Even before her visit to the bank she had detected a coolness about town, and she began to understand what she was facing.

  She loved her father but for the first time she realized that his grandiose schemes would never come to anything. Lately he had begun to whine and blame his failures on others.

  For the first time she began to appreciate Kettleman — or rather, the life he had given her. There had been no worry about bills, she had been treated everywhere with respect, and she had not been curious enough to try to know him.

  He was a means to money. Otherwise she was indifferent. Now she realized he was a mystery, and not only to her. Nobody knew anything about him or his background.

  Nor was there any clue as to what had become of him. He seemed to have dropped off the world as if he had never been. With her father she went to the Virginia farm.

  The house was closed and locked. Forcing a way in they could find no evidence that he had been there in some time. The few neighbors were remote and only one of them had known him slightly, but he had not seen him in more than a year.

  Back in New York she paced the floor angrily. Her father, a large, heavy-set man, puffed a cigar. For the first time Lottie was seeing him as a ponderous, shoddy man with a little cunning and an easy flow of talk.

  “He called in the Pinkertons, did he? Well, why don’t we do the same? Mind you, girl, when we find him we will find money. He has something of consequence in mind. There’s a man named Epperman, a German. He’s done some investigative work for Port Baldwin, time to time.”

  ****

  EPPERMAN SAT back in a squeaky swivel-chair and considered the project. Then he made inquiries. No. There was no picture. Kettleman had never wanted a picture made.

  To Epperman this smelled of money. If Kettleman had disappeared it was something another client of his should know. A canny man might make much of such knowledge.

  Epperman was a stocky man with a florid face and rather protruding eyes of pale blue. He observed Lottie Kettleman’s lush figure with appreciation. A likely filly and, from rumor, no better than she had to be.

  A week around financial circles brought Epperman no news. Everybody knew Kettleman, but no one offered a clue. There was no criminal record. He started to work back toward the beginning. Among other things, he discovered that Baldwin, often a client of his, had lost money in several deals in which Kettleman was involved. And also that Peres Chivington, Lottie’s father, had supplied information to Baldwin, a time or two.

  He had been working on the case for more than a week when he stumbled on a surprise. Kettleman had belonged to a shooting club and was a remarkably good shot. He was also a handy man with his fists, someone said. Another voice said, “He was a prize fighter, I think.”

  In one of the old hangouts of the Morrissey crowd Epperman found a whiskey-soaked old-timer who said, “Jim Kettleman? If you want to know if he could fight, ask Dwyer, him that was bare-knuckle champion.”

  Inquiry developed that Kettleman had given Dwyer a bad beating at Fox’s American Theatre in Philadelphia. “He was good,” an old-timer assured h
im, “maybe the best of them. Many’s the time he boxed McCafferty in the gym, and took his measure, too.”

  From a man who had worked in Kettleman’s corner as a second for several of his fights, Epperman discovered that Kettleman had once made a deal in cattle. The trail ended with a sale of four horses bearing the Six-Shooter brand.

  The Six-Shooter brand, the cattle deal, the horses, the Colt pistol, all spoke of the West. Alone in his dingy office, Epperman smoked and thought, and tried to get inside Kettleman’s mind. Why had he disappeared? When a man disappeared it was usually money, a woman, or both.

  Kettleman had money and he had power, so it must be a woman. Yet nowhere in his investigations could Epperman turn up the slightest evidence of philandering. Before his marriage Kettleman had escorted a number of beautiful women, but was serious about none of them. Nor had he confided in any.

  The trail seemed to point West but the frontier was a big place and Epperman had no desire to travel there. He had come back from a trip West only a short time before Lottie Kettleman approached him.

  When Lottie arrived at the office, Epperman lighted a gas-lamp. She was a mighty fine-looking woman, but cold, Epperman thought He had seen her kind before — the ones who handled men the best because they lacked passion themselves. They were always thinking while a man was merely feeling.

  “Did you know that Jim Kettleman was once a prize fighter?” Epperman asked abruptly.

  “A prize fighter? Jim Kettleman? You must be crazy.”

  Epperman leaned his thick forearms on the desk and pushed his derby to the back of his head. “He was a fighter, all right, and a good one. Did he ever talk about the West? Or about cattle?”

  “No, not that I can remember. He talked, but it was usually about the theater, books, politics, sometimes about horse racing.”

  Lottie was nettled. It was more and more obvious that she had not learned the simplest things about the man she had married. A prize fighter? Kettleman with his perfect manners? It was impossible. She must seem like a fool, not to know more about him. Now she recalled how handsome he was, and how much respected, and not only because of his money.

  Facing it, she had to admit she was a fool. She should have done everything to make her marriage work, but she had been so concerned with getting information from him, trying to make a killing from knowledge gleaned from him that she had missed her chance. Why try to make money for herself when Kettleman had the key to the mint?

  She also confessed to herself that her respect for him had increased tenfold since he had gone away.

  Chivington came in and sat down beside his daughter. He repeated the story, which Epperman knew, of finding the Navy Colt in the safe. The room began to smell of stale cigar smoke and Lottie felt her irritation mounting. Kettleman was making fools of them all.

  “If I learn anything,” Epperman said at last, “I’ll let you know. I think,” he added, “that I may have something.”

  Just what he had he did not know, except for a hunch that whatever it was might turn into money for them all. The first thing he must do now was to contact Porter Baldwin.

  Still, if he himself could find Kettleman, maybe Kettleman would pay to stay lost. It was a thought.

  All the way home he cherished the thought and developed it, at the same time a cool rational wind blew through the dark places of his brain. Kettleman had been quick to use that pistol at Saratoga, and by all accounts he was a man of decisive mind. He just might decide to use the pistol instead of paying blackmail. The more Epperman considered that possibility the more uncomfortable he became.

  He was sitting on the edge of his bed rubbing his feet when he remembered the man on the train.

  Chapter 10

  DUSK CAME slowly to Kaybar. From the far bills, a coyote called. A nighthawk swooped and dived in the air just overhead, and the bats were coming out. Otero loitered on his way to the stable as if to feed stock, and saddled their horses.

  Thomas assured them he would be no trouble, and Flint went to Flynn’s room. The foreman was barely conscious and it was foolish to move him, yet he could not be left behind.

  “You don’t know me,” Flint said, standing over Flynn, “but I found you on the trail after you’d been shot.”

  “Thanks.” The word was barely whispered.

  “What I want to say is, we’ve got to move you. Shortly after dark the ranch will be attacked and they will fire the house. We have to be far from here. We’re going to the Hole-in-the-Wall.”

  “Leave me — with a rifle. Or move me.” Flynn paused to breathe deeply, and then whispered, “Stand by her … like my own daughter.”

  He closed his eyes for several minutes. “Gladys. Nobody else knew I was going. She told them.”

  Big Julius Bent, strangely gentle for such a big man, assisted by Juana, dressed Flynn for the ride.

  Nancy planned quickly and surely. Flint passed in and out of the kitchen but made no suggestion because none was needed. Food, medicines, material for bandages, blankets, canteens, matches. Only when the horses were packed and dusk was down around them did she pause to look about. “It is the only home I have ever known.”

  “You can build again.”

  “Of course.” She looked at him quickly. “One does not surrender, Jim. One has to go on.”

  He considered that. Had he surrendered? But his death was inevitable. Or so they said. There was no cure. But people had recovered despite all the medical prophecies. Was it mental? Was it faith? Or was it some chemical within the body that could be summoned by faith or by the will?

  The West held many stories of men critically wounded who had survived when thought beyond all hope.

  The will to live … it was there, and with it perhaps any disease, any illness might be defeated.

  Nancy and the men moved out into greater darkness, going slowly because of the wounded. Flint remained behind with Pete Gaddis to fire a few shots and give an appearance of defense. They did not plan to remain more than a few minutes.

  Lying on the veranda at a corner of the house, Flint thought how quickly a man takes on the qualities of darkness! Men who live by night, the soldier, the thief, the traveler by night, the vagabond … theirs is a different way of thinking, and they do not fear the dark nor what may come upon them by night because they themselves are of the night, a part of it.

  He had been like this long ago, and then had lost it while living in lighted places, and in comfortable surroundings. Now it was creeping into him again, becoming a part of him. He was no longer a stranger to the night, he was himself a shadow, a creeper by night, a thing to which the darkness was a comfort and a surrounding defense.

  There came, off to the left, an inquiring shot. Lifting his heavy rifle, he drew a careful bead on the source of the shot, knowing if the man was an Indian fighter he would have moved by now, and he squeezed off the shot, then instantly fired to right and left. He heard a startled cry, more of alarm than pain.

  Gaddis stirred. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Give them one. Then we’ll go.”

  They moved out, walking their horses where dust lay, Gaddis using his memory of the ranch to choose the route.

  Gaddis was quiet, the coyote out on the ridge was still, the bats and nighthawks were invisible now in the cloaking darkness. They were accompanied only by the hoof falls of their horses and the creak of saddle leather.

  “You hunting somebody?” Gaddis asked suddenly.

  Now what did that mean? Flint waited a moment before replying and then said, “No … there’s nothing I want that anyone can give me.”

  They climbed a little, and when they were on a level again, working among the trees with only the stars listening, Flint said, “I’d like to help that girl. Believe me, I would.”

  They came up on the others suddenly. Far behind they heard another questioning shot. Then they saw the shadows of the bunched horses, and Flint was beside Nancy. They moved off at once.

  “It is good of you
to help. It isn’t your fight.”

  “I no longer know whose fight it is. Maybe injustice is everyone’s fight, now and forever.”

  “Who are you, Jim?”

  He considered the question with wry humor. Who was he? A fair question, but a difficult one. He was nobody. He was a man without a name of his own, born of parents somewhere, somehow, but with no heritage of reputation, or love.

  “I am nobody,” he said, “I am nobody at all.”

  And soon he would be less than that. He would be dust — a skeleton lying in a stone house in a secret place behind the dead lava.

  “You have a family?”

  “I never had a family.” Only a wife that wanted him dead. “There is nobody,” he added, “there never has been.”

  “You must have friends?”

  Well, the original Flint was a friend. Or was he? He did not know how Flint himself would have answered that.

  “Maybe. I think I did. I believe I had one friend.”

  “Had?”

  “He was killed. But that was long ago, and almost in another world than this.”

  Nancy was mystified. There was an isolation about him, an aloofness, something she could not touch. Nor was there any reaching out in him, any grasping for love. Only this strange withdrawing. She had the feeling that he shrank from getting too close to people.

  Flint. Even the name had a lonely sound.

  Where had he come from? What did he want? Where was he going? Why was he here? And where was “here”?

  He glanced back and saw the glow on the sky. Her eyes followed his. She drew up and watched it. “My father and uncle built that ranch with their own hands. I wonder if hope and ambition and memories and dreams catch fire, too?”

  He watched the glow. “They are the intangibles. Nothing, not even fire, can destroy a dream.”

  A single shot sounded, then the quick reply of several rifles. She caught his arm. “Jim, one of my boys is back there.”

  “He’s all right, believe me. And if he’s not, there is nothing we could do but go back and get ourselves shot at. No.” He paused, listening to the night. “Whoever it is came upon them firing the ranch. He knows you are not there or there would be shooting at the ranch, so he is just taking a few shots for himself.”