Hard Money

by Short, Luke;

  “Father wants to see you at the hotel,” Sharon said falteringly.

  “Afterward,” Seay said.

  “No, now.” And then suddenly Sharon lost all the stiffness that had gripped her, and some of the pride, too. “Oh, Phil, how can you gamble with so much?” she said passionately. “So much that isn’t yours!”

  Seay’s eyes widened a little, but he spoke without heat and with a patience that was unbearable to watch. “Those nine men were mine to keep alive. That tunnel is mine to put through.”

  “But can’t you see? This is what they want!” Sharon cried. “Have you got to fall into their clumsy traps like a bullied schoolboy?”

  Seay’s face darkened, and his lips drew tight across his teeth. Then slowly he exhaled his breath in a great gust.

  “They want you to do this, Phil. Yates is out there with a hundred witnesses. He warned you,” Sharon said desperately.

  Seay shifted his wicked gaze to Tober. “Did he?”

  “He talked to you for three minutes,” Tober said quietly. “You laughed at him.”

  “You haven’t a chance, Phil,” Sharon pleaded. “Don’t you see, it wasn’t the tunnel they were after the other night. It was you! They knew you would do this. And you are. Are you?”

  Seay said nothing, his hot eyes still on Tober.

  “You’ll never get the chance to meet this man you’re hunting. When you see him Yates will shoot you. He can. And if he does, where will the tunnel be—or Dad, or Reed, or your nine men, or all the men?”

  Seay’s glance whipped back to her. “Where are they now? With not a man’s life safe!”

  Sharon shook her head, looking into his eyes. “You can’t, Phil! If you kill him, other men like him can be bought! It wouldn’t settle anything—it would only destroy it!”

  Seay turned and looked out the window, which opened onto the blank side of the adjoining building. The room was touched with the oversweet scent of barber’s lotions that clung to the discarded bottles and jars heaped in the corner and mingled with the old hot dust of the place. Sharon turned her head to look at Reed, and Reed nodded imperceptibly.

  Seay swung around slowly and said, “All right. I—you’re right.”

  Sharon put a hand on his arm and smiled a little. “It’s too simple—too open—to walk into.” Seay did not look at her. He reached out for his hat that lay on the dusty packing case and then turned to her, his face contained and normal. “That’s right,” he said quietly.

  Sharon was trembling a little, but she managed to say offhandedly, “Dad really does want to see you. Will you go with me?”

  Seay nodded. Sharon walked out between them. Once on the sidewalk, Reed was on one side of her and Seay on the other. The knowing men lining the streets turned or looked away, and Sharon flushed deeply at what she knew they were thinking. Seay tramped beside her, face grave, speaking to no one.

  In front of the Union House the sidewalk was cleared, and while Sharon was still wondering why, she stepped into the cleared space and then looked at Tober. He was slowing his pace, his glance directed to the hotel porch.

  Towering against the pillar, his attitude at once casual and wary, was Chris Feldhake. Sharon had never seen him before, but she immediately sensed that it was he. She felt Tober’s fingers clasp her wrist and pull, but she fought it quietly and with all her strength. Tober came to a stop then, and Seay did too, and Sharon stayed beside him.

  “You lookin’ for me, Seay?” Feldhake drawled, his voice insolent, contemptuous, above the street noise.

  Sharon waited for what Seay was going to say. She did not look at him, for she did not want to humiliate him before these men, before Feldhake.

  She was surprised at the easy readiness of his answer.

  “Not yet, Chris.”

  Feldhake straightened up. “I heard you wanted to see me,” he drawled. “I thought they must be wrong.” Slowly he raised his hand to put the cigar in his mouth.

  “I said, not yet,” Seay said again, the slightest edge on his voice.

  Feldhake grinned, raised a finger to his hat in the first sign of recognition he had given Sharon and then swung down off the steps and headed downstreet.

  Sharon felt a hand guiding her elbow, and she mounted the steps. It was not until they were in the half-light of the stair well that she dared look at Seay. His face was pale, and the muscles along his jaw line corded with an effort that she understood, but his expression was reserved, remote.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “I learn my lessons well—once I learn ’em,” he answered lightly.

  Sharon left him at Charles Bonal’s door and went down to her room and closed the door behind her.

  Sinking down on her bed, she stared at the rug and did not try to fight the steady feeling of shame that crept through her, making her angry and disgusted. Only ten brief minutes ago she had come out of a barber shop on the arm of a man whom an hour ago she thought she despised. Now she knew that she had never despised him, and that events had betrayed her and finally trapped her into this final humiliation. She rose and moved restlessly to the window and looked out, and then she remembered that she had seen him do this a little while ago. She came away then and sat on the bed again, waiting for this turmoil to settle in her mind. She wanted to call herself cheap, for she held that what she had just done was unwomanly. Hugh would think so, too, although he would defend her. And then she thought of Vannie Shore, who had done the same thing, and probably with no thought of opinion, and she recalled that pang of bitter jealousy felt as she came up beside Reed Tober in that back room and found Vannie and Seay there. Wanting honestly to understand herself, she went back over every word she had said. She had called him Phil; a day ago she would not have spoken his name. Why? What had changed her save the excitement of that minute when Tober stammered out his helplessness to her father? It was more than that. She had pled with a conviction that appalled her now because she knew it had been sincere.

  The answer was slow in dawning on her, because she fought it at every turn, and with all those weapons of scorn and pride that she could command. Later, when she rose and walked over and seated herself in front of the mirror and looked at her reflection, it was to study her face intently, without vanity. It was not the face of a common woman, or an indecisive woman. For one fleeting instant she thought she recognized a new and strange tranquility there, and her memory leaped to Vannie Shore. Yes, Vannie’s face was tranquil, serene.

  But when she groped for the reason for it she remembered Vannie and Phil Seay at Maizie’s party. Could Vannie’s serenity have its source in that night? And what that thought led to made Sharon stand up so abruptly that she knocked over the stool she had been sitting on. She went out swiftly, her face dark with shame.

  Chapter Ten

  Borg Hulteen was roaming the way between the two bunkhouses, his eyes on the bunkhouse doors, a slab of bread and ham in his fist. It was a half-hour yet till the shift change at the tunnel head, but Borg was hunting up his crew, ordering them one by one away from their brief rest into the tunnel. By six, before six, he would have them at work.

  Seay stepped to the door of the office and called to him, and Borg tramped over, chewing morosely on the tag end of his supper. Seay was already seated in the doorway, and Borg sat down beside him. From one side of his mouth he emptied a considerable accumulation of tobacco juice; that done, he chewed again on the bread and ham.

  “Hot, hunh?” he commented.

  “I talked with Bonal this noon,” Seay said. “They’ve got him on the run again.”

  “Money?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far can we get with what we’ve got?”

  “That depends on you,” Seay said. “We’ve got enough for a month’s expenses, Bonal says.”

  Borg was quiet a moment. “We can turn it into two if you’ll keep them process servers away from the tunnel head.” Borg grinned suddenly. “Hell, come to that, we could store enough grub in there to
make it three—if you could still keep them out of the tunnel.”

  Seay smiled meagerly. “It may come to that. I fought with Bonal to lay part of that money on equipment. If we got the drills we can fight court orders for a long time. Providing, of course”—and here he looked swiftly at Borg—“that the men will take a wage cut and maybe no wages at all toward the last.”

  “I know nine men that will,” Borg answered slowly.

  “It may come to that, and I hate to do it.”

  Borg rose and wiped his mouth with a hairy forearm. “Maybe I’m wrong, Phil, but I think we’re workin’ into a new formation there at the head—softer rock.”

  Seay looked up at him. “You sure?”

  Borg nodded. “I ain’t one of these experts with a hammer, but I can tell how it drills. This is softer. Besides, the color’s different. I’ll know better tonight when I come off.”

  When Borg was gone Seay sat on the sill, turning over in his mind the implications of what Borg had just told him. But he refused to count on luck, and he rose and returned to the office. On the desk was the time sheet, his legacy from Hardiston. When he thought of that spare, vicious little man, the old anger boiled up in him, but it was an impotent anger now. Not even Tober guessed that it was Hardiston who had sold the tunnel information to Feldhake—sold it twice, this last time out of revenge for being detected in selling it the first time. Nor did Bonal, who accepted Seay’s word that the desert heat was breaking the little man, and that he had been sent to the coast for a vacation.

  Fighting his restlessness, he concentrated on the time sheet, the pen fragile and strange in his square hand. Whenever he was forced to do this, it was a compromise with his temper, for he had no liking for this work. He went at it much like a schoolboy, concentrating fiercely, shoulders hunched, with an attention that was too absorbing to be of any long duration. At dark he lighted the lamp and worked on, but slowly his interest lagged, and he found himself unable to give the work even his easiest attention. Thoughts kept intruding with such insistence that finally he threw his pen down, swore at the smear he had made on the time sheet and rose. Craig could finish it. This was his kind of work, or work that he had resigned himself to doing.

  At the door of the office he looked out over the camp. By lantern light a few men were pitching horseshoes down by the warehouse. The lights in the cookshack still burned, but the clatter had died. The bunkhouses were already quiet, crude slab temples dedicated alike to sleep. Up at the tunnel mouth he could see the new guards conversing. Somewhere out in the night Reed Tober was prowling ceaselessly, alert for any trouble.

  Seay turned back to the office, and all at once its hot loneliness was unbearable. Blowing out the light, he took his hat and went out and found himself turning toward the stables. He smiled at this, wondering if this was what had been in the back of his mind these last two hours.

  He was saddling his horse in the dark when Tober came up silently and said, “Phil?”

  Seay grunted. Both Tober and Bonal had pleaded with him to avoid Tronah, to stay away from its crowds. They had good reason, he had admitted to them then, but tonight he was in a mood to ignore it. Waiting for Tober to speak up again, he finished saddling and led his horse out of the pole corral.

  “You got a gun?” was all Tober said.

  Seay told him no, and he accepted the one Tober gave him and rammed it in his belt. He stepped into the saddle then, and Tober stood away while he rode down the rough street and angled up the road toward the pass.

  It came to him that it was excitement he wanted tonight, a change. Gambling maybe. And when he thought of gambling, he thought immediately of what Sharon Bonal had said of his gambling. Resentment stirred within him and then vanished, and he let memory frame the image of her there in the back room of Sig Pool’s barber shop. She had been without pride then, and he probed his memory for what she had told him, but it was not clear. But he still remembered her face, alive for once with a grave concern that went beyond consideration of him and his stubborn rage. It had been a sudden loyalty to her father that had broken that pride. He remembered, too, the quiet way she faced Feldhake, the iron of her presence turning Feldhake’s threat into cheap bluster, an unpleasant incident encountered on the streets. And her own contagious conviction then had given him the power to laugh, and looking back on it now he smarted under the memory of his own foolhardiness of the minutes before. When she had thanked him for that, it was without reproof that his own violence had threatened her with a street brawl and worse. It occurred to him then that her pride was not broken at all, and that the spirit of her was not brittle or false, but like a flame that burned high in still air, that bent and weaved but did not die against the pressure it sometimes met. This was a woman of Charles Bonal’s kind, indomitable and proud and unconquered and not easy. Not easy. Memory of the times he had seen her before, when his own impulse and deed was to jeering anger, and her own was to an overriding of him, made him smile thoughtfully into the night. His rough ways irritated her, and he in turn, was impatient of her dominating him as if he were one of those soft and agreeable men who seemed to surround her. Still, Hugh Mathias was not wholly soft, although there was behind his affability a seeming unease that puzzled Seay. Wealth and breeding did not hide it. Perhaps its source had been the secret knowledge that sooner or later he was to be the instrument of another one of Charles Bonal’s defeats.

  Seay pondered this as he packed and lighted his pipe and lifted one foot out of the stirrup to stretch. The stars were close tonight, and the heat giving off from the rocks around him seemed to lift toward the night sky in invisible waves that made these stars dance fitfully. A rat scurried off in the stunted brush by the road, and his horse shied, and he spoke sharply to him.

  How could Sharon Bonal face this bad news from Hugh? Like a woman whose love has already acknowledged the imperfection of her man, and to whom forgiving is now easy because at first it was so hard? Abruptly he was angry with himself and put Sharon Bonal and Hugh Mathias out of his mind.

  Approaching Tronah, as he was passing the humble street of miners’ homes, he heard the provocaive, throaty laugh of a woman hidden in the shadows of a tiny porch, and it disturbed him oddly. For a brief moment fancy tried to explain the reason for that laugh, husky, teasing, warm, and immediately he thought of Vannie Shore. That might have been her laugh.

  He reined in a little, his face musing, and he rammed his cold pipe in his pocket. Of a man on a side street, away from the town’s clamor, he found where Vannie lived. Anyway, he thought, here is a woman who will let me thank her in my way for a friendly service.

  The street was ugly, the afterthought of the town’s greed, and it ran aimlessly beyond the alley which separated it from the town’s main street. Its houses, some of cut stone, were close to the street, and iron and picket fences tried to cover up the meagerness of the bare yard.

  It was at one of these that Seay dismounted and looped the reins of his horse over the iron hitch rail in front.

  The house was dark, but he could make out a white blur on the porch which moved and then became immobile as he opened the gate.

  “I wondered if you asked questions for nothing,” Vannie Shore greeted him at the steps. “Would you rather sit out here? It’s hot inside.”

  Seay murmured something and took the half of the leather cushioned porch sofa that was vacant beside Vannie, letting her first pick up the knitting she had laid there.

  She did not speak for a moment, but her silence did not come from awkwardness: it was that she found it hard to shake the habits of loneliness, Seay thought, and thinking it, he asked gently, “You have no one with you, Vannie?”

  “Cat,” Vannie said. “Cats and knitting.” She laughed easily, warmly. “I’m almost into the ways of a widow woman, Phil.”

  “Rot,” Seay said quickly.

  Vannie put her knitting aside and stretched out her long, full legs now and rested her head on the back of the sofa. Seay watched her, unable to se
e her fully, but the rich fragrance of her was all around him in the night, and he felt his blood strangely quickened.

  “Not so much rot as you think,” Vannie said quietly. “Maybe I like it.” She was silent a moment, and then added more softly, “Maybe I have to like it, so it’s just as well.”

  “But you like men,” Seay mused. “They like you. They can’t help it.”

  “It’s the women,” Vannie said, and without bitterness. “All the men I would like have women—here or somewhere else. And the women here have made it hard for them to know me.” She looked lazily toward him. “All except you.”

  “And I can’t—not as well as I’ll want to.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Vannie said with gentle irony. “The men I would like haven’t time for me. And that’s all right, too. I’d only expect them to have time for me if they more than liked me.”

  “You make it hard for me to thank you for this morning, Vannie,” Seay replied, and his tone held a good-natured truculence. “This is a rough town, where a man hasn’t time to take a step for fear he’ll take his foot off the neck of the man below him.” He said more seriously, “Why don’t you leave then?”

  “I own a mine.”

  “A man could run it for you.”

  “Not as well. Besides, it’s the one thing I hold to—a kind of a lifeline keeps me from drowning in self-pity. For ten hours a day I’m alive, with a sense of power, success. I’m thankful for that. What happens during the rest of the day isn’t so bad,” she added, looking full at him. “You must know the feeling, Phil. It’s almost your life.”

  “Not the self-pity.”

  “Nor mine. I say it keeps me from it. And you’re not a woman, so you wouldn’t know about that part of it.”

  Seay rose and walked over to the single step and rammed his hands in his hip pockets, his old restlessness upon him. The things Vannie said always had the power to disturb him. He said over his shoulder, “Tell me, Vannie. Is self-pity the lot of a woman?”