by E. R. Slade
Late in the afternoon they suddenly came upon a pair of ruts running through the woods. The hair at the back of his neck prickled. Deep ruts, these were. The gold suddenly seemed real and near. He began to warm with excitement.
“Pretty close now, eh?” he said eagerly to Leanda, who returned only a fleeting smile as she swung her mount left along the wagon track.
Jeremy spurred up next to her.
“We can just follow the tracks to the wagon,” he said. “Maybe we won’t have to cross Blue at all.”
“I told you about that,” she said.
“But I don’t see what’s the point, if we can find the gold.”
Leanda pulled rein, and Jeremy hauled up beside her.
“Let’s get something straight right now,” she said. “I give the orders. I decide who gets what, how we do this, and when. Is that clear?”
Everything about her speech rankled him. He had a powerful urge to tell her that he didn’t take orders from women and would do as he saw fit. But after a few moments he got the lid back on the pot seething within and said, “There’s two things. First, I never said we wouldn’t leave Blue his share. And the other thing is that if you got business with him, that’s your affair. It ain’t no reason for me to take chances.”
“Jeremy, if you won’t agree I’m the boss, you can turn around right now and leave.”
“I’m here to get my share of that gold. I been promised it and I ain’t leaving till I get it.”
“The only reason I have for sharing any of it with you is if you do what I tell you.”
Jeremy opened his mouth to answer that one, then realized he didn’t have an answer and shut it again.
“Well?” she said.
“I ain’t opposed to doing a thing if I got to,” he said, resenting Leanda’s abrasive bossiness—none of the hands back home would have stood this kind of talk from a woman. “If there’s no other way but to shoot it out with Blue, then there ain’t, and that’s that. I just don’t see the point if we can get the gold without no shoot-outs.”
Leanda sighed impatiently. “You don’t really think he’d just park that wagon somewhere in the bushes out of sight and let anybody track it there, do you? Those ruts will run out to nothing somewhere, you can bet on it. Come on, Jeremy, you’re not really that stupid, are you?”
“Let’s go,” Jeremy said irritably. “I already said I’ll do the shooting if I need to.”
“And you agree I’m the boss?”
“I ain’t a hired hand. I’m a partner. I get a share, right? That’s a partner. You offered me a deal and I ain’t backing out of it. I’ll do what I said I would.” He paused, then with an effort added, “If it makes sense or not.”
Leanda glanced back at Cork, who was tee-heeing to himself not quite silently.
“All right,” said Leanda. “I’ll let you have your silly pride. As long as you keep your end of the deal. Agreed?”
“A deal’s a deal,” Jeremy said. “I ain’t going back on my end.”
Leanda nodded, and nudged her mount ahead. At that moment it began to rain.
Chapter Eighteen
They rode only a short distance in the rain before coming to a big overhang of rock with a spring nearby. They took shelter and Cork proposed a fire. Leanda said no, and Jeremy for once agreed with her—he was hot to get after the gold and couldn’t be bothered about such a mundane thing as a fire. He wasn’t even hungry—and it took something to put him off his grub.
“Time enough to eat when we got the gold,” he said to Cork’s offer of an apple.
Cork began to laugh, which Jeremy found irritating. “What’s so funny?” he demanded, but Cork just went on chuckling to himself.
“Let’s get going,” Jeremy suggested to Leanda.
“Not until after dark,” she said. “You’d better make sure your gun is loaded.”
“It’s loaded. How far away is he? Seems to me I ought to go take a look at the lay of the land while there’s still some daylight.”
“No,” said Leanda. “There’s no point risking him seeing you. If he knows we’re here he’ll be sitting up waiting. You won’t have a chance.”
Jeremy pondered that doubtfully. “I wasn’t planning to wave no flag nor nothing like that. I just want to know what I might trip over in the dark.”
“Sit down, Jeremy. Have an apple and some beef and take a nap.”
Jeremy stood irresolute, hardly aware that he was within reach of occasional sheets of rain driven under the overhang by the wind. Leanda, who was sitting beside Cork, patted the ground next to her, shifting her curves coquettishly.
“Come on,” she said, enticingly this time. “Sit down here by me.”
Some part in the back of Jeremy’s mind was alert to this change in tone and urged him to sit, which he did. But consciously he was hardly aware of what he was doing, thinking so obsessively about the gold. He felt her hand on his, the warmth of her body pressed against his arm, and there should have been fireworks. But he was trying to imagine where he would have hidden a wagonload of gold if he’d been Blue Yanuk, and he was having trouble coming up with reasonable possibilities. The only thing that seemed a pretty sure bet was that it was parked not far from the trail, and someplace easy to watch.
Leanda kept hold of his hand, and laid her head on his shoulder. Jeremy didn’t even notice. The rain stopped, darkness approached, and there came a decided chill in the air. Leanda snuggled even closer. Jeremy was getting very impatient and Leanda’s closeness made him feel cramped. He nudged her.
“Dark,” he said. “Time to get our gold.”
“Not yet,” Leanda murmured. “Blue was never an early-to-bed type.”
So Jeremy had to fidget for several hours (decades as it seemed to him) before Leanda would agree it was time to go.
The cabin was of peeled logs with a roof of split shingles on poles. There were two windows with heavy shutters closed over them. Smoke drifted downhill on the night flow of air, which had a way of going by fits and starts: a surge, then it would stop for a while and Jeremy could see smoke rising ghost-like against the stars from the stone chimney.
“I don’t see no light leaking out around the windows,” Jeremy said to Leanda in a low voice.
“He ought to be asleep by now, but be careful,” she said.
Jeremy, standing a little ahead of the other two at the edge of the cabin clearing, peered around hoping to spot the wagon, or at least ruts. But he saw neither. There were ruts going by on the trail a few hundred feet away, and he still thought the smart move would be to follow them.
Jeremy pulled out his pistol and looked it all over, took out the shells, reloaded them examining each one carefully, thinking all the while he did so that this old Colt might be his only chance of surviving the next few minutes. The last time he’d used one—to actually fire it hoping to hit something, at least—was back in Texas when he’d tried to shoot a rattlesnake. He’d emptied the gun and the rattler had slid away unharmed.
“Well, Jeremy, are you going or not?” asked Leanda, tensely.
“I’m going,” he said, and jammed the gun into its holster decisively. He stepped forward, got three steps before deciding he’d better have the gun in his hand and pulled it out again.
He skirted the clearing, going left, and as he drew near the cabin he moved only when the wind rustled and washed in the trees. Finally he had to cross to the front door, where he stopped, fingering the cocked gun, getting up his nerve. The gold had receded from his thoughts. He felt cold and quivery, and the thing uppermost in his mind was that just beyond the door was a man who had killed two of the fastest guns in the West. However he’d done it, he’d done it. It was beginning to seem to Jeremy that maybe this was foolish.
He passed the pistol to his left hand, wiped his right palm as dry as he could on his pant leg, then passed the gun across again, trying to hold it steady. But he didn’t feel steady himself, was unsteady all the way in to his heart, which was pounding now.
>
He glanced back, could not see Leanda or Cork in the darkness under the trees across the clearing. He put his ear to the door and listened, holding his breath. At first he could hear nothing. But then it seemed to him that perhaps he heard regular breathing. He drew a long, very unregular breath of his own and took hold of the leather latch thong.
It pulled readily, then would pull no more. Jeremy listened again, but the wind in the trees made too much noise. He drew a second long shaky breath making final plans, then set his shoulder to the door, gun ready in his right hand.
The door didn’t move.
He pushed again, harder, sweat breaking out in his armpits. It gave this time and Jeremy stepped into the absolute blackness, went immediately to the right as silently as possible.
Already he’d done differently from his plan, which had been to holler, “Don’t move,” before shifting quickly to one side. Somehow he hadn’t had the courage the say anything. He stood with the gun held out, but he had no way to tell where to aim it and no idea what to do next.
“What the hell ...?” said a voice sleepily. Jeremy aimed at the sound, using both hands, but still said nothing.
There was the rustle of a corn-shuck tick, and Jeremy followed the padding of bare feet across the dirt floor. When the man stood in the open doorway looking out, muttering incoherently to himself, Jeremy could see him well enough to be sure he had no weapon in either hand. Jeremy took two steps and stuck his gun into the man’s back.
“Don’t,” was all Jeremy could get out.
“I wasn’t going to,” the man said sleepily.
“The gold,” Jeremy remembered aloud. “Where’s the gold?”
“Can I shut the door? It’s cold.”
“No, you tell me where the gold is.”
“Didn’t you never hear of knocking? Can I light a candle?”
Jeremy considered. It might help to be able to see the fellow a little better.
“No tricks. This pistol is cocked and I’ll shoot if you try anything clever.”
“No tricks, I promise.”
Once the candle was lit, Jeremy let the man turn around. He was unshaven, with surprisingly friendly blue eyes, and wearing a ratty sort of robe that didn’t reach past his knobby knees. He didn’t look at all threatening, just chilled. Jeremy frowned, feeling the stirrings of doubt, of something not quite right about this. This didn’t seem a likely man to have bested two fast guns any way at all.
“You Blue Yanuk?” he demanded of the man.
“Well sure. Who else did you think?”
“Then Leanda got us to the right place, I guess,” Jeremy said doubtfully.
Blue’s eyes opened wider. “Leanda’s here?” he asked.
“Outside waitin’ for me to call.”
“Oh,” he said. Blue looked Jeremy over, a little apprehensively. “You mind if I ask you something?”
“What?” Jeremy felt he ought to be asking the questions, but he wanted time to think first.
“She in the mood to skin me alive?”
Of all the things Jeremy thought the man might ask, this wasn’t one of them, and he stared with his mouth open, trying to make the words register. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But,” he said, starting to come back to himself, “she wants the gold. So do I. That’s what we want.”
“Oh, the gold,” he said, as if it was his biggest headache.
“Do you have it here?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, looking off into the middle distance.
“How about you show us where, and then we’ll just take it and leave you in peace.”
Blue brought up his hands and ground his palms into his eyes. Then he let them drop and looked at Jeremy.
“I wish it could be that simple. But it isn’t.”
“Why? You got the gold. We want it. You give it to us and we leave. What’s hard about that?”
“You don’t understand. You might as well call in Leanda. I guess she can use my bed. You and I’ll have to sleep on the floor. Got a bedroll?”
“I don’t think you understand,” Jeremy said, getting impatient and waving the cocked pistol around for emphasis, “Leanda and me and her uncle have come ...”
“Oh, that old varmint is here, too? I should have known she’d bring him along. I don’t know why she doesn’t just leave him to his corn liquor and that junk-wood house of his. You ever see it?”
“Yeah, I seen it. Now like I was saying, Leanda and me ...”
“And those pickled fingers. He ever tell you the story about those things? About how he cut them off some guy’s hand because he beat him at poker and the man didn’t have no more money?”
“Looky here, Blue, this ain’t a social call. Leanda and me have come to take that gold, whether you like it or not. Now let’s go.”
Blue sighed.
“Okay okay,” he said. “Can I get some clothes on?”
Jeremy allowed this, and they stepped outside.
“Got Blue,” Jeremy shouted into the night.
“So I see,” Leanda said from not twenty feet away. She and Cork approached and stopped, facing Blue. Leanda looked at Blue, and Blue looked at Leanda.
After they had looked at each other for quite a while, and Jeremy was getting edgy, and Cork had started chuckling softly to himself, Leanda said, abruptly, imperious, “Let’s go inside.”
“All right,” Blue said obligingly.
So in they went, and lit a lantern and blew out the sputtery little candle. Blue put the lantern on a rickety table that stood off to the right, and they pulled up the chair and three stump stools and sat down. Jeremy still kept his vigilance with the gun, though nobody seemed to be taking any particular notice, least of all Blue.
“How’d you find me?” Blue asked Leanda.
“I knew you had this cabin,” she said. “And I heard that you’d been seen coming up this way with supplies.”
Blue looked tired and he had big bags under his eyes. He merely nodded. Leanda glared fiercely, jaw set.
“Looky,” Jeremy said, “we’re here for that gold. Blue was just going to take us to it. Let’s go.”
“I thought we had an understanding,” Leanda said to Blue. “And what happens? I wake up one morning, and you’re gone. If you wanted to leave me, why weren’t you man enough to tell me so to my face?”
“What was there to say?” Blue asked dully.
“What was there to say? Just listen to the man. For one thing, you might have told me why. After all I’ve done for you.”
He flinched at that, but didn’t answer.
“I saved your life, Blue Yanuk. And this is the thanks I get!”
“Maybe I’d have been better off if you’d let me alone,” Blue said. He was beginning to have a hunted look.
“Not likely. They’d have strung you up for sure. Lemieux was wearing a badge when you shot him, if you’ll recall. Some authorities tend to frown on killing lawmen, even if the lawman in question only took up that side the week before because he needed a stake and he’d been losing too much at cards.”
“What do you want from me?”
Leanda made an exasperated sound but didn’t otherwise answer.
“We want the gold,” Jeremy put in.
“Is that what you want?” Blue asked Leanda.
“Now what do you think?” she said.
“You can’t have it,” Blue said. “I’m giving it to charity.”
Leanda’s mouth dropped open. “You’re what?”
“Giving it to charity.”
Leanda’s eyes, which had widened quite prettily though to no notice of any of the men, now narrowed. “You must have gone round the bend,” she said softly, more to herself than to him. She turned to Jeremy. But before she could say anything Blue spoke again.
“How could I spend gold bought at the price you paid for it? Or let you spend it?” Blue’s manner had changed. There was now a hard edge to his tone.
“What are you talking about?” Leanda demanded.
“Suppose you had lost?” Blue’s voice thickened. “I can hardly stand to think of it.”
“What is the matter with you? Don’t you remember what I was when you met me?”
Blue turned away as though the image of it gave him physical pain. “Lusty cowhands is one thing,” he said. “Courtland is something else.” Yet Jeremy had a feeling the lusty cowhands bothered Blue more than he wanted to admit.
“But I won,” she pointed out. “Now I’ll never have to do that kind of thing again. Ever. Get yourself together, Blue. Let’s divide up the gold. But as for me, I’m going to enjoy my share, and I’m sure Jeremy and Uncle Ham will enjoy theirs like sensible men.”
“I won’t listen to such talk,” Blue said fiercely. “You weren’t like this before. It’s the gold that’s done it.”
“Bull,” she said. “It’s what I’ve wanted all my life. And now I’ve got it I’m going to keep it and enjoy it. You know, Blue, I can’t understand you men at all. Here you are, a man who has killed for as little as fifty dollars, but if I put what I have on the table and win a fortune, killing nobody, then you ...”
“I never killed any man for fifty dollars,” Blue contested hotly. “I called those men for cheating and defended myself then they tried to kill me.”
“And what you were owed by Lemieux was fifty-one dollars and ten cents, if I recall—isn’t that so?”
Blue’s fist struck the rickety table. “That’s not the point,” he said. “The man was pulling cards out of his sleeve. You saw him. It was a matter of honor.” He paused, tense, then slumped back in his chair. “I guess honor is something you don’t know anything about.”
“Honor,” Leanda said with infinite disgust. “Honor’s nothing but pride, and I can’t afford it. Well, not until now. When you’re rich—or fast with a gun—you can play games with honor, but if you’ve got nothing and can’t shoot you can’t afford it. Now, let’s go to the gold.”
Blue deliberately folded his arms. “No,” he said.
“Blue,” Leanda said warningly. When it had no effect she turned to Jeremy. “Make him,” she said.
