Fiddlefoot

by Luke Short

  He picked up the lamp and opened the door in the rear wall that led onto the hall. Turning left here, he was in the living room.

  Holding the lamp overhead now, he looked about him, and the sight of its gilt trashiness brought a flood of ancient and unwelcome memories to him. Here were the tastes of a dozen of Rob Custis’ women recorded in tarnished gilt mirrors, in fluffy pillows, in ornate lamps. He moved slowly across the room to the hall opposite, tag ends of dim memory made vivid by the room. Who were the women, and where had they gone? Some of their names and faces were part of his childhood; some were pretty, some drunken, some cruel, all indifferent to the growing waif Rob had tolerated around the house.

  He remembered the weeks of carousing, the nights made hideous and wakeful by singing and shouting and fighting. Those were the times he ate at the cookshack and rode with the crew, and often when he came back the house was empty and Rob was gone. There were months on end when he never saw school, when he ran in the brush with the half-wild Ute kids, and nobody knew where he was, or cared. There were times, too, when Rob returned, sometimes with a new woman, sometimes alone, but there were always beatings and threats and a harshly policed life. Sometimes there were presents, too, so many and so lavish as to numb him; other times, there were only Rob’s bitter black silences, his indifference and his savage discipline. The only thing that had stayed constant through the years was Saber itself, its vaulting mountain ranges and its cattle, kept so only by Rob’s hard-headed greed.

  He went on into the opposite hall that led him past two closed doors, and he turned into the end room. This was his room; it had been his since the first day he came.

  Moving across it, he put the lamp on the table, then opened the outside door, letting the fresh night air drive out the musty smell of disuse. A bare iron bed and a single chair beside the washstand comprised the furniture. He pulled off his boots, and then peeled out of his shirt, and as he threw his boots across the room he saw the bullet hole in the wall. He regarded it thoughtfully, remembering the day long ago when he had stolen Rob’s new Sharp’s rifle, hiding it under his covers until nighttime, when he could try it. In the darkness he had fondled it, admiring it, and finally he had sighted it at the wall. He hadn’t meant to fire it, but somehow that happened, and Rob had raged, baffled at the wildness of this orphan he had never tried to break until it was too late.

  He rolled a pair of cigarettes now, placed them beside him on the washstand, lighted one, and stretched out on the bed. I wish he’d broken me, he thought now with an unaccustomed bitterness.

  For he saw with new clarity the cause of his trouble, and the end of it. He had accepted the wearing of Rhino’s stolen uniform out of some wild and reckless protest against the words Rob had spoken that night in the bunkhouse. In a way he could not explain, those words were the crudest he would ever listen to. All the self-doubt that he had known in his life with Rob had been confirmed by those words—he was the unwanted son of a cheap woman and an anonymous father. It had taken him three weary months to accept that, to reason away the shame and the hopelessness, but those three months had done the harm. For he knew that Carrie would accept his irresponsibility with a patient hope that he would change, but she would never accept his crookedness. He would stand trial for Rob’s murder before he would let that come out. And then, sickeningly, he knew he would do neither. This house, these cattle and these acres were his, and he was rich, and he would give them all to wipe out these three months past.

  And then a thought came to him, and its strangeness brought him slowly to a sitting position on the bed. Why do I have to accept Saber? he thought; if I don’t take it till Rob’s murderer is found, Hannan can’t say I killed him for it. He lay back now, his mind roiled with excitement. Would that pull Hannan off him? It would, because once this motive for his killing Rob was removed, there was only the motive of hatred left. And Frank knew grimly that his hatred for Rob was shared by a half a hundred people here that Rob had bullied and swindled and trampled over.

  As for losing Saber, he didn’t care. He had fifty or sixty horses up in the hills, the only things he could call his own. He’d start from scratch, and show Carrie he was in dead earnest.

  When, minutes later, he blew the lamp, he felt a deep peace.

  The clanging of the triangle, the cook’s call to breakfast, awakened him next morning. He dressed hurriedly and went out, and by the time he reached the cookshack, the last hand had gone in. He washed at the bench which stood just outside the bunkhouse door, and combed his hair.

  As he turned toward the cookshack door, a subtle change came into his face, altering it with a faint grimness. The men inside were the same men who had witnessed his exit three months ago. They had heard Rob name him, and had seen Rob hit him, and while they had remained aloof and silent that evening, he knew they thought Rob half right. A handful of them, the old hands like Jess Irby, had even taught him to judge a horse and fatten a steer and keep simple books, grooming him for the job he had contemptuously thrown in Rob’s face that last night.

  A comfortable clamor of tinware filled the big room as he entered. The fifteen men of Saber’s crew lined each side of a long table in the center of the room. At his entrance, the men looked up, and Jess Irby rose from his place at the end of the table.

  Saber’s foreman was a tall man in his sixties, slow-moving, with a white down-slanting mustache in a sun-blackened, seamed face, and the big hand he held out to Frank was dry and leathery. His eyes, a frosty blue, were reserved, neutral, as he said, “Thought you were about due, son. Take a plate.”

  There was a vacant place halfway down the table, and Frank, heading for it, touched a tall, balding puncher on the shoulder and said, “Hello, Red.” His greeting was returned. From some of the others, he received reserved nods, and still others carefully stared at their plates. There were three or four new faces; all the rest were old Saber hands, proud, competent—and hostile.

  Frank stepped over the bench into the vacant place between Joe Rich and old Cass Hardesty, the blacksmith. Across from him sat Johnny Samuels, the youngest hand in the crew. Johnny’s single year at Saber had taken the edge off his cockiness and steadied him, for it was Jess Irby’s way to load a new man with enough responsibility to make him or break him. Johnny passed over a tin plate of hot cakes to Frank, and their glances met. The reserve Johnny had cultivated was not yet deep enough to hide the dislike in his eyes, and Frank saw it and met it with a quiet indifference.

  Old Cass Hardesty from beside him asked pleasantly, “Make any money for yourself, Frank?”

  “For Rhino, mostly,” Frank answered.

  Johnny Samuels observed quietly, “That’s one thing you can quit worrying about now, Frank.”

  Frank said easily, “I never did worry much about it, Johnny.”

  “That’s right. You never worried about it,” Johnny agreed soberly.

  Frank was aware that the whole table, while eating, was listening. He was further aware that they were understandably uneasy about the change of ownership, for while Rob had been a savage tyrant, he had not been a fool, and he had let his crew alone. Frank checked a quick answer and set about eating.

  Presently, Johnny said, “When do you figure to sell, Frank?”

  Swift anger touched Frank then. “I figured Jess was foreman here, Johnny.”

  “He is. Foreman for who, though? The bank? A company?” There was a deep and mounting resentment in Johnny’s voice then as he added, “Or any stranger that trimmed you in a poker game?”

  “Johnny!” Jess said sharply.

  Frank put down his fork. “You talk too much,” he said quietly.

  Johnny Samuels put down his fork too. “I can do something else besides talk, though. I’ve never seen you do much else.”

  There was a limit, Frank knew, to what he must pay for the past, and this went beyond it. He rose, reached across the table and grabbed Johnny Samuels’ blond hair in a hard grip, and with his right hand he hit Johnny along his shelv
ing jaw. He hit him once, and let go his hair, and said thinly, “You’ve seen me do that.”

  Johnny came boiling out of his seat. He mounted the bench, stepped on the table, and dived across it at Frank.

  As if this were a prearranged signal, the whole room exploded into action. Jim Desert and fat Roy Shields, who had been sitting on either side of Johnny, came onto and across the table at the same time. Joe Rich slugged Frank in the belly; Cass Hardesty leaped on his back and wrapped a sinewy arm under his chin. Frank staggered back against the wall now, Cass still on his back. Bracing himself, he put his head down and fought blindly, savagely, and the crew fought among themselves to get at him, to hit him, to kick him. He knew with a gray despair that this was their revenge for his undeserved luck, for the years he had idled while they worked.

  The rain of blows on his chest, belly, and face drove the breath from him, and the pain of them was a numbing thing that weighted his arms with lead. He fought stubbornly, ferociously, a feral anger twisting his face.

  And then a shotgun boomed in the room, filling it with a deafening roar, and Jess Irby’s voice followed on the heel of it. “Get away from him or I’ll shoot you in the back!”

  Cass dropped off Frank’s back, and the others backed off. Frank leaned against the wall, hands at his sides, head hung, dragging in great gusts of breath, and now he heard rather than saw Jess Irby roughly shoving his way through the crew.

  Jess said roughly, “Have the whole bunch of you gone crazy!”

  Old Cass Hardesty muttered, “Hell, you don’t have to be crazy to want to hit him. I been wanting to for six years.”

  Johnny Samuels said, “Yeah. I’m glad you got it before you fired us, Frank.”

  Frank took a deep breath, wiping the blood from his nose with his sleeve. His shirt was half-torn off, his chest livid with bruises, and it hurt to breathe. Looking over the crew he saw the residue of anger in their faces, and of a wicked pleasure, too.

  He said: “I’m not giving anyone his time unless he wants it. Jess is running this outfit and he’ll keep running it. I got Saber by accident. I’m not taking a penny from it until Rob’s killer is found, and I’m not running it.”

  He paused, and nobody said anything. Pushing away from the wall he said: “I’m going to be trading horses, and I’ll live in my room and work out from Saber. I’ll be around here a lot.” He looked at each man directly now. “I’ll take exactly as much ridin’ from you as I’d take from any man.” He looked now at Johnny. “You know how much that is, Johnny?”

  Johnny didn’t answer.

  “None,” Frank said flatly. He moved past Jess and went out the door, leaving the room silent.

  Chapter 5

  TESS FALETTE was making out a waybill for a waiting teamster when old Mr. Shinner paused by her desk in the late afternoon and said in his dry and worried voice, “Mr. Hulst would like to see you.”

  “All right,” Tess said. She went on writing, and Shinner, after waiting a moment, said, “Right now.”

  “Go away,” Tess said. Shinner sniffed and went over to his desk. Tess finished the waybill and handed it to the teamster, a big, sulky-looking man. She said in a matter-of-fact voice, “If you hadn’t come in drunk this morning, Bill, you’d be ten hours on the way now.”

  The teamster said morosely, “This ain’t no time to start It’s quittin’ time, almost.”

  “But you’ll start,” Tess said firmly.

  The teamster rammed the waybill in his pocket, and then grinned slowly. “I only had a drop, Miss Falette. Nothin’ wrong with that, is there?”

  “Not if it isn’t the drop too much,” Tess said. “It always is with you. Now, get along.”

  The teamster tramped out and Tess looked over her desk. Things were pretty well cleaned up for the day, and she stretched luxuriously. She was aware that Shinner was watching her disapprovingly and almost fearfully, for the boss had spoken and she had not jumped. He was a little gray man with a little gray mind, and out of some perverse wish to tease him, Tess rose, went through the gate in the railing, but instead of turning down the corridor, she strolled to the outside door. She paused here, looking over the lot, and watched Bill Schulte climb into the high-sided freight wagon and whip his six horses into movement. As he passed the office, he saw her standing in the doorway and he called out, “Good-bye, honey-sweetheart,” and guffawed loudly.

  Tess regarded him coldly, not moving, and presently she turned and went down the corridor and stepped into Rhino’s office.

  Rhino was standing at the open window; he was so tall he had to stoop to see out. Now he turned and looked at her and nodded toward the lot. “That happen often?”

  “Often enough, but I can handle it,” Tess said.

  “There’ll be no more of that,” Rhino observed grimly. “Sit down, please.”

  Tess settled into the chair pulled up beside his desk, and folded her hands on the lap of her drab office dress. She noted without interest that the sleeves of her dress were getting shiny and that her fingers were ink-stained.

  Rhino sat down heavily in his oversize swivel chair and laid a massive hand on top of some papers on his desk. “I’ve finished these,” he said pleasantly, and he frowned a little. “Are you sure your figures are right?”

  Tess smiled a little. “The money’s in the bank, Mr. Hulst.” “I can’t believe it,” Rhino said slowly. “Frankly, when I gave over the freighting end to you, I’d have been satisfied if you’d paid your salary out of it. The thing was a nuisance.”

  “A money-making nuisance.”

  “How’ve you done it?” Rhino asked in his kindly voice. “What’s happened to the McGarrity boys? You’ve taken a nick out of their business, haven’t you?”

  “No, we can each do one thing best, and we do it,” Tess replied. “We can haul freight downriver at a rate they can’t touch, and they won’t even try. But from Leadville over to here, we can’t buck them. We each go our own way.”

  Rhino’s eyes sharpened. “Why can we beat them downriver, but not upriver?”

  “We’re hauling feed for the lot in from downriver all the time,” Tess said. “The wagons used to go down empty. Now I load them with freight, so we’re full coming and going, and can offer a lower rate. The McGarritys’ wagons have to come back empty, and it doesn’t pay them.”

  Rhino smiled and nodded appreciatively. “What about upriver?”

  Tess shook her head. “The McGarritys have us there.

  They’ve got good wagons and good teamsters, and they keep a schedule.”

  “And we haven’t?”

  Tess laughed. “Bill’s a sample of the teamsters Hugh gives me. Anybody half drunk or sick or who can’t do a day’s work is a teamster. For wagons we use anything lying around the lot. For teams we’ve been using half-wild range horses that we want broken for harness.” She shrugged now. “As for a schedule, we couldn’t keep one at the point of a gun.”

  Rhino put back his head and laughed, and Tess smiled too. She had never complained of her tools before, and now that the opportunity had come she wondered if it would do any good. She was a woman in a man’s world, she knew, yet Rhino seemed interested enough.

  He said now, “What do you need?”

  “Sound freight wagons,” Tess said promptly. “Real working teamsters, not saloon bums. Good teams broken to harness.” “Think you could run the McGarritys up a tree, then?”

  “I wouldn’t try.”

  Rhino frowned, puzzled, and Tess leaned forward a little. “Look, Mr. Hulst. Plenty of freight outfits in Denver City and Leadville book freight on through to points in Utah and even Salt Lake, don’t they?”

  Rhino nodded.

  “Well, the McGarritys have an agent in Leadville. Let him book freight on through to Utah too. The McGarritys can haul it this far and transfer to our wagons. We can haul it to the Utah points and still bring back all our feed. With our low rates tacked onto the McGarritys’ rates, we could haul cheaper than other outfits and both o
f us would make more money than we do now.”

  Rhino scowled and half-swung his chair around to look out the window. His big hands lay on his massive thighs, and a thick third finger tapped regularly on his frayed trousers. Tess wondered again at the worn clothes Rhino affected, and guessed shrewdly that a horse-trader, which Rhino had once been, could never afford to seem too prosperous. Rhino scrubbed his chin thoughtfully and turned to regard her. “A sound idea,” he murmured, “but why make money for the McGarritys? Why don’t we do it all?”

  “They’ve got the good equipment. We can’t buck them without spending a lot of money.”

  Rhino pursed his lips doubtfully. “What would happen if we hauled freight from Leadville to points in Utah for ninety cents a hundred?”

  “You’d lose money.”

  “But I’d get the business. What else would happen, though? Would the McGarrity boys match that rate?”

  “They couldn’t, and stay in business,” Tess said.

  “Exactly,” Rhino murmured. He laced his fingers behind his head and stared benevolently at the ceiling. “I’ve made some money this summer I’d like to gamble with,” he said, and now he looked sharply at her. “Do you think the McGarritys have money behind them—or could get it?”

  Tess frowned. “No. They’ve got where they are by hard work and little money.”

  Rhino smiled. “What would happen then if I threw away a few thousand dollars by cutting rates until they couldn’t meet them?”

  “You’d ruin them,” Tess said quietly.

  Rhino detected the censure in her words, and he raised his eyebrows. “And if I do?”

  “I like them,” Tess said simply. “They’re good men.” Rhino chuckled. “It’s your privilege to like them—after working hours.”

  Tess was silent, appalled by what was shaping up. She said now in a quick and curious voice, “You mean you’d break them to make money, Mr. Hulst?”

  Rhino smiled, and nodded. “I’ll throw away up to ten thousand cutting rates. By that time, they’ll be out of business and we can pick up their wagons cheap, maybe the whole outfit. After that, I can hoist rates and make back my ten thousand.” Tess sat utterly motionless now. She was remembering Jonas McGarrity, that big, loose-framed, gangling man who had spent a score of nights telling her of his deep ambitions, watching her to see if he stirred affection or love in her, and finally being content with her friendship. He was a good man, simple and kind and tolerant, and all his homely hopes along with his brother’s were doomed now by Rhino’s greed. It was the heartlessness of Rhino’s plan that frightened her. If a man with a few thousand dollars in the bank could drive two other men to ruin, something was wrong. It was as if she had glimpsed something black and slimy and nameless that she was not meant to look upon, and she turned away from it instinctively.