Beyond Fort North

by Peter Dawson

  In that moment when he saw Gentry’s right fist draw back to strike, Caleb Ash tensed his massive frame against the expected blow, knowing with a stunned and helpless certainty that he was beaten. The aching impact of Gentry’s knuckles against his ear and jaw had left him completely befuddled. His head was ringing, and he was only vaguely aware of Mike Clears’s warning shout. He didn’t know that his outcry to Ewing had even been heard until suddenly he saw the rifle butt arcing down, saw Gentry collapse in a loose sprawl.

  Afterward he stood unsteadily, feet spread wide, staring down dully in disbelief at the unconscious Gentry while he dragged in deep lungfuls of air into his aching chest. Gentry’s solid punches had really hurt him, and his senses were so numbed that it was several seconds before he became aware of Mike Clears’s voice raised in anger.

  When he did finally look up it was to see Johnny Ewing, standing over Gentry, grudgingly lowering his rifle and taking a backward step. Mike Clears stood beside his horse directly beyond. There was a .45 Colt in the saloon man’s hand, and it was pointed squarely at the trooper.

  “Back, I tell you,” Clears said flatly now. And Ewing moved farther from Gentry.

  Ash hardly cared what was happening between these two. He shook his head to clear it, and then plodded unsteadily across to the bay, climbing awkwardly astride the animal. He was feeling an acute shame at these two having witnessed the thrashing he had taken and wanted nothing so much as to get away from here now. He lifted rein and rode on past Mike Clears, a furtive sideward glance letting him see the scornful, derisive look that was directed up at him.

  Anger boiled furiously in him then, and he took the bay away at a run. Only when he had gone on a hundred yards did he look back to see Ewing and Clears together lifting Gentry’s limp bulk across the Grulla’s saddle.

  The night’s chill air soon sobered Ash, and by the time he was down off the bench and had reached his corral at the street’s upper end he was once more considering what he’d had in mind before meeting Gentry. And now a heady excitement took the place of his resentment as he turned the roan into the corral. Shortly he walked off across his wide, cluttered yard to his shack opposite the new building on the far side of the gate.

  Some ten minutes later he was standing at the back corner of Mike Clears’s bunk barn far down the street, eyeing the darkness along the alley to make sure he was alone. It was important that no one should see him, for he was playing some long odds in having come here to find Shotwell and talk with him before the Army got to him. All he had to go on was what Peebles had said on their way down the cañon at midday, that Shotwell was dead beat, that he’d come across here after seeing Mike Clears, that he’d probably sleep for a week.

  This was the same kind of gamble Ash had already played twice today, ever since making sure that Shotwell was the wagon train’s only survivor and realizing how extremely simple it would be to carry through his long-planned claim of ownership of his hardware. First, he had taken the ledger from Tipton’s trunk as self-protection; the diary was merely something that had roused his curiosity and he hadn’t yet looked into it. Secondly, he had made his flat claim there in Fitzhugh’s office regardless of the girl.

  Faith Tipton’s unexpected appearance plus her knowing the truth about his not having paid for the goods had thrown his calculations off balance. But so tempting was this chance for laying his hands on so much easy money that he had brazenly and stubbornly held to his original plan of claiming the goods. What he intended doing now was his gamble on making good that claim.

  Peering up at the top of the log wall above him, he was remembering the arrangement of the inside of the barn. A stovepipe elbowing out between the logs and rising above the line of the peaked canvas roof told him that this was the corner he wanted to climb. Once he had decided that, he stepped up onto a log end three feet above the ground and started up the eight-foot wall. And presently he was sitting astride the butt of the topmost log and reaching over to cut the rope that tied the canvas to it.

  He lifted the canvas slightly and went belly down on the log, pushing head and shoulders inside. He peered down into the thick shadows, making out a potbellied stove in this near corner directly below and the long rows of double bunks beyond. The barn’s interior was dimly lighted by a hooded lantern hanging on the log upright that supported the canvas roof’s long ridge pole. Up at the street door a second lantern hung over the makeshift counter, behind which sat Sims, Clears’s man who ran the place. Sims was there, dozing in his chair. Noises from the street blended with those of the big room — snores, heavy breathing, the grunt of a man turning in his bunk. The sound Ash made as he hung by his hands and then dropped to the dirt floor was drowned by the others. Squatting down so that he could peer between the bunks, he saw that Sims at his desk hadn’t stirred.

  There was no furtiveness in the way he set about finding Shotwell, though he walked as quietly as a stalking mountain cat. He stood erect and moved slowly, peering at the feebly lit faces in the bunks. Seeing him moving this way between the beds, no onlooker would have been even mildly curious.

  Luck was with him. He found Shotwell in a bottom bunk, the next to the end one of the row that ran on back to the stove corner. Ash kneeled silently alongside the man and reached out and put a hand over his mouth.

  Shotwell’s eyes came wide open. Quickly Ash bent over and whispered with his mouth close to the man’s ear. “Nothin’s wrong, friend. Just want to talk with you. Remember me? I was with the soldiers this mornin’.”

  Shotwell nodded and tried to move his head around. But Ash kept his hand tight over the teamster’s mouth, hastily whispering: “Leave your boots here and come on over behind the stove. I’ll be there.” And he straightened and walked away toward the stove corner.

  It was a long quarter minute before the bunk creaked and Shotwell’s spare shape came erect in the aisle between the bunks, and in that interval Ash’s nerves drew taut, and perspiration began to stand out on his forehead at the likelihood of Shotwell balking.

  The teamster approached the stove warily, stopping well out of Ash’s reach. “What d’ you want?” His tone was suspicious, too loud.

  “Couple of things,” Ash replied in a harsh whisper. “But let’s be quiet about it. Did you know they found a girl alive in the wagons?”

  “No,” the teamster breathed incredulously. “Which one?”

  It was a moment before Ash could take this in and ask over his surprise: “Was there more than one?”

  “Sure. Faith and Laura. But of course it couldn’t be Laura. I seen her scalped with my own eyes.”

  “Who was Laura?” Ash asked warily.

  “A young girl we brought on from Santa Fe. Nice. Pretty, too, and a help to Tipton’s women. She paid Tipton to bring her this far. She’d heard how maybe she could travel on west with the paymaster from the fort his next trip. She was trying to get to Frisco. Her father’s out there.”

  “Let’s talk quieter,” Ash said urgently, thinking of what the teamster had told him. “Anyway, this was Harry Tipton’s daughter they found. How come you didn’t mention the other one this mornin’? All you mentioned was women bein’ along.”

  “Was there any reason to name ’em?” Shotwell asked testily.

  “No, no reason,” Ash admitted placatingly.

  “Faith Tipton alive,” Shotwell said then. “Well, something good had to come of this. She’s the salt of the earth.”

  “That may be,” Ash said guardedly, “but she’s brought me a headache.”

  “How come?”

  “Remember me askin’ you this mornin’ about my hardware?” Ash waited for the other’s nod, went on. “Well, damn me if this girl don’t claim the goods belong to her father, not me. And here I paid Harry eighteen hundred in gold, sent the money to him by express not eight weeks ago.”

  Shotwell stood silent a moment. “What’s this got to do with me?�
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  “Everything. I’m hopin’ you can back me up. Didn’t Harry ever mention the stuff was paid for?”

  “To me? Why should he?”

  Ash cursed soundly, softly now, saying in a baffled way: “This sure puts me in a fix. So that’s all you can tell ’em, is it? They’re sendin’ down for you tonight, pretty soon now.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “The major up there at the fort. He was hopin’ you could settle the thing.”

  The teamster shook his head. “Not me.”

  Ash stepped closer to him then, saying in a hushed way: “But you could settle it.”

  “How?”

  Instead of answering, Ash drew from his pocket something he had a quarter hour ago taken from beneath a loose board in the floor of his shack. He held it out in his hand.

  The teamster kept his hands at his sides, asking suspiciously: “What is it?”

  “Money. Gold! An even hundred.”

  “What for?”

  “For you to say Tipton told you those goods were paid for when they ask you tonight.”

  Shotwell’s jaw sagged open. Then he laughed softly, derisively. “Lie for you? Uhn-uh, mister! You don’t pull a trick like that on the girl.”

  “But it’s no trick, I tell you,” Ash whispered harshly. “You come around to my place in the mornin’ and I’ll show you a receipt for that money signed by Harry Tipton. All I want is to get this thing settled. It’s worth a hundred to me to end the argument. You can end it.”

  “Sure, but I won’t.”

  Ash grunted his disgust, lowered his hand. “Then you want to stay on here as a witness while I take it to court?”

  “Me stay on?” Shotwell chuckled. “Brother, I’m leaving this town just as fast as I can get. Me for back East. I’ve freighted my last load through this god-forgotten country!”

  “You think the Army’ll let you go?” the scout insisted. “Did you ever see the Army get its teeth into a thing? You’ll be here weeks, months, maybe, while they’re writin’ Denver provin’ my claim.”

  Shotwell had nothing to say to that, and Ash in the faint light thought he saw a worried look come to the man’s face. So he went on. “Look, Shotwell. It’ll all come out the same in the end anyway. Those are my goods by law. All I’m tryin’ to do is save us all trouble. Take this hundred and tomorrow you can leave here for good. I’ll even throw in any horse you want to pick from my string. Or, if you’d rather, wait’ll this Apache scare dies down and I’ll send you across to Santa Fe as boss of my first wagons that pull out. Now how about it?”

  Before Shotwell had the time to answer there were heavy steps along the front of the room by the street door and a voice up there was plainly heard to ask: “Sims, is that teamster still here? The one off that wagon train?”

  And Sims’s answer came just as plainly: “Far as I know. Why?”

  “The major wants to see him. Right away.”

  “But he’s paid up till four in the morning.”

  “He can come back.”

  Ash reached out and took a tight hold on Shotwell’s arm, breathing urgently: “Here’s the hundred! Do you take it or do you loaf around here till the Army settles this?”

  “Just what do I say?” Shotwell asked uncertainly.

  “Tell the major you heard Tipton say I’d paid for the hardware. Just that. Tell him Tipton said it more than once.” Ash’s whispered words were urgent as he added hastily: “When you get back down here, come straight and tell me how it went. My layout’s that barn lot up the street. I’ll be in the shack by the gate.”

  They could hear Sims now as he worked his way slowly along between the bunks at the front of the room. All at once Shotwell lifted a hand. “All right, give it here,” he whispered.

  Ash silently palmed the coins into the teamster’s hand, saying quickly: “Get back to bed.” Shotwell at once moved away into the shadows.

  Chapter Six

  Ash was crouched behind the stove when Sims finally found his man, roughly shook the teamster, and told him to get up. Shotwell made a good pretense of being hard to waken, and then complained bitterly about having to go out. But shortly he followed Sims up the aisle, carrying his boots. While the trooper who had come down from the fort was explaining to Shotwell what was wanted of him, Ash was on his way out over the log wall.

  Later, in his shack at the stable yard, Caleb Ash hung blankets over the two windows before lighting the lamp, sitting on the long packing box he used for a desk. The room was bare of everything but the box, two caboose chairs, a hog’s-back stove, and Ash’s bed, covered with rumpled and dirty blankets.

  Ash kneeled now and moved the foot of the bed out from the wall. Then he pried loose a board the bed’s near leg had been resting on and, reaching in under the floor, drew out Tipton’s bent ledger, Mrs. Tipton’s diary, and a soiled and stamped envelope.

  He took these things over to his desk and sat down. Then he drew two sheets of paper from the envelope, which was addressed to him in Harry Tipton’s hand and bore a Denver postmark. For some minutes he compared the signatures on the two sheets, one of which was genuine, the other a forgery he had accomplished after a vast amount of practice late last night.

  Finally satisfied that the signatures closely resembled each other, he returned the sheets to the envelope, laid it aside, and began examining the ledger. Ten minutes later, after having read every entry, he knew that nothing in the book would affect his fortunes one way or another. He pushed it away from him then and began reading Mrs. Tipton’s diary.

  It took him twenty minutes to get through the book, and when he had finished the last page, he thumbed back through the others, folding the corners on four. Then, drawing his clasp knife, he carefully cut out those four pages.

  Finally he took the ledger, envelopes, diary, and the clipped pages across the room and returned them to the hiding place under the floor. He moved the bed back in place. He stood up then and stretched and yawned, and afterward idled on back to the desk.

  He was thinking of Shotwell now, wishing the man would show up. He sat behind the packing box and leaned down to rummage in under its lid along one of the shelves he’d built there. Shortly he found what he was looking for, a grimy deck of cards. Then, lounging back in the chair, he began shuffling them, cutting them, dealing one card after another all the way through the deck. His stubby fingers were remarkably supple, and there was no break in their rapid movement between a deal off the top of the deck or off the bottom.

  He went on doing that, just playing, just killing time.

  * * * * *

  Mike Clears was at first convinced that Gentry must be seriously injured. His impulse had been to take Gentry on in to George Spires. But then, judging from Johnny Ewing’s manner that the feeling on the post was violently against Gentry, he decided to take him on down to town.

  When he dismounted in the alley behind the Lucky Find and walked on back to the mare, he was encouraged at finding Gentry’s breathing deep and even. He tied both animals and went on in for help.

  It was old Ben Qualls he brought out with him, and Qualls, not prepared for this, drew back in surprise when he saw who it was roped to the Grulla.

  “Him again?” he asked. “I thought he’d gone.”

  “So did I. Come on. Lend a hand.” Clears was unknotting the rope.

  “Why you botherin’ with him, Mike?” the oldster asked in his caustic way.

  “Never you mind. Get busy.”

  Qualls muttered his contempt for Gentry and grudgingly helped Clears lift him down and carry him on into the office. Then the saloon man told him: “Hang around the door in there, Ben. I don’t want anyone coming in on us.”

  “Wouldn’t think you would,” was the other’s dry rejoinder as he went on into the saloon.

  Clears’s office was big and comfortable, ranging all the rear
width of the building except for the space taken up by a small storeroom to the north. His walnut desk sat in the inside corner and was flanked by a window looking downcañon to the south. Under the alley window was a broad, rawhide-upholstered settee, and it was here that he and Qualls had laid Gentry. Beyond the alley door, at the foot of a steep and crude stairway climbing to Clears’s bedroom above, a deer’s head with a huge span of antlers stared sightlessly across toward the desk. Below the head hung a deer-leg gun rack holding two shotguns and a rifle. A grizzly’s skin, an enormous one, lay across the floor with the head under the edge of a table occupying the outside corner between the two windows where the stove sat in wintertime. Clears had relative privacy here, for he had purposely built the door leading to his saloon of thick planks that shut out most of the noise.

  Now as he began working over Gentry, trying to bring him around and not succeeding, he was really worrying, blaming himself for not having gone straight to George Spires regardless of the consequences. Bathing Gentry’s face, even slapping it a few times, had no visible effect on the unconscious man. Presently Clears climbed the stairway to his snug sleeping quarters under the building’s roof peak, and came down with a bottle of spirits of camphor. When he held the uncorked bottle under Gentry’s nose, the unconscious man’s breathing shortened. But that was all.

  So Clears began rubbing Gentry’s arms and legs, massaging the back of his neck. Several times he looked at his watch, the passage of time alarming him. He had been in the office thirty-five minutes when he finally went out to the bar and brought back a glass tumbler full of whiskey. He managed to prop up Gentry’s head and shoulders and force some of the raw liquor into his mouth.

  At first he couldn’t get Gentry to swallow. So he stretched him out flat again. At the next try Gentry gagged on the liquid, coughed. Then suddenly his long frame doubled up, he rolled onto his side, and his eyes came open. He struggled to get an elbow under him, and then lay there with head hung, gagging and reaching for a full breath.