The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  He got his grip on Marengo’s thick wrist and forearm as they collided with breath-jarring impact. Logan was outweighed by fifty pounds and he carried scars on his body which this rock-crusher of a giant had inflicted on him in the past.

  Twisting, Marengo clubbed Logan’s kidneys with his free fist. Logan hurled his full weight on the hold he had on the man’s other arm; his right leg came between Marengo’s knees and they went down on the narrow deck, rolling as Marengo wrenched his pinioned arm away from his body.

  In the dim light of that deckway Logan saw that Blackie’s great fist clutched a knife. Logan forced that hand back, using his lifting weight for leverage to twist Marengo’s elbow behind his back before the big fellow could regain his balance.

  White heat flowed through Logan’s back from the sledging blows he was taking; they writhed to their feet, boots grinding on the splintery deck, as Logan doubled Marengo’s trapped arm higher behind his shoulder blades.

  Bone bent under Marengo’s muscles, bent beyond his endurance and snapped like a breaking twig before Marengo could bawl out either in pain or submission; and the knife fell to the deck at their feet.

  Logan released his grip on that broken, useless arm and broke clear, yanking at his jumper to clear his gun, knowing he must brain Marengo before their fight attracted attention.

  So far their clash had been in silence, but that could not last; and for Logan, discovery would be fatal.

  Marengo wheeled completely around, his dangling arm a dead weight in its socket. But he squatted to avoid the whistling arc of the gun barrel in Logan’s fist and his good hand, bracing him off the deck, seized the bowie knife he had dropped.

  As Logan set himself for another attempt at clubbing Marengo’s bald pate with gun steel, Marengo reared upward, stabbing the knife point-uppermost at Logan’s chest.

  Logan felt the hot bite of steel gouge his ribs, and his effort to dodge the stroke of that knife robbed his downswinging gun arm of its full power.

  The .45 muzzle slanted like the flat of an ax blade off Marengo’s temple, its impact stifling the bull roar that was lifting in the big man’s throat.

  Marengo’s face went slack then, and his eyes had a queer glaze in them as Logan’s blow drove him backward to strike the steamer’s railing.

  Rotten wood splintered to the heavy jolt of Marengo’s body and gave way where the railing met a steel stanchion which supported the Texas. A six-foot section of railing collapsed outward from the Sacajawea’s hull. Feeling himself catapulting backward into space, Marengo dropped his knife, and his clawing hand made its frantic swipe at Logan, seizing his jumper and pulling him forward as Marengo catapulted backward through the gap in the railing.

  Logan’s head smashed hard against the upright steel stanchion. Fireworks exploded behind his eyes; he was unaware of Marengo’s fingers ripping the fabric of his jumper. He knew Marengo was falling overboard, and that thought was Logan’s last conscious impression; his brain dropped into a black vortex into which pain and fear and all sensations were nothing.

  Marengo’s hurtling body made a great splashing geyser alongside the Sacajawea’s hull, vanished in the frothy wake of the paddle wheel. Only the stanchion pillar which had knocked him out had prevented Cleve Logan from following the convict into that watery doom.

  Logan was sprawled on the cramped deck when Alva Ames stepped out of her cabin to investigate the sound of combat there, the lamplight streaming past her to lay its glitter on the welling blood which spread across the front of Logan’s shirt.

  Chapter Five

  On the Dodge

  Cleve Logan opened his eyes from a natural sleep to find himself stretched full length on a cabin berth. Morning’s first light showed pearl-rose beyond a circle of glass port. For a long moment he lay there, puzzled as to where he was or how he got here, trying to pick up the broken thread of memory.

  Then a woman’s soft voice impinged itself on his consciousness, near at hand. He thought instantly of Opal Waymire and wondered by what freak of circumstance he had wound up in Cabin D.

  But it was Alva Ames whose face he saw when he turned his head on the pillow. She was kneeling beside the berth, her face showing the strain of a sleepless night.

  “I think you have nothing to worry about, Mr. Logan,” she was saying. “The knife wound was shallow, and you were not unconscious long from the blow on your skull. You drifted into a sound natural sleep shortly after Jeb carried you in here.”

  Logan groped a hand to his skull, aware that his head had a slugging ache in it which seemed oddly out of accord with his general sense of refreshment and bodily well-being.

  His fingers brushed over an egg-sized welt where his scalp had made contact with the iron stanchion outside, and with that discovery Cleve Logan remembered the fight, remembered seeing Blackie Marengo drop toward the treacherous waters of the swollen Columbia.

  He thought, Blackie had a broken arm. He never had a chance in that river, which means my secret is safe.

  Logan sat up, promptly thumping his sore head against the rawhide springs of the upper berth. He swung his legs from under the blanket that covered him and saw that he still wore his Levis but that his socks and cowboots had been removed.

  Glancing down, he saw that he was shirtless as well. His chest was bound in tightly-wound strips of bandage, torn from a petticoat or a bed sheet. Under that bandage was a steady pulsing ache where Marengo’s knife had sliced its shallow track.

  Logan managed a crooked grin.

  “Looks like I’m in your debt again, Miss Ames,” he said. “What happened?”

  A softly modulated male voice answered him from the far part of the stateroom. “My sister and I heard your fight with Blackie Marengo. When it was over we brought you in here. God had you in the hollow of His hand last night, Mr. Logan.”

  Logan turned to get his first look at Alva’s brother. Ames was younger than he had expected—in his middle twenties—and he wore the reversed collar and black garb of a frontier clergyman.

  The minister’s sun-weathered, intensely vital face would have been handsome had it not been for a patch of puckered scar tissue which covered his forehead and drew his entire left cheek out of shape.

  With a start, Cleve Logan realized that the man was stone-blind. His eyes, lusterless behind scarred lids, had the opaque fixity of a sightless person.

  “My brother,” Alva said. “Reverend Jebediah Ames.”

  The blind man reached a hand in Logan’s direction, and his grip was strong and sure and virile.

  “This is a pleasure,” Logan said gently. “Does the captain know about my tangle with Marengo?”

  Jebediah Ames’s sightless gaze focused somewhere past Logan as he shook his head.

  “We saw no reason to give Rossiter further cause to be antagonistic toward you, Mr. Logan. You see, my sister and I knew of this Blackie Marengo back in Lewiston, before he went to jail and when he used another name. His death is the vengeance of the Lord. I pray you not to let his drowning last night trouble your conscience.”

  Cleve Logan’s mind was busy as he donned his socks and boots and shirt. When Alva handed him his riding-jumper he noticed that the girl had neatly mended the tear made by Blackie Marengo’s clutching fingers.

  His gun harness hung from a peg on the corner post of the bunk; he saw the girl’s attention fixed on him as he buckled on the shell belt and thonged the holster in place on his thigh.

  Force of habit made him remove the Colt from scabbard and give the loaded chambers a brief inspection, putting the empty chamber under the firing-pin before restoring it to holster.

  “I’m glad you knew the smell of skunk Blackie Marengo carried,” Logan said. “I didn’t throw him overboard, actually.”

  The girl averted her eyes. “As Jeb said, his loss is nothing to grieve.”

  Logan stepped to the promenade do
or and opened it, taking his exploratory look outside. The Sacajawea’s stacks were pouring white smoke, the packet having come into the main seaward-rushing run of the Columbia during the night.

  Fifty yards off the starboard beam the high, eroded bluffs of Washington Territory lay green and fertile under the dawning sun, giving no hint of the desert aridity to which they would revert when summer came. It was an empty land without visible road or human habitation along its southern border. The Oregon plateau lay across the river at this point, a quarter of a mile south; Logan judged that high noon would see the Sacajawea tying up at Celilo Falls, the end of navigation from the east.

  His glance dropped to survey the missing length of boat railing, which someone had temporarily repaired with a length of rope tied between stanchions. Someone had sluiced the bloodstains off the deck where he and Marengo had fought their silent, bitter fight to the end.

  Logan swung full around, his glance shuttling between Alva and her brother.

  “When was that break in the railing discovered?”

  Jeb Ames answered. “It was after midnight. There was considerable hullabaloo from Rossiter. He told his crew the railing had been in need of repairs for months.”

  Logan’s voice sharpened. “Does the captain know one of his passengers went overboard?”

  “Not that we know of. But neither of us has left this cabin.”

  Logan’s relief came with an outrush of breath. He started to speak and was interrupted by the blast of the Sacajawea’s whistle, drenching the overhead deck with spray. That signal changed whatever Logan had been about to say.

  “Rossiter’s whistling for a landing,” he said tensely. “I will not complicate your situation by remaining here, Miss Ames. I want you to take my thanks, for what it is worth.”

  He fitted his Stetson at an angle across his head to conceal the narrow bandage Alva had bound around the gash on his skull.

  Over his handshake with Jebediah Ames, Logan said, “I understand you’re taking over the sky pilot’s job at Owlhorn, Reverend. You couldn’t have chosen a wilder spot to preach the Gospel.”

  Jebediah Ames’s smile transformed his scarred face.

  “I go where the Lord calleth,” he said humbly. “Owlhorn needs to learn of the teachings of Jesus Christ perhaps more than any other community in Washington Territory. I thank God that He chose me for His missionary there.”

  Logan stepped out of Cabin C and closed the door behind him. He moved quickly aft along this deck, seeing the Washington bank quartering in closer as the Sacajawea, her engines at half speed, veered in toward an obscure landing-dock built at the end of a rocky outcrop covered with second-growth timber.

  This port of call was no town, then; it appeared from this distance to be a lonely river ranch, for he saw horses penned in a corral beyond the patch of timber.

  He was approaching the deckhouse and its breakfast odors when landing-bells jangled in the engine room, and the packet nosed her prow into the spreading V of the landing-slip.

  Alongside the dock, Logan saw firewood ricked in four-foot lengths along the smooth gravel beach, and knew that this was a woodcutter’s camp where some enterprising settler was selling fuel for the boilers of the Columbia’s river craft.

  “Fuel stop!” Rossiter bellowed through a tin megaphone from the pilothouse wing, as lines were made fast to the dock. “The more o’ you passengers who lend a hand loadin’ firewood, the quicker we git under way ag’in!”

  Logan glanced through the open door of the dining-salon and saw that it was jammed at this early hour by Duke Perris’s riffraff. The big deck hand, Krumenaker, brushed past Logan without appearing to recognize him and bawled into the galley, “All hands out to load wood. Rustle along, you lazy bastards.”

  The gangplank had gone overside, and the woodchopper waited at its foot, a row of wheelbarrows lined up beside the woodyard. Men started shuffling out of the dining-salon, grumbling as they came; and Tex Kinevan came through the doorway and stepped aside, lighting up a brown-paper cigarette.

  “Hear anything about a man overboard?” Logan asked behind motionless lips.

  Kinevan’s weathered face was obscure behind smoke.

  “Considerable talk at breakfast about one of Perris’s hardcases disappearin’ last night. They found a chunk of railin’ missin’ an’ figger this hombre leaned against it and fell into the drink.”

  Logan appeared to be waiting his chance to get into the mess room.

  “It was no accident,” he told Kinevan enigmatically. “It could have been me.”

  Kinevan grumbled, “I expected it was something like that. Somebody’s bound to spot you sooner or later, Big Slim. Don’t crowd your luck too far.”

  Logan stepped into the deserted dining-salon and saw that the fat Chinese cook had joined the men ashore, trundling firewood aboard the Sacajawea to stoke the packet’s boilers for the remainder of her downstream run.

  He went around behind the counter and poured himself a cup of coffee from the five-gallon pot on the galley stove, swigged it down, and was pouring a second when a shadow fell across the doorway and Opal Waymire stepped inside, closely followed by Duke Perris.

  She looked almost demure this morning, in a formfitting suit of gray material with a pert little aigrette hat tipped across her braided coils of corn-yellow hair. But her eyes were shadowed as she accompanied Perris across the salon, and he got the vague impression that she was almost surprised to find him still aboard this morning.

  “Made up your mind about our deal, Logan?”

  The fact that Perris spoke openly in the girl’s presence verified what Rossiter had said about Opal being the promoter’s woman.

  Logan shifted his glance to the girl, surprising a look of strain and concern in her eyes.

  “I’ll take your job,” he said, ignoring the warning he saw in Opal Waymire’s covert look. “I could hardly do otherwise.”

  Duke Perris straddled a stool, his head turning as Logan rounded the galley counter.

  “I want to tell you something, then,” Duke Perris said. “This is the last stop Rossiter’s tub makes before we reach Klickitat Landing. There is a railroad telegraph between Wallula and The Dalles. John Stagman could easily have a sheriff waiting to pick you up at either Klickitat or Celilo Falls.”

  Logan considered this information with full seriousness.

  “The woodyard man out there is Grover Winegarten,” Perris continued. “He hunts wild horses and breaks them for market. I suggest you leave the Sacajawea here and buy yourself a mount. It’s an easy ride across the hills to Owlhorn. You could get there as soon as I will.”

  While he was speaking, Duke Perris was drawing a thick roll of greenbacks from his coat. Without counting them he shoved the currency along the counter toward Logan.

  “Buy yourself a nag,” he said, “and keep the remainder as advance wages. I’ve got a land office in Owlhorn. When you contact me there, do it after dark. I don’t want Owlhorn to know we ever met before.”

  Logan accepted the roll of bills after a brief hesitation.

  “Hold on,” he protested. “You’re helpin’ me duck the law so I can work for you. What kind of a deal am I walking into here, Perris?”

  The promoter shrugged.

  “Time to talk over details when we get to Owlhorn. You better mosey.”

  Logan crowded his doubts out of his head and stepped out into the blazing sunshine. A group of laggards from Perris’s bunch were being herded toward the gangplank by Rossiter’s big deck boss, Stacey. Logan elbowed into the anonymity of that group and thus made his way unnoticed off the river boat.

  The woodyard man stood alongside Rossiter at the head of the dock with a tally sheet, watching the passengers loading their wheelbarrows from the nearest rick of cord-wood.

  Logan stooped to pick up the handles of a wheelbarrow and trundled it down
a steep path to the woodyard, putting himself unobtrusively behind a high rick which shielded him from view of the Sacajawea’s decks.

  Immediately behind the woodyard were the cottonwood bosque and horse corrals he had seen as the steamer put inshore.

  No eye saw Logan abandon his wheelbarrow and cut into the trees. He worked his way along the side of high pole corrals where fuzztail mustangs were feeding, and came finally to a cabin of squared cottonwood logs which was Winegarten’s home.

  From the porch of this cabin, forty minutes later, Cleve Logan watched the Sacajawea retreat from the wharf and swing her nose into the stream on the home lap of her run to Celilo.

  He hoped fervently that he would never lay eyes on that shabby, somehow sinister, river craft again; although Rossiter’s stern-wheeler had played a key part in his destiny, from the moment he spotted her rusty stacks beyond the roofs of Riverbend.

  He thought of Duke Perris, who was using the Sacajawea to transport nearly thirty rough characters from the Idaho mines to this new land rush in Washington Territory; and like Tex Kinevan, his friend so coincidentally met, he wondered what Perris’s motives were in gathering up those hardcases, and why he chose to approach Owlhorn from the back door of the hills.

  Blackie Marengo, the man he had heard swear to kill him if it took a lifetime, had played out his string aboard that river boat fast dwindling down-river from Logan’s sight. Marengo had made his try and failed, as other men had done in Logan’s time; his bloated corpse would wind up in some fisherman’s net or run afoul of a sand bar somewhere between here and the Pacific’s salt water.

  Logan’s last glimpse of the Sacajawea found his gaze riveted on the figure of Alva Ames, that wholly unassuming and strangely attractive woman who stood at the paddle-wheel housing beside the tall and angular shape of her blind brother.

  Waiting for Winegarten to return from the dock, Logan thought, Perris must have been awfully sure of his hold on me to advise me to leave the boat here. There’s nothing to force me to meet him over in Owlhorn now.