“I’d say you did a good job on this Ogden party,” he said. “What do you want to spoil it for? If he ain’t dead, leave him die.”
“I didn’t shoot him,” said Jeff briefly. Then he looked at Arlene; she was leaning back against the bar, her quivering hands were tight-pressed against her mouth and it wouldn’t have surprised him if she had toppled over in a faint. So Jeff didn’t say what he had on the tip of his tongue; he didn’t say, “Warbuck shot him.” That could wait; no use torturing a kid like Arlene any further, not even if she was a Warbuck.
He said to Bill Morgan, “You wouldn’t let a dog die like this, Bill, and you know it.” He glanced at Still Jeff. “Neither would you, Jeff. Well, what’ll we do with him? He’s bled a lot; I don’t think we ought to move him. What about it?”
What they did a few minutes later was lift Jim Ogden up and carry him into the room where the old bed was. First, Still Jeff and Arlene had gone to Still Jeff’s cabin for clean blankets and an old ragged but fairly clean sheet to serve for bandages and a bottle of high grade alcohol to bathe the wounds. The sting of the alcohol made Ogden’s eyes fly open. He asked for water and they gave it to him, with a stiff jolt of old Jeff’s alcohol spiking it.
Arlene turned to go. The desperation stamped on her face, making her eyes look dark, and enormous against the background of her pallor, drew Young Jeff along after her. He overtook her in the barroom where his candle burned low and began to gutter.
“I’m sorry for you, Arlene,” he said, only now beginning to understand what tonight’s events and disclosures must have meant to her. “It’s tough, but you’ve got to take it the way it comes. Want me to ride along home with you?”
“Home?” said Arlene. A sudden brimming wetness came into her eyes making them sparkle in the candlelight. Then she said again, all but screaming the word at him, “Home!” She started laughing, then began to weep and a moment later for the life of him Jeff couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying. For that matter, neither could Arlene have told.
“Look out!” he said warningly. “You’re as high strung as a fiddle string that’s about to snap. Hold on tight, Arlene.”
Arlene held on—to him. Neither of them ever knew quite how it happened, but there she was sobbing with her face against his chest, his arms around her.
“Home,” she said the third time, her voice so muffled that he could scarcely hear what she was saying. “I’ll never go back to—to that place. Never! After tonight—after what I know now—”
“Where are you going then?” demanded Jeff.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Anywhere on earth but there.”
He went outside with her and to where her horse was tethered among the pines. His hand from her shoulder slid down her arm, fastened a moment about her wrist, then caught her hand, and hers clung to his. He could feel the tremors shaking her. He said, still holding her as she would have pulled away and climbed up into her saddle. “How’d you happen to be here tonight?”
“I was terribly restless; I’ve been afraid lately, though not quite knowing why.” She shuddered. “It was that old woman, mostly. She had fascinated me ever since I was a little girl. Sometimes when I ride alone I come by her place. She has said such strange things to me, just hints, Jeff, that made me wild to know what she knew that no one else seemed to know, and how she knew it and—and what mystery there was about the Warbucks. I started out to see her tonight; when I’d nearly got there I heard somebody riding after me; I pulled aside in the dark and let him go on. It—it was my father. I spied on them—”
“Three spies tonight,” said Jeff. “You for one, me for another—and Jim Ogden. How did he happen in on the party?”
“I don’t know. I have noticed of late a strange look on his face whenever he was watching my father, and he was doing that all the time out of the corner of his eyes. I suppose he followed him tonight. And—Oh, let me go!”
“Where?” he said a second time.
“I tell you I don’t know! I don’t care! Let me go!”
“I’ll go with you,” said Jeff. “I won’t let you go alone like this. But wait a shake! We can’t go off and leave Jeff and Bill to do all the mopping up. There’s Jim Ogden—”
“He’s dead,” said Arlene miserably. “He was dying. You could tell.”
“But he isn’t. He’s even got a chance to pull through. Here, you come back with me; we’ll see what we can do for him. Then maybe, if you’re dead set on riding and don’t care where, you can ride for Doc Jones. Come on back. This is as much your job and mine as anybody’s.”
As once before, so now his words drew her back into the old house and to Jim Ogden. They found Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill Morgan standing like two old figures carved out of weathered wood, ignoring each other, staring down at the man on the bed. Jeff spoke up briskly.
“Arlene’s going to stick around for a while; we’re going to try to pull Ogden through. Either she or I will hit the high spots on the way to Pioneer to get Doc Jones. Tell us what to do meantime. Anything?”
While Red Shirt Bill was replying in a good many heated words, Still Jeff answered and turned away to the door. Still Jeff’s remarks had been confined to a twitch of his lips, an upward drift of one end of his big mustache and a bony-shouldered shrug. It did, however, say all that Red Shirt or any other man could possibly have to say.
“I’ll stay,” said Arlene. “I don’t want him to die. You go for the doctor, Jeff.”
“She doesn’t want Jim Ogden to die,” Young Jeff told himself as he struck off through the darkness toward Pioneer City. “Why should she? It would come hard, knowing her old man for a murderer—again.” But he got to thinking of Arlene dancing with Ogden that time in Pioneer, and from that he got to wondering, and his horse’s hammering hoofs seemed to be beating out the one refrain, “She doesn’t want him to die.”
He found Doc Jones in a back room at the Silver Bar playing poker. Doc, cashing in his chips, got up with a broad grin.
“Me, I’m the lucky baby tonight,” he chuckled into the faces of the men he had been playing with, faces just now inclined to scowl. “Here I’ve been winning all night, Jeff, until luck seemed to turn against me about ten minutes ago; and here you come galloping in to drag me away while I’m still to the good! No man can blame a doctor for stepping out of a game when it’s an emergency call, can he? Let’s stagger along.”
“By the way, Doc,” Jeff asked him, “how is Dan Hasbrook getting along? Making the grade all right?”
“Dan’s hard to kill; sure, he’s all right and rarin’ to go. Now let’s step.”
But he had to stop in for his bag, and he had to shake up a bottle of medicine for old Butcher Lily, so Jeff told him where to come and rode on without waiting.
When he came threading his way back through the gloomy dark shrouding Halcyon, it was to find Arlene alone ministering to a half-conscious, pallid Jim Ogden.
There was a rickety old chair at the foot of the bed; she sat there. There were two small tables, one at each side of the bed and a smoky lantern burned on each, and the bleak room fairly quivered with eerie shadows.
“He’s still alive anyhow,” muttered Jeff.
“He’s got to live, Jeff! He’s got to!” She sprang up and ran to him and caught him by both arms. “If he died—”
“Well? What if he did die? You heard him, heard what he said—”
“If he dies I want to die too!” She shook him savagely, then went suddenly lax and slumped down into her chair.
“Oh,” said Young Jeff. After a while he asked, “What happened to the old boys? Where are Jeff and Bill?”
“They couldn’t breathe in the same room together,” said Arlene. “They pretended they had to go and get things; one went looking for whisky and the other for another blanket. Why do they hate each other so, Jeff? Oh, why do men have to hate like that—a
nd do the things men do?”
“You can go any time now,” said Jeff. “Whenever you know where you want to go. Doc Jones will be here any minute.”
“I’m not going,” Arlene told him swiftly. “I’m going to stay right here. I can be a—a sort of nurse. Dr. Jones can tell me what to do.”
Young Jeff, having already said, “Oh!” now said “Hmf!”
“What do you mean, ‘Hmf,’” demanded Arlene sharply.
He took one of the lanterns and went prowling through the old house to see what he could find in the way of creature comforts with which to surround her. Sure, she was going to stay; she didn’t have to say it twice. And after all, here was shelter; it was better than going off half-cocked into the woods not knowing whither bound, not caring, so long as it wasn’t “home.”
There was nothing on the ground floor that would serve. So for the first time in years he hunted the staircase which led upward from the lobby, a mere ante-room to the spacious bar, and made his way up the creaking treads. He remembered a certain room; it must have been the deluxe room of the hotel in the old days. It opened on the upper porch; in it were a huge bed, a faded red sofa, a table and marble-topped wash-stand, two big chairs—and a battalion of bats. Jeff ducked, the bats flitted out, and he took up the most comfortable-looking chair. From the door he looked back critically.
“If she does stick around a while, this room could be fixed up,” he decided. Then he went on down with his chair.
And Arlene stayed. Arlene, all unexpectedly, proved herself to be of more valiant material than any man of them—old Jeff and Young Jeff and Red Shirt Bill—had any inkling. Her chin was round and soft and sweet and had a dimple in it; just the same they came to see that it was a chin that could set itself every bit as stubbornly as even Bart Warbuck’s.
Doc Jones came and probed and swabbed and grunted and gave directions—(“Let the skunk die; who gives a damn?” he wanted to know)—and rode away. Arlene said, “We won’t let him die. He mustn’t.” She turned to Jeff and put both hands, that trick of hers, on his two arms, and said, “Will we, Jeff?”
Yes, Arlene stayed.
* * * *
Jeff scrubbed and aired and after a fashion renovated the room opening on the upstairs porch for her. She wouldn’t go home for her clothes; she didn’t have so much as a toothbrush with her. A few articles she had to have in order to live like a human being were purchased for her at the store in Pioneer City; it was Still Jeff in his buckboard, accompanied by five dogs, who went shopping. When he asked for a hair brush and a girl’s nightgown, Jock Barber, the storekeeper, leered at him. Old Jeff tucked in the corners of his mouth, very smug about it, and curled up his mustaches and let his old eyes roll heavenward; and that was all that Jock Barber got out of him.
“Going to tell your folks where you are?” Young Jeff asked Arlene. “Going to let ’em in on any part of it?”
“No,” said Arlene crisply. She turned away, then pivoted and said swiftly: “Everybody knows by now that my father tried to murder Jim Ogden. You spread it all over town when you rode in for Dr. Jones, didn’t you?”
“Darn it,” said Jeff. “I meant to, but forgot. As it happened, I didn’t tell a soul; I just fingered Doc out of his poker game, told him outside and even told him we’d better keep the whole thing under our hats until we knew a little more about everything. Too bad, but sort of too late now to do much about it, huh?”
“Jeff,” said the girl, and looked as though she were going to cry, “do you want to make me love you?” She ran out of the room.
“Poor little devil,” he thought, rubbing his chin and staring up the steep, dark stairway after her. “This is one hell of a come-down for Arlene Warbuck. Last week the proudest little high-stepping queen that ever stepped—now, what? A killer and a skunk for a dad, and she’s got to think about that while she’s going to sleep, while she’s waking up, all day while she tries to keep this other skunk Ogden alive. Gosh.”
He stepped along for a word or two with Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill, “You can’t leave her all alone with Ogden there,” he said flatly. “You two old boys are the only neighbors handy; you’ve got to make it your business that one of you is with her all the time.”
He himself did not ride out of Halcyon until the night had slid along half way to dawn, and he left Still Jeff and Arlene together, both of them looking slight, unreal figures in the immense shadow-infested barroom. He had to get back to the ranch; there was that cursed mortgage and there was Bart Warbuck to be satisfied, and he had promised to be far up-country early in the morning, to talk to the Fraser boys about a deal in horses. He’d sell unripe material now as he had to; he’d have Warbuck’s money for him, one way or another, before fall. That was another promise, one that Young Jeff had made to himself.
He didn’t get back to Halcyon until the second night. He rode into town late, down in the mouth, weary, nothing done—with the debt to Warbuck looming up like a monstrous night-black Chinese Wall. He was riding Ranger that night. He was slouching in the saddle, head down, and pretty much disgusted with everything. Ranger snorted. Old Red Shirt Bill Morgan couldn’t have achieved a snortier snort even when going strongest and at his very best.
Young Jeff jerked his head up. He and Ranger were willing enough to come to a dead halt and stare, as both of them did. Jeff rubbed his eyes; Ranger pawed and shook his head and snorted again. What they had run into was enough to upset both of them.
There was a light in every window of the old Pay Dirt Hotel. There was a light in every single one of the old, so-long-abandoned houses. There was a bonfire blazing in the Square. There were lanterns going about like fireflies. There was a hum of voices like a magnified hum from a swarm of bees. There were men all over the place. Little, long dead Halcyon had come alive again!
And, awakening after its many-yeared quiescence, it comported itself just exactly as it had done in the past: Hell’s Bells it had been fondly called by those many who had loved it. That was a name to fit it tonight.
Last week there had been two old men in Halcyon. Then, a wounded man and a girl had camped on them. Now? A thousand men, the sort of men who make the wide-open, new-born, lawless mining towns of the West, had moved in.
Indubitably Halcyon was again alive. With bells on.
Chapter Nine
A bewildered, pretty nearly thunderstruck Jeff Cody rode up to the front door of the old Pay Dirt Hotel. A long hitching rail had been put up, saplings stripped of their branches and made into sagging poles between hastily and crookedly implanted posts; there was hardly room among all the other horses for Jeff to find a place for Ranger.
Ranger drew a deep breath, a vast sigh of relief; he had by chance been tethered right next to a pony he knew, a little red-bay mare belonging to Frank Plunkett, ’way up Wandering River way. The two rubbed noses friendly-wise, conversationally.
Jeff shouldered his way through the small lobby, thick with men and tobacco smoke, and on into the barroom. There were no less than two hundred men in the place and not a kill-joy, not a dead-head among them. They were busily engaged making investments at round poker tables or at the newly cleaned and polished forty-foot bar.
There were two bartenders. At one end was Still Jeff, at the other Red Shirt Bill Morgan. They dispensed drinks in the good, old-fashioned way. “What’ll you have, gents?” they’d say, and shove out the whisky bottle. If you didn’t want whisky—and who wouldn’t?—or if you craved any brand other than the one which Pay Dirt was just then putting before you, it was just too bad. You were free to go to some other place—only there didn’t happen to be any other place to go.
Jeff’s astonished eyes swept the room. He saw at least a score of men he knew well, Ed Spurlock and Steve Bannister, the two Jameson boys and Sam Harper, Hank Fellowes and Chris Wright and Dick Yates—men from Wandering River and the cow country the other side of Pioneer City; and he s
aw about a hundred and eighty men he had never laid eyes on before. They seemed to have come from everywhere on earth. There was a big Chinaman with a diamond in his red necktie, and cheek by jowl with him a little Chinaman in rags; there was a man who looked like a banker down in Albuquerque or San Antonio and he was uplifting a glass with a gent who smacked of some larger and dirtier city gutter; there were Swedes, such as you find everywhere, even in the mountains and deserts, and there were derelicts from the four quarters. Mountaineers and desert men, flashily dressed and scare-crowed as far as clothes went, old and young, city dwellers and men who had never seen a city of more than five thousand population, they were all there.
And over the steaming horde Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill presided! At his end of the bar, Red Shirt Bill greeted all and sundry with joyous rumbling shouts and hand-grippings for those he knew and liked, and exclamations that began, “Say, this is something like it! Remember when—” And down at his end of the bar Still Jeff was smiling crookedly out of one end of his mustache-draped mouth or lifting a shaggy eyebrow—lifting both brows at once only on occasion. Both he and Bill Morgan thumped the bottles out and collected a dollar for every drink—and either one of them could have bought up the entire crowd and never missed what it cost! The proceeds of their sales went into two separate boxes; Jeff noted that the first thing.
“This is kind of funny,” thought Young Jeff. “The old devils don’t even look at each other. They’re both pretending they don’t know the other is on the job. But I’d bet a man they’re watching the dollars roll in, and each one of them is bound to out-sell the other. What made ’em like this?”
When he got a chance he caught Still Jeff’s eye and squeezed in at the bar.
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