“Had breakfast?”
“Ah Wong overwhelmed me. And he calls me Ah Lee.”
“Ah Lee?” Then he too understood; familiar as he was with Ah Wong’s pidgin English he got the thing almost immediately. “Pretty name—Ah Lee. Somehow it suits you too.”
Ah Wong stuck his head into the room.
“All light, Bossee Jeff’son,” he chuckled. “Plitty good, plitty much all light, think so!”
“What’s all right, Wong?” said Jeff, perplexed.
Ah Wong pointed, using a butcher knife as a pointer to indicate Arlene.
“Plitty good wi-hoo, Bossee Jeff’son,” he giggled, and vanished like a cuckoo bird going back into the cuckoo clock.
“What on earth?” gasped Arlene. “‘Wi-hoo,’ what’s that mean?”
“Ah Wong’s in his second childhood,” said Jeff. “Third maybe. Anyhow he likes you, and that’s something; stick a feather in your hat; Ah Wong inclines to be choosey.”
“I haven’t any hat,” said Arlene. “Feather, either.”
“I know,” he nodded, catching her thought. (“Clever of him,” she thought. “How does he know what I’m thinking about?”) He settled down in a big cushioned chair, shoved his booted feet far out ahead of him and regarded her soberly. “You’ve crawled out on the end of a limb, haven’t you?”
“If you’d take a string, then cut it in two with a pair of scissors,” she answered quietly, “it would be just like what’s happened to my life.”
“Yes. Of course.” She wondered whether he’d ever stop nodding over that old black pipe of his, whether he ever meant to say anything else. Her fingers curled tight about the edge of the cushion on which she sat. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked abruptly.
“Don’t be afraid that I’m going to camp here on you all my life!”
“Wish you would,” said Jeff casually. Then he removed his pipe to grin freely at her. “So does Ah Wong, Missee Ah Lee.”
But presently the question came back as a byproduct of something they were saying. “What was she going to do about it all?”
“Am I welcome to stay here until tomorrow?” she asked.
“As long as you’re happy here. A thousand years.”
“Thank you, Jeff. I’ve been thinking this morning. I’ve been trying to make plans—for the first time in a silly lifetime. It comes sort of hard, you know,” she confessed with a rueful smile. “To really think and plan, I mean.”
When she stopped he didn’t say anything, didn’t goad her with a question. He just waited, but she saw how his eyes had cut at her, then drifted away, centering on his pipe. It had gone out. He put it on the mantel and began building a cigarette.
“I haven’t a hat,” said Arlene. “I had one; I lost it somewhere the other night. I haven’t any clothes except the ones I’m wearing and a nightie your daddy bought me. These clothes I’m wearing—well, they were given to me and right now, if I didn’t have to run around naked, I’d strip them off and do an Indian dance, watching them burn! I haven’t any money; not five cents. And I’m not going to borrow a darn nickel from you, Mr. Jefferson Cody, or from anybody else on this good green earth. Do you grasp what I’m talking about?”
“I’m a good grasper,” said Jeff. “I grasp.”
“I’m going back to Halcyon tomorrow. I’m not afraid—”
“I know. You weren’t afraid for yourself last night. You just wanted to drag me out from under. I suppose it would have been a redwood box for me, and you knew it.” He got up and went restlessly roving for two minutes before he wheeled and came to stand over her, frowning down into her uplifted face. “If I haven’t seemed to appreciate a shining fact—”
“Don’t Jeff! We were talking about me; you haven’t any cue to rush in on center stage like that! Here’s what I’m going to do. I—”
Only she didn’t quite know what she was going to do. All her life she had done nothing; now, in a few hours, how could she tear down and build up and see in the least clearly? Still she almost knew—He understood. He said, “We’ve got all day. Let’s not rush anything. How about coming out and looking around? You’ll like my place. I’ll show you some of my horses—”
She went with him to hang on a fence and look at his long-legged colts and thought, “I could open a millinery shop or a dressmaking shop—only there are no women in Halcyon—and I haven’t any money—and I don’t know a darned thing about dressmaking or how to make a hat.” She did get a thrill out of the perfection displayed by lightstepping Claude Duval and Lady Augusta, but her brain was busily ticking away.
“I could make salads and sandwiches and sell them to hungry men—only they’d want pork and beans and roast beef—and I wouldn’t have anything to buy the stuff for salads and sandwiches with anyhow.”
It was very pleasant out in the sunshine, and the ripply fields and gentle hills and rugged old mountains with their big timber were lovely, and far up at the end of Jeff’s little shut-in valley a leaping waterfall making miniature rainbows was a thing of beauty, and there were gay young quivering aspens—but she was wondering, “Could I help cook at the Pay Dirt Hotel? Or wash dishes? Or maybe wait on tables?”
And, while she listened to Jeff talking of this and that while he strove so manfully and obviously to take her mind off her troubles, she kept asking herself, “How can I make enough money, and when can I make enough, to buy some shoes and stockings and undies and a dress—so that I can get out of these things I’m wearing? And a toothbrush—and a comb and—Oh dear!”
But it was a day to remember, as unforgettable as the ride through the dark last night. And Arlene, at times despairing, at times frightened, was for the most part happy, strangely happy.
How strangely happy she had been did not altogether dawn on her until that night after she and Jeff, with Ah Wong in the offing, had dined together; after they had talked utterly aimlessly out in the patio until it grew chilly and even the far bright stars seemed to shiver; after they had said good night and she had gone to her room. In those enormous pajamas—they must have been terribly loose fitting even for Jeff, and as a matter of fact they were—when she had at last crawled into the big bed which had long ago come buffeting around the Horn, feeling quite small again, she actually found herself smiling and demanded of herself, “What has happened to you, Arlene?” She was tempted to giggle the way Ah Wong did, to say it over this way: “Walla malla you, Ah Lee?” It had been a gorgeous day. She snuggled down, burrowed deep into a fat pillow and went to sleep, leaving tomorrow until tomorrow.
…And she awoke with a nervous start, she didn’t know how many hours later and she didn’t at first know why. Half-awake she slid out of bed and ran to the door. What her rudely awakened mind could not tell her, something within her sleeping mind had heard and registered and had come close to understanding. She was calling, “Jeff!” before she got the door open.
Then she heard his voice, sounding stern and not at all like Jeff’s of this pleasant afternoon, and knew that he wasn’t speaking to her, that he hadn’t even heard her.
“Who’s out there?” he was calling. “And what do you want?”
Her mind leaped then, rushing to conclusions and, as it happened, going straight to the mark: It was Warbuck’s men, come to do Warbuck’s bloody work. A voice, after the briefest silence answered Jeff’s, a voice which somehow seemed to her too mellifluous; it made her think of the old nursery tale of Little Red Riding Hood.
“It’s me, Jeff; Frank Bruce,” said the voice. “Can I have a word with you? I know it’s kind of late.”
“What about?” asked Jeff.
Frank Bruce laughed. There was perhaps never a poorer actor of parts. He said, “Warbuck sent me up to talk to you, to see if you and him can’t get together on things. You need money, he says, and he needs some more horses. I come to talk trade for Warbuck.”
By this time Arlene, shivering with dread, was close behind Jeff. He had put a candle down on a table; its tiny flame left the room shadowy. But Jeff saw her; he had heard the soft beat of her running bare feet. He scowled at her and lifted his hand commanding silence.
“All alone, Frank?” Jeff asked.
“Sure I’m alone,” laughed Frank Bruce. “Don’t think I’m scared to take a ride at night, do you?”
“You’re a damned liar,” said Jeff. “You’ve got anyhow four or five men with you. And the first one that sticks his head into my place is going to get it shot off. Now get the hell out of here.”
There came no answer, but there was the sound of horses’ hoofbeats, several horses as even Arlene could tell. They didn’t go far. The sounds withdrew, but slowly. Then they stopped short off.
“You keep out of this, hear me?” Arlene started; it was Jeff talking to her, commanding curtly, “Go get dressed in a hurry; go into the kitchen and into the pantry beyond; you’ll find a trap door leading down into the cellar. Take a candle with you. There’s a window there that you can crawl out through; wait your time and duck for the stables. Beyond, set back quite a way, is the bunk house. Go get the boys to saddle for you—streak back to Halcyon. To old Jeff and Bill. Now you do what I tell you!”
“Yes, Jeff,” said Arlene meekly. But when he rushed off to his own room to get his boots on, to get his hands on a rifle, to make sure of doors and windows, Arlene knelt on a bench in the shadowiest corner and peeked out at the edge of the window shade. She was scared cold: she seemed to feel the icy fingers of death clutching at her heart—but she was simply darned if she was going to miss the show.
Chapter Eleven
When Young Jeff came back into the room, Arlene, high-strung, as nervous as a cat and scared out of her wits, clapped a hand to her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He was still pajama-clad; grotesquely striped pajamas they were, making her think of a colorful zebra. About his middle was a cartridge belt, hastily strapped on, and an old black Colt forty-five hung from it; tucked under his arm, so that he made her think now of old Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill, was a rifle.
But her impulse for hysterical laughter died stillborn the instant that she saw his face. His jaw was set, there were hard lines in his lean face, and in his eyes a look she had never dreamed of seeing there. Men, she thought, and went suddenly limp, were killers. They not only killed but they gloried in the killing. Jeff was ready for anything right now; what was more, he was eager. If Frank Bruce and Nick Balff and the rest rode away without doing anything, she knew that Jeff would feel not relieved but cheated.
Jeff did not see her where she crouched in her corner. He stood in the middle of the room, as still as the century-old chairs and tables about him, listening. He seemed so sure of an attack to come at any moment, so ready to have it come. And of a sudden she was glad to have him like that, glad to see him standing just as he stood, looking just as he looked—waiting for the pack of wolves sent against him by Barton Warbuck. She experienced an almost uncontrollable desire to leap up and cheer him on. But she managed to keep as still as any mouse.
The silence was profound. There was no sound of the horses’ hoofs on the hard-packed ground of the yard. That meant that the riders were still out there where they had stopped—or that they had dismounted and were coming on foot and silently to the house. Arlene thought feverishly, “Any minute now will tell. If I don’t hear them riding off in a minute, I’ll know that they’re creeping closer.—Five hundred dollars to kill a man! A young, vital, splendid man like Jeff Cody!”
The overlong silence was shattered by a crash, the sound of splintering glass as a window was smashed. Someone outside must have demolished it with a club. A second window went the same way, and a third, all three nearly at the same instant. Then it was still again.
Jeff had not stirred; there was no use shooting through a drawn shade when the best he could hope to hit would be a gun barrel wielded by a man standing safely at one side. As the last tinkle of falling glass died away the little breeze which sprang up here always at night-fall set the window shades rustling gently; the flame of the candle that had been so still began to waver.
Jeff did move then. He leaped to the candle and extinguished it—and not a second too soon. As the dimly lighted room went opaquely black there was the sound of a window shade released from outside, flipping noisily up. Another shade went up; still another, stubborn on its roll, was ripped away.
And then the bullets came screaming in; the room was raked from end to end by rifle fire. They were shooting wild, of course; they couldn’t see a thing within the dark room; but with five men raking the place with exploratory lead they must have deemed it a fair bet that one of their bullets would find its elected mark.
Arlene slid down to the floor, lying close against the wall under her window and a little to the side. She saw orange-red flashes of flame outside, then out of the corners of her eyes a more vivid flash within the room, and another and another. Jeff returned as good as they gave him, and where they had the advantage in numbers they had no way of even guessing where he stood, and he had the dimly outlined squares of the windows to aid him locate them. Then when he had fired half a dozen shots and knew that they had seen the flashes of his rifle, he stopped firing and stepped quietly to another part of the room.
Arlene crawled toward him; her groping hand brushed his boot.
“Jeff,” she whispered. “Jeff, I’m here.”
“You get out of here!” he whispered back at her angrily. “Didn’t I tell you—”
“Yes, Jeff,” she said again, and stood up close to him, so close that her hand brushed the forty-five he had buckled about him. Swiftly she slid it up out of its holster. “I can use one of these things as well as you can,” she said, and no longer sounded meek.
And then, the last sound in the world she expected to hear, she heard Jeff chuckle. But instantly he took her by the shoulder and shoved her down to the floor and stood in front of her.
Bullets came spraying in again from the outside, through the three windows; she heard their thin hissing, so close did some of them come; their spats against wood and adobe struck like mad hornets. She saw gun-flashes and, sitting on the floor, lifted Jeff’s old forty-five and blazed away at them, giving shot for shot. Then she scuttled to one side and stood up, flattened against a wall.
Again it grew intensely still, all firing ceasing. She could smell the powder smoke filling the room.
“Jeff!” she whispered.
“Sh!” came his whisper back to her. She drew a deep breath and was strangely happy; where she should have been frightened to death, she was no longer frightened but happy! That’s what happened to you when you came to grips with things as you did tonight. Jeff was unhurt, she was unhurt, and she was tinglingly alive.
From somewhere in the darkness within the house, from the dining room or the hallway, came a sibilant whisper:
“Bossee Jeff’son! Walla malla? Ev’body go clazy?”
Jeff’s answering whisper cut back through the silence, as dry as the hiss of a rifle bullet, saying:
“A raid, Wong. Warbuck’s men. Grab a gun and watch for them from the kitchen.”
“Bully! Ketchee shot gun, mo’ bettah,” said Ah Wong, and sounded delighted.
They hadn’t heard Ah Wong’s approach but did hear clearly his pattering bare feet as he ran on his errand. Arlene could fancy that she saw his shrewd old face twisted into a grin. There was a man it would be fun knowing!
Then Jeff came seeking her in the dark and somehow found her; his hand sought out hers and shut down on it so hard that it hurt.
“Dammit,” said Jeff, “you clear out of this. Scoot down into the cellar the way I said; grab your clothes and scoot. They’re apt to be starting something again any minute. I don’t want you hurt. Scramble out of here and duck into the cellar.”
�
��I think I hit one of them, Jeff,” Arlene whispered. “I thought I heard him squeal!”
“Are you going to clear out or not?”
“I’ll say Yes, if you want me to,” Arlene told him sweetly. “But no matter what I say, I’m darned if I’m going.”
“Young woman, you’ll do what I—” A man outside yelled something; they didn’t catch the exact words but knew it for a warning shout and a command. For an instant all hell seemed to break loose out there; again several rifles opened up with a fusillade which raked the room from corner to corner. Then a deep silence settled down, and next came a new sound, the clattering of running horses’ hoofs. And then another yell, in another voice:
“Hey, Jeff! Oh, Jeff! What the hell’s goin’ on?”
And Jeff said, with a long sigh, whether of relief or regret she could not be sure, “And so the party ends. That’s the boys coming up from the bunk house. All the racket woke ’em up. And our Long Valley friends are calling it a day and going home.”
He went to the front door, jerked it open and thought that he saw several scurrying figures departing across the meadow. He sent a couple of shots after them, “Just for luck,” he told Arlene, and came back and lighted his candle. By that time Benny and Pete, coming on at a round gallop, both armed with their heaviest artillery, arrived.
“What’n hell?” demanded Pete blinking.
His eyes and Benny’s were drawn to Arlene and stayed there, refusing to be drawn away. Young Jeff grinned.
“Boys,” he said, “meet Miss Ah Lee. She’s a friend of Ah Wong’s. Miss Ah Lee, this is Pete, this is Benny—and they’ve just saved our lives, or have they? Anyhow they’re good boys—and you mustn’t get ’em wrong, judging by the way they dress. It’s just a way they have.”
Both Pete and Benny were barefooted. Pete wore a long nightgown like a Mother Hubbard; Benny was in his long red flannels which he figured if good enough by day, were good enough by night. Both Pete and Benny blushed.
Benny gasped, “Oh, my Gawd,” ducked out of the room and ran. Pete glowered.
The Fifth Western Novel Page 67
