There were Doc Sharpe and the old woman, snarling at each other across an old bare table, like two cats. Their eyes coming swiftly to focus upon him, were already glaring. The woman’s claws were clenched so that the bony knuckles shone bluely, and the man’s face was flushed and his eyes were as wicked as a snake’s.
“Now,” said Young Jeff, closing the door and coming over to them, “let’s talk. There are things I want to know.” Amanda Grayle relaxed and sat back loosely in her rickety arm-chair. That all but toothless grin of hers which he knew so well seemed to trace an extra score of fine wrinkles in her weathered face.
“Let’s talk,” she said. “Let’s talk, dearie. What about? About you and Barton’s little daughter? Or about the weather, or Charlie Carter’s gold or—”
“Let’s talk about the good old days,” said Jeff. “Let’s get back about twenty years; when you and Sharpe knew each other pretty well, when you were both twenty years younger, and Bart Warbuck was, too; when Bart Warbuck’s daughter was born—and he didn’t quite manage to strangle her in her cradle, because Doc Sharpe popped in.”
Sharpe’s eyes widened and he glanced hurriedly at Amanda Grayle, a sort of consternation twisting his pasty face. The old woman spoke up sharply before he could utter a word.
“Hold your tongue, Sharpe! Jeff here is only putting out feelers. He doesn’t know any more than a babe unborn. He’s doing a bit of guessing, that’s all.”
“If you’ve been talking—” Sharpe said then, surly and vicious.
“Shut up, you fool!” she snapped back at him. “You’re talking yourself. Me, I don’t gabble.”
Jeff saw then that Sharpe had been drinking a good deal; by the look of him he was that sort; no doubt he carried a whisky bottle in his saddle-bags and was bleary half the time. But now, with the old woman’s words like a slap in the face he grew silent and transferred his stare back to Jeff.
“What do you want here?” he demanded. “Who are you anyway?”
“He’s Young Jeff, Henry,” clacked Amanda Grayle. “Old Jeff’s boy. And old Jeff is old man Cody; used to be Bill Morgan’s pardner, remember?” She leered at him, then directed that same leer bafflingly on Young Jeff. “They’re not pardners now, Sharpe; not pardners even though they’re running the same hotel together and own it half and half. Someday they’ll cut each other’s throats—Won’t they, Jeff dear?—and we know why, you and I, Henry Sharpe, don’t we?” She giggled and rubbed her old hands together in that unholy delight of hers which up-gathered her spirits whenever she saw black shadows hovering anywhere but over her own bony frame. “And Young Jeff can’t even guess—and so that’s one of the lots of things he wants to get straight. Wants us to tell him!” And she kept on laughing in the way Young Jeff supposed, from remote hearsay, hyenas laughed.
“Yes,” he said stiffly. “That’s one of the things. Jeff and Bill won’t talk. Maybe you will.”
“Why should I?” she challenged him.
“Maybe I’ll make you.”
“You’re a nice little gentleman, Jeff dear,” she reminded him. “And such as you don’t get tough with ladies. You’ve got to remember that I’m a lady!”
“Let’s get somewhere,” he said without even waiting for her to finish. “Both of you have something on Warbuck. You’ve been blackmailing him for years. Well, the old secret is beginning to get out of your control. I have an inkling or two, so has Warbuck’s daughter and so has Jim Ogden. How long do you think it will be before the black cat jumps out of the bag?”
“Who the devil has been talking?” growled Sharpe, and again glared at the one who he supposed must have talked.
Amanda Grayle told him with acid emphasis, “You’ve already done more talking than I’ve done in twenty years. Young Jeff isn’t half the fool he looks. Better swallow your tongue, Henry.”
“You two had better come through with whatever it is,” Young Jeff told them. “There are still a good many folks around here who can remember back twenty years, to the time Arlene Warbuck was born. And when I start asking them questions, telling them what I know, to start with, maybe they can put the pieces together. Most of them don’t love Warbuck much, you know; not all of them love you, Mrs. Grayle. And if I can find a single one of them who’s got much use for this Doc Henry Sharpe, I’m going to be surprised. Yes, maybe you’d better tell me a thing or two now, instead of waiting to have it dragged out of you later on.”
“You sound sort of like a man making threats, Jeff Cody!” rasped the old woman.
“Warbuck’s not only a crook, not just a killer, but a damned murderer,” Jeff retorted hotly, “and I know it. He’s had him his fun and he’s going to pay for it. As for you two—you just keep on playing the game the way you are now, chipping in on his side even if you do bleed him for your silence, and when the showdown comes you’ll swing just as high as Bart Warbuck!”
His anger gave a sort of authority to what he said; he was like a judge empowered to deliver sentence. Doc Sharpe grew as tense as a violin string, and Jeff could see the stringy muscles acrawl in the old woman’s yellowish throat.
It was just then that Bart Warbuck came in. He had a dozen of his men at his back and every man of them already had his gun unholstered. Obviously Warbuck was playing it safe today; playing it as safe as he could when his whole object right now was of the high-and-mighty order that regarded no law save one of his own making.
“I’ve been listening outside,” he said bluntly. “Talk’s gone far enough in here. Sharpe, it wasn’t two hours after your hitting Pioneer when I heard; you’re a damned fool ever to come back—but I’m glad you’ve come! Sit still, or I’ll blow your dirty head off your shoulders.”
No one of the three in the old hut stirred. Jeff saw how it was; Warbuck, informed in haste of Sharpe’s return, had come looking for him and on his way had encountered those of his men who had just now quitted the Pay Dirt as an unhealthy locale; he had brought this choice dozen with him, being desperate and meaning to get results. He no doubt knew or sensed that Sharpe was the kind to get drunk and blab. So he had come for Doc Sharpe. But not for him alone.
“Amanda Grayle,” said Warbuck, and stood looking at her as though he longed for nothing so much on earth as to get his two big hairy hands about her scrawny throat and choke her to death, “there’s hell to pay in general, and you’re the cause of it. Go get your bonnet on; you’re going along with me for a ride.”
“Don’t you dare, Barton Warbuck!” she screamed at him, already frightened. “If you dare—” He nodded to two of the men at his back, Johnny Carse and Two-time Billings, and they stepped briskly toward the old woman. She scuttled away from them, trying to flee through a door, trapping herself in a corner. As the first man touched her, Johnny Carse it was, she began biting and scratching and spitting at him, screaming curses. Then Billings, with a wide grin to mock Johnny Carse, for his inability to cope with her, lent a hand, and she fell silent, her arms gripped and dragged down to her sides by the two.
“I’ll go, Barton,” she said then. “Oh, I’ll go all right; go anywhere you say. All you’ve got to do is remember one thing: Everything is written down, with every little thing explained, and it’s in a safe place—and if anything happens to me—”
“Shut her mouth for her,” growled Warbuck. She grew still without waiting for the clap of a hand over her lips.
“A couple of you boys shake Sharpe down,” said Warbuck. “He’s like a scorpion with a sting in his tail. He’s riding with us, too.” He turned to Jeff. “Until we get things all talked out, I guess you better trail along with us too, Kid,” he said.
“Where to?” demanded Jeff. “What for?”
“Shake Young Cody down too,” Warbuck commanded. “If he gets gay, bat him over the head with a gun barrel. Make it lively now; let’s go. One of you boys get the old woman’s horse ready.”
Jeff watched his gun dragg
ed up out of his holster and jammed into another man’s waistband; there was nothing much he could do about it. He didn’t stir and he didn’t say a word. But he asked himself, “How does Warbuck think he can get away with a thing like this in broad daylight? Has the man gone clean crazy?”
No, Bart Warbuck wasn’t crazy, though his eyes were as mad as a goaded bull’s. Jeff understood for the first time what hate could be. How that man hated Amanda Grayle, and how he hated Doc Sharpe!
Warbuck gave his orders, and they went through the slovenly kitchen and out through the back door. Men brought horses around and they rode swiftly into the densest part of the hollow, where trees were thickest and shadows blackest, and where there was no trail of any sort. They kept away from traveled ways and from the open; with Warbuck leading, they rode northward along the timbered slopes of the hills, always keeping well out of sight of any possible passer-by up or down the valley. Thus any chance of being seen was almost negligible.
Jeff wondered whither they were bound but did not ask a second time. He read in their faces that both Amanda Grayle and Doc Sharpe wondered too, and were afraid. Perhaps it began to dawn on them that they had goaded Warbuck too long and too deeply.
When they had ridden thus three or four miles Warbuck threw out his arm, commanding a halt, and then beckoned half his following aside. He talked with them briefly; they wheeled their horses and sped back toward Halcyon. Warbuck came back then, gave the signal to move on and led the way still northward.
Within another hour Jeff had a pretty good idea where they were going: Warbuck was headed into a wild, utterly desolate and seldom visited strip of badlands lying between the upper reaches of Wandering River and Long Valley River. That was a country which for the most part man left alone; there was little water in it, scant pasture, never a road or well defined trail. Formerly it had been scoured year after year by prospectors, hardy old fellows like Charlie Carter, but of late years even they had given it a wide berth. Nothing there, they reported, but sandstone and dirt and scrub brush and rattlesnakes. If a man wished solitude, those barrens afforded it.
As they pressed on, the old woman grew garrulous, almost hysterical. No one paid her any great attention, Warbuck least of all. Sharpe, looking more and more frightened, lifted his voice railingly a time or two; then Warbuck glowered at him and one of Warbuck’s young riders slapped Sharpe so hard across the mouth that the blood dribbled from his crushed lips, and thereafter there was silence. Jeff had never a single word to say; he jogged along with the rest as though this were an ordinary, everyday sort of expedition and wore a poker face as indecipherable as old Jeff’s. He thought of the Irishman’s parrot and felt rather like that good old Nestor who “didn’t say much but did a lot o’ thinkin’.” Jeff was thinking that he knew exactly where they were going—and why.
They rode slowly and by devious ways, always keeping to unfrequented forestland by-ways, Warbuck always riding ahead like a scout, and it was already dusk with a deep purple dark filling the sharper canyons with its mystery when they came to journey’s end. Young Jeff drew his small amount of satisfaction from one fact; he had guessed aright in the matter of Warbuck’s destination. They had come at last into the silent, secret heart of the badlands, a spot which Jeff had visited only once in his life, a place among pinnacles of rock and deep-gouged gorges known as Devil-Take-It. There was the ruin of an old house under a touring black cliff, its logs rotting now, most of its roof gone. Both Still Jeff and old Bill had told him about that house; it had once been the hang-out of the Tuplow gang, stage-robbers, cattle rustlers and general lawbreakers and trouble makers. A thin stream of clear cold water, spilling over a rock-basined spring, ran by the front door.
“Make yourselves at home,” said Warbuck, as they trod on the musty broken floors. “There’s room aplenty anyhow. There’ll be blankets coming and you can be nice and cozy. You’re going to stay here a while.”
Jeff settled down on a rickety bench and rolled himself a philosophical cigarette. The old woman and Sharpe looked at each other in a way to suggest that each blamed the other for everything, but they didn’t say a word. There was something stamped on Bart Warbuck’s face just then that kept them silent. Both knew that the man would kill the two of them as readily as he’d slap a deer-fly that was plaguing him—if he could only be sure that in so doing he wasn’t pulling the temple of his own life down on top of him. Let him just find the way to dispose of any posthumous menace from this pair of vipers, he would not tarry a split second. They shivered, although it was only cool in here, not cold; maybe he could find the way.
Suddenly the old woman, finding a longer silence impossible, began to rail at him. If he dared, if he dared—if he dared—“What don’t I dare?” said Warbuck, as cold as ice. “What haven’t I dared? Don’t be a fool, Amanda Grayle.”
“I tell you,” she screeched at him, “if anything happens to me, the whole thing will come out. That’s the truth, Barton Warbuck, and you better know it!”
“I know,” he said. “But did you ever think of this: The minute that happens you’re a dead old goose. I’ve got you now where I want you; where I ought to have had you years ago. I’ve got you and Sharpe. If I go down, you two go down first—and you better know that!”
Jeff thought, “I’m a low card in this game he’s playing. I can see why he means to have it out with them; what’s he got up his sleeve for me? He brought me along just because I happened to be on the spot, to keep me from spreading the word that he had grabbed them—or why?”
Amanda Grayle, hushed for a moment, burst out with words which came like an answer.
“There are others that will talk, Barton Warbuck! Don’t forget that Jim Ogden got an earful, and that Arlene—yes, and Young Jeff here—”
“None of ’em’s talking right now,” Warbuck told her. “I’m seeing to that.”
So Warbuck was plugging up every leak, holding not only the Grayle woman and Sharpe, but Jeff too, and had no doubt arranged to take care of Jim Ogden in one way or another—and only this afternoon had tried to get Arlene back into his hands, and—Young Jeff stiffened on his bench. There were those men whom Warbuck had drawn aside, whom he had dispatched on some errand that led them back toward Halcyon.
“Warbuck,” said Jeff, “you’re out on the end of a limb and you know it. The limb’s beginning to break off; you know that too. You’re pretty well washed up in this country! Better keep your shirt on.”
“Yes?” said Warbuck. “Go on, Kid. What else is eating you?”
“I don’t care what you do to these two; the chances are that they’ve asked for it and have got it coming. But leave Arlene alone.”
“Yes?” said Warbuck again. “Doing some mind reading, are you, Kid? What about Arlene?”
“You might get out of here on the run and beat it to Canada or Mexico. Stay here a little while longer and go on with this sort of thing, and you’re apt to be pulled apart.”
“Take an interest in my welfare, don’t you?” Then when Jeff didn’t bother to answer, Warbuck flared out: “Damn your souls, all of you, I’m here to stay and inside a year from now I’ll be like a king over this whole end of the state! Me, run out?” He exploded into heavy laughter.
He went out then. It grew pitch dark and one of the men he had left guarding his prisoners made a fire in the fireplace, not so much for warmth as for light; neither Jeff nor Amanda Grayle nor Doc Sharpe could make a move without several pairs of eyes being drawn watchfully. And so time passed.
In his corner Young Jeff, having taken thoughtful stock of the situation, scarcely stirred and spoke not a word as the slow hours dragged by. There was nothing he could do right now; the men Warbuck had left behind him were almost squint-eyed in their watchfulness, and every one of them was armed and ready to shoot at the drop of the hat. Better not let any hat drop for a while. But on his part Jeff was no less watchful. Vigilance like theirs was a strain; it w
as like a man standing with every muscle quiveringly tense. In due course the most powerful muscle must relax or it would cramp. He grew as stoical as an Indian, waiting.
At last he heard several horses clattering on the rocky slope and a moment later Arlene came into the room. Her face was hotly flushed, her eyes were blazing. Close behind her came Warbuck, and after him those several men he had sent down on the back trail.
Arlene’s eyes swept the weirdly lighted room and after tarrying briefly with the old woman and Sharpe, passing swiftly over those other men so obviously guarding their prisoners, came to a long meeting with Jeff’s.
“Hello, Jeff,” she said.
“Hello, Arlene,” he answered. And asked bluntly, “How come you’re here? What were Jeff and Bill doing?”
“Miriam tricked me,” she said bitterly. “Chrystine Ward and I had been visiting; Chrystine left, then Miriam came in. She lied to me. I went with her where we could be alone, where she was going to tell me something, out to the edge of town. Then these men grabbed me—and Miriam laughed.”
“Miriam knows which side her bread is buttered on,” said Warbuck. “When will the rest of you learn?”
Then Jim Ogden, looking pale and gaunt but with head up and eyes as clear and hard as ever, came in.
“We’ve got a caucus,” said Warbuck. “We can attend to business.”
Chapter Fourteen
Warbuck proceeded to make things crystal clear. Young Jeff, listening to him, was amazed that the man could be so frank, so outwardly contemptuous of critical opinion.
“All of us,” said Warbuck, “anyhow all of us that are worth the powder to blow us to hell, take chances. Me, I’ve taken mine. And you can’t win every pot; that’s a cinch. So I’ve lost a few times and I’ve slipped a few times. Hell with it. In the main I’ve done what I wanted, got what I wanted and knocked out of my path them that stood in my way.”
The Fifth Western Novel Page 70
